The Nature of Ice

by Robyn Mundy

  The co-pilot hauls boxes and bins from the body of the plane and passes them down to a chain of outstretched arms. From inside the fuselage Freya hears the splutter of an engine followed by a roar. The waiting group breaks into a cheer. The pilot ushers people clear as he reverses the overhauled skidoo brought out from the station, a carton of beer tethered to its back, down the plane’s ramp and out across the snow. Slumped a distance away, sporting an ungainly lean, a second, wounded snowmobile—its frame warped and buckled—looks a sad and sorry sight. Just wait until Malcolm gets wind of it. Freya watches the broken skidoo being hooked and winched into the plane like a harpooned whale. The vehicle’s fate will rest on a dieso’s report, skidoo knackered, or a miracle cure by those same mechanical wizards.

  Freya is directed to the big top, which accommodates a makeshift mess and field laboratory. The mail satchel she delivers from Davis is filled with printouts of incoming emails, letters from friends on station, old copies of newspapers emailed daily to the station.

  Freya has to look twice to recognise Travis, the young field assistant she travelled down with on Aurora Australis. He gives her a wry smile. No longer the clean-shaven, baby-faced boy she remembers, his bearded face is sun-browned and lined, lips cracked, his hair hangs lank to his shoulders. Travis looks harder, rougher, has acquired an Antarctic edge. He hovers over the table. ‘Anything for me?’

  She checks the bundle in her self-appointed role as postmistress. ‘Nothing, I’m afraid. Sorry.’

  He slumps into a plastic chair beside her and extracts a crumpled wad of paper from his pocket. ‘Do me a favour when you get back? Type this and email it to my wife.’ He unfolds the pages. ‘The address is at the top. If she writes back you can send it over on the next plane.’ His hands tremble.

  Freya hesitates. ‘If she writes back?’

  Travis nods. ‘If you ever decide you want to fuck things up at home, try phoning your wife from a floating ice shelf in the middle of nowhere on a ten-dollar-a-minute satellite phone that keeps cutting out.’

  ‘Those nosy little satellites have a lot to answer for.’

  Travis barely reacts, devoid of the eager optimism she remembers from the ship. ‘That’d be the same night,’ he says, ‘you’ve come this close to being wiped out in a crevasse on a skidoo, because you have this stupid idea that wouldn’t it be good to hear Leila’s voice after being marooned out here for three months.’ He shakes his head. ‘Who, as it turns out, is off her tree at a nightclub, along with one of your white ant mates who’s promised to look out for her while you’re away. She’s screaming at you from her mobile, bawling you out because you weren’t there for her twenty-third birthday, or for Christmas, or New Year, or right now when she really, really needs to feel close to someone.’

  Freya closes her eyes against the image, only to picture Marcus at home, oblivious to her deceit. Whether you’re the one away, or the one waiting at home, everything hinges on trust.

  ‘Life was good when I left home. I came down here thinking this would be the chance of a lifetime. What a joke.’

  Their voyage south feels an age ago. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She’s sorry for them all: Travis and his wife, she and her husband. And Chad, leaving tomorrow because of her. ‘Travis, the Casas leave for Mawson Station tomorrow. As I understand it, they won’t come out here again before they bring you guys back to Davis Station in February. Shall I ask Charlie to radio you any news we hear?’

  ‘Depends what kind of news.’ Then he shrugs. ‘Who gives a flying fuck. Give the comms guys something to laugh about.’

  ‘Charlie’s not like that,’ she says quietly.

  DURING THE RETURN FLIGHT FREYA’S camera rests on her knees, the vibration of the plane’s engines burring through her limbs. Adam dozes in the seat in front, his feet resting on the buckled red skidoo. It feels ludicrous to admit that she was once attracted to a man as vain and boorish as Adam, his charm surface deep. She thinks of Travis—damaged and altered—and begins to see how Antarctica affects people in odd, unpredictable ways. She looks out the window but her focus turns inward, replaying conversations. She feels, within the waves of sadness, a double-edged admiration for Chad, for his strength and self-reliance: he has the courage and conviction to turn and walk away. She thinks of her marriage and questions whether she would have the fortitude to do the same.

