by Jean McNeil
‘I always find it a relief, to smell anything,’ Luke replied. ‘The minute I step out of the plane in the Falklands, the smell of the grass – it just hits you, as soon as you open the door. I never knew grass smelled so wonderful.’
She stopped to smell the wind; now she could only smell the familiar empty flint of the Antarctic. ‘Why do you think there are so few smells here?’
‘It’s a pretty antiseptic environment. Nothing grows. But you don’t even smell the seals when they calve, the blood, or the salt in the sea.’ He stopped beside her, squinting into the sun. ‘Let’s have a seat,’ he said. The day was brilliant. The shoreless sea around the Point sizzled with melt. Dark granite rocks absorbed the sun until they were warm enough to sit on. Icebergs lolled in the bay, eroded by a summer of melt into fragments. Soon they would be frozen in by sea ice.
As soon as they had sat down they were startled by the sound of the explosion. A small iceberg only a few feet away popped and turned over, displacing a group of blue-eyed shags, which bolted into flight at the sound. With her eyes she followed their confident strokes, their long, thin necks straining.
‘I love to watch them fly,’ he said. ‘They’re so committed.’
‘Will they head north now?’
‘Yes, they’ll be gone for the winter, to the islands north of the peninsula.’
‘You must be looking forward to seeing your family,’ she said.
‘I am, yes.’
They looked out toward Pinero Island, the sun painfully sharp on the water. The tide of ice rose and fell on the gyre, ice scraping against the rocks, then clinking its withdrawal.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I think the most exciting thing in life is discovering that someone else is attracted to you. I think that’s by far the most exciting thing that can happen to you, don’t you?’
‘More exciting than flying?’
‘Oh – so much more.’
He waited for her to say something, and she knew he was waiting.
They sat reclining among the rocks, hands clasped behind their necks for support, Weddell seals basking around them, their torpid, cinder-coloured bodies, listening to the wash of the bay, a distant breathy sigh of wind, the crack as icebergs expanded with the heat of the day, on this unnaturally warm and clear day, so late in the season.
The peninsula was warming twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet, apart from swathes of Greenland, and the boreal forests of Canada and Siberia. This had been known for ten years, now. For Nara, this knowledge had always been with her, through school, university, her doctorate. She was too young to remember a time when the earth had been in a perfect equilibrium, the ice sheets stalled immensities, when Greenlandic hunters did not go hungry.
She said so to Luke.
‘I’ve been to Greenland,’ he replied. ‘I flew a season there once, in the summer. I remember I met an old Inuit hunter who I uplifted from a place up north. He’d gotten stuck on the sea ice, for the first time in his life. It was too thin and it had caught him unawares. When he asked me my name – he didn’t speak much English – he misheard me and went around calling me “Luck”. I said, that’s a good name, maybe I’ll keep it.’
She laughed. But Luke looked pensive. ‘The old man told me that there is no such thing – he said, what you white people call luck is actually the secret arrangements of the spirits. His nephew had been killed in a helicopter accident, he told me, the year before. His body and the helicopter were both entombed in a frozen fjord. He said that was the doing of the spirits. They decided everything, including whether a winter would see starvation or plenty.’ He turned to look at her. ‘It’s quite a thought, don’t you think? That the spirits are at this very moment listening to our conversation, coming to their shadowy decisions about our futures?’
He didn’t give her time to answer. He stood, pointing to his watch. ‘We’d better get back, special dinner tonight and all.’
They rose and headed back to base.
That night a farewell dinner was held for the pilots who would fly the Otters out the following day. For dessert they had ice cream with fresh mango – a first on base. The base chef had requested a crate of mangoes and Luke had flown them in from the Falklands himself. They had come from the rainforests of Brazil, via Montevideo, then to the Islands, then down to their lonely base at the bottom of the peninsula.
The taste – sweet, thick, with an undertone of bitter wood – when had he last tasted that? He remembers sharing a mango with his wife in Arniston. They went to that windswept village one Christmas, its Cape Dutch cottages, bone-white in the bleached sun of the southern ocean. She peeled the quadrants, offered them to him, her fingers dripping with juice. He remembers the months they spent on that lonely cape, shuttling between Cape Town, Hermanus, Struisbaai, Arniston, Mossel Bay, one white compound to another. His wife had grown up in post-Apartheid South Africa, in a family made wealthy by mining. Every few weeks they would move; she had the bored discontent of rich people everywhere, looking for opportunity, always, business opportunities, romantic opportunities (although he did not know that then), for the next thing that would vault her into pleasure and intrigue. When their marriage ended, his shock was total, because he had never seriously considered another woman, and yet he was the one who ended up alone. Why did life do that – reward the sinners? He had never thought in those terms before: saints, sinners. He was uninterested in guilt, retribution, judgement.
They should have stayed in South Africa, that is what he thinks now. He could have earned his living flying tourists up to the safari camps of Limpopo, Kruger, even Botswana, Namibia – those other deserts of Gondwanaland. He would have been at home more, he could have kept an eye on things. Year after year he had gone back, spending five months away from his family, keeping in touch by email, by Iridium phone. He could not shake it from his mind, his dreams. He had been dazzled by the continent, sucked in by its white-cold eye.
