by Rebecca Hunt
Addison had bowed his head. ‘Do you know what you’re asking me?’
‘Let me, let me. Let me go,’ Dinners had cried, rattling on the bed in seizures. ‘Please, I want to go.’
Addison’s memory became hazy at this point. He’d wept, he’d pleaded with Dinners. He’d made promises and begged. And, then, unable to deny Dinners any longer, Addison recalled the frantic search. He’d emptied the medicine case on to the floor, scattering glass tubes and bottles in his urgency to find the morphine.
Now Addison lay alone under his blankets, remembering how he’d knelt beside Dinners and administered the injection. Then I’ll let you go, he’d said, and was still saying even when Dinners was no longer there to hear it. But Addison felt there was a moment of suspension after the transition from dying to deceased. Like the delay between lightning and a thunderclap, the sentience of life took a few seconds to dissipate. So he’d spoken to Dinners anyway, and said goodbye to him, and he’d thought that the sense of peace which came over him might be Dinners’s response.
Addison stilled himself. He leant up on one elbow to drink a glass of water. The emptiness in his wrinkled, intolerant stomach was salving. The comfort he wanted was found in abstinence, and an instinctive desire to reject the contentment and warmth of eating meant he’d been fasting for two days. Addison rested, cooling and slowly deactivated; a lizard at dusk in the dark of his room. He heard footsteps and waited. They passed and he lay welcoming the dull steep of inertia.
41
December 2012
The Adélie bay was an industrious arena of commotion and squalor. It became louder and livelier and filthier as the temperature rose. Everything was stained pink with bird dung, and the smell had intensified until it was no easier to breathe than chlorine. The chunks of stranded ice along the shoreline had now melted completely, leaving deep indented pits. Tiny flowers bloomed in the plush green fur of moss and lichen that covered the scree slopes beneath the cliffs.
Death was just as endemic as life in the colony. Dead chicks lay on the stones with the breeze through their marabou fluff, trampled by penguins and the pursuing horde of frantic chicks. Every passing adult bird was bombarded by these gangs of juveniles, who were also under continual bombardment themselves from the gulls which loitered around, prospecting for opportunities. There wasn’t an inch of beach which didn’t heave with movement. The noise was unbelievable.
‘Does anything here ever shut up?’ Jess said, taking her hat off and using it to fan her hot face. The sun which scorched their skin to leather, and plagued them with a nagging, unquenchable thirst, had also faded their red jackets to a peach colour. Having started as blonde, Jess’s ponytail was now a white woolly tassel. She yawned in a way which Decker thought suggested the beginning of another discussion on the topic of ‘unexplained night sounds’ and ‘sleepless fear’.
Decker didn’t want to talk about it. The sounds Brix and Jess had heard were absolutely not odd, as he’d already explained several times. There was nothing spooky or ominous about it. It was a fur seal, or some sort of bird. Some sort of whatever, it didn’t matter. The empty canvas sling he was holding was rigged to a spring balance. It was a device used for weighing small animals. ‘Next,’ he said.
They were at the colony to weigh chicks. The morning’s target was to collect the data from forty chicks, then go to the northern end of the island to survey the glacier. In the fifty days it took for a hatchling to grow into a self-sufficient Adélie, a chick needed to bulk up by around a hundred grams every twenty-four hours if it was to grow large enough to fledge. The rapid transformation from tiny scrap to sleek adult was ungainly, and the chicks had reached the gawky adolescent stage. Their flippers were too big for them and dragged on the ground like long sleeves. They had little heads, fat bodies, and a scruffy coat of down.
Brix put the thirty-fifth chick in the sling, where it sat with stately patience until its weight was recorded. Once freed from the sling, it squealed off to rejoin the chase of parent Adélies ferrying through the turmoil.
Brix looked at the sky as if it was sending her cryptic messages. Despite the weather forecast of normal conditions, there was a charge to the atmosphere which had amassed as a migrainous static behind her eyes. She was unable to work out whether her increased awareness of the static was due to preoccupation on her part, or because the atmospheric heaviness was becoming more distinct. ‘Low pressure,’ she said, clapping a hand to her forehead. ‘Can you feel it?’
