The Ice Lovers

by Jean McNeil

  4

  It happens on the sea ice, only twenty kilometres from base. Luke is flying very low, at the lowest threshold of the altimeter, 100 feet, to fix a landing track. They strafe the icefields so that a smoky curtain of ice crystals is blown in their wake.

  Nara looks out the window, her face turned away. For the first time since she arrived in the Antarctic, she does not want to see the ice beneath her. She shirks her co-pilot duty, which is to watch out for bird strikes and icebergs.

  He is tired and he does not see the nearly invisible silhouette of the iceberg. The plane’s skiwheel snags on its top; it is a pinnacle berg, those triangular lumps of weathered ice that look like spinnaker sails.

  Of the actual impact, Luke will remember nothing at all, nor of the moment that preceded it, nor the time immediately after. His memory will be erased. Later, he will report to the authorities that the aircraft was destabilised by the berg strike, although very slightly. If he hadn’t been coming in to land he would have had the time and room to correct the plane’s tilt.

  The left wing dips, toward the ice. He corrects it quickly – he is an excellent pilot, no one has better reflexes or judgement – thinking for a moment that it would be all right, but gravity tugs at it again. If he’d had just a little more altitude, he would have recovered the situation. Nara puts her hand out on the console, and this is the last thing he will remember of her, a right hand reaching out toward the altimeter, to steady herself. It is New Year’s Day, 2013.

  They came for them in the RIBs. It took them two hours to reach the plane, portaging over unstable ice, looking for leads between ice pans. The ice was shifting, blowing in, then blowing out on the Bellingshausen tide. They came for them even though there was no certainty they would all get back; later this is what would impress Luke most, because he knew that in the Antarctic, such missions were not mounted lightly. A few years before a Norwegian man who survived a Twin Otter crash not far from base with only a broken leg was left to freeze to death, because the sea ice was too unstable to rescue him. There was no point in endangering many lives just to save one.

  The plane was largely intact. A week later the Navy ship would arrive to salvage the body, winching it up from the ice. Its undercarriage was smashed, but otherwise, not a scratch. Luke had been right in his feeling that no matter what happened, he would always be able to get the plane down, in some form. It would not end in disarray.

  He was knocked unconscious by the jolt, but he was only out for ten minutes, he estimated. However long it was, when he came to, Nara was gone.

  The Southern Ocean constructed itself piecemeal over 120 million years. Only 38 million years ago the Drake passage appeared, revealing its island archipelago arcing up toward the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire. The protoice sheets of the Antarctic also date from this event. In the early Pliocene, 3 to 4 million years ago, the Antarctic circumpolar current that Nara and Alexander helped study on their journey into the Antarctic by ship that summer stabilised its flow and has not changed much until this day.

  The cold current it spawned fanned cold water out to the world’s oceans – the Indian, the South Atlantic, the southern Pacific – causing the earth’s temperature to plummet. That the early Pliocene was also the date of the onset of the most recent planetary glacial epoch was no accident, Alexander knew; the birth of the Antarctic was in part responsible for the last global freeze.

  There is nowhere on earth like the Antarctic, with its consuming vortex, a static frozen whirlpool moored at the bottom of the planet, its weight so heavy that it drags down the magnetic field of the earth, so that the planet is not spherical at all, but pear-shaped. A fulcrum, the coldest place on the planet, far colder than the Arctic. In the Antarctic there is only ice, which makes more ice, and it goes on forever. It is a sinuous, remote, abstract reality. To live there, you have to accept this – that it is not a place, not really part of the world. It is like living in the deep ocean, or on the moon. But also, there is something else, some element of a trick involved. The Antarctic is a hoax, a visual puzzle. It never happened, it does not exist.

  PART VIII

  Iceblink

  1

  ‘So what do you do, at work?’ Helen asked.

  ‘I make policy.’

  She smiled. ‘I know that, but how do you make policy? How does it actually work?’

