by Jean McNeil
The news seemed unreal. On base they called the rest of the world the Real World, or Out There. Out There, people were dying. In the summers they died of heat exhaustion, in the winter of influenza. Here, nothing would touch them. The world could combust in nuclear warfare, and the katabatic winds of the continent would protect them. Radiation would simply circle the earth thousands of miles above them, driven by the Coriolis effect, which had little influence on the winds of the extreme southern hemisphere. Southern Patagonia and Antarctica would be unscathed. They would survive, for a while at least, until the food stocks ran out.
What they feared most in the Antarctic, it turned out, was not cold or disease, but fire. Fire could not be contained, it took hold in seconds, fuelled by the dryness of the air. If the buildings burnt down they would be left exposed. So they do fire drills, fire alarm tests, oil spill drills, fire-fighting exercises, donning smoke hoods, wielding fire extinguishers. The whoop of the alarm every Wednesday morning, all of them standing on the deck, shivering.
In the Antarctic, the change of the seasons is abrupt. Suddenly the dynamic brightness of summer is gone, like a giant klieg light switched off. There is no enchantment in the polar day, she realises, only these solar floodlights, ruthlessly simplified, dragging all energy into reverse; the sun was so full of light it turned black. It lacks vigour, somehow, this blizzard of white, an overdose of blankness. It feeds and exhausts her at once. She is thirsty, always. Her skin is puckered with need for moisture. Her throat is parched.
The eternal whiteness of the savage day. Outside her window, the glacier burns, consumed by its lack of pigment. This place, is it one of possibilities, or impossibilities? Soon it would reveal itself. She has no memory now – of the lakes, of swimming, years spent trying to untangle herself from her family. Here she is safe, but also futureless. Here, seeing means nothing. This place has been unwitnessed for so long, it repels the human eye effortlessly. These early winter nights before she falls asleep a voice springs up inside her head – it is not her voice, perhaps it is not even human. It is coming through her, travelling from a long way away. It asks her a hunted question: Will the world end in ice, or fire, or will it simply wear away?
PART III
Running Out of Night
1
He does not know her yet, but she sits ten rows behind him on the Dreamliner, Boeing’s long-range, low-emissions aircraft which had come into service a few years before. He declines to travel business class, even if the FCO would pay. He doesn’t believe in privilege. You burn up the same carbon whether you sit in first or steerage is Kate’s response, whose use of ‘steerage’ makes him wince; it strikes him as vulgar and elitist. Outside his porthole is the dark night, the Brazilian rainforest beneath him.
He rarely reads on flights these days, or watches films. He finds enough to entertain him in watching the flight map: the skycam, the tailcam, the plane silver and spookily artificial, like a holograph, clouds scudding beneath it, the temperature screen (–63°C), the kilometres to destination (4,603). At the bottom of the flight map is a blue-white landmass. The map gives it identifying place-names, but not its one true name: Antarctica.
He silently recites the names of its explorers: Drake, Darwin, Cook, Weddell, Palmer, Biscoe, Bellingshausen, Ross, who as captain of the ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror was an early oceanographer, undertaking comprehensive studies of the ocean. It was he who first saw the great volcano, which he named after the Erebus. Then D’urville, Drygalski, the Scot Bruce, Charcot, whose expedition was named Porquoi Pas. Why not, indeed? Why not go to the Antarctic, why not perform mapping, geology, glaciology, botany, tidal observations?
His great-grandfather had been part of this world; a naturalist, he signed on to Shackleton’s Endurance expedition in 1913 and spent 1915–16 trapped in ice, fighting for his life. His great-grandfather had been a great naturalist, but ended up being remembered for a feat of survival. He ought to have followed his ancestor’s example, chosen a life of a frenzy of cataloguing, acquiring knowledge of the earth, doing inventories; the simplicity and reassurance of measurements, of inquiry. Instead he had waded into the slew of politics.
