Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

She clamps and stitches the muscle. She clamps and stitches the fasciae. She clamps and stitches the skin. She washes the wound with saline.

It has been three and a half hours.

Suki says she’ll clean up and keep an eye on Jon.

Arvind says, “That was an extraordinary piece of work.”

Clare steps outside, removes her gloves and lowers her mask. Mikal comes up to her and puts his arms around her. Per is standing beside them. It is the first time Mikal has shown her physical affection in front of another person. “You were heroic.”

Jon dies the following morning. Suki has brought him some warm oatmeal and a weak coffee. He hoists himself up the bed so that he can eat and drink more easily and this must be the moment when the sutures break. He asks for Clare. Suki doesn’t understand what is happening.

He tells Clare that it is his fault. He should have told them earlier that he was feeling ill. The sheet under him is red. He asks for morphine. Everyone is in the room now. Arvind, Mikal, Per. Between the pain and the growing fog there are five minutes of clarity.

Per stands up straight and sticks out his chest. “I would like to say on behalf of all of us—”

Jon says, “Oh, do fuck off.”

Arvind laughs and catches himself.

Jon lies back and closes his eyes. “I want to listen to some music.”

“What music?” asks Mikal.

“Bluegrass,” says Jon.

He is unconscious by the time Mikal returns. Mikal puts the music on anyway. No one knows what else to do. There is nothing in the Protocol which deals with this situation. Leaving the room seems wrong, talking seems wrong, but standing quietly doing nothing makes it seem prematurely like a funeral. Suki holds Jon’s hand for a while but he does not respond so she drops it again. Arvind stares out of the window so that no one can see his face. Jon dies listening to “My Lord Keeps a Record” by Carl Story and his Rambling Mountaineers.

Per says, “Let’s concentrate on the small things.”

They strip Jon’s body, plug it and wrap it in the bloody sheet. Recycling is so axiomatic that Clare cannot help thinking how wasteful it is to discard an object containing so much fluid and so many calories. They lay him in the airlock ready for the morning. They don’t want to be outside with night falling.

Mikal and Clare tidy Jon’s room. They fold the clothes, put them away and make the bed. Clare opens Jon’s Ark and takes out a crucifix of palm fronds, a fossil trilobite and a green toy Ferrari with one tyre missing. She arranges them beside Jon’s little zoo of origami animals. In the bottom of the Ark she finds a dog-eared and faded photo of a young woman aged eighteen or nineteen lying naked on a bed. She is dark-skinned with shaggy coal-black hair, big breasts, utterly at ease. There is an open bottle of red wine on the carpet and the bottom of a film poster Clare cannot identify above the headboard. She puts it back in the box and they seal the room to save energy.

They bury Jon the following morning. They have no vehicle so Mikal and Arvind have to carry him slung between them. The EVA suits make it hard to get up after a fall so they move slowly and rest often. It takes them twenty-five minutes to reach the site a couple of hundred metres south of the base which has already been quietly earmarked as a graveyard. They return for spades. The soil is not as deep as they had hoped. They lay Jon in a shallow trough. They have been outside for more than two hours by this time. Per tells them to return to the base but they insist on completing the job, gathering stones and building a long, low cairn so that Jon’s body is not uncovered by the wind. When they return they have been outside for more than five hours. They are exhausted.

Per says, “I know that this is a difficult situation but we mustn’t allow emotion to undermine discipline.”

Mikal and Arvind remove their suits and everyone eats lunch together.

Arvind says, “I would like to recite a poem.”

Per says, “That would be acceptable. If no one has any objections.”

Arvind stands up. “ Maranare tuhu mamo shyamo saman meghabaran tujha, megha jotajuta, raktakamalkara, rakta adharaputa …”

Suki asks what the poem is.

“It is Tagore,” says Arvind. He does not offer a translation or a title. Clare suspects that he is trying to show more grief than the rest of them.

Mikal tells stories about Jon, how he played noughts and crosses on the Argo with floating grids of rye crackers, the monitor he made to predict Suki’s fits, his God-awful singing voice.

Per says, “I think it would be a good idea if we were to carry on with this afternoon’s timetable as usual.”

Suki says, “We have years ahead of us. Perhaps we should each of us decide how best to spend the rest of the day.”

They write reports for Geneva and give video testimonies. They are not allowed to discuss these with one another in advance. They are given pre-prepared scripts to learn and perform for a media package. They are encouraged to edit these to make them seem more personal. They take psychological tests which have been devised for them in the event of the death of a crew member.

Previously when she tired of company she retired to her room. Conversely when she felt lonely she sought the others out. Now she hungers for some indefinable third option. She has become the crew doctor. She tells Mikal that she does not want to have sex. He asks if he can simply hold her. As he is doing so she wonders if she was frightened of loving Peter too much, if that was why the relationship failed. Loving someone too much, not loving someone enough. Was it possible to mistake one of those for the other?

One evening Per is absentmindedly humming “My Lord Keeps a Record” to himself as he prepares his supper. Arvind says, “What the fuck are you doing?” She has never heard Arvind be anything less than courteous. Per has no memory of where the tune comes from. Arvind calls him a robot. Per puts his hand high on Arvind’s chest but not quite around his neck. He says, “This mission is more important than you or your feelings.”

Clare says, “We are all upset. We just express it in different ways.”

After a pause Per takes his hands off Arvind and says, “You are right, of course.”

She gives Arvind diazepam, 6 mg a day with a slow taper. She makes him increase his exercise regime by 50 percent. She sees him every evening to assess his mood. He is allowed to record and receive more videos to and from his extended family in New Haven and Chennai.

Per asks to talk to her in private and says that now might be a good moment to share with her the contents of the Kent Protocol. She says that Arvind will get better. It was a temporary aberration. She will read the Protocol if and when it becomes necessary.

Life refinds its equilibrium. Per, Mikal, Suki and Arvind take turns doing EVAs to the Long Array. Clare is no longer allowed to take part in potentially dangerous activities. Instead she measures heart rates and blood pressure and lung capacity and muscle tone and bone mass and visual acuity. She gives reaction tests and scans for tumours. She reads Neil Gaiman. She reads George R. R. Martin. Christmas comes and goes and the fact that none of them are practising Christians prevents the party atmosphere thickening to something more sombre. Arvind finishes his course of Valium and seems stable.