by Rebecca Hunt
Another couple of rifle volleys mixed with the slack spout of the whale’s exhalation. The shots broke off while Smith reloaded. He didn’t notice Castle jump the last rungs.
‘Steady, girl . . . steady,’ Smith said with one eye shut, pressing lightly against the trigger as he aimed for the fin. ‘I’m going straight through the centre.’
Castle’s first strike knocked the rifle stock into Smith’s jaw. The second caused Smith to stumble backwards, the rifle clattering across the deck. Castle had grabbed him by the collar before he could regain his balance.
‘The last minke we might ever see and you want to bleed it to death,’ Castle said, inches from Smith’s face. He roughly threw him loose. ‘What’s happened to you, Smith?’
‘Why don’t we ask what’s happened to you?’ Smith said, pulling his twisted coat into shape. He picked up the rifle and hugged it to his chest. ‘What’s this about? A whale? Well, how strange. I’ve watched you with a hook, dragging them aboard with everybody else.’ Then Smith understood. ‘No, this is about Napps. It’s the cat—’ He almost laughed. His bloody cat. Again, the cat!
‘Napps helped you, he protected you. But you’re a small man, Smith, and you’ll hurt a better man if it flatters you to do so.’
‘A better man?’ Smith looked like a pink-faced, indignant young boy. ‘We found evidence to the contrary lying abandoned under a dinghy.’
‘That you can stand there and say that to me,’ Castle said scornfully, hating him. ‘How do you live with yourself? And how can you go along with them?’ He angrily lifted an arm in the direction of the stairs which led below deck to the Mess. ‘How do you sit listening as they eviscerate him when you know none of it is true?’
‘As you and Addison keep saying. On and on you go, despite everything. Except I think your memory may be hazy when it comes to Napps,’ Smith said. ‘It certainly is when it comes to the story you have about the cat. Because what I remember is him killing it for no reason.’
‘You deceitful little—’ Castle lunged at him.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Lawrence cried, pushing in between them. Uneasy about the prospect of stormy weather, he’d stomped back up from his quarters to walk another lap of the deck.
‘It’s just as Coppers joked earlier, sir. Castle’s head is wrong,’ Smith said to Lawrence. ‘He objected to me shooting at a whale. It was only sport, but I’ll apologize regardless if you want.’
Lawrence released an epically bored sigh. Of all the countless seals and birds and dogs and ponies and marine beasts they’d shot, snared, cleaved or bludgeoned, Castle wanted to detonate now about a whale which was where? Bobbing in the dark, perfectly alive.
‘I objected to the context, sir,’ Castle said. ‘I don’t believe it’s honourable to injure a creature when you don’t have to, especially when the harm done has no motive and comes at great expense to another being’s dignity.’
What an odd statement, thought Lawrence. A whale’s dignity?
‘You seem so determined to make things harder for yourself, Castle,’ he said. ‘You cast your judgement on others very freely, but don’t seem to realize that you’re also being judged, perhaps more harshly than you suspect.’
Comprehension of where this was leading started as a tightness in Castle’s throat as he thought of Lawrence, sitting at his desk every night. Just chatty bits to show the reality of life on board, he always said when asked about his journal. And he remembered Addison’s concern about the power the Captain wielded over another man’s reputation. The tightness spread to Castle’s chest as Lawrence continued.
‘I hear nothing but complaints about you. Aggressive, uncouth . . . woefully antagonistic.’ Lawrence’s head tilted in a way which could be either patience or condescension. ‘Can this really be the legacy you want to leave behind? Because you’re building a certain picture of yourself, Castle, which you are running out of time to amend. You see, once the expedition is over, that picture is set. Both in memory and in anecdote, all those stories people tell, and possibly write.’
34
April 1913
Millet-Bass felt as though he was being observed by a giant lidless eye. Napps was watching him with an intent which far surpassed Millet-Bass’s determination to ignore him. Millet-Bass tried to look unconcerned. If anything, he hoped his expression suggested boredom as Dinners jabbered about his favourite walks in Cornwall, and his boyhood toys, and other pointless things.
