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‘You can’t publish this, Cherry.’
‘What? Whyever not?’
‘We-- I -- know Antarctica was hard, particularly for you, and the trauma from an experience like that can manifest in many different ways. And of course anyone who knows you is quite willing to forgive you that, but you’ll make a fool out of yourself if you put this to print.’
‘That’s very blunt of you. If you’re referring to the writing, I know I have a tendency to go on rather a bit, but--’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s not the writing; the writing is... excellent. It’s-- your facts. They’re not all entirely correct.’
‘Well, thank goodness I enlisted the assistance of such an able proofreader. What have I got wrong? Well?’
‘It is a matter of public record. None of the Polar Party survived. What you’re representing in that book is simply not true.’
‘What? Poppycock. Birdie and I--’
‘ Cherry . None of the party survived. Not even Birdie. I know you miss him, but he died, Cherry, ten years ago. You have to realise that.’
Atkinson shows you the papers and the reports. He shows you a photograph from a funeral. He makes you walk him through the house and show him the spare room, Birdie’s room, empty and covered in a fine film of dust (Because Birdie sleeps with me! you want to cry), the chair where Birdie sits with the same book that’s been flipped open on it for years.
You tell him to leave the premises, please, and once the sound of the door clicking quietly shut dies, you sit down because you don’t think you can stand anymore. The newspaper Atch brought, nine years old but folded perfectly as the day it was printed, sits on the table.
...But even the gallant sacrifice of Captain Oates could not save the doomed mission. The remaining
three men were snowed in by a blizzard a mere eleven miles from the safety of One Ton Depot, and Captain Scott’s last journal entry, dated 29 March, is written in the hand of a man who knows death is coming, and has resolved to face it bravely. Robert Falcon Scott, Edward Adrian Wilson, and Henry Robertson Bowers are three souls whom the world will never forget.
You cannot read any more.
It’s too warm for a fire, truly, but you stoke one anyway, and dispassionately feed the newspaper to it. The house feels empty. Birdie could be out in the stables, you tell yourself desperately, or tramping around the grounds. He loves Lamer; he’s more involved with the tenants than you ever were, and knows all of the men who work on the grounds by name.
He does. He must, because you know their names only from him.
You can’t seem to make yourself understand that none of that’s true. Birdie is dead, and every detail of your life together is a fiction. You can’t grasp, can’t comprehend, can’t force it to make sense. Antarctica taught you that the mind may be easily fooled; an old milk tin left on the ice can look like a tent or a troupe of ponies from the right distance, but you can’t equate that with ten years of life that you haven’t lived.
Birdie should be here. You have never wished to go mad, but you do so now.
You'd rather go back to that, even if it means that you’re mad and delusional and should be locked up somewhere. You'd rather have that than face a world without Birdie, without everything the two of you have. Had. Never had.
For the first time since Antarctica, you cry yourself to sleep. The bed is empty, and you curl up into yourself, knees pressed to your chest and arms curled around yourself in a desperate parody of an embrace. You cannot quell your shaking, and you wish for nothing more than the heat of Birdie’s body next to you and his arms around you and his voice telling you that everything is fine.
Sleep comes uneasily, and you have nightmares.
The next morning, you wake in a sweat to the soft touch of a hand on the side of your face, and Birdie’s eyes wrinkled with soft, sleepy worry.
‘Hey,’ he murmurs, the same voice he uses (used?) to soothe spooked, restive ponies. ‘Hey, Cherry, shh, what’s the matter?’ His hand is soft; the whorls and lines in the flesh catch on your faint morning stubble.
‘Just-- just a nightmare.’
Birdie’s face folds into sympathetic concern, and he smacks a kiss to your forehead; you shift in bed to pull him into a tight hug, your arms against his slender back, tucking your face into his shoulder and breathing deeply. There is an ache in your throat of tears, tight and hot, and you nearly want to say, You’re not real. Go away, you’re not real , but you can’t. With your face against his neck, you can smell the warm, sweet scent of hay, of grass and soap and clean sweat. Your brain couldn’t make that up, surely.
You can feel his heartbeat, and it grounds you.
He’s not real, but you don’t care. You need him.
It’s not difficult to forget. Somewhere in the back of your mind you know it’s all illusion, that perhaps you have gone irreparably mad, but it doesn’t seem to matter when Birdie insists that you should go hunting, and then kisses you up against a tree until you get sap all down the back of your best Norfolk jacket. There’s no-one to tell you otherwise. You can smile again, and Birdie is there at night to stave off the nightmares.
