by Jean McNeil
A group of twenty-one people, dressed in parkas, in hats and mukluks, stood there in their line at the bottom end of the runway, their torsos and legs in darkness, their faces slowly tilting, like flowers, to face the sun. No one spoke. The wind threaded its way between and through them. For twenty minutes they watched as sunlight shared the sky with the moon: one half yellow, that watery yellow of winter Mediterranean cornfields, the other a brittle silver. Then another shift in the light, an imperceptible nudging, and the spires dismantled themselves. And then, with another glimmer of movement behind the horizon, far away and inside the light, the sun sunk away.
A blizzard paws at the windows. The wind is from the south – the coldest, most driven of the Antarctic winds. In the skies, high above them, temperatures of –190°Fahrenheit help to form nacreous clouds, those clouds of raw pearl created only by extreme cold temperatures, the clouds Luke promised she would see in winter.
Inside, a group of five people sit at the cafeteria tables, playing Twenty-One. It is Nara’s turn to be the croupier. She slaps the cards down on the table.
Alexander leans back, extends his arms and shoulders over the chairs around him, widening his scope, also creating a shield.
She comes to him. ‘Stick or twist?’
She waits. He stares at her, shrugs his shoulders.
‘What do you want me to do, read your mind?’
‘Isn’t that what you are, a mind reader?’
That night, she sits alone in her pitroom. The blizzard is still going strong.
I love
I love –
Words shred themselves in her mind until it is full of their tattered silks, like the flags they fly on base and which are ripped to shreds, after only one winter, by the wind.
She finds him in his room. She walks straight in and sits on his bed. He perches, wary of her proximity, on the chair.
‘I thought being here would help me get over my fear.’
‘Fear of what?’
‘I don’t know.’ She puts her hands to her face. There is a constant buzzing in her ears, like a swarm of bees. ‘I’m more afraid than I’ve ever been.’
She looks at him then, grave and tempted, as if she is constantly keeping a confession under wraps. His mouth is like a statue’s, a disappointed Inca, a cruel ruler. She would want him for his mouth alone.
It was his coldness, and his unresponsiveness, that had won him her heart. He knew this and fully intended to abuse it, but stopped short. This was how Alexander discovered the existence and limits of his compassion, through her. He was not a scrupulous soul. He saw what he wanted to see, and moved on. To love without wanting something in return was foreign to his nature. To him her distress was almost comic, but also a marvel, that he could move her to such an intensity, merely by performing a number of acts which to him were instinctual.
Before she knows it, she is upon him, her nails are dragging themselves down his cheek, little tracks of skin and red and exposure.
He is much stronger than her, he throws her against the wall easily. He blocks her exit with an arm over the door.
‘Let me out!’
He takes both her hands, at the wrists, and holds them above her head. The wood of the door bites into her back.
Her gaze fixes on his fingers, the whorls of his fingertips. To think they had been already formed when he was barely a thought inside his mother’s head. When he was a spark, flashing out of the darkness of the universe…
He says, ‘I don’t love you.’ He drags her to the bed. She sees his expression shift, in one moment, from indifference to the trauma of lust.
When his fingers curl around her neck, her legs, they are not vicious fingers. In his normal, everyday persona, he is incapable of violence, but as a sexual being he is someone else. He treats her roughly, an instinct which has its home in a kind of automatic, depthless passion Nara will never understand.
Later, he falls asleep, but she stays awake, staring at the ceiling. A thin knife of winter air, minus thirty-five, slices through a crack in the window, near her head. She dares not move; Alexander sleeps carefully, with the unconscious concern given to a stranger in his bed. Before he had fallen asleep he had taken her and squeezed her so tightly she wondered if he meant to strangle her. Very carefully, she puts her ear to his back and hears the bass sound of a heart twice the size of her own.
In the days that follow, they avoid each other, as much as is possible on an Antarctic base. In these days the howl in her mind becomes louder, now that it has a shape – the shape of his body, which she cannot touch. She is an open wound of loneliness.
In another week she can no longer eat. Like parents monitoring a food-shuffling anorexic, the winterers close around her in a protective posse. They feed her soup. The doctor insists upon taking samples for her stomach problem.
She caves in. ‘It’s not that I can’t eat, I don’t want to eat.’
‘Why not?’
‘My stomach doesn’t feel like mine.’
The narrowed, suspicious eyes again. ‘Who’s is it?’
‘I don’t know.’ She has enough self-preservation not to say: If I feed my stomach I am only feeding the animal that lives there.
New visions have replaced the wolves. Flowers, black, canopy-like – miniature umbrellas – blooming in fields fertilised by flesh. Fungi flowers feeding on the rancid cadaver of hope.
She closes and opens her eyes, willing the flowers away.
The blue hour. This was their light, now: three hours of lilac light in the afternoon. In the sky, pale planets. Venus and Mars throb uncertainly on the western horizon.
