by Rebecca Hunt
A pack of cackling friends appeared. Draping themselves over Millet-Bass, they’d demanded with the fun-hunting belligerence of the very drunk that he come with them now and do something somewhere. And without knowing what he’d wasted, Millet-Bass had shrugged good-naturedly and let himself get towed away.
At that point he’d still believed he could afford to bank his hopes entirely in the future. It was just one of the things he’d do later. As always, he’d tell them he loved them later.
‘I think I should . . . ’ he said, lying back on the sledge. ‘Grace, I wish—’ But he couldn’t finish the sentence and decided not to try again.
What a life you’ve made for yourself, he thought, unsure whether his accomplishments tallied to anything much. The seafaring paradox of freedom and regimentation was so claustrophobic it would be intolerable to most people. There was never a second unobserved or an action done in independence, and he’d spent years as celibate as a monk in an environment of suffocating intimacy. And although he obviously corrected this once he was on land, he could never stay ashore for long.
‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ Millet-Bass said, because Napps was perhaps returning with Dinners this very second. He only had to remember all those times he’d been proved wrong when absolutely sure of the outcome.
‘You never know,’ he said encouragingly to his boots. Except he did know.
Millet-Bass had a knack with nature and knew how to make a home anywhere. He had a knack with ships and understood them with a rough, intuitive rhythm which came effortlessly to him and went beyond expertise. He listened to the ship and the waves, and he grasped the elegance of their exchange as the sea spoke its fierce language and the ship responded in sweet agreement. And whatever else he had or hadn’t done, he could at least be proud of his expeditions.
‘Judge me by my own standards,’ Millet-Bass said to the night sky, ‘and I think I can live with it.’
54
December 2012
The rucksack wasn’t there.
Because this was impossible, Brix continued to stare at the place where it had been as if disbelief would force the bag to materialize. When this didn’t work, she turned to survey the area behind her in case miracles only happened when you weren’t watching.
Thoughts of Decker and Jess waiting, thoughts of diminishing time, of the seconds counting down to nothing, were manageable to Brix as long as each stage of her journey complied with her expectations. For a while they had. The trek down the beach had segued faultlessly into the arrival at the glacial bay and the relocation of the moraine, and now everything was in chaos. The rucksack was gone, she was alone in a blizzard with no idea what to do, and her awareness of the passing seconds had become a distinct and more physical sensation. Every sixtieth of a minute developed the ability to inflict its own individual misery as it went by, wasted.
Less of a fluid gaseous substance, the blizzard wind was a resistant material composed of flying glass filings. Hoping that something might change if she kept reordering the same actions, Brix paced up the moraine, paced back, searched the same area, felt the same despair, and paced back up the moraine. It was the first of several theories which proved to be useless. That the rucksack might have been buried under the snow in such a way that it was somehow invisible, instead of being a bulky rucksack shape, was disproved as Brix scratched about with the gloved hoof-things she had for hands. The erratic notion that the heavy rucksack had lifted into the air and blown directly into the cliffside fissure was equally hopeless, but also needed to be disproved.
Whatever monumental force of pressure had split the cliff, the resulting hall-width fissure seemed designed to evoke human contemplation. Removed from the noise and turmoil of the blizzard, it was a vacuum of serenity, with an enchanted and chapel-like stillness. The fissure’s roof peaked three metres above Brix, rubble and atrophied seaweed littering the ground. She went inside and saw no bag. Despite knowing that the likelihood of the rucksack being thrown the length of a train carriage to the back of the fissure was zero per cent, a misplaced sense of either conscientiousness or desperation had compelled her to walk the full distance.
Brix was already halfway out of the fissure again when she registered him. At first he was a darker object in her peripheral vision. Something lying contorted and wrought like an iron girder. Then came the hot, sickish shock of recognition. Once she’d regained enough self-possession to consider the situation with a clearer mind, Brix wondered if there was a memento of his she should take for posterity. Perhaps rescue his wedding ring from under the dog fur gauntlet. But she couldn’t bear to touch him, didn’t have time to think, and moments later she left.
