by Rebecca Hunt
She’d spent a whole year making inexplicable decisions as Joe’s affair continued despite the wall-shaking arguments and teary pledges and constant grinding loneliness. They’d battled through another degrading eleven months before Brix realized that of Joe’s two relationships, it was hers which was finished. So then she’d done a whole lot more crying, and a fair amount of ranting and drinking, and said enough to worry her friends, one of whom was Angie, the superhuman friend.
Brix had first met Angie at university, where they’d been a pair of science geeks with nose rings and badly dyed hair. Angie had since transformed into a sleekly groomed powerhouse, becoming a director at Aegeus. She chaired the committee on field expedition selections, including the Everland centenary. Her relationship with Brix obviously wasn’t something she’d publicized, and the two women appeared to be no more than polite acquaintances whilst at the base. Angie was better at maintaining this pretence than Brix was, because Doctor Angela Pennell was brilliant at everything.
It was Angie who helped Brix pack and then unpack into the new south London flat she’d helped her to find and then decorate. It was Angie who staged one-woman coups on Brix’s resistance to do anything, and took Brix to the pub or the cinema, or to a restaurant, or just came over to hang out. And it was Angie who listened to the repetitive, emotionally exhaustive monologues in bars and cafés and late-night phone calls and marathon weeping sessions at kitchen tables. She listened through long walks and coastal daytrips and the entire duration of several weekend mini-breaks and finally in a tapas restaurant in Barcelona, on a wasted summery afternoon, where she said to Brix, ‘Okay, stop. Here’s what we’re going to do.’
‘She got you selected.’ Jess smiled unpleasantly. ‘Which means that he knows all about it,’ she said, watching Decker walk back towards them.
‘Yes,’ Brix said. Except Decker didn’t just know. He’d played an integral part.
18
March 1913
The man had said, ‘Want this?’ Napps couldn’t have been more than six years old as he stood on the jetty, watching fishermen unload the teeming crab baskets. The baskets were ancient-looking things, with furred ropes and some natty contraption which locked the crabs inside. He could see them through the bars, flat brown shapes swarming over each other with their claws raised. He could hear shells clatter when the baskets were lifted. The man had tugged out a magnificently sized crab, its articulated legs roving at surprised angles in the air, and offered it to the boy. ‘As a treat, you want this?’ Yes he did. ‘Give it to your mother to deal with, she’ll love it.’ Perhaps not so much, but Napps knew he’d be able to talk his mother round. She’d only have to look at the crab to be convinced it should live with them for ever. Then the fisherman killed the crab by forcing a screwdriver into its mouth. Napps had silently reached out to accept the clammy body which was handed to him, holding it in his arms like a dead baby.
He’d vowed then, at six, that he would murder anyone who hurt an animal in front of him again. He would protect all animals.
Napps had then gone on to break his own vow thousands of times. He’d hurt scores of animals himself. By joining the Navy he’d chosen a career which meant brutality was an unavoidable part of life. Worse still, his revulsion for harming creatures had never diminished. If anything it got more extreme with age. The same boy was there shrieking his horror whenever Napps’s job required him to go against his fierce love of animals, which it did constantly, in hideous ways, such as with the pony Nelson.
Death was integral to the success of Antarctic expeditions. The dogs and ponies were tools, with every one of them starting as an engine and ending as fuel. The dogs were cannibalized by other dogs, held down by the men to have their hearts pierced with a long blade before being dismembered into sinewy chunks and fed to the pack. The ponies were fed to both man and dog, shot and stored as meat after they’d been worn into devastation over one epic outward trek. And so it was with Nelson, the pony who made low welcoming rumbles whenever he saw Napps. Small friendly Nelson who’d willingly sloughed alongside Napps for months.
Because the pony had to be shot, and because he was unable to bear the idea of anyone else doing it, and because he believed Nelson deserved the real, heartbroken sorrow which only he, Napps, would feel at his slaughter, Napps dealt with it himself. He’d led his stumbling, emaciated pony a long way from the group in order to give the task some privacy and also to hide the fact he was about to burst into the wrenching sobs of a child. He’d put his hand on Nelson’s shaggy cheek, the pony’s ears twitching at his voice while he told him he was a good pony, one of the greats, and that he would be missed. He was a heroic little pony, Napps reassured him, barely able to speak, who should be very proud of his contribution to the team. And then, with a gunshot, Nelson was nothing at all. The men had cut him and buried the pieces to freeze as they did with every ruined pony. They’d stripped him like a bed.
