The Ice Lovers

by Jean McNeil

  ‘I’ve got to pack up here,’ he said, gesturing toward the projector, the laptop.

  For a second Helen wondered if she should tell him about the Wintering file, then decided against it. She nodded, then walked away.

  I can hear…what it is saying.

  He and Nara sit in the Air Unit office. Between her fingers she is twirling the little plastic bull of the bottle of Sangre de Toro he had given her as an end-of-summer present.

  It is the night he’d flown into base for the medical evacuation, and he is so tired. He and Chris are on four-hour shifts; every four hours they fight their way through the wind and snow over to the hangar to check that the heaters are preventing the aircraft from freezing to the spot. He is so tired from the effort of rescue, from flying five hours worrying about icing, about knottage and windspeed and fuel and power, and yet he cannot sleep.

  He needs to talk to her. It will be another two months before he sees her again. This is still in a time when two months away from her feels like a sentence, a miserable longing.

  Who is talking?

  Not who. What. It has a voice. It tells me – it comes from the earth. It’s not human.

  But if you can’t hear what it is saying, how do you know it’s speaking to you then?

  I don’t. It’s just a – a feeling. Or a signal. It’s more like a signal I’m picking up, from a long way away. I’m trying to understand what it’s saying.

  He is thinking: she is sensitive. Perhaps too sensitive for this place.

  It says God doesn’t exist.

  He snaps back to attention. Does it?

  It says that it is God, or rather that God is in it, that it is His embodiment.

  That’s not so outlandish, he thinks. I’ve heard that before. Perhaps it isn’t so serious. Perhaps she will be okay, yet.

  Now, four years later, he sits in his pitroom, the storms of early winter howling outside. He has never been on base in the winter, apart from the medevac he did that year in early August. He has no experience of this live animal called winter which paws at his door as if desperate to come inside.

  When has he last thought about God? Not since that night, possibly – the last night he drove the road to Digby Neck.

  He would see it so clearly from the air in the planes he would fly years later, gliding over the narrow, gouged province of his birth on his way to more worldly places.

  Digby Neck is unique; he doubts there is anywhere like it in the world – a long, thin ribbon of land, bordered on one side by a gigantic bay raked by the highest tides in the world. On the lee side, dunes, hair grass, a smaller narrow bay. The large bay drains twice daily, refilling, driven by the most powerful tidal gyre in the world. Here the difference between high and low tide is fifteen feet. On the mudflats, sand pipers, clams, Junebugs, sand worms, quahogs, mussels, barnacles are exposed, their skins glistening in the sun. Overhead crows, hawks, bald eagles, and seagulls wait to spot the glint of the sun on flesh.

  The tide does not arrive, it storms. You can see it on a silver wave, coming. On the other side of the neck is a thin bay, much more static. For some reason the tide does not penetrate here.

  He has to make a decision: whether to leave, or to stay.

  Every night that week he drives the Neck, with its narrowing road. At the end, toward the open mouth of the bay, the spit of land fragments into three narrow islands. Here ferries must be used to cross the water, tiny four-car ferries, engineless, pulled across the sand banks on a chain.

  He secures the jeep, looks at his murky headlights clouded by the corpses of wasps, bees, mayflies. The road narrows toward the end, were there is only one lane. Hair grass on one side, sand dunes. The hair grass thin, resinous, like violin strings.

  He has lived in this narrow province all his life. This is where he grew up, learned to fly at the local glider club, before going to Florida to train, then to the UK, then South Africa, then the Army, then Scotland, then the Falklands, and finally the Antarctic. Punta Arenas, Santiago, Cape Town, the Falklands, those Southern Hemisphere rim-named places he frequented and their turbulent, empty seas: he would develop a fascination with the southern hemisphere, because it was so empty of land and people in comparison to the northern half of the world, but also for its difference – the stars, the sky, plants, birds, the wind. The Antarctic he will think of as the place where the wind is born. He is a pilot, and he lives by the wind.

