by Rebecca Hunt
‘More than decayed,’ Napps said. ‘Digested is a better word.’
‘Both carcasses?’ Millet-Bass said.
This was the first time he’d spoken in over an hour, since Dinners had unwittingly poisoned the mood by enquiring if his hand hurt, which he was gruffly informed it did. When Dinners asked if he could do anything to help, Millet-Bass’s expression had an inward-looking conclusiveness which suggested the question of ‘what Dinners could do’ was a subject he’d discussed many times with himself.
‘Your “help” is the reason I’m in this state,’ Millet-Bass said. ‘So how will you help me next? Spinal damage, perhaps? Cut off a leg?’
Cringing through his apologies again, Dinners said he was sorry he’d offered the wrong knife, and sorry for Millet-Bass’s injured hand, and sorry for the tendons, and sorry for everything. Yet he did think this stubborn refusal to forgive him was a bit unfair. It was an accident, after all, he hadn’t planned it.
‘You’re right,’ Millet-Bass said with biting irony, the five-fingered source of their misery papoosed inside his woollen top. ‘You are very sorry, and maybe I am being unfair. It’s just one of the many outcomes you didn’t anticipate. Because how could you?’
Not wanting Millet-Bass to see how thoroughly ashamed he was, Dinners lay down and turned his face away.
‘I expect you’re starting to regret your little confession to me that night during the storm, aren’t you?’ were the last words Millet-Bass said until Napps returned to the tent with his bad news and his wicked-smelling gloves.
Napps told them that every piece of meat was in the same state of decomposition.
‘What could have happened?’ Dinners asked, the numbers three and four eclipsing any other thought in his head.
‘The holes might have been too shallow,’ Napps replied. ‘Or the snow covering wasn’t thick enough.’
Dinners knew the human body could go three or four weeks without food, three or four days without water.
‘No, it’s nothing to do with the cache,’ Millet-Bass said defensively. ‘I’ve built them countless times before, and never once had a problem.’
‘Well, precisely. It could be any number of reasons,’ was Napps’s diplomatic answer. He wasn’t about to admit to the shameful scene at the cove where he’d flung his axe and sworn in a voice so violently angry he didn’t recognize it as his own, kicking chunks of ice around in a fit of rage over Millet-Bass’s inability to correctly bury chunks of meat. But he’d gradually thundered himself into resignation. Whether it was human error or not, Napps had accepted that staving in Millet-Bass’s head with a rock would not ultimately improve the situation.
Thinking three or four, three or four, Dinners asked, ‘So how long do we have with the remaining supplies?’
‘It’s this place,’ Millet-Bass said. First the crates had been ravaged, and now the meat they’d been counting on to bolster their depleted rations was wrecked and inedible. With complete predictability, Millet-Bass blamed the island.
‘We’ve got just less than three weeks at full rations and possibly one month of fuel,’ Napps said to Dinners.
The heartbreak of knowing proved to be slightly less painful than the raw anguish of hoping. It was a different kind of pain which entranced the sufferer. Dinners closed his eyes and thought of jellyfish.
In Dinners’s mind, the men and their provisions had assumed the form of a single and elegantly simple jellyfish-like organism. If the organism remained connected, the men were able to survive Everland’s barrenness. Any severance to the connection, however, resulted in terminal breakdown. Without those supplies, they were as helpless as the transparent, immobilized domes of beached jellyfish.
‘But the Kismet will arrive soon, though,’ Dinners said, opening his eyes. He looked expectantly at Napps, as if the Mate’s agreement would cast a spell on the future and convert this wish into reality.
‘Of course, I’m expecting the ship any day now,’ Napps said, although his reassurance didn’t have the comforting depth of faith Dinners had hoped for. What he heard instead was a man distracted by his own misgivings.
‘Any day now? Well, that’s news,’ Millet-Bass said. ‘Although I’m sure Dinners will believe you. After all, this is the man who also believes that horned things are lurking in the shadows.’
