The Thing Itself Read Free

tenner? You can go fish for that , my friend.’
    ‘It’s not for sale,’ he repeated.
    ‘Is it a scam?’ I said, my temper wobbling badly. ‘Is the idea you hold out until I offer – what, twenty quid? Is that it?’
    ‘No. That’s not it. It’s mine. I do not choose to sell it.’
    ‘Just tell me what’s in the letter,’ I pleaded. ‘I’ll give your money back and you can keep the damn thing, just tell me who it’s from and what it says.’ Even as I made this offer it occurred to me that Roy, with his twisted sense of humour, might simply lie to me. So I added: ‘Show it to me. Just show me the letter. You don’t have to give it up, keep it for all I care, only—’
    ‘No deal,’ said Roy. Then he wrung his speccy face into a parody of a concerned expression. ‘You’re embarrassing yourself, Charles.’ And he shut his door.
    I went through to the common room, fuming. For a while I toyed with the idea of simply grabbing the letter back: I was bigger than Roy, and doubtless had been involved in more actual fist-flying, body-grappling fights than he. It wouldn’t have been hard. But instead of that I had a beer, and lay on the sofa, and tried to get a grip. We had to live together, he and I, in unusually confined circumstances, and for a very long period of time. In less than a week the sun would vanish, and the proper observing would begin. Say we chanced upon alien communication (I told myself) – wouldn’t that be something? Might there be a Nobel Prize, or something equally prestigious, in it? I couldn’t put all that at risk, even for the satisfaction of punching that bastard on the nose.
    Maybe, I told myself, Roy would thaw out a little in a day or two. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, after all. Maybe I could coax the letter out of him.
    The week wore itself out. I went through a phase of intense irritation with Roy for his (what seemed to me) immensely petty and immature attitude with regard to my letter. Then I went through a phase when I told myself it didn’t bother me. I did consider returning his tenner to him, so as to retain the high moral ground. But then I thought: ten pound is ten pound .
    The week ended, and Diamondo overflew and tossed the supply package out to bounce along the snow. This annoyed me, because I had finally managed to write a letter to Lezlie that explained the situation without making it sound like I valued her communiqués so little I’d gladly sold it off to weirdo Roy. But I couldn’t ‘post’ the letter unless the plane landed and took it on board, so I had to hang on to it. And I couldn’t even be sure the letter Roy had purchased had been from her.
    On the fifth of July the sun set for the last time until August. The thing people don’t grok about Antarctic night is that it’s not the same level of ink-black all the way through. For the first couple of weeks the sky lightens twice a day, pretty much bright enough to walk around without a torch – the same dawn and dusk paling of the sky that precedes sunrise and follows sunset, only without actual dawn and dusk. Still, you can sense the sun is just there, on the other side of the horizon, and it’s not too bad. As the weeks go on this gets briefer and darker, and then you do have a month or so when it’s basically coal-coloured skies and darkness invisible the whole time.
    Diamondo landed his plane, and tossed out the supply package, but didn’t linger; and by the time I’d put on the minimum of outdoor clothing and grabbed a torch and got through the door he was taking off again – so, once again, I didn’t get to send my letter to Lez.
    That was the last time I saw that aircraft.
    There were two letters in this week’s batch: one from my old grammar school headmaster, saying that the school had hosted a whole assembly on the ‘exciting and important’ work I was doing; and the other from my professor at Reading. This was nothing but a note, and read in its entirety: ‘Dear