Everland

by Rebecca Hunt

  The officer family Napps had drafted into enjoyed a studious type of fun. They argued about politics and cracked intellectually dry jokes. It was here that Napps and Addison, two reserved and emotionally aloof men, discovered a soulmate in each other. The sailor Castle was another great friend of Napps’s, which was one of the more unexpected alliances on board the Kismet. Uptight Napps and rowdy Castle had managed to form a close bond despite the total absence of common ground. Nobody knew how it worked. It was a friendship which didn’t make sense to them or anyone.

  The lawless band Millet-Bass was initiated into always seemed to be having a good time. They’d famously invented a wild game which Napps had played once or twice. Some crazy rules he couldn’t remember, everybody hysterical and being thrown to the floor. An interest in environmental topics had meant Napps very occasionally mixed with Dinners’s placid scientific tribe. It was enough for Napps to form an unforgiving opinion of him. There was something odd about the runtish Dinners; he’d never been at sea before the Kismet voyage, which was bizarre, and didn’t act as though he had any sailing knowledge whatsoever. It would perhaps explain why Lawrence appeared to shield Dinners from the rougher tasks aboard. He didn’t seem to do his share of night watches, for example, or ever get sent up to the crow’s nest. He was basically a pet, Napps had decided, a useless misfit.

  In the Kismet’s social Venn diagram, the three men had occupied almost entirely distinct spheres, and would have been perfectly happy to let the situation remain unchanged. But then the Captain made his proposal. He wanted volunteers to explore an uncharted island while the ship detoured north to Cape Athena. Claiming new territory would be a matter of pride for the Kismet, obviously, and the island would be of great scientific interest. You can imagine what a triumph it would be for Britain, Lawrence had said, for us to return with a significant new discovery, either geographical or ecological. The potential benefits of these trophies are immense, not simply for this expedition but with regard to securing sponsorship for future ones.

  ‘So who’s interested?’ he’d said, as every hand in the room shot up.

  As First Mate, Napps was the natural choice to lead the island team. He was also the worst person to negotiate with, as Lawrence discovered for the millionth time as the two men went to the Captain’s room to fight over the merits of each volunteer.

  ‘Oh, we all had stakes on who’d be chosen,’ Millet-Bass said as he and Napps walked to the cove, still too battered to muster anything more energetic than an achingly slow trudge. ‘Coppers owes me some jug he inherited from his uncle.’

  ‘What are you going to do with the jug?’ Napps asked.

  ‘Fill it with the money Matthews owes me. That donkey also bet it would be him here instead of me.’

  Millet-Bass’s arrogance was amusing. ‘Did you have bets on anyone apart from yourself?’ Napps said.

  ‘There was an interesting point when most people suddenly put a wager on Dinners.’ Whatever reaction Millet-Bass seemed to be anticipating was making it hard for him to keep a straight face. ‘Even Dinners placed a bet. Quite a substantial one if what I heard was true.’

  ‘Giuseppe,’ Napps said furiously.

  Lawrence and Napps had agreed on Millet-Bass being a member of the island party. He was strong, capable, and his talents as a sailor were unanimously admired, but Dinners proved to be a point of intense controversy. Since what possible reason was there for choosing an amateur like Dinners over a veteran when the ship was full of them and many had years of Antarctic experience? Napps concluded that he’d rather take Smith’s stupid cat. Slamming a hand down on the table, Lawrence was moved to remind Napps that Dinners was a brilliant scientist, and therefore this resistance to taking him to a location where his skills could be used was absurd. Look, we need expertise, not illiterate force, Lawrence said, still hammering the table. A couple of sailors stoning birds and grubbing up random slabs of granite won’t exactly enlighten us. Evidence of Dinners’s commitment to science was there in the numerous books he kept on marine and mammal life, the soft bladderlike creatures he trawled with nets and dissected, the hundreds of watercolour diagrams he’d already produced. And it was precisely this kind of expertise which made him so vital to the island party, Lawrence shouted. Because what do you know about geology, Napps, beyond recognizing a rock when it’s flung at you? And what do you really know about biology, beyond what you can and cannot eat?

