by Rebecca Hunt
He drank his coffee. ‘A maverick like me finds a pencil does the job just fine.’
‘I’ve also seen you clean your teeth with a match,’ Jess said, shuffling round to let him start.
His sleeping bag was separated from theirs by two low wooden boxes. The pots box at the head of the tent was filled with a jumble of enamel plates and mugs. The VHF radio was stationed on top. It was the size of a shoebox and resembled a military field phone, with switches and a large dial on the front, and a telephone receiver plugged in via a curly black cable. The personal effects box at the foot of the tent contained some books and DVDs and a few comforts, such as Jess’s collection of Tabasco sauce bottles. The primus stove occupied the space between the two boxes, secured in place by two thin metal safety rails which screwed to the box sides. Even with the rails, the stove wouldn’t be hard to knock over, so they moved carefully. Dodging a flying wall of boiling water wouldn’t be fun. Neither would be trying to extinguish a burning sleeping bag while still inside it.
‘Oh, and P.S., Brix?’ Decker said as he zipped up his fleece. ‘I mostly clean my teeth with a toothbrush, like ninety-nine times out of a hundred.’ He shot Brix an encouraging wink and she smiled at her knees. Jess noticed this exchange as she served out bowls of porridge.
Jess wasn’t as easy to befriend as Brix had hoped. Instead of being daunted, however, she’d resolved to treat the challenge as a fun project. ‘Your tattoo,’ she said. ‘It’s the coordinates of the North and South poles.’
‘Right. Got it when I was eighteen,’ Jess said with minimal interest. ‘It was a mission statement to myself that I would get to either the Arctic or the Antarctic, which is what I’ve wanted to do since I was five years old.’
‘So why get it written on your skin?’ Decker asked. ‘Couldn’t you have just remembered what you wanted to do in your head?’
‘I was eighteen, dad,’ Jess answered. ‘I wanted a tattoo.’
Once they’d finished breakfast, Brix tuned the radio to find Aegeus over the airwaves. Decker mimed for her to hang up when Tom’s voice blasted into the tent. Tom had a particularly high-speed enthusiasm for life which was hard not to hate when bombarded with it first thing in the morning.
‘Hombres! Everland!’ Tom shouted down the phone. ‘If you even knew how much I love fur seals!’
‘Everyone loves fur seals,’ Jess said to Decker.
He was typing on the laptop, a pen in his mouth. ‘You know they were practically wiped out, don’t you?’
‘I’m a field assistant,’ Jess said. ‘So nope. I don’t know.’
‘They were decimated.’ He shut the computer, removing the pen to make a note on one of the Everland maps. ‘Hunted for their pelts so voraciously that they were presumed extinct by the start of the nineteenth century. It’s called a population bottleneck. There must have been a small pocket of fur seals hidden away somewhere which were able to regenerate into the healthy numbers we have today.’ He shrugged at Jess. ‘Sort of a happy story.’
‘More of a happy ending,’ Jess said, putting sachets of chilli con carne into a pan of water to rehydrate for that evening. ‘Not so much the story. The story’s pretty horrific.’
‘Well, considering how many species have been bottlenecked into terminal decline it doesn’t get much happier. It’s an ending sound-tracked by the Jackson Five,’ Decker said, watching Brix try unsuccessfully to get off the phone.
Her looping repetitions of, ‘Goodbye, Tom. Okay, I’d better go. So goodbye, Tom,’ finally ended when Decker reached over and turned off the radio.
Such directness was alien to Brix. ‘Won’t he think something’s wrong?’
‘Little tip,’ Decker said. ‘Aegeus only know what you tell them. Whatever you say, they believe it. So you tell them the battery ran out? Done, case closed.’
The daily routine of assembling several hundred kilograms of equipment on to a sledge before leaving the camp, and then dismantling the load when back at the camp, felt reasonably Sisyphean. Every morning the primus stove, the medical box, the pots box, two boxes of food, cans of fuel, and their three sleeping bags were dragged out and strapped on to the wooden sledge, the emergency pup tent lashed across the top. And every evening the same cumbersome things were unstrapped and dragged to their original positions. It was a procedure designed to ensure that necessities were to hand in the event of a crisis. It was also a monumental bore.