The way Millet-Bass treated whatever Dinners said as an act of unendurable provocation had become tedious, even for the Dinners-intolerant Napps. He advised Millet-Bass to keep his mouth shut, preferably for the rest of the afternoon, and then he smiled. ‘Oh, I’m Dinners’s guardian in this party, am I?’ he said. ‘God help us if that’s true.’
Napps laughed at how unbelievable he found the situation, either oblivious or crushingly indifferent to the bleak expression on Dinners’s face.
‘It seems your motto’s right, Dinners,’ he said. ‘The times are changing and we with them.’
37
December 2012
Over there somewhere?’ Jess said once they’d descended to the base of the cave’s slope in search of her wacky hallucinated cloth.
‘Zillion pounds,’ Decker said. ‘Not going to find it, because it doesn’t exist.’
This was one of his two recurrent subjects of conversation. If he wasn’t commenting on the pointlessness of searching for an imagined flag, he was grilling Jess. It had been less than twenty-four hours since her accident and he wanted to know if she was all right. Because he thought she looked ill and kind of weak. Sickly. Could she manage okay? Because, seriously, not wanting to make a big deal about it or anything, she didn’t look great.
‘Right, because we all look so great,’ Jess answered as they searched around in the bluish gloom.
With their blisters and scaly skin, and sun-bleached unwashed hair like tufts of coconut matting, it was true that they weren’t overly attractive. Jess’s face did seem pinched, though, with a tightness around her mouth. There was a cautiousness to her steps, as if the ground was an uncertain surface which couldn’t be trusted. She was, however, as she kept repeating, fine. That something grated against something else when she walked wasn’t a detail she wanted to think about.
Brix, who knew more than Jess would have chosen, had shown herself to be admirably discreet. It was interesting and kind of embarrassing to Jess how profoundly this one small act of kindness had changed her outlook. Whereas she’d previously categorized Brix as an insipid person, a boring one, devoid of any of the qualities Jess respected, she was discovering that Brix wasn’t such a pointless nonentity. There was actually quite lot to like about Brix.
‘Here!’ Brix said, kneeling to scrape at the gravel. Frozen into a creased tangle beneath a crust of dirt and frost was half of a torn green sledging flag. What remained had a scalloped rim, a wreath of embroidered oak leaves and a faded Latin inscription.
‘What do you think Aegeus will make of it?’ Jess asked, crowding in next to Brix. ‘It must have belonged to one of Napps’s team. Has to, doesn’t it?’
Brix had turned to look at the two alcoves behind them. They were stunted, low-roofed little dens with a depth of around five metres. She was thinking about the flag’s location. ‘Won’t be a minute,’ she said, handing the flag to Jess.
‘Well, hah . . . ’ Decker’s face lit with boyish excitement as he inspected the flag. ‘Seems I owe you an apology, Jess,’ he said, unable to stop smiling.
After decades in the ice, the cloth had become a type of pottery fabric which could snap or shatter. Jess stood at his shoulder as he turned the brittle flag to examine the inscription again. She slowly mangled out the Latin text. ‘Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.’ She shrugged at Decker. ‘Did you understand any of that?’
He laughed. ‘No.’
‘Hey, Brix,’ Jess called. ‘You learn any Latin?’
Brix didn’t answer. She’d stooped to walk the length of on
e alcove, then come back and gone to explore the other. She was crouched at the far end of the alcove next to a cluster of pebbles in the black volcanic sand when Jess found her.
‘This is weird,’ Brix said, holding one pebble up to catch the light. ‘There’s six of them gathered together. I think it’s amethyst.’
Jess saw the stone glint purple. ‘There might be tons of the stuff scattered around.’
‘I’m not a geologist,’ Brix said, ‘but I don’t believe amethyst is found in Antarctica.’
‘Amethyst?’ Decker said. ‘No, you’re talking Brazil, Zambia, areas of North America, some parts of—Brix, are you digging?’
Having piled the stones to one side, Brix was burrowing at the ground with her hands. ‘Don’t you wonder what the flag is doing here?’ she said. ‘Because I’ve got this hunch—wow.’ She reared her head back, blinking. ‘Can you smell that?’
‘Petrol,’ Decker said as he and Jess followed Brix into the alcove.
