The Ice Lovers

by Jean McNeil

  His dark skin was so pale, his lips the lightest blue. He looked like a religious statue.

  She spoke to him. ‘I have to go and get help. Can you hear me?’

  She saw an eyelash flutter.

  ‘I’ll be back in half an hour. Don’t stop breathing. Don’t fall asleep.’

  Another flutter of an eyelash. His mouth opened, very slightly.

  She turned her back on him and began to climb.

  The propellers kept spinning while the pilots went through the post-flight checklist. If they were going to leave right away they would keep the number one engine running in case of generator trouble. But taking off today was a remote possibility, now that there was fog. The takeoff track would take them over icebergs, and they needed visibility.

  She glimpsed Luke through the cockpit window. From the back of the aircraft two figures, stiff with fear, strangers, emerged – the doctor and the air mechanic, a Canadian who had never been to the Antarctic before, pressed into leaving the summer behind by an offer of a substantial bonus and a vacation in Hawaii.

  Luke appeared last and walked down the stairs. He took off his gloves – a summer habit. Soon he would put them back on.

  ‘Good news,’ Luke said. ‘We’re staying for dinner.’

  The smile which emerged from Nara then came from her deepest being. He had come back.

  Dinner that night was lavish: Uruguyan beef with parsnips, fresh carrots from the Falklands, candles on the tables, plastic flowers in tiny vases.

  After dinner Nara went down to the surgery. Alexander was hooked up to a saline drip which had been slowly warming the core temperature of his body over the past several days. He was conscious now, although he refused to speak to her, refused to even look at her. But he could not stop her from sitting beside him.

  ‘We had salad. With avocado. They brought a crate of pears from Uruguay.’

  He turned his face away.

  She said, ‘You’re leaving tomorrow.’

  Finally, he looked at her, a strange look of barren triumph. ‘You must be glad I’m going.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re alive, that’s all.’

  His face was still drawn and bloodless from cold. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘You mean you wouldn’t have done the same for me. You mean you think I saved you because I am in love with you.’

  He stared at her for a while. In his mind, she knew, doors were opening and shutting themselves; these were his thoughts, his decisions, no more anchored in the world than hers were, but so much more vital and buoyant, because he did not think, he only felt, and this was the source of her fascination for him. She had so wanted to be true and wild, like him. She had so wanted to be free.

  Luke was tanned; that was the first thing she noticed. But he was transformed in some other way, also physical. He looked much more vigorous than the Antarctic version Nara had said goodbye to five months before. This place takes its toll on people, she thought, and considered her own extreme paleness, how thin she had become.

  This shimmering envoy from the northern hemisphere summer sat down opposite her but kept his hands planted on his thighs, as if he might use them as a lever at any second, and get up and go.

  ‘I can’t believe you came back.’

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I didn’t have much choice.’

  ‘You look exhausted.’

  ‘Well, flying down here in winter, you never know…’ he gestured obscurely toward the window. She followed his gaze there and saw a black square of night; in it, their reflections.

  ‘That’s an amazing thing you did, out there,’ he said. ‘He was tagged in, I hear. There was no reason for anyone to worry.’ When she said nothing, he prodded. ‘So why did you?’

  ‘Just instinct, that something was wrong, and that he was involved.’

  How could she tell him how the universe had taken a darkling cast that morning, a subtle change in the albedo exchange between the ice and the sun, the closing of an eye of the wolf. Something small and unnoticable. Mothers probably had such instincts about their children being in danger.

  Luke’s look then was penetrating, restrained, judicious. She flinched slightly underneath it. He might not believe her, on some level.

  He said, ‘It was a good hunch.’

  She had so wanted to hear that note of warmth, of appreciation, in his voice. It had always been there; some times too much, and she had heard the honeyed tone of desire. She reminded herself now how only a few months before she had felt confined, even trapped, by his admiration.

  ‘I never thought I’d see you again before October.’

  He laughed, a little brightly, for him. ‘No. Well. Never say never. I never thought I’d be doing this job as long as I have been.’ He paused. ‘You know, in winter this place gets to everyone. Even the steadiest characters.’

  ‘I’m not insane, if that’s what you’re implying. They say I had a nervous breakdown, but I don’t know.’

  ‘Look – I know how intelligent you are, and all. I think you’re the most intelligent person I’ve ever met.’

  ‘And how do you think that helps me, my intelligence?’

  ‘I think sometimes, you can think too much, take things too seriously – ’

  ‘What things? You don’t think the Antarctic winter is serious?’

  ‘I’m not talking about that.’ He paused. ‘I think you have to accept to live life as it is, on the terms we are given. You know, stuff happens. That’s life. Maybe the point is to just live. Not to think too much about things that don’t work out.’

  When she had not spoken he said, ‘Did you ever once give a thought for me, for my feelings?’

  ‘Yes, I did. As a friend.’

  ‘You’re my friend, are you? In what way?’

  ‘I want you to be happy.’

  ‘And you don’t see any connection between my happiness, and you?’

