The Ministry of Time, page 25
“Oh,” he said.
“Mm.”
“Somehow I did not think it would be—right there.”
The chapel’s memorial to the Franklin expedition, under which the body tenuously identified as assistant surgeon Harry Goodsir was buried, was in an alcove near the entrance. I was embarrassed by the sight of a half-rolled poster display for a recently closed exhibition and a small herd of black queue barriers which had been left nearby. The moment should have been grand, heartrending, important. I felt sure there should be mournful organ music. Instead the memorial looked forgotten.
He stood and stared for a long time at the engraved muster roll of officers.
“They promoted Edward, then,” he said softly. “Good.”
“All the mates got their commission too.”
“Oh, as it ever was. One often had to wait for someone to die in order to ascend the ranks. It’s just unusual for the person dying to be oneself.”
I smiled unsurely. He was very pale. A trick of the shadow had swallowed the green in his eyes. They were an opaque, flat brown, like a spring tree that had failed to regrow.
“And—Dr. Goodsir is—?”
“Yes,” I murmured.
“He was in fine, bombastic form the last time I saw him. He came out to the magnetic observatory and went into rhapsodies about the lichen. He told me moss is a sign that God has a sense of humor, and fungi that he has a sense of awe. He was very eccentric. You would have liked him.”
“Yeah. I’ve read his letters home. He seemed like a funny man.”
“I forget that we are objects of study to you. That you can read our private correspondence.”
“Sorry.”
“No, don’t be. At least they are remembered and cared for still.”
I didn’t know how to respond to this. I touched my fingers to his palm.
He made a soft, gear-adjusting noise in his throat and said, “Would you mind if I had some time alone here?”
“Of course not. Uh. Should I wait—”
“You may wish to find something to occupy yourself.”
“Ah. Yes. I’ll go to the museum.”
I regretted saying that, because part of the museum had relics dug up from the collapse of his expedition, but he was already in a different place in his mind. He didn’t look at me, but he reached out and brushed my cheek, as he might have absentmindedly petted an animal. “Thank you,” he said.
In the end it was an hour before he sent me a carefully composed text, arranging to meet me near the entrance to the Greenwich foot tunnel. We got lunch at a food stall, and I could see him trying to work out the recipe for the Nutella-covered pisang goreng. I joked that we’d have to buy a fire blanket and he accused me of having little faith, then asked why I’d never let him have Nutella before. I said that I tried not to let myself have it otherwise I ceased to partake of the other food groups.
He said, “On the subject of which.”
“Yes?”
“Cannibalism.”
“Uh.”
“I knew those men.”
“Yes.”
“And they wouldn’t have done that.”
He looked at me, as if debating how much I would weigh if I were hundreds of beans and poured in a bottle.
“Would they?” he added.
“I’m sorry. If you know about that then you know how we know. The Inuit had no reason to lie. And, well. We found the remains, eventually. The British, I mean, and the Canadians and so on. The bones had knife marks. There’s this thing called pot polishing—”
He held up his wooden fork, and I broke off. His lips were pale. So was the rest of his face, but it was the lips that startled me. Finally he said, “Do you believe the natives were telling the truth?”
“Graham. It’s what happened. There’s archaeological evidence.”
“But then you believe that it could have been true of me.”
“It would have been true of anyone. They were starving.”
“And the Esquimaux didn’t help.”
“We say ‘Inuit.’ They crossed paths here and there. I know there’s at least one record of a successful joint caribou hunt after the ships were abandoned. But. I mean. You must remember what King William Island looked like. There’s just not enough game to support that many men.”
He gave me a strange, blurry look, like he was burying something in the back of his skull. “Do you know the names of the last men?” he asked.
“No. About thirty men made it to the final camp at Starvation Cove. But we don’t know who. Some people think the very last survivors were Captain Crozier and Dr. McDonald, based on Inuit testimony, but really we have no idea.”
Relief crept through his face. I wondered who he had imagined, starving and blank-eyed, picking calf muscle from their teeth.
* * *
The next morning, when I woke up, he was in my bed.
We’d taken to sleeping together most nights. He slept as if a plug had been pulled on his brain. He looked sweetly boyish when he was asleep, and it made me afraid. I adored him, and it was robbing me of a layer of skin.
But he was rarely still in bed in the mornings, as he rose some two hours before I did. When I saw him there, lying still on his back and staring at the ceiling, I felt a shiver of wrongness.
“I’m never going back, am I?” he said. His voice was low and conversational, as if we were picking up a chat we’d been having five minutes beforehand.
I wriggled closer and settled my hand on his chest.
“No. You can’t.”
“I don’t think I really believed it. But it’s true. They’re all dead. Everyone I ever knew is dead. Everything I had in my life is gone.”
I rubbed my thumb on his chest.
“Be present and calm,” the Wellness team had advised. “Focus on action. Accept confusion; do not demand explanation.”
He stared at me, vague and empty, the way an animal looks at a book.
“There is no one left in the world who has known me for longer than a few months. I am a stranger in a strange land.”
“I know you.”
“Do you?”
