The White Darkness

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  I had to ask Victor what it meant: “Pelmanism.” Even remembering makes my heart clench up in a ball. “Time-wasting,” Victor said, translating Dad’s contempt into words I could understand. “It means time-wasting.”

  Maybe Courage is like Memory—a muscle that needs exercise to get strong. So I decided that maybe, if I started in a small way, I could gradually work my way up to being brave like the others. In this landscape only the color of something matters; it need not be big to be visible. A pile of shit from ten yards away looks like a tent five miles away. So I steeled myself to do something useful for a change, and add to our Hansel and Gretel trail.

  To do it you have to take off your overmitts, then your big jacket, then your quilted shell-jacket, then your fleece jacket and glove-liners, find the top of your sweatsuit bottoms, then the tight waistband of your long thermal pants. The face mask and the neck gaiter and the body bib make it hard to look down, so you can’t see what you’re doing—and by that time your hands are so cold that you can’t feel detail or fastenings. The cold bites like a dog and makes your muscles pull rigid. So much toilet stuff is habit, but automatic reflexes stop working in the cold. It’s like stepping into freezing water up to the waist. You’re a metal pipe bent into the shape of a handlebar, moaning and singing and chanting the periodic table or “The Lady of Shalott” to keep your mind off the cold swilling between clothing and skin, sending your muscles into spasm. Then your hands are too cold to find the edges of your clothing again.

  I told myself I was emptying out the fear.

  I told myself that Captain Scott and his men did this every day, sooner than be ungenteel inside the tent, in sight of one another. And if Titus could do it, so can I now. It’s hardly a Union Flag or some ragged pennant fluttering over a heroic achievement. But a pile of shit in the snow can be seen from a mile away, and I really want us to be found if we run out of fuel. (Not that we will, of course, because Uncle Victor has planned this all down to the last letter.)

  After I came back the first time, I tried to explain to Sigurd what I was doing. But singing and moaning and chanting pump out a lot of wet air, and the condensation had frozen my scarf to my mouth with a spaghetti of ice strands. He just stared at me and said, “Crazy!”

  How to impress a boy, eh? I must tell Maxine when I get home. Start a trend. The school caretaker may not appreciate it.

  Sigurd wouldn’t do his business outside—not even to uphold male prestige and help with the trail. The best he did was to drop a half-dozen paper cups in the snow as we were climbing back aboard after a fueling stop. They danced in a circle on the ground, then took off and tumbled in slow-motion somersaults away and away and away. It was such a futile gesture—such a dopey, helpless, stupid idea that I laughed out loud. My laugh too was snatched away, just like the cups. This place can do that—steal the life straight out of your mouth.

  “Oh, Titus! Titus! It’s Thursday! Fetch a pair of horses! Send native servants to check the verandah for snakes and make the bungalow ready for us! Unmoor Saunterer and let’s go for a sail! Send Deighton with a shovelful of bravery and the route map to Glasstown!”

  But every time I thought I’d called my man’s lovely face to mind—the long pale plains beneath his eyes, the smile lines radiating out through the snowburn on his temples—Sigurd Bruch began making civil conversation. And I couldn’t very well ignore him. I certainly couldn’t ignore the chocolate he extracted from every one of the red provision boxes and lined up on the floor for us to eat. Also, he asked me questions about myself. Oh, I know that’s only what people do to be polite, and it’s not that they really want to know. Still, it was kind. By now, Nikki would have asked Sigurd his blood type, his sign of the zodiac, and whether he wore boxer shorts or briefs. Maxine would have asked him for a date. Me, I asked if he smoked.

  “Smoke? No, for sure! Do you?”

  “What?”

  “Do you smoke?”

  “Me? Grief, no. I have a friend who smokes a pipe. . . . Does your father smoke?”

  “No, no. He does not. Oh, I—” I saw him trip over the trick question and pick himself up again smartly. “Aha! I see! That lighter . . . it is given him by a woman friend. They were . . . you know,” and he rocked his head on his shoulders and put his feet up on the seat opposite, smirking.

  “Mimi, yes. She said he was cute.”

  He hid the flash of alarm very well. The only hint was the way he put two fingers to his lips and tried to smoke a nonexistent cigarette. “Did she say more?” he asked nonchalantly.

