by Rebecca Hunt
Despite hating the plan, and prepared to store the keys in her mouth if it meant she didn’t have to give them to Jess, Brix grudgingly accepted.
With a withering smile, Jess paused what she was doing to receive Brix’s keys. She’d swept clear a patch of snow at the dinghy’s entrance, and had been wedging pebbles in the sand to form a discreet letter J.
‘Vandalism!’ Decker said.
‘Oh, chill out. They’re tiny,’ Jess answered, starting to make the next initial.
J B D: it was a piece of graffiti to commemorate the three of them, who like Napps and his men would be the only things here to vanish perfectly.
16
March 1913
Sitting outside on an oilcan, Dinners posed one bandaged hand behind his awful haircut. ‘How do I look?’
Napps stared at him in the manner of someone tasked to assess fire damage on an already worthless property.
‘Improved,’ Millet-Bass said. ‘Best-looking man on the island.’
Everland had grown increasingly silent as the remaining animals continued to migrate for winter. With each passing day the shriek and cackle of the gulls and the seals’ dull barks became more infrequent, muted and dispersed. The sun had diminished with the sound. Dawn now came at around nine o’clock and dusk fell by mid-afternoon. For the short period in between, a horizontal light flared across Everland which caused crazily elongated shadows and burnished everything in golden, almost unbearably nostalgic colours.
Dinners let out a screech as Millet-Bass lifted him off the oilcan and sat him on a blanket.
Napps was not a talented barber. He’d said, fetch the puppy, and Dinners had been carried from the tent so Napps could scissor haphazard chunks from his filthy hair. Now it was Millet-Bass’s turn to have his wild head-nest refashioned. He nervously balanced himself on the oilcan.
‘It’s not a haircut if you remove the hair with the skin attached,’ Millet-Bass said.
‘I’d talk less,’ Napps said, hacking at Millet-Bass’s odd red beard.
‘It’s technically a scalping. None of the skin,’ Millet-Bass said. Then he released a grunt of surprise. ‘Ha, we’ve got a visitor.’
Napps and Dinners turned to see a new iceberg in the bay.
While the smaller bergs rode past Everland in a few days, the larger ones were more permanent occupants. It was an unavoidable element of human nature that the men had bestowed the resident lumps with various individual qualities.
‘There, you see it? Coming up next to the Little Sisters,’ Millet-Bass said about three bergs clustered together. ‘To the left of Mr. Popular.’
Christened by Napps, Mr. Popular’s battered appearance reminded him of a sailor with a prodigious talent for causing fights. Even the Sunday service ended with chairs flung across the room when Mr. Popular was in the congregation.
‘Eighty foot high?’ Dinners said, guessing at the size of the berg. ‘Ninety?’
‘Possibly more.’ Millet-Bass shut an eye and tried to estimate. ‘A hundred foot, maybe? Certainly the biggest yet to take a detour and pay us a call. Not such a pretty guest, either.’
Facing the island from a central point, the berg had eroded into an unusual shape. It tapered down at the front, resembling an overturned pyramid with its point lopped off, and was horned with two distinctive turrets.
‘What shall we call it?’ Dinners said, admiring the horns. This practice of naming a berg was a shamanistic ritual masquerading as inconsequential fun. The men didn’t admit to it. They shrugged as if it was meaningless to them. But every berg had to be named or something terrible would happen. It had to be done immediately.
‘I once knew a bull which looked like that,’ Millet-Bass said. ‘It belonged to a friend’s father. Thanked him for filling its trough one day by trampling his arm into fifty pieces. He tried to chain it to a post but it bashed through into the farmyard, the post clattering behind. He threw a metal bucket at it. Might have thrown a fried egg for the good it did him.’
‘Very dramatic,’ Napps said aridly, to crush Millet-Bass’s story. He sensed it would to link into some type of superstitious sailor’s nonsense if he let it continue.
