The End of the Day

by Claire North

  “This is summer!” replied the sailor cheerfully, as another wave slammed sideways into the boat, swamping the deck with shimmying foam that ran away as soon as it had come. “You’re wearing too much; look at you, you’re almost spherical!”

  “It’s very cold.”

  “This? This isn’t cold. Cold only happens when the salt water turns to ice. From November to May, I wouldn’t even bother coming this way—wouldn’t be able to get into port. Twenty miles of sea ice between you and the harbour—but this! This is summer, this is easy, balmy, look! You need to eat more meat, more meat, that’s the way to go. Seriously—you’re wearing too much. If you go on the ice, you need to be just a little bit cold, otherwise your sweat will freeze to your body and you’ll die in minutes.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “I’m just telling you what you need to know! Plenty of fools die a silly way! Hey, don’t take it badly. I’m impressed you’re not being sick more!”

  “Thank you; I spend a lot of time travelling.”

  “Have you ever tasted ginger?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “I hear it’s good for seasickness.”

  “You’ve never had ginger?”

  “Me? No.”

  “What do you do for vegetables?”

  The captain laughed. “We eat fish!” Even the smashing of the sea didn’t drown out his laughter, as they sailed beneath the frozen sun.

  And one night

  beneath a midnight sun

  Charlie stood on the deck of the fishing boat, while the other men slept, save for the night pilot, and watched the sky fill with purple and red, the sea reflecting gold, and couldn’t quite see the sun itself, but instead its scattered radiance in the heavens, a wet explosion where the curve of the earth had burst against its rays. Then he watched for a few minutes more, and the sun, which had only set a few minutes ago, began to rise once again, and he realised that he had signal on his mobile phone, he had no idea why, and Emmi had replied.

  It was nice, she said. Call me when you get back.

  Charlie smiled, alone with the endless morning, and knew that the world was beautiful beyond naming.

  Chapter 14

  Two days after boarding a fishing boat in Nuuk, Charlie got off the same boat in the village of Oounavik, and nearly fell over. His knees had no bones as he stood on the wooden quay; his world rocked gently from side to side. He leant against a plastic box filled with mussels, and waited for stability to come again.

  Oounavik—population 273 humans, 62 huskies and four cats. It would have been five cats, but one got eaten by predator unknown. The air was colder here, a few degrees above freezing. The snow had melted, but the steep climb of the black rock above the village as it rose before dropping into the ice sheets was still flecked with never-ending white where the sunlight couldn’t crawl.

  Charlie picked his way through a dockside of blue plastic sheets covered in wide-eyed, open-mouthed dead fish, and asked the first person he met who seemed to be a native—a woman with sleeves rolled up, scraping scales from the side of the latest catch into a blood-flecked bucket—if she knew Professor Ule. He spoke Danish, not well, and with a heavy German accent.

  She stared at him a moment, as if surprised to hear this language from a stranger, then replied, her voice perhaps more used to Kalaallisut, “Yes, of course. He came this way three days ago, stayed with Sven, then went north-east.”

  “North—more north?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did he travel?”

  “On foot.”

  “Into the glacier field? You didn’t …” Charlie stopped himself, but the old woman smiled, feeling his intention.

  “Stop him?” she chuckled, turning her attention back to the fish, the blade, its guts now coming out in a single neat slice and being splatted onto the bucket floor. “Of course not. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “I need to find him.”

  “Do you? Has something happened? His family, his …?” Her voice trailed off, for what else was there, except family?

  “I need to give him something. My name’s Charlie, I’m …”

  She had already lost interest. “Talk to Ane and Sven. They handle people like you.”

  Though there were very few houses in Oounavik, there were no street signs either.

  A pair of teenage boys on brightly painted skateboards pointed him the right way, and the second time he got lost, turned around by the higgledy manner in which the houses clung to the stone and the confusing way two had been painted red side by side, instead of the usual white-blue-yellow-red confetti of the buildings, a woman with an axe in one hand, a smartphone in the other, stopped what she was doing long enough to show him the way to the door.

  “Not often we get visitors,” she said in heavily accented Danish. “We should have a party.”

  The Harbinger of Death smiled wanly, and chose not to mention the purpose of his trip.

  Ane and Sven lived on the edge of the village. Their dog team rose up at Charlie’s approach, curious more than defensive, the younger, more naïve huskies bouncing behind the older, stalwart veterans to see the stranger come to their door. The dogs were more than an acknowledgement of an old way; they were a legal necessity.

  “We hunt with dogs on the land, and in canoes at sea,” explained Sven, six foot three, hair a black so bright it nearly shone, skin burnt wind-bitten red. “These are the only ways.” He waited patiently in the cool corridor of his house as Charlie struggled out of his boots, shook out his coat, pulled off his under-coat, his winter trousers, stripping down at last to just the final few layers of cotton and fleece, then, seeing that his guest was finally happy, nodded once and barked, “In here.”