Exempt from decay and degeneration, Napps’s skin glowed greenish, and his eyes were closed, his head slightly crushed to set his mouth in a palsied, down-turned smile. His clothes had distorted into hardened pleats along the contours of his warped torso. One side of his body was embedded in the ice-lined wall, his left arm bent rigidly across his chest, both legs disjointed at the hip and melded together in a grotesque, balletic curve. Napps would remain here and drift through the centuries, preserved at the age of forty-three for eternity. Everland had defined his life and historicized his death. It had rendered him immortal. And now it would keep him.
55
April 1913
Dinners had run. There was no other thought in his head except the impulse to flee.
Then he’d talked to himself. Frowning at how serious his predicament was, he’d slowly gained enough restraint to start making a plan. His main objective, he saw now, was to get back to Napps and Millet-Bass. So Dinners decided to retrace his steps back to the cove and out on to the sea ice. Fixing a map in his mind, he started confidently.
But the landmarks he anticipated didn’t come, or came in the wrong arrangement, or were new, unknown landmarks. Each surprise caused a different response in Dinners. He sometimes dismissed it and stuck to the original plan, and sometimes he modified his route with hasty deviations. He corrected and redrew his plan so often that before long the map was in unsolvable chaos and had to be abandoned.
Dinners raged and stamped his feet. Calming down, he took solace in his internal compass and made a new, better plan. To his left was the seaward side, the island’s borders. If he went right, he’d veer to the cliffs. So he put the sea to his left and couldn’t understand it when neither the sea nor the border appeared. He tried with the sea on his right, and turned again to retry having the sea on his left. Then, dismayed by his stuttering and numb compass needle, Dinners sat on the sledge to regroup.
These regrouping sessions increased. It seemed to Dinners that sequences of time had started to dissolve and he needed to address the problem. He diagnosed it as either a conspiracy against him, or a type of collapse in the fabric which linked one minute to the next. He wasn’t yet clear on the issue. What he did know was that events hadn’t always got an order, and parts were missing or didn’t exist. Dinners would march and he’d suddenly be on the ground. He’d set off, determined, and then something would happen. He’d find his face in the snow and leap up, yelling with anger. He strode forward energetically, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and awoke to find he was curled tightly, his arms shielding his head.
The cycle was endless. He’d become a man of vapours who dissolved without warning and then reappeared lying back across the floor. When he materialized he’d jump to his feet and lunge along, incanting so he didn’t forget, ‘The sea is on your left, on your left.’
It had been hours since his last meal. Remembering the bar of chocolate in his pocket, Dinners unwrapped it and went to take a bite, only to find the same evil magic had snatched it from him. Astonished to discover his hand empty, he was reduced to tasting around in his mouth for clues as to whether he might have eaten some of the chocolate. Then he was inexplicably down on the ground again.
In his dream, Dinners saw a half-man beast
standing above him, a chimera. Squealing with horror, he thrashed away on his hands and knees as it walked behind him, trailing a mace. With an abdominal grunt, the chimera swung the mace high across its shoulders. And Dinners surrendered. Kneeling in the snow, he looked up and opened his arms. Then he reappeared, running with his sledge, the sea to his left.
How long had he been searching for Napps? It might be years and years and years. Even the vaguest summary of time was now utterly beyond him. The concept of one moment directly relating to successive moments had been erased to leave a vacuum of lawless independence. Nothing connected to anything any more, not that it mattered. As Dinners grew colder, helpful people came to gather nearby and offer advice. He laughed and slurred questions to Captain Lawrence, Dr. Addison and Uncle Joe, and nodded at their wisdom as they all agreed that his strategy should be to keep going. Yes, he said to them. Good, good, good.
The only things on earth for Dinners were the tug of his harness and the rhythm of his feet. He had embers of conscious thought which frayed from his mind and wasted to drifts of ash. Once, briefly, he’d become aware of the pull of his sledge and considered unfastening it, but then that idea was gone and didn’t occur to him again. He knew he’d lost Napps and Millet-Bass, although the significance of this fact was obscured, the consequences skimmed off before he could decode them. Dinners turned into one single mechanical action. He was a marching husk.
