by Jean McNeil
They sit in the bar. David is a bit drunk and drink makes him strident.
‘What do you expect to get out of this?’
‘Get out of it? You mean like resource extraction? Oil? Natural gas?’
‘I meant, for your career.’
‘I know what you meant.’
A silence. He is bewildered, rather than offended. He tries a different tack. ‘How did you become a writer?’
‘By accident.’
Why should she tell him that by thirty-five she’d put two abandoned careers behind her: a PhD in history, then journalism. Why should she tell him she is a person who leaves things unfinished, fundamentally a wayward character, fascinated by contradictions, accidents, ironies, bad luck, bad faith.
To the casual acquaintance, Helen would seem a high spirited character, good company, able to roll with the punches. But in reality she is a Russian doll; several selves collected within this outer carapace, each of them smaller, denser with loss. This was the heaviness, like a shadow in her eye. David was aware of it and like most people he shied away. He was unused to corroded characters, and so fascinated by them, too.
The more time he spends with Helen, the more he is aware of having to keep a complicity at bay. He hopes they will not sour to each other, as often happens – and so quickly – in these environments. Helen is the only person here who is on his level; he sees something of a comrade in her, a true adventurer overtaken by a papery existence, fighting her own destruction. He wonders if she feels the same about him. He knows he is not an easy person to like, remote as he is, detached, given to rituals of austerity. He is a runner, then sits in the sauna, he watches his cholesterol. He rarely drinks. No, he has never been one of those people others flock to, there has never been any admiring throng in his life, only his brother, a few close friends, his parents, his wife.
And Helen, perhaps. Romantic, penitent. Doing time for what sins, he doesn’t know.
It is this thought which prompts him to try again. ‘There’s nothing there,’ he says. ‘That’s the conundrum of the Antarctic. People love it, they are fascinated with it, but there’s nothing there.’
Helen rallies to the thought. ‘It’s like loving a ghost, then? Or a dead person?’
‘I suppose. Most people don’t see the point of giving yourself with little expectation of getting anything in return. These people have no business setting foot in the Antarctic.’
‘You think it’s misguided to ask for something back?’
‘People who think they should get something back, that you are somehow owed something in return for having given your heart – yes, I think that’s misguided. Or childish, at least.’
‘Look at what happened to Scott. He loved the Antarctic, so he expected it to be on his side, and it killed him.’
‘He killed himself, more like it, I think,’ David says. ‘It’s a risk; if you love someone or something enough, you can die.’
The ship saws to the side, pitching her into David’s shoulder.
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologises. ‘This is all a bit heavy. Seeing Elephant Island always has this effect on me.’
‘That’s all right.’ She pauses. ‘I think it would be a sobering sight even if you weren’t related to one of the survivors. I always thought, they must have been so relieved to have solid ground underneath their feet. Do you know that when they abandoned ship and formed what they called Ocean Camp, the ice-floe camp, Shackleton was so worried that the ice would give way at night, he ordered the dogs to sleep in their harnesses. He wrote down instructions on a piece of paper for what to do in case the ice broke up, and pinned it on every tent.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘I saw the notes,’ Helen says. ‘In the Shackleton Institute. They have the originals.’ The ink had faded to the colour of thin coffee, but she had been able to read them: muster point at the Boss’ tent; leave everything; save dogs, socks, provisions. The cook goes into the boat first.
David realises this woman knows far, far more than she lets on – about the Antarctic, its history, even his ancestor’s expedition, he supposes. She is an historian, after all, why wouldn’t she? And yet she has listened to him, never saying, I know that already.
They say goodnight, unsteadily. As they make their way to their cabins the ship lurches underneath them, the stairs rushing up to greet them, then rushing away, so they are sliding down the handrails more than walking They crash into the walls on either sides of the corridor. A groaning sound fills the ship as the hull scrapes against ice.
Helen woke, four hours later, in the middle of the night.