  If there was a knock at the door they didn’t notice it, and the young steward Giuseppe had sidled in just as Napps made it unbelievably clear how little he cared about what bladder things Dinners trawled up. Captain, with respect, your man Dinners doesn’t look like he’d survive the night with a window open, let alone two weeks on a remote Antarctic island. Giuseppe was spotted as he tried to creep from the room, and the language provoked by his trespass made him cower and shake his head, promising on his mother’s soul that he hadn’t heard anything.

  Except what the lying little turd had actually done was repeat the lot, line for line, to everyone on the ship, including Dinners.

  ‘Well, the good news is you were wrong about the window,’ Millet-Bass said. ‘In that dinghy he did six days without a roof.’

  ‘He nearly died and he still might,’ Napps answered. ‘The bad news is I was absolutely correct to doubt his abilities. Dinners has put us in a tight spot indeed.’

  ‘We pulled him through, didn’t we?’ Millet-Bass said.

  ‘I don’t need to tell you about the burden a sick man puts upon a team.’

  The ill made excessive demands on resources and energy. They needed to be fed, which took extra oil, and they needed to be nursed, which took extra time. They shackled the healthy to their feeble limitations and put everyone in danger. Both Millet-Bass and Napps knew the workload of three could just about be managed between two well men. And they both knew the workload of three was doubled with one man incapacitated.

  ‘The weak aren’t buoyed by the strong, the weak sink them,’ Napps said.

  Millet-Bass stared ahead and didn’t comment. The sunshine seemed to lend colours a starched precision. Looking inland, Everland’s volcano was a perfect matte black, above which the sky was a perfect white.

  As their conversation recovered from a period of uneasy silence, it returned to the fascinating subject of Millet-Bass. Napps was learning there were many ways to live a life, and none of Millet-Bass’s ways had ever occurred to him.

  There were those summers Millet-Bass had spent digging up roads or laying bricks or milling flour before sailing off with that ship. At one point, for no real reason, he’d constructed himself a den in the woods and experimented with living in nature, which he’d found very easy. He’d spent a few months snaring rabbits, swimming naked, and guddling fish, whatever that entailed, something to do with groping around barehanded in streams. There were periods when he’d worked as a game beater or a carpenter or at a distillery, or been involved in some eel-poaching racket. And in between these exploits, from the age of fourteen onwards, he’d headed out to sea.

  Napps tried to remain neutral as he listened to all this. He didn’t think a man should run around in the woods with no clothes on, he thought a man should accept responsibility. Secretly, he felt glad of his scorn for Millet-Bass’s anarchic past. It stopped him analysing a different feeling underneath the scorn, which was perhaps jealousy. The only job he’d ever had was in the Navy, where he’d unadventurously plodded his way through the ranks. It seemed very bland now. So Napps hinted at a recklessness of his own, saying enough to imply that he was embarrassed about an impressive history with women which far surpassed anything Millet-Bass could ever imagine.

  When Millet-Bass mentioned that Napps had told him he’d met his prospective wife at fifteen, Napps was too busy inspecting their supplies to answer.

  The cove was littered with large, salt-sculpted chunks of ice from the neighbouring glacier, the sand
frozen into the messy ruts of yesterday’s footprints.

  ‘The sum total of our possessions,’ Napps said. ‘Everything we have in the world.’ He turned to see if Millet-Bass was in an equally philosophical mood.

  ‘I used to be able to carry three of these,’ was all Millet-Bass said. He tried to lift one of the thirty-pound boxes and made some unhealthy sounds, dropping the box.

  Millet-Bass’s weak display only confirmed Napps’s decision. Shifting all the supplies to the camp would involve grunting through fifteen or sixteen trips with a fully loaded sledge, and Napps doubted he even had the strength to rip an envelope in half. ‘The cove is sheltered enough for the supplies to remain where they are,’ he said. ‘They’ll be fine here until the ship arrives.’

  Millet-Bass said nothing, just looked at him.

  ‘It’s been two days,’ Napps said, a little testily. ‘Allow them some time.’

