Everland

by Rebecca Hunt

  After years of analysing data in a sterile laboratory, it was more than just an uplifting sight for Brix. That she was here on an expedition herself, seeing a wild colony, released a surge of happy energy which made her want to dance on the spot, or let out a victorious whoop. Instead she rewarded herself with a discreet fist pump and walked faster, almost bouncing.

  An audience of curious penguins watched while they unpacked the tools and rolls of fencing. The stumpy, knee-height Adélies had white rings circling each eye and were as conspicuously immaculate as brand-new trainers.

  ‘Okay, let’s get this party started,’ Decker said as he looked at the sky, felt the threat of snow in the air, and then looked worriedly at Brix. He looked at confident, unfazed Jess and could have hugged her.

  The Adélies would be monitored with an automated system. A low wire mesh fence separated a large section of the beach from the ocean, leaving a two-metre-wide gateway for the penguins to filter through. The birds had to cross this gateway whenever they went to forage at sea and then returned to the colony, shuffling over a pallet-sized platform on the floor which logged their weight. Everything about the breeding season was defined by weight. Life and death were measured in grams. It took between twenty and thirty kilograms of food to transform an eighty-six-gram hatchling into an independent bird. For its five-to-six-kilogram parents, this meant providing ever larger catches as the chick grew, until they were finally hauling back up to a fifth of their bodyweight in krill; which was also the amount of bodyweight the adults would lose by the end of the summer, as they exhausted themselves running to and from the ocean on their pink rubbery feet. Electronic readers buried alongside the platform would identify microchipped birds as they went past, recording the duration and frequency of their trips. Since lengthy trips and poor catches indicated that food was scarce, the data wouldn’t only provide information on the Adélies’ health but the health of their environment as well.

  It took four gruelling hours to get the automated system established and dig in the electronic readers. Although neither Jess nor Brix had any experience with this equipment, Jess only needed a job to be explained once before she grasped it and was then amazing at it. Unlike Brix, whose contribution was not just weak but virtually worthless. The mood became tense as freezing mist rolled in from the sea and drenched everything. Dew saturated their red Gore-Tex suits, water dripping from faces and plastered strings of hair. Hands became paralysed, causing the sufferer to swear and drop whatever they were holding. When sleet started to drum across the beach, the cold became internalized as an encompassing, unsolvable misery.

  Decker alone was able to remain patient with Brix. He was saintly when Brix couldn’t work out where to position a fence post, which meant he had to show her, and then show her how to hammer it in. Her inability to nail the fencing to the posts correctly meant Decker had to come back and redo it. Since Brix also kept letting parts of her face freeze, Decker twice had to pull her to one side and revive a whitened patch of skin. It became difficult to tell who’d win in the competition to hate Brix most between Jess and Brix herself.

  Jess observed from under the brim of her sodden hood as Brix failed to manage some other job and Decker jogged over and talked to her. They were only thirty metres away, yet the waterfall roar of the pelting sleet masked their voices. The ground jumped with millions of beads of ice, steadily filling the hole Jess and Decker had been gouging out of the cast-iron sand for the weighing platform. Jess watched Decker put an encouraging arm around Brix’s shoulders as she shook her head in frustration. Good, you cry, Jess thought, staring at Brix. Cry and waste more time, that’s just perfect.

  Decker made a scooping gesture to tell Jess to keep digging.

  Yeah, great, thought Jess, shovelling angrily with her spade. I’ll finish my work, and then her work, and any work you haven’t done since her bullshit means you’re constantly interrupted. And, then, once I’ve done everything else, I’ll make you both dinner. Because this team is composed of one useless tourist, one biologist, and one slave.

  Decker relieved Brix of her fence-nailing duty and sent her off into the colony with an armload of nest-marker poles. The nests built closest to each of the individually numbered and randomly placed marker poles would be monitored to provide a cross-section of information on the year’s breeding success. The chicks raised in these nests would have their progress measured as they either survived to fledge or perished.