A foggy light filtered through the porthole – she had forgotten to close the nightshade. Now that there was no more night she would need to draw it down in order to sleep. Her throat burned, and she regretted the whisky. The ship’s air was very dry.
A chill shot through her. Helen said it aloud, then. What? An energy, very powerful, passed through her. As if she had been handed someone else’s rage.
In the dusk light as she dressed, she saw – or thought she saw – shadows in the mirror. A pair of eyes that were not her eyes. Hair, longer, darker than her own. There was something about a camera, a flash – someone was taking photographs of herself in the mirror. But when? It wasn’t happening now. And then a folding away, as if she had nudged open the edge of an envelope, only enough to see an outline of its contents, before it sealed itself again.
She was so shaken she had to sit down on the edge of her bunk. There was a shadow inside her, but it did not belong to her. It was a mocking, white, scalded rage. As if once released, it had never found anywhere to settle. All this time it had been looking for someone who was open to receiving it. She had never felt anything like it.
That night she spent on the bridge in the company of the Second Officer, who did not question her appearance on the darkened platform high above the ocean in the middle of the night. They sat together in an easy silence, watching the searchlights probe the dusk ahead of them for growlers, those near-invisible lumps of ice substantial enough to sink a ship, and which lurked just beneath the surface.
5
Nara and Alexander met across a dinner table at their hotel in the Falkland Islands, the same musty relic where Helen and David would stay one day in the shadowy rim of time we call the future.
She noticed him, not only for his looks, but because he stared at her. His stares were not searching, or teeming with interest, or even ordinarily judgemental. There was a dull, brutal quality to them, as if he were trying to decide what kind of treatment he would mete out. She stared right back, until he seemed to become aware of it, and averted his eyes.
The ship was delayed coming into port, and their group had several days to kill in the Falklands. They were all dazzled by the light, by daffodils in November, the seasons turned on their head, their sudden release from the encroaching northern hemisphere winter, at being tipped out at the bottom of the world into wafting clouds of yellow gorse.
The stern magic of the Islands astonished her. The capital, Stanley, had a Toytown charm with its white picket fences, its bright-coloured houses of painted corrugated iron. The sharpness of the white in the light, as if giant searchlights had been turned on overhead, setting up a pulsating beaming, ribbons of clouds in the sky, harried, windswept clouds – all this seemed familiar and exotic at once.
Nara and Alexander walked together out to the little airport where red Britten-Norman Islanders came and went, servicing outlying communities. There they found in the departure lounge a giant-scale map of the island. They looked at the jagged coastline, frayed and gouged with coves and fingers and islands brewing with sea lions.
They walked and talked, and she fell in with his long elliptical stride. There was something instantly familiar about his presence and spirit – it was even in his walk, the way his bones moved next to hers.
He talked easily about himself, without self-interest but with a willing spirit. Sh
e liked his lack of ceremony, and the bright alertness of his mind.
He told her he was from Devon. He had grown up in a large but not ostentatious house, an Aga in the kitchen, he said, with a fond irony – for his mother’s predilections, or his class, or the conventionality of it all, she didn’t know. He told her his father had been in the Army and that he was dead, killed in a mountain-climbing accident, and that the house was full of photographs of him. Every wall and every corner, he said, his voice wary and wry, like a shrine. Outside the shrine was a rose garden, not decorative but wild.
He was a glaciologist, travelling to the Antarctic on a post-doctoral fellowship. He would spend the winter of 2011–12 there to consolidate his research. Nara asked him what he might do, after the Antarctic, and he replied that he might want to take a job abroad, in Switzerland, or in the US; these were the two world leaders in glaciology. He said all this with a breezy complete optimism, so powerful that he began to take on a golden glow. There were people in the world like this, she knew – doors simply opened, as if on an electronic signal. These people would never know what it was like to scrape and scrape at brick walls until your fingers bled.
Alexander pointed into the sky. ‘Look, you can see Venus and Mars tonight.’ Mars hung low in the sky, to the southwest, a reddish, ceramic hue. Venus shimmered bright, it threw many times the light of any other star.