“I’m trying. I’d like to know you better.”
Something softened in his face, enough that I caught a glimpse of the ocean of sadness he had dammed and kept damming, every night, every day.
“Come here,” he said.
* * *
People sometimes asked me if I’d ever been “back” to Cambodia. I told them I’d “visited.”
On one such visit, with my parents and my sister, my mother arranged a trip to the seaside resort town of Kep. There, women manning market stalls cooked mudfish and baby squid over charcoal and cheerfully fleeced us—my mother’s Penh accent as poor a passport as her family’s Western faces—and we ate fish and rice with prahok and bitter melon on a raised wooden picnic platform. A wandering drinks vendor with sak yant tattoos told my mother that nice Khmer girls didn’t drink, and my father had to buy the beers and sneak them to her, holding up a fan each time she took a sip, an operation they managed with increasing hilarity.
When we were fed and had made a memory of it, she took us farther up the coast. Eventually we found what she was looking for in an abandoned, weed-choked plot smelling outrageously of animal behaviors. She pulled up something red from the floor.
“Look.”
It was part of an intricately carved floor tile, bearing the rubbed remains of a mandala pattern. We started to look, amazed, around our feet.
“It was my family’s holiday home,” said my mother. “Your grandmother chose the tiles.”
When something changes you constitutionally, you say: “The earth moved.” But the earth stays the same. It’s your relationship with the ground that shifts.
The time-travel project was the first time in history that any person had been brought out of their time and into their far future. In this sense, the predicament of the expats was unique. But the rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, roll like floods across human history. I’d seen it happen around my own life.
I knew Graham felt adrift on treacherous waters. He desired me—that much was obvious now—but either he wished that he didn’t, or he wished we could have done it his way. He was in an uncertain relationship with everything in our era, but he knew how to make love to me, and he knew it was what I wanted. If I’d let him have his choice, he would never have touched me, but would have courted me chastely in that little house until the Ministry made him enough of a man that he could create an honest woman out of what he had to work with.
I suppose I mean to say that I’d betrayed him, because he’d been told I was his anchor, and instead I insisted he become mine. Betrayed him in other ways too, of course, by keeping secrets from him and reporting on him. But that was all in the original job description.
* * *
He sat with his back against the headboard and held me in his lap, rutting unhurriedly into me. My mouth and breasts stung pleasurably where he had kissed me and rasped me with the shadow of stubble on his chin. He rolled one of my nipples like a rosary bead between his knuckles, and clasped my hips in one arm, pinning me in place.
“Let me—”
“Be good and take it slowly.”
Twice I’d wrenched myself off him and tried to provoke him into rough movement with my mouth and my hands. Our bodies were slick with sweat, and when I moved away from him to do this, the cold air in the bedroom lapped at me with a peculiar frigid eroticism. When I came back to him, he licked my mouth clean.
“Let me—”
“No,” he said, and bit me lightly on the throat.
On my bedside table, my work phone started ringing.
“Oh—”
“Ignore it.”
“It’s—uh—it’s—work—”
“So far as I understand it, I am your work. Thus, you are working. Do you like it—when I am very deep—like this—?”
The phone rang out. A few seconds of silence, then it started again.
“Oh—Godsake—I should—”
He sighed, then lifted me up and dropped me onto my back. I hooked an ankle around his hips. Soon he didn’t even need that urging. The bed thudded ferociously against the wall. I came, one foot scrabbling at his calf, to the sound of the headboard thumping and the phone ringing. It was very stressful. He climaxed soon after, gasping in my ear. I stroked his back, touching the bump of the microchip.
All the tension streamed off him, and he flopped onto me.
“Hhhuk. Heavy!”
“I think I put my back out trying to hold your hips at the right angle,” he said peacefully. “For which you are welcome, by the way.”
“Gerroff. Phone.”
“Hmm. I’ll stay here until I can feel my spine again.”
I waggled about, trying to dislodge him.
“You’re going to get it all over your thighs,” he observed. “And then you will be so annoyed.”
“What happened to the blushing virgin I married?”
“Well, we did not marry. You took me out of wedlock. Now I’m ruined.”
This worked, however. He rolled off me and pulled the bedsheets around his hips.
“You weren’t a virgin either,” I said cheerfully.
He ignored me.
The phone lit up with a text message. It was from Adela.
Come to the Ministry immediately.
IX
May 1859. Captain Leopold McClintock’s search expedition has spent eight months locked in the ice by Bellot Strait. Frostbite, scurvy, and the long Arctic winter have ravaged his crew. Now the sun is back and sledging is once again practicable.
McClintock’s Lieutenant Hobson heads south along King William Land. Some Esquimaux have told him that, nine years before, they saw a straggling group of thirty starving, ragged white men—the purported remnants of Sir John Franklin’s expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. Franklin’s two ships, Erebus and Terror, have not been seen since July 1845. None of the officers and sailors who sailed with him have been found.