  Many of the crates were damaged. Napps and Millet-Bass sniffed the punctured cans and squeezed the swollen ones distrustfully. Some jars were cracked and they wondered about sieving out the glass fragments. They thought saturated powdered goods could potentially still be edible after drying, a theory they tested with a bite of wet flour and then disagreed on. What could be saved was organized into a loose pile. Napps took a pencil and notebook from his pocket to write an inventory.

  They had Bovril sledging rations and nut food, pemmican, Huntley & Palmers Antarctic biscuits and some butter. There was also a selection of tinned meats and fruits, jams and fish. Cans of kidney soup, nobody’s first choice, were listed with lukewarm gratitude. Giblet soup followed, which wasn’t exactly worse but certainly wasn’t better. Cans of Moir’s lunch tongue and cans of pineapple in syrup were received with more enthusiasm. Tea leaves, Cerebos salt and packets of Trumilk were found. Sugar and Fry’s Pure Concentrated Cocoa caused the sweet-toothed Napps to rap his notebook with a fist. Millet-Bass whistled in relief at the discovery of several pouches of tobacco. There was also a decent stash of candles, additional Alpine ropes and tackle, and another sack of clothing. Napps discovered a compass, which he shook and studied. He frowned at the few viable boxes of matches. There wasn’t much paraffin either. Napps grimly counted which oilcans weren’t leaking.

  In one of their typically hostile discussions, Lawrence and Napps had collided over the amount of food necessary for the trip. To Napps the quantity was entirely justified, but Lawrence had seen the boxes being piled on deck for the Joseph Evelyn and yelled, ‘Where’s your head, Napps?’ Napps had won the argument by being the man happy to carry the debate on through the night. It was also significantly preferable for him to be the one proved wrong, as he had explained to the idiot Captain. Because if he was wrong then they could always return surplus food to the hold, but if Lawrence was wrong it meant they’d starve.

  Napps muttered absently to himself as he calculated the inventory into units of days and meals, units of fuel and men. Millet-Bass heard him mumbling that he wanted to start rationing in order to save a month’s worth of supplies.

  ‘Wait, hold on,’ Millet-Bass said. ‘How long do you plan on us staying here?’

  ‘I don’t want to have to explain it again to Dinners,’ Napps said. ‘We’ll discuss it at the tent.’

  Watching Napps snap shut the notebook to put it in his pocket, Millet-Bass considered for the first time that there might be a rift between them over what they proposed to do next.

  10

  November 2012

  Why Everland?’ The member of the selection board looked over his spectacles at Brix, his pen ready. ‘Why this field-trip?’

  Enthusiasm, curiosity, ambition. It was nothing the board hadn’t heard countless times before. Everybody who’d been interviewed would have said the same thing in the same passionate way. So Brix told them about her trilobite fossil.

  This marine animal had once ruled the earth. For nearly three hundred million years, these flattened helmets with legs had mowed across the ocean bed, feeding on small organisms or detritus. Trilobites looked suitably basic and warlike for a creature that had emerged from the beginning of life, in an age so ancient they’d already died out before dinosaurs existed. The first trilobites belonged to a different planet, without trees or grass, or fur or feathers, when the various permutations of eyes and organs were in their very earliest, craziest stages. Which made it all the more incredible to Brix that she could just own one of these things. She’d been fifteen years old when an aunt gave her a trilobite fossil as a birthday present and changed the way Brix saw the world. Something had clicked in her head. For half a billion years, animal life had been evolving, from crawling, slithering, modifying, and then running, flying, diversifying. And this history wasn’t lost, as an apple-sized fossil demonstrated. That’s what had amazed the teenage Brix. All of existence could be traced back, from the start until now. It was still there, but as rock and bone, as layers of soil, or clay, or resin, or preserved in tundra ice and peat.

  ‘The same trilobite sits on my desk at home as a paperweight,’ Brix had said.

  Someone on the board laughed. ‘Extremely profound for a paperweight.’

  Brix’s answering laugh was self-conscious. The trilobite speech which had seemed so captivating in her head revealed itself to be peculiar, perhaps even a little dorkish. ‘It reminds me why I became a scientist,’ she said in a serious tone, to emphasize that she was in fact a studious person, not a kook. ‘Once I understood that everything connects, I knew I wanted to be involved in the process of discovery.’

