The Ice Lovers

by Jean McNeil

  It was five o’clock in the morning on December 23rd, 2011.

  ‘Well,’ Luke turned to her, ‘home for tea and medals.’

  2

  Time is circular. The sun goes round and round in the sky. There is no end to the light, and no beginning. Yesterday and tomorrow are as one, artificial delegations, unruled by daylight. Nara has had no shadow for weeks and finds that she does not need it, this ghostly chaperone which has accompanied her all her life one way or another, in all other places. In the Antarctic something is falling away, falling off her, this nameless weight she has been carrying around.

  They go skiing on the glacier. There was snow overnight, not the usual snow of the Antarctic: fine, crystalline, bone-dry, no this snow was soft. Although not too soft; just the right snow, said the field assistants, neither powdery nor slushy. There were so many types of snow, she was learning: grainy, soft, slushy, hard crusts, the brutal sastrugi, useless for skis, the hard meniscus cracking through to loafy snow, like wading through wet Styrofoam.

  Eleven pm, midnight, two in the morning, and they are skiing on the glacier. This was what you could do in the Antarctic: ski at four in the morning, lie down and make snow angels, like children. She is only too happy to participate, but it strikes her that there is only one kind of fun permitted in the Antarctic, an obligatory recklessness.

  Only now, very late in the evening, could she look at the icefield without the protection of her polarising glasses. It seared a pain through the mind, which was not about colour or reflection but an overdose of blankness. There was no enchantment in the polar day, only a solar floodlit glare, ruthlessly simplified, dragging all energy into itself. The light fed and exhausted her at once.

  She skis, breathless, down the V-shaped slope, rising stiffly against jagged exposed rock. The Bergschrund at the top, sagging where the rock and the icefield parted, a light turquoise congealed abyss. The moon is mute in the nightless sky, a gauzy white shadow.

  Skiers hurtle down the ice sheet with the most gargantuan landscape they have ever encountered in front of them. The ordinary mountains of the pensinsula are as large as those of the Rockies, or the lesser Himalayas. Up and down they shuttle, skiing to the bottom, then hauled back to the top on the end of ropes by skidoos, the snow angels flapping in the snowfield – that was the original task of the angels, Nara remembers: they were messengers, transmitters from God to man.

  She is a terrible skier. She is starving and her cheeks burn from the cold. The drynesss of the air sears her throat. Her mouth is bleeding at the corners. Two little open, messy wounds where spit accumulates, then dries, forming a thin milk crust. She is living so fast, here, everything refuses to stop and be understood. It feels like being out of breath.

  At the same time she feels herself growing physically, her chest expanding, becoming man-sized, until she might explode. This intermittent feeling of power arrives accompanied by an indefinite hunger, she does not know for what: it passes through her with the force of one of those gravity-driven winds they called katabatic: not so much an explosion as a dream.

  There must be somewhere beyond sentinel mountains, beyond the horizon. It seems too incredible that she is out of the world, she has escaped. She has been lifted out of her life and deposited on an Antarctic glacier by an unseen hand, among these people. Angels fallen to earth.

  A week after her return from the Ellsworths Nara went for her first dive in the bay to collect samples. She would place these creatures in her acquaria with their warming waters.

  She slipped through a thin broken cover of sea ice, into the darkness guided only by her torch. Sea-sponges, gigantic, overfed on the cold nutrients of the water, sprouted on the seabed; she saw sea-squirts with their sodden turnip flesh, which attached themselves to the smooth basalt sides of an underwater cleft. Also sea-spiders, nematode worms, starfish the colours of bruises. The ice above her acted as a lid. No light, apart from a weak gleam, penetrated. On the surface the boatman awaited her signal.

  Just as she was about to radio him, she spotted a sleek, mottled head, inches from her face. In a flash she saw the wraparound mouth, a slit almost to its ears, like a snake.

  She refused to panic. She rose slowly to the surface, as she had been taught to do. But once her head was out of the water, fear flooded her lungs.

