Everland

by Rebecca Hunt

  There were three sets of keys to the quads and two of them were in Jess’s rucksack.

  It was Jess who spoke first. ‘Then we’ll manage on one bike.’

  Brix’s voice was shaking. ‘I put the rucksack near the moraine. I can get it.’

  ‘Brix.’ Jess inclined her head, her eyes wide in dismay. ‘We might manage on one bike.’

  And they might not, thought Decker. Three bodies on one quad would result in a slow, unstable journey. It would be challenging, the drive would take longer, and what he needed was speed. Things needed to happen fast. He felt their options shrinking with the visibility.

  The situation required Decker to either return to the glacier himself, or allow Brix to return. He decided the answer to this quandary lay in deciding which of them was responsible for going to get the bag. If he admitted the rucksack wasn’t where Brix claimed it was, then that responsibility would be his. Which was a problem, because he had virtually no idea where he’d put the bag. In his distraction, he hadn’t noticed he’d dropped it. But since he’d not said a word about moving the rucksack, or even seeing it, while Brix kept repeating that she had done both, Decker found his memory to be a willingly malleable tool. The more Brix insisted, the simpler she made it for him to doubt what he recalled. She was so adamant that she could find the bag, and he was so sure that he couldn’t, he decided to assume his memory had betrayed him and elect to believe her instead.

  ‘You can’t go.’ Jess was leaning against Decker, one arm clinging round his shoulders. Using her free arm, she snatched at Brix’s jacket, grasping her sleeve. ‘Decker, tell her to stay.’

  ‘I’ll be back in three minutes,’ Brix said. ‘Will you wait?’

  ‘Decker,’ Jess said, fighting to hold on to Brix. ‘Tell her.’

  Decker thought the distance between himself and safety had either doubled or tripled with the addition of Jess’s weight. Everything had deconstructed into a series of numbers. He was fifty-four. There was a seven degree internal temperature difference between a functioning body and a fatally malfunctioning body. The quads were approximately four hundred metres away. He had one life. He had around fifteen or sixteen minutes.

  ‘Will you wait?’ Brix asked again. ‘I’ll be three minutes. Can you wait for me?’

  Make sure you come home, Viv had said, to which Decker promised that he’d always come home. ‘You’ll have to catch us,’ he said, staring towards the cove so he wouldn’t have to see Brix leave.

  50

  April 1913

  Millet-Bass was the one who said it. ‘We do have a can of oil.’

  Napps looked at him. Yes, they did. They had that single can; the product of Napps’s futile efforts to minimize Dinners’s load. He would have taken all six cans on to his own sledge if there’d been any way of doing so. He should have kept trying.

  ‘That’s enough to heat a little water, if we’re sparing,’ Millet-Bass said. ‘We might manage on cold food.’

  Here, if Napps wanted it, was his excuse. It was being laid before him. He thought about the fact he had seventy miles of sea ice to cross, in winter, with the sick Millet-Bass. Despite aiming to cover ten miles a day, Napps suspected they’d be lucky to achieve six. There was also another ugly, bestial thought. Although the lack of oil was a disastrous problem, both Napps and Millet-Bass knew that Dinners himself was no less of a problem. He’d be slow and incapable, weighing them down with his helplessness. Napps remembered what he’d written to Rosie. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to return.

  He said, ‘Can you climb back up?’

  Millet-Bass couldn’t. Even with Napps’s assistance, he’d struggled to climb down the borders on to the sea ice. It wasn’t possible for him to scale the slope again.

  No man or deed or sin or obstacle. ‘Not even try?’

  ‘If the weather breaks before we’ve set up the tent— Napps, we’ve got twenty minutes at most.’

  Napps considered the situation. No heat, no hot meals, but further each day, and faster. They might be able to manage on cold food, as Millet-Bass had said. All he had to do was choose to believe this decision was not only forgivable, but necessary and right. With enough determination you could perhaps convince yourself of anything. There is nothing I can’t live with if it gets me home.