  David drew a breath. ‘Well, it’s all a bit mysterious. I spend a lot of time consulting with ministers on – oh, science, resource exploration, territorial claims, military matters, foreign policy. Then we work with lawyers to draft legislation, and go to conferences, and consult with other Antarctic Treaty member states. And then,’ he said, shifting in his seat, ‘I do a whole lot of very secret stuff I can’t tell you about, or they would shoot me.’

  The place has become so familiar to Helen and David, by then, with the low buzz of the squash dispenser and fizz of water boiling in the tea urn, the cans of Nido powdered milk stacked below. On the walls the Antarctic photo gallery: pilots, skidoos, elephant seals. The dog-eared climbing magazines, ten-year-old National Geographics. All this had not changed since Nara’s year on base.

  They talked more now; in their captivity a new complicity had sprung up between them, more cautious than what they had shared on the ship, yet at least now David spoke with her without those boards nailed across his voice, which simultaneously issued a challenge and refused her entry.

  ‘What about the future?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, that. We spend vast amounts of money on the future. Consultants, presentations by scientists – the NASA guys, they’re the best – and future scenario modelling. They’re by far the most amusing, the scenario people. They show us everything from dystopia to utopia, the whole gamut laid out on the table. They talk about the Icarus scenario, where we all fly too close to the sun, we want everything, we aim too high for a perfect sustainable society, and we fall, scorched by our own ideals. Or the Lame Duck scenario, where resource poverty cripples growth, and the political momentum that’s driven the democratic process atrophies, slowly, over the decades. There’s another scenario, but I can’t remember what it’s called, the To Hell in a Hand-Basket scenario, probably.’ He laughed. ‘But how much this changes anything, I don’t know – all these futures, floating in front of us like ogres – but we have to choose, that’s the problem. We have to choose now, how we want the planet to be, in the future, because there is no way back.’

  He paused. ‘My brother is one of them, in fact.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He’s an economist by training, but these days he tells the future.’

  ‘How can he do that?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. All I know is that these days banks, governments, the corporate world, they all go to visit Ben and his crystal ball.’

  When had he seen Ben last? David realised he couldn’t remember. They must have had lunch, sometime around – could it really have been Christmas? He had a vague memory of a tree blinking on and off in the corner, one of those lavishly decorated trees, in what used to be called a Gentleman’s Club. Ben looks so young – this is what David kept thinking, over and over, during their conversation that day. He was only thirty-six. Although there was something about his face, his physique, that suggested he might age in giant leaps, the sort of age acceleration seen in presidents and prime ministers made suddenly old by the stress of running the world.

  ‘Ben took the right route,’ he said it absently, so that Helen barely heard him.

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To power, I suppose. PPE at Brasenose, an early career internship with the FCO, then the Treasury, then industry. Next up, government.’ David rapped the table, hard, with his fingers, startling Helen. ‘I took the back door, as it turned out. I studied history and science. I wanted to be a scientist. But I suppose I knew from the beginning that I didn’t have the stamina, the dedication, for research science. But I never really fitted in at the FCO – Ben did – and
they just didn’t know what to do with me. So they gave me the Polar Regions. Well, I earned it, actually. My name helped, of course.’

  ‘And how do you want the future to be?’ she asked.

  ‘A version of this, I suppose.’ David swept his eyes around the dining room. ‘Little Antarctic bases, recycling their own rubbish, treating their own sewage, desalinating encroaching floodwaters, producing their own entertainment. Victorian pantomimes, burlesques, vaudevilles.’ He laughed. ‘This is how we should all be living.’

  ‘Don’t you miss anything from the outside world?’

  ‘Only friends. Anonymity. Restaurants. I want to go into a restaurant and order something from the menu, something I want, instead of queueing up at the cafeteria like I’m back in university, or in the Army. I miss swimming. Heat. Being able to walk outside with only a shirt on. Not having to wear socks. Travel.’

  ‘I only ever wanted to live in cities,’ she said. ‘I wanted that anonymity, the choice they give you. We can go to this play, or this concert, or this restaurant. The strange thing, we never do. Near the end of our marriage Eric and I never went out. We were always working.’

