The Ice Lovers

by Jean McNeil

  She shovelled wedges of snow into a metal bucket. When she stood up a gauzy shield of white met her eyes. The plane had disappeared. She looked around, trying to find any sight line, any landmark, but the gauze was not only in her eyes, her ears, but in her mind. In the swirling snow she couldn’t even see her own hand. She felt a sudden vertigo, then a slight but insistent nausea. She took ten steps in the direction of the plane. Stars gathered and dispersed in her eyes. She fumbled for the wire at her back. A frayed ribbon of shout on the wind – the pilot’s voice saying, you all right? You still there?

  Nara felt the tug at the small of her back, and then she was being pulled backwards. As she moved she thought: this is a new way of living, we are living each moment as a part of itself. And then, how powerful he is, the pilot; can we really be the only two humans for a thousand miles in any direction? Only he knows how to get us out of there. Otherwise, what are we? Corpses. Other people’s guilt.

  In twenty steps she was back at the plane.

  ‘I don’t know what happened.’

  ‘You were heading off in the wrong direction. Good thing I had hold of you. How was your little expedition? We should call you Shackleton, or would you rather be Scott?’

  ‘Don’t joke about the dead. Not in these conditions.’

  ‘What conditions would they be?’

  She understood: he had seen so much worse.

  The pilot smiled. ‘It’s dinnertime. Have you heard of that famous restaurant, The Twin Otter? They say it can be hard to find, but once you do, it’s worth it.’

  That night the storm intensified. They spread their P-bags on opposite sides of the fuselage. The pilot lit three Tilley Lamps and hung them from hooks in the cross-beams overhead. The lamps swayed with the plane when it was buffeted by gusts.

  She took out her book.

  ‘What’s that you’re reading?’

  She turned the book toward him so that he could see the cover: The Worst Journey in the World.

  He smiled. ‘Ah yes, that Antarctic classic. Wait ’til you get to the part where they etherise the albatross to death on the deck of the Terra Nova.’

  ‘Why did they do that?’

  ‘They were killing it – either to eat or to take back as a scientific specimen, I can’t remember. Now there’s a sad, sad episode. All of them flapping behind the albatross, trying to pin it down. It never tried to escape because it didn’t know not to trust humans. Albatrosses had no predators then. Sometimes, when I read that episode, I want to cry.’

  She stared at him. He was physically similar to his colleagues, but he was so different from them, these lean weatherbeaten ex-bush and ex-Army men, hyperactive yet taciturn, perpetually in thrall to the next challenge. All the pilots she had met so far on base really did seem tuned to a higher frequency of life, so that they actually vibrated, like wires. In the cafeteria queue they clicked their fingers, rose up and down on the balls of their feet as if at any moment they might make a run for it. Luke was so different; wellspoken, thoughtful. Yet then he was not wholly unlike them, either. In the cockpit, on the way down, she had asked him why he became a pilot, and he had answered her, ‘I like speed. I like machines. That’s about all there is to it.’ She thought yes, you could ruminate too much on the whys of something. Why could be a big waste of time.

  ‘I’m not finding it that easy to read.’ She paused. ‘I’ve only managed the introduction. I think it’s too close to what I’m actually experiencing.’

  ‘You mean you could read it better on a hot summer day, lying in a park in London?’

  Hot days. Parks. London. She registered that she had left that world – if not forever, then for a long time.

  The pilot rolled over on his back. In the dim light she could only see the breath rising from his balaclava. ‘I know, I shouldn’t talk about where we’re not. It’s like how you miss people down here. It’s as if they’ve died. Or you’ve died and they’re carrying on in a separate timeframe. You can’t talk to them, nothing you say about this life makes sense to people who don’t experience it, you can’t touch them. That’s what I think ghosts are like, you know – they’re there, living right beside us, but there’s this invisible curtain between us.’

  A blow hit the plane. It swayed, then rocked.

  ‘That’ll be a katabatic gust, straight off the mountains,’ he said.

  ‘It felt like we were going to tip over.’

