The White Darkness

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “We could always . . . you know,” says Sigurd. “I don’t mind.”

  “Not if you were the last schmuck in the universe,” I say, and he doesn’t seem to mind that either.

  There is a hollow inside me big enough for twelve nesting planets and as cold as Outer Space.

  Within a few paces of the hood gapes a curved crevasse, like an idiot grin gouged in the face of a snowman. Seeing it in the nick of time, Sigurd slammed on the brakes and immediately switched off the engine instead of letting it idle for ten minutes like it says in big letters on the dashboard. The oil pressure essential to the turbo-charged air-cooling system suddenly slumped, and the engine overheated so much that bits of it melted. I only mention this because I think it’s funny. The Hagglund didn’t die of cold: It overheated. That strikes me as funny, for some reason.

  It does mean one slightly important thing. There is still fuel in the tanks.

  There might be only one quart. It might be only a slush of freezing diesel. Whatever there is, it won’t power a wrecked engine. But it does mean we can go out in a blaze of glory.

  “You’re mad!” says Sigurd. (I’ve noticed he says that a lot.)

  I make the fuse out of the piping on the cushions, coiling it up inside the Primus for an hour or two in case there’s a vestige of alcohol for it to soak up.

  “You’re out of your mind!” says Sigurd, watching me pull it out again.

  I braid my hair and cut off ten inches of it to put on the end of the fuse—just to get an extra burst of heat where it’s needed.

  “If you think I’m going to let you . . . ” says Sigurd, following me out of the truck.

  I push my wick of hair in at the filler cap, weighted with a few Argentinian coins to get it to the bottom of the fuel tank. I think cassette tape burns as well, so Lee Konitz may come in useful. Best keep him dry for now, though.

  “They should’ve locked you both up—you and the psychopath!” says Sigurd, watching me grind out a trench for the fuse to lie in, so the wind won’t blow it out.

  “We can shelter behind that,” I say, pointing out a pressure ridge a yard or so high.

  “And I say we don’t. How about that, then?” says Sigurd, following me back inside the van, snatching up a thermal blanket for fear I should gain some unfair advantage over him in the competition to keep warm. We huddle down again among the cushions, two pit bulls too weary to do anything but snarl at each other. “You hear voices. You see things. You’re cracked,” says Sigurd.

  Am I? When the bombs are falling, what’s so clever about staying outdoors? Inside my head I’ve built this air-raid shelter . . . . At least, there was one there earlier. . . .

  I didn’t say that out loud, but almost in answer to the mention of air raids comes the sound. I don’t hear it myself, of course. I’ve told Sigurd he is the one who has to listen; has to be our ears. Now he doesn’t want to tell me what he’s heard, for fear of what I’ll do, but I see the noise fly into his head, the hope flare up in his eyes, the struggle to keep the news to himself: He has heard an aircraft engine!

  It might be a vacation flight or a search plane; an airliner at 50,000 feet en route for Australia, or a military plane delivering personnel to the Scott-Amundsen Base. It might be the Law in pursuit of those who stole a half-million-dollar vehicle, or a mercy dash financed by Mimi Dormiere-St.-Pierre. Doesn’t matter. It’s the end.

  I get up and go outside, Lee Konitz in one hand, the storm lighter in the other, and Sigurd at my heels, bear-paw gloves swinging around his ankles. Festooned in blankets and coats and cushions, I’m a shambling bag lady under the arches on the coldest night of the year, trying to justify herself to the Salvation Army. “A hundred miles more, that’s why! They’ll see us at least a hundred miles farther off!” I have no idea what I’m talking about.

  It’s a great tool, the storm lighter—a cross between a blowtorch and the thing you use to light a gas oven. Even the strongest wind can’t blow it out—or so Jon told us a million years ago. In the hope he is right, I set about stripping the music tape out of its cassette and bunching it into kindling. Somewhere in the sky above is an airplane, and if it isn’t hundreds of miles away, if it’s flying at low altitude, if it’s looking, if we’re incredibly lucky, the pilot might just see an explosion or a column of black smoke.

