Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  He had meant that when he said it in his dream. But Bert wasn’t listening. He had never learned to snowboard. Bert was scared of the kids who ran the spoon lift and the chair lift and who bullied him at school. Don’t worry about them, insisted Nelson, and in his dream he tried to hug his big brother, who stood there stiffly, his arms by his sides, still looking away. I’ll make sure that those assholes don’t mess with you. But he remembered, even now, when he was almost fully awake, how this had bothered him when he was dreaming it: why did he still have to take care of that business? Hadn’t he done it already? Didn’t Michael Rudenko have a scar on his eyebrow where Nelson had punched him? Hadn’t Nelson been blamed for starting that fight, one of several counts that, eventually, led to his expulsion? Did he have to do all this again? Would there ever be an end to it?

  From where he lay he could see Bert’s red Canada Goose parka hanging on the back of the door. He knew that Bert had worn that coat in Antarctica, because Bert had sent Nelson a photograph – a proper old-fashioned printed photograph – in a letter mailed from McMurdo Sound. When it reached Nelson’s old place on Vancouver Island, the nice place that he’d had once with Donna, they had shown it to little Lizzie and said, ‘That’s your Uncle Bert, the scientist. Look: he’s at the South Pole!’ It was the closest Lizzie ever came to meeting her uncle. She would be eight years old by now.

  He wanted to go back into his dream again but it was already closed to him. All that was left was Bert’s smile, the sad, patient smile of somebody who knows something that you don’t, and a stupid dead word: ‘Snurfer’.

  There was a tapping sound beyond the bedroom door. Was that what had woken him? That’s right: the Englishwoman, Fay, was out in the sitting room. She’d come back here to look at Bert’s French-language folder; she had wanted to use Bert’s computer to translate the words she didn’t know. He had only meant to lie down for a minute, leaving her to it: how long had he slept? His phone was his clock, but it didn’t connect to the eccentric old cell network they still had up here so he’d let the battery run down.

  He got up and went over to the door. It was open a crack. Fay sat at the desk with the computer in front of her, hunched and staring at the screen. He watched her read for a while, then type some more, then read.

  Her face was creased in pain and concentration. She still hasn’t slept since she got here. If I throw open the door it might frighten her.

  He retreated from the door, silent in his bare feet, then made a point of coughing noisily. The tapping stopped. He walked once around the room, stepping heavily, then opened the door.

  ‘I guess I fell asleep,’ he said. ‘Want some coffee?’

  She was standing by the desk, putting on her coat. She already had her boots on. He stared at her groggily. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, who are you?’ Louder this time. She eased sideways past the desk, keeping her back to the wall. Nelson realized that she was inching for the door.

  ‘I’m Nelson.’ It was all he could think of.

  She slid another couple of feet along the wall. ‘Nelson. Your brother’s surname is Nilsson. So you’re Nelson Nilsson? Did your parents play a joke on you?’

  My parents loved us both. You couldn’t say that they didn’t. ‘My surname is also Nilsson. People just call me Nelson. It stuck a long time ago.

  ‘How do you know all these things about me?’

  He saw that she was trembling. She was ready to run. Her eyes were red and staring. She was angry or terrified or both. Maybe, thought Nelson, it really was time to call in the cops.

  ‘What things?’ He took a step backwards to try and take the pressure off her, like you would with an animal, and he felt the couch bump the back of his legs. ‘What am I doing? Just tell me.’

  She jabbed a finger at the desk. ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That note there. The one included with that French officer’s journals.’

  ‘I can’t read French.’

  ‘The note’s in English.’

  I’d better humour her, he thought desperately. He picked it up and looked at it. It was another blue-lined page of his brother’s handwriting. It read:

  These documents were retrieved from the archives of Abwehr 1-M, German naval intelligence, by Squadron Leader Hugh Morgan RCAF, attached GHQ Liaison Unit Regiment (Phantom Signals). An element of Phantom entered Hamburg 1 May 1945, two days before the city’s surrender, to retrieve Abwehr files on Operation Holzauge, the Weather War in Greenland. Included in the German file were these French documents, believed to have been seized by the Abwehr from the naval ministry at the Hôtel de la Marine, Paris, following the fall of France in 1940.