  They fly over endless rifts of ice. Directly below, three frozen rivers converge into the headwaters of a glacier. From here the mass of ice begins its slide towards open water, set in motion by its own colossal weight. Only when it reaches the ocean will the river of ice complete its course, unfolding like a Herculean hand and releasing immense frozen fingers into the sea.

  The birthplace of bergs. Ice bobbing and turning. Weightless. Free.

  GINGER EASES DOWN AMONG THE hills of the Vestfolds and lines up the plateau pegged out with black blocks. Freya can see the bank of fuel drums and beyond them the figure of Elisia Hood hurtling snowballs at the two engineers. The plane pulls down on skis and bounces once, twice, before sliding over snow and easing to a stop.

  The door of the Casa opens to a beaming, breathless Elisia, clumps of snow tangled in her hair. Freya wishes she could bottle some of Elisia’s cheer, take it home and keep it by her side.

  Elisia takes one look at the broken skidoo and whistles. ‘What happened to the poor driver?’

  Adam shrugs and gives the bumper a kick. ‘It’s cactus. If it had been up to me I would have left it in the crevasse. Let the plateau swallow it up.’

  Elisia has a deft way of flaring her nostrils to show disdain. ‘And how exactly would that solve the problems of the world, Dr Adam?’ She bellows into the plane. ‘You don’t just chuck something out the minute it’s busted. You’d never get anywhere in life.’

  ‘Well, excuse me for living,’ his voice booms back.

  Freya climbs down the ramp and jumps into ankle-deep snow. ‘Can it be fixed?’

  Elisia shrugs. ‘Won’t know until we try.’

  21 miles south

  January 1913

  A LEADEN GLARE, SAGGING CLOUDS, a sharp rise in temperature—the first swirl of snow corralled him to a halt, a stern reminder that he was scarcely strong enough to pitch the tent in calm conditions, let alone in gusts of wind and flurries of snow that would soon wind up to blizzard.

  The euphoria of crossing the glacier had propelled him onward to the beginning of the western slope, two miles, three, each terrace a harder, steeper goal than the one before. Seized with hope at glimpses of coastline and a berg-studded bay, he had turned a deaf ear to caution running through his weary, weary mind and discarded his worn crampons and alpine rope. He had flicked his crevasse stick at the glacier and watched it skittle downhill.

  It was unfair that he should be held back now by changing weather when he was eager to go on—caged within a wilting tent with a saturated bag and freezing feet.

  Hair, human and reindeer, formed a russet halo on the snow around his head. The lining of the tent held a skin of rime from exhaled air. Outside, torrents of snow pressed down until the whole enclosure stood no higher than a coffin. The base of his skull hammered out a strange new pain that brought an image of blood vessels swelling in his brain. The perpetual craving for food racked his body and addled his mind when he tried to calculate how long it was humanly possible to spin out the remaining two and a half pounds of food—a normal day’s rations.

  Providence had let him come this far, had dragged, cajoled him, drummed him on, step after step, with endless rhyming lines of Robert Service: Have you suffered, starved, and triumphed, grovelled down, yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?

  Providence had chafed his body raw until it bled, punished him with the science gone to waste—three hundred miles of surveyed coastline, notes on glaciers and ice formations locked inside his head.

  Done things just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story, seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul?


  It had shamed him with an imagined sea of admiring supporters and an image of forty thousand pounds scattered to the wind by the festering hands of a man with grandiose ideas. Up every slope and over every ridge the voice dragooned like a drill sergeant, Duty! Duty! Duty!—kicked him when he crawled.

  Only when he held out the sun compass and angled his thoughts to Paquita did the world ease to a hush. In warm, glinting light he remembered her capacity for kindness and love. In the refraction of sun on a circle of glass he knew that nothing meant more than honouring a pledge sealed with a diamond ring and upholding his promise to return.

  The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things; then listen to the Wild—it’s calling you.

  He had paid his dues to the Wild. Let him reach the plateau and find his bearings; let him make it home.

  HE TRUDGED INTO WIND WITH petticoats of drift flouncing at his waist. He moved like a hobbled mule over last year’s worn sastrugi that finally marked his direction beneath his feet.

