The White Darkness

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  That’s why it’s so good to go instead to the Turf Club in Gezira, on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, and watch Titus playing polo, his long legs tucked tight around his latest protégé of a pony. The only things Titus has ever “trained” for his personal use are horses and beagle pups. He’d never apprentice girls as breeding stock for the Underworld.

  “Meet my friend Roly Barnard. He can run faster backward than most people can run forward. You can win money betting on him! Go on. He won’t mind.”

  I miss my own friends, though. If I were back in England now, at school, I reckon I’d have a bit more to say for myself than I did—though I’d have to be careful: No one likes it, do they, when someone brags about expensive foreign vacations? Here’s a questionnaire for you, Nikki, about vacation romances.

  WHAT COULD YOU

  PICK UP ON VACATION?!!!

  What’s your idea of a hot destination!?!

  A. Paris

  B. the Polar Plateau

  C. the Underworld

  What would you pack (apart from a six-pack)!!!?

  A. snow goggles

  B. a copy of War and Peace

  C. morphine

  Who would you choose to go long-haul with??!!!

  A. Pengwings Expeditions

  B. your uncle

  C. Italia Conti

  What is your perfect vacation date?

  A. 2006

  B. 1912

  C. 1066

  What dish would you and your vacation dish share!???!!!

  A. beach barbecue

  B. city restaurant

  C. herring in formaldehyde

  What would you wear to score!?!?!

  A. snow goggles

  B. 10 layers of neoprene

  C. an Edwardian riding habit

  Which of these foreign languages could you get your tongue around??!??!

  A. Norwegian

  B. swearing

  C. lying

  Oh, those memories! What’s your idea of a great souvenir??!!

  A. my hair

  B. snow goggles

  C. a Hagglund all-terrain vehicle

  PS: Sorry if snow goggles crop up rather a lot, Nikki; it’s because my eyes are giving me trouble.

  PPS: I’d’ve sent a picture postcard, but there’d be nothing on it. Only way you could paint the Polar Plateau is to leave the paper blank.

  At the sight of Sigurd driving the Hagglund away, Uncle Victor tore off his glasses and threw them on the ground in anger. The metal bridge had frozen to his face, though, and he ripped off a large piece of skin from the space between his eyes. I don’t believe he even noticed. Luckily, I picked up the glasses, because when he realized that he had left his snow goggles in the driver’s van, he needed to use mine. At least I thought it was lucky to have pocketed Victor’s glasses, except that when I got them out of my pocket, I found that both lenses were missing. They must have dropped out when they hit the ground.

  The ultraviolet light reflects off the snow and burns the cornea. At first it feels like when you peel onions, then like when you open the oven door and something’s burning and the smoke is acrid in your face.

  Then it gets really bad.

  Now there’s the added joy of ice crystals. They form a haze in the air—like tiny fragments of razor blade that slice into the eye. A sandstorm, but of ice.

  At school, Nats obsessively doodles eyes during lessons. Always eyes. The longer the lesson, the fuller the lashes, the more ink black the iris and eyebrow. I can picture them now, like Egyptian hieroglyphs looking at me, looking at me, and I’d like a page of them here now: Nats’s weird talismanic eyes like the ones the Greeks painted on the prows of their boats so as not to lose their way.

  “What do you miss most?” I ask the man with the most beautiful eyes on the planet.

  “The smell of damp earth,” he says. “It’s so dry here in India, don’t you find?”

  Actually the whole business of eBay fossils and Thoughtextreme.com and Manfred and Sigurd (and similar sharp pieces of razor blade) sets me brooding about Maxine. I hope Waldron is not just another Manfred. I hope he is the genuine article and not a Chinese replica. I hope Maxine is not one in a long line of Internet conquests. I hope that Waldron is his real name (insofar as I’d wish that on anyone) and that he won’t take her money or anything else she doesn’t want to give. I hope he’s nice. After all, who am I to criticize her for liking an older man?

