The Thing Itself (2 page)

The following day I eased my irritation by writing to Lezlie.
Hey, you know Roy? He’s a sad bastard, a ringer for one of the actors in
Revenge of the Nerds
. Anyway he asked for a letter and I sold him one. Now he won’t tell me whose letter it is. Did
you
write to me last week? What did you say? Just give me the gist, lover-girl.
But as soon as I’d written this I scrunched it up and threw it in the bin. Lez would surely not respond well to such a message. In effect I was saying: ‘Hey you know that love letter you poured your heart and soul into? I sold it to a nerd without even reading it!
That’s
how much I value your emotions!’

Chewed the soft blue plastic insert at the end of my Bic for a while.

I tried again:
Hi lover! Did you write last week? There was a snafu with the package and some stuff got lost.
I looked over the lie. It really didn’t ring true. I scrunched this one up too. Then I sat in the chair trying, and failing, to think of how to put things. The two balls of scrunched paper in the waste bin began, creakingly, to unscrunch.

Dear Lez. Did you write last week? I’m afraid I lost a letter, klutz that I am
! That was closer to the truth. But then I thought:
What if she had written me a Dear John letter? Or a let’s-get-married? Or a-close-family-member-has-died?
How embarrassing to write back a jaunty ‘please repeat your message!’ note. What if she hadn’t written at all? What if it had been somebody else?

This latter thought clawed at my mind for a while. What if some important information, perhaps from my academic supervisor at Reading, Prof. Addlestone, had been in the letter? Privacy was one thing, but surely Roy didn’t have the right to withhold such info?

I stomped down the corridor and knocked at Roy’s room. He made me wait for a long time before opening the door just enough to reveal his carbuncular face, smirking up at me. ‘What?’

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I said. ‘I want my letter back.’

‘No dice, doofus,’ he replied. ‘I paid for it. It’s mine now.’

‘Look, I’ll
buy
it back, all right? I’ll give you your ten pounds. I’ve got it right here.’

When he smiled, he showed the extent to which his upper set of teeth didn’t fit neatly over his lower set. ‘It’s not for sale,’ he said.

‘Don’t be a pain, Roy,’ I said. ‘I’m asking nicely.’

‘And I’m, nicely, declining.’

‘What? You want more than a tenner? You can go fish for
that
, my friend.’

‘It’s not for sale,’ he repeated.

‘Is it a scam?’ I said, my temper wobbling badly. ‘Is the idea you hold out until I offer – what, twenty quid? Is that it?’

‘No. That’s not it. It’s mine. I do not choose to sell it.’

‘Just tell me what’s
in
the letter,’ I pleaded. ‘I’ll give your money back
and
you can keep the damn thing, just tell me who it’s from and what it says.’ Even as I made this offer it occurred to me that Roy, with his twisted sense of humour, might simply lie to me. So I added: ‘Show it to me. Just show me the letter. You don’t have to give it up, keep it for all I care, only—’

‘No deal,’ said Roy. Then he wrung his speccy face into a parody of a concerned expression. ‘You’re embarrassing yourself, Charles.’ And he shut his door.

I went through to the common room, fuming. For a while I toyed with the idea of simply grabbing the letter back: I was bigger than Roy, and doubtless had been involved in more actual fist-flying, body-grappling fights than he. It wouldn’t have been hard. But instead of that I had a beer, and lay on the sofa, and tried to get a grip. We had to live together, he and I, in unusually confined circumstances, and for a very long period of time. In less than a week the sun would vanish, and the proper observing would begin. Say we chanced upon alien communication (I told myself) – wouldn’t that be something? Might there be a Nobel Prize, or something equally prestigious, in it? I couldn’t put all that at risk, even for the satisfaction of punching that bastard on the nose.

Maybe, I told myself, Roy would thaw out a little in a day or two. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, after all. Maybe I could
coax
the letter out of him.