  “I Love Paris” frizzles into black vermicelli. We take shelter behind the pressure ridge. Whatever happens, at least we’ll be warm for half an hour. I can’t remember warm. I have allowed for kindling, for wind, for flying debris, for sitting out the wait. I just didn’t allow for Sigurd’s lovable nature.

  Suddenly he hits me and jumps to his feet. “What are we, effing Vikings?” he shouts. “I’m not doing this!” And he rushes back toward the tank, to pull the fuse out of the fuel cap. His gloves swing and bound, like terriers trying to bite him. His boots slide on the ice and he skids up against the metal body of the van. Steadying himself with one hand, he reaches to pull out the fuse. Then he screams and screams and screams, because his bare hand is welded by cold to the freezing metal, stuck fast, as with superglue, except that through his palm and spread fingers it feels more like a scalding kettle.

  Flame trickles along the fuse, closer and closer. Put it out, Sym.

  It’s a really excellent fuse, considering I’ve never made one before. If I put it out, the plane won’t see us, and if the plane doesn’t see us, we’re dead anyway.

  But Sigurd is trying to tear his hand free, to rip the skin off his palm and fingers, screaming and screaming and stretching and straining but still unable to reach the fuse with his other hand. The fire bubbles happily along the fuse, closer and closer to his feet, and even though he kicks at the ground, trying to scuff ice over the fuse, it persists in burning. There’s no stopping it. Unless I stop it.

  I won’t put it out.

  I’ll go back inside the truck instead.

  With all the upholstery pulled out of the seat frames, the wall of the Hagglund is bare. It is massively insulated, but there’s Sigurd’s ice axe and there’s a tire jack and a handful of seconds. And there’s desperation. And there’s terror, stronger and sharper than any crowbar. In the end, I just direct the storm lighter at the hole I’ve gouged in the insulation, blistering paint, filling the air with noxious smoke, coughing and gasping, tears leaking from my grazed eyes. I light a cushion and push it into the hole. Any moment now, the fuse will ignite my wick of hair in the bottom of the fuel tank, or the dregs of diesel, or the fumes swirling above it. I’m too tired to be this afraid, Titus. Mum. Nikki. I’m too tired to decide whether to freeze or burn.

  The explosion is of swear words, as the van’s metal rises a few degrees—enough degrees—and the ice sealing Sigurd’s hand melts and sets him free. And I’m out and running and hoping the tank won’t blow and hoping it will and hearing the plane, and we’re calling out to it. . . . As if two children’s voices could possibly carry as far as the sky.

  Far too long has passed. Even before we take cover behind the pressure ice, it’s plain my seamless planning has gone for nothing. The Hagglund doesn’t explode. There’s no gigantic orange mushroom cloud. No track rods or luggage racks come spinning past our ears. This is no stunt from a disaster-and-destruction movie.

  Victim of a shoddy education, you see. Diesel’s not like gasoline. Not when it’s cold. Not when there’s so little. It doesn’t even catch fire. Only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. And all I can manage to think of is my braid of hair lying in the bottom of the tank. I begrudge my hair.

  Even I can hear the airplane now. The noise flexes the sky, to see if its dull white plastic can be broken. Sigurd hugs his hurt hand to his stomach and rocks to and fro.

  Then, suddenly, flames are looking out at us through the windows, jigging, jumpy, jazzy-colored passengers gawping out at the scenery, all set for the journey of a lifetime on their big red bus. The cushion I lit has ignited another—also, instruction manual and maps, food wrappers and cotton bal
ls. Sigurd runs to the back door and throws inside the cushions we brought out with us—feeds the fire, like someone hurling meat into a lion’s den. The windows crack. The sludge-cold diesel ignites with a grudging thump. Within two minutes, the caterpillar tracks have begun to flex and burn, the smoke to billow blackly. Our eyes follow it up into the sky, watch the wind twist and strand and wash it away.

  “What now?” says Sigurd, aghast. “What if they don’t come?”

  Be quiet, Sigurd. Enjoy the warmth. Don’t think about it. Just enjoy the warmth.

  “But what if we wait and they haven’t seen and they don’t come?”

  I shrug. “Take off our clothes, I s’pose.”

  His face is a treat. I’d laugh, but my mouth isn’t up to laughing anymore; I have to do that on the inside too.

  “Get it over fast, I mean. Take off our clothes and get it over quick.”

