Hemispheres

by Stephen Baker

  Lightning crawled across the sky as the train ran south. I put my head back against the headrest and slowed my breathing. Emptied my conscious brain until the night country moved through me, the clay lands of the Vale of York, wide fields and ancient woodland, flat country and hill country, sleeping villages and dreaming farms. Hawthorn hedges knitting the land like sutures. A flock of sheep ghostly in the damp night. One or two of them coughing in their sleep, facing the east where the light was already beginning to mass. Wood beetles deep inside decaying trees, chewing at the timber, drumming with their hind legs. Birds roosting everywhere like fruit, half asleep and half awake, ever watchful for the death which comes in the night. Men and women and children asleep behind the blank windows of houses, in each other’s arms, back to back like bookends, or alone. After sex, after arguments, after beatings, after bedtime stories, after full or empty lives, but mostly half full or half empty. And the sleepless were reading, masturbating, or just worrying, turning over and over to find a comfortable position, in the small cold hours of the night when dawn seemed an impossible solution.

  6. Wandering Albatross

  (Diomedia exulans)

  You should try your colleagues’ solution. Sarah laughs, gest uring with her golden head towards the far Nissen hut. It might help with the insomnia.

  A solution of forty per cent ethanol in water? I throw back. Don’t touch nothing stronger than beer, me. Not for fifteen years.

  She looks quizzical.

  It didn’t agree with me, I say. Or rather, I didn’t agree with it.

  Our voices are stretched out like a flysheet over the constant noise. Imagine ten thousand claw hammers squeaking ten thousand nails out of ten thousand gobby bits of timber. Imagine all the demons in hell gabbling and cackling and speaking in tongues. Imagine it, but even then you won’t come close.

  Bird Island, South Georgia, is the biggest breeding colony I’ve ever seen, a sprawling shanty town of nesting seabirds. Gannets and skuas and five kinds of albatross, all camped on these untidy mounds of nest with scarcely enough room to turn round, reaching to jab with thuggish bills at anything that encroaches. They squawk incessantly, to maintain territory, to greet and threaten incomers and mates and chicks and parents. They gabble and bicker like biddies over the back fence. They squabble and fight like radge kids. They yelp and howl it seems for the sheer outrageous joy of the sound. I am here, they say, in a million clattering tongues. What are you going to do about it?

  The nest mounds sprawl over every available surface, pebble beach and black rock and grassy slopes, streaked with guano and rotting seaweed. And the stench of the colonies comes as loud as the noise, a reek of ammonia that puckers the eyes and stings the inside spaces of the nose.

  Away to the north stretches the open ocean, grey and restless with the white caps bristling across it like neurons firing in the lonely spaces of the brain. The boat sits at anchor in the shelter of the point, and we’ve pulled the inflatables up the steeply raked pebble beach towards the small complex of Nissen huts that’s become our temporary home. To the south, behind us, rear the ranges of South Georgia, a long black fossil like the spine of a sea beast. Ice and snow on the peaks, white as the sun. Black rock matt and impenetrable, absorbing light, absorbing heat. The improbable green of tundra grasses on the lower slopes, spikes and globes rippling in the constant wind, each inflorescence a tiny world. White, black, green. And the incongruous scarlet and blue of our anoraks, as we stand above the colony and look back through the whirling melee of seabirds towards the huts at the head of the bay.

  Sarah was sanguine when we turned up out of the storm, five castaways in a limping boat. Pointed a shotgun at us, told us that she was quite ready to radio the marines at Grytviken if we put a foot out of line, and then showed us the spare hut, chilly and damp from disuse. The others made themselves comfortable, lugged a gas canister and lit the heaters, and then, with the aid of a crate of whisky from the boat, wallowed in the pigpen of extreme drunkenness. But I couldn’t sleep, even when the snorts and grunts and squeals of the others had subsided into slumber. Every time I perched on the edge of it and the circle of my thoughts threatened to fall into dream, I felt the rocks beneath us move, the island come adrift and begin to sink beneath the relentless ocean. I felt the water, breathtakingly cold, in my mouth and my nostrils, and I jerked awake, sitting upright and rubbing my eyes.