  I picked and chose: “She said you were cute, too.”

  Sigurd smiled with pleasure and relaxed again. He wriggled into a horizontal position, resting on his heels and his elbows, lifted his hips to resettle them on the soft luggage piled between the seats. “I wish these words they were yours,” he said, and offered me one of his two-hundred-watt smiles. “Ah, but there is this friend of yours, I suppose. With the pipe. I have no luck.”

  “Oh yes . . . I mean, no, I—Yes. There is him.” I could almost hear Maxine’s snort of contempt, her felt-tip squeaking across my file cover:

  Sym Wates—virgin on the ridiculous

  She’s right. I am a coward. About this place. About boys. About everything.

  “So, Clever Sym, you know about Antarctic, yes?” said Sigurd. “The Hole, we will find it soon, you think?”

  “I only know what I’ve read, nothing at all hardly. No. Not this side of the mountains.”

  “There are mountains?” He looked out the window. “How far?”

  “You don’t—you know—miles are no good out here. It’s more, you know, days.”

  “How many days so?”

  “Or luck.”

  “As in ‘How long did their luck hold out?’” said the friend with the pipe.

  “Shut up, Titus. I don’t want to scare him.”

  “Scare the young Viking hero? No! For sure!” said Titus sarcastically.

  “About Mr. Bruch—” I began.

  “So. You live where in England, Symone?” Sigurd interrupted.

  “Croxley Green. Look, Sigurd, about your fa—”

  “I am staying some long time in Norfolk. You know Norfolk, yes? I would like to show you sometime my beautiful country of Norway.”

  “Thank you. Look, Sigurd . . .”

  “Yes?”

  But my puny courage failed me. “Oh. I just wanted to say . . . About Uncle Victor. I’m really sorry. And the tea. Drugging you. Sorry. Drugging everyone. I think the fire—you know—I think he must have—you know—been in shock. Sorry.”

  Sigurd regarded me with a smile of such understanding and wisdom that he might have been forty-five. “It is most natural.”

  “As yogurt!” said Titus incredulously. “Natural?”

  “Well, actually, I think it was a bit beyond the pale, actually,” I said to Sigurd.

  “Ah! But your uncle he is man in love with Big Idea! Is same for my father also. All is done for the Big Idea. But you? Your love it is not for Big Idea. For what, then? For this friend of yours, yes? With the pipe?”

  “’Fraid so,” said Titus, briskly reefing mountaineering rope into a figure eight around his hand and biceps.

  “There’s a girl at my school—Maxine—she’s going out with a man of thirty called Waldron. How creepy is that?”

  Sigurd flinched from the nervous loudness of my giggle, but he didn’t stop smiling for a moment. “He is rich, maybe, this Waldron. Like you.”

  The odd inaccuracy of this rather slipped by me, since Sigurd had moved to sit much closer. As the van hit a step in the ice, our shoulders were jolted together. He slipped an arm around me and took aim on my mouth.

  “You’re very good,” I said after the kiss. I meant his command of English! His English vocabulary! So why didn’t I say that? “What’s yours?”

  “Complete sentences, Sym. Think on.”

  Oh, please shut up, Titus.

  “What’s your dream, I mean, Sigurd
? What would be your totally—you know . . .”

  A quite different look came over Sigurd. It made kissing seem like old gum he’d been chewing only until the pizza deliveryman came. “I shall be in films!” he said.

  “Wow. Lucky your dad’s in the business.”

  Sigurd bridled. “I’m good, me! I don’t need help! I’m a good actor!” he declared hotly.

  “Except for a certain incontinuity of dialect,” said Titus, but I shut my ears to him. There was a brightness and sincerity in Sigurd’s face now (Heaven knows, it was close enough for me to see) and “sincere” was better than “charming.” “I’ll go away,” said Titus. “I am clearly not required.”

  No! No, don’t go, Titus! Please. But I couldn’t concentrate enough to keep him by me. “Sigurd, about this trip—” I began to say.

  “For you life is one big holiday, I bet?” Sigurd interrupted again. “Rich is good, yes? One day I also am rich.”

  “Oh, but I’m not . . .”

  The rear doors opened. I had not even noticed the Hagglund stopping. Sigurd moved sharply away from me as Victor clambered in to fetch another can of fuel. He was wearing the red face mask. I snatched up the funnel and went to help.

