by Rebecca Hunt
‘The peg goes here?’ Brix asked at a discreet volume as she and Decker hammered in metal stakes to secure their ‘office’ tent. This was a generous name for what amounted to a second living tent, furnished with a bare crate for a seat.
‘Nearly, not quite.’ Decker showed her the correct place and smiled as she bashed it into the ground. ‘Good job, chief. You’re strong for a skinny chick.’
Brix looked at him sideways, amused. She was a mid-thirties academic with a practical bobbed haircut and a unisex dress code of jeans and jumpers. It was fair to say she’d never thought of herself as a ‘chick’ before. Being addressed as ‘chief’ was also a new experience. Brix hadn’t just warmed to Decker, but was so grateful for his cheery encouragement that she almost loved him. He understood how out of her depth she felt without her having to say it, offered help without needing to be asked, and did it with such an infectious sunniness that it reassured even the most self-doubting person.
‘See, I knew it. I knew you’d be a natural,’ Decker said with an approving nod, as if Brix’s successful tent-pegging was the work of a prodigy. Then he got to his feet and cranked his aching back. ‘Where’s Jess?’
Jess was waddling along with the large red first-aid crate. ‘What’s up?’
‘Would you make an old man happy and deal with these pegs for a minute?’ After the office tent, they still had the bathroom to construct, which was a small, Boy Scout-style tent with a chemical tank for a toilet hauled inside.
Jess’s tone conveyed a certain interest in why Brix couldn’t just peg the tent. ‘Yes, boss.’
‘Boss? Guys, no. I’m not your boss,’ Decker said, although he was actually the boss, with overall responsibility for the expedition. ‘Don’t expect any rank pulling to come from my direction,’ he said, leaning right to stretch his back, and then making a face as he leant left. ‘I, your beloved leader, pledge that to you, my obedient servants.’
With his chunky build and wafting long hair, Decker had the appearance of a musician from a seventies progressive rock band. He was regarded as something of a hero at Aegeus, a kind of polar Socrates who could be relied upon to have the answer for everything, whether it was advice on crashed hard drives, or Antarctic mite species, or Thai curry recipes.
Jess ditched the first-aid crate at the tent’s entrance, where regulation advised it should be stored for easy access. Just remembering the purposes of the various implements inside the crate gave Brix a sickish twinge of anxiety. The medical training had been intensive and graphically advanced as they were taught to deal with various horrors, such as smashed and protruding bones or drama with arteries. Things might break or blacken or burst, they were told, with a slideshow of nightmarish images. Things might freeze and thaw, or, like you can see here, freeze and rot, the instructor had said as Brix thrashed weakly in her chair.
The Twin Otter’s next trip brought the rest of the food. Each large crate would sustain three people for one week with bland but hearty meals. There were packs of quick-cook spaghetti and tins of tuna with mayonnaise, cereal bars and chocolate. Tubs contained individual sachets of instant coffee, or instant enriched potato powder, or full-fat milk powder. Cans of processed cheese were designed to be forced down with the tough, high-calorie sledging biscuits that hadn’t changed much since the Kismet’s era. For dinner there were packets of grit which could be rehydrated into beef stroganoff, chicken korma, or lamb and pilaf rice. Jess had brought a hoard of condiments and stolen a small plastic box of sausages and bacon from the industrial fridges at Aegeus. This would be the only fresh produce they’d eat, so she’d buried it in the snow to freeze until an occasion was deemed spectacular enough to deserve it.
Brix was admiring the mountain of crates in a purposefully conspicuous way, hoping the nearby Jess might notice and then comment. Because she found Jess-types intimidating and normally avoided them, it was therefore crucial to Brix that she became friends with Jess quickly, as a method of self-defence. The major obstacle to her plan was the absolute lack of chemistry between them. But this, she’d decided, was a defeatist attitude. Of course they had things in common. They were both women, for example. They were both human. That was two things right there. Deploying her most winning smile, Brix lifted an arm towards the food pile and said, ‘I cannot believe we’ll get through this in two months.’
