Transit

ELEVEN

He lay there until the edge of the pain had dulled, and his lungs no longer felt like a couple of ripped balloons. He lay there for perhaps five minutes, sick with anxiety, his mind cataloguing all the more lurid possibilities like a hysterical computer. Eventually, after about three or four minutes that stretched into dreadful hours, the various aches in his body were reduced to a scale on which they could be handled. He summoned the strength to get to his feet—a tricky operation—and began to hobble back towards the camp…. The leader of the expedition! He smiled cynically. A goddamned bloody marvellous leader of the expedition he’d made! He couldn’t even lead a self-respecting troop of boy scouts…

There was nobody at Camp One when Avery arrived. There was nothing but devastation. The tents, flapping drunkenly in the slight breeze, with half their ropes severed, seemed to gaze at him with mute reproach. The camping equipment was scattered crazily over quite a wide area. The trunks had been flung about, and so had their contents.

Avery found his paints and canvas boards half buried in the sand. Many of the packets of cigarettes had been opened, crushed and tossed carelessly aside. Several of the L.P. records had been wantonly smashed, but strangely enough the record player itself had survived.

Mary’s sweets lay scattered with various items of clothing and underwear, suggesting, ludicrously, the combined remains of a rather violent and extravagant children’s party and a communal sex-orgy. Barbara’s possessions reeked of whisky—several of her bottles had been smashed apparently just for the hell of it. But the biggest surprise of all came from the widely distributed contents of Tom’s trunk.

Avery remembered how only the night before—already it seemed a year ago—Tom had been so coyly secretive about his possessions. Well, the secret—or secrets—was out now; and so was the reason for Tom’s reticence. The tom and tattered remnants of his fantasy world lay grotesquely and garishly on the sand—dozens of photographs and colour prints of pin-up girls. Some evidently taken from magazines and some rather too revealing to be acquired by other than ‘private subscription’. There they lay in various states of dress, undress, provocation, invitation and so on. Among them were even snaps of one or two naked and bored-looking couples engaging in the sexual act in various and somewhat improbable postures.

Somehow, in this place and in this situation, the total impression was not of pornography exposed but of a cruel and tragic illusion. Poor Tom! Here were the symbols of his loneliness, his personal hell, his private despair.

Before he did anything else at all, before he even thought of anything else, Avery was moved to gather up the pathetic scraps of card and paper and try to get them back into Tom’s trunk, as if they had never been disturbed. It was not decent in the true sense of the word that a man’s weakness should be exposed and consequently mocked in such a fashion.

Even as he gathered them up, Avery knew that his hope of conrtaling what had happened was a futile one. And what the hell did it matter, anyway? Quite possibly Tom was dead by now, if the destruction here was anything to go by. Quite possibly the girls were dead as well and he, Avery, was wasting valuable time and effort for a stupid bloody reason when he ought to be concentrating entirely upon problems of personal security and survival. But he went on collecting the sad survivors of Tom’s pornographic collection just the same.

He was so intent on his task that he did not even hear Mary and Barbara return. They found him among the wreckage of the camp, scrabbling about on his knees, picking up the soiled, two-dimensional scraps of a scattered dream world.

Mary began to laugh. There was a taut note of hysteria in her voice.

‘Shut up! ’ said Avery brutally. ‘Nothing is funny any more. I lost my sense of humour a while back.’

He stood up and looked at them both. Their clothing was tom, their hands and arms were scratched. Mary was bleeding from a cut above her eye.

‘What the hell have you two been doing—fighting off hordes of sex-starved Indians?’ He hadn’t meant to say that. He was so unutterably glad to see them alive and relatively unharmed that he had to say something harsh to stop himself from dancing for joy or flinging his arms wildly and possessively round them both. Suddenly, inexplicably, they were no longer just Mary and Barbara. They belonged to him, they were part of his family. They were wives, sisters, mothers, sweethearts—anything that would give an excuse for kinship. He knew that he loved them. He knew because he knew how much he had been afraid.

‘Sorry if we interrupted your private study,’ said Barbara acidly. She dropped the empty gun on the grass in front of one of the tents. ‘We got chased up a small tree by one of those dear little rhinotype creatures. And then the cunning little devil decided to bulldoze the tree over.’ She shuddered at the recollection. ‘God, they die hard, those things do. I kept pumping bullets into its head until I swear it began to rattle But, as I say, if we’d known you were engaged in vital research, maybe we’d have just sacrificed ourselves with dignity.’

Suddenly, Avery smiled. ‘I’m sorry…. I mean really sorry— I—I was so glad to see you I could have cried.’