  Charlie followed him into a living room where a fire burned against one wall, fed by propane tanks outside the window. On the shelves were photos—photos of Sven holding a harpoon, Sven with his dogs, Sven and Ane on the steps of the tiny church that sat on the top of the hill above Oounavik, white flowers woven in her hair, a shawl draped over her dress against the cold. Ane being mobbed by the students of her school, all twenty of them, the youngest five, the oldest sixteen, dressed in sealskin coats. Sven and Ane repairing the sled, Sven and Ane on honeymoon in Rome, utterly out of place and bewildered by the burning light in their faces, squinting against it.

  Beneath the rows of images, a flat-screen TV, set to a muted drama about plague and time travel. Opposite, a couch, covered over with quilt and wool. “You can sleep there,” he explained. “We will give you breakfast.”

  “Thank you, but I—”

  “You want to go onto the ice, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a bad time for it. The summer has been too hot; the glaciers are melting. The sea hunting is bad—you can get cast adrift while you sleep. There is flooding in the south, there’s nothing here now.”

  Sven’s English was clear, crisp, to the point, and Charlie suspected that his Danish or Kalaallisut would be just as blunt. “What did you want to see? The Northern Lights? The sun isn’t down long enough at this time of year, you won’t get a good sight; come back in winter. Whales? The seas are changing, the currents are all wrong. Polar bears? They’re dying. You are sad to hear this? The government said don’t worry, this is a time of opportunity, this is a time when the green things grow, but the narwhal are few and the birds change the routes they fly and all things …” He stopped, shaking his head, turned away lest Charlie see even a flicker of emotion on his long, tight face.

  Charlie said, into the silence, “I’m looking for Professor Ule. I was told he sometimes comes here, to Oounavik.”

  Sven turned back, fast, curious, and for a moment Charlie wondered if he’d said something wrong, given insult. Then Sven drew himself up a little straighter, proud, even. “Yes, he comes here. He came here four days ago.”

  “You saw him?”

  “He visited.”

  “Did he stay here?”

  “No.
We have a difficult relationship.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I neither know nor understand.” Again, surprise, mingled with something else—was Charlie mocking him, was this stranger, come to his fire, playing the fool? Charlie shifted uneasily on the couch, then added, “I’m just doing my job. I’ve … I have to give him this.” He gestured at the tin of tea, gift-wrapped in bright red tissue paper, that he’d carried all this way.

  Sven, no more enlightened, looked from the tin to Charlie, back to the tin, back to the man. “Why?”

  “It’s my job. I’m the Harbinger of Death.”

  A while Sven stood, and the fire burned, and the sun shimmied around the horizon, barely setting, barely dipping its fingers beneath the edge of the boiled-black mountains that towered above the village. Then, without a word or a change to the expression on his face, he walked out of the room, leaving Charlie sitting on the couch, holding the tin of tea, staring into the fire.

  Chapter 15

  “It was a good hunt, a good kill, we use every part of the animal …”

  “No rabbits were harmed in the testing of this product.”

  “I think it’s disgusting, what they do, just disgusting …”

  “Beagling is a time-honoured tradition …”

  “Werewolves!”

  “They take the blood and they smear it on their faces …”

  “Let’s be honest here, shall we, let’s speak honestly? The real problem is that poor people are jealous of our way of life …”

  “I don’t stand for no gun control laws ’cos I need my gun for hunting the deer.”

  “That counter just keeps on counting …”

  Menu, Polaris Restaurant, Nuuk, September 2015

  Smoked mackerel with horseradish, mustard seed and milk.

  Heart of musk ox, served with spelt, buckthorn and house mayonnaise.

  Saddle of reindeer, reed cabbage, marrow and blackberry.

  Suaasat—soup with seal, onion, potato and bay leaf.

  Narwhal tartare served with crisps and crowberry compote.

  All our dishes are made from the freshest, finest ingredients.

  Bring your own fish!

  Chapter 16

  Ane taught at the school. Ane was the school. When she wasn’t teaching, she had a sideline making jewellery and ornaments from bones, skin and stone. Some of her work had been exhibited in Nuuk—one of her pieces had been bought by an American for a celebrity client who was apparently involved in a campaign for the protection of indigenous peoples, but she never saw it again or heard what happened next, and besides, she was a half-blood and had never understood how people in LA were going to protect her, or against what, but hey, at least she got paid.

  Now she stood in the kitchen of her little house at the place where salt water met white ice, and whispered low and long with her husband of fifteen years, while in the room next door where sometimes guests stayed on her mother’s old couch, the Harbinger of Death tried and failed to get a signal for his mobile phone, and watched the fire, and waited.

  He’s not …

  … but coming here …

  … doesn’t mean …

  … the summer ice …

  … Ule went without the dogs …

  … always without the dogs …

  Will we know Death, when he comes?

  I don’t know. I don’t know.

  At last, as the shadows stretched and the sky turned purple-grey for the long, light-soaked night, Ane and Sven went into the room where Charlie sat, and she said, “Ule went towards Vituvasskat four days ago. He went without dogs, without much water or food. Is he going to die?”

  “I don’t know,” Charlie replied, then, quickly, “I’m the one who’s sent before. I’m not … My presence is not the end. Sometimes I am sent as courtesy, sometimes as warning. I never know which.”

  “As warning?”