  There again, everyone’s capable of deception;that’s another thing I’ve learned. So maybe it’s not just Waldron whose honesty I should be doubting. Maybe the great Internet romance didn’t all happen quite as Maxine said—the parties, the flowers, the glamor, the passion—or maybe she gave us the edited highlights. Maybe it never happened at all, in fact. Any of it. A happy thought. “Bet it only ever happened in her head,” I whisper gloatingly to Titus.

  “Only?” says Titus sharply, and tramps off for a cigarette.

  Though we have skis in the Nansen, it has become impossible to ski. The sastrugi here have surfaces like millions of fishhooks. When you fall, they try to keep hold of you. I didn’t notice when it began: so unobservant. I don’t remember much between here and the icefalls. Strange that I can remember the names of all Titus’s horses, but not how we got down the icefalls. There must have been icefalls, because this is Amundsen’s Glacier and I’ve read a dozen times his account of reaching the Pole. “It all went like a dream.” (Must have had very different dreams from me, is all I can say.)

  The tent, when we camp, wrestles with us. Through the groundsheet, I can still feel the fishhook sastrugi, except when the wind lifts us clear off the ground before dropping us back down again. You could probably tenderize octopuses like this. Never mind hitting them on a rock: Just put them in a waterproof bag and slam it up and down on hooked ice. Our sleeping bags writhe and heave as we lie in them. It doesn’t help ease the nausea that comes with altitude and a diet of sild and dried dates and beef broth. But sleep solves all that.

  Sleep is there the moment we get out of the wind. Despite the noise and the hunger and the raging thirst, the need to light the emergency Primus and thaw snow, the need to make the broth . . . sleep slows movement as if we were underwater. No need for Victor’s narcotic tea bags here; I have to fight my way through long folds of sleep like heavy velvet curtains before I can shove food into my mouth. Romeo and Juliet never made more eagerly for bed than I do for my sleeping bag—my sanctuary from Victor’s endless talking, my wormhole to another solar system, my portal into my interior world. There’s a masculine smell in my stolen Pengwings sleeping bag. The top part comes all the way over your head and zips completely closed: the perfect hiding place when the Devil has his hooves over his eyes and is counting to twenty. Nudged by the wall of the unsecured tent, I feel as if someone restless is lying against my back, his body against the curve of my spine.

  “I’m sorry I brought you here again, Titus.”

  “Don’t mention it, Sym. I wasn’t doing anything else in particular.”

  I would like to turn over and see his eyes, but then I am asleep—as quickly as that—like the wolf falling down the three pigs’ chimney into a cauldron of boiling dreams.

  I dream I’m riding on the back of Titus’s motorcycle, down a stony road. The suspension of these old bikes is terrible, but with my arms around his waist, I can feel the curve of his rib cage through his linen shirt, the big, syncopated beat of his heart, and the swell of his diaphragm as he takes quick gulps of the sweet, flowery air. The Boers are shooting at us, and I can see the holes their bullets make in the cloth of my school coat, but they don’t seem to have hit me yet. From time to time, Boer outriders on motorbikes and sidecars, or on horseback, draw level and inquire politely if he would care to surrender. But Titus declines, equally polite but insistent. The bike is almost out of fuel, but he has arranged with his friend Roly Barnard for an alternative means of transport to be waiting: a hot-air balloon.

  It billows in the dista
nce, a funnel of bloodred silk; I can hear the roar of the burners, big as jet engines—pouring their heat into its envelope. We have to drive through the blast of flame, and I expect it to incinerate us, but it scorches nothing but my eyes. Already the basket beneath it is bumping along the ground. Guy ropes trailing, the balloon swells and bellies and strains, fuller and fuller, eager to be airborne. Titus dismounts before the bike has even stopped moving—and I must have done so, too, because now we are in the basket of the balloon.

  But Titus has left something behind—his honor?—his pet deer? He swings his great long legs back over the basket side and, without the smallest difficulty, drops to the ground. For some reason, though, I can’t persuade my own legs to move, to bend, to lift over the towering sides of the basket, now crenellated and garrisoned like a castle wall. Looking up, I realize that it is not a silk balloon envelope hovering over me at all, but the solid sphere of a planet, open at the base and full of fire.