  He is twenty-four and his girlfriend of four years is pregnant. That October, she will have their child. He knows what he should do: marry her, settle down here, give up dreams. Drive from Zellers to Canadian Tire, along hushed wooded highways, misted vaulting valleys. And one day, if he can stand it for long enough, he will bring his daughter here to Digby Neck, to watch the tide fill the Bay of Fundy, then retreat.

  Driving the road to Digby Neck that night for the last time he knows nothing of his future, nothing at all of the woman he will marry and divorce, the lonely flat roads he will drive with her at the bottom of the world, Cape Agulhas, Struisbaai, Arniston, sand dunes there too, an emerald empty ocean beyond them. Why is it that we can’t see ahead? He will never accept how life is so gauged against our survival; if only we could see around corners, he thinks, we could protect ourselves from our futures, from our fates. After Luke’s talk, Helen retreated to the laboratory which had become her office. On the walls were maps: a geophysical map of the Antarctic, showing the four south poles – geographical, magnetic, relative inaccessibility and ‘true’, and an Ice Extent map, which showed how the Antarctic doubled in size due to the growth of winter sea ice. What was she doing in this place? She yearned to see a painting, or antiquities, to see green, to meet strangers.

  On her computer screen was Nara’s Wintering file. On this precise date, March 5th, four years earlier Nara had written, In the Antarctic time feels like something to be got through, rather than lived. The present is only about endurance. Here, the only things that exist are the past and winter.

  2012, 2013, 14, 15: these are the numbers of Helen’s recent past, numbers filled with trips, assignments; November 2012 in her diary of that year read: November 6: Baghdad Airport, where she went to do a story on the newly reopened airport; November 21: Kandahar, where she would research a story about the aftermath of the British Army’s pullout from Afghanistan, the instant clandestine economies which sprung up to fill the void, the private armies, the reversal to warlord practices. The past was only vacuums and eddies quickly filled by more time, so that within months it was impossible to say what had really happened in a particular place. Time cauterised events like wounds closing in on themselves.

  She had always felt a compulsion to shoulder other people’s tragedies. This was a more selfish instinct than was immediately obvious; it allowed her to draw her own boundaries, to see how much she could take. She would absorb displacement, rape, murder, starvation, all that while harbouring an underhand assumption that by putting herself in their path, on behalf of others, she would be granted a celestial immunity from their effects in her own life.

  All that changed in late 2012. She stopped travelling, because no travel was allowed. Her diary was empty of places and tasks. Instead it read: Feb 15: Someone has cloned my debit card and bought £800 worth of kitchen tiling. Feb 20: Can’t get up in the morning.

  Helen realised many things in that year: how she refused to believe in the wholesale destruction of the planet, even while she worked on stories about war, environmental collapse, climate change. How angry she was: she wanted to erase nations, for the harm they had done. She wanted to erase the easy cynicism she saw in her own country, which had become nothing more than a money-obsessed dissolute old victor, a serial adulterer who held values of loyalty and truth in open contempt.

  From the sick pride of nations, the bad faith, the Antarctic would save her. Because she would be in a continent owned by no one. She would go, for the first time in her life, to nobody’s country.

  Luke slid open the doors to the a
ircraft hangar. Inside, three Twin Otters huddled. He walked around them, running his hands along their fuselages, over the rivulets, the embossed penguins-and-propellers emblem. He knew each of their quirks – the fickle generator on BZ, the sticky trim on BC, the bounce of BB, how it flew into the sky more eagerly than the other planes, thrilled to snag the updraft. The Twin Otter was the world’s greatest bush plane, and for him it was a creature, a living thing.

  He stopped beside BB, the plane he had flown down to the Ellsworths that year. That trip was the beginning of everything. For years, he hadn’t felt that way about anyone – not on base, in Stanley, in Calgary, where he spent his summers. While he was married there had been one or two women he had found attractive, yes, but he was married and that was that. Then after his marriage had ended, he’d felt… nothing; this solid nothing, cold and hard, coagulated within him. He would call it an iciness, but he knew now how many names there were for ice, how many properties it had, and that it was a more complicated substance than most people suspected.

  He leant against the cool fuselage of the Otter. He should speak to this woman writer about Berkner, he should tell her what happened. Then he would finally be free.