  ‘Leopard seal,’ she managed to say.

  ‘Christ,’ the boatman hauled her into the boat. ‘We’d better tell base. No more solo diving here. Not for a while anyway, not with leps around. Are you ok?’

  She nodded, although the truth was, she was having difficulty breathing. The leopard seal was the main danger for divers in Antarctic waters. The only seal that fed on other seals, if they mistook her for one they could easily drown her.

  She put the net containing her specimens in the bottom of the RIB. The boatman looked mournfully at her collection of creatures.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘They don’t stand a chance, do they?’ he shook his head.

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘They’ll die. They can’t take more than a half-degree rise in temperature, as it turns out. Not much of a window for survival.’

  ‘But if you already know the result, why carry on with your experiments?’

  ‘Because I have to be sure. Some have a different upper temperature threshold than others,’ she said. ‘Some of them can hang on for longer.’

  ‘But if the water around them is warming, what’s the point?’ he asked. ‘You know they’re all goners anyway.’

  ‘We don’t know for certain. That’s why you need science,’ she said. ‘Until you have experimental data, it’s all just conjecture.’

  The boatman was a mature man – Luke’s age, she guessed, perhaps even a bit older. He had worked in dive schools all around the world – Belize, Australia, Greece. She saw that he was unconvinced. To him, she knew, her experiments were just senseless killing of animals that would die anyway. Not that they would die straightaway: they might live for an indeterminate amount of time. But it was already proven that the oceans around base were warming so quickly, it might be only another twenty years before they were all gone.

  Back in the lab, she removed the layers that kept her alive in the coldest waters in the world. She would not be able to swim for nearly two years. Although she would dive in the tar-black Antarctic waters, diving below the ice protected by layers of polyeurothane, rubber, steel; a choking rubber seal gripping her neck and hands, her prison suit of seams and zips and watertight seals. But she would not feel water slipping over her skin.

  Lately she has been having dreams of swimming in lakes in Canada, where her father took them to live for six years when she was a child. There were so many lakes, no one had bothered to name some of them. In the city where her father teaches at university is a famous oceanography institute. She does her undergraduate degree there, returning to the UK with an accent she will struggle to shake off. She attends a concrete early 1970s university, an eminent if not elite institution where she does a graduate degree, then begins a PhD.

  She has had to prod herself to be ambitious, to a degree, and acquire some specialist knowledge of the world which would guarantee herself a place in it. Her parents’ professional background are influences, but also she is a woman of her generation in that she refuses to leave anything to chance, fate, biology, never mind a man. She studies marine biology and oceanography, struggling through the maths and physics courses but excelling in biology and chemistry. It is the diving she loves. There, beneath the surface, she is unburdened from the world above and its greasy mechanics, her father’s long-term affair with a colleague – the real reason for their emigration to Canada, she will learn much later, was to follow his lover there – her mother’s unhappiness.

  In the Antarctic she dreams of the city they lived in for the first time in many years, its wide, eventless streets named after the billowing trees which cover them: Chestnut, Walnut, Larch, Tamarack. The city of trees, she called it, when they mo
ved there. She asked her father why all the names in their new home were from animals, flowers, trees, and words in a language she had never known existed, with words that sounded like water running over stones in a brook. ‘Because there’s no history here,’ her father had said – this from a history professor – ‘because it’s such a new country. There haven’t been enough people. There hasn’t been enough time.’

  She dreams of the swarms of mayflies, strange locusts, mosquitoes, the pestering blackflies, the deerflies and horseflies that tormented her as she swam. She dreams of the roads the colour of faded denim. The giant boulders, slates of shale – she would learn the names for them in her geology class, gneiss, schist. The province was fissured with rocks, minerals, seams of coal. It was old, despite what her father said; the land was old, it had once been part of the Amazon basin.

