by Jean McNeil
She tells him about the conferences she has been to or will soon attend in San Francisco, Vancouver, Lisbon, always ocean cities, fittingly for these acronym-named oceanography summits called CRYONWED and ADELIE, one of a large science army dedicated to charting a disaster: ecosystem collapse, oceanic dead zones which last for months on end, volatile wind patterns, plankton blooming and dying equally mysteriously, siphoning all oxygen from the water. Nothing survives these vacuums; the crabs first, then fish, then the seabirds, then higher predators, whales, sharks.
It is July now, and she does not know where the time has gone. She left the Antarctic on the ship at the end of the season in early April, then came straight back on the RAF flight from the Falklands. Other winterers planned thawing-out holidays in South America. But she rushed back to a country which many on base feared.
A heron swoops low over the water, grazing the surface of the canal with the tips of his wings. Alexander has something of the heron’s grace, she thinks, the way he folds his leg beneath him as he stands, his weight thrown on one hip, an origami figure of vigilant angles.
Alexander does not ask, what really happened to you? He does not ask, what went so badly wrong for you; was all that despair just because I couldn’t love you, is all that distress really necessary? Alexander doesn’t want to talk about it, she supposes, because he would not want to give her the impression she is in any way important to him. He is not intrigued by her being a figure around whom controversies swirl. Nara knows she does not fit the description of a woman disgraced, she has none of that tribe’s corroded glamour. And anyway, he is not interested in other people’s damage.
She couldn’t bear to be that far away from him. She couldn’t bear not to be able to touch his body. She is jealous of him and she is frightened of the power of her rage. Jealous of his barbecues, his grad schools, his dinners out with people every night this week, of which he makes sure to tell her she is only one. He does not suggest they have dinner that night.
She leaves him to walk through the rain, which she knows now is avoiding ice crystals in the sky. To the west, an electrical storm gathers. She boards a train after a similar but less rigorous security regime and she does not think, cannot think, for the entire half an hour journey into London, the sky a scorched orange. Thinking might unleash some dangerous, possibly lethal, substance.
July 26th, 2013. The day was almost over. Neither of them had referred to the anniversary. She wondered if he was even aware, if he paid attention to things which marked the lives of lesser mortals, such as dates on calendars.
They had made it through the most difficult chapter of winter. On the 22nd of July the sun came back. It had gone away so profoundly, but it came back, and it was like the return of some living yet prehistoric creature. Days of twilight lit by a sudden aurora. Faint at first, then fiery. Soon those viscous days which began and ended in darkness would be over. Soon the hungry, sideways glances would be no more.
Sometimes she liked the storms, the sheer viciousness of them. She liked looking out from the entrance of the sledge store to the accommodaton block, twenty yards away, yet not being able to see it. The wind tore past the door like a ghoul. She liked being battered by the elements. The hounding coziness, the strange confidence it produced, that they could take all this, mentally. That they could be so stricken with winter and still function. That they could take care of themselves. This was the greatest pleasure: the self-sufficiency, the pride they felt in being able to withstand the punishment. And the relief to find that winter still existed. To feel its power, when it was weakening in so much of the world.
She looks up to find a child, very young, staring at her from the aisle of the empty carriage. The child has a bruiser’s face, already very male, a square forehead, small eyes. On his cheek is a large patch of skin rubbed raw – some injury, she guesses, a burn, or eczema perhaps. Where has he come from? Where are his parents? She is almost alone in the carriage; it is nearly midnight. The child stares at her with those strange depthless eyes of very young children, scanning her, not unlike the iris machines with their flitting laser beams which blind her with her own retina’s reflection, those dark veining trees, long after she has passed through. The child bursts into a sudden reckless smile, then runs away.
Outside, glass buildings have begun to appear on either side of the high suicide barrier. They are nearing Ladbroke Grove. Soon she will be on the Tube, alone, heading to her flat, where she will spend countless similar nights. They stretch in front of her like a dank chaperone.
She had wanted nothing from Alexander but that primal satisfaction, feral, warlike. This is what her experience of sleeping with him had been: not kind, but ferocious. She loved him, not who he was in everyday life, necessarily, but who he was sexually. This makes no sense, she has never before known lust and it took her many months to recognise it. She is in love with him and to live without him has been like being in another dimension, beyond human life, a frozen dimension, but without the purity and splendour of the Antarctic. She has no name for that place.
The train arrives. The nocturnal stragglers pour off, and melt into the night.
‘What’s that you’re writing?’ David puts his hand on my shoulder.
‘Another future, a possible one.’ I don’t say, had the crystal river flowed in another direction. We no longer talk about that. I no longer go to see the woman with the Norse myth cards. I no longer want to know the future. I’ve learned the future is far more slippery than we think. And there is another danger: once we know the future, we feel it owes us to turn out as we have been told it will. And when it doesn’t, the sense of betrayal feels more like insanity.