‘Any word from your publisher?’ Birdie asks one day during tea.
‘Mm, I gave the manuscript to Atch to edit.’ You spare a chuckle over the rim of your teacup. ‘If there’s anyone to do the job, it’s the good doctor.’
‘Aye!’ Birdie agrees with a laugh that’s cousin to yours. ‘How is the old bugger? I’ve not seen him in an age.’
‘Didn’t you see him last time he was here? Odd. I’ll write to him; he can come down for a day or two.’
You forget, when you sign the letter from you and Birdie.
Atch comes to Lamer, and then you remember.
The next thing you know, you are awake in your bed, and the warmth next to you is not Birdie, but Atch, perched on the edge of the mattress, his eyes tight with worry. The lines of care smooth out into a careful non-expression when your eyes come to rest on him.
‘Where’s Birdie?’ you demand.
‘What’s the last thing you remember?’
Atch stays for a day, for two, for three, and you cannot get out of bed. Sleep is bad and waking is worse, and every time you slip back into consciousness, there is a moment when Birdie ought to be there, and you cannot understand why he is not. Sometimes that moment lasts for hours, until you remark to Atch that ordinarily when you’re ill, Birdie scarcely leaves your bedside. Atch tells you your own story over and over again, and gives you drugs to make you sleep when the shaking becomes too bad.
It’s cold. At some point, the down and expensive sheets of your bed take on the rough scratch of the cot at Hut Point where Atch stowed you after those days of lying feverish on the floor with the anguished howl of the dogs in your ears and the walls pitching and bucking about you like the boiler room on the Terra Nova . Your muscles ache and your heart aches, and the blizzard screams outside; the Polar Party is out there in that somewhere. Birdie and Titus and Bill, the Owner, Evans.
‘They’ll come back.’ Your voice rasps over the insistence, hoarse from illness, like frostbite in your throat, shards of ice scraping your vocal cords to tatters. ‘Won’t they? Birdie wouldn’t-- he wouldn’t--’
There’s a washcloth on your forehead, cool and damp, pressing away the sweat, and you can’t shake the feeling, just out of reach of your fuzzed mind, that there’s something you’re missing, something important. ‘The dogs,’ you breathe. ‘You have to tell Atkinson, don’t risk--’
But no, Atch is here, murmuring something in his deep voice; gruff, professional affection; there’s a prick at the crook of your elbow, and then a needle sliding out of the skin. A hum of pins and needles washes out from the tiny point of heat, and you can feel yourself melting back into the bed. Morphia . You remember Cape Crozier, and how you had thought if it got too bad, you could always inject yourself and sink into sleep under the weight of wind and snow. This wouldn’t be such a bad way to die, you think hazily.
You can hear Birdie and Bill singing as the last scraps of consciousness are subsumed into warm, comfortable darkness.
You awake to a woman’s voice. It’s muffled, like she’s speaking on the other side of a glass wall, or through a thick balaclava. ‘Lassie?’ you try to say, but your tongue is dry in your mouth, thick and clumsy, and the sounds refuse to mesh into intelligible words. What is she doing in Antarctica? You’re at Hut Point, surely; you were when you went to sleep...
‘How long has he been like this?’
The voice that answers her is a deep grumble, clipped and firm along the edges. Atch. ‘Like this, you mean? Nearly a week now. Ever since I came up.’
Since Atch-- with the cutting force of a cape wind, the memory slices through the haze of opiates and sleep, and heat wells up, stinging your eyes as you lie there. You don’t have the energy to move; even the attempt to curl up into some kind of foetal comfort results in merely the barest shift to the side, burrowing your head into the pillow as tears slide over the bridge of your nose.
‘Oh, Apsley ,’ comes the voice of your sister, and then suddenly there’s warmth next to you, the rustle of her skirts and the firm flat of her hands to either side of your head as she presses a kiss to your temple, and then your hair. ‘Oh, my darling, whatever’s happened to you?’
You don’t have the words to tell her, can hardly understand it yourself, much less explain to poor Ida; all you have is Birdie and I miss him and I need him , and the sudden, fearfully lucid realisation that somewhere along the line, something in you has simply... broken. Atch is a fine surgeon, but perhaps there’s a limit to what even he can do.
So, ‘I’m sorry,’ you whisper, groping weakly to find her hand with yours. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so--’
‘No,’ she overrides you, dry lips pressing another kiss to the ridge of bone under the thin skin. ‘You’ve done nothing to be sorry for, do you understand me? You’ve simply been ill. That’s all.’