  She becomes a diver, partly because of her profession, partly through fascination with the sunken, mysterious world underneath the surface of the oceans. She is driven toward depths rather than heights. Mountains confine her, she has no fascination for them. Strange then, that her life will become intertwined with the Antarctic peninsula, with its grandiose peaks, its sea so cold that she would not survive even a ten-minute unprotected immersion in its waters.

  In her dreams she is swimming in freshwater lakes, remnants of glaciers so recently passed, such is the startlingly intact trauma they have inflicted on the landscape: she can read the landscape like a map, its contours are the moraines, drumlins, the ragged thin snakes of topsoil raked away.

  She swims too far out from shore, she risks becoming entangled in strange currents. In freshwater there are snapping turtles and leeches. The lake, the copper water, pine trees sentinel around it. Moose kneading the brackish water. Muskeg and moss.

  She is young enough to believe that she will always be in the world. She has just learned about death, they did it in school: Week 4, Social Studies: Death. The shock still ripples through her as she swims. But I thought I was here forever. She is young enough to believe that all this is God’s doing, infinite and complete. As if the earth has been broiled at the edges, then soldered until it is smooth, horizon and water one enamel plane, and she is moving through it, she is one with it. A lone silver swimmer, stroking silently through a copper summer morning. How far from the shore she is, is hard to say.

  3

  It was January and there was no night and the days seeped into each other, boundaryless, hungry to move through time. The light was white and savage and fell straight from the sky.

  A solid wedge of indigo now marked the boundary of their white world, because the ice had broken up and was blown out to sea. Clear blue days took hold over the peninsula, and the intensity of its glare on the snow forced Nara’s eyes shut, even behind her sunglasses. The blue and white world seized dominion of her mind and installed a spartan satisfaction there, as if she had never seen any other colours, and never needed to see them again.

  The Antarctic calendar had its rituals, she learned; each season on base followed a pattern. Summer began in October with the arrival of the airplanes and the first fresh fruit and vegetables in seven months for the wintering population. November and December were frantic months, inputting scientific field parties; base barely stopped to observe Christmas and New Year’s. By midsummer, in January, there was a pause long enough for the annual visit of the American oceanographic research ship, followed by the Russian tourist cruise ship, then the Navy’s polar patrol vessel, followed by the annual Winter Olympics between the Navy ship and base staff: sledging, snowball throwing, snow-fort building, skiing, skidoo driving and snowboarding. Base celebrated Burns’ Night even more raucously than New Year’s, thanks to the always-strong Scottish contingent. On these nightless nights of high summer the bar always had to be cleared at two or three in the morning by the Saints, as the St Helena domestics who came to work on the base in the summer were called.

  Nara had thought the Antarctic would be an isolation posting, but if anything there was too much activity, too much company. She felt the need to retreat; never before had she found such sanctuary in her thoughts. The Antarctic summer did not favour memories or tortured evaluations of one’s life; it was too oxygen-rich, this environment of optimism powered by awe. For the first time in her life, she felt erased of her past, unburdened. Even if a darker current ran beneath this voluntary amnesia, one she could not grasp at all, although she heard its warning, a distant voice that said: We are not meant to live in a continuous present tense.

  Outside the bar, silver crates of explosives were stacked, innocent as cases of beer. The geologists and the glaciologists were dynamiting that summer, in search of subglacial lakes kept liquid by thermal heat from the bedrock and by the tremendous weight of the ice sheets above. There were many lost lakes underneath the ice sheet, they told her – Lake Vostok, in the Russian sector, Lake Ellsworth in Ellsworth Land at the base of the peninsula were only two that radar had picked up; there might be many more hidden underneath the sarcophagi of ice. These lakes had been tropical swamps of Gondwanaland until they were slowly covered, the ice sheets crawling over them, sealing them in. If any organisms survived in that frigid black chamber they would be like deep-sea animals, she thought, adapted to live in total darkness: aquatic newts, diatoms, spectacular creatures that looked like fluorescent toothbrushes.