  Wish granted. Here Brix was, on yet another overcast morning, clouds draped across the volcano like a rotting woollen rug. The sky was sludge-coloured and ominous, as always. They’d never once seen the sun, even for a second.

  Decker, Jess and Brix had driven the quads to a bay at the southern end of the island to begin monitoring the estimated four thousand Adélies which located here each summer. Although the colony was still eight hundred metres away, they’d travel the last distance on foot, pulling equipment on sledges to prevent the quads’ engine noise from disturbing the birds.

  The last week had taught Brix several interesting yet largely unpleasant facts. By far the quickest thing she’d learnt was what it meant to be cold. It wasn’t discomfort, or shivering, or any of the things she’d experienced before: being truly cold meant being unable to think for the pain, and feeling sick with the pain, and remaining shaky for hours afterwards. That fieldwork was physically relentless was another lesson Brix had learnt with every single muscle in her body. If they weren’t dragging equipment on or off sledges, they were fighting against headwinds, or trying to read maps in the sleet, or trying to return to the tent, or waking up to start the battle all over again. Their camp was on the eastern side of the island, and they’d been to the western coast, where the beach was a thin stretch of black rubble and deader than the moon. They’d hiked across the lower slopes of the volcano, where nothing lived except a purple moss which resembled burnt rice. They’d tried to drive north to the Joseph Evelyn cove and had been beaten back by such heavy snowfall they couldn’t see three metres in front of them.

  Decker was the best thing about Everland, in Brix’s opinion. He was also Brix’s protector from the worst thing about Everland: Jess.

  Her plans to befriend Jess had been absurdly naïve. From the start, Jess had made no effort to hide the fact that she not only preferred Decker to Brix, but appeared to actively dislike Brix, which she showed by having an opinion about whatever Brix did. It seemed Brix was too slow at dressing, or eating, or walking, or digging out the supplies. Brix sometimes got her revenge by talking very scientifically to Decker, which was the one conversation Jess couldn’t monopolize. Brix would start an impenetrable discussion about phytoplankton, the microscopic aquatic organisms. Or she’d mention the Southern Annular Mode, the wind belt that circled Antarctica. More often, she would invent reasons to spend time alone in t
he work tent. She’d say she was going to write her notes. What she’d really do was sit there on her own and feel unbelievably lonely.

  Brix’s sledge was no heavier than Decker’s or Jess’s, but it had become her habit to lag a few steps behind them. She examined the chunks of stranded ice which littered the shoreline. The pieces ranged in size from bars of soap to half-ton lumps, all sculpted into futuristic shapes by the wind, and arranged by the tide in such an orderly row that the display seemed curated rather than organic.

  ‘Man, it’s a constant inquisition with you,’ Decker said to Jess, because she deemed no topic too sensitive. She would prise any subject apart with a barrage of questions, such as why Decker and his wife Viv had no children and how they felt about that.

  It was no big surprise to learn that Viv was charmingly eccentric. She favoured cardigan coats, giant jewellery, and a karmic slant to life. They lived in a farmhouse in Somerset, and were the kind of people who brewed their own alcohol to drink in riotous celebrations with similar people. They had driftwood sculptures in the garden and curios from their extensive travels covering the shelves. It was all very loose and joyful and free. And as for children, Decker and Viv had come to accept it wouldn’t happen. They’d been through their share of heartbreak about it, he said. ‘But we’re okay. And that’s how it goes. This’ll be my last fieldwork trip, though.’

  Jess shot him a canny, incredulous smile.

  ‘No, really. I’m serious,’ Decker said. ‘It’s not fair on Viv, I’m never home. And expeditions are a young man’s game. I probably should have retired a while ago.’

  Ahead of them, the winding coastline rounded into a smallish, sheltered bay, which sloped up from the sea to the base of twenty-metre-high cliffs. The breeding season’s first arrivals were visible at the far end. About a hundred Adélies were grouped together in a black mass, with occasional white flashes of chest feathers as individual birds toddled out of the surf.