  ‘Why is she here, Decker?’ Jess said when he returned.

  ‘You could try giving her a break,’ Decker said. ‘She’s an excellent scientist.’

  Jess was about to respond with a different, less enthusiastic summary of Brix when Decker cut in. ‘You all right there, chief?’ he shouted to Brix.

  Brix’s mood had actually taken a dramatic upturn. She’d discovered an empty can of pineapple lying partially crushed among the rocks. Picking it up, she examined the red lettering and quaint illustration mottled with a century’s worth of corrosion. Marks on the rim showed where it had been cut open to bend up the rusted lid.

  Napps, Millet-Bass and Dinners had been reduced to sepia portraits, with their centre-partings and utterly joyless expressions. These photographs were stamped through a hundred biographies until the repetition erased any emotional content and their faces became nothing more than the emblems of a tragedy. The three men were almost mythical creatures, so dead it was hard to believe that they’d ever been real. Which made evidence that they’d truly been here, walking this same beach and seeing this same view, as remarkable to find as a trilobite fossil. But the past was a different world. It remained unknowable and evasive, even when you were holding solid proof of it in your hand.

  11

  April 1913

  You sly bastard,’ Lawrence murmured to the doctor sitting beside him. ‘Don’t think I don’t know exactly what you’re doing.’

  To the uninitiated, Addison remained peacefully oblivious to either this insult or any of the raised voices quarrelling in the Officers’ Mess. His attention was focused on the remains of his cold meal. He wasn’t averse to confrontation, but understood that authority in an argument relied on timing and composure. Addison was a strategist. He would wait until the ideal moment arrived, then shut off the dispute’s airways with a fatal pincer-grip of clarity.

  Lawrence’s proposal to launch a final search for Napps and Millet-Bass before starting homeward had been met with deep resistance. Morale still hadn’t recovered from the storm.

  The Kismet was a traditional, three-masted sailing vessel with a heavily reinforced frame designed to withstand the timber-shattering pressure of the ice. Messy-looking piles of tarpaulin-covered boxes, coal sacks and fuel cases loosely divided the deck lengthways down the middle to leave a narrow gangway at each side. Buckets, oilcans, timber and tools were wedged in wherever there was room, just as those tragic animals had once been. For a brief time, eight terrified sheep had lived in a pen on the deck, before they were strung from the masts, their skinned and frozen bodies clattering together. Below deck, a warren of passages ran between the infirmary, the galley kitchen, the Mess rooms, the hold, the laboratories and the engine rooms. There wasn’t an inch of idle space anywhere. No one was ever more than four steps from someone else. The ship was a home, a village, a centre of scientific research, and an abattoir. She was a kingdom unto herself, with a figurehead of a bare-breasted angel decorating her prow. And although she was beautiful to look at, she was less enchanting to sail.

  The Kismet had been used for whaling in the Labrador Sea and was nearly thirteen years old when Lawrence purchased her. She was starting to show her age. Water seeped through the deck and rained on to the bunks, or choked the engines. The flat-bottomed hull which worked so well to resist the ice was hellishly unsteady in open waters. She rolled and lurched at wild angles, smashing people against the walls. The Kismet was already in a ramshackle condition when the storm hit her.<
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  In the almost month-long repairs at Cape Athena, men had crawled to pack gushing leaks near the propeller shaft with tar and cement, while others worked endless shifts at the pumps. The five-ton rudder had been torn from its truck and needed to be hauled out with chains and laid on the ice to mend. The problem of chronically waterlogged engines took long, oil-blackened days in the engine room to solve. Each new dilemma had weakened the collective buffer of optimism. Once thick sea ice trapped the ship at the Cape, the men’s concerns for the Everland team had been replaced by concerns for themselves. Their hearts held an uncompromising will to be safe and the sacrifices it urged were ungallant to say the least.