  For the first time in years, he wished he could talk to Nara. The desire was so powerful he thought he might cry. Everything they had done together, everything they had exchanged, had ended in the appearance of this woman four years later, picking over the bones of those moments. As for the woman, Helen, he might like her personally, in different circumstances, but he distrusted what she represented. He thought Helen misguided in her entire project. Nara was dead, that much was true. And while the truth could perhaps be pieced together after the fact, it would never be whole again; the fissures and fractures are too deep. And what would such an archive yield anyway? A record of desire, or thoughts, or deeds. But nothing to match the splendour of life, those days they had flown together in the empty Antarctic skies, or sat in silence as fog blanketed the base. He wanted to tell Helen: don’t you know that the truth can only be lived? If you go looking for it after the moment is over all you will find are ashes, cinders.

  He found himself walking to the laboratory that had been Nara’s office, now occupied by another marine biologist, hoping to find her there. He stood in the doorway and addressed Nara’s empty chair. Why aren’t you here? Where are you? As much as he wanted to speak to her he wanted to grasp the sense of having loved her, or at least the memory of it. Since Nara what had there been? Encounters. Squall people who formed and dispersed on his horizon.

  There would be a war, soon, he thought. It would be fought over oil and ice, in the form of water, in the form of its potential. No one cared much about the ice itself; to them it was just an obstacle. Wars would happen, yes, they were part of the unending bloodsport in which the human race engaged, and he would continue to fly over the ice sheets, as long as they existed. Because in order to exist, he believed that you need a witness – someone who is consumed by you, concerned for your survival. Otherwise what were we? A mirage: half-human, half-smoke. A ghost.

  3

  Nara’s visions started around the time the sun went away. If she closed her eyes, they were there; she had the impression they were looking at her always, but were invisible. Only on the dark screen of her eyelids did they make themselves known.

  The creatures had long white faces and slit eyes. Their expression was difficult to describe; it was not indifferent, nor benign, nor threatening; rather it was a flat evaluating look. They were making decisions, she felt, coming to their own conclusions about her, trying to decide what they wanted from her.

  She began to feel the will of a presence – a disembodied thing, not a person, but not an object, either – looking at her. On those winter nights when sleep refused to overtake her she lay with her eyes closed and the white faces foamed out of the darkness of her mind. It was as if they had taken a cold interest in her. They had been there all along (they existed, she was certain), but she had attracted their attention only now, for some reason. When she opened her eyes, they dispersed. But the impression of something threatening in the landscape, a rigid intelligence which cared nothing at all for her, for them, for anyone, remained.

  She became afraid to sleep. What was happening to her? She was a scientist, well-educated, rational, schooled in materialism, empiricism, the process of hypothesis and evidence, she was an agnostic, and an entirely ordinary person with ordinary powers and capacities – the last sort of person to see ghosts, or spirits, or to lose her grip on reality.

  She was prepared to accept that the polar night offered an uncanny clarity, that people and spirits might intermingle in its dark pane. Many of the old explorers had experienced hallucinations, even temporary madness, which had been dispersed by the return of the sun. But still, there was something real about these apparitions, with their canny children’s eyes, their cut-out faces. On one of those nights she asked them, what do you want with me? They did not answer but remained on the inside of her eyelid for longer than usual, forming and reforming, as if from smoke.

  Over the winter her visions sharpen in focus, the Viking-Aliens, and sometimes wolves who give her a disapproving but not exactly menacing stare. At times she has a powerful sense of a great consciousness passing through her hands, her lungs, possibly her mind. Mostly this happens while she is diving, when she is far underwater, away from the realm of man. Here among her giant sea-sponges, the starfish and seaspiders, she felt a living, breathing thing that slipped through her fingers, like a multitude of fish. It was sleek and ungraspable, on its way to another destination.

  How amazing, that knowing and believing are not after all the same thing: she knows these things are real – the intergalactic Vikings, the world-spirit in the ocean – but yet she does not believe in them. At the same time, she believes in them, but she cannot know them; there is no experiment she can devise to confirm their existence.

  She tells no one about these grandiose, spooky fantasies, or her feeling that the pulse of the world was quickening, that somewhere a giant heart was beating, louder, faster.