Everland presented them with an oppressively low-clouded day the colour of diesel fumes. The wind carried a sawdust-fine snow which immediately worked its way down Brix’s collar and made her eyes stream as it blew into her face.
‘There’s no way this is all going to fit,’ she said, blinking and squinting while she tried to find room on her quad bike for a small bag of extra clothing among the masses of rescue gear. The bikes were compact, powerful four-wheel vehicles, with wide black leather saddles, oversized tyres, and sturdy racks at the front and rear for luggage.
Jess rearranged the gear to accommodate the bag, accomplishing in ten seconds what Brix had failed to achieve in ten minutes. ‘Seems sort of crazy to me,’ she said.
Despite knowing she wouldn’t like the answer, the same malignant itch which compelled Brix to scratch at a rash also compelled her to ask, ‘What does?’
‘Well, Everland’s not the kind of place I’d send a rookie,’ Jess said as she walked off. ‘But whatever. That’s cool. I guess Aegeus know what they’re doing.’
‘Field assistants are supposed to assist, Jess,’ Decker warned.
Jess directed her embarrassment into the unnecessary task of unpacking and repacking her rucksack. Her bag was the largest and heaviest. It contained their lunch and flasks of tea, and some first-aid things, such as painkillers, antiseptic gel, and a number of electrolyte sachets to mix with water and drink. Jess also kept her medical kit in the bag. It was a small yellow plastic box which she’d had since her time as an Alpine guide, her name scrawled artlessly across the lid in black marker pen.
Decker was examining the harnesses which fastened each rider to their quad. ‘Minus ten.’ He made an amused noise, stamping the blood back into his feet. ‘Oof, with the wind-chill it’s more like minus fifteen,’ he said and turned his attention to the thick ropes which tethered the quads together.
If one bike fell into a crevasse, the next would act as an anchor until a rescue strategy could be implemented. The ropes were strong enough to withstand weights several times heavier than a quad, and were trusted implicitly by everyone right up until the moment they were actually used. At the sight of a colleague plunging through the floor, even the most rational person understood they’d just witnessed a fatal yet undeniably stunt-like tragedy. Yet no one was more astonished to find the rope hadn’t snapped than the guy buckled to a quad inside a chasm, as Decker knew. He’d celebrated his fortieth birthday this way.
He remembered some fool screaming, ‘Sing a song, Decker!’ as the bike’s creaking revolutions gave him a slow, vomitous tour of the abyss. He’d risked a look down, seen his hat fall, and gathered that there was nothing below him but an interesting death.
Stay calm! The situation was under control, they’d shouted from above.
‘I’m forty, don’t let me die,’ he’d said, crying with an emotional purity which felt so unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, it nearly distracted him.
‘That’s it, keep singing!’ was the reply. ‘Na na na na, hey Jude . . . ’
If Decker had ever cared that his previous attempts to rouse them into a Beatles sing-along had all failed, that concern was lost to him now. They’d never understand, as he did here, twisting above oblivion, how beautiful the world really was. Statistically, he’d had a one in however million chance of being born. He’d survived infanthood and childhood and a good chunk of adulthood. And what he should have done, he realized, was everything he ever wanted. He should have l
oved more, risked more, travelled more, said yes more. And now he’d die in a crevasse.
‘Here’s a birthday you won’t forget,’ someone had said to him once he was rescued. ‘Yes, lovely birthday,’ he’d answered in a trembling voice.
‘Decker,’ Jess said. ‘This is paranoia. We’ve done the safety checks, we’re ready.’
‘You think I’m being paranoid about the threat of a blizzard?’ Unwilling to trust anything, Decker was completing a fourth or fifth inspection of the quad ropes. ‘Then I have a list for you, Jess, which will illustrate that seemingly implausible things are absolutely possible and happen all the time. Listen and learn.’ He stood up. ‘For instance, spider farms—’
‘Yeah, hello? What do you think I was doing with the Mountain Rescue?’ Jess said, her hands raised. ‘Organizing picnics? I might know a little bit about blizzards, Decker.’
