by Jean McNeil
Night snags on day. Shadows increase. The pillage of light by darkness.
Nara drifts among bergs, rolling and floating like stricken ships. She could climb aboard them, if she chose. Weddell seals eye her, unalarmed by her presence. In their eyes is moist indifference. They want only to swim, eat fish, loll on ice floes, soak up the solar burn of the polar sun.
The wind slams into her body, curves it into a small pine like those stunted bonsai shrubs called Diddle-dee that she and Alexander had seen on their walks in the Falkland Islands. On the horizon a glimmer of persimmon light vanishes into a dark water sky.
Nara thinks, if I can never touch flesh again, never hear the heartbeat of another human, then please let me go. She talks to this thing which has her life in the palm of her hand, addressing it in capital letters: You, It. She wonders, who are You? A will is imprisoning her there, on the ice. It is a mysterious force. A black wall, shimmering in the whiteness: magic. Alexander has the same quality, now, when she thinks of him. He is an amulet, a statue. He transports himself through time, he barely needs to move across space. Like a moving target on a radar screen, she cannot track his every moment, only his trajectory.
The body endures longer than she expects. The first immersion is a lurching shock. Her heart rocks sideways in her chest. She breathes in desperate gulps, her brain suddenly starved of the oxygen that has deserted it in order to try to warm the extremities. She can’t move her limbs; she is a diver, a strong swimmer, but her arms are made of lead suddenly, and they sink.
Her life has been the same as any other: years of striving punctuated by fleeting moments of exhilaration, of enlightenment. Fear has hung heavier over her life than most, just like the mantle of Antarctic clouds which drop so low that the sky is only a sliver of light on the horizon, trapped between cloud and sea.
It is more than a year since she has been warm. Still, some part of her does not want to let go.
The sea ice congeals in giant pancakes; it bunches into ridges where the plates of ice have driven against each other, much the same as when continental plates grind mountain chains into being when they collide. Above her, in this empty quadrant of sky at the bottom of the planet seen by only a chosen few, are nebulae and supernovae, with their bursts of strange red flare. The stars are cold, the space between them dark caesuras.
Not six months before, she and Alexander had spun underneath the stars on the first clear night in weeks after a bout of winter storms. On that night Alexander recited the names of the Southern Ocean stars, still unfamiliar to both of them, their spook names: Centaurus, Musca, Carina, Pleiades. Orion, Betelgeuse, Aldebaran. He pointed out the Southern Cross, how Venus and Mars sit low on the horizon, almost tipping over its dark seam, the reversed planets hurtling through an abandoned sky.
Her eye fixed on Pleiades, also called the Seven Sisters. At that extreme southerly latitude the constellation flickered on the horizon like strobe lights. It might have been Alexander who told her the baleful story behind its name: there were seven sisters who all committed suicide for sorrow at the death of their father, Atlas. The seventh star was named for Merope, who shined dully because in life she shamed herself by having an affair with a mortal.
Nara was alone. For the whole of the following day her ice floe drifted toward Adélie Island. It thinned, melted by the heat of her body until it was only a sagging meltpool beneath her; unstable and wallowing, like a child sitting in a deflating bouncy castle.
Cold starts at the perimeter of the body and travels inward. Nara knows when she is chilled to the core because her lungs hurt. A small pain at first, it expands and turns a yellow hue, threaded with black branches of agony. Each of the polyps on her lungs is slowly freezing.
It occurs to her that it would be quicker to die in the water. The immersion shock speeds up her heartbeat until it groans under the pressure of cold.
Beside her, Alexander spun. He was tall, quite dark-skinned, for an Englishman. His skin had an unusual hue – burnished, like wood. Even then, months after they first met, she still stared and stared at it, as if she had never seen skin before. There was an Asiatic tinge to his eyes, the shape of mussel shells.
Satellites streaked across the sky, spewing bolts of greenish light. If a satellite were to have fixed its lens on them, what would it have spied? Two people in the dark of the Antarctic winter, necks craned. They must be friends, or lovers; why else would they be alone, spinning round and round in the night, two of the only one hundred people left on the Antarctic peninsula, an area the size of France and England combined.