  Napps unbuckled his harness. ‘We can’t leave him.’

  Because if he left Dinners he would never be without him. He’d be a bitter taste at mealtimes, a weariness at midday, a chill at night, and an insomnia which started in the hour before dawn for the rest of Napps’s life. Dinners would be present at every Christmas and holiday, every weekend and birthday to remind Napps of the joy he’d stolen from him, just as every animal Napps killed was witnessed by the spectre of the pony Nelson. To abandon Dinners meant abandoning any hope of peace. Napps couldn’t go home, he couldn’t expect to ever find contentment, if he had to sacrifice another man to do so. How time tricks us into seeing who we really are, and what choices we make.

  ‘Don’t,’ was all Millet-Bass could bring himself to say.

  Napps gripped him by the shoulders. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Millet-Bass’s voice cracked. ‘Please, Napps.’

  ‘We’re all right,’ Napps said. ‘We’re all right.’

  With that, Napps started back into the dark towards Everland. Three steps, four steps, and he was gone.

  51

  December 2012

  Decker and Jess reached the cove as the storm was breaking. The wind drove against them, Decker’s steps weaving as he went to his bike and placed Jess on the saddle. He climbed on in front and they watched as the snow blew harder, in increasing volumes, until its density acted as a wild, airborne corrosive, dissolving the beach into opacity.

  Jess willed Brix to appear. As a spell to protect Brix from danger, she devised hazards and then neutralized them with the corresponding solutions. The fear of not having much time was offset by the fact they didn’t need much time. That Brix had returned alone to the glacier, in a burgeoning storm, wasn’t going to alter the island’s geography in some menacing way. The distance between the glacier and the cove was non-variable, regardless of blizzards, and so remained short and easily negotiable. Similarly, the anxiety of the left rucksack was defused by the confidence that Brix knew where to find it. The difference between a setback and a disaster, Jess assured herself, was the ability to control unregulated factors and therefore determine the outcome. Which meant there was nothing to worry about. But as five minutes ticked into seven, and Brix still hadn’t returned, the protective force field of Jess’s spell began to wane. Something had clearly gone wrong and was becoming more wrong by the second.

  ‘We could return to the glacier and search for her,’ Jess said.

  Decker refused outright. He was terrified that his hands would freeze into incapacitation, leaving him unable to drive the quad. As the nature of sensation loss made it impossible to gauge the percentage of numbness in his feet, he decided it was as bad as he imagined. Decker thought he noticed the sallow mark of frostbite on Jess’s cheeks, which indicated that he was getting frostbitten, which led him straight back to agonizing about his hands. Every additional moment of exposure widened the gap between what might be physically recoverable and what would become unsalvageable. He knew that to stay much longer would mean losing fingers to the first knuckle, then the second, and then losing the fingers entirely. The same with toes, the same with ears and noses and parts of the face, as ice scorched flesh into blackened deadness. Shortly after that, their brains would begin to slow and they’d lose cognitive function. And then they’d lose everything. So when Jess said that they could wait, Decker knew he wasn’t going to wait. He wasn’t going to stay here. He wouldn’t just patiently let himself die.

  Jess cried and argued against it when he told her there was no alternative.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Decker said. ‘Jess, I’m sorry.
’

  ‘Hold on to me. Tighter,’ he said, starting the ignition.

  52

  April 1913

  Every mistake was costing Napps time. He’d see Dinners and go to him, only to have Dinners morph into the wrong shape as he approached. The convincingly human outline would become stumpier and oddly proportioned, with no discernible head, and then reveal itself as a rock formation. But no matter how many plausibly Dinners-shaped silhouettes disappointed Napps, he’d spot another and his optimism would renew. He’d let this maddening cycle of hope and frustration steer him in one direction and then another until he was no longer sure if this was the route they’d used.