So when Millet-Bass reasoned, ‘Look, taking the fur seals won’t matter. We’ll be hastening their decline, nothing more than that,’ these two seminally affecting deaths shimmered into view. The crab and the pony hovered beside Napps while he said weakly, ‘They might be able to regenerate if we left them.’
‘Napps, these are living ghosts,’ Millet-Bass said. ‘What’s left, a handful? Nowhere near enough for them to recover.’
He could practically feel the wet crab in his arms again. ‘I suppose an argument could always be made in favour of hope.’
They’d walked to the northern end of the island and Millet-Bass spotted the Everland fur seals first. He’d pointed to the dark blimps clustered together near the cove and said, ‘There! Twenty at a guess?’ The sight of twenty edible objects caused him to rhapsodize on the subject of meat. It didn’t concern Millet-Bass that fur seals had been hunted so insatiably they were presumed extinct, or that these were clearly miraculous seals. What concerned him was his own annihilation. Thumping the handle of his ice axe on his palm, he talked of blubber and iron-rich organs, and the steaks he could almost taste, and his new idea of mixing brains into the hoosh.
Napps listened without reaction. He was exceptionally good at hiding his secret. Although the prospect of butchering seals made him ill to his soul, his face remained placid. He might have even appeared keen. It was an expression honed over years of leading men into peaceful seal colonies. To Napps, no matter how essential the need for meat, hunting always carried a sense of profound loss. So the idea of hammering out the last few surviving fur seals on earth seemed like an act of unspeakable evil. He’d be forcing a screwdriver into the mouth of a whole species with his own hands.
Napps continued to remain placid-faced as Millet-Bass told him his argument in favour of hope was a ton of horse manure. You couldn’t live on baseless sentimentality, he said, and you also couldn’t inflict damage on something which had already been destroyed. He’d also got a theory of his own. Hope was fine, it spoke of faith; faith was nice, it spoke of justice; yet we all learn, don’t we, Napps. We learn that not everything true is fair.
‘And you’ve never had a problem with killing seals before,’ Millet-Bass said, his smile suggesting that Napps’s enjoyment of shattering animal heads was an open secret they’d long indulged.
During the expedition’s first summer, a group of men had been sent ashore to restock the Kismet’s supplies. Under Lawrence’s command and Napps’s guidance, they had been instructed to take bulls if possible, lone cows if not, certainly no cows with dependent young, certainly no pups. But with weeks of pent-up energy to use and only minutes to apply it, the mood had become hedonistic. The sound of bludgeoned flesh and screams rang into the dense blue mist. No one was thinking of the instructions, they were thinking of sport, and if McValley realized the cow he went to strike was shielding a pup, it hadn’t stopped him. While McValley hauled her corpse off to dump with the catch, Napps had seen the baby seal struggling after its mother. Since the dep
ravity of using his club on a pup was overridden by the greater cruelty of leaving it, what he did next he did out of compassion. A scurrilous laugh had come from behind him. ‘Well, well, well,’ McValley said, returning before Napps could complete the dispatch.
The sensible thing would have been to clarify the situation immediately. What Napps should have done was vehemently brand the offence on to its rightful owner. Except he’d been too saddened by the pup to think clearly, and to explain the situation later seemed pointless and, as time went on, increasingly petty. It felt demeaning to even try and justify his actions. Of course, if Napps had known then just how vengeful Second Mate McValley was, how gleefully opportunistic with any weapon against him, he’d have reconsidered. Better yet, Napps thought, he’d have left McValley to die of his fucking scurvy when he had the chance. What happened instead was that rumours of the pup and its unlawful death circulated around the ship until even the Captain was aware of it. ‘Killed a pup, did you, Napps?’ Lawrence said in the artificially languid tone he used to stop himself spewing out rage. ‘I specifically order that pups be avoided, yet you beat one to mince. Tell me, what am I to make of that?’