  As Napoleon said, Come what may, there’s always Death.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “I Do Not Regret this Journey.” —Scott

  What kind of word is big to describe Antarctica? To begin to capture anything here, big would need twenty-seven syllables.

  Words can’t cope. The space between the letters ought to make them elastic enough, but they aren’t. The tails under the g’s and y’s and q’s and j’s ought to help them grip, but they slide about helplessly. Cliffs are the length of counties. Icebergs are the size of cities. Prospects run as far as the sky. Parallel lines never meet because there’s no disappearing point. Adjectives die on the wing the moment they see Antarctica, and plummet onto the Plateau. Words are no good.

  Mimi’s friend Fern deleted the phone message, thinking it was kids messing about. We never stood a snowball’s chance in Hell.

  The coordinates that I guessed were entirely wrong, anyway.

  A hail squall obliterated the tracks of the Hagglund, showing which route it had taken out of Camp Aurora. No Hansel and Gretel trail.

  Not a snowball’s chance in Hell.

  Boom. Boom. Boom. It is all around me, making the air vibrate, making the air in my lungs vibrate. When I first woke, I thought it was the noise of the Devil’s Ballroom. Or my heart beating with terror. Boom boom boom. There’s a music to it, starting with strong, loud bangs about my head, thumping downward through my body and on by, pattering away toward silence. A hollow symphony of timpani.

  Arriving after the destruction of the plane, the Americans at McMurdo Base suspected terrorism and took over the search, concentrating all their efforts on looking for submarines out at sea. The only reason terrorists would go to Antarctica is to find out the meaning of terror, that’s what I think. No one was searching the Barrier or the Queen Maud Mountains. I knew all along: Sigurd and I never had more than a snowball’s chance in Hell.

  Fortunately Hell happens to be tucked away here at the bottom of the planet, in the last place on Earth. And sometimes even snowballs get a lucky break.

  Boom. Boom. Boom. The icebreaker’s hull is smashing its way through pack ice, splitting it with the bow, forcing a path into the fracture, crumbling the pieces smaller and smaller as it pushes them aside. The brash ice whispers past, caressing the ship’s sides like a lover.

  Apparently, a tourist aircraft flying a mile high was suddenly confronted by a tent tumbling through the sky, ropes trailing, the Pengwings logo perfectly legible on its billowing sides. Calculating that it could not have been aloft for many minutes, the pilot noted his position and reported it. On the same day, Mimi Dormiere-St.-Pierre found my postcard home, in her snowsuit’s back pocket, telling Mum what Victor was planning. The search switched southward—to the Barrier itself—rather than out at sea. In the end, one of the search planes did spot the burning Hagglund.

  Every snowball deserves a lucky break.

  “You’ll come back,” says Bob. “You don’t think so now, but you’ll see. It gets to you, this place.” Mike agrees. He says less, but his face is equally sure I won’t be able to resist the lure of The Ice.

  I shake my head. We’re sitting on deck, and on either side of us, towers of ice soar to the height of skyscrapers, fissured and etched by wind and water, colonized by birds and sunlight. The color is blinding—a bombardment of vivid greens and blue and red that pound away at the brain. The glitter on the water is a firing squad shooting from point-blank range. It is beautiful past all description. There’s not a chance I’m coming back. I never want to see the place again. Like Cherry-Garard said ninety years ago, the good memories are swallowed up by the bad.

  Boom. Boom. Boom. The noise of the icebreaker drives the memories through my skull, like it or not:

  A sled somersaulting over a crust of ice like a paper cup blowing in the wind;

  A face with tea bags for eyes;

  Turquoise xylophones of wafer-thin ice;

  A man running on a broken ankle;

  Sun dogs and ghost dogs.

  Boom. Boom. Boom. The noise is like the piston rods driving some huge mechanism inside a hollow planet.

  “You did good. For a first-timer, you did all right! You did some bright stuff!” Bob enthuses. “You could do like us! Get a job with one of the travel companies. Give talks—the whole tour thing, you know!” And Mike agrees and nods. It’s a triumph of optimism on their part, since I don’t even speak right now, let alone give talks. It is hard to focus on their faces, because I am still suffering from Long Eye. “The four-yard look into a three-yard room,” they call it. It comes of peering into an endless whiteness. It is a kind of battle fatigue.