Was it possible to be traumatised by joy? The shock of it rippled through her: to have discovered joy, only to be immediately cut off from it…Nara was only beginning to understand that love could be something entirely different from the exalted force most people take it for, the romance and beauty in which she herself always believed, but rather a dark masquerade, a stalker, moving from her future backwards, silently, toward her.
Beyond the iceblink she sees black open water, a grind of shadow. St Augustine wrote, Whatever has flown away is past, now. Whatever remains is future.
Like everyone who sets out on a journey, she had hoped she would arrive unscathed. What could she do to make another man exactly like Alexander, this time a version which would love her? She wishes she had never seen him.
Even now her office on base and her cabin on the Astrolabe are saturated with her thoughts of Alexander. Dreams, fevers, meetings real and imagined, turnarounds, ruptures in the fabric of fate and time. Luck.
One star, or is it a nebulae? – it is dark, elusive. Nara watches it flicker on and off, sees the shadowy vortex its intermittent extinguishing leaves in the sky. ‘I don’t like that star,’ she says, more to herself than anyone.
For some years after her death Luke flies above the haze, this swirl of frontal passages, of lapse rates, the transfer of heat and moisture from the ocean to the air as the interior ice is pushed outward.
Season after season he will fly, drawn again and again to the frozen continent on the pull of its cold voltage. The light on the horizon, that prowling, infinite light. He flies into this valley of whiteness and returns with presentations, slideshows like the one he gave on the Midas III rescue the winter Helen was trapped on base, deploying the capable language of the Antarctic: traverse, expedition, sastrugi, katabatics.
Everything else is an unnecessary disturbance. Only this place matters. It is real, but so unreal. What am I going to say to this young woman? That was his thought, when he found her beside him in his cockpit on the way to the Ellsworths. This place they had come to was the least likely theatre for love on the planet. The unmistakeable bright ringing of its name, like a bell: the sound of Utopia, for a world beyond this world – Antarctica – a name as arid with endeavour as the desert which it describes.
In flying to and from the Antarctic there is always a Point of No Return. It is not a fixed place on land or in the air but a wandering axis, calculated on the basis of fuel, wind and knottage, weight carried and the weather forecast. For years he has always known when there was no turning back.
The doctors told him he’d had it for years. A mole, unnoticed on the back of his leg. By the time they caught it, it had spread. His PNR was passed, but he had not called it, radioing the comms manager on base as he habitually did, or even known it was there. He was told that his skin cancer was a result of all those years flying so close to the polar sun, absorbing its dazzling wattage of radiation.
But what a life!
He flies through days abandoned by night. A slim, pale moon, far above, stale in the sky. Migrating between the darkless polar summers, underneath dissolving stars.
Helen cannot sleep. Everything about David is unfamiliar. He sleeps fitfully, drawing in air in gasps, snorts. He sounds as if he is fending off an attack. She wonders if she should wake him.
She listens to the reassuring grind of the engines. They are making good time now, eleven or twelve knots. Outsi
de her portal window is a winter light, watery and dissolute. By tomorrow they will be in the Falklands. They will return to the real world, to shops and money and newspaper stories of death and of melt. Bangladesh is battered by successive cyclones, its delta flooded. Greenlandic women are giving birth only to daughters because of environmental pollution that warps the genes which assign gender. Crops in sub-Saharan Africa have failed for the fifth year running. Fortress Europe’s boats and helicopters patrol the oceans, forcing refugee boats back to the coasts of Tunisia, Senegal, Cape Verde.
David’s body offers small suprises which stun her. He is boyish in his limbs, his ankles are thin and graceful, so unusual for a man, his skin is taut. Apart from her own husband, she has never slept with a married man. She can feel the ownership of his body, the stamp on it. This lean body is on loan to her, for how long? She is unaccustomed to having a body beside her. The warmth is reassuring. She listens to his breath, his heartbeat. It seems to be keeping time with the ship’s rhythm, the plough, followed by a sigh as the ship mounts a wave, then a slide down the trough, a smash, and the cycle begins again.