  Nelson put it back where he had found it. ‘I don’t know what that means and I’ve never seen it before in my life.’

  She ignored him. ‘How do you know about my grandfather?’

  He was glad he had stayed on his feet. She was clearly quite nuts. ‘Your grandfather? What the hell are you talking about?’

  She slid closer to the door. ‘Squadron Leader Hugh Morgan. His name is written right there at the end of those French journals. You must have put it there. Why are you pretending to be someone you’re not?’

  He was tired of this. Whatever was eating her, she could go when she liked. ‘And who am I pretending to be?’

  She reached the door and stopped. ‘You’re not Nelson. You’re Bert Nilsson. The mad geography teacher. You’re the one who’s been making this whole thing up.’

  ‘That’s a good one. How do you make that out?’

  ‘Because I don’t think a loser with a name like Nelson Nilsson would have the brains to cook up a story like this. I don’t think he’d have even heard of Franklin or Crozier or Bellot. And I don’t think he’d have found a way to go online and work out who my grandfather was and write him into his bat-shit fantasy.’ She opened the door. The hallway was a blur of yellow light.

  ‘I didn’t write it,’ he said. And although his primary concern was, of course, the crazy lady in his apartment, he began to worry that something strange really might be going on. ‘And I’m not Bert. I’m Nelson.’

  ‘That police sergeant in Tuktoyaktuk didn’t think so.’

  ‘He made a mistake.’

  ‘You’re driving Bert Nilsson’s car. You’re living in his apartment. You have this story that’s he’s missing, but you’re the only one who knows. I’m going back to my room now.’

  He rubbed his eyes vigorously. ‘I’ll drive you, if you like.’

  ‘No, I don’t like.’ She took off down the hall.

  He followed her, stopping on the threshold. She was already halfway to the stairwell. This could end even worse than it seemed to be ending right now. ‘How are you going to get a taxi?’ he called after her. ‘You don’t have a phone. You can’t just hail a cab here at . . .’ What time was it anyway? He had no way to tell. ‘It must be thirty below out there. Let me call you a taxi.’

  She stopped by the door of the stairwell. He watched her think it over.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait at the door of the flat while you call me a taxi. But I want to hear you give them this address and my name.’

  Is there any point, he wondered, in telling her that she’s crazy, or that I’m not going to hurt her? He decided there was not. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Whatever you like.’

  He retreated back into the apartment as she came to the door. She watched him pick up the cordless landline phone which lay on the coffee table. ‘Put it on speaker,’ she said.

  The taxi said it would be there in twenty minutes. It would call when it was outside. Nelson put the phone down and looked at her. ‘You can wait there,’ he said. ‘Or you can come in and sit down.’

  She sat on a chair by the door, perched o
n the edge of the cushion, her legs half turned under her, knees towards the door. She was ready to bolt.

  ‘What time is it?’ It was really just something for him to say.

  She looked at her wristwatch. ‘It’s ten past seven.’

  ‘Morning or night?’

  ‘Jesus Christ. Give it up.’

  ‘I swear,’ he said, ‘I’m not messing with you. I don’t know how long I slept. It’s hard to keep track.’

  ‘It’s night.’

  ‘Thanks . . .’ He needed this to end on friendlier terms. He was afraid of what she might say about him. ‘You want to take some cigarettes with you?’

  The idea seemed to appeal to her. But then she shook her head. The silence which followed seemed less fraught than before, so he decided to try again. ‘I don’t know anything about your granddad. If his name is in those papers, it has nothing to do with me. I haven’t read that French stuff.’

  ‘So you say.’ Her face grew pinched again. ‘You know what? I think I’ll go and wait outside. That taxi won’t be long now.’