  That winter Alexander teaches her about ice. There are the icebergs: glacier bergs, ice islands, tabular bergs, growlers, bergy bits, brash ice, blue ice, dirty ice. The sea ice: the pack, ice floes, hummocks, ridges, pancake ice, stalactites, undersea ice, frazil ice, ice flowers, rotten ice. The coastal ices: shore ice, piedmonts, glimmer ice, ice cakes, fringes, grounded ice, anchored ice, ice shelves, ice lobes, streams, rime ice. The mountain ices: cirque glaciers, piedmont glaciers, valley glaciers, pinnacles.

  She knows that Alexander undertakes lone missions around the Point, to catalogue the ice. He contravenes all the rules by not tagging out on the tagging board. He will not talk to her about his motives, but she understands: this is his fleeting rebellion against the rules that their whereabouts be known at all times, against the tagging board – the base equivalent of CCTV, which will be introduced within a year, after Alexander’s accident – his attempt to carve a crucible of privacy, however small, in this secretless place.

  Midwinter Dinner is followed by a ceilidh. The cook plays fiddle, the vehicle mechanic has been practising his accordion. June 21st, midsummer in the northern hemisphere, is the Antarctic Christmas.

  In the outside world the summer has turned volatile: thunderstorms, flash floods, savage weeks of kiln-like heat which turned the fields of the Mediterranean into ceramic. In the Pacific a red tide of algae wiped out krill stocks. Grey whales are dying in unprecedented numbers, their corpses clogging currents just as horses abandoned by the conquistadors once bloated the horse latitudes. Seven small islands in the Pacific were evacuated due to King Tides; on the internet Nara saw photographs of flooded homes, schools drowning in brackish water, the children’s desks full of suctioning molluscs. In the North, light rains down on the planet, caused by bursts of solar fires which are now accepted to be adding to the catastrophic droughts in Australia, in Kenya. On the internet the news is full o
f picnics, sunscreen – everyone wears factor 75 now; too thick to be absorbed, it covers the skin in a thin layer of white zinc, and photographs show armies of pasty-faced sunbathers, like extras in a film set in the Elizabethan era.

  But in the Antarctic they are safe. There is turkey, presents, a Christmas tree, the windows are dark squares onto a moonlit snowfield. There is even mistletoe.

  They eat and drink and dance reels. At some point in the party, Nara finds she is being forced near Alexander. He, too, is being driven toward her. The fiddle and accordion blare in her ears.

  They have all been kissing under the mistletoe. Not chaste pecks on cheeks, but full-on kisses. It is some kind of midwinter dare.

  Someone says, ‘the only two people who haven’t kissed.’

  Nara looks at the mouth she has kissed before, although not recently. A cruel, casual, deeply sexual mouth.

  They both manage to break free from their captors. The desperation in their limbs gives them away. They are both ready to fight, just to not have to touch.

  Everyone backs away, against the wall. They dissolve into the shadows, they go to get a beer. The winter won’t be the same, from now on, knowing that among their number are two people who despise each other.

  On July 22nd the sun came back. The winterers knew the date in advance – the sun returned to the peninsula either on the 21st or the 22nd of July each year, depending on the weather and subtle changes in the rotation of the planet.

  At 11am the winterers assembled at the south end of the runway, facing southwest, looking into the still-dark sky. The moon was a wolf, a loping shadow creature inside a white mist of stars.

  They stared, in silence, into the darkness. At first the light was only a movement deep inside the sky. But then an invisible shift inside the light revealed a sudden garnet glow. The first ray of sun to fall on their land in months came so fast, and the light so searing, that many had to close their eyes against it. Nara was one of the few who defied the urge to blink and was rewarded by a rush of black, as if it were being thrust from the sky by a giant hand, come roaring across the half-frozen bay. Then the stab of green, as sudden and unexpected as an explosion. Then the dark receded from the green energy, draining back over the sea. Flutes of light spread, then, refracted between the mountaintops and narrowed into spires. Emerald light leaked from the sky’s indigo hem, and on the outskirts of the light, where the sky faded back into darkness, stars glittered.