Cold Fear

by Mads Peder Nordbo

  ‘I would like to hear more about Tasiilaq,’ Matthew said. He pushed the throttle a little more so they reached twenty knots, but then pulled it back again. The sea bashing against the hull of the boat felt powerful, even at that speed.

  ‘I’ve already said plenty,’ Tupaarnaq said, and pulled the wheel slightly. Matthew’s hands followed and the boat made a soft curve across the sea.

  ‘I was thinking about the landscape and so on.’

  ‘The landscape? Yes, it’s beautiful, but my life…Well, there was a lot of hunting and blood even before…’ She pointed ashore. ‘We can dock over there. The bunker point is built for big ships.’

  Matthew followed her finger with his eyes. He had seen the Polaroil bunker point from a distance before, but this would be the first time he would be going ashore there.

  It looked like any big installation in a small Danish coastal town. The big grey oil silos and the many pipes which connected the tanks and the plant by the quay belonged to an era when both big freighters and trawlers would call at Færingehavn to unload and refuel. White painted steps led up the rocks behind the bunker point, and although the place felt abandoned, it was also evident that someone was looking after it. The woodwork was freshly painted and the residential buildings that could be seen from the sea were all intact. As far as Matthew knew, the bunker point was still active and was maintained by just one man, Bárdur, who spent most of the year out here alone on this lump of rock.

  ‘I would go crazy if I had to live here on my own,’ Matthew said.

  ‘Maybe he has.’

  At the water’s edge the bunker point was divided into several smaller sections. A tall bunker for very big ships, and then a lower section for smaller boats like theirs. In addition, a couple of pontoons stretched out into the sea, where small boats could tie up.

  ‘Move over.’ Tupaarnaq took over the wheel and the throttle from Matthew and straightened up the boat so that it glided calmly towards and then bumped into the pontoon.

  Tupaarnaq pushed open the door and stepped out into the snow.

  Matthew crawled after her up onto the wide wooden pontoon. The fuel hoses were so long that they crisscrossed each other over most of the pontoon. She twisted one free and wrenched the nozzle from the stand.

  ‘See if you can find the guy who lives here,’ she said, dragging the hose towards the boat.

  Matthew nodded and straightened up. He looked towards the first house. It was low and red, made from wood, with a grey roof and white window frames. Not far behind it lay another building of more than three storeys, but otherwise identical; a little further behind that was a tall, square building, which looked like an office block or small production factory.

  On the quay itself was a cabin constructed from corrugated fibrocement sheets. The door at one end was ajar and near it was a sign listing the opening hours. There was also a lifebuoy, a ladder and warning signs that read ‘No Open Flame’.

  Matthew leapt up a few steps and walked towards the cabin.

  ‘Hello?’ he called out. All the signs were in Danish. ‘Is anyone here?’ He had reached the open doorway and could see inside the dark room behind the iron door. ‘We’re refuelling. Where can we pay?’ Matthew popped his head around the door. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is anyone there?’ said Tupaarnaq, who had come up to him from behind.

  ‘Doesn’t look like it.’

  ‘Let’s take a closer look.’ She peered up towards the houses. ‘This place gives me the creeps.’

  They followed the steps up to the first house, and then onto the next as the first one was locked. The rooms inside it looked like offices, but it was hard to imagine them being in use now, although they looked like they had only just been abandoned.

  The second building seemed more promising. There was furniture. A living room with a television and a stereo. Everything looked dated, but there was stuff on the tables and everything looked to be in use.

  Matthew knocked on the front door. There was no postbox, but a small nameplate next to the door knocker said ‘Bárdur Hjaltalín’.

  Tupaarnaq continued round to the back of the house. Matthew knocked again. Harder this time. Then he tried the handle, but the door was locked. He knocked a third time and called out along the wall.

  It was so quiet that he could hear it snow when he closed his eyes. A crackling, scattering sound.

  ‘It’s locked all the way around.’

