make me end where i begun

“Every minute of every hour,” Hickey says. “From the moment you set foot on Terror.”

The blood seeps from the split in Crozier’s hairline, inching down through one eyebrow. His wrists are bound.

“I thought that was just the scurvy.”

“Don’t deny it. You felt it then.”

With proximity comes pleasure — a damp spreading warmth situated squarely in his guts. It’s harder to stomach than the unrelenting misery that comes when they’re too far apart— at least he’d have decades of firsthand experience with that. Having the man flogged had alleviated it, if not for the reasons Crozier had hoped.

Hickey breathes tobacco smoke in his eyes — tobacco from a dead man’s pocket. Crozier won’t look at him. Relief swirls inside him like the queer peace that comes after having vomited up the last of a night’s overindulgence. The cessation of discomfort.

Why couldn’t it have been Blanky, or Jopson, or Christ almighty, even Commander Fitzjames —he’d have hated himself, but it wouldn’t have him aching at night for a bullet in the brain. He could have asked Peddie and McDonald to cut this complication out of him like a cancer. To think that he’d once imagined his separation from Miss Cracroft to be an impossible burden, an insurmountable obstacle — the memory of that last decisive rejection is bliss contrasted with this. A toothache would be a happy memory compared to having your guts spooled out by that thing on the ice. Such things are relative.

With separation comes pain — aboard the Terror, it had been a dull pain. Crozier could bury the feeling under a stiff drink and fancy its comings and goings to be as meaningless as the dip and wobble of a compass needle, until he couldn’t any more. And what did Mr. Hickey do, when the discomfort of being divided from the object of his determination by wooden walls and wardroom rank had become too much? Hickey had found excuses to skive off and make himself scarce, to linger in corridors, to dawdle at the threshold of Crozier’s own cabin. Forcing an intimacy where he had no right — but it had given both of them a modicum of ease, hadn’t it? Crozier had come to know which days the man was present at divine service and when he wasn’t, by feel alone — like a rheumatic knee. He’d come to cherish those days.

This bond has made a freak out of him. He can’t call it lovesickness — what men do to each other at sea has nothing to do with love. Some disease, passed from man to man over cut-crystal glasses on a Wednesday afternoon.

Out in the open, on the ice, the distance between them was like an ulcer — it would have eaten Crozier up and he would have let it rather than come a step closer to its cause and cure. What’s one pain out of many? What’s a stomach-ache to a full suit of ruined joints? The absence of it now is arresting, like a sudden silence. It’s taken all other pains with it. Perhaps that’s all pleasure is to them now — a reprieve from suffering. Now they are close.

Crozier’s mouth is pressed in a tight line. Hickey gestures at him with his cigarette, as if he means to force the loathsome thing past his lips, and the flutter in Crozier’s stomach at the close pass of that hand almost makes his knees spring apart.

“Not like you did,” Crozier says.

“Don’t you worry, Mr. Crozier. We won’t be parted now, you and I.”

The canvas rustles behind them. Hickey rises up from his knees, worrying a lock of gingery hair behind his ear, — Tozer stands in the open tent-flap, hugging his rifle to his chest. The two men exchange words at close range, practically in an embrace — the movements of Hickey’s mouth are obscured, but his grasping body language suggests he might wrench the gun from Tozer’s hand any moment. Whatever he hears displeases him.

Hickey may fancy himself a latter-day Fletcher Christian, but he will never keep these men subdued if he carries on like this — he is aloof, covetous, brutal, cunning. There is nowhere to lead these men, nowhere but straight on into the mouth of hell. Southeast, he’d said — which way is southeast? How will he know at night, with only the clothes on his back, if that? Mr. Hickey’s clever fingers will go through his pockets and find his compass there, along with other odds-and-ends of old kit that will do the lot of them no good.

These men are holding Mr. Goodsir captive, and they’ve forced his hand, they’ve made a beast out of the gentlest man Crozier has ever known. What have they made out of lesser men? Des Voeux, Tozer, Benson, Armitage, Pilkington — what have they made of Gibson? Supper.

The two men break apart — the look on Tozer’s face is bloodless resignation. Solomon Tozer would make a better match for this cannibal prince than Crozier does, but he’d pledged himself to another Royal Marine long before these mutinies were even a glimmer in Mr. Hickey’s eye — and now that man is dead. Hickey dismisses him with a gesture — the tent-flap falls back again and the Marine limps away across the stones. A stone is digging into Crozier’s shinbone.

The two of them alone — there must be some suitable comparison in the animal kingdom, but Crozier doesn’t know it. Swans, or bees, or those damned penguins from the Ross days — filthy birds, the buggers of the Antarctic, with filthy habits and flesh that tasted of cod-liver oil no matter how you cooked it. Hickey bends down, pressing Crozier’s face in his hands — roughly, clumsily, warmly. The press of his gloves makes the peeling skin on Crozier’s face smart, and his fingers comes away bloody.

“We’re in a spot of luck, Mr. Crozier. Are you hungry?”

Crozier doesn’t answer.