  The sea-ice people had arrived too, to measure the extent of the summer ice. They told her that the Antarctic is a jellyfish, billowing, expanding and contracting on a sigh, casting skirts of ice toward the southern rims of the world, Hobart, Cape Town, Punta Arenas. Flourishing in the winter, dying in the summer, each year a little more. In winter, between March and September, the continent doubled in size and no ship could penetrate its ice shield. Planes could land, theoretically, but only in medical emergencies. Even then, flying into the Antarctic in winter, with its fuel-freezing temperatures and volatile visibility, was one of the most dangerous missions on the planet.

  From her laboratory window she could see the low profile of Alexander Island. It was the size of Ireland but uninhabited; according to the map it was 150 miles away, but looked no more than 40 – Luke had told her about the landmarks that looked much closer than they actually were – another polar hallucination.

  There was so much she did not know about this land. Everything Luke had said, she realised, had been a subtle instruction, so deft that she had been unaware at the time of how much she was learning.

  She thought of the way Luke had done things, simple actions. How he had clambered, practised and agile, onto the plane’s wing. His graciousness when faced with her uselessness in this new environment – anyone would have been a better co-pilot for him on this trip, than a newly arrived woman scientist – his hunger to know her thoughts. There was a soft, indulgent quality to him. Again she thought how different he was to the other pilots she had met on base, those brashly laconic types who snapped their fingers while waiting for food in the cafeteria queue, as if to test their reflexes. Though not unlike them at first glance, a lean figure in his orange boiler suit, walking toward her with his sunglasses on – not against the sun, for there had been almost none during those snowbound days in the Ellsworths, but as protection against the wind and the driving snow, and the glare which still emerged from it as if from a buried light, far below the earth’s surface, slapping his gloves against his thigh to keep his fingers warm. He had a pilot’s walk: jaunty, springing forward from the tips of his toes, bow-legged, too, his legs swinging wide around his hips. If she saw him from afar with a group of people, everyone dressed in their identikit Antarctic gear, she would know him from his gait alone.

  Luke – she liked the name, near as it was to luck. He had told her his name, of course, before they even took off for the Ellsworths – she might even have known his name before that. But during their time in the Ellsworths she had avoided using or even thinking his name. She felt as if they were strangers hastily introduced only to tumble into an incontin
ent intimacy, and for some reason to use his name there would have been to breach a taboo. This man who now stood in the bar laughing with a glaciologist was the only living being she had seen for five days. She had never been so isolated and also so wedded to a single human and this – dependency, was the only word she could think of, although it was not quite correct – had left a faint imprint on her, indelible but definitely there. Why had she not found out more about him? She had missed an opportunity, she knew: not for love, or sex – on these levels she knew nothing about him – but for some kind of knowledge, as yet unidentified.

  She saw him come toward her. There was a slight hesitancy in his expression.

  ‘I’m going into the field for a week,’ he said. ‘Maybe two. A survey for MAGIC.’ The map team were known by their acronym; Nara had seen it scrawled on the flight board at the end of the dining hall, and had looked it up on the intranet. It stood for Mapping and Geographic Information Centre.

  ‘What does that entail?’

  ‘Flying in straight lines, mostly.’ Luke smiled. ‘It’s a challenge, believe me, to fly on the exact coordinates.’

  ‘And you like a challenge.’ As soon as she said it, Nara regretted the way it emerged: presumptuous, assuming too much familiarity.

  ‘That’s right,’ Luke said. ‘I do.’

  There was a silence, during which he cast a slightly hunted glance around the room. ‘Well, I just wanted you to know where I was going. People come and go down here. They just disappear and you’re left wondering why they didn’t say goodbye.’

  Again, he seemed to have arrived at the end of what he wanted to say. But at the moment when she was expecting his body to angle away from hers he spoke. ‘I was watching you the other night.’

  ‘Watching me? When?’

  ‘I don’t mean it that way. I wasn’t watching you deliberately. At dinner, I was sitting down the table from you. You looked so tired. You were sitting opposite – Yeah, well, I don’t know his name. But it looked like he wouldn’t speak to you.’