They all started to dig, shovelling out handfuls of sand, and the acoustics changed as the hole got deeper. Listen, Brix said, and banged her fist against the bottom of the cavity. It had a hollow, metallic pitch. Wiping off the film of grit revealed a flat surface. Working faster, they levered their fingers under the corners and heaved it free. The oilcan came up with a scattering of sand, a peal of viscous liquid swilling inside.
The can’s seams were stained brown with corrosion, its paint eaten into blistered patches. The cap was crusted shut with a thick batter of oxidation. The sides of two other cans were dimly perceptible in the empty crater.
The fun had drained out of the situation for Jess. Whatever odd and inexplicable event had happened here, it seemed to her that the cave was now a sinister place which possessed the ability to absorb old misfortune and then to reflect it back on to them. The ghosts of Napps and his men were suddenly very present. She asked in a volume which betrayed her irrational sense of having three dead men as an audience, ‘Does anyone else feel a bit uneasy about this?’
‘Ah, yep,’ Decker said, trying to twist open the rusted cap. ‘I feel uneasy pretty much every second of the day.’ He shook the can and estimated it contained half a gallon of fuel.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Brix said as they prised up the two other cans and then unearthed a fourth, a fifth. These last four cans were entirely full. ‘When Napps and Millet-Bass left Dinners, why did they also leave their fuel?’
‘Perhaps they intended to return?’ Jess said.
‘So why bury it?’ Brix answered.
‘Well, they marked the site,’ said Decker. ‘You found it yourself.’
‘But it’s their most precious resource, why leave it at all?’
38
April 1913
Birth and Death, an infinite ocean; A seizing and giving, the fire of living.
The Adélie hadn’t been dead long: it was still warm beneath the chilled feathers, and Napps was now in serious danger of crying. It was the first time in twenty years he’d remembered reading Goethe’s Faust, and it certainly hadn’t made him cry then. The situation was so critical he had to keep his head turned away from Millet-Bass. Trusting himself to speak or even make a friendly conversational noise was out of the question.
‘Because, Napps? There’s a good chance it’s diseased.’ Millet-Bass felt he’d been talking to the back of Napps’s head for far longer than seemed normal. He assumed the Mate’s silent fixation on the dead bird was the result of a debate over harvesting meat from its corpse, which was a bad idea, as he’d already explained several times.
Napps had done nothing more than touch the penguin. That was all he’d done. He’d innocently reached down and something very simple and astonishingly powerful had blasted him to pieces. In feeling the heat of a life just departed, Dinners’s awe at the orange lichen suddenly made perfect sense. It was like hearing the voice of God.
‘I don’t trust meat that can’t keep itself alive. I mean, you might, but . . . ’
Napps was ready to slap himself in the face. A gusting sigh restored enough emotional balance for him to stand up, mostly dry-eyed. ‘You’re right, let’s go.’
It was the end of a dispiriting hunt. Carrying oil lamps, the men had traipsed the full five-mile route around the dark island without encountering a single living thing. Old animal tracks were erased by new snowfall which lay undisturbed, and there were no bird or seal calls in the low soft notes of the wind. A summer’s worth of roosting and breeding and basking had been entirely swept clear in preparation for next year’s migration. The beaches were fallow.
In Napps’s single hopeful moment, he’d heard Millet-Bass yell about a catch and blundered across to him.
‘The only one left on Everland and the task’s been done,’ Millet-Bass had said, prodding the Adélie with his boot. It was supposed to be a joke. The bird had cunningly avoided having the men kill it by dying slightly before they arrived.
‘Are you all right? You look cold,’ Napps said while they returned to the camp. His tone was suspiciously carefree. ‘How’s the hand?’
Millet-Bass unclenched his arms and straightened his posture. Famously immune to temperature, with a reputation for happily wading around in appalling conditions, he didn’t want to admit he was so profoundly frozen it was making his stomach cramp. He didn’t want to admit, to himself or anyone, the severity of his condition. He didn’t want to think about what his increasing susceptibility to the cold might mean.
‘And I’m still waiting for an answer. How’s the hand?’