  “Get out! Get out!” yells Titus, and I want to, but my leg is so painful and my eyelids are stuck together with gum arabic, and the basket is tipping so violently . . .

  “Get out! Get out, lass!”

  Uncle Victor, waking and instantly determined to get going, crawled out of his bag and shouldered his way out of the round tent door. The tent, relieved of his weight, had no reason to hold its shape. It rolled over. The groundsheet became the side wall, and like a wind sock the whole thing strained away from the Nansen, molded by the wind into a flaccid sack. Victor was on the outside; I was left inside.

  Even when I am out of my bag, I can’t at first find the door hole, because I am lying on top of it. Empty food jars ricochet about like giant bluebottles. A flashlight hits me in the face. Also my boots. My boots! Mustn’t lose my boots, no matter what! Both sleeping bags wind themselves around me. Briefly I can see Victor’s silhouette through the wall as he tries to get hold of the tent. Then I am through the hole, dragging the sleeping bags with me willy-nilly, holding a boot in each hand, plunging like a diver out of a diving bell into freezing water.

  The sled is hopping—actually hopping—over the ice, dragged by the guy ropes and the blowing tent. Free to rise even farther into the air, the tent instantly fills with wind, emptying out bits of equipment—the flashlight, my axe. We daren’t grab the ropes to haul it in; the sled runners would smash our feet or legs. So there’s nothing to do but watch as the tent drags the sled along—a great kite rattling in the sky. The sled begins to pick up speed. In socks, I can’t run on these fishhook sastrugi.

  Uncle Victor stands, lifting his hands and letting them drop back to his sides, swearing vilely. I push my feet into my boots, but it’s hard—it’s hard, Titus!—it’s hard, Mum! You use so many muscles in your legs to get into a pair of boots! As I run, laces flying, laces catching in the ghastly frozen Astroturf, the bandage around my thigh slips down. Getting skinny. Smoke from the burning calories is stinging my eyes.

  As the sled balks at a seam in the ice, I catch up and swing my axe at it—at the half hitches fastening the ropes to the sled. But they’ve swollen into Gordian knots of compacted ice, and at once the sled is off again, beetling along faster than huskies or a Ski-Doo could pull it.

  In the end, the ropes snap off the tent. It rises and rises and rises, tumbling and diminishing in size, until an opaque roof of white haze swallows it from sight. A half mile away our sled lies on its side: lacings frayed, pulling-harnesses spilled out onto the ice.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” says Uncle Victor, ambling up behind me.

  We are ugly, Neanderthal people, big pawed, knock-kneed, drunken, reeling people, no better than the apes—can’t join fingertip to thumb tip—wiping our noses on pads of sheep’s wool, eyes fixed on the ground in front of our feet. Mindless Ice Age people with nothing in mind but food and shelter and sleeping out the pain. Stupid, bovine people shoved from side to side by wind and weariness. Yeti people, round-shouldered and slow, looking for somewhere to become extinct.

  But yes. All right, yes! Buck up! Maybe Victor’s right! Never say die! If Victor’s right, there’s a chance we won’t. Die, I mean. By tonight or tomorrow night, he says, we’ll find Symmes’s Hole and climb down into its cavernous, gloomy warmth. Be greeted by pallid albino faces. Smiling, maybe! He knows so much. The population of Zanzibar—the melting point of glass—everything! Perhaps he has been right all along! Yes! By tonight we’ll find Symmes’s Hole! We will! We must! This is an adventure! That’s what happens in adventures!

  “What happened to me, Sym?” snaps Titus, and for some reason he’s really angry. I didn’t ask him to come to mind, but suddenly he’s there anyway, and he’s shouting. “What happened to me, Sym?”

  And he’s so real that I can see the way the hairs spring from his hairline, the length of his lashes, and the rim of white around the hazel of his eyes. And he’s ragingly angry. “What became of Lawrence Oates? Was he snatched up to Heaven like Elijah in a chariot of fire? What happened? Answer me!”

  But I can’t answer him. I can see the water vapor on his breath, the darkness of tomorrow’s beard beneath his skin, the asymmetry of his lips. That’s why I can’t afford to answer him.