The hostile atmosphere in the tent resisted Dinners’s attempts to neutralize it. None of the subjects he broached received any interest, even when he mentioned his latest flights of imagination. In an act of provocation, he said he thought he’d seen a buffalo or something at the cove, like an ox but partly human. Isn’t that funny, he said to his stony-faced audience. Then he talked about the merits of a professional shave.
Millet-Bass wanted to be left alone to shiver through the indignity of his sea-wading, can-throwing shame until he could bear to speak. There was also another problem of a gigantic scale which demanded his full concentration to avoid. He couldn’t bear to think about it, except the pain kept reminding him. His stomach would send up a mouthful of acid, and Millet-Bass wasn’t always able to stop his lips bunching or his throat chugging slightly. The diabolical eye registered these actions.
‘ . . . Wrapped in a hot towel, your whole face swaddled in a warm turban.’ A covetous shudder ran through Dinners as he relived the experience.
Dogfights often flared up on board the Kismet. Men raced each other to the borders of civil disagreement as opinions turned from criticism to abuse and then to the brink of violence. Happily, the ship had a culture which allowed brawlers to navigate back from a dispute without humiliation. Instead of chewing through an apology, the code for amnesty was a moderately restrained punch at the kidneys and a few obscene riffs about mothers and wives. It was possible to inform a man of your intention to slit his throat and then have harmony restored minutes later. Which was why Napps was graciously prepared to wheeze over to Millet-Bass and put him in a headlock. This tradition meant they could skip the tedious reconciliation and have the situation fixed.
But some puzzling obstacle had trapped them in stalemate. Napps noticed Millet-Bass was still wearing his gloves.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked sharply.
What? Nothing. Millet-Bass shook his head.
Dinners glanced nervously at him. ‘Is something the matter, Millet-Bass?’
The three men had trudged back from the disastrous cove without saying a word. They’d sat silently in the tent, brewing tea which they drank in the same complicated silence. Then Napps had lifted his jumper to inspect where he’d smashed with the crate.
‘Oosh, Jesus Christ,’ he said.
‘Is it bad, Napps?’ Dinners thought it looked pretty bad.
A huge bruise was developing in various shades of ugly. It ran from his shoulder to his hip and seemed to radiate evil. Napps dabbed pressure on it and whistled out a low note.‘Is it really bad, do you think?’ Almost as upsetting as the bruise for Dinners was the spectacle of Napps’s semi-nakedness. It felt exploitative to see these foreign, vulnerably soft places. There was an odd disenchantment to seeing Napps’s belly button and realizing he hadn’t just sprung out of nowhere as a fully formed man, but had once been a baby like any other person, with all the fallibility that implied. Dinners averted his gaze, because he was tactful. Then he stared again, because any nudity, even a man’s battered rib cage, demanded to be seen. For months, the human body, including Dinners’s own body, had been reduced to hands, feet and head. The rest was a formless mystery hidden under a woollen rind of never-removed clothing. So to have other bits jump out for examination was thrillingly unpleasant.
‘Take off your gloves,’ Napps said to Millet-Bass. ‘That one.’
Dinners began chewing his lip. The way Millet-Bass had protectively shi
elded his right hand made him very anxious.
Millet-Bass started to remove the glove. He exposed a portion of wrist and then hesitated. ‘I’m not sure—’
‘You’ll do it now,’ Napps said, fighting against a strong instinct to turn his face away when Millet-Bass did exactly what he ordered, and he caught sight of interior crimsons and a wet meatiness, and an arterial-coloured slash which carved open the palm and the base of two fingers.
‘Can you move the fingers?’ Napps said, as if asking the question would enable some universal force to grant him the gift of being wrong about the severed tendons.
Millet-Bass answered with a contemptuous smile. ‘No.’
Napps remembered Dinners grabbing the dropped clasp-knives and passing one to Millet-Bass. And he remembered how carefully Millet-Bass had trussed the handle of his knife during the tent-bound storm days.
‘I—Millet-Bass, it was an accident,’ Dinners said with a tremor in his voice. ‘I was trying to help.’
