A Victim of the Aurora Read Online Free Page A

some wistful Siberian sledding song. Petty officers Henson, Wallace and Jones staged a comic performance during which they impersonated everyone – Stewart, Dryden, Beck, Hoosick, Henneker, Quincy – the lot of us. Wallace and Jones were lost in their roles but I remember that Henson was brilliant, that I went red in the cheeks when he did his characterization of me.
    Next, a sailors’ choir sang a sentimental song about the King.
    â€˜There’ll be no wo’ar
    As long as there’s a King like good King Edward,
    There’ll be no wo’ar
    For ’e ’ates that sort of thing,
    Mothers need not worry,
    As long as we’ve a King like good King Edward.
    Peace with ’onour
    Is his motter,
    So God save the King.’
    We didn’t know the King and the age had died in our absence just the month before, the King fading into coma from bronchitis caught when the proprietor of the Porte-Saint-Martin theatre in Paris turned the heating up too high.
    Lieutenant John Troy stood up on his chair. His blockhouse shape wavered there; he had a parrot-like grin beneath his long nose. ‘No better time, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘to introduce to you the definitive version of the John Troy his colleagues began cat-calling him, ‘that you all carry nose protector. You might remember,’ he continued when about with you an extremity called the nose, that you have all been ice-bitten on that extremity and that I then had to suffer the indelicate sight of grown men staggering about the hut with their noses half-sloughed off. You might remember that conventional nose protectors didn’t work because your breath froze them and so things were as bad as ever. My nose-piece, however, combines a sensible conical profile with a triangular shape.’
    Then he put on his windproof jacket and buttoned the nose-piece to it. It looked ridiculous, and everyone began to laugh at his bemused eyes, one either side of the apex of windproof nose cloth.
    You could see his hurt ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I was going to run up three dozen of these. But …’
    Some of us stopped laughing but others went on, as if punishing him in a small way for mentioning the cutting winds while we were feeling so well-fed, brotherly and immortal in the hut’s warm core.
    I noticed now that Par-axel Beck was asleep in his place at table. None of us had drunk liquor in any quantity since the ship landed us, so that there was a sharp vinous gleam in the eyes around the table.
    Men drifted from the table to argue at closer range. I saw Henneker sitting on my bunk with Paul Gabriel. Paul had his glasses in his hands and wore the blind, bemused look of all very short-sighted people when their spectacles are off. Henneker was reading him a letter or something similar, some piece of documentation from one of the scandalous stories he’d been telling that night. They were both dark men, Henneker tall and piratic, Paul wedgelike and, liquored, reminding one of some dark young Irishman or a Welsh miner. Henneker spoke quickly, quietly, smiling crookedly, and Paul seemed to be in that unpleasant state when you’re trying to make up your mind whether to be sick or to fall asleep.
    The arguments grew louder. Barry Fields burned his hand on the stove while playing indoor soccer with the American, Hoosick. Through it all, Stewart sat smoking and with his head inclined as if he could learn something from all of this too. He watched Coote, the tractorman, and Isaac Goodman tote Beck to his bunk and pull his inner shoes from his feet.
    Alec Dryden, a married man, thirty-eight years old, had offered to be night watchman that night and make notes of the aurora in the appropriate auroral record book. Only he was left sitting at table at eleven o’clock when Petty Officer Percy Mulroy went to the acetylene hut at the rear of the men’s quarters and cut off the gas supply to the lamps. The last drunks collided,