  Eric would prepare his classes, she would go to her job on a daily newspaper, and at night they would sit at separate computers and catch up on their emails. When they ate dinner together the television would be on; they would watch the news, and exchange views about what they saw happening in the world, their alarm growing in concert. Day after day they had seen each other only this way, and in bed – to sleep. For a long time, bed had been only about sleep.

  ‘Do you love your brother?’ she asked.

  He looked away. ‘I feel pride, and envy. Mixed together.’ He looked back at her. ‘Do you think that’s love?’ He meant, Is that the answer you were looking for?

  The drinks machine switched on, its buzz filling the silence.

  They sat back in their respective chairs and allowed their eyes to roam the dining room, the photographs now so familiar: planes landing against a watermelon sunset, Orcas probing the surface with their lapidary heads, skidoos pulling Nansen sledges across a featureless plain of white.

  Night gathered outside the window. Helen knew that in some obscure way she would be the Antarctic’s prisoner forever now, that a cold fire had been lit inside her. To keep it stoked she would either have to find a way to return, or run the risk of an eternal homesickness by extinguishing it forever.

  There is the dead, and the living, and what between them? Dusk. A collusion. That is why, in this duskless place, life seems unreal. There are no ghosts. So we haunt ourselves, having no one else to do the haunting for us.

  Nara wrote in fragments, mostly. Many of them make little sense: I hear it now. The voice. It says: Moss hours. Our confessions.

  But it is clear she thought she was reading the planet, as if it were writing its diaries or memoirs, and had simply arrived at the last chapter. Too exhausted to write on its own, now, it required an amanuensis – a translator, a scribe. Why had it chosen her? She was at the end of the earth, alone and grappling with an impossible love. The Antarctic winter had driven many strong-minded men insane, and why should a young woman biologist not succumb to the hallucinations of the most total winter on earth? She has been abandoned – that much she understood. She needed a voice to fill the silence.

  Now, Helen wonders: is it possible she was telling the truth? It was a radical thought, but perhaps it has a voice, and was trying to communicate, in its distress, and it found a willing receptor tuned by anguish to its frequency.

  At night in her pitroom, Helen tries to tune herself into its voice, but she can only hear the hiss of snow, the hollow ringing wind, a sound like no other on earth. Black with emptiness, and also something else, if Helen allows herself to be fanciful: despite its ferocity, a quiet kind of sorrow. A longing.

  The Wintering file stops on the night before the Berkner trip. Nara must have been in a rush, Helen decides: all she had had time to write was ‘tomorrow – Berkner trip with Luke. Leave base at 0800, refuel at Bluefields, then Berkner.’

  The old maps of the Antarctic show endless archipelagoes of islands, ice caps draped across their vacant names: Lassiter, Wilkins, Sweeny, Charcot – all men, all long departed. Men of the desert, of the hollow places, glass, crystals, following a parallel code through time. They were famous, they had charted the world Helen occupies now, and that was about it. They moved across this transparent world where there is no lightning, customs, music, where water has never flowed, except as ice.

  Nara had confided to her diary that she had reached a dead end with men. Why then, Helen wonders, did she volunteer to go to a place so suffused with men, their presence, their exploits, their pasts and deaths? These men had marched across the polar ice caps in pure summer, the sun pounding them from above. Hel-lo there, she could imagine them saying, in their sharp Edwardian diction, as if swords were being driven through their words. They had been here, in this ghostless chalice of the world, a hundred years ago.

  For the first time in her life, in the Antarctic Helen feels a true kinship with men, in particular with the old explorers, also long dead, and also something more mysterious: it is if she can feel the remnants of forgotten life, a life she has lived, that definitely existed, but which she cannot remember. All that is left is the residual impression of having been given a formal gift: of passion for cold, for this frozen world, its flaxen, diligent light.

