by Jean McNeil
‘And your extremity of choice was the Antarctic?’
She had expected David to say something just like this, remote, rigid with irony, rejecting the emotion she had revealed to him. Their shipbound intimacies had evaporated in the cold light of base life. She missed them. Now she felt uneasy with him; she always did with these privileged, go for-the-jugular types, their ruthless dedication to the truth honed on some notion of their own superiority. Perhaps it was the vulnerability of their situation, perhaps she felt bested by him. He was married, and she could no longer hide behind the grandeur that marriage conferred. She would be just another person he met in the road. He had met plenty before, she presumed: ambitious women, scientists, intellectuals, and he would meet plenty after.
He turned his gaze away, to the window, a black square of implacable polar darkness. ‘You feel let down by life,’ he said. ‘But it can’t be about our individual expectations any longer,’ he shrugged. ‘They’re just not important enough, given what will happen to the planet. What is happening now.’
The anger she felt was like a silver, igniting light.
‘What do you know about my life?’ she found herself saying, before she had even thought the words. ‘With your illustrious ancestor, your public school, your Oxbridge university, your career in the foreign office, for Christ’s sake. What do you know about life?’
She nearly said, your wife is alive.
David pulled out his chair, scraping against the linoleum, and left.
Helen sat with her hands wrapped around her cup of tea, to gather warmth, but it had gone cold. She stared out the window at the glacier. It was covered in a thin glaze of ice, which glittered in the night.
3
Each day light is subtracted from our sky. The dark water sky is hardening to the white enamel of iceblink. Frazil ice glues floe to floe in the night, when the cold is most intense. The pack ice has gelled the ocean currents. They are forced under the surface, wending through the submarine alleys and tunnels of ice. On the surface, the departure of waves and tides has deepened our silence. The sea has frozen around us, a fist of noiselessness.
It will be two months before the ice is thick enough for us to walk on. Only ten years ago, Gerry the base commander told me, the sea ice froze to a thickness the length of the human body. Now it might only be inches thick and instead of locking themselves into ice, icebergs loll in slushy moats. We wait to see what the winter will do, whether it will be a good ice year.
I am reading one of the diaries kept by the early explorers, an Australian. He wrote that when summer came to the continent, ‘the days passed fleeting and swift, as in cities.’ But now, in winter, the day is night, we are living through a three-month-long polar night, and the days last forever.
According to the calendar it is May. In England there is a drought. The bluebells and apple blossoms have already come and gone; on average spring comes three weeks earlier than it did fifty years ago. May is summer now, although the month is plagued by violent storms which threaten to drop rain, but mysteriously never do. These tantalisations infuriate farmers. In May the grass is already parched and cucumbers and strawberries ruined.
I can’t look at photographs of growing things. I can’t look at the news, the internet, photographs well-meaning friends email in an attempt to keep me supplied with greenery, because my body says it is May and this should mean a lightening of body and spirit, a growth of hair and nails and a surge of melatonin, but instead my body is shutting down. My skin is dry, my hair limp. I feel no yearnings of any kind, not even hunger.
David has apologised, after a silence, an awkard choreography of avoidings. But we can’t avoid each other here, and we all seem to understand that disputes have to be settled, as in families, before greater damage is done.
‘I shouldn’t have left like that,’ he said.
‘We’re in a stressful situation. I shouldn’t have said what I said.’
‘I’m sorry, for what happened – to you. What you told me about.’
‘I’m sorry, too,’ I said.
Last night David showed me his great-grandfather’s journal, a photocopy of it. ‘I keep this with me, not the whole thing, but a few pages of it, always.’
‘Always?’ I am thinking of him on the Tube from his flat, winding underneath the sandy shale beds of the Thames, on his way to work in the corridors of power.
‘Yes. You think that’s a fetish, don’t you?’
‘Well, it is a little extreme, maybe.’
We read it together. At first I have trouble making out the spindly, fading hand:
It is 1915, or 1916; we are not certain. We have to keep moving. A blizzard can last two weeks, and snow builds up against anything stationery.
I wonder, what are we doing here? We were mappers, explorers. All gone now, our only purpose here is to survive.
Some nights it is too cold to sleep and we poke our heads out of the tent to count the stars. We travel over the sea ice. Last week one of our horses disappeared. After that we gave up talking.
Now we walk and walk over the slush and I can think of nothing. I used to recite the names of cities to myself, silently. Marrakesh, Antannarivo, Rangoon. Only later did I realise they were all hot, tropical cities. Places I might never see. I would spell them and re-spell them, try to remember their coordinates, the latitude and longitude, in my head on the slog, often in darkness, against only the moonlight. Moonlight as it turns out is excellent for spotting crevasses.
We feel like sinking boats taking on water. There is no respite, it seems, and no end, to our suffering. The dogs starved, one by one, or we shot them, because we couldn’t take them with us on our journey toward the northern islands. There wasn’t room in the boats, you see. Boris, the big husky, chewing on a penguin’s wing, just as the Boss crept up to him with his rifle. The dog didn’t even look up as the Boss aimed – that was how much those dogs trusted him.