‘Easy does it,’ Napps said. ‘It’s nobody’s fault.’
Dinners’s anguish had a bolstering effect on Napps. Help me, he said to Dinners, help me by finding some bandages; help by holding the lamp closer so I can see what I’m doing. Panicking doesn’t help anyone, Napps said while he treated Millet-Bass’s hand, thoughts of suppuration and infection flashing through his head, blood immediately drenching every cotton pad he wadded on to the cut. We’ll be all right, he said, suffocating with secret panic because he wasn’t a doctor and didn’t know how to sterilize the wound or prevent grime from his own fingers contaminating it.
‘Dinners, stop flinching from his hand like he’s going to throw it at you,’ Napps said while he pinned the bandage, wishing Addison was there with him more than he’d ever wished for anything in his life. ‘He’s not so crocked up. Eh, Millet-Bass? Not so crocked, are you?’
‘I’m sorry, Millet-Bass,’ Dinners said. ‘You have to forgive me.’
‘And why’s that?’ Millet-Bass replied with startling bitterness.
Dinners’s eyes widened. ‘It was a mistake.’
‘Well, don’t make another!’ Napps said cheerily to alleviate the tension. ‘And if you do another thing wro—!’ He resisted the urge to gag at the blood on his hands and sleeves. There was blood on the groundsheet, blood on his trousers. ‘Just one more thing wrong, Dinners! And we might decide we’re better off without you.’
35
December 2012
Are you all well?’
Decker glanced at Jess. ‘We’re slightly out of action.’
‘How?’ David’s voice grew serious. An Aegeus interrogation began.
The radio phone was passed to Jess.
‘I hurt my ankle,’ she mumbled self-consciously into the receiver, saying she thought it was the Achilles heel sort of area. ‘ . . . David, honestly, it’s nothing.’
David didn’t sound convinced. He offered to get the doctor Canadian Sam for an impromptu phone consultancy. ‘Because what are you doing to it?’ he wanted to know. ‘Don’t guess at the treatment and then make it worse.’
Jess rolled her eyes for the benefit of anyone watching. This David! He’d have Sam hauled to the phone for a sprained ankle! It was embarrassing! She’d made a big deal of laughing about her fall in the cave. She’d laughed even louder when Decker and Brix asked if she was okay, like it was the most ridiculous question.
Jess wasn’t going to let a dumb mistake jeopardize her Everland trip. She knew how quickly these situations escalated. Reservation became alarm, then panic, and then game over: you were hauled straight back to Aegeus. So once they’d returned to the tent, she had bandaged the ankle herself with the speed and blitheness of someone tasked with a trivial chore. She’d positioned her bag to hide the offending foot from sight as she treated it, cheerfully repeating how perfectly all right she was, and how unremarkable the incident was, and how they should just put it behind them. Then she’d made coffee and tidied the mounds of discarded clothing, working with the efficiency of someone who considered the matter resolved and really didn’t have time to waste on further discussion. In unobserved moments, using great stealth, Jess allowed one of her hands to creep into her sleeping bag and gingerly touch the ankle as if she was examining stolen property. It felt several degrees hotter than normal and had an unhealthy watery balloon-ish roundedness. ‘I was in the cave and thought I saw—David! I’m fine,’ Jess said, aware that Brix had looked at her with interest.
David’s lecturing continued. Any further stiffness, or anything unusual, and she must let them know immediately. He was absolutely not joking about this, he said, and then launched into a needlessly terrifying speech about their distance from help. Two and a half hours by Twin Otter in good weather.
In their haste to get Jess to the quads, Brix had forgotten about one detail. She reached over for her journal, flipped to a clean page, and wrote a giant-lettered note. She held it up to Jess. What did you see?
Still fending off David, Jess read the note and shrugged at Brix. I don’t know. Something?
The stuffily warm tent smelt of dead seals and unwashed people. Decker was lying flat on his back, his hands meshed behind his head as he thought of the bathtub in his house, the towels, a bed which wasn’t an insulated sack on the floor. He propped himself up on an elbow. ‘If we did want to leave,’ he said conspiratorially to Brix, ‘you realize the whole ankle thing is a valid reason to go home.’