  At some point he remembered the ground had caved beneath him and he’d fallen into a thigh-deep, slushily iced pool. He’d plunged forward, his sodden clothing stuck to his body, the leather knapsack bleeding water from its seams as water gushed to fill the pits left by his boots. The wind-chill against his drenched clothes induced a type of recklessness in Napps. He either felt cold or very hot, it didn’t interest him enough to resolve. No, I won’t be long, he said to Millet-Bass. When he didn’t reply, Napps turned to admonish him and was bewildered by his absence. Then he nodded at his foolishness. Being wet is making me illogical, he told Millet-Bass with a self-congratulating kind of laugh. I’ve got to get less wet.

  You’re helping the wrong man, Millet-Bass said to him telepathically.

  Napps held up one finger to silence him. I’m coming back for you soon, he answered. Taking off the waterlogged bag, he dug through it, rummaging past the photograph of Elizabeth Dinners to get a few biscuits to put in his pocket.

  ‘There you are, Dinners,’ he said to a manlike object in the distance. He pushed the bag against a rock shelf and set off after him.

  The snow whipped into Napps’s face and made his eyes sting, which bothered him intensely. With an enraged tooth-bared grimace, he scrubbed at his eyes, wiping them and blinking, grinding them with his sleeve, until it stopped being important. With all efforts to shield his face suspended, he waded along, nearly blind as the moon dimmed into nothing behind the clouds. He arrived at the place he thought he’d seen Dinners, but Dinners had either left or never been there, and frankly Napps didn’t have the time to stand around thinking about it. His father was waiting for him, so was his mother. They wanted him to hurry because otherwise they’d be late. Napps whispered to Dinners anyway in an act of hushed rebellion, telling him to stop playing these stupid games. It was already twenty past six and the invitation said it started at seven.

  What Dinners needed to understand was that there was some party Napps’s parents were forcing him to attend. And although he didn’t want to go, his opinion had been overruled because he was fifteen years old and therefore powerless.

  Napps’s hands paddled at the dark and hit against a solid thing, which he spent a while tapping at and patting before he established that it was a cliff face. Since he was having trouble coordinating his legs, he used the cliff as an assistive device and slid himself along it. When the cliff unexpectedly vanished, and he lurched sidelong into a nothingness of some sort, Napps systematically decrypted this new mystery with more patting, and quizzical nudges, and a sustained period of investigatory tapping. He was, he finally concluded, in a fissure. He hadn’t intended to stay there, but it offered shelter from the blizzard and he needed a minute to think. Some brown-haired girl had appeared in front of him, and she wanted to know why he was being so boring. What a question. The answer, he thought, was probably to ignore her. Also, she was making him very shy.

  Then Napps found he’d crouched down or overbalanced. Whatever he’d done, he was now on the ground and she was sitting so closely beside him their knees were almost touching. He didn’t mind, though, to the point where he thought he might even like it. That he felt light-headed was almost certainly because he’d tried to impress this brown-haired whoever-she-was by drinking a tumbler of rum on an empty stomach. He was hiding with her in the garden, and despite the fact he’d never met her before, they were already talking as if they knew each other. Like this could be the start of something. And although it was bitterly cold, he didn’t want to go inside just yet.

  53

  April 1913

  Millet-Bass sat on the sledge and said, ‘What a fix.’ It didn’t matter what the words were, he wanted to hear his own voice.

  He’d watched Napps go, and then kept watching in the hope that he might come back. But after counting to a hundred very slowly, three times, he’d understood what the situation was and begun the process of trying to put his affairs in order. There was a list he needed to tick off. It involved rolling through Christmases and holidays and birthdays and long gauzy summers. The time was a metronome tilting left with one age and tilting right with the next as the boy stretched out of the infant and the man hulked out of the boy.

  He thought of the family planets which had orbited his fast, furious sun. His four sisters had been enemies, become friends, become mothers, and Millet-Bass was a good uncle. His parents had been tyrants, become confidants, become equals, and Millet-Bass was a good son. And no matter what he did to reassure them, they worried constantly when he was away. They saved every single one of his short, infrequent letters. He docked and they sent packages containing exhaustively detailed letters and thoughtful presents. He left and they missed him. He returned and they made transparent, wishful jokes about him settling down. And three years ago, had he said enough?

