The Survivor by Thomas Keneally

Author:Thomas Keneally
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504026765
Publisher: Open Road Media

6

It was a waking dream. The diggers found no corpse but a vacancy, and stood back, their faces all what he would call classic Antarctic faces, the type that squint out of their incommunicable suffering through the glossy skin of a coffee-table book on exploration. Of such an order was their foreignness; they would rather not have worked in the polar dusk to resurrect this blankness. Ramsey himself, dreambound on the first floor of a hotel in Christchurch, went limp at seeing the hands they had risked with digging. One of his knees slid towards the carpet. Warnings of lost balance bounced in his ears; his eyes flew open, out of their doze.

His tiredness had stopped him walking and leant him against the wall. Perhaps the dim, mothering noises of the air-conditioning had untimely lulled him. Whatever, he was still squatting when a man with chef’s hat and tunic, apron, neckerchief and starchy little gut, came from the manager’s office. Ramsey yawned and pretended to have trouble with a shoelace. He was content, until the chef had passed, with the characteristic Anglo-Saxon joy of having avoided being made a fool of. Then he saw that his journey was insane and that insane gestures, once done, mightily conduced to internal and genuine, bottled-in-bond insanity. And that was why he had suffered his threatening vision.

He went on down into the lounge for a whisky.

It had been drizzling all evening in Christchurch, and at the Deep Freeze installation the stylized cigar-shape of a transport plane stood out in the wet, looking finally immobilized. The scene had all the comfortlessness of a fairground closed for the winter, and the national blitheness of the young Americans who brought him illogically good weather reports from McMurdo Sound and Cape Hallett irked Ramsey. An officer made him sign a form absolving the United States of any liability for his death, told him that another Australian, representing National Press of America, was going south with him, and cast him up full of lassitude and self-doubt in the plush hotel across from the airfield.

It was fashionably built for tourists; in its downstairs bar you heard mainly senior American accents. Their strangeness made it easier than ever for him to presume that the gaiety of the Clipper Bar was conspiratorial, that he was the butt of the conspiracy. Such a presumption lasted only a manic second; yet he was grateful to hear New Zealanders talking loudly from a knot of tables in one corner. Here the conspiracy was patent; from the blazers and boasting of the men he could identify a pre-season meeting of a Rugby club. All that was being ineptly plotted was a football premiership.

He sought a lone table. There was a precedent for loneness. In a corner at a table of his own sat a thin, tanned man of about thirty-five, chewing on a savoury omelette and being served coffee and liqueur. The panting kinship of the Rugbyesque men and women and the tourists’ zealous talk of travel left this young man unabashed.

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