‘Spider farms,’ Decker said, undeterred. ‘Spider farms don’t work but have genuinely been tried.’ Also real, he said, was a Children’s python. Locust forecasting was a real job.
‘Someone gets up in the morning, eats a bowl of cereal, and then goes to the office to forecast locusts,’ he finished with emphasis.
‘I can’t believe any of those,’ Jess said.
‘Yet all are true.’
‘A Children’s python?’ Brix said.
‘Not what you expect,’ Decker replied. ‘Much as we might like the idea of someone trying to appoint a snake for kids, no. The name comes from the scientist John George Children.’
He wondered if they understood what he was saying. Their two blank faces suggested the answer was no. ‘The point I’m making here,’ he continued, ‘is that the ground suddenly caving in beneath you can happen, believe me. It doesn’t have to be your birthday. And blizzards can definitely happen.’
Brix thought about whether any job could be creepier than spider farming until Decker eventually completed his inspections and said, ‘Okay, let’s hustle.’
8
April 1913
It was well after midnight when the search party finally returned. Addison was on deck to greet them, and Lawrence remained there to talk with him while the rest of the group disappeared down below to speak among themselves.
Despite fears that Napps and his men were dead, the small hope that they’d survived to reach Everland was enough to haunt everyone aboard. From the moment the storm abated, the Kismet had been trying to get to the island. The first delay was the storm damage to the ship, which had forced them to go to the nearer Cape Athena, where repairs had taken a month. Once they were ready to leave the Cape, the second delay came in the form of an abrupt and unseasonably low temperature drop which trapped the Kismet in sea ice for several more days. These setbacks, combined with the fear of winter’s approach, had left the men dispirited. They’d begun to talk of ill luck, worrying that there was a doom-tinged poetry to the situation which should be heeded.
The tall, dignified Addison had aged significantly in the last few weeks. He’d lost weight and developed anxious frown lines. At forty-four, Lawrence was only two years younger than Addison, but the doctor looked a decade older, and somehow vulnerable compared to the big, handsome Captain.
‘Any news?’ Addison asked.
‘None.’ Lawrence rubbed a hand over his face. ‘We can’t find them.’
The search party men had been divided into three teams, with Lawrence leading his group to the cove and dinghy site. They’d waded across land floes which collapsed under their feet and struggled against a viciously cold wind in order to grub around in the blackness and find nothing. Find nothing at all. Because it wasn’t only Napps and Millet-Bass who were missing, Lawrence explained. The camp was empty. Their supplies were also missing.
‘How can everything be gone?’ Addison said.
‘I think the question is where has it gone. Or rather, where has it been taken.’
Addison looked at him. ‘I don’t understand.’
Don’t you, thought Lawrence, because he certainly had a theory.
Addison possibly guessed more than he cared to admit. ‘But I’m sure we should refrain from making any hasty conclusions.’
‘I doubt we’re going to like the conclusion, Adds, hasty or not.’
‘Yes,’ Addison said softly, ‘I’m aware of that.’
Are you? thought Lawrence. Are you aware of what I’m actually saying?
Addison had mediated between the Captain and the Mate for three years. The nature of their volatile relationship meant Addison’s door would fling open on an almost daily basis as either Napps or Lawrence burst into his cabin to rant about the latest offence. Whenever Lawrence went to him, the doctor would remain sympathetically neutral, let the anger burn itself out, and then offer calm advice. Addison could never be baited into making even the mildest derogatory comment. Lawrence would describe Napps’s behaviour in vitriolic detail, expecting Addison to overturn his desk with shared fury, and instead he’d be asked if he wanted a glass of water. Perhaps, if the Captain was tired of pacing back and forth, he’d like to sit down? Lawrence wondered resentfully if the counsel was equally impartial when Napps raged off to find Addison. The two men were annoyingly close. Their friendship might be enough to make the doctor resist understanding the ugly inferences of that bare camp and its lone inhabitant.
