by Michel Faber
They stood together in the chill wind and the horizon-less gloom, the three remaining members of the Fahrenheit family. The huskies were harnessed and ready, their breath clouding silver in the tungsten porch-light. The corpse of Una Fahrenheit, wrapped in furs and bound with leather straps, was secured on a long sled, shackled behind the twins’ buggy like a tenacious seal.
‘And remember!’ Boris shouted after them as they slid away towards the wasteland, ‘If you need to send up a flare, avert your eyes as you fire!’
Faces blushing hot with mortification and fear, Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain urged the dogs to go faster, to escape from the avalanche of unwanted love.
For what seemed like eternity but was probably only an hour or two, the twins raced full-pelt across the sugary tundra.
‘Faster!’ shouted Marko’cain.
‘Quicker!’ shouted Tainto’lilith.
Of course the dogs were wild with enthusiasm at first, but then their pace slackened, not so much from exhaustion as from anxiety – the need to be reassured that there were fellow mammals behind the reins and not some sort of unfeeling machine. Flicks of the whip against their flanks goaded them back up to speed.
Even as they ran, the dogs tried to turn their heads, straining to catch a glimpse of the children they loved so dearly, who had never driven them so hard for so long before. But Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain ignored the appeal, identically determined, hunched down low in their buggy, blinking stoically against the upflung snow.
It was as if they feared that if they stopped or even looked around, their father would still be running after them, clutching a thermos flask or an extra pair of gloves.
‘It’s mother’s death that has done this to him,’ said Marko’cain when they finally stopped to let the huskies rest. ‘He will feel better when he has had a sleep, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tainto’lilith, blinking in the steam from the panting dogs.’Perhaps he will be like this forever.’
Glum, they turned to look at their mother on the bier behind them. Her face, which they had not been able to bring themselves to wrap up like the rest of her body, was snow-grey in the twilight.
‘She looks worried about something,’ fretted Tainto’lilith.
‘It’s because you are looking at her upside-down,’ suggested Marko’cain.
Tainto’lilith contorted her head to test this theory. Her black mop of hair swung free from under her furry hood, and she palmed it tight against her cheek while examining her mother’s physiognomy.
‘No, she still looks worried,’ she concluded.
‘The cold has made her complexion paler,’ said Marko’cain, secretly afraid of where this line of enquiry might be leading them.
‘No, it’s in her expression,’ said Tainto’lilith.’In her brow.’
‘She has a few wrinkles there, that’s all,’ explained her brother, as if the subtle workings of ageing held no secrets for him. ‘In life, she kept them moving around so we wouldn’t spot them. Now, they’re still.’
‘It’s more than that,’ insisted Tainto’lilith. ‘I hope she wasn’t worried about something as she was dying.’
‘What would she have been worried about?’
‘Us, for one thing.’
‘We are two things.’
‘Precisely.’
‘She knew we would take care of each other.’ ‘You think so?’
‘She must have, or she would have done more for us herself while she was alive.’
For several more minutes they sat there, their seal-coated forearms resting on the back rung of their buggy, their faces pensive, staring down at the glacial upside-down face of their mother. Then they got up to stretch their legs, and to pour some of the hot water from the canister onto the snow, so that a tepid pool formed from which the dogs could drink.
All round them, in all four directions (- but why only four? – in all three hundred and sixty thousand directions! -) the landscape looked exactly the same. Only the sky differed, varying from greyish indigo to pale purple.
‘Where are we going, exactly?’ enquired Marko’cain.
‘We’ve been going south, I think,’ said his sister, stroking her favourite husky, allowing the bewildered animal to lick her furry fingers.’Is the direction important?’
‘The universe hasn’t taken any notice of us so far,’ said Marko’cain. ‘Maybe if we go to where the land ends, it will understand that we need help.’
Tainto’lilith had knelt down in the snow, butting her cheek and nose playfully against the snout of the husky. The dog leaned close into her face, almost wetting himself with relief.
