Read Online A Victim of the Aurora by Thomas Keneally - Free Book Online Page B

eyes. I wanted to laugh. He had the over-solemnity, over-frankness, of a child. ‘I mean, you found him. Did you really think he’d hit his head? Just that? Sorry if this is painful. But what did he look like?’
    I couldn’t frame words. ‘Yes. I don’t know. Blisters. His face was blistered. I don’t know.’ I wanted my non-knowing-ness to sound like the last word.
    â€˜You and Paul and the sweeper brought him back. Did Alec look closely at him? Listen, you’ve got to bloody forgive me. I’ve got reasons for asking.’
    â€˜We put him on a bench in the naturalists’ room …’
    And instantly we had done it Paul went and leaned his brow against the wall. Stigworth sat moaning with a frostbitten hand and chafed it furiously against his chest far inside his polar clothing.
    Nikolai was keening by the door. Only I – and I don’t know why – watched Alec work with Victor. First he felt Victor’s temples, then wrestled with the frozen gauntlets, seeking a wrist pulse. His attempt to close the eyelids failed since they were frozen to the eyeballs.
    He touched Victor’s bloated and frozen tongue and realized that, even if it were thawed, it would not fit properly back in the mouth again. Then, unbuttoning the iced wind-proofs from around the neck, he put his fingers towards Victor’s carotid and saw, before he touched the cold flesh, what I also could see – the various purple bruises of strangulation on the throat. Alec stared at me a second, pulled the windproof collar back into place so that the marks were not so visible and asked me alone to help him carry Victor through our quarters, manoeuvring his stiffness around the end of the table, then into the sailors’ quarters and so through into the workshop. I held Victor upright while Alec cleared a bench of hammers and chisels. When that was done, we placed the corpse on the bench.
    â€˜There’s no one else to ask,’ he said, ‘so would you mind getting some blubber and lighting the stove here?’
    The temperature in the workshop, you see, was probably close on freezing, but the room had an unused blubber stove which, if lit, would give out enough heat for the thawing of Victor’s body.
    I went out of the workshop to the space beside the men’s latrines where frozen blubber was heaped. Men like Mulroy and Wallace flensed it away from the meat of any seal they caught, cut it in blocks and stacked it here where, of course, it froze. Every day sailors took a supply through to the stables for Mead to use in the stove there to keep the ponies warm.
    I loaded myself with four blocks, enough – I thought – to warm Victor’s corpse, and brought them into the workshop. Alec had already covered the body with a blanket. ‘It’s from his own bunk,’ he said. I could dimly hear the explosion of a flare in the blizzard outside. Stigworth or Paul must be doing that duty, pointing the flare pistol southward over the hut, so that the flare exploded in the blizzard above our heads.
    I put the blocks of blubber in the perforated bin at the top of the stove. As they melted they would give off an unpleasant fatty smell inappropriate to respect for the dead, so I covered the bin with its steel lid. Next I opened the slide beneath the bin and lit the small oil burner inside the stove. I closed the slide. What would happen now was that the burner would melt a little of the blubber, the blubber oil would drip through the bin perforations and feed the flames which would melt more blubber still. And so a heavy sooty warmth would grow in the workshop.
    â€˜Thank you,’ said Alec. He took a chair and began filling his pipe.
    â€˜Aren’t you shocked?’ I asked him. I thought the pipe was indecent.
    He put it on the floor, near his feet, and put both hands on his knees. ‘You’ll have to forgive me, Tony.’
    â€˜It’s all right,’ I