  Matthew looked at Tupaarnaq, who had walked around the whole house.

  ‘I’m tempted to break in,’ Matthew said. ‘I really want to see that man.’

  ‘Not now,’ Tupaarnaq said. ‘It’s like the abandoned houses across the fjord…If there’s evidence and we mess with it, then it’s worthless.’

  27

  The boat jolted when Matthew tried reversing it away from the pontoon.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Tupaarnaq exclaimed.

  ‘Reversing the boat,’ Matthew said. ‘Like you told me to.’

  She heaved a sigh and pushed him out of the way. ‘Move…I said watch the screen. That was what I said.’

  She hauled Matthew off the seat and grabbed the throttle. It made a strange noise and the boat barely moved.

  ‘Shit,’ she said, and looked at him. ‘You’ve damaged the propeller.’

  She tried accelerating again, but nothing much happened—there was merely a vague sense of the boat swinging its stern.

  ‘Drop the anchor,’ she said, turning off the engine. ‘I’ll dive down and check out the propeller before it gets dark.’

  ‘Eh? Do you know how cold it is? You’ll die.’

  She shook her head. ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Matthew said. ‘It was my mistake.’

  She rewarded him with a weary smile. ‘A: This water will kill you. B: You’ve got no idea what you’re looking for.’

  Matthew looked down.

  ‘Now, go outside and drop the anchor before we run into the rocks,’ she told him. ‘I’ll go get ready.’

  ‘And what if you don’t make it back up?’

  ‘I always make it back up. My father would throw me into the sea at least once a week all year round when I was a kid to get my body used to the shock. You’ll thank me one day, he used to say. Who knows? Perhaps today is the day he’s proved right. I haven’t had anything to thank him for yet, but I guess there’s a first time for everything.’ She pulled her jumper over her head, briefly exposing her stomach, and he could see the many dark plants and leaves on her skin. ‘Now, go and drop that bloody anchor!’

  Matthew hurried to the back of the boat and dropped the anchor over the side. The bottom of the sea was only a few metres below where they were.

  Tupaarnaq was standing in the doorway wearing black knickers and a black spaghetti-strap vest. Her tattoos curled like living creatures around her arms and legs.

  ‘Stop staring, you moron,’ she snapped, shoving him hard in the chest.

  She stepped past him and down onto a small ledge near the water, right next to the rubber dinghy. Her arms and legs were thin, but sharply delineated by muscles and the dark colours of her tattoos. Matthew forced himself to look away and dusted some snow off the bottom of the rubber dinghy with one hand. The water could only be about one degree Celsius.

  ‘I can manage two trips,’ she said. ‘One minute each time.’

  She disappeared under the surface immediately. He moved to the gunwale and peered into the water. This seabed seemed dark, although it wasn’t very far away. He checked his watch. A minute was a long time. She couldn’t manage a minute. Not in this water. He started hyperventilating, gulped a couple of times, then checked his watch again. He didn’t know where the hands had been when she dived in. She should have come back up by now. The snow started to fall more heavily. He could feel it melting on the skin at the back of his neck. When the snowflakes hit the sea, they dissolved instantly.

  She broke through the surface and looked up at hi
m. ‘We can’t… fix it…moment…’

  The water closed over her head.

  ‘Tupaarnaq!’ Matthew said and reached over the gunwale to grab her. She had said two trips, but she had been almost incoherent from cold after the first one. The skin on her head had been speckled, red and white. Had she dived back in? Or had she succumbed to cramps? Was she drowning?

  Matthew tore off his jacket and threw his watch on top of it. He was about to pull off a boot when she resurfaced. She had a heavy, floppy white object in one hand. It looked like an animal skin. She threw the hide up on the ledge and followed suit.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ she said, sounding exhausted.

  He reached out his hand to her and felt her grip it and pull herself up onto the deck.

  ‘I need to get inside,’ she said. Her voice was trembling.