The week wore itself out. I went through a phase of intense irritation with Roy for his (what seemed to me) immensely petty and immature attitude with regard to my letter. Then I went through a phase when I told myself it didn’t bother me. I did consider returning his tenner to him, so as to retain the high moral ground. But then I thought:
ten pound is ten pound
.

The week ended, and Diamondo overflew and tossed the supply package out to bounce along the snow. This annoyed me, because I had finally managed to write a letter to Lezlie that explained the situation without making it sound like I valued her communiqués so little I’d gladly sold it off to weirdo Roy. But I couldn’t ‘post’ the letter unless the plane landed and took it on board, so I had to hang on to it. And I couldn’t even be sure the letter Roy had purchased had
been
from her.

On the fifth of July the sun set for the last time until August. The thing people don’t grok about Antarctic night is that it’s not the same level of ink-black all the way through. For the first couple of weeks the sky lightens twice a day, pretty much bright enough to walk around without a torch – the same dawn and dusk paling of the sky that precedes sunrise and follows sunset, only without actual dawn and dusk. Still, you can sense the sun is just there, on the other side of the horizon, and it’s not too bad. As the weeks go on this gets briefer and darker, and then you do have a month or so when it’s basically coal-coloured skies and darkness invisible the whole time.

Diamondo landed his plane, and tossed out the supply package, but didn’t linger; and by the time I’d put on the minimum of outdoor clothing and grabbed a torch and got through the door he was taking off again – so, once again, I didn’t get to send my letter to Lez.

That was the last time I saw that aircraft.

There were two letters in this week’s batch: one from my old grammar school headmaster, saying that the school had hosted a whole assembly on the ‘exciting and important’ work I was doing; and the other from my professor at Reading. This was nothing but a note, and read in its entirety: ‘Dear A. I often think of Sartre’s words. Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realises its freedom. Where is freer than the very bottom of the world? Nil desperandum! Yours, A.’ This, though slightly gnomic, was not out of character for Prof. Addlestone, who had worked on SETI for so long it had made his brain a little funny. No letter from Lez, which worried me. But, after all, she didn’t write every week. I reread the Professor’s note several times. Did it read like a PS, a scribbled afterthought? Did it perhaps mean that the letter Roy bought had been from Addlestone? Maybe. Maybe not.

We got on with our work, and I tried to put the whole letter business behind me. Roy did not help, as far as this went. He was acting stranger and stranger; simpering at me, and when I queried his expression (‘What? What is it?’) scurrying away – or scowling and saying, ‘nothing, nothing, only …’ and refusing to elaborate.

The next thing was: he moved one of the computer terminals into his room. This was a proper hefty 1980s terminal; not one of those modern-day computers the size and weight of a copy of
Marie Claire
, so it was no mean feat getting the thing in there. He even cut a mousehole-like shape in the bottom of his door, to enable the main cable to come out into the hall and through into the monitor room.

‘What are you doing in there?’ I challenged him. ‘That’s not standard policy. Did you clear this with Adelaide?’

‘I’m working on something,’ he told me, not meeting my eyes. ‘I’m close to a breakthrough. SETI, my friend. Solving Fermi’s paradox! You should consider yourself lucky to be here. You’ll get a footnote in history. Only a footnote, I know: but it’s more than most people get.’

I ignored this. ‘I still don’t see why you need to squirrel yourself away in your room.’

‘Privacy,’ he said. ‘Is very important to me.’

One day he went out on the ice to (he told me) check the meteorological data points. It seemed like an odd thing – he’d never shown any interest in them before – but I was glad he was out of the base, if only for half an hour. As soon as I saw his torch beam go, wobbling its oval of brightness away over the ice, I hurried to his room. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I told myself. I was just checking the identity of the letter’s author. Maybe have a quick glance at its contents. I wouldn’t steal it back (although, I told myself, I
could
. It was
my
letter after all. Roy was being an idiot about the whole thing). But once my itch was scratched, curiosity-wise, then everything would get easier about the base. I could wait out the remainder of my stint with equanimity. He need never even know I’d been poking around.

