by Jean McNeil
‘Yes and no. I’m not really sure where I would be allowed.’
‘What does your work want to do?’
‘They advise us to stay wherever we are, all of us. In fact I think I’m the only person in the whole FCO who can move right now, if I want to. Even if it’s only to the Falklands.’ He pauses. ‘Once you’re here for the winter, you’re here. The sea ice is already beginning to form, I doubt a ship could get in to pick us up in a month’s time. So it’s now or never.’
‘Well, not quite never, hopefully.’
‘No,’ he says. But he looks as if he has not heard me.
The next day we learn that the summer base commander, the field operations manager, the meteorologist and a handful of summering scientists will leave on the last flight. Luke will fly the plane to the Falklands. We have not spoken for weeks, now, apart from an exchange of pleasantries in the bar. I can’t blame him for avoiding me. He knows that in my mind she is not dead, and that everything that happened is still happening, over and over again, as if on a revolving wheel.
David joins me in the dining room to say goodbye to the departing personnel. We all shake hands, even Luke and I. The others ask me if this was a difficult decision and I say yes, that it is one of those decisions taken negatively, not positively, without any desire or volition but because I can’t see what else to do. In that sense it is the easiest and also the most difficult decision I have ever taken.
Luke comes over to me, already dressed in his fleece, his hiking boots. He is the capable pilot, the man striding toward you in a bar or a hotel and you think yes, this is a real man, he will be a hunting guide, a major in the Army, an engineer.
‘I think it will help your book, staying here.’
‘In what way?’
‘Few people in the world have lived through an Antarctic winter. It will bring you closer to her.’
And then he is gone, striding away, to calculate fuel and payload, to fly his plane out of this antiseptic colony and back into the real world.
From the dining-hall windows I watch the plane take off. It is a dusky, overcast day. At the last moment, as it stands lined up on the runway I realise I should be on that plane. I have made the wrong decision. I feel trapped, despite the internet, the newspapers, the satellite link. When the plane is gone I go to my pitroom and lie down on my bunk and stare at the bottom of the bed above me, the slats of the wood, the pink and purple mattress, the frayed edge of the sheet which covers it.
The nightmare card, the crystal river woman lays down a card for my future, in a position that represents about six months ahead. It shows a black sky, the moon hidden by a cloud. She looks up at me, her elfin face dwarfed by zebra-striped glasses. I wonder what it is hiding?
At three o’clock in the afternoon it is pitch dark outside. Nara is bent over her microscope in the room they call ‘the freezer’, kept at minus 80. A hunched figure, swaddled in layers of clothing.
I know from her diary that during many of those winter days, when she ought to have been attending to the creatures she was slowly cooking in the aquarium, she was actually looking at snow crystals under the electron microscope in the walk-in specimen freezer kept at a temperature of –80 degrees. She wore mukluks, two parkas, three hats.
Here she was conducting a private, sacred experiment. She was photographing snowflakes before they melted, taking meticulous notes about each of them: ‘0.08mm diameter, classic snowflake shape, spikes like the North Arm of Newfoundland. 12-sided, a flower in the middle. Branches gutted.’ Others she labelled as ‘waterlilies’ or ‘diatoms’.
Later she would learn via the internet that these shapes had scientific names: the boxy crystal star was a stellar dendrite; those with a transparent circle in the middle were stellar plates; there were also snowflakes called fern, rimmed crystal; sectored plate. It really was true that no two snowflakes were exactly alike. What they had in common was that they had all taken hours to fall to earth, their journeys were perilous, and they had been changed en route. Nara noted all this in her methodical scientist’s hand. But these observations were a feint. She was trying to see through the crystal, into the future. She believed that if she looked at them correctly, swivelling them this way and that, like a prism they would divulge a shape greater than themselves, and which pointed to a grand design, like a divine intelligence. She was not the first person to believe this; far from it, for centuries people had been scrying into the future, using crystals. She did not know how, exactly, but she believed these crystals were a blueprint for the future, that most dangerous of countries.