She drives herself outside, into the storm. She doesn’t have enough clothes on to weather the cold. The snows of winter on her eyelashes, just like those years in Canada, where she alternately froze and broiled through successive continental summers and winters. They were doing it for his career, her mother said. Those winters had not melted. They were still turning over, savage and frozen, inside her. Snowflakes becoming heavier and heavier until they weigh her eyes shut. She closes her eyes against the storm, hoping to obliterate all traces of the world.
What would it take? She would only need to sit down, or lie down, and it would be over. She hadn’t tagged out. No one would know where to find her, or even that she was gone.
She is freezing. Her core body temperature has dropped, but not significantly. The little burning core of her hums along, intent on survival.
One of the mountaineers finds her there and gently guides her back. The touch on her elbow, firm and frightened, is not Alexander’s. She is not even sure he would save her, if he had the chance.
Two days pass. She does not leave her pitroom, she refuses to eat. Screeches tear through her ears and she only belatedly recognises them as her own. Then she remembers: the doctor, an injection, hands on her shouders.
Where am I?
You’re in Antarctica.
The base doctor is a young woman Nara’s age. Her face comes into focus. The doctor’s expression – professional, poised with instruction, even clinical – tells her that she is a normal, intelligent, accomplished young woman. She could never let this happen to her.
She says, I love to swim in the sea. It purifies me.
In the darkness behind her eyes they are back, the coldeyed animals. Raptors, predators all of them – eagles, lions, tigers. The wolf. When she closes her eyes they peer at her with a bold stare. They have journeyed all this way from their planet to tell her that she is in the wrong place. She is not favoured; yet she belongs to them. It leans on her, despite her defiance, the throbbing intelligence behind them. It turns its attention to her with the same energy death has, a langurous, almost willowy swishing of its cloaks, a giant eye suddenly discovering that she is there. It focuses on her, briefly. It is much, much bigger than her. She is frightened, yet defiant. She tells it, go back to the future. She says, it’s not me you want. Go away.
She can no longer tell when she is asleep and
when she is awake. Outside the surgery Nara thinks she can see the old maps tacked to the walls. The peninsula, the Dead Men Islands, the detailed maps produced by the MAGIC team. Giant-scale maps of places with place-names, but there are no cities, towns, villages. There is no reason to go there. There is nothing there.
Then the figures, rising from the ice plateau, through the air. She will not see these men again until that day on the ice floe. They have come to tell her that she is starving, there is a famine. The sun has been extinguished, all the food has been eaten. She and Alexander are alone on base. Everyone else has left, taken off on the ship. They have been left together in the Antarctic, in a kind of penance. These men’s faces are stern with unconcern, they are fixated on their mission. She knows who they are: they are the explorers, famous men who had to die to attain their fame, in love with the horizon, so much so that night after night they march, their only witnesses the stars, dissolved in a nightless sky. Heroes, giants of the plateau, marching across its empty expanse, their hearts exploding.
4
May 25th, 2016. As winter takes hold it sets a scattered geometry in motion: trapezoids, polygons of ice, the open leads snaking between the floes; on the ship I learned these are called polynyas. A sky smudged with grey. Granite ice, diamond ice, cloud ice. The light is bleached bone. The sea is black; against its dark canvas the sea ice flickers, glowing dully, or suddenly iridescent, caught in a beam of sun.
Out in the real world, an estimated 8 million people are dead, nine weeks after an international lockdown has been imposed. Airlines are bankrupt, the food supply in major cities is precarious.
The Ministry of Defence has decided our fate. They have rung Gerry on the satellite phone and told him that all nonessential personnel can leave, if the Polar Research Council can arrange our evacuation. But go where? We can only get as far as the Falkland Islands. We are told that if we elect to stay the winter, the MOD will pay our costs and fly in or take us out by ship in spring. You could do worse than overwinter in the Antarctic, Gerry says. There is enough food to see us clear through until next year. They have counted and recounted the stocks.
Luke will go – by pulling strings, contacts in the RAF, he has managed to get his ex-wife and three children down to the Falklands on the MOD flight from Brize Norton. It was there they weathered the previous pandemic, tucked away on a desolate shore of West Falkland.
At night we talk – hushed, uncertain conversations, overshadowed by the choice we have to make. Everyone else has gone to bed; the Saints have mopped the floor, tipped the chairs up on the tables. It feels just like a university cafeteria after closing time, and here we are, the FCO man and the writer, two overgrown students whose final exams are long over.
David tells me about a trip he took to China, back in 2005, to meet their polar people. He tells me of fog-cloaked cities. Small pine trees, their torn roots. A grandmother sitting in a doorway smoking a pipe, her grandson next to her, holding a bowl of tea. He had stopped and talked to them. Through his interpreter he understood that their house, which was made of wood and dated from the eighteenth century, was soon to be demolished. They would be re-housed in a concrete block. He stood in queues for everything – apples, train tickets. He refused to be the official, whisked here and there in dark cars.
So many people – he was thinking then only with his climate change brain, which was at war with his humanitarian brain. For many years, he was anti-people; he saw more dignity in those small pine trees with their dying roots, in the silk blue nights of the wilderness. In people (he tried to include himself ) he perceived only failures, knives, a dim future of pitiless sun, swelling oceans. It seemed now that he and Kate went to more funerals than weddings, and they were only thirty-seven, for Christ’s sake!