  How do you deal with the loneliness, I ask. Here on your own?

  She grimaces.

  People never understand, but I’m not lonely. I find myself alone in a dark house, late in the evening, and everything is deathly quiet – then I’m lonely. But here there’s always sound. The birds and the sea, even in the middle of the night. The birds talk in their sleep. Dreams, nightmares. You know.

  Wonder what an albatross has nightmares about.

  People, probably. Long-line trawlers, being hooked and dragged under. Killer whales. Or perhaps the sea drying up, flying forever over desert. Who knows.

  So there were three of you here, monitoring the birds. What happened to the other two?

  The other two went back when the island was liberated. We never saw the Argentines, you know. Just a few ships moving out at sea. That was the Falklands conflict for us.

  Don’t suppose seabirds give a toss about human wars. They just get on with it. Sensible approach, if you ask me.

  What about you Yan, she says, looking at me from behind a wing of hair flapping on the wind. Do you just get on with it? Is that what’s brought you here?

  I think, I say. That sometimes I just act on instinct.

  Like an albatross, she says.

  The wandering albatross is huge. The strange black triangular eyes of the tubenose and a great bludgeon of a beak. Clumsy as a goose on the ground, but in the air it soars beautiful and strange. An angel, or a ghost. We stand close to a nest mound, blinking back the stench. One of the adults is there with the giant brown chick, not fully fledged. And out of the chaos of take-offs and landings comes a single bird, wingspan held at just the angle to bring it through the rookery and down to this nest, this one among thousands. It stands facing its mate, webbed feet pawing the ground, and they greet each other with gurgling sounds and clacking of bills. Then the newcomer yawns and regurgitates a cropful of partly digested fish with an eyewatering wave of stink, the chick gobbling the slime excitedly as it emerges from the throat of its parent. All seem contented and companionable, a nuclear family within the metropolis of the colony.

  They mate for life, says Sarah. Don’t breed for a few years, but when they pair up, it’s for good. They can live for forty, fifty years.

  Raise the chick through the winter, don’t they? I say. Must get chilly down here.

  She’s a goodlooking woman, a few years younger than me, late twenties or early thirties. Golden hair cropped at the jawline, threshing around in the blustery wind. Through the all-weather clothing it’s hard to distinguish her figure, but she has fascinating eyes, green like the tundra grass and always moving on the wind. A hint of sadness perhaps. Why did she stay here on her own?

  No flies on you, she says. Chick stays on the nest all through the austral winter. The adults take turns to go fishing, even though there can be heavy snow, violent storms. We’ve monitored the distances they travel, with radio transmitters. If the weather’s bad in the South Atlantic they head north, as far away as the waters off Brazil. Six hundred miles or more and back to this rock in the far south. They’re incredible creatures.

  The pair on the nest launch into another frenzy of head tossing and bill clacking.

  Old mate of mine, worked the merchant navy. He used to reckon they were reincarnations – you know, of old sailors drowned, gone down with the ship. They would come alongside, inspect the radio masts and the rigging, check everything was shipshape.

  We like to think everything revolves around us, she says. But they don’t give a damn whether we float or drown. They inhabit their own world and we’re not part of it.<
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  Her eyes are tossing and she can’t keep the anger out of her voice. Then she subsides, embarrassed by the outburst.

  Sorry, she says, with a placatory smile. Just pisses me off that we expect the natural world to jump to our tune.

  The colony howls and jabbers and vomits behind her.

  Look at them, Sarah goes on. They deserve more than that.

  Tears in her eyes. We stand in silence for some time, the sea and the sky toiling.

  Penguins, you know, slurs Joe Fish, leery with alcohol, are a fantastic source of fuel. You know what they did here, in the old days, the sealers and the whalers? They had no raw material to power the furnaces for rendering the carcasses. No trees for timber, no coal. They used fucking penguins. Bashed their brains out and threw them on the fire, herded the stupid buggers straight into the flames.