There will be a surprise.
The crystal river woman lays down the cards. ‘There will be a man, yes, but he will be married. He must be resolute.’
For Helen, she lays down the Queen of Hel. ‘The woman who is in charge of her life,’ she says. ‘But what kind of life? A life white and cold with silence. Its meaning is loneliness.’
Helen watches as one by one, the cards cancel her hopes. If she had gone to see the crystal river woman before Eric’s death, how would she have coped with the knowledge of what was to come? If Nara had known, before she set off to the Antarctic, what would happen to her, would she have gone? The future is a trap, she thinks. That is why we are not supposed to know it. And also, if we do know the future, how to carry the burden of this knowledge?
Nara came to the Antarctic with hope, Helen will realise in the coming northern hemisphere summer, as she sits in the flat she and Eric once shared, reading and re-reading the file called Wintering. The entry for Nara’s first day on base is giddy with shock at leaving the ship, with the stony glamour of her new environment, her eyes blinking, her heart astounded by the thrill of everything that has happened to her on her journey: Yes, it is cold, she writes. But so light.
Fennoscandia
Finland, Sweden, Norway. A two-page spread in the atlas lies open on the desk to show a glacial, watery landmass so like the province where Luke had grown up and which he had told Nara about: bog, gneiss, schist, clouds of summer blackflies, studded with moose and wolves.
Alexander walked in the door. He had gone outside to make a phone call which Nara presumed he did not want her to overhear. Immediately the prowling presence of a life-flooded creature soaked the room.
‘I’m mapping Fennoscandia in the LGM. Here, I’ll show you.’ He clicked the mouse and his computer screen dissolved into a landmass – the dips and troughs, drumlins, the moraine, waterlogged interior.
‘We can have some chocolate.’ He rummaged in his desk, the same long fingers which had picked her backpack off her shoulders in the Falklands so that he could carry it, searching inside an ordinary desk drawer.
The city is limp and dull, trapped in a heatwave, the third of the summer so far. Nara reads an article in the newspaper about what happens to the human body in temperatures over 38.5 degrees. As it turns out, it boils. Proteins in cells congeal, as when you poach an egg – stringy formations, clumps of albumen, form. Water evaporates from the blood, and salts are lost. Nara reads that the heatwave is set to kill many more abandoned elderly people in anonymous apartments on the outskirts of Paris, of London.
In England temperatures of twenty degrees in late October are now routine. By April summer has arrived. In between, a shallow dip into a mild winter. It has not snowed in seven years. Many trees keep their leaves through the winter now; by spring they are yellowed and frayed; new, pale green leaves form a mottled patchwork with these old remnants. Some birds no longer migrate, and squirrels are dying en masse from a kind of nervous collapse; their nervous systems, programmed for hibernation, have been unravelled by wakefulness.
Nara has just emerged from a winter of the kind that now existed in very few places on earth. She had longed for heat, but now that she is back it feels unnatural; her back burns in a way it never did before, her legs sweat. An inner thermometer has shifted and she is no longer comfortable in temperate climates.
On that day she sits on a dank commuter train out of Paddington, electrical storms brewing to the west. She has to pass through the security cordon before boarding the train: metal detector, explosives-sniffing dogs, hand-searches, identity-card check, iris scans.
The new rule, she learns, is that people arrive an hour before the train is supposed to depart. Hygiene checks are obligatory now. This means passing their hands under scanners emitting violet light; when she was a teenager and went to nightclubs she had done this, to check that she had paid and was stamped in. Now the scanner routine is accompanied by disinfectant gel which must be rubbed on hands, between fingers, a cool astringent sensation in so much heat. Someone in the queue behind her says, I remember when you only had to do this to go into an intensive care unit. Now we have to rub gel on our hands to get into a bloody train.
