by Jean McNeil
I tell the comms manager I need access to Nara’s files. I say there are some research facts I need to check.
‘I don’t know where they are,’ he says. ‘But you’re free to rummage around on the old drives. She would only have put her public files there, but you can try.’ He gives me a quizzical look. ‘You’re not doing this as a make-work project, are you. I mean, given the news.’
‘I meant to do it all along. I just didn’t think I would have time.’
I file through the old drives, the archived music, field assistants’ reports, winter trip reports, inventories of equipment in the sledge store, lab reports, drafts of projects. Then, buried within a file unhelpfully titled ‘Science’, a directory with her name. The folders inside are all about experiments: CO2 uptake, carbon uptake, CTDs, Sea-Squirts, Chemical Analyses, Mass Spectrometer and Experiment Design. In a folder labelled ‘home’ I find a file. I try to open it, but it is password-protected. I ask the comms manager. ‘Nothing I can do,’ he says. ‘Unless you know the password, that is.’ I try various passwords, but none of them work. Why should they? I know so little about her – not her mother’s maiden name, the name of her first lover. Nothing which might unlock the key to her existence, never mind any random combination of numbers and letters she might have used. Then I think of something, out of the blue, and try the word: polargirl2012. The file blossoms into life.
It is called Wintering.
2
At the lookout point over Charcot Bay three plain crosses marked the deaths that had happened on base. Two were for a Canadian-crewed Twin Otter which took off too heavy and failed to clear an iceberg in North Cove. The third cross marked the sea-ice incident. There were no bodies underneath, buried in Antarctic shale. The bodies were long gone, flown back to their home countries, or never found.
Helen and David stood looking out into the bay. A beam of sun sunk under the horizon, tracing the edges of the glacier with a cold yellow.
‘She died somewhere out there.’ He pointed to the southwest, past Adélie Island. ‘The plane came down on the sea ice, which was breaking up at the time. The island is only fifteen miles away, but that’s fifteen miles over disintegrating sea ice. They took the RIBs, but by the time they got there it was too late. They couldn’t even find the body, although they dove for it.’ He paused. ‘I flew with her down to Ice Blue that summer, it must have been about six months before she was killed. We just happened to be on the plane together. She was going to input fuel, and I was on my way to see Mount Vinson for the first time. She was so – so thrilled. She was so enthusiastic, like a child. It reminded me of what I’d felt, my first few seasons down here.’
‘You don’t love it here anymore?’
He looked away, as if stung by her question.
‘It’s the simplicity of life here I like,’ David said, finally. ‘Deal with the cold, survive, do the job at hand.’ He paused. ‘Once you’ve known this life, you never forget it. It – it holds you, in some way. It’s like a marker you measure the rest of your life by.’
They turned their eyes back into the sun and Helen felt the pull of the horizon: thinking, now the sun will sink, now, now, now. But the sun remained in the sky, stalled just above the horizon, hovering over a sea greasy with congealed ice. Mountain, ice, water, sky; and those unnameable colours: lava, tangerine, mauve and another colour, nameless, between rotting plums and black – the black-purple of dog’s gums, or embers in the middle of fires, when they have burnt low.
The sun will be extinguished. Only animals, burrowers, hibernators, will survive. Raptors – hawk-eyed animals: eagles, owls, lions. They tell me this. At night they appear on the dark screen of my eyelids. The world will be only glittering snow and cold, ice. Cold stars in the sky, their dazzling silver light, like swords. Dark horses graze into a starved future.
This is what the planet was saying, Nara wrote. The voices she heard only very rarely spoke in words, but when they did she transcribed their message in the Wintering file.
David appeared in the doorway of the unoccupied laboratory Helen had taken as her office. He found her staring at the computer. When she saw him, she changed the screen.
‘They’ll pull us out of here before winter. Don’t worry.’
‘You sound worried,’ she said. ‘That’s what worries me most of all.’
‘What are you writing?’
‘Oh just – just notes.’
‘I won’t try to read it.’
‘You could read anything here, if you wanted to.’
He gave her a steady look. ‘Maybe, but I don’t want to.’
‘I found a file,’ she said. ‘Nara’s file. A sort of diary, although interspersed with work notes, with experiment observations, weather observations.’
‘And what are you getting out of it?’ He didn’t say: of your spying. That’s how he classed reading other people’s diaries, even if they were dead. And he knew a thing or two about spying.
‘Did you know she heard voices?’
‘Whose voices?’
‘Not people’s. The planet – she believed the planet was speaking to her.’
He nodded, but said nothing.
‘Maybe she really heard them,’ Helen pressed on. ‘Perhaps it was real.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the planet doesn’t speak.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Do you know how many people suffer from depression and anxiety in an Antarctic winter? Over half. If they all said the planet was speaking to them, would you believe them?’ David shook his head – slowly, again a gesture more of regret than disbelief. ‘It just isn’t possible.’
‘Do you always need to be certain in order to believe?’