It was a ridiculous reason to go home, as Brix’s confused smile informed him. Decker flopped down again. ‘You’d understand if you had a Viv worrying, Brix. Or a flock of chickens you haven’t seen for months,’ he said, and then put on a faux-solemn voice. ‘There is nothing I wouldn’t do to return, nothing I can’t live with if it gets me home.’
‘Quoting Napps,’ Brix said warily. ‘A superfun sign for the rest of us.’
‘It’s because I’m extremely tired,’ he answered, placing a sock over his eyes. ‘The Napps attitude starts to make a lot of sense.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bye, David, yeah,’ Jess said, ending the call in order to discuss her cave theory. ‘It looked like material. Green cloth.’
Decker grunted, amused. ‘Come on, Jess. That’s extremely doubtful.’
‘I saw green cloth,’ Jess insisted. Taking advantage of his blindfolded eyes, she permitted herself to clutch her ankle. For one careless second, she gave in to the instinct which made her want to take the beef-hot ankle in both hands and just squeeze it. The pain was exquisite and must have shown on her face. Because then Brix was studying her with exactly the kind of concern she’d wanted to avoid.
Jess appeared to deflate. Her shoulders dropped, her eyes lowered. The aura of confidence was replaced with something more lifeless. That she didn’t for one minute expect Brix to do her a favour was conveyed in the despondent way she shook her head: please don’t say anything.
Fieldwork protocol, or the fact it was irresponsible to withhold information from Decker, meant Brix should have discounted Jess’s request. She couldn’t do it, though, as it seemed so unfair. Everland had represented Brix’s opportunity to redefine herself as a courageous, resilient person instead of a dejected wreck, and she knew Jess would have come here with her own hopeful agenda. While the inexperienced, initially clueless Brix had semi-swindled her place using Angie and Decker’s influence, Jess deserved her place, and her work had been faultless. And Brix remembered what Decker had said about the centenary trip being sentimentalized, with no real need for it to last for two months. An ill-judged comment regarding Jess might be enough to convince him to abort it. There was always a self-serving element to any expedition, whether that was a desire for achievement, or adventure, or fulfilment. So considering the extra pressure Brix’s numberless mistakes had put on the team as she sought to satisfy her personal ambitions, compared to whatever Jess’s ambitions were, which hadn’t impacted nega
tively at all, Brix thought it would be an act of supreme hypocrisy if she used this, Jess’s one single setback, as an excuse to nuke her.
‘Green cloth?’ Brix asked. ‘You’re sure?’
Jess didn’t seem to hear her correctly. She stayed braced for disappointment. Then, as if she’d been slapped awake, her voice resounded with its typical cockiness as she answered that, er, yes, she was sure. Decker lifted the sock, examining Jess with one eye.
‘A million pounds says you’re wrong.’ He put the sock back down.
There was a warmth to Jess’s expression, a sweetness and earnestness which Brix had never seen from her before. Thank you, she mouthed. Thank you.
36
April 1913
I’ve got some news,’ Napps said agitatedly as he came into the tent.
He had been to dig up the seal meat and transfer it to their ice locker, and Dinners’s initial thoughts were a crazy notion that the meat would be gone, or somehow lost in the storm. But that wasn’t the problem. Napps had located it quickly enough. The problem was worse.
These were the last smog-coloured days before four months of night fell across Antarctica. Beyond a distance of a hundred feet, the sky and the landscape merged together in an unfocused mass. Napps had felt troubled when he reached the seal meat and saw the snow covering the catch was tainted with odd liquorice-brown discolorations. And he’d felt ill when he discovered the stains were caused by blood seeping from meat which was wet, not frozen.
‘It resists description,’ Napps said, trying to explain what he’d hacked out of the ground. Instead of being red and firm, the meat was black and waxy and he could press his fingers through it. The tissues smeared into a coarse pulp when he rubbed it. And the smell, God. He couldn’t even begin to describe the smell. He showed them the thick treacle residue on his gloves—look at this.