  He sat where he was and watched her leave. I did my best, he thought. The door closed, a sound followed a few moments later by the swish of the spring-loaded door in the corridor. And then he remembered: she never paid me for those rides.

  The chalet was so hot that Fay kicked the duvet to the foot of the bed where she lay. Then the air grew cooler and she pulled it back up again. She still couldn’t sleep. She opened her eyes and stared at the knotty pine ceiling. The bedroom was lit by a bulb that shone through the door of the bathroom: she didn’t want to lie in the dark.

  The knots on the ceiling formed into patterns, constellations, that hinted at meanings that melted away again. I could count the knots, she thought, plank by plank, until I fall asleep. But now the knots were lakes, the million unnamed lakes of the circumpolar tundra, as futile a landscape as the surface of the moon. She let her eyes widen in horror, then noticed the edges of the planks themselves, parallel meridians stamped across the chaos. They reminded her of a different image, one she had found on the internet in Nilsson/Nelson’s flat while he slept: an aerial photograph, overlaid by a reticule grid, of the sea of craters made by Allied bombers on German lines in Normandy. A pencilled arc, drawn across the bottom of the photograph, indicated the Bomb Line, the ne plus ultra traced on the map to prevent Allied planes and gunners from harming friendly forces. Beyond it, they could bomb and strafe and shell as they liked.

  This particular Bomb Line, the caption noted, had been drawn by the unit responsible for mapping the shifting front line, a secret inter-service organization known variously as Number 3 British Air Unit, GHQ Reconnaissance Unit, GHQ Liaison Unit or – unofficially, from its radio call sign – as Phantom Signals.

  Phantom’s most famous member, Fay read, had been the Hollywood star David Niven. She knew of David Niven but she had never before heard of Phantom Signals. She had no interest in such things. But earlier that evening, searching the internet for clues about her grandfather, she had learned that Phantom was a picked group of scouts, linguists, radio operators, drivers and code experts who probed ahead of the most advanced Allied units to find and fix the ever-shifting front. Wherever they found it, they drew the Bomb Line on the map.

  Had her grandfather really been a part of something that dashing? She thought of the shy, slightly plump man in her mother’s stolen photograph. He didn’t look like David Niven. He didn’t seem the type to rub burnt cork on his face and slit someone’s throat with a commando knife. She knew from her mum that he’d been some kind of boffin, that early in the war he’d been based in Northern Ireland hunting for submarines. That was how he’d met her grandmother. He’d been an expert on wireless and radar. Maybe his job was to fix Phantom’s radios? Yet the note in Nilsson’s folder suggested he’d done more than that: he had entered Nazi Hamburg before it even fell . . .

  But that mention of her grandfather was beyond belief – a handwritten note on the end of a file that itself made little sense to her.

  On the one hand, she knew that Bellot had been wrong about his strait’s non-existence – Fay could see it on the map above the desk, a thin blue line between Somerset Island and Boothia Peninsula. But on the other hand, he had been right about something even more fantastical – his allegations that a ‘spirit map’ had secretly guided the expedition. According to an old academic paper she found on the internet – ‘The Paranormal Arctic’, by Ralph Lloyd-Jones – there was evidence that spiritualists really did persuade Lady Franklin to search for her husband at King William Island, where no one else had looked for him. Their map really did show a new secret strait where none had been charted – Bellot Strait. William Kennedy, the commander of Lady Franklin’s ship, really had made a last-minute trip to Ireland to see the child who drew that map.

  Strangest of all, six years later Captain Leopold McClintock had taken his Fox through the Bellot Strait, confirming its existence. That was written in the history books; it had really happened. Reaching King William Island, McClintock’s sledge teams found a short message in a cairn at Point Victory – where little Ann Coppin had drawn the ‘ship with no men in it’ – confirming the death of Sir John Franklin and the abandonment of the two ships. Bellot, the idealistic young rationalist, had rejected the strait’s existence and scorned the advice of the spiritualists, yet he had been wrong on both counts. Then he himself had vanished . . .