No dice. Roy had fitted a padlock to his door. I rattled this uselessly; I could have smashed it, but then Roy would know what I’d been up to. I retreated to the common room, disproportionately angry. What was he doing, in there, with a whole computer terminal – and my letter?

I had enough self-knowledge to step back from the situation, at least some of the time. He was doing it in order to wind me up. That was the only reason he was doing it. The letter was nothing – none of my letters, if I looked back, contained any actual, substantive content. They were just pleasant chatter, people I knew touching base with me. The letter Roy bought must be the same. He bought it not to
have
the letter, but in order to set me on edge, to rile me. And by getting riled I was gifting him the victory. The way to play this whole situation was to be perfectly indifferent.

However much I tried this, though, I kept falling back.

It was the not knowing!

I tried once more, during the week. ‘Look, Roy,’ I said, smiling. ‘This letter thing is no big deal, you know? None of my letters have any really significant stuff in them.’

He didn’t reply to this, but he did look at me with a ‘that’s all
you
know’ sort of expression. This was, I decided, just winding me up.

‘I tell you what I think,’ I said. ‘You can, you know, nod, or not-nod, depending on whether I’m right. I think the letter you bought was from my girlfriend. Yeah?’

‘No comment,’ said Roy primly. ‘One way or the other.’

‘If so, it was probably full of inane chatter, yeah? Fine – keep it! With my blessing!’

‘In point of fact,’ he corrected me, holding up his right forefinger, ‘I do not need your blessing. The transaction was finalised with the fiduciary transfer. Contract law is very clear on this point.’

I lost my temper a little. ‘You know how sad you are, keeping a woman’s letter to another man for your own weird little sexual buzz? That’s –
sad
. Is what it is. I don’t think you realise how sad that is.’

‘Oh Charles, Charles,’ he said, shaking his head and smirking in that insufferable way he had. ‘If only you knew!’

I swore. ‘Suit yourself,’ I said.

Then the airstrip lights failed. I assumed this was an accident, although the fact that every one of them failed at the same time was strange. Diamondo came through on the radio: ‘Fellows!’ he declared, through his thick accent. ‘I cannot land if there are no lights to land!’

‘Don’t know what’s happened to them,’ I replied. ‘Some manner of malfunction.’

‘Obviously that!’ came Diamondo’s voice. ‘Can you fix? Over.’

Roy suited up and went outside; he was back in minutes. ‘I can’t do anything in the dark, with a torch, in a hurry,’ he complained. ‘Tell him no. Tell him to toss the package out and we’ll fix the lights for next time.’

When I relayed this message, Diamondo said,‘Breakables! There are breakables in the package! I cannot toss! Over.’ Then, contradicting his last uttered word, he went on. ‘I can take out the breakables and toss the rest. Wait – wait.’

I could hear the scrapy sound of the plane in the sky outside. Then, over the radio: ‘Is in chute.’

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Where are you dropping it? If there’s no lights – I mean, I don’t want to go searching over a wide area in the dark with …’ There was a terrific crash right overhead, as something smashed into our roof.

‘You idiot!’ I called. ‘You could have broken our roof!’

Static. And, through the walls, the sound of the plane’s engines diminishing. Roy looked at me, and I at him. ‘I think it rolled off,’ Roy said. ‘You go out and get it.’

‘You’re already suited!’

‘I went out last time. It’s your turn now. Fair’s fair.’

It was on the edge of my tongue to retort:
Stealing my letter – is
that
fair
? But that would have done no good; and anyway I was hoping that there would be a new letter from Lezlie in the satchel. So I pulled on overclothes and took a torch and went outside.

It was extraordinarily cold – sinus-freezingly cold. The air was still. The sound of Diamondo’s plane, already very faint, diminished and diminished until it vanished altogether. Now the only sound was the whirr of the generator, gently churning to itself with its restless motion. I searched around in the dark outside the main building for ten minutes or so, and spent another five trying to see into the gap between the main prefab and the annexe, which was half-full of snow. But I couldn’t find it.