5
It is three in the morning. Helen cannot keep from falling asleep, her head lolling on the cafeteria table. She walks outside in her shirtsleeves into minus 25 to jolt herself awake. Outside the air is so cold that her skin cracks, the lines around her eyes etch themselves deeper. She is losing weight. She is becoming an outline of herself.
She enters rooms, turning on and off lights, switches, shining torches in dark corners, looking for spark. She collects adjectives in her mind as she goes about her rounds, chippy shop, genny shed, lab, boatshed, MiracleSpan shed, Accommodation Block 1, Accommodation Block 2; blunt, overbearing, cutting, opinionated, unfeeling. An instinctive BBC impartiality urge prods her to add: honest, astute, witty, forthright, experienced. Stubborn, restless, pessimistic, grinding. Secretive – yes, that’s what he is, fundamentally. He’s a government employee, very likely a spook.
When did you become so suspicious? Who was it, who had asked her this? A friend, somewhere along the way, and recently. I’m a journalist, or at least I was one. I was trained to be suspicious. No, not like that. Like what then? How many levels could there be? There was suspicion and there was suspicion. No, she was not paranoid, only wary, wary of self-deprecation, of people with natures steeped in dreams, wary of social backgrounds and childhoods and explanations, wary of pleasure and values and scandal. Also of suspicion itself, and seduction, of dull brutes, of immaturity. Wary most of all of the incestuous love she had felt for her husband, at the end, as if he had been her brother or father and not her lover. When he died, it had been a year since they had made love.
And now men are a distant country. She is susceptible to the constant harassment that she be thin, beautiful, young, but she is no longer sure why, or she has forgotten: oh, she slaps her forehead, mentally – so that I can attract men! That is how remote it seems, to her life, the whole game. No more impossible positions, no more sick contortions called love, sex, passion. Passion kills people. It is only the most effective murderer; she would call it euthanasia, if it were not so violent. Eric’s just another wasted death, his head spiked on passion’s gate.
She guards her locked vault of sparse secrets: catastrophic crushes, usually in war zones, when her safety was under the command of some Major or other, as if she had been programmed for this, to fall in love with the man who protects her. Caveman instinct. The wedding ring on their fingers, always. Outside the situation they were in, at Kandahar, at Camp Bastion, where Helen had been ‘embedded’, they would not have a word to say to each other.
All this took place after her husband’s death. Only then did she understand the true corrosive nature of experiences: there were some things that could happen to you, on this planet and in this life, which, while bad enough, were survivable in themselves. But the really insidious thing about life, the clever trick that lived at its black heart, was that just as you were congratulating yourself for having survived them, you realised a fugitive was harbouring itself in your gut, your mind, your heart – a succubus. And this fugitive had handed you a baton of sorts, setting in motion a process of invisible destruction: Over to you now. But the trick was, the weapon would be wielded by yourself. Ingenious! Life does not have to do the killing after all. We do it for ourselves.
Not that she tried, or not openly. But these missions – to Afghanistan, in the dying days of the war, when it had become very dangerous to be a journalist there, to Somal
ia, Chad, Eritrea, desert countries rippling with unstable militias – had in fact become covert missions of self-destruction. At least she would die on the job. At least she would die moving. In the end, that was all she needed, as far as death was concerned – to die while moving.
At six in the morning, an hour away from the end of her shift, she finds David making a cup of tea in the dining room.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ he proffers. ‘You must be tired.’
She says yes, she is tired. She does not answer directly about the cup of tea. David must take this as an affirmative, because he sets another cup on the counter.
‘I’m impressed, you putting yourself down for nights. You’re getting into the life here. You’ve made yourself one of the team.’
‘Why are you up?’ Next to David’s careful constructions, Helen’s question hangs plain-clothesed, awkward. A scarecrow next to a human being.