There was no light to blur the stars, there was no other land, for thousands of miles. For a moment she thought the lights moving across the sky were planes. But it was only the beam of satellites, and drifting clouds of stars. This was an empty quarter of the planet. Punta Arenas and the tip of Argentina and Chile to the west, and to the east, only random specs: South Georgia, Tristan da Cunha, St Helena, until Cape Town. Planes from Chile to Australia crossed the Pacific. South Africa was thousands of miles to the east. No one flew over the Antarctic because there was nowhere to land, in an emergency.
‘I miss seeing the lights of planes in the sky. Here there’s only the flight from Ascension,’ she said.
‘Don’t forget the military planes,’ Alexander added. Every day, a dank roar ripped through the skies, so loud Nara felt her ears were being torn open. The sound travelled through her; she could even feel its tear in her heart.
They walked through clouds of perfumed gorse, past banks of lupines, past the church with its sculpture of the four giant ribs of whales. The night glowed with a strange undertone, like the dark red of overripe strawberries.
They had done no more than walk under rough skies harried by rigid southerly winds, like tearsheets of corrugated iron. They counted ten shipwrecks in the harbour, rusting in the peaty waters. They read the plaques that spelled out the stories of individual disaster. Ships run aground, or abandoned, long interludes of war, of isolation. The copper water lapped against their sides, rusted to the hue of ceramics. DEFENDER and ENDURANCE were spelled out in white stones across the harbour on dull hills. These were the names of ships which came to rescue and protect the islands in a time of war.
‘Well, that’s one way to show your gratitude,’ Alexander said. He towered above her, wind running through his hair, fastened down with a knitted hat of some Scandinavian design, his windbreaker rustling, his mouth, normally a disdainful cast, erupting into a sudden smile.
They had walked on, sunglasses lowered against the glare of the sea, and the smell always present, fishy, peat, copper, the glitter of the southern Atlantic. Strange birds appeared in the undergrowth, lush geese with velvet heads. She saw brilliance in the dun, savaged hills, in the minefields, in the dirty, half-feral sheep that scrabbled away from the bankside on stick legs, crashing against the stark stone that littered the islands. This was no bitter landscape, but lush with flowers, and gorse, a reversed spring, penguins marching in their huddled armies on deserted white beaches and in tourmaline bays.
They had done all this together, and his presence was familiar and exciting at once. Only a week after meeting him, she felt that if he were to disappear from her side a cold rift would open up inside her.
‘Goodnight’ he said, and left her at her doorstep.
She opened the door to her temporary home, exhausted by the light, the ground they had covered, and by the knowledge that she was not alone at the end of the world.
The ship was called the Astrolabe, named for an instrument used by early astronomers to measure the altitude of stars and planets. Night disappeared somewhere at the bottom of the Drake Passage, after Elephant Island and the tabular icebergs, the exact stretch of ocean where Helen and David would one day salute his ancestor, darkness thinning to a solemn dusk between two and four in the morning. Nara slept only lightly. Every morning she rushed awake, rising buoyant up and up, as if from a depth chamber, harried by a strange zeal.
Everything about the icebergs astounded her. They easily dwarfed the ship. Some filled the horizon and she could not see where they began or ended. As the ship picked its way through them, she saw that their cobalt hems did not look like ice, but some harder substance: steel, or quartz. Depending on how the light fell, in the dusk of night the icebergs were not white at all but a rose pink or cement grey.
Nara and Alexander watched the ice citadels from their perch in the high deck engineers’ chairs in the lab at the rear of the ship. From here they had a nearly 360-degree view of the ocean, low enough to be eye to eye with the cape petrel and sooty albatross, the ship’s vigilant chaperones, with their hawkish unblinking eyes.
He was a keen climber, he told her, even though his father had died on a mountain. Sometimes he could taste the rock, he told her; through his sweat, or when he inadvertently licked it. His explanations were, like he himself, largely physical.