  The sailor Matthews was talking with Smith, a blond sailor of twenty-three who worshipped Napps. There was a vulnerability to Smith, a sort of silliness and cluelessness, which not only provoked but almost invited the more bullying crew members to target him. And it was these same qualities which had proved to be Smith’s salvation. Although Napps had plenty of bullying tendencies of his own, he also abided by a perverse type of code. Certain people, such as the idiotic Smith, were so crushable their persecution insulted him. Which meant Smith-baiting was a dangerous sport, as the furious Mate was prone to suddenly appear from nowhere to menace Smith’s tormentors. And now his defender was gone, Smith’s eyes darted around nervously.

  ‘If we leave, though,’ Smith said. ‘What if they’re alive?’

  ‘If they’re alive we’d have found them,’ Matthews answered.

  For the fiftieth time, Castle said, ‘We cannot rule out hope.’

  ‘Spoken like a true friend,’ Coppers said. He turned to laugh dismissively with the men near him.

  Castle’s nose resembled something used to jam open a door. He had crazy red hair which stuck up in tufts, and a charisma which belied his small size. Although his relationship with Napps somehow disqualified his views, he was still persuasive as he talked about the First Mate’s abilities. No one could deny that Napps was frighteningly capable. Under his supervision the crew ran effortlessly. He was known for his belief in discipline and his famously blunt assessment of work. If the work was good you’d be told how to improve it, and if the work was bad there wasn’t time to catch your breath. Although Napps’s professional reputation was faultless, judgements on his character were far less consistent. It depended on who you spoke to. It depended on what kind of a bruising Napps had just given their best efforts.

  Castle’s speech was received with a polite lack of interest from everyone except Smith, who clapped enthusiastically. A slow, facetious applause came from McValley.

  ‘Careful,’ Lawrence said to him. ‘We’re aware of your opinions on Napps.’

  McValley wasn’t aggressive exactly, but the men were wary around him. He could be venomous. As the ship’s Second Mate, he was third in rank behind the Captain and Napps. He was also sensationally good-looking. His facial expressions always seemed very consciously arranged to accentuate his handsomeness, such as now, with this smile.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ McValley said with poorly acted remorse. ‘I will admit there may not have been a lot of love between myself and the Mate.’

  The audience raised their eyebrows at this colossal understatement.

  Smith overheard Coppers saying quietly, ‘Hah, practical Napps. Lethally practical with the cat, wasn’t he?’

  ‘That isn’t decent,’ Smith said. ‘Napps is a good man.’

  Coppers looked at Smith pityingly. ‘Honestly, if they were alive we’d have found them,’ he said to the room, specifically to Lawrence.

  In trying to stay professionally neutral, Lawrence’s nod was designed to confirm he appreciated Coppers’s point whilst also showing he didn’t necessarily agree. It wasn’t that he disagreed, but he wanted to project a certain image of himself.

  ‘Captain, let it be documented that I unreservedly offer my services to the next search party,’ Smith said with uncharacteristic determination. He was visibly willing Lawrence to immortalize the statement in his journal.

  You little idiot, Lawrence thought as he offered the same neutral nod. When it comes to you, Smith, let it be documented you wouldn’t want me anywhere near my damned journal.

  The expedition funding was reliant in part on the book Lawrence was contracted to write about it afterwards. He dutifully spent an hour before bed recording the day’s news. It wasn’t only the larger traumas and triumphs of Antarctic exploration, but also the minor domestic events. He wrote about their festive meals and birthday celebrations and their games of football on the ice. Everything about their rituals as a community and dynamic as a group was preserved. Just chatty details, he’d say when asked about his diary. Chatty bits to show the reality of life aboard. What he didn’t say was that the journal also chatted pretty heavily on the subject of his personal opinions. Certain things were slanderously discussed, certain men. His journal frequently got used to harbour a grudge or channel eruptions of spite. Not that anyone would ever know. The editing would smooth it out later, and he’d insert extracts from other men’s diaries to create a balanced depiction. Except he wondered about the notion of keeping his book objective now it seemed they’d taken this enormous emotional detour.