‘And how is Dinners?’ Lawrence asked.
‘We’ve bathed and re-clothed him,’ Addison said. ‘He’s asleep now. I checked his pockets for a diary, as I know he had one. Millet-Bass also kept a journal, and Napps regularly wrote to his wife. I’d hoped we’d discover a record to help explain the situation. But no, unfortunately not.’
At the mention of Napps, Lawrence had sought to confirm the location of an item in his jacket pocket. ‘That doesn’t answer my question, Adds,’ he said, something rustling against his fingers. He smoothed the pocket flat. ‘I asked you how Dinners was.’
‘He’s a very ill man.’
‘How long will it take for him to recover?’
‘I feel it’s best not to speculate too much on—’
‘Don’t dance around it,’ Lawrence said hotly.
‘I’m afraid his condition is serious,’ was Addison’s only comment.
‘Christ. You can’t even give me an approximate recovery time, can you?’ Lawrence’s voice had suddenly lost all power. He shut his eyes, aware that the intensity of his reaction was surprising the doctor. ‘Addison, if you knew what you were saying to me.’
Addison had the tact not to articulate what they were both thinking. From the morning of the selection onwards, Addison had persistently registered his concern about Dinners’s inclusion in the Everland party. Dinners was unsuitable and his lack of experience was a real worry, he’d argued in his unaggressive yet politely relentless way. It was unwise to send him, he’d warned Lawrence, even as the Captain chucked around insults and barked that Dinners wasn’t a child, or a little toy teddy, but a fully grown man with a wife and young daughter. And who’s the Captain here, Lawrence had pompously demanded. Who tells a Captain what to do?
Addison heard the faint sound of laughter coming from beneath them in the Officers’ Mess. ‘I suggest—’
‘Don’t,’ Lawrence interrupted, in case Addison planned to draw his attention to this colossal mistake. Addison wouldn’t, he was too considerate, but Lawrence still felt it was safer to pre-empt the conversation and ban it.
‘Another search,’ Addison said. ‘That’s what I wanted to suggest. I believe we should organize a final search tomorrow.’
‘Late April already,’ Lawrence answered. ‘It’s close to beating us. We can’t risk much more of a delay.’
They were behind schedule and the possibility of being frozen in ice until spring was becoming a serious danger. Although one extra day might not make a difference, the distinction between today’s relative stabilit
y and tomorrow’s jeopardy was growing thin. They were approaching the very end of plucky assumptions.
‘We’ll see if we can hold out, though, won’t we?’ Addison said, expecting this battle to be difficult.
‘Wishful thinking is fast becoming wilful ignorance, Adds,’ Lawrence said, staring forlornly at the sea, ‘as I think we’re both now realizing.’
9
March 1913
Did Millet-Bass have children? Ha, not that he knew of. Napps suppressed his natural reaction.
Their period on the dinghy had ignited a fierce union, but it wasn’t friendship as much as dependence. The two men were essentially strangers, and the differences between them were becoming uncomfortably obvious as they started down the beach to sort through the supplies unloaded at the cove.
‘So there’s a chance you may have children?’
‘There’s a chance I may be a grandfather, all considered.’
An extraordinary response. This man was a rare moon, never before seen in Napps’s galaxy.
And what about him? Well, Napps was married with two daughters. Married for over twenty years! He and Rosie were practically children themselves when they met, so. Anyway. It was a very sweet story.
Millet-Bass hoped his smile looked approving. His romantic priorities had been more or less the exact opposite.
The ship’s crew separated into distinct tribes, and the first, crudest divisions were decided by rank. Scientists, officers and navvies automatically gravitated towards their own kind, and these clusters then divided again into smaller splinter groups as personalities sought reflection and tried to create a version of family. It was a system which meant you could learn more about a man’s character than anyone else on earth knew, or exist in complete indifference to him. It was possible to forge monumental relationships with some and spend three years as a hairy object blocking the view to others. Napps, the omnipresent yet distant figure of First Mate, saw more than most, and even then the majority of the men remained anonymous beyond their duties.
