Everland

by Rebecca Hunt

  Beyond their heartbreak over Brix, people felt deep sympathy for Decker. Almost everyone at Aegeus had applied for the centenary expedition, and the fact they hadn’t been selected was now an immense relief. Any one of them could have joined the Everland team and then been forced to make that terrible decision. But what choice did Decker have, they asked, fretting that he’d blame himself as he was leader of the trip. They were adamant about his guiltlessness in such a situation. The general, yet unspoken, consensus was that Brix should never have gone to Everland. It didn’t need to be said. People looked at each other with troubled expressions and saw the same opinion mirrored back at them.

  Sam was holding an aerial plan of Everland and wanted Decker to concentrate. It was essential that he shows them where Brix was last located so they could begin the search.

  ‘I’ll show you in person,’ he said.

  ‘Decker.’ Sam shook her head. ‘Just show us on the map.’

  ‘I’m going with you.’

  ‘Look, Deck, I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ one of the rescue team replied.

  Decker tried to speak and choked on his answer.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Sam said. ‘None of this is your fault. You did everything you could.’

  He nodded, his head lowered. He covered his face with a hand. ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Decker, we know,’ Sam said gently. ‘Everybody knows that.’

  60

  April 1913

  Dinners woke in his tomb and started again with his catalogues. Anchor knot, bait loop, dogshank, monkey’s fist, sailor’s knot . . .

  If he recited his lists, he could keep himself present enough to think. If he didn’t then he crumbled into absence. And there was another state between the two where he drifted through a purgatory of horror. So he went through the names of animals and countries, like beads on a rosary. He bit the inside of his mouth and sometimes tasted blood, and chanted the alphabet.

  Dinners lay in his reindeer-hide coffin without any semblance of peace. He didn’t believe he ever slept, although he often discovered himself gobbling peaches and buttered toast and custard tart. Or he’d be sitting with his little daughter, reading to her. Or he’d be cycling around a sunny June park. He was at a restaurant telling the waiter, no, he didn’t want the steak rare since he could taste blood already and didn’t care for it. He was in his childhood home as a very young boy until he was here in the dinghy, with only his wife’s name for company. Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth.

  Because he thought incessantly of Napps and Millet-Bass, and because he was haunted by their voices pleading for him as he hid and then ran away, Dinners chose to believe they’d escaped over the bay and reached the hut at Cape Athena. He designed a victorious journey which saw them finish with hot meals and clean beds, surrounded by the jubilant Kismet crew. He imagined the heavenly moment when Napps, thrilled with shock, told his audience that he hadn’t expected to survive. Each scenario was brighter and more rapturous than the last. Dinners added champagne and woollen slippers. It was so easy to conjure these things that he added a gramophone playing dance-hall records. He could add anything he liked, yet the trouble came when he tried to hold the pictures together. They were too thin and kept tearing. He was never able to stop his happy ending of a safe hut from rotting back into a blizzard. The beds and meals and jubilance always decayed to leave Napps there on the sea ice begging, ‘Please answer me, Dinners.’

  You can still hope, Dinners would instruct himself. Except he feared he’d ruined hope when he took his sledge with the oilcans. Napps and Millet-Bass had one can, but that was such a tiny amount. By separating the sledges he worried he’d made both loads useless. He had access to heat but no way to use it, and they had access to food with no way to eat it. Without oil to cook it the pemmican was indigestible, and without oil to melt it water was impossible to retrieve from the ice. Then, in a flare of confidence, Dinners remembered the cans of fruit and stew. Fruit can be eaten uncooked, thought Dinners. The stew doesn’t need cooking, and neither do tinned sardines. Neither do biscuits.

  The problem was that the food would be iced into a frozen slush, and eating it would chill the last vestiges of internal warmth. Even if they could manage on cold food, Dinners knew he’d halved their chances, or quartered them. And the need to make atonement for his crime was something he fretted and writhed with. He was scared he’d die before he could honour it and fought in panic to the surface of his bag, snatching at the diaries.

  Dinners found his pencil. He was unable to see the marks it left in the pitch black as he wrote a statement of apology. To whomever this concerns, he scrawled on a page at the end of his diary. To whomever locates this book, let it be known the loss of the Everland expedition group is my fault. Let it be known that I am a coward. The events are as follows. I record below an accurate and honest account. Dinners spared himself no blame. He was so merciless with himself it made him weep with sorrow for the poor, lonely corpse waiting to be uncovered beneath the boat. He visualized the diary balanced on his dead chest, his face yellow and parched, his eye sockets empty as the summers rose and set through long, forsaken years. Dinners cried and wrote, to you, to whomever this concerns, will you take my remains from Everland if possible? Please don’t leave me here. He shakily spelt out these words in capitals and immediately felt better. Comforted by the idea of leaving the island, he put his signature underneath and the atonement was complete.