Hope was with us, then. Rotten men are everywhere on this earth, but there are none among us; we know each other’s strengths, our weaknesses too. We don’t know if we are mad or very, very sane.
Our satellite dome becomes covered with what the comms manager terms the wrong kind of snow. It sticks in glutinous pancakes, then freezes overnight. The signal is obstructed by these patches, and the phone and internet is hazy with static. For two days not even the Iridium phone works. I immediately imagine a national crisis. One possibility is that our satellite connection is fine, the snowstorm a smokescreen for Cambridge, who are cagey about what is happening in the outside world. In communications blackouts we all feel our vulnerability and our aloneness more. We look at each other with expressions of hounded friendliness.
To reassure us, base commander Gerry tells us about the old days when there was no email, no internet, no Iridium phone over the winter, and the base commander would send a maximum of two hundred words per month off by satellite fax to Cambridge. A month’s life, recorded in two hundred words. These missives are collected in binders stored in one of the disused pitrooms in the old building. No one looks at them anymore, but one night I turn the handle and walk into a cold room, its walls lined with coffee-coloured carpet.
The room is lined with ring binders stuffed with legal-sized carbon copies of the original typewritten accounts of sledge parties. They all date from the early 1970s through to the end of the eighties.
I take them to my office and read. They talk of men returned safely, of sun up and sun down, of the health of all on base. A long sledge journey over sea ice to Porquoi Pas, out and back in three days. All men and dogs well and fighting fit.
I read about the sea-ice accident when four men died sledging back from Stonington, a base long defunct, some twenty miles down the coast of the peninsula. The men thought the ice had frozen fast, but a blizzard brewed up and the sea ice blew out, taking the men with it. Two dogs made it back to base. Around their necks were remnants of their ropes, which had been cut. The men had cut the dogs free because they
wanted to give them a chance. It took the dogs two months to find their way home to base. They had probably survived on penguin. The men were never seen again.
The reports are titled good ice year, bad ice year. Occasionzally, about one in eight years now, it will freeze solid enough for sledging parties to make it to the coast of the mainland peninsula. If we had a good ice year, we could travel further off base, across the bay to the mountains which remain out of reach to us, even down to San Martin, the Argentine base. I learn that the ice is not a prison, but a highway out of here. Only when it fails to form are we truly trapped.
I find the report about the exploding dogs. This is a famous incident, part of the lore of our narrow culture. At Stonington a team of wintering men had to abandon the base ahead of schedule; the ship could not get in to take them out, because – this was in the 1970s – there was too much sea ice. A plane was sent down to get them out before winter closed in. But the plane developed a mechanical problem and it would only be able to make one journey to evacuate the men. All equipment, including the dogs, would have to be left behind.
The dogs would starve in an Antarctic winter. The men could not bear the thought of the dogs, increasingly feral and desperate, living on the occasional penguin or seal they managed to rip apart, devouring each other, or freezing to death without their kennels. No animal, even the Arctic husky, could survive the Antarctic winter unsheltered.
In those days large stocks of explosives were kept for geological survey work, to blast away rock. The men took the dynamite, strapped it to the dogs, and constructed a remote timer. When they were in the plane, out of sight of the base, they pushed the button.
For a long time I thought about the exploding dogs of Stonington. One particular vision haunted me: a dog, sticks of dynamite, un-detonated, attached to his increasingly skeletal body, wandering through the darkness of the Antarctic wasteland, far from home.
David and I sit in the bar together, long after everyone has left, with cups of tea or hot chocolate. Here, where alcohol is freely available, we rarely drink. I have the feeling we are keeping ourselves under wraps.
He says we are eccentrics, ice priests, or ice disciples. (His use of ‘we’ means I have been admitted to the Antarctic fraternity.) He says we drill down through time; ice coring is about depth, he says, but depth equals time. The further down you go, the further back you go. We are doing this to scry into the planet’s future; he says we have all become obsessed with the future, but our methods are about the past. Some of us have written obscure books, some of us are on telly every night, on the ten o’clock news. Melt prophets, hired apocalypticians. That’s what we have become. All of us transfixed by events that took place 200, 400 million years ago.
I say, the Antarctic, is it really a place, or a giant outdoor laboratory? I feel sorry for it sometimes. Us crawling all over it with our theorems of exploration, elaborate computer models, me with my story of death, those dead bodies of explorers grinding through the ice even as we speak. We could disappear into it. This place could swallow us whole.
I don’t tell David that at times here I feel as if I have been filled with lead. I feel I ought to pray – me, the atheist. I have never felt this before, not in the most violent deserts. Pray for what, to what? For absolution, for protection from the cold-eyed God who sits suspended in this upside-down sky.
That winter Nara wrote: There are the dead, and the living, and what between them? Dusk. A collusion. There is no dusk here, and that is why life seems unreal. There are no inbetween states, there are no ghosts. So we haunt ourselves, having no one else to do the haunting for us.