Ten rows behind him she is unknown, even if he has caught a glimpse of her while standing in the queue at Heathrow, the sort of glimpse that is so instantly forgotten it turns up later in dreams, and he wonders, how did I dream that stranger’s face into being? I am sure I have never seen that face before. But he has, of course, in the queue at Heathrow. On the Dreamliner Helen might be a dream, she might not exist at all, she might be someone he invents in a future reverie. We dream ourselves into being as much as anything that could be said to lead to a more solid existence: David firmly believed that much of life was illusory. This was a great secret, especially in the circles he moved in, of facts and decisions and legal measures and instruments. He thinks. We glow, we are blind arrows in the night.
At the instant the thought blooms in David’s mind, two fishermen in one of the countless tributaries of the Amazon River near the town of Santarém look up into the sky and see thin lights, far away: a slim fish, high above them, streaking through the night.
Later, Helen would not be able to remember the first thing they said to each other. It must have been in Chile, at their Santiago hotel. A comment about the weather, the sudden rush of heat and light of the southern hemisphere summer. It was late November and they had left behind a watery, mild autumn. The sun shone in her eyes.
‘I can’t find my sunglasses,’ she said, and squinted unhappily. She wanted no man to see her wrinkled brow, the two lines which had appeared, seemingly overnight, beneath her eyes only a year ago and had spent the past twelve months entrenching themselves. Until recently she could have been taken for a very young woman. Now she saw people sizing her up, trying to date her. She might be very young or surprisingly old.
For all she knew, this was what he was thinking, this tall man in front of her, obscured by a stab of sunlight. His face wanted to be stern, she could see, but it had a sensitive cast, with large brown eyes.
‘Is this your first time South?’
Antarctic people referred to the continent with this shorthand – ‘South’ – as if nothing else southerly existed. Before she’d had a chance to challenge this man’s geographic arrogance, his mobile phone rang. ‘Sorry,’ he said – unusual enough, these days, to apologise before taking a call on a mobile – and he’d walked off, beyond hearing distance. She watched him for a second or two, his expression concentrated, unsmiling. A checking-in, I’m-here-yes, expression. Wife, she thought.
Around them, a group of Chileans circulated. A corporate meeting, she guessed, the men in suits, the women in skirts of dusty pink or orange, far more colourful than you would see in England at such a function. She wondered what they made of the motley Antarctic crew who had stumbled off the plane only two hours ago milling about restlessly, pale from a distant winter.
David was still talking on the phone. She considered leaving, but their hotel rooms were still being prepared. She sat down on a lounger next to the pool, underneath an unfamiliar tree with blood-red leaves. From that position she studied him. He had made another call on his phone; now his expression was alert, despite his obvious fatigue: work call. Helen had the impression she knew him. It was not impossible; their paths might have crossed at some function or other, some seminar on future climactic doom. But when they had been talking she’d had a flash, a visual picture, of a glassy flat, a silver river rimmed by marshlands. It had come and gone in a second.
And then perhaps they exchanged a word or two in the airport the next day, before boarding the plane that took them on their hopscotch flight to Puerto Montt, then Punta Arenas, then finally to the Falkland Islands, which the LAN-Chile crew rigorously called Malvinas/Falklands, although with a scurrying pronunciation – ‘Vaklan’ – as if they did not want to say the word at all.
Then the terrifying landing at the military airport on East Falkland, the plane sheared
sideways by the most forceful crosswind she had ever felt in twenty years of white-knuckled landings in terrible places, skirting mustard-coloured hills streaked by rivers of grey stone. Then the shock of the military nature of the airport – jeeps driven at breakneck speed by men in fatigues, planes with no distinguishing markers, which reminded her of the renditions flights she had seen sitting on the tarmac in Kandahar, the squat Chinook helicopters on the apron, also familiar, their bellies slit open to reveal troops in combat fatigues. Inside there was a separate queue for civilians and personnel. Alert Code BIKINI, read a sign above the luggage carousel. Was that good or bad? she wondered. Beside it, a sign informed them that THE ENEMY IS LISTENING. Yet another instructed people in Spanish to prepare their passports for inspection, and listed items which could not be brought into the islands, among them guns and fruit.