That night the voice woke her.
What?
It was calling her, although not by name, from a long way away. The voice erupted from a cloud of static, as if she’d left a radio on in the room on an unoccupied frequency and someone had begun broadcasting.
She was moving through a wood-panelled room, somewhere hot. The voices were there. She was with two other women, strangers, and she said: can you hear them? No, said the other women – girls, she saw, on closer inspection. They might not be more than twelve years old.
Who are they?
The voice said, They’re dead. But don’t be afraid.
Yes, it was a dream, then. She was not awake, after all. She strained, listening for more. Then she heard a thumping sound, like a heartbeat.
The next morning she went to the Communications Officer in the control tower.
‘I’ve heard the atmosphere makes noises,’ she said. ‘Can I hear them?’
‘Sure.’ He was an eager type, this man. He clapped a pair of headphones onto her ears. ‘Listen to this, I recorded it last night. The sun is low enough in the sky to hear the ionosphere now.’
He turned the dial on the digital recorder, and she heard the familiar hiss of the HF radio. She heard static, but also a pattern of blips and bleeps that were unmistakeably electrical. After a while the static began to pulse, like a heartbeat. She listened to this empty fuzz, hoping to hear the voice she had heard in the middle of the night leap from it, until a voice burst in, an Argentine Ham radio operator. Nara listened to the rough Spanish for a while, then translated for the communications manager. ‘He’s saying, “First you take the B-road, the 109, then you turn right at Comodoro Rivadavia and drive for twenty kilometres? Got it?”’
It was gone, the heartbeat in the wilderness.
The next day Luke flies up to Stanley and returns in the same day. No mangoes in the cargo this time, just a few drums of avtur and the last delivery of fresh fruit and vegetables the winterers will see until October, seven months away.
The last Point of No
Return of the season is a milestone to be marked, and is called over the tannoy. They troop, as one, to watch the plane make a rare night landing, which is also the last time they will see the Dash land for eight months. So much of life on base is about this, now – the rituals of leaving and ending, and looming abstinences: the last banana, the last cucumber. It feels as if they are all about to walk the plank. And they are, in a way; in the Antarctic, winter is a door which, once closed, cannot be prised open.
The plane appears first as two sparks under a black sky, the four overwing lights piercing the darkness. Behind it, snow-capped mountains, mute with solitude. The runway lights are lit for the last time in the season; in two days’ time they will be covered with old oil drums. Drifts will accumulate around them during the winter, in windscoops, cornices.
The charcoal runway gravel, the striped sky, the steel mountains, the sudden appearance of the four wing lights, like four powerful stars, the plane framed against Adélie Island coming in heavy and slow, the methodical workhorse plane it is – suddenly she knows she has loved it here, at times, that this is her life: now, and here, and there can be no other.
She watches the plane land against a sunset of mauve, purple, scarlet. The feeling, watching the plane buzz to a stop, is indescribable. The rush of thrill, the pride she feels as it lands, knowing Luke is flying.
She sees Luke emerge from the fuselage. The return of a friend is not the same as the return of a lover. Still, his return feels like salvation; it feels like he has been gone forever.
They cleared sight of base, turning the corner at the north end of the Point, and stopped to admire the view. It was a moody, dark evening, a sky of brushed steel.
Only a week before they had sunned themselves on the rocks. It was cold now, from the lack of sun, and from night, which was claiming more and more time, a dark stain seeping over the peninsula. The cold had changed from being merely cold – a dry, invigorating chilliness – to a biting, wanton substance.
‘Now that it’s here, winter, I’m not sure how I feel about staying,’ she ventured.
‘You just have to get through it. You have to enjoy every moment of it, if possible. Think about it, how many people get to do what you are doing? In the future, you’ll look back on this year and it will seem like the most intense and exciting time in your life. No matter what happens, you’ll only remember the good parts.’
‘I remember you saying that, at the beginning of the season. That somehow you remember only the good.’
‘It’s true, you’ll see.’ The smile he gave her was different; embedded in it was a new note of reassurance.
‘Are you glad to be getting away?’
Luke answered with a small, subdued laugh. ‘I never know how I feel, leaving base at the end of the season. Every year I wonder what it would be like to leave for good.’
‘What else would you do?’
He shrugged. ‘Fly for someone else.’ He looked at the ground, knocked one Rigger boot against the other. When he looked up again, his face had a new expression, hard and unswerving, staring down the horizon. ‘Every year I feel I’m tempting fate by doing another season. That there is only so long you can go before something gives way, either luck or judgement or both.’
He walked on ahead, slipping from time to time on the rime that covered the loose shale of the shoreline. He had the absent, distracted air of someone who was leaving soon. He was slowly fading out, like a still frame at the end of a film. They might email, she supposed, if he were the writing type. They might talk on the phone once in a while, so she could tell him how the winter was going – sporadic, friendly contact. Not sustaining, not electric.
They came to a stand on a small rocky promontory. She had never seen cloud come so close to the land. At times there was only a stripe of blue, or luminous white, a thin ribbon between its grey overhang and the sea.
