by Jean McNeil
Water is slow: the Antarctic circumpolar waters circulate the world oceans every one thousand years, creating velocities of cold, eddies, thermal columns which govern the great currents of the oceans – the Gulf Stream, the Humboldt – and which affect the planet’s climate. In this process, the sea ice is key; it acquires structure through sinews of ice crystals, it melds, binds into a static ice scuplture garden.
Less is known about the continent, its processes, its intents, than anywhere else in the world, apart from the deep oceans. It is a cold terrestrial moon, another planet, this cold node of the known world.
The day of the plane’s departure was overcast and cold. Nara walked over to the plane alone along the gravel path leading past the accommodation block and across the runway.
She found Luke in the hangar, supervising the payload, calculating fuel. She watched as they loaded the plane. She said goodbye to the summer base commander, to the Met man, who had left his five-day forecast behind for the winterers, pinned to the flight map. After that they would have to predict the weather for themselves.
Luke emerged from the fuselage. He was wearing his orange ventile jacket, the one he had worn in their days in the Ellsworths. He had told her how this jacket had been invented during the Second World War, how it had saved the lives of Allied pilots who crashed in Greenland, in Iceland. ‘That’s its genius: the wind passes through you, but you don’t feel it.’
Now he said, ‘I almost want to say, if you need anything, let me know.’
‘I know, but you can’t help me, here.’
‘No, I can’t.’
The chief pilot was calling him from within. Luke turned to her. His expression was difficult to read: ecstatic, but grave; a grain of regret, but also the happiness of release.
He said, ‘I’ll see you in October.’
She nearly said goodbye, but at the last minute caught herself.
The door is closed with a groan more human than mechanical, and the plane’s propellers start to chop at the air slowly at first, in fits and starts, then building to a smooth rotation. The plane remains on the apron, all four propellers spinning, the plane trembling while the pilots run through their checklist and speak to Stanley on the HF for the latest weather. Then the plane begins to move, tentatively at first, as if it has not yet decided to leave. It taxis to the southern edge of the runway where it executes a deft, balletic turn, and lines up at the end of the airstrip, where it stands, its trembling now a shudder. A roar, and gravel spews as it charges. It is already flying when it passes the hangar apron. When the plane has cleared the icebergs in the cove it climbs sharp, then banks right to turn around the peninsula where it disappears, hidden by the hill back of base. When it reappears it is flying low for the traditional fly-by past the comms tower. At the height of the laboratory roof it comes back over the runway, the propellers whipping the dust. Behind her the cook says, holy fuck. Just at the moment when the plane’s position seems untenable, when gravity is about to reach up to snatch it, the pilots climb and the plane soars over their heads. She sees the pale underbelly of the fuselage, hears the roar of the propellers as they chew the air above her. A single shaft of silver sun breaks through the clouds and flashes off the fuselage. The silver slash stays with it as the plane journeys upward and begins to be consumed by cloud. She watches as these points of silver light congeal in her mind, absorbing their negative radiance, the grey of clouds, lead and pewter dispersing, until she is only looking at a place in the sky where the plane had been.
PART V
Wintering
1
Life began in burning ice and biting flame. In the south, Muspell was fiery. The fire shone all day and all night. Only those who are born to it can endure the heat. Niflheim is in the north. It is an icy realm, swept by vast currents of snow, gelid rivers, frozen lightning.
Between these two realms lies Midgard. Here it is mild, warm, a perpetual summer’s evening. In Norse myth, these tepid latitudes were where most people lived, and were built for – neither in fire nor ice but a pleasant if undramatic realm between. But Midgard is sickening, becoming violent in its moods, driven by erratic currents.
The first sign was the rubbish. It accumulated, fermented and stank. Initially I thought: it’s no worse than a strike, a protest over working hours. So we have to live with house arrest, it might last a month, two months. But viruses could, theoretically, travel on air. Or anyone who came to visit your house, any friend or official bearing advice. And so we had to seal ourselves in with tape, and commit to not opening a door until we were told it was safe.
I watched the plants on my balcony wither, yellow, droop, then die. I stood so many times, water bottle in hand, my hand on the sliding balcony door. Only the vision of myself in a hospital bed, or worse, at home in my own bed, putrid, bloated and decomposing, stopped me from opening it.
The dog owners had a dilemma. I saw them, sometimes, in the wedge of gritty green that passes for a park in front of my flat. They wore little white masks and looked around them, constantly, as if they could spot it coming. The dog owners, once so willing to share tips and observations, to let their dogs sniff each other, became tense when another approached. They backed themselves up against trees and looked the other way.
After a few weeks the dog owners stopped coming to the park and this stiff choreography ceased. Perhaps, all over London, dogs were spontaneously combusting, unable to hold in anymore the shit and piss and energy which drove them to tear back and forth across playgrounds and parks.
Plague Ground – a sub-editor’s triumph. Next to the headline was a photograph of a deserted swingset. Playgrounds had become incubators of disease. The parents, sitting on a park bench, watching their children scramble through jungle gyms, slide down the metal sliding board. Everyone smiling and laughing as the sun glints off the slide, silver and sure, more throb than light.