‘Believing in something is serious, you know. It’s a serious matter. If you get it wrong, you can lose everything. Even your mind. Look at what happened to…’ he stopped. ‘To her.’
She thought he would leave, then. But he didn’t – he stayed in the door, a lean, tall figure in moleskins, regulation fleece, woollen socks fraying around the edges. He flinched.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Electric shock. I’m getting tired of zapping myself.’
‘I know, I’ve never had so many electric shocks in my life – here, on the ship. I notice I hesitate before touching metal now.’
‘The charge builds up,’ he said. ‘There’s hardly any moisture in the air, there’s nowhere for it to go.’
‘Doesn’t it bother you, this – ’ she threw her arms open, ‘this confinement?’
‘Yes it bothers me. Meanwhile everyone else out there in the world, that’s all they want, safety, at any cost. People will give up almost anything in order to be safe.’
‘I don’t want safety at all costs.’
She found he was looking at her. There was something of the intellectual in his gaze, the cold thrust of fact. He was like a doctor, or a psychiatrist, this man. One of those men who was evaluating you, always one beady eye tuned toward your flaws. He had the arrogance of knowledge. He expected to be consulted, to be deferred to, he expected to dispense reassurance but it would be of the barbed-with-truth variety, it would never be fully reassuring because he was too avid for the facts, for the point. She wanted to say, don’t you know that all emotion and thought – anything that was worthwhile about human life – lives between these points. Life took place between peaks of facts. Life took place in troughs, in hollows.
An hour later David sits in one of the old pitrooms which serve as telephone booths. The room’s only decoration is an ice axe hanging by a single nail on the wall. He thinks, well, if I can’t take it anymore there’s always the ice axe.
In front of him, the telephone twitches. He finds he can’t pick it up.
He is not thrilled about being kept here, but neither is he anxious, devastated, desperate to leave. He is beginning to suspect he may have been handed a piece of luck.
Alt
hough what is luck? There wasn’t much of it in the annals of polar exploration; at best it was an elusive substance. In normal life, away from the flare of the great ice-fields, it was like a clock; it ticked along, soundlessly. Once every while it chimed a floating hour, and life became an aqueduct of dreams. But he distrusted this – that happiness seemed only a substance to be hoarded, then savoured when it was withdrawn. Life was very rarely graced with happiness, David believed; apart from that, happiness was exactly like luck: it had very bad timing, present at the precise moment when you are least likely to be aware of it and absent when it is most needed. These gruesome emotional mathematics held him in their spell, because he was a descendent of his great-grandfather’s luck, a disciple of his survival.
He tells his wife about his week, she tells him about hers. They speak about events, not thoughts or feelings. Kate never asks David about the people he was stuck with – that was how she put it, stuck with – and he never mentions anyone directly by name. Instead he refers to them by their job titles: the base commander, the boatman, the historian.
Kate has never been jealous. They were of the same tribe, that of the effortlessly confident, who knew that their existence was approved of by the universe. If something were to rupture this fantasy, their anger and disappointment would be as huge and neverending as the wind. He is afraid of his wife. Yes, he fears her, because she is him. They are the same creature.
There’s more than one way to starve. Helen had said this, on the ship, months ago now, when they were talking of Elephant Island. And it struck him so bluntly at the time that he promptly forgot about it, until this moment.
He is certain now that Helen has had to overcome something enormous, she has had to cut herself off from joy. A small woman, possessed of a certain vigour, the body of a twenty-five-year-old even in her early forties. This is where David placed her – late thirties, early forties, a tumbledown age when the weeds are starting to gather but have not quite invaded the flower patch. She might yet have a second blooming, and turn her face toward the sun.
What else has he noticed about her? She wears dramatic bracelets more like armour than decoration, chunky rings that if properly employed would be like a set of brass knuckles. Her voice has a Scottish tinge, and indeed she comes from Edinburgh, originally, although she told David she had lost her accent, or toned it down to the extent that it was only a lilt snagging on certain vowels.
All this she’d told him on the ship. They’d spoken little since coming to base. Ships were good for trading confidences, but somehow being on land deterred them. On the ship Helen had told him she came from a bad-luck family. They had lost all their property, they were squanderers, she told David, biting on the word. They were stupid and unlucky and she feared she had inherited this trait, much as you would inherit a gene.
He had been on the edge of asking her if she would like to have a drink in his cabin. He imagined removing her jewellery, as if divesting her of the arguments she might use against him, running his hands along her fragile ribs.
But then he had gathered himself, fortified by both the memory and idea of Kate, and by his discomfort with lies and secrets. He is not a man for mysteries, for secrets. He would never find himself under someone’s influence, or live a clandestine life. He would never have affairs. Women picked this up, as if hearing a homing signal, and immediately understood its value. Some woman or other had always wanted him.
Yes, if he had to lie to his wife, it would be akin to being seasick, for years to come. If he were going to sleep with Helen, he would have to first call his wife and tell her their marriage was over. That was the only way he would be able to do it, this thing people called betrayal.