Well, here it was, thought Jess. More proof that Brix’s selection for the Everland team was an inexplicable mistake. Nothing about the past fifteen hours had done anything to dispel the impression she’d formed about Brix whilst at Aegeus, which was of a person with all the charisma of a chicken bone. And now Brix was, what. Declaring herself amazed at the food crates. No one who knew anything about fieldwork would be amazed at the food crates. It was like a builder being amazed at a brick. Her answer came after a longish pause. ‘Not been on so many fieldwork trips, hm?’
The camp was taking shape. In order to prevent a vortex of wind dumping down great drifts of snow which would need to be dug out later, the living tent, the toilet tent, the office tent and the sledges were laid out in an expansive, well-spaced line to allow the wind to pass through cleanly. They’d just finished setting up as the plane returned for the final time with the quad bikes and more delicate scientific gear.
Big Norwegian Oar, hilariously secretive Oar, climbed out and said, ‘This had better be everything. I’ve been in that seat so long my whole body’s locked.’
‘I feel your pain, man, my back is wrecked,’ Decker replied in middle-aged sympathy.
Brix was hefting their bags of clothes into the tent. It wasn’t many clothes, considering. Aside from the thick quilted freezer suits, they’d also got a couple of fleece jackets each, around six thermal tops and bottoms, and a scant ten changes of thermal socks. Aware it would be their last proper wash for months, they’d all spent an extravagantly lengthy time in the shower that morning.
‘Watch, can’t move my head,’ Oar said to Decker, and then turned his head effortlessly and began to windmill his arms.
‘You’re such a big baby, Oar,’ Brix said as she walked over to them.
‘Stor babyen,’ Oar corrected, never missing a chance to remind Brix that her mother was also Norwegian. ‘Embrace the mother tongue!’
‘Don’t listen to him,’ Jack told Brix. ‘He’s too selfish. I ask to have a go at steering, he says no. I ask to try on his glasses, the answer’s no. Everything’s a constant no. But he did tell me about his girlfriend.’
Brix and Jess stared at him with open-mouthed anticipation and Jack grinned.
‘Nah, not really,’ he said. ‘I’ve been wedged next to him in that little plane for, like, a hundred hours and he won’t even tell me his middle name.’
‘It’s driving him crazy.’ Oar had a soundless laugh. His shoulders bobbed.
Having appeared infinite right up until the moment it finished, their transfer was suddenly complete. Oar celebrated by offering everyone a stick of chewing gum. It was a poignant moment for the Everland party. Chewing Oar’s slightly old-looking gum was the last rite before the dawn of a great solitary era.
As well as surveying the island, the fieldwork team were here to identify key oceanic areas surrounding the island and designate them for protection. Known as ‘foraging hotspots’, these fertile hunting zones were essential for all Antarctic life, starting with krill and the microscopic things they fed on, and then intersecting up through every size and weight of beast to end with the tonnage of whales. The resulting data maps would inform scientific papers for the Commission for Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, an international body which oversaw the conduct of fisheries in polar waters. Since seals’ and penguins’ offspring bound them to the island during the breeding months, they were ideal for research into ‘foraging hotspots’.
‘Yeah, and we’ve all seen the film Alive,’ Jack said unoriginally. ‘So, you know. Severe consequences if you
’re the least popular.’
‘Give me one good reason to ever come back and collect you,’ Oar said.
The unspoken code of goodbyes was that they were goofy in order to disguise the enormity of the situation. But when the jokes came from Oar his naturally blank voice made them sound like harsh bargaining exercises.
‘Okay then,’ said Oar, when no one responded to his chilling attempt at comedy. He shook hands with each of the fieldwork party in turn. ‘I’m sure you’ll have a happier experience than Napps and his team.’
‘Not much of a vote of confidence there, friend,’ said Decker.
‘No, don’t go yet. Stay for dinner,’ Jess said, to stop the dreaded send-off. ‘Bag of nuts and raisins? There’s enough for everyone if you hate nuts and raisins.’