  Lawrence felt the Everland calamity as an acidic fire in his stomach. It burnt penny-sized holes throughout the day, which made it impossible to concentrate, and attracted swarms of flesh-eating thoughts throughout the night, which made it impossible to sleep. So now Lawrence lay in the dark with his eyes open until morning. He tried to plan his way out of a labyrinth full of monsters named debt and defeat and ineptitude and failure. And because Dinners’s condition was an issue which required supreme caution if he was to navigate it safely, Lawrence had already begun drafting those chapters in his head.

  Now Addison spoke. ‘We all want to go home,’ he said. ‘But can we leave without being sure that Napps and Millet-Bass can’t be saved? That’s the predicament.’

  ‘We are sure,’ McValley said.

  Addison said, ‘We think we’re sure. It’s entirely different.’

  Addison was using the level, parental tone of voice Lawrence had come to hate. He regarded it as an act of ethical hooliganism over his right to perfectly normal character flaws. The doctor was forever defying his rank by exerting a strange influence over Lawrence which forced him to be a better man.

  Lawrence tried to keep the resentment out of his voice. ‘Another search will be dangerous.’

  ‘My belief is that we must not permit ourselves to assume they’re dead because it suits us,’ Addison replied, looking intently at the Captain.

  McValley listened to this and imagined a happy scenario where he beat Addison to death. He had a baby at home in England, a daughter, and he was being forced to risk his life for a pair of corpses. If he was going to risk it for anyone, McValley thought his wife and baby deserved priority since they were actually alive to appreciate the sacrifice.

  ‘We didn’t find Napps and Millet-Bass the first two times,’ said Coppers, thumping back against his chair in protest. ‘Why should we the third time? What are we searching for?’

  ‘For anything, Coppers,’ Lawrence said quickly, since the doctor’s morality pincer was crushing his throat. ‘Any trace or evidence. If we can’t leave with the men, then we’ll leave knowing we did everything in our power to help them. It’s the honourable course of action. I expect we’re all persuaded by that.’

  Lawrence chose to interpret the men’s silence as agreement.

  ‘The final search will be launched tomorrow,’ he said.

  McValley responded with one of his wonderfully insulting smiles.

  12

  March 1913

  With no wind-chill it was pleasant enough for Napps and Millet-Bass to shift the primus from the tent and cook their lunch outside. It would be dark within the next couple of hours, and hundreds of bird and seal calls echoed acros
s the island as the mid-afternoon sun set in a flame-red sky.

  Millet-Bass put blankets on the snow for himself and Napps to sit on, in front of the tent entrance so that Dinners could join the conversation. He sat huddled in his sleeping bag inside the tent.

  ‘See you’ve been busy,’ Millet-Bass said to Dinners.

  Dinners had emptied his little collection of rocks out on to the groundsheet and lined them up for inspection. His ration bag was as personal to him as another journal. He’d stockpiled Antarctic specimens, including diorite quartz and kenyte lava, and he’d also brought a number of rocks with sentimental value from home. Among the opal, jet and pyrite, amethyst was his favourite. These purple crystals had been a present from Elizabeth, before they were married. His February birthday meant amethyst was his birthstone, she’d said, and Dinners had admired her for trying to romanticize his interest in geology. He’d thought the whole birthstone thing was nonsense, but when their daughter Madeline was born on a February morning two years later, the amethysts came to symbolize his wife, his baby, and his life at home. He took them with him everywhere, along with a photograph of Elizabeth.

  Dinners’s face went a deep mortified red. He scraped the stones into the bag and stammered to Millet-Bass that he’d given himself various jobs. He said he wanted to make a contribution, even if it was only very slight. For example, he’d reached from the tent to place some wet socks on the snow to dry in the sun, which took him a long time due to his awful hands. He’d also peered out at the beach to observe any seals and birds for scientific purposes. It was one of the more troublesome jobs.

  ‘But you had a job,’ Napps said. ‘You were to sleep and recover. Your contribution, as you put it, would have been to do the job I assigned to you.’