Edmund Cooper - Transit

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.

It was evening by the time they had restored some semblance of order to Camp One. It was evening, warm and clear; and the bright jewellery of the sky was dominated once more by a pair of palely glowing moons.

Avery, Mary and Barbara were sitting round the fire, recovering from the trauma of the day and digesting a meal of steak—cut from the side of Tom’s Lilliputian deer—supplemented with fruit. Tom had had the luck to chase the deer into a thicket, where it became hopelessly entangled. He had been able to break its neck with a staff he had provided for himself.

He had not, however, enjoyed the spoils of the hunt. When, at last he had regained control of himself after the humiliating exposure of his private world, he joined the others in salvaging what was left of their possessions. But he said nothing, and moved about almost as if he were in a, trance. Mary tried to shake him out of it, but her approaches were blocked by silence. After a time, she stopped trying.