by Jean McNeil
Perhaps, if the future had already happened it explained the dreams I had of the Antarctic before I ever went there, and which turned out to be true, in their own way – dreams of being stranded in a colony on a recently discovered continent, of red planes circling in a white sky, of not being able to leave.
Every time I tried to imagine being there, I could picture only a white plain, the gnaw of perpetual daylight. I could not see my feet on the surface of the snow, under which lay two kilometres of compressed ice crystals. I could not see my hands in that air. We have only a few ways of conceiving the world: personal knowledge, species knowledge, memory, imagination, and dreams. I could perhaps add books, reading. But none of these helped me imagine myself in that place.
Later, in the Antarctic, with winter closing in, I would only be able to remember a few of these cards: Odin and his two birds, a man and a woman in a clearing, surrounded by a forest embroidered by spring. And behind me, somewhere in the relatively recent past, Ragnarok – the end of the world.
And the final three cards the woman laid down. One was a wolf howling at the moon; in another a wolf wandered through an iron forest. The first wolf card meant that I would want something emotionally which I could not have. The second card meant fear. Last of all, she put down a card which showed a dark sky. In it, the moon was absorbed by a cloud.
‘The nightmare card,’ she said. ‘I wonder what it is hiding.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s refusing to tell you something. Why you have to go there, perhaps. Or you have to go there to find out.’
I looked again at the cards on the table. My mind slipped off them, it seemed to need to reject the stark symbols they showed. I did not want to acknowledge that a nightmare awaited me. I had made a naïve calculation about how much shock and distress one would be handed at once, or how many episodes in succession, how much hatred and betrayal. I didn’t know it then, but I had been living with a false sense of protection. I had assumed that from this juncture in my life I would flow through the crystal river, as if there were a quota of harm and corrosion dealt to us all, and I had exhausted mine.
Here, there is no sovereignty. In the Antarctic, everyone has to unite against the cold. We live in nobody’s country.
Winter does not arrive, it congeals. The sea ice does the same; one day the sea is that blue-black of the Antarctic, the next day it is white.
The cryospheric cycle is one of lags, of flux and melt. It is about the way ice builds and binds. Over 10,000 years ago, at the beginning of the last ice age, the northern hemisphere summers cooled for an unknown reason, and the cool summers meant the ice did not melt. By the winter the ice was well established and it grew, advancing by inches each year, a many-fingered, cold hand reaching out from the poles, from the moutains, to the sea, to the plains of the grain-growing countries.
We we are living in an ice age, still. To a glaciologist an ice age means literally a period of glaciation and we are still in one because the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland still exist. Our current interglacial is called the Holocene; the present ice age began over 40 million years ago, with the growth of the Antarctic ice sheet. Since then, ice sheets have been advancing and retreating in 40,000- to 100,000-year cycles. The most recent intense glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago, just as Asiatic man was making his migration over the Bering Strait to populate the Americas. Predicted changes in the earth’s orbital forcing, based on past records, show that the next ice age will begin in 50,000 years’ time, regardless – possibly – of man-made global warming.
Or will this happen? Alexander’s models of the ice sheets of the future were refusing to make ice. He and Nara sat together on base on those winter nights and he showed her how, when he input the data for current conditions and temperature rises, the ice sheets of the future would not form.
For years, the stories I wrote were all about endings. First, they were about war and destruction, the lives that had been abruptly and prematurely ended by history. Then, when I started to write about science, I discovered a new crop of endgames: glaciers which had accelerated far beyond their predicted velocity, local species extinctions, red algae blooms, the water poisoned by it, plankton and krill asphyxiated. The species which will die out are those which are unable to adapt in time. I wrote lines like that, passing sentence on entire categories of creatures, the end of certain species of temperate latitude fruits, a type of whale. The end, even, of winter.
