The Surfacing (14 page)

Morgan was smiling at all of this, enjoying the audacity, the outright refusal to
submit. DeHaven had that talent, and had that luxury. In a matter of hours he would
have packed his bags, be ready to row over to the
North Star
tomorrow, to go home
with her. These past six months would have been nothing more than an interruption
for him.

And that's a letter it wouldn't take me too long to compose, DeHaven was telling
them. It's quite a while now I've had that little testimonial by heart.

You're all wind, Brooks said. You've done absolutely nothing this whole trip but
whine and whinge, and now it's roughing up a little, you're deserting.

I'm not deserting, Mr Brooks. I've been discharged.

Perhaps. But I've never seen a man so glad to go. So write
your letter. Write it
and nail it to the mast, to give us something to remember you by when you're gone.

DeHaven patted the stack of ledgers on the table. Don't worry, he said, I don't think
you'll be forgetting me for a while yet.

23rd September. Midnight

Morgan touched the edge of the blade to the hawser, began to saw it back and forth.
It was their best bower anchor, and his best skinning knife. An hour before, he could
not have imagined the act. Now it felt like something he'd been planning for years.
The first strands curled into the air. Long smooth strokes, he told himself. The
full length of the blade. The thing was firm but yielded something under every thrust.
It felt more like cutting meat than cutting rope. A minute or two more was all he
needed now, without anyone coming up. Like a piston, the knife shuttled smoothly
back and forth. His arm was starting to tire. On each side of the blade, the rope-ends
were flowering beautifully.

Then he was standing alone at the bell, sounding midnight. He could hear them singing
below. So she had to climb the mast, they sang. It was DeHaven's farewell. They had
been at it for four hours solid now. He sat and watched the light flickering in the
seam of the hatch door. He had left a few strands intact on both hawsers, and wondered
when exactly they would cede. Lately he had often thought of Cabot, opening the
letter that brought the news his boy was dead. Morgan could not help imagining it.
That first, irreversible moment of understanding. The definite downward pull. Under
the man's
own impossible weight, the surface of the world suddenly paper-thin. Under
Morgan's own bootsoles now, that was how the deck felt. They were about to launch.
The entire ship was ready to tilt.

Below, he stepped through the doorway with a definite stride. DeHaven was wearing
a tricorne hat. A naked sword lay on the table before them, amongst the bottles and
the cups. The cat too was up there, licking at a plate.

Here he is, DeHaven announced, pleasantly surprised. Our lost sheep. We were going
to send out a search party. He stood up and offered his hand. Geoffrey DeHaven, he
said, by way of introduction. Ship's surgeon, dentist, coroner and midwife.

The others were laughing. The words were perfectly pronounced, and Morgan wondered
how much more they'd had. It was half an hour since he'd slipped away, and the lack
of drink now was making him drunk, showing him just how much he'd already had. He
was no longer distracted by the momentum.

Remind me what exactly it is we're celebrating, he said. Her departure or your own?

Mr Morgan, DeHaven said, did you honestly expect the lady to travel without a chaperone?

24th September

He was lying in the bottom of a rowing boat. From time to time it bumped gently against
the wall of the quay. He did not let it wake him. He knew exactly what was wrong.
Smiling harmlessly, he let himself drift off and drift under again. Afterwards, who
knows how long he slept. Hours perhaps. And even when he woke fully, he did not get
up. The sound of DeHaven's lusty breathing was floating overhead. Something had dared
him to open his eyes, and now dared him to smile again. They were on the move. He
was sure of it. More than anything, he felt relief.

By the time DeHaven finally woke and charged up on deck, they were well out in the
Channel, being driven west. Already they were sinking Beechey, and rising the southeastern
coast of Cornwallis Island.