  Her skin was icy and Matthew could feel the cold spread from her hand to his.

  She was shaking and was barely able to turn the ignition key.

  ‘Hang on,’ Matthew said and knelt down to open one of the small storage cupboards in between the seats. He remembered having seen blankets in there previously. He passed a blanket backwards to her and found another two. Tupaarnaq dropped the blanket instantly. He picked it up and wrapped all three blankets around her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she stuttered, and looked at the steering wheel while she sat down on one of the two double seats at the back of the wheelhouse. ‘I couldn’t turn on the heating.’

  Matthew turned the heating up to the maximum and found another blanket, which he wrapped around her feet.

  ‘Why did you dive the second time?’

  ‘I saw something at the bottom.’ She breathed in and out a couple of times. ‘I was scared that it might be a human being…But it was just a seal.’

  Matthew nodded grimly. ‘Are we safe to go?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t want to risk going along the coast in the dark with all those rocks, given the state the propeller is in.’

  ‘Do you want me to radio for help?’

  She shook her head again. ‘I’m not sure its range reaches as far as Nuuk.’

  Matthew frowned. ‘Surely that’s not very far…for a ship’s radio?’

  ‘No one would sail down here at this hour anyway.’ She tightened the blankets around her body. The only visible part of her was her face from the nose up.

  ‘They could send a helicopter.’

  ‘Matthew.’

  He looked up at her.

  ‘I just want to sit here, okay?’

  Matthew was about to say something, but stopped himself. It was because of him. He could see it in her eyes. She wanted to be alone with him.

  ‘Okay, that way we can also see if anything happens during the night,’ he said in a hoarse voice, looking feverishly out of the window, while at the same time trying not to catch her eye.

  ‘That was what I was thinking too,’ she said abruptly, and tightened the blankets even more.

  He nodded and stared across the sea. Very soon they would be surrounded by total darkness, and the dense snow made it hard to see anything at all. Except light. Any light would stand out clearly in the all-consuming darkness.

  28

  The snow continued falling for several hours, and except for the faint glow coming from the boat’s dashboard, there was no light anywhere.

  Arnaq and her friends had now been missing for two nights.

  Matthew had only known Arnaq for a couple of months and now she was gone. Perhaps she had been abducted, perhaps she was already dead, and there was nothing Matthew could do apart from search and wait.

  They had turned off the engine. The boat had an oil heater which ran independently of the boat’s engine. There was a faint hum from the heater but apart from that, everything was quiet. The snow lay thick across the windscreen of the boat but had slid off the side windows. There was a cold draught coming from the sliding door to the deck at the back of the boat. It was flimsy and didn’t close fully.

  ‘Are you still cold?’ Matthew looked at Tupaarnaq, who was resting her head against the window.

  She shook her head slowly. Her breath made a circle on the glass. ‘If you relax completely, you can send heat around your body.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  She nodded. ‘I don’t know if it works for everyone.’ She extended her foot from under the blanket. ‘Feel.’

  Matthew gently touched her warm foot. He looked up. ‘Wow.’

  Tupaarnaq withdrew her foot, leaned her head against the glass again and resumed staring out into the darkness. ‘Do you think the kids are out there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Matthew’s voice had grown faint. ‘It’s so messed up. I have to hope that someone abducted them, because they wouldn’t survive another night outdoors in this weather.’

  ‘As long as you keep moving, you’re alive,’ Tupaarnaq said. ‘At this time of year, at least…in a couple of months it’ll be hard to survive several hours in the snow.’ She looked back at Matthew. She had loosened her grip on the blankets, baring one arm. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

  Matthew’s eyes traced her tattoos from her shoulder and down to her hand. It wasn’t often that he got a proper look at the dark tattoos, although he always wanted to. ‘What’s it like to be in prison for that long?’

  Tupaarnaq raised her eyebrows, the only hairs on her body. ‘Gee thanks…Let’s talk about something other than that.’