‘Because I can’t sleep.’
They sit down, scraping out their chairs on opposite sides of the table.
‘How is your wife coping with all this?’
‘Not very well. I’ve had to stay away before, but not like this.’ He runs his hands through his hair. Several strands stay between his fingers. They dangle there, like Christmas tinsel. ‘Is this happening to you? I’m losing my hair. I feel like I’m going into hibernation. You know, no one has had an enforced overwinter in the Antarctic in thirty years, not on this base.’
She nods, even though she didn’t know that. ‘I have problems with claustrophobia,’ she admits. ‘This is my way of dealing with it, I suppose, by keeping busy.’
He nods. ‘While the planes are here, it doesn’t bother me. But as soon as the planes are gone and the ship is the only way out, I feel – ’ he puts his arms around himself, hugging them to his chest ‘…It’s like a prison. A pleasant prison, but it’s not as if we can leave. Then again, we only have the impression of freedom in everyday life. We can’t necessarily walk away, or go anywhere, either.’
‘What did you do in the pandemic?’
‘Stayed in the office. We were ordered to.’ He pauses. ‘How about you?’
‘House arrest.’
‘My wife did that, although not at our flat. She stayed with friends, she couldn’t bear to be on her own, so she left while she could. We didn’t see each other for two months.’
Helen is preparing to give him a sympathetic look when he says, ‘It was good for us, I think. To have that time apart.’
She reins in her look and considers her options. She finds she cannot ask, why do you say that? She wonders, does she fear an answer negative or positive? Does she fear finding out that he is, after all, separated?
‘How did you manage?’ he asks. ‘I mean, during that time.’
‘I try not to think about it much.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, it’s all right. It’s just – ’ she cannot finish the sentence.
‘Do you have anyone – at home? I mean, you said your husband was dead – ’ He falters.
‘No, I have no one.’ She pauses. ‘After my husband died, I wasn’t able to – well, I was able, but I had no luck.’
After Eric’s death, she had been hopeful. She expected things to improve. She expected to be granted happiness, and not any happiness, either, but of an exceptional kind in direct compensation for what had happened to her.
‘No luck?’
She gives David a direct look. ‘My husband had been having an affair, for a long time. I’m not sure how long. That’s why he died, because he was desperate to see her, and he left our flat. She was already sick. He caught it, and died. They died together.’
We’re going to have to test you, I’m afraid. We don’t know how long he had been there. She didn’t know either. She didn’t know how long he had been seeing another woman, from whom he had contracted the virus. She didn’t know if he had passed it to her.
She lost weight instantly, while listening to what the policeman had to say on the telephone. Her trousers slacked around her waist, her hair lost its sheen. She was dying, anyway. Her stomach turned to stone. Her fingernails split, her skin hung flabby and sallow. She aged. Her first grey hairs sprouted from her head. All this happened that day, and those that followed the telephone call.
She learned that her name was Claire, a name she had never much liked, its lightness, airiness, transparency. How they had met, she would never know. After Eric died she found some photographs of her on his computer, but erased them.
At night, and for the following month, Helen took diazepam to sleep and woke feeling sick. Her smell changed – for the first time in her life, she could smell herself. The scent was old, disused, the scent of a body which would not make love or be made love to in a very long time. She slept and sweated in sour sheets, which she did not bother to change.
With the Antarctic, this sinister requiem finally came to an end. Or so she had hoped.
When she finishes speaking, she finds David is staring at her openly. Spurred on by some reckless instinct, she tells him about going to see the crystal river woman. She knows he is likely to mock her. But then she is not sure she has ever had his respect, so perhaps there is not much to lose.
He listens without interrupting. When he finally speaks, his voice has changed. The challenge so often nailed across it has been removed and a new note, barren and raw, rings through.
‘Do you really believe that we can know the future?’
‘Some things you can know, yes. Other things have not yet been decided.’