One by one, backs flat to the wind, the bergs came cruising past. Myer and Morgan
and DeHaven stood shivering at the stern, watching the procession. To the south and
west, the ice surpassed anything he'd ever seen. Beside him, DeHaven stood hypnotized.
The man was no sailor, but even he must know there was no point trying to turn back.
Even if they managed the manoeuvre, and swung her about, it would have been into
the teeth of the gale. They would try to make fast to the Cornwallis shore, or the
shore of Griffith Island, if the drift carried them that way, as it now seemed inclined
to do. And there wait out the storm as best they could.

That night it blew a lunatic gale straight down the Sound, and the mercury dropped
to 14°. It was a new record. They were in new territory. They had managed to make
fast to the southeastern tip of Griffith Island. Their small and best bower anchors
were gone, but they still had the two kedge, and somehow managed to attach themselves
to the land floe, a cable fore and a cable aft.

For no more than a minute Morgan stood up against the
galley and watched the slack
racking along the ground – the snow drawn out into long thick tendrils, swaying endlessly,
alive. It reminded him of his youth. It reminded him of the sandstorms of the Afghan
plains.

At eleven o'clock the stern-cable finally gave. Her rump swaggered left and right.
But at the bow, for no good reason, the cable refused to cede. Afterwards, it was
a sobering night for all aboard. All through the small hours Morgan lay awake on
his bunk. DeHaven lay four feet overhead, mute. He had said nothing since bolting
awake that morning, to realize that Beechey was behind – beyond – them, and that
very likely he would now winter aboard the ship, with everything and everyone he
despised. Morgan lay in the dark just as silent and still as his friend. For once
he made no effort to defend himself. He let the bunk under him melt away, till he
had all but merged with the floe. To the roots of his teeth he could feel it scouring,
sounding, working with a purpose. If they broke loose now, they would be rushed straight
out into the mayhem. It would not matter what they tried. Whatever happened would
happen as it did to other men. They were helpless, paralysed. Their rigging was solid
with ice and rime.

All night he lay awake listening to the carnage. In the early morning, he wrote:
We cling by a thread to a scrap of floe, itself but perilously fixed to a barren
island out in the Sound, home to a million blocks of marble in total riot. If havens
the locality has, they are unmapped. Mapped, they would be unattainable, against
contrary winds, and with the ice as it is, prospering on every shore.

All morning DeHaven sat at the table with his head in his hands, in despair, as if
despair could somehow annul the defeat. Cabot and Hepburn made it four. At noon the
door opened. It was Brooks, down from his watch. He shucked off his greatcoat and
left it steaming on the boards. He stood dripping. At the table, in perfect synchronization,
the heads bobbed and dodged like boxers. The mast mercury was down
to 11°, according
to Brooks. To every horizon now, it was a solid sea.

During the night, miraculously, the wind died a little, and wheeled around more to
the south. Next morning Myer ordered the ship flogged. They were going back, he said.
If they could get her soft enough to steer, and steer her round and into the lee
of Griffith Island, he had determined to try and work their way north, then beat
their way back to Beechey.

Bravo, DeHaven said. It was the first word he'd said in two days. A cup was rattling
uselessly back and forth across the floor.

By noon they were boring their way round the southern tip of the island, through
the narrow lead that had opened up between the fixed ice and the drift. But even
there a new scab was forming fast. Morgan at the helm, and Myer conning from above,
they rammed their way north, and refused to count the cost. Time and again the ice
looked too close to pass, but Myer roared at Morgan to plough on. Anything that was
not a solid mass of the main pack, he had decided to ride it down.

The wind wheeled one way and another. The tides swung back and forth. Mechanically,
the canal opened and closed. Hour by hour they ground their way north in the lee
of land, then swung east again into the channel between Griffith and Cornwallis Islands,
and began to box from tack to tack. Everything to the west was now a single solid
block.

They bore east as best they could, through the young ice, that was stiffening by
the hour. Morgan tried to sleep, but could not manage to slight it – the dull, lumbering
rounds of the millstone, up against the hull, two feet from his head.

They staggered on. The rigging was wrought iron. The wind was failing, and the mercury
falling still. Now they stalled, now they limped a little farther. A little farther,
they stalled again. They staggered on, erratic, almost petulant. The clockworks were
wasted. It was a half-hearted struggle by now.