‘I don’t know why this happens,’ the crystal river woman said, when I told her that the cards had been wrong about one thing. ‘Sometimes it misreads the shapes, usually in small ways. But sometimes it gets it very wrong.’ Like Nara did in her diary, the crystal river woman calls it It – not them, or God, or even the cards. In any case, the cards are a means of communication with this It. The entity knows all the future, and all the past – everyone’s, for all time, because as the crystal river woman says, the future has already happened on some level we are unfamiliar with, and possibly unable to conceive. Through the cards, it transmits its message to us. ‘I am only the translator,’ she says.
David left his wife because she had never been to the Arctic or the Antarctic, and had no reason or interest to go there. This is what he says, now, that he can never again live with anyone who has not known The Ice. We were trapped there together. Everyone will think we were lovers there, but that happened later, on the ship, because for some reason we needed to be released from the ice before we could love each other. The thrilling loneliness we felt there, which threatened to strangle us and instead gave us a new life. And here we are: a new life in a different world.
The book I will write about Nara’s death will have an alternative ending, just as if the crystal river had shifted and taken a different path. No one is allowed to know the path not taken. This is another thing the crystal river woman said to me. She was quoting the book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which a young girl enters an alternative world through the portal of a wardrobe. In this other world, it has been winter for a hundred years. Everything is frozen, because of the spell of an evil ice queen.
In life we may not be able to know the path not taken, but in books we can. We may not be able to excavate the fleeting moment and the truth it holds locked in its crystal embrace, but we can know what would have happened, what might have, what should have – if only the destiny-givers that day of the plane crash had been more lax, or kind, or less vigilant.
This other future is only marginally less real than the one that actually happened. In this future, Nara will return from the Antarctic to her concrete university. Soon it will be autumn and she will teach Earth Sciences courses with titles such as ‘Oceans Past and Present’. Each year in late September she will walk into a crowded lec
ture theatre and face students who get younger and younger each year until they look to her like children.
The symposia, colloquia, conferences and seminars where Alexander might be present she will avoid, just as she will avoid knowing where he is teaching, whether he is married or has a family or which country he is in, even if the polar research community is small and such evasions are not easily maintained.
The avoiding will become automatic for her, a mere consideration, although the pain on which it is built will curiously not drain away over the years, but will remain as fresh and raw as the day Luke flew him out from base, or the day she went to see him on the anniversary of his rescue. Grief is curious, she will come to understand. It operates by the same laws as love: when taken away it does not diminish or decay, but remains intact, an empty statute to its former gleam.
Nara will never let go of the conviction that she and Alexander are linked, and not in any ordinary way. Their survival is somehow bound up with each other – but it is her survival that is linked to his, and not the other way around. That was why she had saved him. As long as Alexander was in the world, she would be alive. She would have a chance.
The planet would continue changing, and each year her students’ research proposals would be increasingly driven by the cataloguing of extinctions, taking the measure of the loss. As the years passed and meadow grass colonised the tip of a warming Antarctic peninsula – she found it hard to imagine, although she had seen the photographs of long prairie grass scythed by the summer katabatic gusts, carpeting valleys that had only recently been choked with ice – the entire ecosystem would change and the losers would be the endangered Ross seals, the giant squid, both which would be declared officially extinct within thirty years. The blooms of coldwater krill, those life-sustaining organisms on which the entire Antarctic fed, would shrivel. For most of the planet’s history extinctions had had their own reasons, Nara instructed her students, they had been programmed into the species net, the food web, the set of mutual obligations that linked predator with prey: all the laws and rules which humans had so wantonly broken. Now we are causing the extinctions, and the balance can never be restored.
As the years pass she will think less and less of Berkner Island, of what happened there. She never went to counselling, or to therapy. She kept the polar medal she had received for saving Alexander with her always, even when she travelled. She slept with it beside her bed.
Even though Nara is convinced she will never return to the white continent, each year as the northern hemisphere autumn rolls round again, she will think of it. At any given point on the calendar she knows what is happening because every Antarctic season is the same: there is a method, a pattern, a way of doing things which has been tried and tested over decades. There will be advances in technology, yes, a reorientation of the scientific focus, a new aircraft, perhaps, once every thirty years a new ship will be commissioned, but otherwise each year is identical.
It begins with the Antarctic Conference in September, held at a gloomy Cambridge college. The conference brings together hundreds of recruits, new and old, summerers and winterers, for workshops on IT, seminars on fair play, breakaway groups for those on long scientific ship cruises or people wintering on the more temperate islands of the South Atlantic. Meals will be taken in the cafeteria, and just as in the Antarctic itself, she will find herself sitting next to anyone – a meteorologist, a paleo-geologist, or the Foreign Office representative for the polar regions. On the last night an evening ceilidh in the Great Hall will bring all these strangers together, as will those nights in the subterranean bar, future intimates ranged round the pool table. They are all embarking on the biggest adventure of their lives. They all think something wonderful is about to happen to them.