  I can’t face Sigurd. We keep to opposite ends of the ship, and Mike (sensing that events haven’t forged undying friendship between us) seems to have mounted guard over me, so that Sigurd can’t come near. I sit on a steamer chair, all tucked up in blankets and quilts and borrowed clothing, and the Battleship Potemkin (or whatever it’s called) bullies its way out through the ice toward the open sea. I’m a celebrity being escorted through a jostling crowd of gawking paparazzi penguins and skuas. No photographs, please; I am not exactly looking my best.

  Mimi and Clough; the colonel, the Pogsbaums, Ms. Adolphus, and the rest were all flown out long since. But for some reason it was decided to send me home aboard a ship bound for New Zealand, rather than by the South American route. I don’t know who decided, only that it wasn’t me. I haven’t been doing decisions lately. Perhaps Pengwings are anxious to avoid adverse publicity. The state of me wouldn’t exactly sell Antarctica as a health cure or a life-affirming experience.

  Trouble is, Sigurd is nervous of what I’ll say about him when I finally open my mouth—scared that my account of events will land him in jail. I suppose I could tar and feather him with criminal wrongdoings if I wanted: conspiracy to defraud, traveling under a false identity, impersonating a good guy, reckless endangerment of life. Taking and driving away.

  I can’t be bothered. Sigurd doesn’t know that yet, so he’s still in fear of me, but I can’t see what I’d gain by squealing on him. As Titus said, the thing is to go around such people; to take avoiding action. One day, if Manfred’s body is found out on the Barrier, the bank draft in his pocket may set whiskers twitching. But for myself, I am content not to speak ill of the dead. Let people go on thinking Manfred Bruch was a gullible innocent, obsessed by the same cockamamie theories as my uncle. I wonder which label the Viking would hate most: Fraudster or Geek?

  At first I thought I could not speak. About Sigurd. About the dead. About anything. Too hollow inside. No happiness, no unhappiness, no words, no anything. Like the Plateau. It seemed as if The Ice had frozen shut my mouth, finally perfected the cocoon that I’ve been weaving around myself since Dad died. When they all came at me with their questions and their compassion and their first aid and their curiosity and their reassurance and their incomprehension, it was much easier just to turn my face to the wall.

  I wanted to go to Glasstown. It would be like running inside a church and claiming sanctuary in the old days, when they were after you. I
n the end, they’d get me when I came out, but not for a while. Not yet. When I went looking, though, the windows of Glasstown were all smashed, the streets deserted, its buildings condemned as unsafe.

  And I couldn’t find Titus anywhere. I shut my eyes, like closing the blinds in a house, and vowed not to open them again.

  But the sky is radiant with buttery yellow iceblink, and beneath it heaves a sea that’s a gaudy swill of cobalt blue, inky navy, sage, emerald, and holly green cluttered with snowy bergy bits. Pancake ice, delicate as pierced stone tracery, rises and falls on the swell. Mountains and sculpted icebergs leap up on all sides: killer whales frozen in the very act of breaching. It is fabulously lovely. It demands to be seen.

  And curiosity, like warmth, is creeping back into my bloodstream.

  Bob says we could have been nowhere near the Devil’s Ballroom—that we could never have crossed the Axel Heiberg on foot and been found where we were. He sits with a map on his knee, trying to work out where we really were, which geographical features I must have mistaken for which others. Mike nods his agreement, but keeps trying to take the map and fold it away. “I don’t think Sym wants to . . .” It’s true that my curiosity doesn’t extend to where I have or haven’t been.

  The solid world turns on its axis and, in some place that isn’t the Antarctic Ocean, people wake up. Bob goes to make an international telephone call using a satellite phone that has been to the Devil’s Ballroom and back in the pocket of a madman. Mike never says anything at all when Bob’s not there, but that’s all right; silence doesn’t strike me as awkward these days. It is the natural order of things.

  Presently Mike leans forward and folds back the blankets from over my three layers of socks. He does it without comment, but I must look puzzled, because he ducks his head and says: “There’s this animal called a dassie. It can only get going in the morning when the sun shines on its feet.”