He told her about the equations which bound mass and gravity, driven deep into ice by parameters, by hypothetical elasticities. He was interested in thresholds, moments of poise which continue for centuries. The ice sheets flow, or hang back, strung on filaments of forever. They are too grandiose and slow, these processes, to be understood by humans.
The beginning of an ice age was like that of a hurricane, Alexander told her, only much, much slower. What he wanted to model was the moment before the forces gather, when the Caribbean Sea is ruffled by wavelets, and flying fish still ripple through silvered air. The moment before the storm attracts the attention of the fates, with all their rage and scores to settle and lives to erase.
It occurred to her that might be this, too: the moment before the storm. With one half of her being, she thought: I must avoid him. With the other half she thought: I love him. Or it was beyond thought, it was simply a reaction, much as the hydrogen and liquid react in the ice that scrapes against the hull of the ship to create something solid, if not particularly durable.
On the ship, when Alexander walked into her cabin, Nara had the sensation of the room being flooded with sun. When he left, the sun was extinguished and a cool light took up residence: this was the light of her soul, her being. It was the only light she could emit, a timid blue hue. But like the sun he was unstable. The light he threw gave the impression of constancy, but it was born of flarings, firestorms, dark ruptures. Not the kind of light that warms the soul, or promises understanding. Even as she understood this, she wanted that dark flare for herself.
The following day, they encountered pack ice for the first time. For a while, the ship was able to make headway. But eventually the floes nudged closer, then locked around the ship. One engine was kept running, as in port, and it hummed vague and distant. The only other sounds were the crack and sway of ice and the distant cries of birds.
Nara went to the bridge, where officers scanned the horizon for signs of dark water sky. Their charts show reefs, rocky underwater islands. In order to get to base they must thread their way between these reefs and the mainland. But the pack stood in their way. They were icebound – this was the term the officers use: stopped, or icebound. Never stuck.
The captain revved the engines, took the ship back, th
en rammed it forward. She heard a whine of hydraulics, then a rent – the sound of steel groaning – followed by a dull crash. She watched as the floe yielded a fracture, then another, moving aside sluggishly. But the ice stiffened in front of them, and the engines did not have enough horsepower to break through.
The captain ordered the ship stopped, so he could fill the steam compressors on either side. The ship listed to the right, then to the left. Sallying, the engineer yelled at her, above the roar of steam. They were sallying from side to side, nudging the ice open. Still the ice stayed fast, locked around them.
They were far south and night was already a relic of a past life. Now they lived only in the light. To look out onto the icefield from the bridge, even with its tinted windows, sent a searing pain into her corneas. Everyone had to wear their polarised glasses now, to avoid ice-blindness.
Nara and Alexander sat in her cabin and stared at the ice-field at midnight, one, two in the morning, as if keeping vigil. The cape petrels and albatross had disappeared. The ship felt abandoned without the birds, without the sound of water lapping against its hull. Seals, sleeping or drowsing in the midnight sun, were scattered like gleaming slugs across the icefield. They took no notice of the red and white monolith which had installed itself in their world.
The sun slunk along the surface of the floes. To the east they could see the unmistakeable tower and continuity of an ice sheet rising from the sea, and beyond it, mountains. The base where they were headed nestled on the other side of these mountains in a sheltered bay. It was only some forty kilometres away as the crow flies, but it might as well have been four hundred.
In her cabin, Alexander said, ‘I wonder how we’re going to get out of this.’ She had to manufacture the right note of alarm, in order to give him the impression that she, too, cared whether they escaped. She had found a stalled paradise on this ship, with Alexander, stuck in a white world which will not let them go.
In their stopped world, some of the officers became land-sick; a version of seasickness, because they were on a ship and not moving. Some were so nauseous they couldn’t eat. Everyone fell asleep at odd times, and stayed up all night. All Nara’s dreams became convoluted parables.
