Peoples Choice 2010: Leaving the Body

By Tracey Slaughter

This is the end that justified the means: this tour, this circuit of corporate bodies. This is what he’s done since the launch of his book: powerpoints for the business sector, motivating speeches on targets, incentives, the driven uncompromising optimism of top-achievers. Of course, he covers her accident, briefly, her determination not to turn the group from its course, to deviate from the goals of the expedition: the adversities that strike are opportunities, they distinguish the attitudes of overcomers. It was a code she supported. She followed the principles to the end, never abandoned the team’s objective once. She had the heart-muscle of a hero, would not consider jeopardizing the higher mission. She weighed the odds, the factors, stayed rational, dispassionate; she did not expect her gender to tip the scales, to plead for special treatment. She had set out into an environment beyond known values, she’d crossed a great distance to put herself beyond limits, beyond the workings of sentiment, the narrow bonds of the norm. There is no ‘I’ in team. He gives her airtime. He gives her the oxygen she could no longer grasp when he left her at that altitude, fused into her frozen shelf. She was fractured, alone, but she did not go to pieces. Her knife-edge decision had been made, he says, she knew it was touch and go.
  But I wonder how she surveyed his face, as he did go, I wonder if he paused to touch her, whether she panned his look for pity, that pinprick vision at the centre of his eyes, their bluewhite straits. Or whether she just lay and listened to the hiss and crack of a continent, its endless disinterest.