‘Instead of which…’ observed Barbara. She gazed pointedly at the photographs.

‘Not mine,’ he said, feeling irrationally like a traitor. ‘I heard the shots, ran too far, and too fast, fell in a heap, then staggered back to find the remnants of our happy home. I thought…. Hell! I don’t know what I thought.’

‘If they aren’t yours,’ said Mary, ‘then they must be ’

‘Christ! There’s not much choice, is there?’ He exploded. ‘And is that all you can worry about? You two nearly got killed, the camp has just about been flattened, God alone knows where Tom is—but your sensitive souls are shocked by a few pathetic little pin-ups. Where’s your perspective?’

‘It died with the rhinotype,’ said Mary, suddenly fierce. ‘But if these objects of art are so important that you have to collect them first, we’d better help.’ She bent down and began to gather a few of the pictures.

‘I was hoping to get them stowed away before Tom came back,’ said Avery dully. ‘It… It seemed the kindest thing to do…. You needn’t bother now, Mary. He’s coming along the beach. He must have heard the shots, too, I suppose.’

Tom was about a couple of hundred yeards away when Avery saw him. He had the body of what looked like a miniature deer slung round his neck and shoulders. He walked jauntily, like a man who seemed reasonably well pleased with life. When he was about fifty yards away, he saw what had happened to the camp and came forward at a jog-trot. At twenty yards or so, he saw the three of them waiting for him, frozen as in a tableau. He saw also one or two of the pin-ups that had been caught by the wind. He dropped the body of the animal and came towards the group slowly. His face was expressionless, his eyes remote.

‘Glad to see you in one piece,’ said Avery with an attempt at lightness. ‘It’s been a day of catastrophes. The girls nearly got hammered by a homicidal rhinoceros. I heard the shots, started running and gave myself a sort of Grade A heart attack.’

Tom said nothing. He knelt down and began to collect the rest of the pictures.

Avery watched him. He didn’t know what to say or do.

‘It’s all right, Tom.’ Barbara spoke. Her voice was gentle—too gende. ‘My weakness is whisky. Richard and Mary have weaknesses, too. These things don’t matter any more.’

Tom said nothing. He went on collecting the pictures. Silence flapped among the four of them, a heavy curtain of tension.

After a moment or two, Mary laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Tom, dear, there’s no need to be ashamed….’ She hesitated, then went on. ‘I fill myself with sweets— compulsively—I just can’t help it…. I have a rag doll and—and I have to sleep with it held tightly between my legs….’ She swallowed. ‘Because if I don’t, I’m afraid. And then I begin to shake all over.’

Mentally, Avery took off his non-existent hat to her. Mary was the quiet one, the timid one, the prudish one.

But, by God, she was wonderful!

She went on: ‘Please, Tom. We’re not sniggering. We might have done yesterday, or in London a week ago. But not now. Please don’t be ashamed.’

‘Ashamed! ’ Tom turned an agonized, tear-stained face up to her. His voice was high, almost shrill. ‘Ashamed! Do you know what these amusing little pictures have robbed me of—fifteen years of manhood! And you tell me not to be ashamed.’ He laughed and the laughter was cracked with anguish. ‘An eminent Viennese gentleman of the psychiatric persuasion once claimed humorously that sex was merely an unsatisfactory substitute for masturbation. I, God help me, spent fifteen years proving the thesis for him…. I bet you don’t even know what masturbation is…. My father knew. He was a parson. He used to tell us choir boys all about the evils of the flesh— on alternate Sundays. Masturbation produced insanity, paralysis, every rotten disease you could think of…. I believed him. I believed every single word he said—until one day I had no father and the village had no parson. Do you know why? Because he was doing eighteen months for sodomy. There was a kid—a little horror— but my father used to say he had a face like an angel’s. He may have done—but, Jesus, he had a mind like a sewage farm…. And who corrupted who? Your guess is as good as mine. I’ve been wondering for fifteen years…. And I’ve played it safe. Oh, yes, by heaven I played it safe. I never had a woman. I never had anybody. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. I wasn’t ever going to trust anybody again…. Well, what did it bring me? It brought me those dearly loved four-colour harlots in all shapes and sizes. It brought me nights of three-dimensional dreams, so strong I felt as if I were drowning in a black marble bath with the water at blood temperature. It brought me days of misery, days of penitence—and more empty synthetic nights of splendour…. It brought me a lifetime of retreat.’

Suddenly, he collapsed upon the ground and lay there sobbing.