‘Ah, I wish, but we’ve got plans,’ said the deadpan Oar.
‘It’s time to put on make-up!’ Jack sang, doing the Muppet dance at the nose of the plane. ‘It’s time to light the lights!’
‘Keep in touch,’ were Oar’s last words from the cockpit.
‘Isn’t going to be a problem,’ Decker said, as the phone still rang, even in earth’s last wilderness. Calls to Aegeus on the VHF radio were scheduled daily, and the base would initiate a rescue mission if twenty-four hours elapsed with no contact. They also had a laptop and satellite phone, which they’d charge with solar-powered generators. It was all very reassuring, to a point.
Jack made a peace sign at the window as the plane gathered speed and lifted. And then they were a population of three.
6
March 1913
What was this thing behind his shoulder? Napps reached into his long-sleeved woollen vest. He’d forgotten about the pair of socks he’d been drying there. Pushing them into a less obstructive position down his sleeve gave his left arm an impressive strongman bicep as he assembled the primus stove for breakfast.
It was their first morning on Everland. The ruinous after-effects of the dinghy voyage meant Napps couldn’t work fast or accurately, so he dropped things. Because his aching stiffness prevented him moving in any decisive way, it took him for ever to pick things up. Not that he minded. Every grinding joint and squealing muscle was just another happy souvenir from the stony beach of dry land. He would have enjoyed lying across broken bricks, loved it, he didn’t care as long as it was solid. Even the hideous smell didn’t trouble him. Their odour had reactivated in the tent’s warmth, and the reek of unwashed bodies pickling through filthy clothing was intense. But they were alive, so Napps relished it.
Their green, pyramid-shaped tent accommodated three grown men so long as none of them wanted to move around much. The tent was the length of a man lying on his back, the height of an upright man in its peaked centre, and every inch of space unused by sleeping bags was crammed with equipment. A small gap opened on the groundsheet once Napps sat up and crossed his legs tightly. He poured the very minimum of oil into the primus and started to worry. The need to make their fuel supply last, or increase it with seal blubber, was at the top of his list. Absolutely number one on the list, he decided, although he wondered if it could really be called a list when everything was equally urgent. Napps had a neat strategy for these situations. He exchanged what should be done first with what could be done now. And that was to loudly jangle a spoon inside an aluminium mug right next to Millet-Bass’s ear.
His big hairy head lifted into sight. ‘Rude.’
They got the water heating and the promise of sugared tea was enough to generate movement from the opposite side of the tent. Most of Dinners’s face emerged from his sleeping bag, the sores on his nose and cheeks already blackened. ‘Did you ever see a lamb being born?’ he said inexplicably.
Napps didn’t bother to reply. One of the many rank ironies of preparing food was that the chef’s hands were far cleaner at the end of cooking than they were at the start, as some of the dirt was rubbed off on to the meal. There was nothing to be done about it and they were long past caring, which was fortunate because Napps’s hands looked like he’d spent years in a dungeon. But it was his habit to wipe the blade of his clasp-knife on his woollen leggings before he started chopping biscuits to thicken the hoosh. It was a nod to the memory of hygiene, an acknowledgement that it did exist.
Once the tea boiled, Millet-Bass filled their sledging mugs and put the pan of hoosh on the stove. ‘ . . . Lambs?’ he said to Dinners.
‘The farmer has to rub them to bring them round when they’re born,’ Dinners said, his shiny grey fingers so swollen that he struggled to grip the mug as it was passed to him. ‘And that’s what I knew this tea would do for me. I can feel myself coming back to life.’
How lucky, because Napps was the closest thing they had to a doctor.
‘And I’m the closest thing you’ve got to a nurse,’ Millet-Bass said chillingly, as Napps served their metal pannikin trays of hoosh.
Dinners gave him a weak smile and tried to eat. Did he have any sensation in his fingers? Some, perhaps. He couldn’t really tell. If Napps noticed that Dinners’s spoon moved at awkward and feeble angles, or that Dinners had almost lowered his head into the pannikin to bite at the falling food, he made no attempt to help. Ignoring Napps’s conspiratorial look, it was Millet-Bass who stopped his own meal and fed grateful Dinners.