At some point later, a minute maybe, or another year, Dinners grew conscious of a hole in his body where his stomach had been. A look of devious intrigue sneaked over his face. He could sense the wind sculpting the hole wider as it flowed through, and the aerodynamics produced a low resonant note which he tried to harmonize with, singing and humming. It was obvious to him that he’d begun to transform into his black surroundings, a change he both approved of and accepted. Clouds of particles were billowing from his limbs with every step, his whole body streaming with smoke as he abraded to non-existence. Feeling serene, Dinners noticed a large object looming out of the dark and tottered towards it.
The thing refused to be identified, even though Dinners knocked gently at the curved sides and clopped around it, and then kicked and pounded his fists against it. When he eventually recognized the Joseph Evelyn, he spoke in an excited, unintelligible language and banged his hands together. The dinghy was somehow hollow and somehow safe, he remembered that. All he had to do was find a way to get inside, which he did by pawing tentatively at the snow. He burrowed about for the dinghy’s edge, the sledge toying along in his wake, until he finally uncovered the entrance and pushed himself through.
Dinners made long toneless groaning sounds and blew his breath down the neck of his coat. He rubbed his legs and squeezed his fingers until he’d thawed enough to writhe out of his harness. Unfastening the ropes which bound his sleeping bag to the sledge, Dinners began the exhausting process of pulling the bag into the dinghy, and then levering and prising at the frozen reindeer hide until it opened enough for him to force himself inside.
The cold had left Dinners mercifully ignorant of any description of pain or anguish while his body died around him. But as his brain started to defrost in the shelter of the boat, he wept and howled with grief. Because what he’d done, he understood now, was leave Napps and Millet-Bass. He’d lost them. He wouldn’t ever find them. And now he himself was lost.
56
December 2012
Listen to me. Stay where you are, we will take it from here. Do you understand?’
‘We’re in serious trouble,’ Decker said to Aegeus.
‘I need to hear you say you understand.’
‘There was nothing else we could have done,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’
He’d informed them of the situation. The keys, Brix’s promise that she knew where to find the rucksack. Her inexplicable failure to reappear, their lack of any other choice. He didn’t want to let Brix go, he said, but he was carrying Jess. And they’d waited, the storm breaking.
Aegeus was beginning to mobilize. The person at the other end of the radio line started a rapid, heated discussion with someone else at the base.
‘Hey, Jess?’ Trapping the phone against his shoulder with his chin, Decker reached across to touch her arm. ‘ . . . Jess?’
It looked like she might cry and Decker intensely did not want that. There’d be a descent into havoc if she cried, a catastrophic explosion of feelings he was working hard to contain.
He’d driven to the camp at reckless speeds, the quad hitting snow gradients to lurch upwards and swerve through various potentially toppling degrees as it hurtled over uneven plateaus. Decker had thought fleetingly and remotely of Brix, yet concluded that Jess’s injury more than justified his decision. No, there was nothing else he could have done, he kept saying to himself. During those first few minutes in the tent, breathless with pain as blood started to circulate back into frozen extremities, Decker was not only convinced of his blamelessness, he was almost angry about it. For a short while, he’d been a beautifully free man.
Proof of his rightness was in the wind battering against the tent, and his frostbite, and his will not to die in a blizzard. Undeniable proof of his rightness came with the agony he inflicted while easing off Jess’s boot. Decker’s apologies had taken on a new enthusiasm as he pulled the sock from her monstrously swollen foot and saw how much it hurt her. Drink something, please, he’d begged with euphoric concern. Jess, eat something, please, he’d said, getting happier by the second. As long as Decker kept his mind occupied with their own immediate suffering, he could forget about the rucksack, forget about leaving Brix, forget about the consequences of his actions, forget about guilt.
‘Jess? What do you need?’ he asked. ‘What can I do to help?’
Nothing. Jess didn’t want to be helped. She didn’t care about herself.