But her voice is tight, and you think you can hear the worry in it. It’s your fault, you know, distantly, but you have no idea what might be done to fix it, and all you can do is grip her hand a little more tightly and murmur your apologies into the fabric of her dress.
‘How much do you know about your brother’s condition?’ asks Atch from somewhere behind her.
‘Not much,’ Ida admits with a shake of her head, and her hand in yours squeezes a little tighter. ‘I knew-- that is to say, I was aware that he was... not well, but I had no idea of the extent of-- things.’
‘He’s mentioned Lt. Bowers to you before.’
She pauses. ‘In-- letters, sometimes, yes. I’ve started reading his post before I let mother see it; it would kill her if she thought--’
‘Yes,’ agrees Atch, deep and steady, reasonable. ‘I quite understand.’
You listen as he minces words, delicately, as he explains to your sister that you and Birdie had a... particularly close relationship, that you had suffered greatly from the belief that you might have done something to save the returning Polar Party. It is as if he’s talking about somebody else. He is not a psychologist, Atch says, but Antarctica has been known to cause what is known as polar madness, and that under stress, it is not unreasonable to suppose that an already weakened mind might simply... be unable to deal. That guilt and desperation might, under such circumstances, be enough to lead to delusion.
Ida is a strong woman, and you can see the muscles in her hand as she grips your bedding. Her back is straight, and there is only a sniff which proceeds the words when she asks Atch, ‘You’re his friend; is there-- anything else wrong with him? Or is it just-- just Lt. Bowers?’
‘No,’ Atch says slowly, thought behind the word like the grand, crawling motion of glaciers. ‘Ordinarily he maintains unremarkable health, and mentally-- outside his specific delusion-- I have seen nothing to suggest any other problems.’
He pauses.
‘It is only when presented with proof that the delusion is false that he shuts down. The brain can’t deal. Total collapse. I almost wonder--’
‘What?’
‘Nothing, Mrs. Shorting. I beg your pardon.’
~~~~~~~~~
I have sent the final draft of The Worst Journey in the World in to your publisher, and he assures me that the first copies should be in print within a month or two. I expect you will be encouraged to hear that things are progressing so rapidly.
As for myself, now that I no longer have your manuscript to occupy me, it seems likely that I shall be taken away from my researches and deployed once again, despite my eye. Now that the War is past, the Navy has little active use for fellows such as myself, but they are loath to let us sit around and grow idle for too long. It will, I think, be good to be back at sea, particularly during peacetime.
I trust and hope you are doing well, and am glad to hear that your health is improved. Remember to take advantage of the grounds you have at Lamer and not to stay holed up with your books too often. Being a failing I myself am prone to, it is easy to recognise it in others.
Regards, always,
E. Atkinson
P.S. Do pass on my greetings to Birdie as well. I’m sure he will not take offence that I have neglected to write him a letter of his own.
You let the letter fall back to the table. Across from you, Birdie crunches toast, speaking around a mouthful.
‘What’s the good doctor got to say?’
'The Worst Journey is going into publication.’ It has been a labour of years writing it, and a painful one; you’ve dedicated the book to the memories of Titus and Bill, but you think finally, now, you’re entitled to a little excitement that it’s finished. Still, the excitement is tempered with a fair measure of trepidation; going into publication means putting it out there for everyone in the world to see, and you’ve no idea how it will be received. Birdie knows you well enough to recognise your expression, and he snorts.
‘Och, don’t pull that face; that’s brilliant! They’ll love it.’
‘Who will?’
‘Everyone with tuppence to buy a copy,’ grins Birdie, and you can’t help the mirroring smile which tugs at your muscles. ‘You know I think it’s wonderful, Cherry; I couldn’t write six pages of a book, much less six hundred.’
He leans over to give you an affectionate little punch to the shoulder, and as ever, the strength of his good regard for you makes you want to blush. ‘And,’ you turn the subject back to Atch’s letter, ‘he’ll be deployed again soon, he thinks.’
Birdie crunches again. ‘Lucky bastard. We should go sailing sometime.’
‘As soon as the first royalties from he book come in,’ you promise, half teasing but still entirely genuine-- how could you ever be else with Birdie, ‘we’ll go somewhere exotic. Or I’ll buy us a yacht and we can blunder our way there ourselves. Pass the marmalade, will you?’
The marmalade is nearer Birdie than you, but despite your own request, you lean over to grab it yourself.