People rapidly become accustomed to stories of ending, I found, until it is really the only story they will consent to hear. We need these narratives of termination in order to confirm our worst suspicions about ourselves, the fleetingness of our lives, the power of destruction we have, the harm we are capable of wreaking on all and anyone who strays too near.
This story of endings is the great story of our day – our present disintegration, our eventual extinction. The play has already been scripted, despite our rising mercury of emergency, and we are figures already exiting stage right, moving ghost-like, nudged by heat. I cast myself as the witness, valuable and futile at once, charged with documenting this slow Armageddon. How long these final days will last, was hard to say.
Then I discovered a different, although related, story. The sparseness and silence surrounding it intrigued me. Nara was part of a vast puzzle of researchers sent to discover clues to the future. She became convinced that the planet had a will, that it was adjusting its settings. This was the cause of her distress that winter, her uncertainty. But distress was fuelled by many things, not least that she heard voices in her head that she could not decipher.
I know very little about her; only a skeletal listing of impersonal facts. Born in London, educated there until her father, a university lecturer, took a position in Canada at a provincial though respected university. They lived there for six years before returning to the UK. She did a year as an undergraduate at an oceanographic institute in Canada, finishing her undergraduate degree at University College London, then a postgraduate degree at the University of East Anglia, in Environmental Science. She stayed there to do a postdoc. There were rumours on base that she’d had an affair with a married professor while there, and that this had ended unhappily. It was one of the reasons she came to the Antarctic, although she never said so directly.
Her parents refused to speak to me, either by telephone, email, or personal interview. I pressed my case, but only managed to press them into silence. So I would have to guess, or, to use a more intellectual term, to imagine. There is archival research of course, and photographs. But photographs are static tableaux, a false promise lurking within their fabric: that they will tell you something essential, definitive about the person depicted. But they are ciphers, ghosts in the machine. To know someone you must see them moving.
As for the man who is here with me, he is a surprise, and very much alive. I see all of them in him, their brokenhearted destiny – the dead men of this continent in their felt coats, woollen mittens, their pathetic provisions which stripped them of their strapping musculature as they hauled their sledges across its chrome surface. His great-grandfather was one of them. He has their physique – tall, well-proportioned, his intelligent brown eyes. A firm jaw, built for teeth gritted against the daily cyclone of the ice desert. The discerning, convince-me gaze he fixes me with, always, as if he is trying to decide whether I am friend or foe and changes his mind. Now friend, now foe.
We cannot avoid each other, even if we might want to. I find I can only feel desire when it is intertwined with sadness, or loss, or some dark valour that has nothing to do with any individual man. He is no hungry ghost, he is alive; sordid, beautiful, vague. Married. Not someone who inspires neutral feelings. Hostility or desire, yes; hatred, hostility and desire, a fiery helix of confusion. He is like the wood you find in stairwells of Oxford or Cambridge colleges. His very existence confirms that there is a submerged level in all of us, down several flights of stairs, through tunnels, dank laby
rinths. There, nameless animals are alive and ravenous with anticipation of their next meal. These are our true selves, our vacuous battered souls. If I sit still I can feel them sometimes – a gnawing, a scavenger’s footstep in my innards. Their fluttering little hearts, their sharp, insolent teeth.
2
After the meeting David walks – no, he stalks, he has been accused of this before, a long, swinging, laird-of-the-manor stride – the corridors. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, despite its gleaming new exterior, is inside a relic. He swishes past the history, portraits of queens, kings, prime ministers, the corridor leading to the Middle East region, to southeast Asia, these sumptuous, well-funded sections with their terror analysts, their breakfast briefings with MI6.
This is where he had yearned to work, these hot regions of the world. For so long the polar regions office had been no more than an internal outpost. Although now of course they were very nearly the centre of a conflict, and he was suddenly deserving of his seigneurial stride: ‘Polar Guy Comes in from the Cold,’ his colleagues joked.