  ‘We would, if we weren’t blanked down. And this is midsummer. Imagine winter. Sometimes when I’m out here I think about what those men went through, the Scotts, the Shackletons.’ He turned to face her again, propping himself up on his elbow. ‘You know, though, what I think is the saddest story of all? Shackleton, when he went back to London. After surviving the wreckage of the Endurance, making his way to South Georgia, rescuing the men left behind on Elephant Island. It was 1918, the War was still on. He gave lectures to a half-filled Philharmonic Hall, twice a day. Imagine what the man had just done, how he had saved his men. And he had to stand up there and tell people how he had failed to cross the Antarctic, every day, twice a day. The hall should have been packed out but nobody cared. Because there was a war on. Because he had failed.’ He paused. ‘His secret was that he was able to get over disappointments quickly. He said “a man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground”. I think about that a lot.’

  This is the last thing she remembers hearing. From time to time the plane shudders in the wind. Otherwise, the silence is deafening; she can hear her own heart, even the blood humming in her veins.

  Then she is in a different dimension. The storm, the plane, the pilot, they are all separate from her, they are all on the other side of the curtain.

  She sees a man. He is talking to people, they sit row on row. Behind him, a film rolls, a modern video stream of ice floes. On them lie dark gleaming lozenges, like wet seals. But something is wrong, something is coming up, from the deep. When it reaches the surface, it will shatter this itinerant ice-floe world. The man tells the audience how the killer whales circled them, their horrible eye, big as a man’s head, their black and yellow mouths. The fishy stench of their breath.

  The man begins to cry. The film flickers against empty rosewood chairs. The few people left in the hall are all women. They sit primly under giant hats. The man’s voice booms into the crevasses of empty rows until there are only two or three women left. Their faces lengthen and contort until they are all screeching like the figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

  In the depths of the night which is not night, the pilot asks, You ok?

  Is she talking in her sleep? It is so long since she has slept in the same space as anyone. On the ship she had her own cabin.

  Someone else’s words are in her head: the pilot’s, the man on the podium’s, the ghosts on the other side of the curtain. But it is sleep talk, fragmented, not unlike ice breaking up in summer – something about being proud of what you do, of having done your best, of being forsaken by God.

  She was awakened by a sheer taffeta stream of sun on her face. The pilot was not in his sleeping bag. She dressed quickly and shuffled to the cockpit.

  ‘Morning. At least I hope it’s morning.’

  He turned and gave her a quick, professional smile. He glanced at a chunky silver watch which had almost as many dials and sprockets as the Otter cockpit. ‘Eight-fifteen.’

  She sat in the co-pilot’s seat. ‘What time did you get up?’

  ‘About seven. Same time I get up on base.’

  She peered out the window. ‘Weather’s improving.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ He sounded unconvinced. ‘I’ll just call Adelaide on the HF and then let’s have breakfast, what do you say?’

  ‘Should I get some snow in?’

  ‘That’s all been taken care of. We pride ourselves on our customer service here in the Otter.’

  Breakfast was porridge and instant coffee. ‘You know,’ the pilot volunteered while they were eating, ‘you talk i
n your sleep.’

  She laughed. ‘What did I say?’

  ‘Oh, you know sleep talk. From what I remember you said, “Nowhere to burn. Only wolves.” Then a bunch of stuff I couldn’t make out.’

  ‘I never knew I talked in my sleep.’

  ‘Well you might not normally. It might just be the situation we’re in.’ She stiffened at his use of the word. It was the first time he had acknowledged that it was that, a situation.

  They spent that day and the next in the plane. The pilot made the first move, whenever anything needed to be done. He refused to have her put a lifeline on him, instead clipping it onto the side of the plane. She wondered why he had not done so with her; it would have at least freed him up to do other things while she was wandering around getting lost in blizzards.

  She washed the dishes out with snow. It didn’t quite clear the food off the plate; thin ribbons of beef Bourgogne froze onto the Melmac surface.

  ‘Not a very good Antarctic dishwasher, are you?’