The Esquimaux hinted at other things too. Dismembered bodies at makeshift campsites. Boots boiled in pots, boots still filled with human flesh. Knife scores on tibia, finger bones sucked clean of marrow. A last camp in a harbor on the mainland, where they found a corpse who had passed watch chains through gashes in his earlobes, perhaps for safekeeping, perhaps clinging to the idea that he might yet return to a place where the watch was worth something. Hobson spoons his rations and wonders what his own biceps would taste like.
At the place the Europeans call Cape Felix, he finds the remains of a camp. There are tents still pitched, filled with bearskins and canvas sleeping bags. He finds two sextants, wire cartridges, snow goggles, brass screws. He concludes that this was not a camp of last resort but a scientific observatory, set up for the milder summer months. The only strange thing about it is the speed with which it was abandoned, leaving behind valuable property of the Royal Navy.
Sledging farther south, he discovers a cairn of piled stones. Inside is the only piece of communication from the Franklin expedition that will ever be discovered: a note on Admiralty notepaper, written over twice.
The first message, in strong, confident handwriting, reads:
H.M.S ships “Erebus” and “Terror” wintered in the Ice in lat. 70° 05' N., long. 98° 23' W. Having wintered in 1846–7 at Beechey Island, in lat. 74° 43' 28" N., long. 91° 39' 15" W., after having ascended Wellington Channel to lat. 77°, and returned by the west side of Cornwallis Island. Sir John Franklin commanding the expedition. All well.
Party consisting of 2 officers and 6 men left the ships on Monday 24th May, 1847.
(Signed) G. M. GORE, Lieut.
(Signed) CHAS. F. DES VOEUX, Mate.
The second, wavering in the margins:
25th April 1848 H.M. ships “Terror” and “Erebus” were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues N.N.W. of this, having been beset since 12th September, 1846. The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls, under the command of Captain F. R. M. Crozier, landed here in lat. 69° 37' 42" N., long. 98° 41' W. This paper was found by Lt. Irving under the cairn supposed to have been built by Sir James Ross in 1831–4 miles to the Northward—where it had been deposited by the late Commander Gore in May June 1847. Sir James Ross’ pillar has not however been found and the paper has been transferred to this position which is that in which Sir J. Ross’ pillar was erected—Sir John Franklin died on the 11th June, 1847; and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.
(Signed) JAMES FITZJAMES, Captain H.M.S. Erebus.
(Signed) F.R.M. CROZIER, Captain & Senior Offr.
and start on tomorrow, 26th, for Back’s Fish River.
The note revealed two important things.
Firstly, that the expedition had abandoned their ships in April 1848, after two consecutive summers so cold that the sea had remained frozen. Twenty-four men had already died and the lauded Franklin was among their number. Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames, captains of Terror and Erebus respectively, had led the ships’ companies in an overland march of eight hundred miles. None, as far as Hobson could tell, survived the effort.
Secondly, that Lieutenant Graham Gore—who had been granted a field promotion to Commander—was dead before the march began. History had swallowed him, closing over him as the sea does over a luckless sailor.
CHAPTER NINE
At the Ministry, Adela stared at me with wild eyes. She looked like her edges had been improperly filled in, and I realized it was the first time I’d ever seen her without makeup. A palm-size clump of hair frizzed out from her head.
“There’s a mole,” she barked.
“A—”
“I thought it was Quentin. It was last time. That’s why he was neutralized.”
“Neutra—”
“You’re in danger, do you understand?” she said, seizing my arms. I stared at her, hot with shock. Adrenaline slimed under my skin. I felt like overhandled putty.
“I know I’m in danger. The Brigadier—”
“Someone inside the Ministry is feeding him information,” she said. “And I don’t know who.”
I had a feeling like I’d always assumed I was a real girl but someone had flicked me in the eye and it had produced no pain, only a glassy click: I was just a doll, with no more inner intelligence than a bottle of water.
“How do you know there’s a mole in the Ministry?” I asked.
Adela threw her hands up.
“There was a breach!” she said. I’d never heard her talk in exclamation points before. It took a decade off her. “The time-door’s location was leaked! And I still can’t find the Brigadier! I’ve looked everywhere he ought to be!”
We were looking at each other, neither with much of a grip on our expressions. Something was washing over Adela’s face. I thought, at first, I was witnessing a rare example of high emotion, but the longer I looked, the more I became convinced that the weird battlements of her chin and cheekbones were moving again. She looked viscous, recently shaken.
I stared, fascinated, at her expression’s bending scaffolding.
“You said the mole was Quentin ‘last time.’ What did you mean?”
Adela combed her fingers through her hair. The big kink at the side of her head began to flatten, in an oily, exhausted way.
“One day,” she said, “you will have to stop asking stupid questions for the sake of conversational presenteeism. It endears you to no one. You know exactly what I meant.”
* * *
After my meeting with Adela, I went back to our wretched dripping flat and sat in our miserable kitchen, trying to read a report—though really I just stared at the same page for twenty minutes. Graham was out on the motorbike, a permission that hadn’t yet been rescinded. I heard him pull up in the forsaken courtyard that hid the entrance to the flat, and then, a few minutes later, I heard the key in the door. He stumbled over the doorstep, and called my name in a strangled voice.