‘Our island is only small,’Tainto’lilith said, as the other dogs began to pant for their turn. ‘We are bound to get to one of its edges soon.’
Marko’cain fetched out the compass, and consulted it, turning round and round as if playing a game, his black boots trampling a hollow in the snow.
‘Ho!’ he said. ‘This is a strange thing: the compass is pointing to a different north whichever way I turn.’
Tainto’lilith gazed up into the stratosphere.
‘Perhaps we have reached the Pole,’ she murmured.
‘The Pole is the other way,’ said Marko’cain, frowning.’I think this compass is broken.’
His sister sidled close, examining the pristine-looking instrument nestling in the grubby palm of his glove.
‘The glass is perfect, and the arrow is wobbling just like normal,’ she pointed out.
‘It’s broken inside,’ declared Marko’cain,‘where we can’t see.’
He shuffled around in a circle again, to demonstrate how north had lost its meaning. Tainto’lilith shuffled with him, and the huskies, smelling a new kind of play, paced around them in a wider circle.
‘You are right,’ she said.’But it doesn’t matter. The dogs know the way home.’
And they stowed the compass somewhere safe, for their father to mend when they returned.
It took longer to reach the shore of Ostrov Providenya than the twins expected. A whole day’s worth of hours, perhaps more. Perhaps two entire days. There was a feeling the twins always got when they had neglected to sleep, a feeling as if their eyeballs had been carelessly left lying about somewhere, and had dried out. Then again, maybe this time it was the weeping that had caused it. Maybe they had only been travelling for a day after all.
And yet they really hadn’t thought their island big enough to permit such a long journey as they had made. At their first glimpse of the sea, when it was still a long way off, the twins wondered whether perhaps they’d passed the end of the land a long time ago, and had ever since been traversing an appended halo of frozen sea-water.
However, when at last they were drawing near to the strand, all doubt was swept away. They could see the waves breaking against an undeniably substantial shore of stone, an igneous corona around the rim of the softer earth.
The twins whooped in unison, waving fists in the air as if their advance towards the sea were a battle charge.
Even from a distance, it was obvious that this strip of Ostrov Providenya’s shore was only very narrow, and yet it seemed to have some influence inland: the ground on which the twins were travelling grew deceptive beneath them. Oh, the snowy tundra looked the same as all the terrain they’d been sliding over from the beginning, but it wasn’t the same. Violent bumps and scrapes under the skis of the buggy warned them that the crust of snow was hazardously thin. They glanced behind them: two long lines of dark earth trailed in their wake, and the frozen body of their mother was jolting against its straps.
Hastily, Marko’cain and Tainto’lilith reined the dogs in. If the sea-shore was the place where the universe intended to give them its verdict, they would have to travel the rest of the way there on foot.
With the sleds at a standstill, quiet descended – or what would have been quiet a few miles back: instead, the air was a-buzz with the sound of waves. This was an awesome novelty
for the Fahrenheit twins; not the vastness of the ocean, because they had grown up with vastness, but the sound of it. All their lives, circumambient silence had suggested to them that their little family and its machines must be the only animated things in the world: everything else just lay there, still. Even the occasional storm seemed nothing more than a stirring of white dust, a redistribution of lifeless snow by the careless opening of some big door in the universe. As soon as that open door was noticed by whoever was responsible for these things, it would be shut, and silence and inertia would be restored. Here by the sea, however, the illusion was shattered. The great waters were in constant motion, bawling and hissing to each other. Their hubbub was fearsome and relentless, and next to it the voices of the Fahrenheit twins were feeble, barely audible, swallowed up by a larger life.
All this the twins observed and understood in a moment, but even in their newfound humility they found reason to hope. Perhaps the grand restlessness of the sea, its deafening roar of collective purpose, only served to prove how much power it had to help them.
Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain had stopped thirty yards or so from the shore. Dismounting from their buggy, they stumbled around, stiff-limbed, calming the huskies. The ground beneath their feet crackled and sighed. Here and there, sparse vegetation poked through the thin snow, like limp green beans emerging from an inedible expanse of mother’s powdered potato. In the near distance, tortured rock formations –volcanic froth frozen in time — fringed a stony shore. Startled by the arrival of the Fahrenheit twins’ little cortège, a colony of white birds billowed into the air, a swirling cloud of wings.
‘This is the place,’ affirmed Tainto’lilith.
The dogs were very hungry by now, and so the Fahrenheit twins fetched out the tins of food from either side of their mother’s body.
‘There is a tin opener, I hope?’ said Marko’cain, holding one of the tins aloft from the slavering jaws of Snuffel Junior.
‘Of course there is,’Tainto’lilith reassured him, bringing the glittering tool to light. ‘Father has thought of everything.’
Disappointingly, however, the contents of the unlabelled cans, when the lids were cut off, did not appear to be dog food — at least no dog food the twins had encountered before.
‘What is this stuff?’ frowned Tainto’lilith, peering into the tomato-red goo.
‘I’m not sure,’ admitted her brother. ‘Let’s see what the dogs think.’
They tipped two cans-full of the substance onto the ground, where it spread into a globulous pool of gore, enriched with pale seeds. The huskies approached eagerly, sniffed, then looked up at the twins in puzzlement.
‘This is bad news for us,’ said Marko’cain.
‘Worse news for the dogs,’ said his sister. ‘We have food, at least.’
‘Yes, but we need the dogs to get home. They are hungry and cold. Soon they will get weak and bad-tempered.’
‘Let’s make a fire, then, and cheer them up.’
Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain walked to the shore, feeling the strange new pressure of stones against the soles of their boots. Accompanied by the cloud of cooing birds, the twins searched the rocky strand for something to burn. There was nothing. However, they did find a big bowl-like metal object, ochre with rust – a fragment of a ship, perhaps. They carried it back to where the sleds and huskies were, with the idea of filling it up with fuel like one of those flaming braziers in Hansi and the Treasure of the Mongols.
‘Remember to stand well back,’ counselled Marko’cain as Tainto’lilith prepared to drop a lighted match into the oily pool.
The match fell into the liquid and was instantly extinguished. A second match did likewise. One after another, the little sticks of flaming wood were sacrificed to the same greasy fate. Eventually a faint aroma of singed fried food, familiar to the twins from their mother’s meals, began to venture through the air.
‘This is cooking oil,’ said Tainto’lilith.
A finger-dip’s taste confirmed she was right.
‘We should have packed our own supplies,’ said Marko’cain, putting his glove back on.’Father was not thinking very clearly.’
‘He certainly was in a state.’
Perplexed, the twins perched themselves on the edge of their mother’s sled and considered their lot. The huskies whined and snuffled nearby, investigating every clump of vegetation and bird dropping in case it was edible. They were well-behaved so far, but it wouldn’t last. Soon they would realise that the twins, and the body of Una Fahrenheit, were the only meat for miles around.
In the skies above, contradictory messages were being sent. A subtle orange glow on the horizon promised the dawn, at long last, of the Arctic summer. Then again, there were massive clouds in the sky and the occasional flicker of light, threatening a thunderstorm.
‘We are going to need some shelter,’ predicted Marko’cain.
‘If we get too comfortable, the universe may think we don’t need any help.’
‘I’m sure we will not be able to get too comfortable.’
They harnessed the dogs again, and travelled along the shoreline at a funereal pace. The heavens were crackling with electricity, which made the animals uneasy and distractible, tugging against the reins. The waves crashed louder and louder, sending spray so far inland that it spattered the cheeks of the Fahrenheit twins.
After another mile or so, something extraordinary could be seen, sprouting up from a hillock.