His insistence eventually forced her to answer. ‘Codeine,’ she said. ‘But it’s outside. In the medical crate.’
‘There’s got to be some in the tent,’ Decker said. If codeine would prevent her from crying, he’d find it, or something like it. The amount of plasters and antiseptic, bandages and crumpled blister packets of tablets strewn about everywhere, there was surely a variety of painkilling drug buried among them. He continued talking to Aegeus as he hunted through miscellaneous drifts of clothing and equipment.
‘We aren’t sure. The Achilles tendon, we think. Yes, she’s managing. She’s okay.’
Jess was not okay and doubted she’d ever be okay again. If the storm hadn’t come, wished Jess, unable to stop replaying the same anguished scenarios. If I hadn’t fallen, if the bag hadn’t been left. If we hadn’t gone to the glacier. If only Brix had come back. This last wish kept devising new ways to torment her. When she wasn’t remembering grasping Brix’s coat to stop her going, or those final hopeless minutes on the quad bike, Jess was imagining the cause of Brix’s delay. Except there were no good reasons. The rucksack had been a short distance away, Brix knew where it was, and whatever Jess thought of to explain the crisis she then overruled. The more she tried to make sense of it, the more incomprehensible it became. Jess watched Decker throw stuff around, his frostbitten hands delving into pockets and bags. He searched fleece jackets, trousers, sweaters, the drifts of clutter on the floor. Then he grabbed his coat, distracted by the information Aegeus was firing at him as he fumbled with an object in the side pocket. It was a small yellow first-aid kit, ‘Jess’ scrawled across the lid in big black capitals.
With a tone of subdued finality, Decker relayed the conversation to Jess while he pried open the lid and retrieved a box of codeine: they should expect hourly updates, a Twin Otter would leave at the first opportunity. The weather was under constant surveillance. And yes, when it came to Brix, all anybody could do was try to remain positive.
‘Could you get a message to Viv? Tell her I’m all right,’ Decker asked Aegeus as he held out two pills for Jess. When she s
at motionless he said, confused, ‘Take them.’
‘Why have you got that?’
Decker frowned at her. ‘Take them, Jess.’
‘It’s my medical kit. From my rucksack.’
‘Just a minute,’ he said to Aegeus, covering the receiver with his palm. Now he smiled in bafflement. ‘You’ve lost me. Do you want the codeine or not?’
‘Brix knew where the rucksack was, you didn’t.’
He made an exasperated sound. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re getting at.’
‘But you must have known where it was, Decker, because that first-aid kit was inside. Did you move the bag?’ Jess stared at him intently. ‘When Brix went back to get the rucksack, was it there?’
Decker might have responded differently had he been less exhausted. He could have concocted an excuse, a plausible defence of some sort. Instead he shrugged with disappointment.
‘Then give me the phone. We need to tell Aegeus,’ Jess said, looking at him with disgust. ‘If we both made mistakes then we’re accountable.’
A long pause followed before he answered. ‘Do you want to do this? If you’re sure then I’ll let you have the phone, and you can give them the whole story. Begin with the injury you concealed, then work your way up to this second now.’
The idea of allowing Brix to take sole responsibility for what had happened made Jess blaze with shame. ‘We don’t have a choice,’ she said.
Decker tilted his head in an attitude of both sympathy and assessment. ‘I want you to think hard about what you stand to lose, Jess. It’s only, what, the past ten years of your life. The past thirty for me, twenty of them in the field.’
‘You said it yourself, I hid my injury,’ Jess answered. ‘So I deserve to lose my job. And if you’re complicit in the situation, then you should admit it.’
He nodded patiently, as if humouring a recklessly contentious stance. ‘Let’s be honest. Brix compromised us many times, and errors can have deeply tragic outcomes. After all, it was Brix you saw leaving the rucksack behind. You never saw me anywhere near it. And as far as I’m aware, your ankle was fine until you fell. You never told me you were hurt, so who’s really to know what state it was in before the accident. I’m not a doctor, neither is Brix. Maybe it was just bruised.’