His release from professional exile had been so sudden his old habits still needed to be shaken off – long lunches, perusals of scientific journals close to his heart, conferences and symposia on glaciology, physics, marine biology. Science was a passion he could no longer indulge. Yes, now he was Arctic and Antarctic Man and they took him seriously, because the polar regions had caught up with the rest of the world. Polar Man was vaulted from the musty basement, where he had been hunkering with his reindeer skins, canvas jackets, his stories of icy sorrow and defeat, into the cauldron of politics.
Men like David had been running the country, if not the world, forever. He was not a dreamer. He remained uncaptivated by ideals. He thought in terms of manoeuvres and outcomes, like a military tactician.
Or rather this was the man he had tried to be, and failed. Because he was a dreamer; he was moved by ideas. He had never, not once, sat around a meeting table and not thought about some woman he had once kissed a long time ago, what his wife was doing at that precise moment, or dwelled on the challenges of manhauling across a glacier field, with its tumble of ice boulders. He had never been consistent, or certain, or acquisitive. He could no longer stand what and who he was, or loved and respected what and who he was. He could bear himself, but not what he did for a living. He accommodated these opposites within himself effortlessly, allowed them to rotate on a dais; perhaps he had inexhaustible incarnations up his sleeve. Who would he be tomorrow? Only someone he had not been today.
‘Yes,’ Edward his boss had said, as they were ranged around that long mahogany table. ‘There’s a journalist. No, an historian.’ He looked down his nose at his notes. ‘She’s interested in that incident. I don’t know why. She won’t discover much, in any case. I’d like you to include chaperoning her in your annual visit, if that’s all right by you.’
If that’s all right by you. This was not all right by him, but what could he do? ‘What do you think she knows?’
‘Not much. She’s talked to colleagues. The parents won’t talk, of course.’
‘Did she tell you that?’
‘No, we got that from Cambridge.’
He will take coffee in his office next, he decides, while reading confidential briefings on Russian territorial expansion, on methane release from a thawing Siberia, on the mass extinction of krill blighting the Southern Ocean. Well, he thought, on the way there: three weeks there, another week travelling. Although he had never gone to the Antarctic and returned on his intended date. You simply couldn’t schedule things as you could in the rest of the world, or any other situation.
A month away. That night, he would tell Kate.
David, alone of his immediate colleagues, takes public transport to and from work; he lives in the Thames Gateway, an area of regeneration, buoyed into existence by the Olympic Games. But the city ran out of money, for everything – gleaming antiseptic stadia, accommodation, transport infrastructure. At times his journey home frightens him. It is against his principles, but he is thinking, finally, of buying a car. The Olympic debacle had impoverished the capital, and he alone of his Chelsea-and-Fulham colleagues has to deal with the human rubble. He takes the Jubilee Line to Stratford, followed by an overground tram on which homeless men sit slumped, shuttling from one end of the line to the other, home to his gleaming showroom apartment overlooking an empty Thames. High up in his glassy water palace he thinks, how amazing, that eels once migrated here, that fishing boats once plied the wide estuary.
He receives a message from Kate. She will be out tonight, she is informing him, at one of her classes – Pilates, French, Yoga. He texts back, ok. Just the two letters. A man of few texts, as Kate says.
While waiting for the lift he thinks of the years he has spent attending conferences: Cold Facts of the Arctic, meetings of the Antarctic Place-Names Committee, of which he is chair, the Polar Symposia at the British library, meetings at the Geographical Society in Kensington. In the summer he goes to the Arctic, in the winter to the Antarctic. He rarely sees darkness; only London is dark, caught in a perpetual night, whereas the two axes of the earth shine in an inevitable white daylight. The Antarctic is his favourite of the two polar regions, although he feels guilty, on an intellectual level, for comparing them. It has something to do with the raw monumentalism of it, and its absurdity, which transmits itself so effortlessly to life there: in the Antarctic he becomes a child, the Fool, the spontaneous clandestine he really is.