Decker could definitely feel it. He’d woken up with a headache of crushing proportions and the stench of infinite penguin turds was doing nothing to improve it. What he wanted to do was to leave the bay as quickly as possible and go to the glacier. Then, once they’d finished there, they could go to the tent, then they could sleep. Then the next day would be closer, and so would the day of the Twin Otter’s arrival, and therefore their departure from Everland. ‘Next,’ he said.
‘Jess, do you want to get the next chick?’ Brix said, since Jess hadn’t handled any birds or really done much of anything. She’d made no attempt to get involved beyond standing there, watching.
A couple of Adélies were within easy catching range to one side of her. Jess didn’t move. ‘Nah, I’ll let you do it.’
She was trying to avoid all but the most necessary of physical actions for secret reasons related to acute leg pain. This ruled out the chasing of penguins, even though a young, baffled Adélie required no more skill to trap than a potato. But leaning down hurt, standing up again hurt. Twisting hurt, lifting hurt. Grappling with a bird might cause her to tread clumsily, and that would hurt. It was just better if Brix was the one who lugged reluctant sack-shaped creatures in and out of slings.
It was a suspiciously non-Jess-like response. ‘Are you okay?’ Brix asked.
Jess’s expression implied this was the craziest question. ‘Of course.’
‘Because you’re not usually much of a spectator when it comes to work,’ Brix said.
‘Then I guess the flag was right,’ Jess said. ‘The times are changing and we with them.’ She smiled as though this was a brilliant comeback.
Decker rattled the sling to get the attention of either Jess or Brix, he didn’t care who. ‘Come on, guys,’ he said. ‘Keep the momentum going.’
Instead of reaching for another Adélie, Brix studied Jess. After a pause, she said, ‘I was thinking that maybe we should wait and go to the glacier tomorrow.’
Decker made a point of checking his watch. Eleven fifteen. Ten hours before bed, minimum. Fourteen days before home. He was impossibly tired. ‘Why?’
‘Toshi won’t appreciate us going to the glacier when there’s fifty billion Adélies to chase around,’ Brix said.
It was a weird and feeble excuse. Jess shot Brix a cautionary glance. Her reason for wanting to postpone the scheduled glacier trip could only be bad. A problem with equipment, Jess concluded, self-deludingly. She’ll have forgotten something. Then she thought, no. It was pointless to kid herself. The answer was in Brix’s forcibly carefree tone. And this was the trouble with befriending women, Jess decided. This was the trouble with Brix. First, she paid way too much attention to what you said. Second, she became extremely invested in concerns you might have divulged, even if you hadn’t really meant to. Perhaps, in a moment of weakness, you’d wanted a bit of reassurance about a matter that was beginning to frighten you. An expanding, purple swollenness which caused a foot to look misshapen, for example.
‘Our job is to survey the island,’ Decker said. ‘That’s why we’re here. Toshi would agree. So, Brix. Just tell me. What’s the problem?’
When she said there was no problem, Decker nodded as though he’d received welcome yet completely predictable news. ‘Then, good. Perhaps we can stick to the work schedule.’ He wondered if a few minutes at the tideline, taking in air which wasn’t ninety per cent penguin vapours, might help his headache. ‘If
you finish the weighing,’ he said, already departing, ‘I’ll do a round of the colony to check there’s no damage to the fencing.’
Jess had only shown Brix the ankle because it was so sensationally freaky. All she’d wanted was a bit of sympathy, ideally a dismissive shrug. Clearly, on reflection, it had been a terrible error to allow Brix to view it, as it then forced Jess to see the injury through Brix’s eyes and accept that, no, it didn’t look normal. No, words such as ‘ordinary’ and ‘minor’ probably didn’t apply. And no, if she was honest, she wasn’t feeling great. There was actually quite a lot wrong with her. In the instant it took for Brix to react with a sober frown, Jess had already regretted her mistake. Her leg was now like a bone child they both shared custody over, with Brix in the role of world’s most neurotic parent. It was boring. It was also hazardous, as Brix’s worrying posed a direct threat to Jess’s determination not to worry.