‘And the bull got even friendlier when it smelt cows,’ Millet-Bass said. ‘It would scream and gore holes in the barn walls. My friend told me the reason his father didn’t shoot the bull was because it sired enormous calves. But I heard he’d had a go once, blasted a chunk out of its leg, and the bull just swerved round and came at him like a meteor.’
‘So we’ll call it the Angry Bull?’ Dinners asked.
‘I didn’t trust that bull, and I don’t trust this berg. It’s a bad omen,’ Millet-Bass said with the irrationality Napps had entirely predicted.
‘Absurd.’ The way Napps exhaled showed how severely his patience was being tested. ‘The island isn’t alive, Millet-Bass. It doesn’t have a macabre charisma.’
‘Taurus,’ Millet-Bass said to Dinners. ‘The bull was called Taurus.’
‘That’s an ideal name for the berg,’ Dinners said. His patchily shorn head turned to look from one man to the other, hoping for signs of agreement. He was also hoping for a different conversation which wasn’t about bad omens.
‘And it isn’t any more stable than the original Taurus,’ Millet-Bass told Napps. ‘It’s moving towards the supply cove.’
Napps dismissed the idea, saying that such a large berg would be beached in the shallower waters surrounding the island before it got anywhere near the cove.
Their dispute was interrupted by Dinners crying, ‘There, there, there!’
The landscape was hallucinating itself. Fata Morgana had replicated the scenery as a ghost surface mirroring the ocean. Each iceberg was roofed by a phantom image which rose and slurred into immense hourglass forms. An inverted twin reared from Taurus and grew huge above its brother, straining against the tethers of the horns. These carnivals were fleeting, and with the abruptness of lightning or splitting glass or a gas explosion everything unearthly was gone. The existent world was left with a post-party drabness. After the spectral distortion, the reality seemed leaden.
‘At least I know you both saw it,’ Dinners said. ‘You definitely did, not just me.’
Of course they’d seen it, weren’t they right here beside him?
Dinners nodded embarrassedly and said he was stupid. No, not stupid, what he meant was impressionable. ‘Everland plays tricks on me. That’s why I asked.’
‘Tricks,’ Napps said, wanting a better explanation.
‘Ah, don’t worry about it,’ Millet-Bass said quickly.
The hint was completely lost on Dinners. ‘Well, the stones want to become animals whenever I’m alone. And the shadows waste my time with funny pranks. It makes me wary and so careful not to fall for these tricks that I can occasionally take against the wrong thing.’ He had an example which would amuse them. ‘Like yesterday!’ He covered his eyes in a performance of comic shame. ‘I refused to believe in Millet-Bass. It was the tent flapping, I was absolutely sure. But what language the tent used!’
‘Then keep quiet and don’t make me repeat it,’ said Millet-Bass, giving Dinners a sociable yet forceful nudge before he could say anything else.
Napps didn’t respond. He watched the fading tide marks, and then watched the waves roll in across the shore to darken them again.
17
November 2012
We definitely couldn’t hear it from this distance before,’ Decker said. He glanced sideways at Brix. Something was obviously bothering her.
‘Um hm. Louder,’ Brix said in the same noncommittal tone she’d been using for the past hour.
As the penguin colony grew, so did their noise. The increase in volume was noticeable as they trekked back into the Adélies’ southern bay, hunched against the minus-eight winds. Brix didn’t know how to tell Decker what she’d realized, p
retty much from the moment they’d left the camp. In a crazy way, she kept hoping she was mistaken, as if the situation might magically resolve itself if she regretted it forcefully enough. That this had never once happened to her in her entire life didn’t stop her from trying to believe it still might.
Around a thousand Adélies had now arrived in the bay, and their lively presence made Everland seem like less of a desolate hole, as did the brighter-skied periods. That morning had seen the sun emerge for the first time. Although it was nothing more than a pale beach ball glowing through the smog-thick clouds, the appearance of any sunlight, however weak, automatically reduced the landscape’s bleakness by at least a third. What had previously been as visually unappealing as a scrapyard became almost attractive. The three humans, however, had become far uglier. They were wrinkled and unwashed, with ratted hair and mottled faces. Fingers and toes were always an inflamed shade of red, and throbbed with their own hot pulse at night.