  He had marched five miles over undulating ice on a bearing north 45 degrees west when a flash of black ticked the corner of his eye.

  He turned and paced closer; he held his breath, uncertain that his mind was not betraying him, believing in miracles only when he touched the cairn with its bunting of black cloth wound through hewn blocks of ice.

  Douglas seized a red bag weighted beneath the snow, the frisson of recognition as sweet as the promise of its contents. He ran his thumb across a seam, seeing, for the first time, the painstaking labour and devotion in Paquita’s careful stitches.

  The note inside the tobacco tin made him catch his breath. The date: 29 January 1913—today. He scanned the plateau for figures, tempted to abandon the sledge and run to catch the party but seeing only ghosts swirling in the drift. When had they left?

  29-1-13

  Situation 21 Miles S 60 E

  of Aladdin’s Cave.

  Two ice mounds one

  14 M S 60 E of Aladdin’s Cave

  the other

  5 miles SE of Aladdin’s …

  —the first has biscuits

  chocolate etc.

  Please find biscuits,

  pemmican, ground biscuit

  tea etc.

  Aurora arrived Jan 13th.

  Wireless messages received

  All parties safe.

  Amundsen reached Pole

  December 1911

  —remained there 3 days

  Supporting party left

  Scott 150 M from Pole in

  the same month

  Bage reached 300 M SE

  17’ from Magnetic Pole

  Bickerton—160 M West

  Aeroplane broke down 10 M

  out

  Madigan went 270 M East

  Good luck from

  Hodgman

  Hurley

  McLean

  A. McLean

  Possibilities swirled through his head. Twenty-one miles to Aladdin’s Cave, another five to the hut—it would take him three, four days if the weather held. Would the ship wait? All parties safe! Wireless messages received! Those Hannam tapped out before the masts came down, night after night, with nothing in return? Amundsen’s triumph at the pole—but what of Scott’s return? For now he couldn’t think. He didn’t care. He was bursting with joy, intoxicated with gratitude and the exquisite sensation of ginger biscuit warming his gut, explosions of flavour as sweet and giddying as each glorious line of news on which he gorged.

  A

  MEMENTO

  CHAD PAUSES AT THE BASE of the studio steps to gauge the cast of early morning light. The helicopter engineer ambles around the Squirrel, yawning as he kneels to release the clamp that tethers a blade. Chad contemplates the thudding in his chest, unsure if it comes from the knowledge he is leaving, or this other act, the offering in his hands positioning him, surely, for pity or silent ridicule.

  The station still sleeps and he is glad to have left this deed for last, certain there will be no chance of an encounter now.

  It seems odd and sad that he has not set foot inside her studio before. The dimness of the room makes him feel more of a trespasser, hushed into furtive steps. He places the gift on her chair then shifts it to the desk. He studies how it looks then returns it to the chair. The urge to linger, to savour, to look around, staves off his compulsion to bolt.

  Stacked along the shelves are countless numbered and dated film canisters, beside them spindles of DVD s. Atop an old steel cabinet lies a hand-embroidered cloth, upon it mementoes from their field trips: snow petrel and skua feathers, an adélie tail quill, a strip of weathered elephant seal hide from the wallow, a collection of pebbles and stones—among them the garnet rock he so self-righteously declined. He wills himself to believe she will leave it at the station, on neutral ground, like her books from the library: articles on loan.

  Bolder now, he takes up a hinged photo frame from her desk. On one side is a woman remarkably like Freya except for hair coloured golden and spiked with darker tips. The face looks unfinished without its spread of wine. Draped across the woman’s lap, a teenage girl reclines in a theatrical pose. Chad turns the perspex frame to a portrait of an older woman with porcelain skin, her silver hair swept into a roll. Beside it, in the saturated colours of old Kodak prints from his parents’ family album, is a younger version of the same woman; the man beside her, fair-haired, slight in build, stands pointing at the nameplate of a ship—Fram—Amundsen’s ship.