  “A warning that may cause Death to pass you by.”

  “You know of that?” she asked sharply, a tiny woman, an oval in a woven coat, dwarfed vertically by her towering husband, pushing him almost into invisibility on the horizontal plane. “You know of warnings?”

  “I’m just the messenger,” he replied with a wan smile. “That’s really all I do.”

  Husband looked at wife, wife at husband. Theirs was a quiet home. Theirs was a quiet town. Gossip was poisonous in such a small community, and so they never gossiped. The snow rarely melted from the hill to the east, and so they did not discuss the changing weather, or seas, or skies. During the dark months of November to April, when no boat dared make the crossing, and the helicopter only came for those who died, the grocer’s stood empty, except for preserved meats and fermented birds, feathers and bone still stuck in the meat. On the ice, or on the sea, the wind carried the words of the hunters away, and the town’s internet connection moved slower than the glaciers that dwarfed it—certainly too erratic and faint for their world to fill with digital news and stories. Ane spoke Kalaallisut to her friends, Danish to the fishermen and English to her elder students, who longed to go elsewhere and were terrified to leave, and having so many tongues in her head, didn’t feel the need to flap about much when at rest. And so their marriage was conducted quietly, and in silence they communicated, reading every part of hand and eye to express all the thoughts that words were unused to.

  And in this way, they spoke long and hard, the pair of them, standing in the doorway of the living room, until at last Sven turned to Charlie and said, “Tomorrow, we will go together and look for the old man.”

  That was the end of that.

  Chapter 17

  Pestilence sits in the economy-class cabin of the long-haul flight and says, “It’s the sex. See him, over there? The film’s just got to the sexy bit and he’s playing cool, playing so cool, thrusting, pumping buttocks, breasts, it’s all so much less without the sound of course, not arousing at all, not sexy, just—but look, she’s checking that no one can see, angling the screen down, a little privacy, it’s not private though, nothing private about this, getting turned on on a night flight down in cattle class, in scum class, in the place where the people are. This is how I love to fly, love flying where the people are …”

  Famine sits further up front, in premium economy. Not quite business class—not that; the NGOs and low-level government civil servants couldn’t afford business class, but neither would they admit that budget travel was the only way to go, that times were so bad, the money so tight and so …

  “I’ll have the chicken curry,” she breathes, voice low enough that the stewardess has to bend down against the roar of the engines. “If you have any left, that is.”

  War flies first class. Champagne, champagne, arms dealers and champagne, squeezing the buttocks of the stewardesses, ogling the stewards with their slicked-back hair, and some

  ogle back.

  Once, War gave a golden card to a man at Heathrow airport who’d comforted a crying woman. She’d come to the airport to meet her son, but her son had never got off the plane. He’d been arrested on the Turkish side of the border for acts of terrorism, and she wept and wailed and said he was a good boy and the man in the airline uniform with shiny cufflinks at his wrists and a silky cravat at his throat held her and comforted her and said he was sure it was a big fuss over nothing, these things always worked out all right.

  War watched this encounter, and afterwards gave the man a golden card, sign of prestige within the airline, and whispered in his ear, “The boy beheaded three women and a teenage boy last week, but I like the way you roll, my son, I like the cut of your jib.”

  Death flies because it is the modern way of things, but doesn’t particularly enjoy it, except for occasionally, when he rides up front with the pilot.

  Chapter 18

  Was this first light?

  In this place, with the sea below and the sky above, Charlie felt the turning of the earth for the very first time, and b
elieved that the sun stayed still while the earth revolved, and thought now he understood the mindset of the ancients who had looked on the dawn and seen God in it.

  In a frozen land of endless sun …

  He wanted to stay awake for ever, and drink in this sky. At first, he’d thought he’d take pictures of everywhere he went, but somehow had never dared, didn’t think a photo could capture the feeling inside his chest as he watched the sun circle the horizon.

  Besides, what would he say of his photos if they were ever shared online?

  Here is the mountain above the endless coral seas, the sun rising over a forest filled with flowers, where I went to tell a woman that she would die. #work #anotherdayattheoffice

  He didn’t take pictures. Instead he stared until his face hurt, and tried to burn everything he saw into his heart.

  This hour was, Sven assured him, the nearest equivalent to first light that his bewildered, blackout-blind-befuddled body would understand, not that the light really mattered at this time of year, so the two of them loaded heavy bags upon their backs, and shoved packets of dried ox meat into their coats, and set out, away from the sea.

  No dogs, Sven explained. There isn’t enough snow on the ground for the sleds, the world below is too exposed and uneven. We’ll have to walk. Can you walk, Harbinger of Death?

  I guess I can, he replied. I haven’t done anything like this before.

  Sven pursed his lips, but said nothing, and perhaps wondered what qualifications for his career Charlie had, and whether they were useful in the snow.

  Walking without the passage of the sun to keep him company, Charlie drifted in a halfway state between sleeping, waking, moving, falling, and somehow without thinking, his legs moved, his eyes looked, he climbed, he thought, he did not think, and time passed without motion. Sometimes he remembered he had feet, and they hurt, and then he forgot, and there was only walking again.