The Thing Itself Read Free Page B

look at me with a ‘that’s all you know’ sort of expression. This was, I decided, just winding me up.
    ‘I tell you what I think,’ I said. ‘You can, you know, nod, or not-nod, depending on whether I’m right. I think the letter you bought was from my girlfriend. Yeah?’
    ‘No comment,’ said Roy primly. ‘One way or the other.’
    ‘If so, it was probably full of inane chatter, yeah? Fine – keep it! With my blessing!’
    ‘In point of fact,’ he corrected me, holding up his right forefinger, ‘I do not need your blessing. The transaction was finalised with the fiduciary transfer. Contract law is very clear on this point.’
    I lost my temper a little. ‘You know how sad you are, keeping a woman’s letter to another man for your own weird little sexual buzz? That’s – sad . Is what it is. I don’t think you realise how sad that is.’
    ‘Oh Charles, Charles,’ he said, shaking his head and smirking in that insufferable way he had. ‘If only you knew!’
    I swore. ‘Suit yourself,’ I said.
    Then the airstrip lights failed. I assumed this was an accident, although the fact that every one of them failed at the same time was strange. Diamondo came through on the radio: ‘Fellows!’ he declared, through his thick accent. ‘I cannot land if there are no lights to land!’
    ‘Don’t know what’s happened to them,’ I replied. ‘Some manner of malfunction.’
    ‘Obviously that!’ came Diamondo’s voice. ‘Can you fix? Over.’
    Roy suited up and went outside; he was back in minutes. ‘I can’t do anything in the dark, with a torch, in a hurry,’ he complained. ‘Tell him no. Tell him to toss the package out and we’ll fix the lights for next time.’
    When I relayed this message, Diamondo said,‘Breakables! There are breakables in the package! I cannot toss! Over.’ Then, contradicting his last uttered word, he went on. ‘I can take out the breakables and toss the rest. Wait – wait.’
    I could hear the scrapy sound of the plane in the sky outside. Then, over the radio: ‘Is in chute.’
    ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Where are you dropping it? If there’s no lights – I mean, I don’t want to go searching over a wide area in the dark with …’ There was a terrific crash right overhead, as something smashed into our roof.
    ‘You idiot!’ I called. ‘You could have broken our roof!’
    Static. And, through the walls, the sound of the plane’s engines diminishing. Roy looked at me, and I at him. ‘I think it rolled off,’ Roy said. ‘You go out and get it.’
    ‘You’re already suited!’
    ‘I went out last time. It’s your turn now. Fair’s fair.’
    It was on the edge of my tongue to retort: Stealing my letter – is that fair ? But that would have done no good; and anyway I was hoping that there would be a new letter from Lezlie in the satchel. So I pulled on overclothes and took a torch and went outside.
    It was extraordinarily cold – sinus-freezingly cold. The air was still. The sound of Diamondo’s plane, already very faint, diminished and diminished until it vanished altogether. Now the only sound was the whirr of the generator, gently churning to itself with its restless motion. I searched around in the dark outside the main building for ten minutes or so, and spent another five trying to see into the gap between the main prefab and the annexe, which was half-full of snow. But I couldn’t find it.
    When I went back to the main door it was locked. This was unprecedented. For a while I banged on the door, and yelled, and my heart began blackly to suspect that Roy was playing some kind of prank on me – or worse.
    I was just about to give up and make my way round to try the side entrance when Roy’s gurning face appeared in the door’s porthole, with the graph-paper pattern woven into the glass. He opened it. ‘What the hell were you playing at?’ I demanded crossly. ‘Why did you lock the door?’
    ‘It occurred to me that the lights might have been