Using eye contact alone, Jess made it clear to Brix that her health was a vetoed subject.
‘Scrabbling around in a gorge at the other end of the island isn’t a sensible plan for someone who’s not well, Jess,’ Brix said, immune to the commands Jess’s eyes were transmitting.
‘I know you think you’re being helpful,’ Jess said, ‘but you’re going to get me shipped straight to Aegeus. Which does not qualify as help.’
Decker was starting to tramp back to them. ‘It seems like a risk, Jess.’
Although Jess wanted to explain that fieldwork was a splint which supported the other problematic areas of her life, her ability to confide in Brix was constrained by the few seconds she had before Decker’s return and her own natural reticence when it came to personal admissions. ‘There is no risk,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’
‘Spider farms,’ Brix said inexplicably. ‘Locust forecasting is a genuine job. Blizzards can happen; it doesn’t have to be your birthday. Have you guessed who I’m quoting? And accidents can definitely happen.’
Jess countered Brix’s pessimistic quote with a gutsy quote. ‘Hard pounding this, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘Let’s see who will pound longest.’
‘Two Everland quotes in one day,’ Brix said.
Jess saw she should have thought it through more. Citing Napps and his men wasn’t the best method of filling Brix with optimism. Still, Jess knew enough about Brix to know that despite her fretting, despite her indecision, she was as invested in the trip as Jess was, and didn’t want to terminate the expedition by having her recalled to the base. In some ways they weren’t that dissimilar, Jess thought, which was a bizarre notion, but not necessarily unpleasant.
‘We’ve got what, just over two weeks left on Everland?’ Jess said with her most persuasive smile. It was deliciously easy to convince someone who wanted to be convinced. ‘Why leave before the end?’
42
April 1913
Millet-Bass’s hand was almost a fourth man in their group. It dominated their thoughts, their days and practically all of their conversations. Millet-Bass treated his hand as an intolerable object. He couldn’t bear talking about it, so Napps and Dinners avoided the subject. He couldn’t bear their fussing, so they never fussed. He rejected the notion of Napps going anywhere without him so furiously that Napps was left with no option but to consent.
Millet-Bass and Napps were toiling along the beach on another of their ship-scouting patrols. At minus twenty-five degrees the human body’s capacity for producing and expelling moisture becomes diabolically apparent. Whatever wasn’t being breathed out to freeze around blistered nostrils and mouths, or evaporating from pores to freeze on to clothes, seemed to be freezing internally. But regardless of the cold, watching for the Kismet outside was better than idly fretting inside the tent. Marching created enough heat to make it bearable, and a job of any kind, doing anything, at least burnt off some of the dread which otherwise gathered in the abdomen as a lump of cement.
Although every hour of the day was now the same bottomless black, the full moon and greenish luminance of Aurora Australis were so bright they almost negated the need for oil lamps. In admiring the vivid constellations of zodiac symbols and mythical creatures shining above them, Napps had unintentionally overtaken Millet-Bass. When he looked back he saw Millet-Bass stumbling with his injured fist crushed to his chest. They hadn’t been out long, perhaps a couple of hours, yet Millet-Bass was already flagging. It was a tricky subject to broach, and Napps knew better than to mention his concern. Millet-Bass’s ego was as damaged as his hand, but twice as sensitive.
Napps stopped and hunted through his knapsack. He’d brought some biscuits each and a can of pineapple in syrup to share. ‘You have your spoon?’ he shouted.
They passed the can of pineapple between them and Napps took the smaller chunks. He manipulated it so that the last bite and the privilege of drinking the sugary juice ended with Millet-Bass.
‘Sure you don’t want some?’ Millet-Bass asked. Napps told him to finish the juice and then stared at the horizon. He said he was concerned about a storm.
There was no storm, it was a perfectly clear and cloudless sky, but Napps sighed and tapped a finger on his chin, deliberating. ‘Should we turn back, that’s what I’m wondering. Umm. I’d say, yes, it’s probably best we return to the tent.’
Millet-Bass looked at him, then got to his feet and pitched the empty can down the beach. ‘You’re a poor actor, Napps.’