  Although was it complete? After he’d finished his letter, Dinners wished he could read it since he wasn’t certain what he’d written. He might have used a match, he had a box of them in his pocket, but he’d wastefully burnt most of the matches to stave off strange terrors and now there were only six left. It seemed sensible to just draft a second letter in a different diary. At this point he’d still been brimming with contrition.

  Once the new letter was finished, Dinners practised lying straight on his back with the diaries balanced in a pile on his stomach, ready for his tragic discovery. Then inspiration for a third letter struck him with such urgency he leapt up and knocked the diaries everywhere. Dinners wrote to Elizabeth, explaining that he did not expect her to forgive him, but it was important she knew how much he loved her. And he was sorry. He wrote several times that he was deeply, deeply sorry. Dear Elizabeth, it’s my fault. Dear Elizabeth, I would never—

  Never what? Limestone, quartz, diorite, pegmatite. Dinners recited a list and didn’t know what he’d been so desperate to inform her of. He went through his purgatory horror world, and perhaps lost consciousness, and recovered again questioning how he could begin to tolerate burdening his family with such dishonour. What about baby Madeline, he thought. She didn’t deserve to be tarnished as the daughter of a shameful man. Since he was not the one who’d be affected, Dinners wondered if it was an act of selfishness for him to leave these letters. It also occurred to him that the contrition he’d felt wasn’t as strong. The guilt had been distorted by a thousand retellings until it was at the very edge of meaninglessness. And from then everything gradually became less clear.

  There were two incidents Dinners could identify as positively real during the confusion which followed. He’d stuffed all three diaries into his pocket and untied a coil of rope from the sledge, lashing one end to the dinghy’s gunwale and the other end around his waist. Dinners had groped along to the full extent of his leash beneath a feeble pattern of stars. When the rope snagged he was at an embankment of rock. Undoing the rope from his waist, he knotted it around a rock to create a shuttle-line, and retrieved the diaries from his coat.

  He’d written: I am a coward. I don’t expect you to forgive me. These declarations now seemed abhorrent. And Dinners suspected Napps and Millet-Bass had written worse things about him. Who knew what slurs and damning accusations were lurking inside their two journals, hidden by the dark. So Dinners ripped apart every single page. Some fragments he ate, some he threw int
o the wind. He tore it all to shreds, even the thick covers, even the leathery spines. He redrew a sterile record where his crimes didn’t exist. He cut out their tongues. Still chewing a wad of paper, he crabbed back along his rope to the dinghy.

  At some indefinable time later, Dinners was only partially inside the dinghy because a percentage of him had been siphoned off to flow back through his entire life. While the present was cold and dying and infinitely black, the past arrived in orange and lilac hues, and a spectrum of beautiful pinks. Although he was in no state to receive guests, Dinners heard people come to talk to him. He was almost tearfully apologetic about his dishevelled condition, and confessed that he’d vomited an evil-tasting fluid over his clothes and made a mess in his trousers. He didn’t even have the energy to pull himself off the ground into a respectful upright position. But he hoped they might excuse him. The snow crunched under his head as he moved it to look at each visitor in turn and notify them of his intentions. He had some good news, he told Lawrence, then the cousin who’d died when he was eight, then the King, and finally a collection of faceless, nameless entities. Dinners would see to it that Napps and Millet-Bass got a funeral.

  With the sledge clanking behind him, Dinners tottered to a cave and felt his way along towards a steep scree slope. With no ability to plan a safe descent, he just walked over the side. Rolling to the bottom with the sledge upturned beside him, Dinners made agonized noises. He’d gashed his leg open above the knee, and he took the sledging flag from his pocket and split it in half to tourniquet the wound. He listed knots and countries and bird species as he worked, until he suddenly couldn’t understand why he was sitting there, motionlessly gripping his leg. He righted the sledge. Forgive me, he said to Elizabeth, I think I was resting.

  Dinners began his funeral service in a small alcove to the rear of the cave. He dug a trench in the sand to lay the five oilcans alongside each other. ‘I wish you well, Napps,’ he said as he raked the sand. ‘I wish you well, Millet-Bass. I wish that you both find peace,’ he said, burying the men’s oilcan bodies.