In China, the boy in the doorway asked: is there war in your country?
Yes, he found himself saying. There is a war against the sky, against the land. But most of all against the ice.
But that is an indirect war (the boy couldn’t have been more than fourteen!).
Yes, David said. Exactly. There are two types of war: direct and indirect.
He tells me he had hoped he could do something good for the world. Make a contribution.
He tells me of the things he misses: twilight, for example. Here, at this time of year, the coming of morning and night are like having the lights turned off, then turned on. He meanwhile is a man for in-between places, for departure lounges, hiatuses. We set about finding synonyms. He is good with words and retorts quickly: limbo, longueur, purgatory, halfway house, transition, pause. He says that now, in our present situation, he has met his match: this will be a hiatus to end all hiatuses.
I read aloud to him from Shackleton’s book about his great-grandfather’s expedition:
We laid a course roughly for Hope Bay, and the boats moved on again. I gave Worsley a line for a berg ahead and told him, if possible, to make fast before darkness set in. This was about three o’clock in the afternoon. We had set sail, and as the Stancomb Wills could not keep up with the other two boats I took her in tow, not being anxious to repeat the experience of the day we left the reeling berg. The Dudley Docker went ahead, but came beating down towards us at dusk. Worsley had been close to the berg, and he reported that it was unapproachable. It was rolling in the swell and displaying an ugly ice foot. The news was bad.
Words and phrases suddenly leapt out: grievous disappointment; northwesterly gale off Cape Horn; retrograde movement.
‘My great-grandfather was in the Dudley Docker,’ he said.
‘Ice beset them from all sides,’ I say, astonished at their vulnerability. ‘They had to try to fend it off with poles.’
‘Read more. I like the way you read.’
The temperature was down to 4 degrees below zero, and a film of ice formed on the surface of the sea. When we were not on watch we lay in each other’s arms for warmth. Our frozen suits thawed where our bodies met, and as the slightest movement exposed these comparatively warm spots to the biting air, we clung motionless, whispering each to his companion our hopes and thoughts.
I think of those men, tough men, explorers, ex- or future soldiers, clinging to each other in the bottom of rickety boats, their arms wrapped around one another, whispering. A rough intimacy, moral, imperilled. Bargaining with fate, desire and memory, that shadowy trio of destiny. Did they beseech each other: Stay in the moment. Don’t leave me. Remember your mother’s bread pudding!
Then we troop downstairs together to the bootroom, put on mukluks, fleece, jacket, gloves, hat. We walk to the tagging board. I take our little plastic disks, our surnames emblazoned on them, military-style. I put mine in room 14, and move David’s to room 6. My hand lingers there, perhaps only a second too long.
I look at him. Suddenly he is not a tall thin Englishman. There is a rawness to his physique I have missed before, he is more rugged than I thought. It is as if he is expanding, growing in his dimensions, beside me.
Outside a blast of cold wind, like having gravel chucked in your face.
‘Well,’ David says against the wind, before we ever reach the accommodation block.
‘Goodnight,’ he says.
‘Goodnight.’
We are losing over an hour of light every day, half in the morning, half in the afternoon. In the mornings we shuffle into the bootroom, shed our clothes and footwear and put on our indoor sandals and slippers, avoiding the meltpools on the floor. Upstairs in the dining hall sunlight-simulating bulbs greet us with an artificial stare. Even with the bulbs we look terrible; bags and grey circles under our eyes, our skin is oily and flaccid despite our daily showers and our circuit-training regimes. Yesterday I found another patch of grey hairs on the top of my head. I pulled them out.
David comes to the office I have been assigned, Lab 7, and catches me looking at photos of the winter of 2011–12 on the archived drive.
‘This must be good for your research,’ he says, his tone formal, also arch, simultaneousl
y conniving and inviting. At times he speaks to me as if I were an acquaintance, someone he has only recently met.
‘I try to work in order not to panic,’ I say.
David sits down, he does not answer immediately. I realise he is having difficulty speaking. When he does, his lower lip trembles, very slightly. ‘I’ve spoken with my wife. She said that because she can’t fly down to the Falklands, and I can’t fly home, I may as well stay here.’ He drops his gaze. ‘What will you do?’
‘I have nothing to go back to,’ I say. ‘Apart from a few dead plants. A ransacked flat, maybe. That’s if I could get to London. I have friends in Brazil and Argentina, but their borders are still closed.’
I look out the window to where the glacier was growing, daily, coated with fresh snow, and beyond it the fortress ramparts of Adélie Island. ‘I don’t much want to stay here, either. I’m afraid of feeling trapped.’
‘I know,’ David says. ‘That’s a reason in itself for spending a winter in the Falklands. At least you can move around there, however much the military have the place under lockdown.’
‘You must be given special–’ I can’t think of the word I want here, dispensation? Freedom? ‘Clearance?’