Then October and the journey South, flying via the Ministry of Defence flight to the Falklands or LAN-Chile via Madrid. Then waiting-room days in Stanley, Land Rovers rattling down the streets, a plague of Union Jacks, ever the outpost with its one grocery store and two hotels. These days offer the last chance for a year or more to drink in pubs, to get drunk with strangers. Trips to see the penguin colony at Volunteer Point, group walks to Gypsy Cove, the pilgrimage to the Stanley lighthouse, the same one Nara made with Alexander under the glimmer of southern Atlantic stars. Suddenly there is no ‘I’, there is only ‘we’. We ate dinner, we boarded the ship, and they begin to understand the pleasures of not having to face experience alone.
Then the journey to the continent, on the ship or on the Dash-7 or the model which will replace it, when the plane has clocked up its maximum allowed hours, even if it will prove difficult to find a better version than that Antarctic air tractor, the slow, reliable plane grinding through the icy skies.
By December they will be encountering their first icebergs just south of Elephant Island. A cocktail party, birthday drinks, or the Master’s birthday perhaps; there will be some occasion while on board. The Navy or the supply vessels will come on side, and the newcomers will experience the fraternity of the Antarctic in all its bonhomie. They will understand that human relationships in the Antarctic are not like anywhere else; a warmth and cameraderie thrums between the firmest strangers or political foes, merely for having encountered each other at the end of the earth.
They may or may not be stopped in ice.
Alexander comes out of the bathroom that night, naked, and she has to hold her breath, to draw all the oxygen she can into her. The suddenness and intensity of their intimacy has shocked them both.
He begins to get dressed. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want to be seen coming out of your cabin in the morning.’
She wonders how he thinks she should take it. She wants to remind him that there is no morning, or evening anymore. They have run out of night and into a three month long day, they will not see the sun set until February.
She says, ‘That’s very logical of you.’ She cannot say, Please don’t go.
He comes out of the bathroom naked and she stops breathing. This is all that happens. Night is gone, and suddenly there are many suns and moons in the room with her.
She watches him get dressed. He puts on his father’s ring, his father’s necklace. He had taken these off, very ceremoniously, in order to make love. He struggles into his dress shoes, a pair of brogues. Dinner on the ship is formal. Every evening they all put on their finest clothes.
There is a bloodstain on the sheet underneath her, as if she were a virgin. It has been some time since a man has made her bleed.
The tungsten light of iceblink floods the cabin. He is standing, fully dressed, before her. She sits on the bunk, a sheet drawn around her, more in self-protection than in propriety.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘goodnight.’
She turns her face to the window and sees the field of pack ice, the seals which loll on its floes, the silver eye of the midnight sun revolving, the darting shadow of a skua. The ship is still and silent then, as the ice fastens all around them.
Short Glossary of Antarctic Terms
Albedo the extent to which an object (in the polar regions, ice) reflects light from the sun
Avtur aviation turbine fuel specially treated to withstand low temperatures
Blank down to tie down (usually aircraft) to the ice using ropes and ice screws
Col a pass between two mountain peaks, literally ‘neck’, from the French
CTD in oceanography, an instrument used to measure conductivity, temperature and depth of the water column
Field away from base; being ‘in the field’ means living in a tent; ‘deep field’ refers to living and working in a very remote area
Field assistants mountaineers charged with helping to look after scientists
Frazil ice cinder-like accumulations of ice on seawater
Gash cleaning and housekeeping duties of the day on Antarctic ships and bases; a Navy term
Gator a utility vehicle designed for off-road and rough terrain used to transport people and good
s around Antarctic bases
HF/VHF High Frequency radio
Hummock a mound or hillock of pressure ice
Iceblink a white light seen on the horizon, especially on the underside of low clouds, due to reflection from a field of ice
Ice flowers tufts of frost or rime resembling flowers that form on surface ice around salt crystals
Iridium phone satellite phone
Katabatic wind a wind that carries high density air from a higher elevation down a slope under the force of gravity; most commonly found in Antarctica and Greenland
Manfood as distinct from dogfood in the days when dogs were used in the Antarctic; the term is still used; wooden boxes that contain ten days’ supply of dried and tinned food for two people
Melon hut an oblong-shaped fibreglass hut used for field operations
Met the meteorologist; weather forecasters deployed by the UK Met Office to base in the summer
Nunatak an isolated hill or mountain of bare rock rising above the surrounding ice sheet
P-bag Personal Bag containing a sleeping bag, sleeping mat and sheepskin, for use in the field
Pitroom bunk bed accommodation
PNR Point of No Return - the point at which there is no longer enough fuel for the aircraft to return to its point of origin; PNR means the airplane is committed to land at its destination
RIB Rigid Inflatable Boat
Sastrugi wavelike ridges of hard snow formed on a level surface by the wind
Sit Rep Situation Report, a weekly briefing given by the base commander on base matters