  She felt regret, or remorse, accompanied by a residual note of hope – hope that she could yet have had a friend like him, an Antarctic pilot eighteen years her senior. It was his friendship, uncomplicated, freely given, that she missed. What luck she’d had, of having found so unlikely a friend. Why could they not love each other in that way? Like family.

  She looked away. This array of thoughts and feelings percolated through her within a single second. And, rising from them, stronger and pointed, something new in her relationship with Luke: a wish to please.

  ‘No, well,’ Luke said. ‘I thought so.’

  She said, ‘You must hate me.’ And waited for his denial.

  ‘Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between love and hate.’ He did not look directly at her.

  Luke might have saved her simply by asking, ‘What’s wrong? What went so wrong for you here, in only four months?’ But he had done enough saving for one day.

  He rose, then, deploying those capable hands of his like the landing gear which had come down upon her from the sky, only that day, but how long ago it seemed. She was certain they had both just lived through the longest day of their lives.

  He left her office. He did not say goodbye, he did not look back.

  From the end of the corridor she heard the tiny clack of his plastic tag being hung on the nail above his room number. The tag with Luke’s surname had sat on the tagging board all winter with the other pilots and mechs in the ‘Flying Off Base’ section. Many, many times during the winter Nara had stood in front of the tagging board, scanning it for where Alexander might be, avoiding Luke’s name hanging there, avoiding missing him.

  The following day the plane left, with Alexander on board. Nara did not go over to the runway to say goodbye. She watched it take off from the dining room.

  In the bay, the sea ice was breaking up, far too early. The week before Alexander’s accident, the wind had come up and blown the ice out, then blown it back in. But by then the ice was ruined and unstable, and for the rest of the winter it would not cohere.

  2


  The Otters arrived first, bringing summer in the form of pilots, fresh fruit and vegetables, the summer base commander, the field operations manager, all on the first Dash from the Falklands.

  It was late October, the beginning of the austral summer of 2012. Spring that year was the purest relief Nara had ever tasted. It was as if one of the cloud mantles that hovered inches above the peninsula had suddenly lifted. The arrival of summer brought the return of the Antarctic Nara loved: volatile, surreal, high-spirited, the delirious cameraderie, the air overstuffed with oxygen.

  Luke flew the first passenger flight into base. The first she saw of him was on the veranda of the main complex. He mounted the stairs, P-bag slung over his shoulder. She thought: he looks changed. But she could not say how.

  ‘Hello there,’ he said.

  ‘Welcome back.’

  She waited for the moment when he would drop the bag from his shoulder, and come toward her, the moment when they would give each other a hug or a kiss on the cheek, as they used to do.

  He shifted from one foot to the other.

  ‘How was the flight down?’

  ‘Totally routine, thanks. No problems at all, compared to the last time we came this way.’

  His Canadian accent had solidified in the two months since she had seen him; he had spent those months in Canada, she knew, driving his children through the Rocky Mountains. She felt a satisfaction – this was what had changed, why he looked different.

  ‘Well, got to unload the plane, check in with the field ops man.’

  She nodded, a moment, fleet and sparing, of happiness dashing through her. ‘Summer’s back,’ she said, and smiled.

  ‘I guess so.’

  Two days later she learned that Luke was on the roster to fly the ice-coring equipment out to Berkner; the base carpenter would go along for the ride as his co-pilot.

  ‘How long do you think you’ll be gone?’ she asked.

  ‘Could be back tomorrow, could be next month. They’ll likely base me at Midas, and I’ll fly back and forth. Berkner’s a brutal place. You should see it. If I get back to base I’ll try to get you out there. Deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ she said, and smiled.

  He was gone for six weeks. They managed several email exchanges during his time at Midas. He sent her photographs; the base looked like Space Station Earth. It was constructed of several pods of blue plastic cladding and porthole windows, and sat five metres above the ice sheet, raised there on hydraulic legs. As the snow accumulated, the base could be jacked up by only two people. They call it an architectural wonder, Luke wrote. The summer sun never approached the horizon at Midas, because it sat four hundred kilometres nearer to the Pole than Adelaide base. It’s a special place. Bleak, but beautiful. Folks here are taking very good care of me. Luke’s emails from Midas arrived with transmission times of three-thirty or four in the morning. We’ve had some late nights, or early mornings You really never know what time it is here. At Midas, Luke told her, he instinctively looked toward the sea fifteen kilometres away, and closing fast. The edge of the Brunt ice shelf was creeping ever closer with melt, which ate away at the towering ice cliffs. He saw iceblink: the clouds reflected the ice, so that the sky was white and the sea ice dark. He saw the fata morgana – mirages caused by refractions in the curvature of the earth, and the lack of any visual markers in his field. He had hallucinations – of towering icebergs which did not exist, of fabulous cities gathering and dispersing in the ether. I wish I could show you all this, he wrote.