The wound had deteriorated to a stage where it now frightened them all. An infection was spreading. Despite Millet-Bass’s pig-headed efforts to trivialize it, he got colder, he got tired. He got weaker. His other hand became badly frostbitten, and Millet-Bass could have bitten it himself for its treachery.
Once, mistakenly, Dinners had joked that his title as chief patient was being usurped. A two-man race and, oh, he’d been edged into second place!
‘Say that to me again,’ Millet-Bass threatened, ‘and I’m coming over there with a sledging pencil to give you back the advantage.’
Dinners’s reply was a very mild and pacifying smile.
‘You did this,’ Millet-Bass said. ‘This hand is your doing. So crack another joke like that to me and I’ll take your eyes out.’
‘Not another word,’ Napps said, glaring at him. ‘That’s an order.’
The weeks had tracked his angry defeat. Millet-Bass, unquestionably the strongest man among them, found himself reduced to the mortal limitations of Napps, and then, worse, of Dinners. His plunge into feebleness was marked by the rising number of tasks he was forced to delegate. It was little things initially. The more fiddly jobs around camp became unsolvable puzzles. Millet-Bass couldn’t lash the tent or assemble the primus or strike a match. It gradually became the bigger humiliation of needing assistance with his clothing and food. As much as he despised his injury, he loathed his dependence on Napps and Dinners even more.
Let us, they said sympathetically while Millet-Bass burned with shame and rapped, ‘What next? Being fed like a fucking baby?’
‘You certainly behave like one at times,’ Napps would answer, lighting Millet-Bass’s pipe for him.
Millet-Bass reacted with fury in order to stave off despair. He raged when his attempts to manoeuvre a button or operate a buckle failed.
‘This was you not long ago,’ Millet-Bass sneered as Dinners dealt with the impossible jacket. Dinners said meekly that he knew.
‘I’ll remind you that we coped with Dinners, and together we’ll cope with you,’ Napps said, annoyed into twisting round in his bag. ‘Your health is my health, remember? Your worries are mine. And if that’s galling for you, Millet-Bass, just think how I feel. Dinners, give him some chocolate, it might cheer him up. And have some yourself. You look terribly pale. You aren’t sick, are you?’
‘Not when you’re here,’ Dinners said. ‘But I don’t feel well when I’m alone.’
‘Dinners, you’re either ill or you’re not,
which is it?’ Napps said.
‘I get muddled if I’m on my own. I worry I trust the wrong things.’
Napps’s tolerance for this type of conversation was spent before Dinners could finish the sentence. ‘Listen, can we please try and cling to sanity. Yes? Shall we make staying sane a priority?’
Millet-Bass talked about Everland as though it had a vendetta against him. If they wanted proof, they only had to look at his undignified transformation. He had wild theories about the island having malign powers. He could sense some sort of evilness, he said again and again until Napps finally snapped in exasperation, ‘Can’t you sense it quietly? We didn’t have this racket from Dinners. Say what you like about Everland, at least it’s deathly silent.’
Despite his temper and foul-mouthed rants, there’d only been one night when Millet-Bass allowed himself any self-pity. ‘I’m not winning here,’ he’d said desperately. ‘You are watching me lose. What am I to do?’
Dinners had become uselessly upset but Napps had become terrifying.
‘What are you to do?’ he’d said. ‘How about apologize. You can start with your parents, for allowing the boy they raised to become such a weak-willed disappointment. You can also apologize to the British Navy, since your cowardice is an affront to the intrepid spirit it’s founded on. And then you can apologize to me, because this obsession with your own misery is turning my stomach.’
The method succeeded. Millet-Bass was so murderously offended it stunned him into regaining his head.
‘Right,’ he’d threatened. ‘I’ll be using that sledging pencil on you, too.’
‘Good,’ Napps had answered, smiling.
The two men trudged back to the camp in silence. Millet-Bass hated that he was the reason they couldn’t continue scouting for the ship, and he hated that Napps tried to blame it on other factors.
‘I’m about done in. The cold’s knocked the strength out of me,’ Napps said.