  She couldn’t tell whether he was teasing, or genuinely put out. ‘Well, show me how to do it then.’

  He retrieved a plastic scraper from the small compartment at the back of the plane, and began to scrape the plates.

  ‘Can’t we just rinse them with hot water?’

  ‘First rule of Antarctic cuisine: don’t waste your hot water. Hot water requires resources: dig, melt, meths, propane.’

  ‘You know how to do everything.’

  ‘Who’s going to do it for you, here? That’s what I like about this life; you have to be self-sufficient. There’s no room for pride or status.’ The pilot told her a story, then, about an artist he had taken down to the fuel depot one year, a wealthy and impatient man, who had left his bags on the ice runway next to the plane in order that someone should hoist them into the fuselage. The plane took off without his bags in it. ‘That’s what happens,’ he said, ‘if you expect someone else to look after you down here.’

  She did not like going outside. It was not so much the weather, but the silence she encountered, away from the plane – the suffocated, chlorine silence of the Antarctic. She could hear the blood hurtle through her veins, she could hear her own heart pumping. The silence itself had no sound: it was not a whine, a ringing absence, but it was pristine, unarguable. Against the totality of the silence she found her mind began to manufacture sounds, so that the thin wires they used to blank down the plane zinged and the sun, hidden behind the low cloud, emitted a distant buzzing hum. Once, while walking back to the plane during those days she caught a muffled, distant sound, projected so that it was huge and clanging in her ears, a frozen carnival, but as she approached the plane she realised it was only the pilot’s voice on the radio: We’re still hunkered down here. Weather window. Tomorrow or tonight.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, when she appeared in the cockpit doorway, stamping snow from her boots on the footrail. She levered herself inside and closed the door, taking the co-pilot’s seat. ‘We could make it to Ice Blue. That’s what I keep telling them, that as soon as the weather clears we can get airborne ok. As long as there’s a mech at Ice Blue.’

  ‘What do you think they’ll do?’

  ‘I don’t know. The field ops man isn’t known for his decisiveness.’ His mouth turned into that sour pout, an oddly childish gesture on such an adult face.

  They sat in the cockpit in silence, fully dressed. Outside the window the wind quickened. She had never seen a storm like this, how it gathered itself, over and over, into increasing waves of fury. The Otter snapped and groaned as the metal contracted with the cold.

  That night they cooked another meal, then retired to their P-bags on either side of the fuselage.

  ‘That’s a one-metre drift today,’ the pilot said. She looked up and saw him peering at his GPS screen. ‘Strange, don’t you think, that the ground is slipping away, right beneath us. That’s why they call it an Ice Stream, I suppose.’

  ‘But the ground is always moving,’ she said. ‘The continents are drifting apart, still. The planet is spinning at 1,600 kilometres an hour. We’re always in motion, whether we realise it or not.’

  The wind hurled snow at the fuselage. ‘It sounds like sand, don’t you think?’ she said.

  ‘You know, that’s exactly what I was thinking. My exact thought.’

  After that, she could not remember them speaking any more. They must have fallen asleep together, meaning at the same time.

  The following day they fired up the engines; it was time, the pilot said, to see if they still worked. Without authorisation from base there was no question of them actually taking off, but there was the risk of the aircraft freezing to the ground.

  For the first time the pilot allowed her up on the wings to help him unblank the plane. At first she struggled with the tension on the wires, how cold they were to the touch, even through her gloves. In the end she had to take them off and blow hot air on the layer of rime ice that had formed overnight in the storm. The tips of her fingers burned, and she put them in her mouth.

  ‘Let’s just get her going,’ he called out to her. ‘Get in.’

  She scrambled off the wing, down along the fuselage, and slipped through the co-pilot’s door. He started the right engine first. The propeller whipped until it was a blur of black and white stripes against the white of the snow. He fired up the left engine and the plane began to shake.

  He frowned.

  ‘What is it?’

  His voice came through the headphones. ‘Generator.’