  Matthew smiled and looked down. ‘I’ve been wondering about your tattoos…They must have taken a long time. Did you have them done in prison?’

  ‘Ah…okay.’ She straightened up. ‘Many years ago I started going out on accompanied day release, and I had several years of unaccompanied weekend release as well. My outings were always a trip straight to the tattooist. Her name is Lis.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were allowed that much leave when you’re in prison.’

  ‘Most Danish prisoners start accompanied leave about a third into their sentence, and unaccompanied leave often starts when you’re halfway through. That doesn’t apply to everyone, but it does apply to most people. If you’re in for terrorist offences, they rarely let you go out a whole lot, though…No open prison or unaccompanied releases for you.’

  ‘But you were allowed them early?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, I was only a big kid when I was first locked up, and I stuck with my education the whole way through. Year Twelve. The law degree. It was easy for me to get leave. I was part killer, part Greenlandic girl fighting to rebuild her life.’

  The boat rocked. Not much, but more than it had done so far. It had stopped snowing and it looked as if the wind was trying to blow a hole in the clouds.

  Matthew thought about the evening he had seen Tupaarnaq under the steaming hot water in his shower. Every tiny part of her body was covered by tattoos and she scraped her skin clean with a razor, so that no hair broke the soft surface of the leaves. He winced as he remembered her rage when she noticed him watching her, and said, ‘I’ll go outside for a moment, so that you can get dressed again.’

  ‘Okay.’ She looked across to the other seat row where she had left her clothes and jacket.

  Matthew got up and slid open the door. The air outside was icy and his face tightened immediately. He found his cigarettes and shut the door. Lighting a cigarette, he closed his eyes and sniffed the night. The sea smelled fresh, cold and salty. The smoke from his cigarette wafted around his face as he exhaled. The gaps in the clouds had grown and in several places the starlight reached the sea. The moon was a thin crescent, barely visible. He looked towards the shore. The buildings stood out like dark silhouettes against the luminous white snowscape.

  He flicked away the cigarette butt. The sea seemed calm, though the boat was swaying gently.

  Tupaarnaq shook her head at him when he came inside. ‘You’re an idiot.’

  ‘Am I? Why?’ Matthew closed the door behind him.

  ‘Give me your cigarettes…�
�

  ‘Ah…’

  ‘Give them to me!’ She extended her hand. She was fully dressed again. Black army trousers, the high army boots and the dark hoodie.

  ‘Why?’ He found his cigarette packet and handed it to her.

  She quickly slid open the door and threw them into the sea. ‘I’ve had enough of that crap.’

  ‘Hey…I only brought one packet!’

  ‘Well, thank God for that. I hate the smell of them. You reek of man…of Tasiilaq.’

  ‘If you’d like to talk about…all of it…Tasiilaq. Then I’m here.’

  ‘Talk about it?’ she echoed scornfully. ‘What’s there to talk about? Two thousand people live in that hellhole, of which nine hundred are children, and out of those nine hundred children, five hundred are on social services’ at-risk register. And those are just the statistics—real life is far worse. No one gives a toss about those children. Rape. Abuse. Violence…What the hell is there to talk about? I want to take out all the men over there one by one…bastards.’ She buried her face in her hands and breathed heavily a couple of times. Then she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. So many wounds are being ripped open right now…with your sister and everything. Let’s talk about something else.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘I know, why don’t you read something to me? From that book you’re writing? Like you did at the hospital.’ She looked down at his backpack. ‘If you brought it, that is?’

  ‘You heard me? When I read to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Matthew smiled tentatively. ‘I did bring it. Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes, as long as you sit as far away from me as possible…You still stink.’

  Matthew got up, but Tupaarnaq pushed him with her foot so that he fell back onto the seat. ‘I’m just kidding.’

  ‘What do you want me to read about?’ he said, picking up his backpack. ‘The rocks? The universe? Or perhaps something about being a father…although I never really tried that.’

  ‘The last bit.’