  He bangs his fist down on the edge of his bunk.

  Never understood whaling, burrs Horse Boy sleepily, from above, where he’s already under the blankets, whisky bottle in hand. They’d make rancid eating – all blubber and fat.

  Oil boy, oil, shouts Joe impatiently. Whale oil and seal blubber, for streetlamps in Britain, in London and Edinburgh and even, god help us, in Sunderland. Bringing light to the masses. They were Titans, those men, raging out into the southern seas to bring back light, across half the world. Thousands of seals, thousands of whales, butchered in the factories here, boiled down for their oil. Men up to their knees in blood and filth. Heroes man.

  He runs a hand over his slicked-back hair and the pockmarked face gleams in the light from the gas fire.

  Not much left now as a monument to them, he goes on. A few rusting sheds and the whalers’ graves. I wouldn’t want to leave my bones down here, under the stones, with home on the other side of the world.

  Those fellas were a rare breed all right, I say. But it was wholesale slaughter down here. Some of the whale stocks have never recovered.

  I toast my hands in front of the stove, where a pot of beans is puttering slowly.

  Charity, says Joe, starts at home. We need to feed and clothe and warm our own. The bosses aren’t going to do it. We can start worrying about seals and dolphins when our kids have got food on the table. Me, I’d quite happily torch a penguin just to get me fag lit.

  He winks at me. Do you want a plate of beans Yan?

  I think I’ve just lost my appetite, I say. And I’m fucking sick of beans.

  Mind if I come in? I say, standing in the doorway. They’re talking about burning penguins in there.

  Sarah wrinkles her nose, indicates the bench on the other side of the table. I sit. This cabin is far more comfortable than the other. A serviceable kitchen area with a built-in table, and beyond this the sleeping quarters with bunks, even a gas shower. Steam billows from the kettle with that soft smell that reminds me of early mornings in my grandparents’ kitchen, boiling water chiming on the stove.

  Cup of tea? she asks. I was just making one.

  I nod. She busies herself and I study her from behind. Simple black leggings and a navy sweatshirt, the clothes emphasizing the curve of her body. Stray wisps of hair catch the light from the tiny window, flaring golden in the dying sun. We warm our hands around the mugs of tea. Feels uncomfortable, like a first date.

  Tell me about yourself Yan, she says. What makes you tick? Clockwork, I say. Same as anyone.

  I shift uncomfortably.

  All right. What I really want to know is what you’re doing here?

  Looks like I’m drinking tea.

  You’re married, yeah? Ring on your finger, guilty look on your coupon.

  Aye.

  Kids?

  I’ve got a son, Danny. He’s thirteen odd.

  So. You could be sat on the troopship on the way back to them. Maybe they’d even have flown you back home. You could be there right now. But instead you did a runner and ended up here. With me.

  A long pause while I wonder what to say. Her eyes are steady, holding mine.

  Kate, I say. She’s sound. We strike sparks off each other, you know. We row and we make up. And Dan. Well sometimes he’s just like me and then the next minute he’s a space alien from another galaxy.

  I pause. She waits.

  I can’t make it digestible for you, I say. It doesn’t really make sense, not in ways you can explain.

  You could try.

  Well, people always want life to be like a detective story. You know, the killer has to have a motivation. Their dad was an abuser or their mam was an alcoholic. I once saw Frank Zappa live when I was an impressionable youth and that was enough to drive anyone to homicide.

  I like Frank Zappa.

  Nah. Way too much noodling.

  Anyway, she says. Motivation.

  Yeah. Well, it isn’t like that for me. Sometimes it just wells up in me from nowhere and I just go with it. I jump. On instinct, you could say.

  Like the albatross coming back six hundred miles to her nest.