  The last photograph smarts. He holds the frame to the light, driven to measure this other man’s face. Older than he’d imagined, her husband looks studious with rimless glasses and a mild face, a city man in his collared shirt and jacket. Chad’s eyes are drawn to the remarkable fineness of his hand placed on Freya’s shoulder, comparing the man’s unblemished skin with the coarseness of his own—nails ragged, thumbnail black, knuckles wide and knocked about. He returns the frame to the desk, despondent at the ocean of difference between them, his gloom deepened by Freya facing him in the photo: the admiration in her gaze.

  Chad uncovers a photograph lying on the bench and feels a jolt to see a black and white portrait of himself. Not a shred of sophistication in sight, more your good-for-nothing loafer leaning back on his bike in a govvie-issue wool shirt, arms propped behind his head, grinning like a galah. Beneath this image lies a second, smaller print of Freya, photographed by him despite her protests. He feels poignant pleasure in the portrait, at the joy in her face, alive and intense.

  Chad hears the rotors whine, the silence of the station broken by a whirring that quickly heightens to a squeal. The studio floor hums. Only now does it dawn on him that Freya works hours on end with this ear-piercing scream penetrating body and mind. Little wonder that at nights, once the whirligigs are laid to rest, he sees her studio lit up; if he stares long enough he will catch her shape moving past the glass.

  Five-fifteen. He peels a post-it from the pad and scratches a note. BIRD’S EYE HUON PINE. A MEMENTO OF YOUR SUMMER IN THE VESTFOLDS. He moves the gift back to the desk and places the note alongside.

  Chad opens the studio door, one foot on the threshold, his helicopter shuttle to the skiway shrieking its readiness to leave. His feet refuse to work, held fast with indecision, lured by desire for something not rightfully his. He returns inside, closes the door, his pulse quickening with this final act of stealth. He takes the portrait of Freya, working quickly to roll it up tightly, scrabbling through the top drawer of her desk to find an elastic band.

  He turns at a sound: Freya stands framed in the open doorway. The sorrow in her eyes—Look at you, they might be saying, no better than a thief.

  ‘I’ve been searching the station for you.’

  ‘You found me. Red-handed.’ He holds out the portrait.

  She shrugs. ‘It’s yours if you want it. You took the photo.’

  She closes the door, the pitch of the rotors still ringing in his ears.

  ‘Adam told me you were leaving.
Not even goodbye?’

  He shakes his head, afraid to speak, his focus on the wall, on a line of loose and missing studs.

  ‘I didn’t want this, Chad. I didn’t want you to go.’

  ‘It’s no big deal,’ he says. ‘I’m looking forward to a change of scenery.’

  ‘No big deal? It meant nothing?’

  That wasn’t what he said. The walls shudder as the second helicopter fires up. ‘You’re the one that changed your mind, Freya. Overnight. I’d just like you to have told me why.’

  ‘This.’ She holds out her ring finger. ‘Because of this.’

  ‘You said you didn’t want to go home.’ He raises his voice above the second engine. ‘One night with me and you change your mind?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. Everything happened so quickly. It scared me, Chad. When I get home I have a lot to talk over with Marcus. Whatever the outcome, I want it to be for the right reasons. Nothing between Marcus and me has anything to do with you.’

  ‘I was more of a diversion, eh. A fling to tide you over. Did you ever stop to consider how I might feel?’

  ‘Nothing like this has happened to me before. You have to believe that. I need some time and space to get things worked out in my own head. When a person is married, it’s not so simple.’

  ‘Call me naive, but I think it is simple, Freya. I know nothing about your marriage or your husband, but I’ve got to know something about you and you don’t strike me as anybody’s prisoner. It might not be easy, but you’re as free to make your own choices as the rest of us. The way I see it, the only person holding you back is you.’

  ‘What about you?’ she shouts above the duelling rotors. ‘You’re so sure of yourself. What would you have happen?’

  He wants it all. The whole unattainable, happy-ever-after bundle. ‘There’s a chopper downstairs screaming for me to get in it. It’s too late to be asking now.’

  He moves past her, pulls on his gloves, has his hand upon the door.

  ‘So that’s it, Chad? You’re running away?’

  ‘That’s it,’ he says. ‘I’m bailing.’