Everyone around her seems angry, nervous. Gone are the resigned exhausted hordes of public transport. Stewards dressed in yellow vests flank the entrances to platforms, where ticket barriers used to stand. They are checking identity cards against tickets, even though identity cards have to be scanned to buy rail tickets online. Each time there is an attack, a new step is added in the security regime. Airport-style electronic scanners must be passed through; they scan for liquid explosives, traces of explosives and plastics. Laptop computers had to be surrendered for manual checks. Once on the train no one reads; rather everyone looks vigilant, on the lookout for invisible threats, illness, explosions, deliberate contaminations.
She has been out of the world for a year and a half and in her absence the world has changed. Still, she gets used to it surprisingly quickly, this and the barrage of other new regulations. Humans are too adaptable, she considers, they just go with the flow. What would it take, for them all to take to the streets, to demand change? She is back in the Real World. Luke’s emails were sometimes called News from the real world. But she finds she is visiting a foreign country. The Britain she left is not the one she has returned to.
The station advanced on them, and suddenly they had arrived; trains were so silent now, hermetically sealed canisters. You couldn’t hear the wind, or the tracks.
She got out and breathed the fresher air. She was there out of curiosity, really. She wondered if time had immunised her to him. She had not considered what she would feel if she found it hadn’t. She wanted to look at Alexander clinically now. He was an obstacle in her life, something she had to get beyond in order to get somewhere else.
In his office Alexander closes the Fennoscandia page and they go for a walk by the river, where it begins to rain. She wears a small, light dress, the lightest material she could find.
She is walking with him beside the river, and everything is normal and as it used to be. They walk along the Thames with its leafy elm trees, a blue summer evening. She has missed all this, she realises: trees, evening, herons and ducks floating on water that does not freeze.
They come to a standstill on a bridge to watch the river traffic. Canal boats putter by. Sailboats sit with their sails furled, like giant white storks resting.
He tells her he is slow, emotionally. A bit tortoise-like. It takes him a while to feel, a while to figure things out. He tells her it amazes him, how long it takes to come to any understanding about his feelings, and meanwhile time is passing, faster and faster. Time is elastic and does not want to be known. He tells her that when the raindrops come thick and fat and widely interspersed it is because they are negotiating ice crystals in the clouds. He tells
her he didn’t love her. Doesn’t love her.
She looks at Alexander’s intense, resolute gaze as he says this. He is awkward; not embarrassed, but slow, as he says, feeling his way. She realises he may have tried to love her, for a while, because of what she did, but gratitude and effort have killed it. She will be lucky if he does not end hating her. Men do not want heroic women (if that is what she is). They do not want peculiar, fascinating characters as lovers. He would never, ever, choose her. This is what she learned in the Antarctic, where everyone makes do with the people around them, where the most unlikely couples form, simply because they are both marooned at the end of the earth, and there is no one else. Nara would have consented to be a convenience for him, because she loved him. But if he did not choose her there, he would never have her.
They are standing on a bridge overlooking the Thames and he is telling her about rowing, how the scull is like a blade in the water, and very unstable. You have to practice rowing with both arms, he says, and she notices a raw patch on his elbow. Ever since she met him, he always has some scar, some slight blemish on his skin. They healed badly down South: for some reason the aridity impedes the scarring process. This time the scar on his elbow, also a scratch across his chest. Might it be some woman’s fingernail? There are not so many ways to get scratched across your chest.
He asks, ‘Do you think you will ever go back?’
Nara replies that she hopes to return to the Antarctic one day, although she is not sure.
In the future she will go to conferences where people will avoid her, subtly. She is tarnished by rumour. She does not yet know how rumour gets embellished, malformed, stretched until it is something greater than it ever was: heroism, rescue, a polar medal, mental illness, breakdown in the dead of winter, left stranded, a tribunal, her word against that of a pilot of twelve years’ Antarctic experience. A real mess. The biggest mess, in fact, in years. Officially, she would be given a medal. Unofficially she would be barred from the programme. Not openly, of course, but in the form of funding applications denied, research contracts not renewed, abstracts for submission to conferences mysteriously not accepted. Until she did the only thing she could do: shifted to working in the Arctic and in sub-tropical waters.