At this point, in the middle of one of their mini-wars, Napps hadn’t cared what Lawrence made of it. Lawrence’s jealous insecurities about the First Mate had reared up again, so if he wanted to use the pup as ballast to his mad notion that Napps would willingly debase himself in order to undermine the Captain, then let him. It was for these stubborn reasons that Napps never refuted the claims against him.
‘We’ll take one seal,’ Napps said to Millet-Bass, who was thinking of liver and fried heart and hot strips of blubber. ‘Is that clear? One seal will provide more than enough meat to last us the few days until the Kismet arrives.’
The fur seals had brown otter-like faces, with long moustaches of whiskers and tiny drooping earflaps. Unaccustomed to people, they watched Napps approach a female at the edge of the group. She was young, about three years old, and had probably been born on this beach. Napps was swamped by the same familiar heartache as he looked down at her, knowing that to kill her was to destroy something perfect. Although the seal couldn’t understand him, he hoped the tone of his voice expressed kindness so she wouldn’t be afraid. I’ll do it quickly, he promised her, like he promised every animal. Swear to God, you won’t feel it, I’ll make it painless. And he did, using his axe to deliver a mercifully efficient blow.
Alarmed noises from the other seals became a louder chorus of frightened barks. Napps turned to see they’d broken into a lumbering gallop, followed by Millet-Bass. Despite Napps’s instructions, the semi-tame seals had proved to be too much of a temptation for him, and the body of a second dead seal lay on the snow.
‘Enough,’ Napps called. ‘That’s an order.’
Millet-Bass either didn’t hear or chose to act like he hadn’t. The mysterious light contorted his outline and he appeared to run up into the sky on a translucent glass band suspended above the ground.
‘I said enough,’ Napps shouted furiously at him. ‘I said one seal was plenty.’
Millet-Bass threw his axe in frustration, vigorously disagreeing that one or even two seals were anywhere near enough. It made no sense that Napps would sabotage their chance to eat fresh kidneys for every meal.
‘What’s gained by letting the seals go?’ Millet-Bass demanded. ‘So they can die out of their own accord? Your pity would be better spent on us, your men.’
Napps answered that Millet-Bass should stop whinging. They had now two seals to flense, double what he’d sanctioned, and sullenly watching while Napps tried to deal with a carcass on his own was not a helpful attitude, and frankly Napps expected better.
Millet-Bass hissed a few criticisms under his breath about Napps’s attitude and Napps’s sullenness and frankly Napps couldn’t peel an egg, so frankly the idea of him flensing was hilarious. It was so satisfying, Millet-Bass forgot that he hated Everland and thought again of his excellent recipe for mixing brains into the hoosh.
The strenuous business of disassembling a carcass was the work of two men or more. First the seal’s skin needed to be sliced and removed with its inconceivably thick mat of blubber attached. Slabs of flesh were carved from each animal and buried there on the beach to freeze. Heaps of entrails steamed alongside two yielding livers. The snow was covered with bloodied footprints and slushy quagmires of blood, and trailing hose lines of blood, and the thin crosshatched streaks drawn as they wiped their blood-sodden gloves. What bothered Millet-Bass wasn’t the stomach-turning gore but their lack of the proper flensing knives with robust handles. These slender clasp-knives were useless and their hands kept threatening to skid down on to the blade. You needed something to hold on to, Millet-Bass complained, not this smooth little thing which was so ripe for accident they might as well just sever a couple of fingers now and get it over with. In tedious detail he told Napps exactly how he planned to bind the handle of his knife to give it more grip, Napps’s reply being, ‘See?’
‘See?’ he repeated, because he hadn’t been listening to Millet-Bass. He’d said it in answer to his own internal conversation about how much brighter life would be the second this loathsome job was finished. Now it was, he was immensely cheerful. ‘See?’ he said, gesturing at Taurus, their pet iceberg, which had drifted noticeably closer to the island. ‘Our mascot is bringing us luck already.’