  It couldn’t all be fake. And who would want to fake it, and why? To trick a random tourist who was only passing through?

  She made the wood knots on the ceiling blur before her eyes, then set the blurs dancing with a flutter of her lids. She had binged on the web until, dazed by not enough sleep and too much information, she had barely known where she was.

  Wood knot: Holzauge in German. Operation Holzauge: the Weather War. With the outbreak of war Germany lost access to international meteorological reports. So it sent its own ships and submarines to transmit weather bulletins to guide its air and surface operations. But the British, homing in on their radio signals, quickly captured or sank them. So then the German navy conceived Operation Holzauge, which inserted secret teams of weathermen into the fjords of eastern Greenland to transmit weather reports for as long as they could. In time the Allies detected these transmissions too. One by one the German weather stations were located and put out of action. Her grandfather had somehow been involved in that too.

  It made her head hurt to think of it: all afternoon she had looked for glimpses of Hugh Morgan on the world wide web, moving click by click away from her starting point until she no longer knew where she had been or how she had got where she was. What sequence of links had brought her to an obscure white supremacist site, no longer active, which talked of a legendary team of German weathermen who, knowing themselves detected, had fled into Greenland’s ice-cap interior? Legend had it they were still transmitting voice messages – long chains of numbers, some kind of unbreakable code – from somewhere in Peary Land when the war ended. Then they signed off and vanished for ever.

  What else had she seen or imagined on the internet? She remembered an American militia officer called John Cleves Symmes who could scientifically prove that the earth was hollow, with openings at both poles. Symmes’s disciples had won the support of Harvard University, and persuaded Congress to fund Lieutenant Charles Wilkes’s South Sea expedition, the US government’s first scientific venture, with secret orders to look for ‘Symmes’s Hole’.

  She had encountered the wealthy New York merchant and occultist Henry Grinnell, who acquired Wilkes’s flag and passed it to Elisha Kent Kane, an American traveller and naval surgeon, who then took it far up the west coast of Greenland, further north than any white man had ever gone before. Kane, she learned from a mouse-click, was by then secretly married to Margaret Fox, one of the famous Fox Sisters, who had been introduced to him by Henry Grinnell. The sisters’ famous ability to speak
with the dead had inspired the global belief in Spiritualism, a cult that did not fade even after Margaret confessed their productions were fake.

  Now the knots in the ceiling melted together. They made Fay feel dizzy, as if she might faint. She narrowed her eyes and brought them back into focus.

  Who was this Nelson? If he was not a dangerous creep and a liar, and perhaps even if he was, he was surely an artist in bullshit and time. He hadn’t seemed dangerous. He only seemed sad.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the night outside the chalet. The breeze had dropped away but every now and then she heard a breath on the veranda and the hiss of drifting snow. The heater in the corner started ticking, which meant the thermostat had shut off for now, and that for a while the room would grow cooler. Fay stretched her arms and legs under the comforter, felt the clean cotton slide on her skin. And so, spreadeagled on her back, she closed her eyes and, to her own surprise, felt herself falling asleep. I mustn’t think about sleep, she told herself: I’ll only jinx it again. And then, like the last swirl of water sucked down a plughole, she disappeared.

  After Fay left the apartment Nelson put on his coat and went out back for a cigarette. Bert didn’t smoke, and Nelson didn’t want to stink out his rooms.

  At the back of the building was a concrete loading platform which stood by the service road for the underground car park. Concrete steps led down to the snow-covered tarmac. There was a bulb over the door, and the ice on the platform was dirty with ash and spent cigarettes. A chain-link fence gleamed in the light from the bulb. Beyond that was the forest. The cold air and ­nicotine drove the sleep from his head. All he could see, as he shivered and smoked, was the fence out back of the apartment block and the silent trees beyond it. But he could hear the see-saw noise of traffic on the road out front, people going about their lives.