A virus has a brain, an engine, a black heart. As for its DNA, the normal rules of sickness and sickening, tried and tested on so many vulnerable bodies, plashy and defenceless as the fens that were at the same time being inundated by the rising sea, did not apply. The backwards logic of this particular sickness meant that if you were young and healthy you were more likely to die, the middle-aged and even the elderly sometimes survived, because the virus overwhelmed the young body more quickly, spurred on by the vitality of youth. The body was so eager to pass it on, eager to be an accomplice in its own destruction.
Airports shut, the wispy contrails disappeared from the sky, as did the familiar whine of aeroplanes powering down over London as they took their place in the landing queue for Heathrow. I missed that sound, of hydraulics, the groan as the plane’s bellies slit open and landing gear dropped down, more than I ever would have believed.
The signs of the unravelling came in November 2012; they were small and at first indirect: a sudden lack of fresh milk in the supermarkets, then the almost instant disappearance of UHT milk. Mothers with young children had official priority at supermarket queues, which began to be staffed by police, or, in some cases, Territorial Army reservists. At the beginning I would walk into a supermarket and see it invigilated by people in combat fatigues and camouflage patiently helping an old woman with her shopping trolley, and reassure myself that this was a good sign, this was quite normal, considering.
The first defections came from the ambulance crews and the paramedics. Even though they had received doses of retrovirals, and had priority for preventative and curative treatments, they got sick, and died, one by one. The virulence of the virus’ communicability was plain. Next were the front-line medical staff, the immigration officers, the police. Once they saw their colleagues sicken and die within a matter of days they too thought twice about turning up for work, Hippocratic oath or no. Calls for volunteers were put out; those who answered them were deemed suicidal. Their families deserted them, they were shunned by friends. They too – over 70 per cent of them, the official figure – died.
It won�
��t happen to me. It will happen to someone else. As it turns out, we are simply not very good at imagining our own deaths, we refuse to believe in them. We kept going to work; there we were on the Tube, ineffectual white masks over our noses and mouths, like an army of surgeons heading for the operating theatre, incubating viruses in canisters. Seven to ten days later, over half the occupants of a carriage where a carrier had been standing, would all be on respirators, ‘fighting for their lives’, as the free rags with their steady diet of celebrity and threat would later put it.
The fight was silent and almost invisible. They were unconscious while the virus wended its way through their bodies, attacking organs systematically: liver, lungs, kidneys. Then the hospital staff stayed away, there were no more respirators, and people too ill to walk crawled to hospitals only to lie down in cold corridors and die.
In more organised and stalwart countries, things were better. The scenes of chaos and cowardice were not as common in Germany or France, with their relatively dispersed populations, their better-ordered systems of authority. Where had the fighting spirit of the British people gone? What about we shall fight on the beaches? Commentators wrung their hands; we had become a mercenary nation, in thrall to profit and fear. Then began the large-scale desertions of those who were employed to save lives, the looting, the random attacks, the failure of public transport and other essential services.
We were confined to my flat, Eric and I, secure in our cocoon of automated systems – internet, telephone, television, heating, electricity – feeding off the stockpile of food and water which I had dutifully created after the first warnings of the coming epidemic.
I busied myself with ordering my boarding passes alphabetically by country, so that I could see all the places I had travelled to over the previous years, places I might never see again. I put all the books on my bookshelves in alphabetical order and straightened them on the shelves, tugging their spines into a neat procession as I had been taught to do the summer I worked in a bookshop as a student. I invented a game for myself in which I would plunk my finger on a place-name in the back of my world atlas, and then identify its latitude and longitude.
Eric was restless. He would say to me, ‘I have to go out.’
‘Go where?’ In the plague world there were no buses, no tubes, no planes, no cars.
One morning I woke up and Eric wasn’t at home. The door was unlocked. He left a note: out for a walk.
I panicked, but there was nothing I could do, no one I could call. He’d left his mobile behind. He will just go for a walk, I reasoned, and then he will come home. He will not pick up the virus floating on the air, it doesn’t work like that. You have to be in close contact with someone, in order to contract it. He will go for a walk and then he will come home.
We are supposed to reckon with our lives in these moments of fear and terror, to swear change, to take oaths, enter into elaborate pacts with deities that may or may not exist.
But I found I just wanted to go on living, as I had before the sickness. This was all I wanted. I wanted Eric home, his sweetness, the deep pleasure of his smell. As if my genes and cells could rest, next to him. But Eric did not come home.
We arrived on base four weeks ago, just before Christmas. My stay here should be over by now, my original departure date was to be tomorrow.
The news came from Cambridge, but within minutes we could have read it on the internet. The base commander called an emergency Sit Rep. The borders are closed, he said. No one can get in or out, anywhere. A spike in infections, most of them contracted on long-haul flights. There are fears that another pandemic will build again, three years after the initial scourge, but this time in spring and summer, when it will be harder to control, harder for people to stomach the necessary house arrest, holidays ruined, children driven mad by enclosure, rubbish accumulation. These fears cause every Western industrialised country to take drastic action.