  He’d bid goodbye to everyone in his traditional emotionally cool style in order to repel the sensational crescendo of wailing love. Yes, yes, he’d say as arms were flung around his neck. He’d escape from one rib-splintering embrace only to be crushed in another. The same ludicrous promises would be wrung out of him as he was forbidden to smoke his pipe in bed, or socialize with atheists, or carry a knife, or forget to wash, all of which he did as a matter of principle. He was absolutely never treated as an experienced man who’d been sailing for more than two decades and always come home fine. Instead he had to tolerate being sobbed over like an ailing baby or talked to like an idiot pet. He had to duck a thousand more attempts to cling on to him. He had to listen as weepy women tortured him with sentimentality.

  But perhaps once he could have put aside his awkwardness and invested some energy into the departure. For your mother, you brute. Except he’d had this idea that he could afford to say everything of importance at some other distant point. He wouldn’t be an absent son and brother for ever. He’d tell them he loved them later. How differently he’d do it now.

  Millet-Bass smiled, mystified by his behaviour. It made no sense to him when he thought of these things he valued so highly, yet treated with careless abandon and ran into the ground. He was mostly useless with people, pretty much all people, especially himself. He was famously useless with himself. For his whole life he’d considered his body with a curious detachment, viewing it as a big biddable horse which had been unluckily loaned to him, the world’s cruellest owner. He’d done such ruinous things to his miraculous body. He’d starved it and gorged it and mistreated it and driven it headlong towards annihilation. Millet-Bass would always gladly volunteer to labour under the harshest extremes while Captain and crew looked on, stunned. When younger, before learning any respect for his limits, he’d work at slavishly gruelling speeds until ordered to stop. And each crime was forgiven. His poor exploited horse of a body would absorb the punishment without exception. He’d collapse down, destroyed, and then bounce up half an hour later, ready to wreck himself again. So the knowledge that in any other situation he could have salvaged his health triggered a particularly crucifying depth of sorrow. Anywhere but here, he knew he could have been saved and maybe grown old and done more with himself yet. Millet-Bass said quickly, ‘Ah, don’t break your own heart.’

  Sitting on the sledge, he hummed whatever tune he could find and said, ‘Come on now. It’s all right.’

  Th
ere were the inevitable mistakes. Millet-Bass examined the ones at the front of the queue. The majority of them were foolishly avoidable. It was too mortifying to remember the occasions when the alcohol had turned to gunpowder and he’d sought out and compulsively scratched at a tension. His beery face would leer to within inches of the chosen target as he deliberately misunderstood the conversation until the whole room just exploded into a brawl. He generally regretted and pleaded guilty to those times. Yet there were also times when he’d done a kindness which cost him dearly. There were many times when he’d acted selflessly. He had an almost simplistic honesty and a gentle side which he did what he could to hide. He wasn’t a hard man to decipher, and he knew he drank too much, but he was sorry. He knew he might have done better, but he’d tried his best. He was loyal except in his head, and that was only sometimes.

  As the worst mistake, Grace was harder to conciliate. What would it have been like? Millet-Bass had spent about five years wondering, because he was a man with a baffling quirk. His natural boisterousness meant he was one of the louder people and could easily be too loud, apart from when Grace was anywhere near him. When she was close he reacted very mildly, if at all. With her he preferred to stand there as dumb as a pile of sand. He remembered with acute frustration the single instance he’d gathered the nerve to take action. It had been midnight and the party was dying at a mutual acquaintance’s wedding.

  ‘Hey-hey-hey, hold on,’ Millet-Bass had said quietly as they passed each other. They’d both been alone and she’d stopped to talk to him, perhaps noticing how gawkily embarrassed Millet-Bass’s pose was as he leant on the bar. The chemistry between them had built to such intense levels it was almost scorching before he was finally emboldened to say, ‘Grace, if I told you—’