Killer

When he looked up, there was the great Ice Barrier stretching up into the morning, and she looked down at him and said, “Climb this, Colin, and I’ll let you go . . .” He went back to Jeremiah, and looked at what he had done to the sledge. Try as he might, his icy mitten would take no purchase on the frozen tatters of the straps. Time and time again the ice-crusted leather slipped off the stiff webbing and Colin hurled face-down in the snow. During the next half-hour they hardly moved any distance. Each time Colin’s hand slipped and he fell forward, Jeremiah fell back, wrenching his frozen legs and screaming. It was no good, he could no longer move the makeshift sled in this way.

He never knew just when he decided to try it without the mitten and glove, but he would always remember what a fair trade it seemed to be: a hand for a friend. There was so little chance for them now that it didn’t really matter much. He looked at the still body of his friend for a moment, then he slowly took off his left mitten, and his underglove. He looked at his white, clean left hand.

“Come on then old son,” he said to Jeremiah, and he wrapped the stiff broken straps around his hand, and started forward into the storm. There were no hallucinations now, only the cold-pains in his fingers. Even his relatively warm right hand ached in sympathy with his tortured left. The cold ate at the joints of the fingers and thumb. His hand seemed to swell with the pain. It crept into his palm. All the joints inside his hand ached and burned. It was as though the hand to the wrist was in boiling water. Before the first hour was up, he was screaming as he walked. The cold-pains began to creep up his forearm. In his mind he could see the warm blood flowing down past his shoulder into the increasing cold of his arm. He began to feel his veins full of blood returning like ice. His mind reeled away from the terrible thing he was doing to himself, and the fantasies began to return. People he knew. Job again, crying out, and, disregarded, vanishing. Robin Quick, stumbling at his shoulder crying, “I’m dying, Colin; carry me too. For God’s sake, Colin . . .” Ross paid him no attention, and he wandered away in the half-light.

“Colin? Colin.” Now Charlie called to him. She stood a little way from him, clad from neck to knee in a grey fur coat. Something inside him tore loose and ran across the snow towards her. Ross stumbled on, watching his own shoulders recede towards her. His phantom reached her. Ross screamed, and fell to his knees. The movement nearly cracked his frozen shoulder. But then his phantom self was back, looking down at him, and screaming, “Get up you son of a bitch. Get up and walk or I’ll leave you here, I swear I will; I’ll leave you here and you’ll lie forever.” “NO,” screamed Ross, looking up along the length of his dream-like self like a whipped dog, without dignity, without pride, without will. “Up, you lazy bleeder, up,” screamed the phantom. Ross’s lips moved silently as the ghost of himself shouted, echoing the words as though learning them by heart. “Your eyeballs’ll be as hard as marbles. Your lungs’ll fill with ice.”

And Ross’s voice broke into a sob as he himself screamed, “Oh get up.” And he got up.

He curled his right arm over his eyes to keep the snow from his goggles, and, dragging the dead-weight of Jeremiah forward, he moved again into the throat of the storm.

His shoulder ached, and his whole left side was a mass of tiny blood vessels packed with freezing blood. He wanted to sleep. God, how he wanted to sleep. It was hopeless anyway.

The figures started coming back again. Job appeared suddenly. “Colin, thank God . . .”

Ross swept back his right arm, and walked on. But Job did not disappear.

Ross’s arm swept down, connected solidly: Job fell down, and Ross fell over him.

Ross had been walking for twenty-eight hours. He had covered less than ten miles. He fell over Job and tumbled into a well of delirium four months deep.

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NINE

i

It had done no good, of course, telling them the story. He had not expected it to: Simon hadn’t believed it, Kate hadn’t understood, Warren hadn’t cared and Job already knew. A waste of time, an unnecessary and bitter humiliation with nothing settled, nothing solved, nothing exorcised.

After a while he got up and went out. As soon as he was out of the tent he had narrowed his eyes automatically and cursed under his breath – he had forgotten his face-mask. But then he noticed that he didn’t need it; the power of the sunlight had decreased radically while he had been stumbling through his story. Suddenly the gold all round had turned to blood. The sea, the floes, the ice itself were a deep, shifting shade of red. He glanced up at the sun. It was hanging low in the sky coloured dull orange. And the sky to the south was no longer blue – it was khaki-grey, shading down to nicotine-brown where the horizon should have been. Then he realised what it was: a fogbank.