The night we hear this, we are hushed at dinner in our cafeteria. We know what we have escaped: mob scenes in airports, panic. Although there are no cases in the Falkland Islands or southern Chile, the authorities there have also suspended entrances and departures. No one can get in and out. So we have to stay in the Antarctic, we are told, until someone figures out what to do with us.
I’ve had so much less time than I thought I would have for writing, for research. Because I’ve unwittingly joined the Army, I was required to do three days of field training, followed by a co-pilot trip down to King George Base, followed by a mystery stomach bug – there are no viral infections here, the air is too dry, the population too endogenous. I thought I would conduct interviews, but there is no one on base who knew her, apart from Luke, the pilot, and he has been flying off base during the weeks I have been here. Now this surprise of our enforced confinement and I can’t think. I am stunned by this turn of events. The claustrophobia is back, as if it has only been in remission these past three years.
After the base commander’s announcement I try to talk to David, but he has to make phone calls. I imagine he has some hotline to the prime minister’s office, and that he can press a button and eject us all out of here. I see little of David. I suspect he keeps himself apart from me, out of expediency. I’m not popular, or rather my motives aren’t, so why would he want to be seen as my confessor, my accomplice. Who knows what this writer will dig up? Who knows what confidences she will betray? She is a spy in a place where she does not know the rules, where she does not belong.
It is early February, and winter is just around the corner. ‘Winter comes fast in Antarctica,’ the base commander tells me. ‘Soon we’ll see night again.’
I don’t say, I can’t stay here, and list the reasons why: my flat, my plants, my friends, my mortgage. I don’t say, a winter in the Antarctic will ruin me. There’s no point saying any of this, because we are all in the same boat. The planes can’t leave, the ship which brought us here, the Astrolabe, is in dock in the Falklands, and is forbidden to leave. The British and Argentine navies are patrolling the waters, escorting cruise ships back to Punta Arenas or Stanley, where the ships and their inhabitants will sit in quarantine.
At dinner that night the plumber jokes, ‘Well, at least if we’re stuck here for the winter you can write your book.’ The panic in my stomach is so sudden, and so severe, I feel I will throw up.
I go to speak to the base commander. Gerry is given to reading poetry and philosophy. I see Stendhal on his reading shelf, next to Rilke. He sees me spying his books. ‘Lots of time to read down here, over the winter. I’m working my way through the classics.’ A steady, sensible type, Gerry is from Fort William in Scotland; a climbing-outdoorsy-kayaking sort of town, he tells me. He works the summers up there in an outdoor sporting centre and does the winters down here. He never sees winter, only summer in the north, followed by summer in the south. But this year he will spend winter in the Antarctic. Fort William is so warm now, he tells me, that the winter sports scene has all but shut down. No snow on the mountains means no challenge for the ice climbers, who now go to New Zealand, where the climate has been remarkably untouched by the global pattern of change.
I ask Gerry what he thinks will happen to us.
‘To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I talk to Cambridge about it every day, who talk to the FCO, who talk to the Falkland Islands Government, who say they want to maintain a shutdown. They could send the ship and put us all on it, but where would we dock? The ship can only carry food enough for all of us for thirty days. It’s a risk.’
‘And the planes?’
‘The planes are grounded. They are only certified to fly in Antarctica now, or to the Falklands.’
‘But if we all got on a plane and went to the Falklands, what would happen?’
‘Well, first of all, only sixteen of us can get on that plane at any one time. They might scramble a fighter plane from the military base, and force us to turn back. Although we’d probably have to land, by that point, there wouldn’t be enough fuel.
The Chileans wouldn’t allow us to land at Marsh, that’s for sure. They’ve been very accommodating, considering the political situation, but with a global influenza alert I don’t think they’d let us in.’
‘So you think the military would let us die, ditch in the ocean, before they’d let us land in the Falklands.’
‘No, I suppose not. They’d probably let us land, and then put us in quarantine.’ He pauses. ‘But tell me, would you rather be here, free to move about, to eat what you want, and safe from the virus, or would you rather be locked in a shed in a military base in the Falkland Islands?’
I don’t answer, because I am not sure what I feel or think. ‘And if we stay here?’
‘We have food here enough for a hundred people to last the winter.’
‘But we’re only fifty-six people.’
‘That’s right. That’s what I mean – contingency. We have enough food for twice our number, and it will get us through the winter, and then into next spring, when they could get a ship in.’
‘So you think that’s what they’ll do, then? Leave us here.’
‘I’m asking for your discretion. Don’t go broadcasting this around base. And it’s not as if I’m in the know, either – go and ask the FCO man. He likely knows more about what’s really going on than all of us combined. But yes, I think it’s their best option, and cheapest, too, by the way: to keep us here until things settle down.’
‘What about our civil rights? We’re being kept here against our will.’
‘I think you’ll find that civil rights have been suspended everywhere, and the human rights of people in the Antarctic is the last thing on anyone’s mind.’ He pauses. ‘It’s the safest place to be, in the world right now. Imagine that, we’re the envy of everyone, down here. We can go skiing, we have enough food at our fingertips. We’re our own little society, we generate our own solar power, we desalinate our water, we have our own sewage plant. And no one who is diseased is going to get here, to get at us. We’re safe.’