  In her office, the same one Helen occupies now, did Nara ever have such thoughts? There, beside Helen, although separated from time, Nara plays with the plastic bull from the wine bottle, the last one she shared with Luke before his departure, turning it over and over in her hands so much she will wear a groove in it. Objects you keep, without knowing why.

  2

  On a night not long before Luke flew out at the beginning of the Antarctic winter of 2016, Helen took a walk to the aircraft hangar. She did not have her mini-disc recorder with her. She had no hopes of encountering Luke, or if she did, of speaking to him.

  She pulled the hangar door open and stepped inside. There in the half-light sat the large interncontinental plane. It gleamed, a deep satisfying red in the semi-darkness. She walked around it, running her hands along the fuselage, passing her fingers over the penguins-and-propellers emblem, feeling its rivets, its seams. It was surprisingly delicate, this machine which could land on an ice runway with wheels, which could fly five hours through the air, back to the real world.

  ‘Thinking about stowing away?’

  She started. Luke emerged from the fuselage. ‘Didn’t give you a scare, did I?’

  ‘You did,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think anyone was here.’

  He saw her hand lingering on the fuselage. ‘She’s a great plane, isn’t she?’

  She took a step back.

  ‘Don’t go.’ There was a plaintive note in his voice which surprised her.

  ‘I’m cold.’

  ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea. Here, come round to the Portakabin.’

  She sat down, amidst the dustless books. The flying manuals were still on the shelf. An atlas lay open in front of her to show the Alps. Helen had read Nara’s account of the nights she had sat there with Luke, drinking Bailey’s, the things they had talked about. She stepped inside with Luke, into an air of regret. She had an impression, fleeting and not entirely fanciful, that something or someone followed at her heels.

  He saw her looking at the atlas. ‘Planning my summer holiday,’ he said. ‘That’s if I ever get one. I think I might be spending the rest of the winter in the Falklands. And you, you’re staying here.’

  ‘Well, as everyone keeps saying, how many people get an enforced winter in the Antarctic?’

  ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘When you become a winterer, it’s like joining the Special Forces. You enter into an élite.’

  They sat in silence for a while. When she finally asked the question, it was on impulse, not at all premeditated.

&nb
sp; ‘Did anything happen between you on that trip to Berkner? There was a mention in the report that you’d had some trouble with the aircraft there, that you’d had to take it airborne to see how it flew? You reported your position to Midas base and that Nara wasn’t with you.’

  For a moment, Luke was silent. ‘There was nothing wrong with the plane. I just flew off.’

  ‘Flew off?’

  He looked at her, and in his eye was an open expression, without a hint of challenge.‘Something just came over me. I couldn’t have done anything else. It was an instinct, a reflex. I didn’t know I was going to do it. Do you think it would have made any difference if I had?’

  She looked at him. Luke was a thinking man, she understood, not a dumb brute. If he could do such a thing, then anyone could.

  Helen suspected that our deepest natures, our real selves – if such a thing could be said to exist – have their expression in these momentary firings. She wondered if it could be true, that we were all driven by sparks toward conquest, abandonment, the many gradations between the two. These were only the same rank sparks that drove animals into hibernation, impossible migrations. Knit together, these sparks write the code to our existences.

  And Luke, in that moment in the Portakabin, with the stranger in front of him who had come to write Nara’s story; he also remembered those nights drinking Bailey’s, looking at maps, talking about Rio de Janeiro, Senegal, the Canary Islands. For years after the accident he had been coming back to this base, to the hangar and his makeshift office, unaware he was returning as a ghost.

  For every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction. Luke had read this in one of the books left behind on base by a scientist, a book about theoretical physics. Much of it was beyond him, but this basic principle made sense: that everything we do in the world carries the energy of its own riposte.

  He did not know why he’d flown off without her that day at Berkner, only to turn around in the sky well short of Midas and return. Sometimes there is no why. This is what he would come to think, in the ensuing years. It was an instinct – curious, inexplicable. Neither in nor out of character; in any case Luke was not convinced that there was such a thing as character, as in a suite of things one individual would or would not do.