  He radioed base. ‘Hey – we’ve got a faulty generator down here.’ His voice was tight with anger. ‘I wish you guys would fix this once and for all. This is what – the third time this season? What about when BZ conked out over at Berkner? How long did it take you to get it back? A week?’

  The reply was a rush of static. ‘Sorry,’ came the voice of the comms manager. It sounded more than distant, rather a voice sieved through space and time, from another planet. ‘The ionosphere is acting up again.’ He was referring to the electrically charged layer of the atmosphere that extends from eighty to four hundred kilometres above the earth’s surface, and which absorbed much of the short wavelength radiation from the sun.

  But that only happened at sunset, she thought, when a refraction of the rays of a setting or rising sun at certain angles caused havoc with radio communications. She checked the pilot’s watch and was shocked to see it was 11:30 – at night, she assumed. Back on base, far to the north, there was no night, but the sun dipped toward the horizon around midnight, a hovering gold and mauve beacon. She hadn’t seen the sun in two days, but behind the storm it was travelling round and round, above their heads, in an ellipsis.

  The propellers slowed, then stopped. The pilot turned to her. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘just like the old explorers, then.’

  That night she dreams of him, and it is all so real, not like a dream or even a memory but a silhouette of experience unhappy to have been confined to the past, restless to be admitted to the present.

  His skin. Like those rainforest woods: padouk, mahogany. His hair, much thicker than hers. To her he seems a more vital creature. Alive. Sudden flares of temper. All the glaciologists she has met are like this; flinty, obsessed. He is generous, hasty, like travel.

  Her fingers trace the concave hollow between his belt – still a boy’s belt, a piece of elastic, fabric, a cheap buckle – and his stomach. The quiver of a thin muscle, a glade of wiry hair. His smell there is not unfamiliar to her, nothing about him is unfamiliar, it is as if she has been poured into his bones, or he into hers.

  In his body she sees not sensuality, vacant and common, but the edges of her dreams. This man is not an accident, but nor is he luck.

  How quickly he has become necessary. He moves her. If this weren’t the case she could take him or leave his barbed comments, his glossy eyes. He is inside her, somehow. He is her.

  She woke up. The Otter was cold now, the Tilley Lamps long since burned down, the pilot
asleep in the tungsten light of the polar night.

  Tent days, the pilot called them, days when you were only waiting – waiting for rescue, for the weather to shift, waiting to be told what to do – days when time became an obstacle. Nara wondered how many days he had spent like this. She looked for signs of patience in his face. But his face, although thin, was not haggard with endurance. It struck her again that she was in the presence of a man with un-ordinary powers.

  As for time, it was not the clammy indistinctness of the hours which unnerved her so much as the whiteness of their environment. Even under cloud the snow glared a hollow grey-white. On the rare occasions when they saw the sun, the white glint of the snowfield burned her irises. The whiteness seeped from the world around her, and entered her so that her thoughts were the white-yellow of raw silk, slippery, they followed one another without destination or will. If she ventured outside she was deprived of any perspective. She felt instantly seasick. The constant uncertainty of whether she was putting her foot in snow or air, the strain of guessing where the surface might be, waiting at any moment to feel herself pulled waist-deep into the snow, her shoulders hooking on a ledge of a crevasse, exhausted her. The pilot held her lifeline with one hand, with the other he cooked dinner, as was his habit. She was on the end of a fishing line and she was moving into whiteness. The blur in her mind grew and grew until it became an intense stinging buzz.

  That night in the back of the Otter she asked him where his accent was from.

  ‘Canada.’

  ‘Which part?’

  ‘I’m from a province next to the Atlantic Ocean. You won’t have heard of it.’

  ‘I lived in Canada for six years.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘My father was a university professor. He got a job there, and we went with him.’

  The pilot nodded, but did not say any more. Normally, she would have pressed him to talk about a country they suddenly had in common. But she detected a hesitancy, whether an instinct for privacy or a lack of interest in origins, his or hers, she couldn’t tell. And here they were so exposed to each other; she did not want to annoy him.