  Aye, I say. Like the arctic tern migrating to the other end of the world. When I was a kid I used to sit in me grandad’s kitchen. He was a hewer up at Horden Colliery, working the seams that ran miles out under the North Sea. He used to sit there in his shirtsleeves with his elbows on the table and his back to the fire, and alls I remember is the coal grit under his nails that never washed out. Not his face.

  She sips her tea and I glance at her and her eyes meet mine and then flick away sharpish.

  Life is a seam of coal, he used to say. Black and glittering and snaking away deep under your feet, who knows where. And to make life happen you’ve got to hew it. The seam is already there under the ground from five hundred million years back, but you never know where it leads unless you put your back into it. Discover it.

  Sounds wise, your grandad. What else did he say?

  Drink your milk up son or I’ll focken batter you.

  She laughs.

  So, she says. Life’s already set in stone, like fate? The shape is there and you only have to discover it.

  That’s what he was saying but I don’t completely buy it. I’ve got this mate who’s a sculptor, eh? Now, he’ll take a block of stone and look at it for hours like a heron stalking a fish. He’ll walk round it, sniff it, tap it from all angles. He says there’s a potential within each piece of stone, an inner shape waiting to get out, to be discovered by the blow of the hammer.

  Just like the seam of coal.

  Ah, but it’s more than that. When you strike, you get a reaction – your active will comes up against the passive potential in the stone – and something completely new can come out of that shower of sparks, something you never saw before. See, you need that spark, that originality, to take you somewhere different. Me grandad never did that, just worked in the same job until it wore him out and he died, not far past fifty. The coal just led him deeper and deeper into the same place.

  I sip my tea. It’s getting dark outside with the peculiar speed of high latitudes, and the birds are still yammering but they’ll soon quieten when the light dies. The gas heater purrs, blue flames shuffling like feathers.

  See, I say. I’m a jumper. A chancer you could say. I don’t want to die alone in a darkened studio, looking at an unworked piece of stone and wondering what I could have made. What excites me is the moment when the hammer comes down, when the dice are spinning, the cards coming to you across the table. That shower of sparks is a thousand different futures, all springing up and flaring for a moment and dying.

  You want them all.

  Yeah. I want to grab them and get my fingers burned. Before they die.

  Is that what you’re doing now?

  It’s what I’ve always done. I was engaged to Kate when I was eighteen, but then I met some squaddies in a bar and off I went. Dropped back in a few years later and married her – I don’t know who was more surprised. But the chance of a few hands of poker or an inside tip on a horse, and I’m off again. To me and Joe it’s like breathing. Joe’s thermos flask, you know, t
hat battered metal thing. Fifteen years of good luck and bad in there, fifteen years of risking everything on the turn of a card.

  So, she says. What happened this time?

  Ah, look. I’ve felt it coming for a while. Like a thundercloud, all them possibilities. We were in a firefight. Place called Mount Longdon.

  I stop short, wonder what to say.

  Afterwards I started walking. Couldn’t help myself. Had to get some air into me lungs. Started walking and all the time I could smell it coming. A sharp smell, like windfall apples in autumn.

  Sarah yawns. I realize it’s getting late. She’ll be up at dawn checking on the colonies. Photographs, leg rings, records. But then she transfixes me with her eyes.

  What about people Yan? she says. The ones who get left behind when you change horses. Don’t they get hurt?

  She holds me with her eyes, and there’s a long pause before I reply.

  I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think about it. Not when the dice are moving.

  And afterwards?

  Well, that’s different. You see, Kate and Dan are so much a part of me. But even when I’m with them, I’m still alone.

  You don’t really do relationships, she says. Do you? Not two-way ones, anyway. When people start getting too close, start getting right under your skin, you have to push them away.

  You make me sound like a right bastard.

  Maybe, she says, smiling. But I’m from exactly the same mould.

  She holds my eyes.

  Do you think you’ll ever go home? she says.

  Her face is smooth, slightly mocking. I want to cup it in my hands.

  I don’t know. I don’t know how deep the seam runs.