But also he admires how Britain has managed to hold onto its claim to this remote part of the world, the opposite end of the Atlantic ocean. He loves the insanity of it, how on the way there he flies twelve thousand miles only to end up in Britain, or at least the version of Britain which is the Falkland Islands, or British Antarctic Territory, patrolled by Union Jacks and a faded Edwardian patriotism. He loves how everything is upside down: the seasons, the constellations. His release in this, his strange clattering euphoria.
He had wanted to be a scientist, and somehow that hadn’t happened. Now he is surrounded by them and he is only the administration man, influential as he is, signing and dotting treaties, conference papers, government memorandums, laws, jurisdictions, while the scientists are searching for the key to the mystery.
Of the mystery itself, he is certain. The Antarctic is no accident – an iced continent does not form by fluke; no, it’s meant to be there, this remnant of Gondwanaland, the ice cap at the bottom of the planet which drags its energy field down, so heavy that from space the earth appears not as a sphere, but more like a pear. If the Antarctic did not exist, the earth could not support life: the climate would be too irregular, the ocean circulation system would brew up a volatile, unfathomable world. He has met many, many people who thought: what’s the point of the Antarctic? An empty ice wasteland, we can’t even go there because the whole place has been ringfenced by sanctimonious scientists. What’s the point of such a place? Little do you know, he thought. And, maybe that’s for the best.
Of late, the world has become a place he is no longer certain he wants to live in. His glassy estuary palace, renewing his ID card, getting Iris scans for his new passport: he spends so much time complying with the surveillance superstructure yet feels a powerful urge to evade its gaze. But it is not so easy. Oyster cards have been twinned with identity cards, so that movements through the London transport system can be tracked on a live database. Purchases recorded on supermarket loyalty cards have been uploaded to the national database. Each email, the sparse text messages he sends, these too are logged. He is caught in a vast digital web. But who or what is the spider? He fantasises about ditching his Oyster/ID card hybrid and buying single tickets; it will cost him a fortune but at least he will be able to avoid ‘them’. When he confides this thought to his brother, Ben gives him a steady look. ‘But you’re one of “them”.’
Not in the Antarctic. No, there he was no one. No satellites are trained upon that empty slice of space (and if th
ey were, he would be one of the very few people to know about them). He is alive in an age of monitoring, surveillance, profile-building, tracking; a wargames era with little handto-hand combat, only surgical strikes, tactical collateral damage. What would his great-grandfather have made of it? The man who, after narrowly failing to die on Elephant Island, had enlisted within two weeks of his return to England, then narrowly failed to die on the killing fields of northern Europe. In comparison David considers, he is living in a shadowy, cowardly time. One thing he is truly afraid of – disease, an epidemic, possibly one of the first real effects of the warming – stalks the land once more, for the second time in four years, a highly communicable strain of virus, as do strange environmental puzzles: Elm trees are losing their leaves from a mystery fungus, triggered by warming, the total collapse of honeybee populations causing a collapse in pollination, causing agricultural output to plummet 16 per cent from where it was in 2010. Storms scrape at Britain, more violent each year.
All this his brother had foreseen; Ben had told David and he hadn’t believed him. At the time, Ben was an anomaly, a futurologist. Uncertain times sent people to soothsayers, although David had never expected to find himself living in such an era. And it was not individuals, but banks, governments, the corporate world, who went to visit Ben and his crystal ball. Just another economist who can tell the future, Ben had joked, at the beginning of his career. And then he found he could.
He turns the key to his front door. His flat is exquisite, he admires it himself, each time he enters. Ships glide up and down the Thames. In the distance, the cupolas of the Barrier. A soft estuary light.
Kate has left not even a coffee cup, not even the imprint of lipsticked lips, on the counter. She has washed and dried up so thoroughly that drops of water have been banished from the sink. On the sofa a book lies open, seemingly casually, but this is the copy of Don Quixote Kate has been trying to read for some months now. She is a woman who sets herself tasks, a self-improver.