  “What became of me when I went outside into the blizzard? Did I put on wings of snow?”

  “No, Titus.”

  “Or get trampled by the stampeding ghosts of all those poor ponies I slaughtered?”

  “No.”

  “Was I suckled like Romulus and Remus, maybe, by a colony of cheerful dinosaurs?”

  “No, Titus.”

  “No! Use your common sense, girl. Use your head!”

  I don’t want to use my head. My head aches.

  “Do you think I’m held prisoner in the palace of the Ice Queen, with a sliver of ice in my heart?”

  “Don’t, Titus, don’t.”

  “What happened to me? Did I scurry underground like the White Rabbit, into Symmes’s Wonderland?”

  “No. Stop.”

  “Use your common sense, Sym!”

  He is so real that I can feel the warmth emanating from his body and see the pulse beat in his throat and the dark hair move above his wristwatch at the brush of his cuff. And in all my life I have never wanted anything, anyone so much; never so much wanted Time to stop. Here. Now. No more thinking. No more deciding. Because if I speak the words in my mouth, he will be gone—will blow out like a flame and leave me in the dark, with nothing but the Fear and the Cold. I pull my hands up inside my sleeves so that I won’t make a grab for him. I shut my eyes so as not to see how his lips shape and release each word and how the pupils of his eyes dilate and contract with the force of emotion.

  “Answer me, Sym! Because I’m perpetually thirty-two, maybe you think I’m Christ Almighty? Maybe you think I went for a three-day warm-up in Hell, then rose again on the third day?”

  But I refuse to say. Because I love him, and you’d give anything, wouldn’t you? You’d give anything for someone you love not to die alone and in scalding agony?

  He is everything, everything, everything I ever admired and wanted and couldn’t have. He is everything I needed and couldn’t find in real life.

  Of course he is.

  That’s why I invented him.

  “All right! You died! Lawrence Oates died! He crawled on and on until the pain paralyzed him—until the walls of his lungs froze and he couldn’t breathe, and the vitreous in his eyeballs froze and blinded him, and his arms wouldn’t lift his face off the ground anymore and his damaged thighbone snapped. Then he froze to death and the snow buried him!”

  There is no Hole. There is no cozy subterranean world inside a hollow Earth. Victor believes in it because he wants it so much to be there. He’s mad. He has probably been mad for years.

  I do not pass this stunning insight on to Titus. Because of course he cannot hear it. He isn’t there either—doesn’t exist, hasn’t existed for ninety years. In fact my Titus never existed. Just a pretend friend. Just someone I invented, out
of loneliness. Like little kids do-hoo-hoo. Like the little kids do. Once you understand about madness, you’re not allowed to go on being mad, are you? You have to grow up, buck up, shape up, wise up, get real, marshal your facts, think on.

  I must open my eyes now, because otherwise the tears will make my lashes freeze together. You have to be careful crying in this kind of cold. I ease one hand out of its big glove and quickly wipe the sockets of my eyes.

  And there, ten yards ahead, back turned on the perpetual wind—from under that blanket-cloth cap, from above the collar of that strangely homely, Navy-issue cardigan, Captain “Titus” Oates flashes me the most dazzling of smiles.

  It is all the smiles I have craved from every face I ever met.

  “Thank God for sanity!” he says, speaking through the frozen clouds of his own breath. “Stick with me, girl. We know this place, you and I. That’s what’s going to get you out of here.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “It Was Not a Very Big Hole.”—Oates

  But it’s not true, Titus. I don’t know spit! It’s right what they say: You can read everything written, but nothing prepares you. . . . What do I know that’s going to be any use at all?

  “Cherry used to use wads of old tea leaves to—”

  “All right, I know. I’ll give that a try, but that’s nothing—”

  “Not poisoned ones, of course.”

  “Obviously.”

  So I make compresses for my eyes, using Twinings English Breakfast blend tea bags, doing as Apsley Cherry-Garard did ninety years ago, and it does give a bit of relief from the pain of the snow blindness. But it’s not exactly Air-Sea Rescue, is it?