19
November 2012
Listen up. Fur seal interaction is not the cute gig you think it is,’ Decker said to Brix and Jess. Behind them, slumped around the Joseph Evelyn cove like an airport lounge full of passengers waiting for a delayed flight, were approximately two hundred fur seals. These were the newest arrivals to Everland’s annual breeding festival. The cove was perfect for the seals, as the large reefs which barricaded the shore formed sheltered nursery pools for pups, and the variously sized rocks covering the beach provided ideal platforms for basking. Seals sat propped up on their front flippers, their heads raised to the sky in a manner of curious haughtiness.
‘You wouldn’t believe how fast they run, and that’s without anything resembling a proper leg,’ Decker said. ‘Their acceleration rate is mind-blowing. One minute they’re lolled harmlessly on the beach, the next you’re swerving in front of a four-hundred-pound hooligan with your thigh slashed open.’
He was hoping for more of a reaction than Brix’s attentive nod and Jess’s terse, ‘Um hm.’ It seemed to Decker that he wasn’t only leading the expedition, but was also in charge of generating all conversation. If Brix and Jess hadn’t liked each other before, they had been at least civil, and then some kind of social permafrost had descended for reasons he didn’t understand. He couldn’t even read their expressions because they were wearing large, ski-mask-type sunglasses.
The temperature had risen to minus one degree and the sun now was a constant glaring presence. It made the tent glow a nuclear orange throughout the night, and reflected from the snow throughout the day, which made working without sunglasses impossible. Their faces had become a patchwork of different shades, with brown cheeks, pale hat-screened foreheads, and whitely goggled eyes above noses the colour of jerky.
Jess held her hand out to Brix. ‘Keys,’ she said abruptly.
Decker’s rule was the experiment in tyranny Brix had predicted it would be. If she absentmindedly pocketed her quad keys, Jess reacted as though she had desecrated a grave. Requesting the keys from Jess meant watching Jess huff through the same indignant performance, slowly searching her bag and then slowly passing the over the keys, like Brix was robbing her at knifepoint. They both knew the whole obnoxious process was Jess’s way of punishing Brix for the Everland selection.
Jess hadn’t said anything about it to Decker for selfish reasons. She wasn’t going to isolate the only friend she had here by embarrassing Decker and making it awkward between them. Interestingly, Brix didn’t appear to have mentioned it to Decker
either, which Jess thought was a weird, self-defeating move. If Brix had gone whinging to Decker, he’d have surely become even more repulsively protective of her than he already was. Although Jess wondered if she was wrong about this. Because perhaps Decker wasn’t entirely immune to frustration. He hadn’t sounded wildly upbeat when he spoke to Aegeus that morning. Brix had gone to the toilet tent, the only thing she seemed capable of doing by herself, when Toshi answered the call.
‘Well, I’m not sure I’d say things are fantastic,’ Decker had said to Toshi. ‘I mean, yes, we’re getting the work done, but it’s hard going.’
Using classic eavesdropping tactics, Jess became very busy rehydrating sachets of pilaf rice so as not to break the spell.
‘There is no “why”, Toshi. The work’s tough, the weather’s been bad, there’s a lot of—no one’s to blame is what I’m trying to say. Some of us just require a bit longer to settle in.’ Decker laughed at Toshi’s reply. ‘Who? Shut up, I’m not telling you who. No, not me, you dick. No—’ he’d glanced furtively at Jess. ‘Not her either.’ His voice became businesslike. ‘I’m sure it’ll be easier now the weather’s improved.’
Over decades of Antarctic research, the technology had advanced beyond recognition. The evolution of the equipment used on fieldwork was rapid and transformative. In a constant race for sensitivity and precision, the apparatus shrank each year to become more ingenious. What had been a box turned into a button and then a microchip the size of a grain of rice, as the new breed of minuscule self-powering devices wiped out their clumsy predecessors. Modern machines decoded an increasingly complex wealth of data about hunting regions and dive range and a hundred other things. The changes were revolutionary, but not everything had changed. However sophisticated the technology became, it still involved dealing with wild animals. And some of those animals, such as an adult male seal, had the muscle and weight to make any middle-aged scientist think hard about what medical supplies he had access to.