  The closest thing he had to a memorial ornament was inside the drawstring pouch of stones worn around his neck. Dinners balanced on his heels and emptied his treasures on to the ground. It took two of the six matches for him to sieve out the amethysts, their purple edges winking against the lava-grey sand. Replacing the other specimens back in the pouch used the third match. Decorating the grave with a neat circle of amethysts used the fourth match, and most of the fifth match.

  ‘Will you be my witness?’ Dinners said, talking to his shadow.

  It hunched deformed across the uneven surface of the opposite wall like a man deboned. This solitary black creature turned when he turned, and aped his movements with huge misshapen arms. Whenever Dinners spoke it wagged its jaws in mimicry of speech. Dinners waited and the shadow waited, and then it disappeared into the rock.

  ‘Have you left me?’ Dinners struck the sixth match and the creature returned, wiping at eyes it didn’t have in sympathy with him.

  ‘I want you to witness that I said I’m sorry,’ Dinners said before it could abandon him again. ‘I’ll say it now in case I don’t ever say it again. I am sorry. Will you remember?’

  The shadow leant forward on its knees, straining to hear him.

  ‘Will you remember?’ Dinners said as the tiny white light cooled into darkness.

  Back underneath the Joseph Evelyn, Dinners wanted to forget the lists and the expedition, and England, and the Kismet. He wanted to forget everything which stopped him flowing off into the brightly coloured past. Dinners wanted to forget all the people, and at last he had.

  61

  December 2012

  Running on the beach. Chaotic noises, busy. A call; a male voice shouting in the wind. The sound of something happening.

  A dream perhaps . . . or perhaps a memory leaching out. Such a sweet dream though. ‘Brix? Are you here?’

  A glimmer of consciousness brought her back into the overturned dinghy. She remembered Everland as a colour, a white immensity, where the cycle of time had dilated to a single endless day.

  She heard digging. Snow was being shovelled away from the dinghy’s buried sides, and calls began to echo from every direction.

  ‘We have her! She’s here.’

  A burst of activity surrounded her as people crawled into the dinghy, others gathering outside. Her arms were clenched around her head, covering her face, and they talked in low whispers, afraid to touch her.

  Someone said tentatively, ‘Is she alive?’

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t tell. Where’s Sam? Get her, hurry.’

  Boots pelted off across the beach.

  People were talking to her, but only some things still made sense, such as her name. Such as one voice she recognized above the indistinct noise.

  ‘Can she hear me?’ Decker asked anyone.

  ‘Give Sam some room,’ Oar said. ‘Decker, move.’

  Sam arrived and knelt close. ‘Everything’s okay, Brix.’ She leant down to speak to her directly. ‘Brix? We’re here and we’ve found you now.’

  Then she requested assistance from those nearby. ‘Really careful, this will hurt her. So take it slowly. All ready?’

  There was the clatter of equipment, the weight of blankets. Brix felt herself being lifted on to a stretcher. Before the dinghy, she remembered standing beside the quads. Before that, she remembered arriving to find Decker and Jess had gone. And before that, she’d been searching for something lost. But the significance of these events had gone. They no longer meant anything.

  Brix half opened her eyes and saw Decker was beside her. He seemed afraid to speak and looked at Brix as though waiting for clarification. As if she was the answer to a question he couldn’t bring himself to ask.

  It seemed so unimportant now that she herself had been found. Brix shook her head to tell him not to be sorry.

  There were things that would leave Everland, and there were things that would remain behind, waiting to be discovered. A rucksack dropped among the ice, or a cluster of six amethysts. The history of these items and their placements might one day be understood, or not. If what actually happened and the perceived truth were contradictory, it was irrelevant. Because no one would ever know the difference.

  ‘Better than it could have been. All’s well that ends well, I guess. I don’t know, hopefully,’ someone said, talking on a satellite phone to relay the news to Aegeus as the rescue team prepared to leave the cove.

  Decker was still looking at Brix. ‘Yes, I think so,’ he said. ‘As long as it ends well, that’s all that matters.’

  Oh, that’s good, that’s very good, Lawrence once remarked when Addison told him that every day had a consequence although you can’t often see it. But there are moments, he’d said, like this one, when you can. The possibilities speak to you. And you listen.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rebecca Hunt is an artist and author living in East London. Her first novel, Mr. Chartwell, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. In October 2011, Rebecca was selected as one of 18 artists and writers to join the Arctic Circle residency, an annual expeditionary program aboard a traditional ice-class sailing vessel that voyages to the High Arctic.