I see him here, in his lab, in front of his computer screen. A conqueror’s profile, like his namesake, Alexander the Great. His body was like this, too: he belonged on a Greek urn. He was sweet, sly, vicious. Nara did not like uncomplicated people. He was forty people in one. A stark, arresting presence, not one of these flaccid characters our modern age throws up, self-obsessed, languorously narcissistic, go-with-the-flow types to whose hands the future of the planet has been unfortunately bequeathed.
He was a hot sandstone palace. He was one of those people you either took against, and violently, or fell in love with. Most people on sensing this slunk away, taking their discomfort with them. But Nara had lived in discomfort, she had conquered her own challenges, and knew about both: that was why she had returned the look he had given her in their first, light-dazzled days in the Falklands; returned it to him intact, and perhaps even more steely with challenge. Our fates are decided in such moments.
He is only someone she never should have considered. But she was here, trapped in the ice desert. Anthropologists study such situations, of siege and nearness, of sex and attraction in a limited population. You look for sexual partners in your immediate environment, because there is no other environment. And suddenly the impossible becomes the only possibility.
She was marooned in the Antarctic winter with the one person she loved, who was also the one person she should have most avoided. It ought to have been a stalled paradise. She hated him, I realise now, for refusing her, there – here. He was not passing her over for someone else, which would have had its own pain, but for an idea: the idea of the woman he would one day love. She admired this self-control, this honesty. She loved him all the more for it, and carried this appalled fascination around with her that entire Antarctic year, heavy chalices slurping with the poison of disillusion. But she had her own honesty, too. She did not console herself with a lesser love, for Luke. Like Alexander, she was holding out for the real thing.
When it was light all the time I had no difficulty sleeping. Now that it is dark I wake up every three hours. I miss the noises of the city at night: the fox rummaging in the garden, the traffic streaking down the road. Here trying to sleep means empty, sandblasted hours, the sound of snow spitting against the window, blown down here on the back of katabatics of the Weddell Gyre.
I give up and get dressed. At two, three, five in the morning I go outside and watch satellites careen through the night sky. At first they look like shooting stars or planes, but they have a too rigid trajectory, they are travelling too fast. Who is up there? NASA, Google Earth. Iran, the newly resurgent Iraq? North Korea? China, probably; China is spying on everyone, along with the Russians. I wonder if they can zero in on a lone woman in the Antarctic night, wearing three hats against the cold, staring into the sky.
The moon looks closer, here, and far more real. I stare at its dusky seas, the surface pockmarked with craters, so etched and alive, reciting to myself the names I learned from the planet atlas in the physics lab: Mare Imbrium, Sea of Showers; Mare Tranquillitatus, Sea of Tanquillity; Oceanus Procellarum, Ocean of Storms.
PART VI
Glimmer
1
In the month after he left base that March, Luke wrote to Nara nearly every day. It couldn’t have been easy for him to find the time on the ferry flight; he would land the plane, he told her, do the customs formalities, then look for the nearest computer. Each email had as its subject line the name of his current stop on the way back to Canada: Montevideo, Santa Caterina, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Bélem, Manaus, Curaçao, Mérida, Houston:
If you ever come to Belém with me, this is where we shall stay. The Selva Hotel is the exact opposite to base. It is where you belong. The building is full of tropical plants and is painted in warm colours. I can just imagine going on a relaxed tour around the interesting-shaped rooms and hallways listening to your impressions. Yes – that’s a nice thought to go to bed with I think.
Usually she opened his messages straight away and read them with real interest, but within a few lines they became directionless, claustrophobic, even vaguely accusing, when she did not answer him quickly enough. Once she did not answer for several days; she had a scientific paper to finish for a tight deadline. Messages began to accumulate in her inbox, each one a crescendoing plea for news of her safety. Did you fall down a crevasse?
She log
ged off her email and went for a walk around the Point. There was only a narrow window of light now. In the midday twilight she walked through slush, over rocks, through brown stains on the snow – seal blood – through tufts of moulted penguin feathers, watching as the sky changed from the colour of sallow bruises to teal, then lead, then indigo, finally a solid night in which the silence and darkness become moulded into a hard transparent substance, like black resin.
She saw that the skua chicks were fully grown, at the beginning of winter. These were the survivors: two chicks were born to each pair but the parents or the sibling routinely killed the weaker chick, so only one survived. Very few fur seals remained but they growled and barked at her as always, like sullen sentries to some fabulous ice kingdom.
She took a shortcut past the Cross and headed back to base. She had to grab a few hours’ sleep before starting her night shift. In summer the Saints took turns to be on nights, but in the winter it fell to the winterers to devise a rota. Twenty years before, the base laboratory had burnt to the ground because the night watchman had failed to spot a rubbed wire, which sparked in the friction of a door, which ignited the tinder-dry wood. The entire laboratory burnt to the ground within the hour.
At night, base had the aspect of an abandoned ship locked in a belt of ice, static and humming, exactly like their icebound ship on the journey to the Antarctic. On this terrestrial ship Nara did her rounds: lab, kitchen, offices, genny shed, incinerator, carpentry workshop, flicking on lights, flicking them off. The carpentry workshop required the most careful investigation – an entire shed full of wood, twitching for spark.