  December came, the supply ship came and went, and still Luke remained flying out of Midas to the Ronne ice shelf, working with the ice-core drillers. Once he flew a mission to take the Midas plumber eight hundred miles east to the German base to fix their solar water heater. He wrote to Nara of the abrupt needling peaks of a practically unknown mountain range in Queen Maud Land, the gigantic and endless ice shelf he saw beneath him, and the fracture which spelt its imminent calving. Soon this shelf, even larger than the Larsen B which had broken free from the continent ten years previously in 2002, would begin its journey toward disintegration in the southern ocean.

  Nara had her second Christmas on base. The chef baked a giant mince pie; on it, miniature marzipan penguins played hockey, in deference to the team of Canadian air mechs among them. After dinner everyone went skiing wearing Santa costumes and jester hats with tassles topped with bells. Everyone had bright, tanned faces. Everyone felt an exhilaration which Nara registered but which somehow passed through her and out of her, on to an unknown destination.

  On the 27th of December Luke returned with the icecoring team. She saw them walk up from the runway together, the men haggard versions of the characters she had seen six weeks previously, unshaven, their faces pinched by constant exposure to cold and the mean winds which raked the island.

  As for Luke, he had changed again: his face was thinner, tanned to the mahogany hue of the Antarctic, where the skin was bombarded with more UV rays in two days than it would absorb in an entire northern hemisphere summer. She looked at him and saw the same man – although subtly different, as if he had been subject to a mysterious reversal – she had met almost a year before to the day, when they were stuck in the Ellsworths together.

  They met that night over a cup of tea.

  ‘I’m thinking of moving on,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean it’s time to do something else, or do the same thing somewhere else. I might go to Africa, for a while. I used to live there you know.’

  ‘You’re tired of the Antarctic.’

  ‘I am, yes.’ He gave her a hunted look as he said it.

  The idea that Luke might no longer love the Antarctic life affected her deeply. She realised that her love for the continent, for her life there – if love is what it was – was linked to him, somehow.

  ‘I don’t think I’d want to be here anymore,’ she said, ‘if you weren’t here, flying.’

  His surprise was visible. And underneath it, in those prism eyes of his, a sheen of hope. She could say nothing to disperse it, because she herself did not know if it was love which caused her to say this or a raw survival instinct, a cheap form of self-preservation, a pact with herself Luke knew nothing about. She had an obscure instinct to say I’m sorry.

  ‘I thought I belonged here.’ Nara put it in the past tense, because her belonging was over, somehow. ‘And then – what happened to me last winter…’

  ‘I know.’ In his voice she heard a glimmer of their old understanding. ‘Listen, it’s been a long day. I don’t think I’ve slept well in six weeks and I’m bushed.’

  She could hear his footsteps retreating, his hiking books squeaking on the linoleum the Saints kept pristine with daily applications of bleach, down the corridor lined with fire extinguishers, with photographs of the old Antarctic, its Nansen sledges and long-dead dogs.

  Nara remained sitting at the desk, the little plastic bull from the bottle of Sangre de Toro in front of her, its foreleg stretched out in anticipation of the coming fight. She had never wanted to see a bullfight. It was an abattoir turned to sport, a spectacle for savages, the matadors only dainty, arrogant little brutes.

  She threw the bull across the room. It rebounded off the far wall, leaving a tiny, nearly invisible mark beside the picture of the Welsh coastline, then fell to the floor.

  The bull will lie there, unnoticed, dustless, until the scrub-out the day after the ship leaves at the beginning of the following winter, when someone will put their broom aside, pick it up, twirl it between their fingers exactly as Nara had done on so many occasions, before throwing it in the bin.

  3

  The propeller spun, a black insect slicing at the air. The Otter projected itself beneath them onto the ice sheet and this replica trailed them, a faithful shadow. Out the cockpit window was a blue-white horizon so wide and commanding it curved in at its edges, like a convex mirror.

  Over the Bowman Coast Luke pointed out jagged
edges of ice. ‘Cliffs down there must be a couple of hundred feet high, at least.’ These were the remnants of the Larsen ice shelf. Luke banked south, then, heading over the Wilkins, Black, and Lassiter Coasts, the mountains beneath them rolling into blue ice glaciers, then a pale turquoise hem of meltwater where they met the salt sea.

  At 75 degrees south they saw a long seam of white spread across the curved horizon – the edge of the Ronne Ice Shelf. Beneath them the ice in the Weddell Sea was breaking up: pale blue rivers of fresh water snaked through wedges of white ice. Ice pans fragmented into rectangles, trapezoids, rhomboids. From the air it was impossible to tell how large they might be. Between these intervals of ice were sheets of transparent lacy ice, like muslin, seamed at the edges where two floating sheets of icy lace overlap. ‘Like a wedding dress someone’d taken a knife to,’ Luke said. Nara looked down and saw the ice slashed, torn at its seams into thin sheets of fabric. Within days, this would all melt.

  Then they passed over a field of unbroken white. ‘That’s the Ronne. The edges of the shelf are actually afloat. See there?’ Nara could see thin tracings on the snow, geometric, like the perforations between pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They appeared as narrow veins of the lightest grey on a field of white.