They milled about outside the airport. She was unused to milling, to waiting for other people. They were a manifest, a sequence of names to be herded onto the rickety bus that would carry them from the military airport into the capital, where she will be billeted, two or more to a room, with other women. She wanted to turn to someone and say, ‘I don’t remember enlisting in the Army.’
On the trip into Stanley she looked out the window and saw dingy sheep, the road lined with Danger! Land mines! signs, little black skulls on them. The sun came out and she had to close her eyes. How strange the light of the Falklands was, she thought, like staring into white bones.
By the time they pulled up in Stanley the day had darkened. The town centre consisted of a few government buildings, a supermarket, a church, and their hotel. Helen was just old enough to remember the grainy images of the War on television, the crippled destroyers listing in the water, their hulls ripped open by Exocet missiles. Even though she had done her share of war reporting, she had never expected to find herself in the landscape of those photographs and faded videos. The place looked just the same: windswept and jerry-built, the mustard hills, the mottled khaki grass.
At their hotel, the reception desk was empty. Eventually a man with a Midlands accent wearing a kitchen apron and carrying a meat cleaver showed up, opened an envelope, and out spilled their keys. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Have to go back to making dinner.’ She exchanged looks with the tall man she’d spoken to in Santiago.
‘It could have been worse,’ she said. ‘He could have gone for us with the meat cleaver.’
‘Welcome to the Goose,’ he said; in his voice a hint of You’ll see.
The hotel was perhaps an intentional simulacra of a Scottish hotel of a hundred years before, with musty carpets of blue and pink thistles, matching floral sofas and floral wallpaper. Their meals were paid for, but drink was not. Cash only, no cards accepted. The Islands were in a twenty year-old time-warp of their own, Helen judged, marooned somewhere around 1995. The islanders looked like they’d stepped out of a BBC newsreel, with their too-big spectacles, their amphibious Barbour gear. They had a ruddy-windswept complexion, but also wrinkled and haggard – victims perhaps of the low ozone cover over the Islands.
Helen caught sight of the tall man again at dinner. He wasn’t eating with the rest of the conscripts in the dining room, that was clear; he wore a dinner jacket and a tie. He looked hurried, and distracted, as if there was anywhere one could hurry to, in such a place.
After dinner she went for a walk in a stinging, bitter wind. Wavelets lapped against the shores of the narrow harbour. The few streetlights cast a smudged light onto the pavements, and jeeps tore up and down the main road. She walked facing the wind and the sleet. And this was summer!
She arrived back at the hotel in time to see the tall man leave the front door, his dinner jacket covered by a windbreaker, walking head down up the road, into the wind.
David’s visits to the Islands follow a pattern: there is the meeting with the governor at Government House, followed by a reception for the local councillors and the MP, if she is in the Islands. During the summer season when the HMS Resolute is in town, he has a briefing with the Navy commander.
The governor’s house is stocked with antiques that had taken a battering on their journey down the length of the Atlantic. Chipped edges. A cloudy mirror. Sherry (they still served it!) was doled out before dinner. Is that so? I would have thought Falklands House and the FCO might have joined forces on that one. Conversations with the governor, the chief of police, the commander of Mount Pleasant base. Tonight he was on automatic. He liked the Islands, he cared about their fate. Why then could he not concentrate? His eye was drawn out the window, where pale lupines blew in the wind. Something the woman had said, in Santiago, the historian/journalist. About always having been fascinated by the stories of the explorers’ trials, but feeling locked out, because she was a woman.
He’d said, it’s not like that anymore. You can trek across the continent, if you want to. Plenty of women have done it.