In an austere silence, he listened to footsteps overhead,
footsteps on the ladder,
then along the corridor. The door flung open. It was DeHaven. The face looked nothing
like the safe, brazen face of his old friend. Defiance, effort, ingenuity – they
had all run their course. Morgan wrapped up again and went to see for himself. Myer
was alone out on the new ice, twenty feet ahead of the prow. It was a final proof,
he seemed to think, that the skin would now take his weight. Overhead, every sail
was big with wind, straining, and they could not move another inch.

28th September

For the next three days, the ship lay swaddled in veils of mist and fog and falling
snow. Their world was shrinking, dissolving. Time and again Morgan went up on deck
to study the show – the way each layer feathered seamlessly into the next, and all
were constantly renewed, and constantly on the wane. He went up again, and could
not be satisfied. It was a world without ground or horizon, with no resting point
for the eye. The affinities were endless, and endlessly shifting. Out there, nothing
could impose itself for long. Some other world was whispering to him from beyond.

For three days he studied the show, and all that time a gentle cradling of the ship
warned they were not altogether fixed in their block of ice – their pedestal, as
DeHaven called it. Either that or the ice itself was on the move.

That Sunday Myer prayed aloud that the wind might haul around to the north. The wind
continued strong from the south. Every night Morgan lay awake listening to the carnage.
There was a new voice now in his head. At last, it said.

1st October

The officers' cabin door was open, and the cold air was charging in. MacDonald, dripping,
stood at the threshold, but did not step inside.

Mr Morgan, he said. I wonder would you mind coming with me.

Morgan closed his book and pushed himself to his feet. What now? he said. It had
been MacDonald's watch. He reached for his oilskins, the stiff empty moulting hanging
from a hook on the wall.

No need for that, MacDonald said. He was still out there in the dark corridor. Please,
the voice said. You need to come with me.

A minute later, Morgan was standing in silence in MacDonald's cabin, staring at the
physical block of her, laid out on the bed. She seemed not to have heard him enter.
He watched her blink, and blink again, impossibly slow. He looked her up and down,
head to toe. The evidence was irrefutable.

Without a word, he began to turn away from her, towards the man who'd betrayed him,
again. He was turning, and watching himself turn. Both feet swivelling on the spot,
the way he'd been taught. Twisting at the knee and then at the hip, the shoulders
coming round last, the momentum flinging the arm out, his fist pulling his whole
body with it, towards a point where he would lose balance – a point just behind MacDonald's
head.

The arm moved out and back, out and back, as a piston would. The shock of it had
to go straight through the wrist, and straight through the elbow. The force of it
had to come from the shoulder.

Don't hit the head, he coached himself. Hit
through
the head. Drive
through
it to
what's on the other side. That was the secret. Imagine a man just behind the man.
A head just behind the head. That's what they told you at the gymnasium. That's what
you were aiming for.

He'd been boxing all winter, stuck in London waiting for the ship to come down from
Aberdeen, and his arms were as good as they'd ever been.

From time to time he shook out the hand, making sure to fold the fingers over right,
to tuck in the thumb, to make the whole thing a single solid block of bone. He wanted
to be sure and not break anything. Already he could see DeHaven's smile, when the
news was announced. He did not want to give him the chance of a smile extra. He did
not want to have to go and ask him for help. He took a step to the side to hit another
part of the face. Little by little the head was loosening up, rolling from side to
side, like a puppet's head. He could feel the whole arm warming up nicely, getting
stronger at each punch, more relaxed. The arm kept moving in and out, towards what
was left of MacDonald's face. As though reaching for – or through – the pain. The
thing was quite messy by now, but that mattered none. Bettered or worsed, the face
would never be his own. It was something he'd been born with, and born to. It was
merely something the world looked through, to see the resemblances. The faces of
those who'd made him. That's all it was. That's all he'd ever be. Leftovers. That's
all you got.