‘Sucks to be him,’ Jess said about a nearby Adélie which was standing guard in the wrong direction, unaware that another penguin was looting rocks from his nest.
‘That guy? His problems are only going to get worse,’ Decker said while he began to unpack the microchipping equipment from his bag. ‘This whole season is a monumental headache for him.’
Just say it, thought Brix as she watched Decker. Just tell him, don’t wait for him to find out, she said to herself, and then continued to observe silently.
‘Because if he’s lucky,’ Decker continued, ‘he and his mate will hatch two chicks, one of which will die, as they can’t feed them both. He’ll routinely travel up to two hundred and fifty kilometres out to sea to gather krill for the remaining chick, but since the vessel for his genes is essentially a fluffy snack, he’ll probably return to find it’s been eaten. Even if his chick survives long enough to fledge, there’s an eighty per cent chance it won’t make it beyond two years of age. And they breed at three, earliest.’
Jeez. Jess made a face. Her previous field-trips had involved climatology, tectonic shift and glaciology. They were very sterile, non-bloody subjects, and she was learning the grisly realities of a biological research trip. Such as for example gulls pecking chicks to death, which Decker informed her she could expect to witness daily.
‘Oh, trust me, you get used to it,’ he said, passing the chipping gun to Brix. Jess made no effort to disguise how obvious it was to her that Brix had never operated a chipping gun. This fact was underlined when Decker handed Brix a box of microchips. Instead of loading a chip, or doing anything useful, or even pretending the equipment was familiar, she just stood there cluelessly.
The gun was a small plastic device, of the same type used by veterinarians to microchip domestic pets. Once a chip was slotted into the shaft of the thick hypodermic needle which attached to the nozzle, it could be injected into a bird’s abdomen by squeezing a trigger. Although being grabbed and stabbed wasn’t especially nice for the Adélie, the procedure was over in seconds and the microchipped bird was then identified whenever it waddled through the automated gateway. The aim was to get fifty birds chipped during this session, which wouldn’t overly disturb the colony.
So here it came. The moment of awfulness. Decker was rooting through the bag with a new desperation and Brix had the urge to offset the pain of his imminent discovery by biting into her tongue, or bending her thumb the wrong way. Whether imagined or not, it seemed to her that dread had a particular taste. Something chemical, like hairspray. This taste only got more potent as Decker upturned the bag, emptying its contents out on to the snow, and then sat back on his heels.
‘Ah, shit.’ He thumped the palm of one hand against his forehead. ‘Shit.’
If Jess had looked at Brix, she’d have seen her slack, bloodless expression. But she was peering over Decker’s shoulder into the bag, trying to spot the problem.
Jess nudged him with a boot. ‘Deck?’
‘Seems I’ve forgotten—Sorry, I haven’t brought enough microchips.’
His performance was so convincing it was as if he really believed it. Snow had drifted up around the quads overnight, and since Decker couldn’t say that it was far quicker if he and Jess dug out the bikes alone, he’d asked Brix to fetch some microchips from the work tent. There was a box of chips in the rucksack already, he’d said, so could she bung in another couple of boxes? But in her determination to be useful, Brix had decided to do more. As Jess was busy, Brix had adopted the role of field assistant and loaded the sledge herself. She’d bagged spare clothing and hauled across their sleeping bags, then carried the primus stove and the medical case. It had felt so good to be a valuable person, except she’d left the microchips in the tent. And by doing that, she’d hijacked the purpose of the entire day.
Hearing Decker say, ‘My fault, my fault,’ and pound his head again, forced Jess to turn and contemplate the ocean with hard eyes. The situation was too insulting to comment on.
Brix said, ‘Maybe we could use the tags we’ve got, then—’
He nodded as if she were reading his mind. ‘And then do the rest later, exactly. Yes, good plan.’
‘So, okay,’ Jess said icily. ‘Great. Shall we start chipping?’