Not plenty, she’d corrected him. In fact, only five or six. And then listed their names. Oh, he had said. Point taken. And felt foolish, then. As if he were in a meeting in a cabinet room, arguing over the nuances of fishing rights. He could have said something witty, encouraging. Point taken.
‘David? How long do you think The Hague will take to rule on the Weddell Sea claim?’
‘Not as long as they took to rule on the Scotia Sea, let’s hope.’
The exploration operation for seabed oil was run out of the Falklands. Seismic ships were anchored in Stanley Sound. He would make many, many more trips to the islands to sort through the thorny matter of resource exploration, natural gas sinks, the inevitable outrage of the Argentines.
‘What do you think, David – will the Treaty hold?’
‘That’s what I spend most of my time on now. It’s not easy. The Russians are riding high on their oil finds in the Arctic. People are desperate to find new supplies.’
He had not answered the question. This was his special and relatively recently acquired skill, to dodge giving a truthful answer. The FCO had sent him on a flock of courses: Media Management, Public Speaking, Techniques of Information Disclosure. So he did not say: I think the Antarctic Treaty’s days are numbered. Soon it will no longer be a continent set aside for science, free of land grabs, of pollution and exploitation. The world had given up on the ice caps; all the science pointed to their inevitable disappearance. Let the ice melt, then, if there’s nothing we can do about it, and get on with mitigating the damage. These were sentiments uttered in cabinet briefings, in phone conversations between world leaders that David was suddenly privy to, as Polar Man.
In the meantime the ice sheets could be mined, for data, yes, for clues as to how they were all going to survive a sudden five-degree temperature rise, because this had happened in the past. The ice cores proved it. But the last time the temperature had jumped five degrees there had been no humans on the planet, or very few.
Their ship was delayed somewhere around South Georgia; the governor informed David, but in fact he’d already heard the news from the FIPASS chief, who’d got the news on HF radio. News travelled fast in the Falklands. This was another reason he liked the Islands – the chain of command just did not exist. You found out vital pieces of information in the queue at the West Store supermarket.
Eventually, someone said, as they always did, Did you know David’s great-grandfather was… And pointed to the picture hanging above the mantelpiece. David was required to turn his face and pay homage to his ancestor.
‘He was one of the men plucked off Elephant Island by Shackleton,’ the governor explained to his guests. ‘Just as they teetered on the edge of starvation.’ And, some said, insanity, David added, mentally.
His great-grandfather was another reason why David was Polar Man: he had the pedigree, and even while he fought against privilege, against inheritance, he realised it had shaped his life. He turned to face his ancestor, who stood with his comrades, four men in fishermen’s jumpers, their skin blackened with soot from the blubber stoves they coo
ked on, underneath the upturned lifeboat which was their only shelter. His mother used to tell him he was a carbon copy, with his tall frame and large brown eyes, a face with the skin pulled tightly to the skull. David wasn’t sure. His great grandfather looked tense, handsome, transfixed by a remote awareness, one that was made available to very few human beings. His was a learned face, not in any way indulged but not corroded either, by lassitude or self-satisfaction or by any other flaccid, difficult-to-spot vice. Perhaps he had been burnt by other, more delicate terrors – luck, randomness, will. Life was random, unearned and undeserved – of this David was sure, and he hadn’t had to spend three months marooned and left for nearly dead on a sub-Antarctic island to find this out. The most deserving suffer, the spiteful prosper. This is not God’s will. These are just the things that happen. That’s life!
‘Yes, yes,’ David said, a little impatiently, he realised. ‘That was my great-grandfather.’ And now, exactly one hundred years later, a toast went up to him, and all the men who had survived the disaster of their expedition.
Dinner was over. People were looking to turn in; the Falklands kept farmers’ hours, still. And then he was free – out into the night, free to think his own thoughts, to craft renegade opinions. Should anyone have observed him at that moment they would have seen a man walking alone down a deserted street, dressed in a dinner suit and windbreaker, grinning.