  “Can I ride up front with you for a while, Uncle?” I asked, steadying the funnel in the filler.

  He said: “I see you two are getting cozy.”

  The CCTV. Of course. He had seen the kiss. I couldn’t tell how angry he was with me, behind the mask. I’m like a daughter to Victor. Well, while I’m here, he sort of is my father, I suppose—honor bound to keep an eye on me; stop things getting out of hand. I remember him signing a form for Pengwings . . . “parent or guardian.” That’s good. I don’t mind. Maxine would. Maxine says parents are as much fun as bull terriers in a nudist camp. But I’m glad there’s a fatherly eye watching over me. People like to think of God looking down on them, don’t they, even if He does tend to criticize.

  “That’s good. That’s grand,” said Uncle Victor pushing his mask up on to the top of his head. “You and the boy get to know each other! I mean really . . . get to it. No rules out here, lass! Drop the niceties! You have fun, the two of you! Mek the most of it!”

  Clumsy as ever, I jerked the funnel and it fell out of the filler nozzle and rolled under the truck, and some of the precious green fluid spilled onto the snow. I tried to reach under the truck, but my arms were too short. Victor had to get it himself, huffing and puffing, flooding a sunburned face with a farther flush of red. I felt it in my own cheeks.

  His head brushed the ground, too, and some of the snow platelets stuck, sequinlike, to the side of his face after he stood up. I should have reached up and brushed them away: They would burn. In any case, they made him look lizardy, metallic. As if he were turning android.

  But I didn’t brush them off. I left them there, those mirror flakes of sequin ice. Standing up had made my head spin. And suddenly Victor seemed as far off as the Hagglund had when I’d walked away from it across the Ice. What kind of an uncle . . .

  This place messes with your senses. Optical illusions everywhere. Maybe I imagined it or misunderstood. God and fathers are meant to keep a fatherly eye on you; they’re meant to give a fatherly damn.

  “Can I ride in the front, Uncle Victor?” I said again, taking particular care to speak clearly. “Please.”

  “Nay. Be told, lass. You and Sigurd stay in t’ back. Get properly acquainted. Up close, manner of thing.” And he actually winked, so that I could be left in no doubt as to his meaning.

  I should not have eaten all that chocolate. Or maybe it was the diesel fumes making me feel sick.

  I was not the only one feeling ill. Victor was just screwing the filler cap back into place when Manfred Bruch—making use of the time to stretch his legs—suddenly clutched his stomach with one hand and made to lean against the Hagglund with the other.

  “DON’T!” I shouted. “Bare hands!”

  Both mittenless hands came to rest on his abdomen and he gave me a small curt nod, acknowledging the warning.

  Then the empty fuel can was cast aside—“Lessen your weight, increase your miles per gallon. Think on, Sym!”—and our endless odyssey continued. As the giant vehicle shuddered back into life, Sigurd and I could hear over the intercom Manfred asking, “Now, Victor, you are perfectly sure you have enough of fuel for round-trip?”

  “You don’t have to worry on that score,” came Victor’s reply, and he began to whistle under his breath. The red light went out on the CCTV camera;Victor had turned it off so as to grant Sigurd and me our privacy. How kind.

  No guardrails on the Barrier—not for a hundred miles in any direction; not a thing to hang on to when the world spins too fast. Get a grip, Sym. Victor wants you to grow up. Don’t you see the notices written up on the walls of Antarctica?

  NO CHILDREN

  Sigurd sat down again in the seat alongside mine, smiling his two-hundred-watt smile. I edged away and picked up the manufacturer’s manual for the Hagglund as if I might be planning to study amphibious vehicles at college. Sigurd closed the gap, his neoprene and mine rubbing together to produce a kind of soft wolf whistle.

  “My friend. With the pipe? We’re . . . you know,” I said, rocking my head suggestively, as he had done earlier.

  “Ah. I see,” said Sigurd. And nice boy, nice, nice boy: Straightaway he believed me. How excellent is that?

  So now we are all liars.