Breakfast was the least exhausting part of the day. It was the time least likely to kill you. You were rested and warm inside a sleeping bag, all surviving parts of your body still presently alive, and you were, in the meagre amounts meted out by a place like Antarctica, comfortable. As a result, the end of the meal was approached with reluctance. But the weary business of dressing needed to be tackled. The size of their tent meant they had to take turns to get dressed, and Napps took the first shift, out of his bag and already petrifying to stone. He kicked his way down the fleece-lined trousers and punched his feet into the socks. The lower layers of clothing were never removed and no one had properly washed or been fully naked in many months. Since all water had to be melted from ice using the ship’s precious coal supply, bathing was a long-forgotten luxury. Occasional glimpses of skin during changes were a teasing reminder of the body hidden beneath and prompted the thought, what would it look like? And then the next thought: do you really want to know?
No, Dinners did not want to know. Frightened enough by the sight of his hands, he shut his eyes and refused to look at his feet when they removed the bandages to treat him.
‘We can’t all hide from your ravaged feet, Dinners,’ Millet-Bass said as Napps grunted over his finneskos. This final tribulation of ramming on the stiffly frozen animal-skin boots was the worst. ‘Think how I feel, I’ve actually got to touch them.’
The day was bright, with a rinsed, blue clarity. A nearby group of skua gulls paid no attention to Napps when he hauled himself from the tent. He limped a quick perimeter and then went to examine the low, uneven cliff-bank which edged the beach behind their camp. An overhanging section in the rock face had accumulated such a dense build-up of snow the drift had compacted solid. Since they’d need to hunt, they could hollow a larder for storing meat out of it. Pleased with his discovery, Napps hobbled to the shoreline and stared out at the sea.
The slushy film of ice on the ocean’s surface would steadily thicken into a sheet several feet deep as winter pressed in. Over the next few weeks, the ocean would be transformed into a vast ice plain which enclosed the coast for months, stretching from Everland to Cape Athena. And near the Cape, somewhere to the north, the Kismet would be on its way to rescue them.
Inside the tent, Millet-Bass was swivelling into his boots.
‘Hurry up,’ Napps demanded.
‘How?’ Millet-Bass shot back.
‘I’ve seen where we can make an ice locker,’ Napps said.
‘Should I get dressed?’ Dinners asked. It was an idiotic suggestion.
‘No, stay in your bag,’ Napps said.
When Millet-Bass had finally got his finneskos on, he gave them a salute and tramped off with the axe. It wasn’t decent to talk of worries or let pessimism infiltrate the mood of the group. But once he was standing alone at the snowdrift, he allowed himself to vent some of those fears against the ice. He voiced them manually with his strength and professional aggression towards the job, his arms hurting in a satisfying way.
‘To strive, to seek, to find—’ he said as he swung the axe, smashing out a shower of ice chips and splinters, ‘—and not to yield.’
7
November 2012
Decker was on his side of the tent, very purposefully turned away from Brix and Jess. It was how every day would start. Decker stared at the inner lining while they washed, and then they turned for him. This was the extent of privacy afforded in the tent. One redeeming feature was that they only had a cup of melted snow-water and a flannel each, so the process of bathing didn’t involve much undressing and was over in a couple of minutes. But even marginal nudity in such close quarters was enough to bring out a certain prudishness in Brix.
Unlike Brix, Jess had zero self-consciousness. She’d stripped to her bra and leggings without hesitation, exposing a tattoo of co-ordinates on her left shoulder.
‘Washing’s a complete waste of time anyway,’ Decker said, questioning what a damp flannel could realistically achieve when pitched against the same ripening clothes they’d be wearing every day.
‘Yeah, but you think hairbrushes are a waste of time,’ Jess said, as if she and Decker had lived together for years. ‘Which is why you comb your hair with a pencil.’