A minute stubbornly passed with no reply. Fine. Perhaps Millet-Bass would rather discuss their hike. Napps had been the quicker of the two men for the first time in history, with Millet-Bass dithering behind when previously he’d have left Napps trotting to catch up as he marched off into the distance.
‘Can’t I be sensible without you finding fault?’ Millet-Bass replied. ‘You complain that I walk too fast, and when I walk slower, you complain.’
‘I genuinely fail to—’
‘Complain, complain!’ Millet-Bass said.
Back inside their tent, the industrious Dinners had already got the tea boiled and pemmican simmering on the stove. Even better than both of these luxuries was his surprise of five muscatel raisins each.
‘Where did you have these hoarded?’ Napps asked gratefully.
Well, it was a funny story. They’d been in a rag wedged at the bottom of Dinners’s pocket and he’d completely forgotten about them. Dinners then made the mistake of describing the rag’s condition. He was going to use it to scrape some of the muck off his trousers when the raisins fell out.
Napps pretended Dinners wasn’t talking. Instead he sucked an ancient dirt-covered raisin and imagined it getting plumper and returning to a grape, then spiriting him to the gnarled vine where he would bake in the heat, shirtless. But he wasn’t so occupied with his daydreamed vineyard that he didn’t study the way Millet-Bass ate, particularly which hand he used and which he didn’t.
Millet-Bass could feel Napps’s eyes drilling into him. He’d prefer to let the raisins sit untouched in his dished palm and rot to dust than give Napps the satisfaction of seeing that he could only use his left hand, as it was no longer possible to form a workable pincer with the bad hand or move those fingers in any useful way.
This obsession with Millet-Bass’s well-being was a game they played every waking minute of the day. If Millet-Bass looked up he saw he was being watched with unblinking reptilian interest. If Millet-Bass mentioned the hand, he was trapped into another inquisition. If Millet-Bass didn’t mention the hand, he was scrutinized distrustfully. If Millet-Bass ever snapped that it was his fucking hand he got the same lecture about the fact that, no. No, it wasn’t actually his hand. On Everland, his health was their health, his wound a problem for everyone, and therefore a democratic forum. Millet-Bass didn’t get to decide ho
w well or ill he was. It was decided collectively. Rather, it was decided by Napps.
So Millet-Bass did his reckless best to treat the wound as an ugly accessory. It was unsightly, yes, but of no consequence. What he couldn’t hide was the wound itself. The cut hadn’t sealed. It was discoloured and the edges gaped. It wept a foul-looking liquid which soaked the bandages. Each evening Millet-Bass was forced to submit his hand to its nightly inspection, where it was pored over like a holy text, undressed and re-dressed, inspected and re-inspected. And each evening Millet-Bass’s confidence was splintered a little further.
In contrast to Millet-Bass, Dinners’s physical heath had vastly improved. The new energy this gave him was largely wasted on trying to bond with Napps, who remained resistant to bonding, and endearing himself to Millet-Bass, whose behaviour since the accident was increasingly cruel.
Napps interrupted him in the middle of a dull story about picking berries. Something about Dinners’s rambling chatter suggested critical fatigue.
‘Dinners, when did you last sleep?’
‘Oh, well, recently.’ He smiled tightly at Napps. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
Taking advantage of Napps’s redirected attention, Millet-Bass was clumsily scooping raisins to his mouth.
‘You need to get more rest.’
Dinners dismissed the problem with a fussy gesture. ‘I sleep whenever I get the chance, Napps, honestly. Any time I can.’
By making the mistake of dropping a raisin, Millet-Bass was instantly aligned in the centre of Napps’s crosshairs. It was enough to drive anyone crazy.
‘I’ll help,’ Dinners said. ‘It’ll be easier if I give them to you one at a time.’
He remembered Millet-Bass’s kindness to him when his own fingers were deadened and blister-swollen from frostbite. He’d fed Dinners and dressed him and held a cup for him to drink from.
Millet-Bass looked at Dinners. ‘Don’t you come anywhere near me.’
‘Less of that, Millet-Bass,’ Napps said.