  What’s wrong with me? Is there something wrong with me? Sigurd’s really fit! Sigurd’s really . . . you know. When we kissed—you know—it was quite . . . I quite enjoyed it in a Chinese puzzle, which-bit-goes-where sort of way. What nursery am I locked in that I can’t get out and go downstairs and join in the grown-up games? Can’t want to join in? Am I like those poor kids who wait and wait for their growth spurt and it never comes?

  What’s wrong with me, Titus? I know some things about Love, don’t I? Why Leander swam the Hellespont; why people do crimes of passion! I know how one word—“cavalry” or “Napoleon” or “Antarctica”—can make the world suddenly clash its gears and jolt so hard that you have to stop and lean against a wall until you can remember how to breathe. . . .

  But maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe “making love” is just what it says it is—a handicraft. Maybe you have to make it before you can give it to someone. Like soup or a raffia table mat.

  “Can’t speak from experience in these matters, naturally,” said Titus, packing tobacco into the bowl of his little white pipe. “In the army, an officer was not expected to marry until his mid-thirties. We channeled our energies into other pastimes. Racing. War. Polar exploration. Getting killed . . . In my day the words meant—well, wooing. Courting. Walking out. Something a long way short of marital intimacy. I take it ‘making love’ came to mean something other?”

  “It did. Actually, we moved on from that too,” I told him. “Nowadays people don’t make love, they have sex.”

  “People always had sex,” said Titus fastidiously. “It’s an accident of birth. Like hair color. Date of birth: March 1880. Place of birth: Putney. Sex: Male.”

  “Well, now it’s more like having fish and chips.” But the tight knots in my stomach had begun to unravel. This was what I wanted: the quaint, chivalric chastity of my beloved Edwardian . . .

  “Oh, if you mean fucking, we had that, too, of course,” said Titus startlingly. “But fucking’s a continent away from making love. And all-around bad for an officer’s career. Never resorted to it myself. Except in regard to swearing. I regret, I did swear on the odd occasion. Unlike the others: all staunch Christian gentlemen clean in thought, word, and deed. The ratings called it my ‘emergency vocabulary.’ But Anglo-Saxon is an ancient language and very useful, when your pony kicks you in the shins. Despite appearances, Sym, Love is not a four-letter word.”

  Apparently this was a day for everyone to behave oddly, even the man in my head. But at least he was there at last, and in sharp focus, in his shabby leath
er jacket and torn trousers. My peripheral vision shut down until all I could see was his face, the good-humored wrinkle lifting the lower lids, the chevron creases holding his mouth in parentheses, the contours of his hairline like South America tailing away southward into the darkness of tomorrow’s beard. Safe at last. Now if I could just hold on—if I could just turn away inside my head and be with Titus—go to Glasstown—lace shut the tent . . .

  “Why weren’t you afraid, Titus?” I said. “Back then.”

  “Who says I wasn’t?”

  “How did you learn to be brave, then?”

  “At bravery school.”

  “Where’s that? Eton? Boer War? Edwardianland?”

  Titus looked at me, his head on one side, exhaled smoke reentering his mouth as he breathed in to speak. “Right here, Sym. Right here.”

  And I suddenly realized something that had eluded me up to that minute. I knew why Sigurd and Manfred weren’t afraid. It had nothing to do with courage. They weren’t afraid because they didn’t know anything about Antarctica. They didn’t know what was coming.

  They still thought we were going to make it home alive.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Diamond Ice

  When the fog came, I thought Titus had sent it. It came so out-of-nowhere and was so perfect a solution. We had crossed three hundred miles of frozen sea without mishap, used up half our fuel, and now, in the nick of time, we could not go on. How can you go forward when you can’t see anything in front of you?

  The rolling motion was stilled. The noise of the Hagglund subsided into neutral and then, after a few minutes, into silence, and everything was so still, we could have been at the bottom of a glass of milk. Oddly, we appeared still to be moving forward, like in a dream when you find yourself driving a car and your legs are paralyzed so you can’t operate the pedals even if you knew how to drive, which you don’t. But it was only the fog rolling past the window in tumbling, half-human shapes. Jaundice yellow it grimaced in at the windows, then churned on by. In the fog no one would be able to find us, but at least our endless journey into the white darkness was halted. Blinded by the milky miasma, deafened by the silence, Sigurd and I sat stupefied, unspeaking. I laid aside the manufacturer’s manual.