‘Decided by whom?’
‘I think it’s by what,’ she says. ‘Not who.’
‘By what, then?’
‘I don’t know. That’s the mystery.’
David sits back in his chair ‘I’m less interested in the future than a lot of people.’
‘I’m not sure I think much of it myself.’
She means, she doesn’t like the lack of clarity in her – in anyone’s – relationship with the future. With the past she has an intimate bond. There was a time when the ice sheets were intact, when Greenlandic hunters had enough to eat, when caribou did not starve. In her own lifetime, she can remember this: that there was a moment, finite, identifiable, when everything was in perfect balance. And now this moment is gone, never to return.
David frowns. ‘I’m not sure I’m as interested in the future as most people are. Or not in telling it; and anyway, I don’t think that’s possible.’
He shakes his head. ‘The way I see it, the only real threat to our existence is ourselves, and other people. I don’t think there’s anything else…out there.’
‘I know. I can’t prove that things are this way.’
‘Yes, all you have is an unproveable hypothesis. But worse, you’re using this story as a kind of proof, in order to confirm your darkest suspicions about life.’
Helen stares at him. She has never encountered someone so sceptical of her existence, her motives, her very soul, so prepared to deflate and question and consign her to the wounded category where all unviable things live. She has the impression that David views her, her beliefs, suspicions, fears, as only a particularly vexing logistical problem.
‘You want to go back and change what happened,’ he says.
‘Isn’t there anything you’ve wanted to go back and change?’
He does not answer immediately. His expression has become cloudy and dense. She expects him to get up, to scrape out his chair and leave, as he did before. But he doesn’t.
‘Did you know about what happened at Berkner Island?’ she asks.
‘You mean the accident, on the way back?’
‘No. I mean what happened between Nara and the pilot.’
‘No. Why didn’t you ask him?’
‘I know already, I know from what she wrote.’
‘So you are on her side, then?’
‘I don’t take sides,’ she says, firmly.
‘But doesn’t this happen wi
th writers, that you take on the life of your subject?’
‘Not usually. If you take someone’s part you lose any objectivity you might have. But I’m here, aren’t I? I’m in the same space, I use the same office she used, I read her diary, I’m stuck here for the winter.’ She pauses. ‘I think sometimes, existences can overlap.’
‘Is that what your crystal river woman said?’
‘No. Yes. She said sometimes we are unaware that we are sent on missions in this life, on behalf of other people, to right certain wrongs, to bring things full circle.’
‘Were you glad, when he died?’
She stares at him. She wonders if she has heard David correctly. ‘Who?’
‘Your husband.’
‘Why would I be glad?’
‘He’d betrayed you. Did you think he’d gotten what he deserved?’
Her answer came to Helen from somewhere else, as if it were being dictated to her. She says, ‘People who live through a time of death are not the same as other people.’ She means, living through a time of death taught her that retaliation was not her right. In the end, life takes its own revenge.
PART VII
Vanishing Point
1
Mean temperature 38°Fahrenheit or 3°Celsius. Wind 25 knots, gusting to 30/35 Northeast, Dew Point 4°C.
It was raining, of course. What did it do in the Falklands but rain? It drove against them as they walked down Ross Road, past the West Store, the Capstan Gift Shop, the Upland Goose Hotel.
Takeoff would be worst; they would be lucky to get 2k vis on liftoff, but once above the cloud mantle this would stretch to 6k. Luke studied the forecasts just in from the military base, deciphering their numbers and codes. In another ten minutes they would radio base and see what Horace was saying. Trust a computer model to get it right, and the forecasters be wrong. It had happened before.
Nautical Twilight 6:12 AM FKT and 5:48 PM FKT. Astronomical Twilight 5:32 AM FKT and 6:28 PM FKT. Length Of Visible Light: 10h 15m. Once in the Antarctic, the visible light would be about half that, he calculated: a five-hour window of dusky semi-darkness.