She shivered, involuntarily. ‘I can’t believe how the weather has changed.’
They finished their walk in an uncertain silence. They arrived at the tagging board, and moved their tags from ‘Around the Point’ to ‘On Base’. He moved their tags for both of them while she signed them in on the computerised logbook.
‘There’s something I want to show you. Wait just a sec, I’ll be back.’ When he returned he was carrying his laptop and a bottle of Spanish red wine, a little plastic bull dangling from its neck.
They sat in the Air Unit office. He opened his computer and started to click through folders. Images paraded past: ice, snow, plane, mountain, ice, snow, plane, mountain, and came to rest on a single photo – a helicopter, mangled in the snow.
‘What’s this?’
‘The helicopter off the Resolute. They had an accident last year, near Bluefields. They were flying and lost their vis, two Navy pilots. Easy enough to happen.’
‘Have you ever lost visibility in the planes?’
‘A few times. Helicopters are more unstable than planes, though. They’re more manoeuvrable, but you’ve got less control.’
‘You fly them too?’
‘Used to. I loved them. They’re like toys, you can make them do almost anything.’ The photo gallery froze on an image of Luke next to a Twin Otter. Behind him was a grey-white murk.
‘Weather looks terrible,’ she said.
‘It was. I flew one of the Otters over, picked them up, and flew them to Midas. The doctor stabilised their condition. Then I flew them here, and out to Punta on the big plane.’
The photos slid into each other: more flat grey snowfields, evidence of poor contrast, eventually presented to the Ministry of Defence, the two pilots in their uniforms, bandaged and on stretchers, one with a broken leg, their arrival at Midas, the medevac flight from a stormy base, the Araucaria trees and dingy sheds of Punta Arenas.
‘They had a lucky escape. The planes were still on base, but only just. We were due to fly out for the winter in a week’s time.’
For a moment Nara wondered why he was showing her all this – to impress her, to confer upon her an understanding, in advance of her first Antarctic winter, how she had entered into a stark terrain of life and death, where anything was possible.
A figure appeared outside the window. In the darkness, she could just make out the profile. Alexander was looking at something – the moon perhaps, just risen. He would have been unaware of the light coming from the office behind him. He stood fixedly, as if at attention. She knew this stare of his, rivetted, unnatural. It was one of the first things she noticed about him in the Islands. She envied him his self sufficiency. She had been too much alone and she craved the company of people. On the ship, when they were both on the observation deck, she went over to the railing, where he stood in his contemplative posture staring into the ice, and asked him to read the ice for her. He did, but after a few minutes he went away, saying he would be back, but he did not return. She tried to copy his invincibility but after a while she became self-conscious. She looked too much like a woman waiting for a man who would not return.
‘His heart is locked away.’
She was not sure she had heard Luke correctly.
‘You won’t get it,’ he said. ‘No one will, probably. I’m a man. I know,’ he said.
‘You know what?’
‘I know. I just know – men like that.’
‘Because you’re just like him? You set someone up, then punch them in the face. Because you have no heart?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I hope not.’ Luke pursed his lips. ‘Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. You don’t know why the other person doesn’t respond, or wants to take another path. In any case there is no why. You just have to accept it and move on.’ He paused. ‘I don’t know, he seems –’ ‘I know what he seems.’
They sat in silence, then, swilling wine in their glasses, not looking at each other.
‘I just can’t stand to see you – waste yourself.’
Nara flinched at the word. ‘What do you mean, waste?’
‘Yes, as in go to waste: your kindness, your experience, your love. Your body.’
Something in the way it emerged from his mouth – fatherly, disinterested, yet with a trill of the sexual underlying it – caused a faint disgust to flicker through her.
Luke put down his wineglass. She watched him stand: lean frame, dark hair, although greying now at the edges. A serious, intelligent face, angular, moody and changeable. She had seen this man every day for four months, with his trousers of many pockets, capable shoes, a trainer/hiking boot hybrid all the pilots seemed to wear and which squeaked in the waxed corridors of the base, his forearms muscled and weathered from the sun, the platinum watch on his wrist.
She had never known anyone like Luke before, she might never know his like again. But she had not given him what he wanted. Perhaps it would not have been so much to yield.
‘Keep this.’ He handed her the plastic bull with the little flag of Cataluña tied round its neck, yellow with thin red stripes. ‘For luck.’
She told him that she would miss him.
In return he said, ‘Goodnight.’
The Air Unit office was his domain, not hers. But she sat there anyway, long after his departure, turning the plastic bull over and over in her hands.
It is winter now. All around the continent the ice tightens its grip. Beneath the surface, winter water is collecting in thermodynamic colums of vertical mixing; threaded through them is a deep layer of very cold surface water.
As water cools, it gels on the surface. Hydrostatic pressures are higher on the floating ice shelves, and this lowers the freezing temperature of the water, and the ocean below the ice shelf deepens its frost. Deep in the ocean, far beneath the continent, Antarctic bottom water churns, dense, depthless, blind with blackness. The Antarctic icefield is a self-reinforcing system: land, water, air – they all depend on the ice. Ice makes more of itself, becomes more itself. In becoming, its being is strengthened. The pack forms.