‘Is it a tree?’ wondered Tainto’lilith, urging the huskies on. But it wasn’t a tree. It was the giant blades of a helicopter, all on their own without a vehicle to be attached to. Someone had carried the great metal cross here, buried one of the blades deep in the ground, and thus created a monumental steel crucifix.
‘We should be careful,’ said Tainto’lilith. ‘If lightning comes, it will probably strike that cross.’
Marko’cain nodded, deep in thought.
‘Perhaps this is the message from the universe,’ he said, as they drew nearer.
‘About mother?’
‘Yes. Perhaps we should stand her up against that cross, and invite the lightning to strike her.’
As if in support of this idea, a bright tendril of electricity whipped across the sky, lighting up everything for a moment with tungsten clarity.
‘Do you really think so?’ said Tainto’lilith dubiously. ‘Don’t you think it might … it might make her … come back to life?’
‘Back to life?’ breathed Marko’cain.’No! Do you think so?’
‘I can imagine it happening.’
Marko’cain stared at the cross, then into his embroidered lap, imagining it for himself.
‘That frightens me,’ he admitted at last.
‘Me too,’ said Tainto’lilith.
‘Let’s wait for a different message.’
A few hundred yards further on, they found the helicopter from which the blades had come. It was bigger than Boris and Una Fahrenheit’s machine, and in better decorative order, except of course for the missing blades and (on closer examination) its belly, which was all crumpled and ruined. Plainly, it had crashed, and failed to get up again.
The Fahrenheit twins went to investigate the wreck. They peered through the perspex windows, then flipped open one of the doors. There were seats for six passengers, but no-one inside, despite complex skeins of blood patterning the upholstery. No doubt at least one of the people who had lost that blood was buried beneath the great metal crucifix nearby. Those who had done the burying had moved on, seeing no point in staying with the husk of their flying machine. Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain would have done the same. After all, (as they quickly ascertained) there was no food in the helicopter anymore, and all the flammable stuff had been taken out of it. The twins walked back towards the growling dogs, empty-handed.
‘We could sleep inside it, maybe,’ said Marko’cain, looking back.
But next instant, a flash of lightning struck the steely hull, exploding the
windows like the skin of a giant balloon, branding a helicopter skeleton shape on the twins’ retinas. In terror they covered their eyes, but the flare of luminescence faded almost immediately, leaving only a blueish flicker fidgeting over the blasted paintwork.
They hurried back to their sleds, where the dogs were barking and howling frantically.
‘Be calm! Don’t fear!’ they counselled the animals, too fearful themselves to extend their hands. Even Snuffel Junior looked as though he might bite instead of submitting to a placatory stroke.
‘Good dogs!’ cried the twins without conviction, taking a step towards the phalanx of snapping canine teeth and saliva, then taking a step backwards.
However, just as the children were on the brink of conceding they’d lost control, the tension was resolved from an unexpected quarter. One of the dogs, a little removed from the others, detected a hint of movement where no movement should be, and, with a yelp of glee, bounded away to investigate. All the other dogs stopped their barking and turned their heads, nostrils agape.
Over at the helicopter hulk, whose metal skin was still hazy with smoke, a small hole in the torn fuselage was apparently giving birth to a flurry of animal life: a family of voles, shrieking in distress. No sooner had the first one found its feet on the snow than it was snaffled up in the husky’s jaws. An instant later, all the other dogs had pounced in unison, and the twins’ view of the squirming litter of disoriented rodents was blotted out by a scrum of haunches and wagging tails. Furious growling quickly subsided when it became clear that there was enough for all.
‘We are lucky,’ said Marko’cain as the dogs gnawed at their miraculous feast. ‘Such things can’t happen very often.’
‘We should eat something ourselves,’ sighed Tainto’lilith, weak and shivery now that the crisis was past.
Marko’cain walked over to the sled and fetched the big bag of provisions out of it. He unbuckled it and peered inside.
‘Ho! This is a puzzle,’ he exclaimed. ‘The hamper our father packed for us is empty.’