His boss did not ring him that day, nor the next. On the rare days when the satellite dome was not covered in sticky snow, David tried to call himself, but no one picked up the private, unlisted emergency number he dialled. David knew this meant they had gone into crisis mode. Millions of British citizens, stranded around the world. It would be like living at the epicentre of an explosion – crisis lines, the internet gone down, people hysterical, ringing all the units, apart from the polar unit – or perhaps they were, and his deputy at this moment was taking Valium.
During the last pandemic he had slept at his office, they had been under lockdown. For three months he did not see Kate. His heart had been taut with anxiety, just as it was now. He yearned to be anchored again in that galaxy of wrath and privilege and proximity to knowledge and power, the sun from which he took his bearings. But most of all he wanted the world to stop spinning with death and distress. Skirmishes in airports, train stations. People hot with desperation, their saliva zinging between mouth and nose, microbes flourishing.
They were trying to contain something that was uncontainable. In those days David had often wished he had been stuck aboard a ship in the Arctic or in the Antarctic. But he’d been in London, preparing for the Arctic summer season, for VIPs, ‘melt tourism’ for ministers, flying over Greenlandic ice streams, over Svalbard’s glaciers, so that they could see the devastation of melt with their own eyes.
He missed the stilted, inadequate everyday life to which he had become accustomed and attached: his lukewarm marriage, his hair-shirt daily commute, lunches with his brother to hear what the future held, holding the painful knowledge at bay, that he was different from his family. He knew he lacked their supernatural fortitude. But why? It was something to do with the wild brazen hope that had sustained his great-grandfather, his ability to blinker fear and panic. Might not this hope, though diluted, run through David’s veins?
Here he is, trapped under the narrowing ellipsis of a winter sun, forced to spend the winter on a well-provisioned Antarctic base, hot water in the showers, three hot meals on the table every day, a warm bed to sleep in. His great-grandfather spent his nights on Elephant Island under an upturned rowboat with the stench from the penguin guano warmed by their bodies, and his only sustenance for months was barely cooked penguin steaks, their greasy flesh.
His great-grandfather would have felt his future dissolving in front of him. He would have had that day, and maybe the next. And after that, who knew? His future was only a dark, glistening animal, like the Orcas which had terrified them when they were stranded on the ice floes. Shackleton and his men felt the thud as they lay in hastily erected tents, trying to sleep on the unstable sea ice. The killer whales were trying to break the ice, so they could devour the men, whom they mistook for seals.
There were two ways to be in this world, David knew: you could be submissive, or you could be devouring. You could accept your fate or you could fight it every step of the way. You had to stand up to life as if to a bully; it was much more powerful than you, and your conviction and defiance were the only weapons you had. He intuited that Helen understood this, and possibly had always known it even before he did, protected as he had been by his vicarage upbringing, by the sanguine and durable marriage of his parents. How was it that he alone of all of his family, with all its Army majors, politicians, explorers, understood that fundamental truth of existence: that life was not what you lived, but the force that tried to kill you. It had to be faced down like a tiger on a dark jungle path.
She found David in the dining hall, making himself a cup of tea.
‘You’re not going to ask me what’s really happening, are you? Because I don’t know.’
‘No,’ she said. Although in fact, she had been about to ask him just this question.
A silence followed, the only sound his spoon banging against the cup.
‘Have you told – people at home, yet?’ he asked.
‘Yes. But – they’re busy looking after themselves. I don’t think they’ve even noticed I’m gone.’
‘You’re not married?’ This question had taken him six weeks to utter, although he had wondered many times. She wore no ring, but then many people didn’t, these days.
‘I was married.’
‘You’re divorced?’
&
nbsp; ‘Widowed.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ David wore an expression she had not seen before – sympathy, perhaps, or concern. It sat, lopsided and slightly uncomfortable, on his face.
‘He died during the pandemic.’
‘Oh, God. But you didn’t get it?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘That’s lucky.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Although I didn’t see it that way at the time.’
‘What did you do – afterward?’
‘Well, I had to be tested, although I wasn’t with him the last week of his life.’
‘You weren’t?’
‘No, he was – elsewhere. So.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘And then three years passed. I thought time had stopped, but actually it had kept going, all along, with me in it.’
Of those years, there was so much she would not say. They were too recently the past and not quite over. She could have asked David the question that those years had taken her to pose, although never answer: we know how to live, or we think we do, but do we know how to die? We only find out in the doing of it.
In the past three years death had become part of her life, and the possibility of it was suddenly everywhere. She had to step back from Tube trains, she found, lest the urge to hurl herself onto the tracks overcame her. Lorries hurtled by her as she crossed the road, and she had to force her step faster to avoid them. Death was so available, sometimes she had the impression it sat down with her to dinner.
She saw he was looking at her intently. ‘What did you do?’ he asked. ‘I mean, for work?’
‘I decided to write another book,’ she said. ‘I began to look around for a subject that would take me as far away a possible – off the earth, preferably. I wanted to write about something extreme. Man-eating saltwater crocodiles in Australian estuaries, suicide bombers, jihadi training camps. You name it.’