‘Yes. Just, uh.’ Decker cleared his throat. There was an unspoken code that ‘taking a reconnaissance’ meant wanting to be alone, and he put it into operation. ‘What I’m thinking is that I’d better take a quick recce of the site first,’ he said, striding away at a speed which wasn’t aggressive, yet was purposeful enough to deter any efforts to stop him.
The southern bay’s transformation from penguin village to penguin metropolis was fully under way. As the Adélie numbers swelled, their circular pebble nests began to fill the beach, all built just beyond reach of the snapping beaks of their neighbours. The increasing density of the population also had another effect, as the penguins’ krill-rich diet resulted in pinkish excrement which stank of ammonia and stained everything pink, including the birds themselves. Most Adélies now had a dirty bib marking their white chests, and leg feathers like a little pair of pink shorts.
Decker wasn’t exactly angry with Brix as he marched between the nest-marker poles, weaving around the penguins hunched over their eggs. He didn’t blame her necessarily, but he’d needed a minute to rage aloud at the weight of his responsibilities. There was no part of the day which didn’t require a maximum investment of energy from him, starting from the second he woke up and lasting until the second he shoved himself back into his sleeping bag at night. They were a three-person team, and although Jess was an obvious asset, despite Brix’s best efforts she wasn’t making anywhere near enough of a contribution. The truth was that everything went at the pace of the least skilled person, which meant every job Brix did took twice the time and twice the labour, as Decker had to first explain it to her and then check she’d done it correctly. And he was beginning to suspect he’d made a massive mistake.
Because Antarctica was so unforgiving to the human body, it wasn’t possible to attain Decker’s level of fieldwork expertise without it having a physical impact. His knees and back had taken an absolute hammering in the twenty years he’d been leading expeditions. He’d torn muscles, fractured bones, knackered ligaments, snapped the tendon in a finger. There was his famous drop into a crevasse. And the ghosts of these old injuries now returned to ache in a non-specific yet troublesome way. So Decker had decided Everland would be his last trip. He was fifty-four, he was tired, and he was done with roughing it in tents for months on end. But here was the difficulty. Leaving this part of his life behind was not as easy to accept as he’d thought. It caused a whole mess of emotions related to his pride and identity. Which perhaps explained why he’d ignored how this expedition differed from his other expeditions of the past five years, and had agreed to it anyway.
What am I doing, Decker asked himself. All those trips had been based in familiar territory, such as Cape Athena
, and had involved groups of eight or more. Why did I do this, he said to the horizon. I could be at home.
Without Decker, Brix and Jess were reduced to prickly silence. Because Jess’s mute hatred was worse than her scorn, and any conversation was better than none, Brix eventually said, ‘I’ve been having the weirdest dream. It happens like this every time. A sound wakes me, and I think it’s someone shouting outside. Except I’m not awake, because then I open my eyes and there’s this other thing in the tent. I’m not sure what, something big, but I—’
‘Dream-talk is the dullest thing in the world.’
‘You’re in it,’ Brix said. ‘Decker is, too.’
‘And do you, in this dream, remember to pack the microchips?’ Jess gave her a sarcastic look. ‘You can’t really think I believe it’s Decker who forgot them.’
‘Jess . . . ’ Brix stared down at the chipping gun. ‘There’s got to be an easier way for us to spend two months together.’
‘An easier way?’ Instead of addressing Brix, Jess directed her speech to an invisible jury somewhere out to sea. ‘Well, there’s the difference between us. Do you have any idea how hard I’ve worked for this opportunity? This is the culmination of years of effort for me. So I’d say I’ve earned my place. And Decker’s been leading expeditions for years, so that’s his place earned. Which brings me to my question. How come you’re here, Brix? What did you ever do to earn it?’
Brix was not only regretting the conversation, but the entire day. If I choked to death on a stone, she thought, that would be less painful than having this discussion. Or if a freak wave rose out of nowhere and drowned me. It was too late to back out, though. Regardless of Decker’s advice, she began to tell Jess about her marriage.