by Robyn Mundy
He feels the bike’s petrol cap grinding into his belly like a biscuit cutter, pictures its scalloped edge imprinting his gut. He shifts his eyes to the left and then to the right; he can’t turn his head, the adze of his ice axe digging into his throat. He thinks, though he has no way to be sure, he is wedged vertically, entombed upright (an odd predicament) between the bike and the wall of the crevasse. The seat crushes his chest, the petrol tank presses on his abdomen. He wets himself, hot against his groin; he cannot tell if his legs remain attached. He hears himself pant, thin and shallow like a tired dog. He ought to panic with the effort it takes to move air through his lungs yet he feels little concern. He begins to feel dreamy, neither afraid nor alone.
He remembers Ma trouncing him at Monopoly, and he, retaliating, launching himself across her as she counted out her properties, tickling her relentlessly until she collapsed into her belly laugh. She wasn’t fast enough to escape, so she resorted to lying upon him—plastic hotels, paper money, dice and Chance cards falling about—her arms pinning his on either side. He remembers wanting to laugh and not being able to—he could barely breathe beneath her weight. He remembers the smell of lotion on her skin, the trace of coffee on her breath, her hazel eyes so close to his he couldn’t focus on them properly. She is here with him now, in the crevasse, trying to pin him down again—him, a grown man. And though her face is as close as it could be, he has no trouble seeing. He can make out the laughter lines radiating from the corners of her eyes, webs of mulberry veins crowning her shiny cheeks. He has not before realised how young Ma is, or how her skin glows. But he wants her to stop, needs her to get up off him and call a truce so he can tell her something he didn’t get the chance to say before. He wants her to know how sorry he is that she is gone, that for the longest time he thought the weight of it would crush him. He wants to hold her, cradle her. If he could change things, he tells her, if he could return to Go and collect two hundred, he would take more care pulling the net, would avoid the whip of a stingray’s tail as easily as that; she’d have no need to drive to Hobart for a prescription—his legs don’t hurt at all.
Ma smiles as he speaks, her gaze full of grace. Love, it’s no one’s fault, is all she says. He can tell, just by her eyes, how much she loves him. She holds out her hand and strokes his hair, over and over until he feels light enough to float away.
Something is winding itself around his neck and he feels Ma must be there, within his reach. It surprises him that she is so much stronger than he, her hands enormous on his back. She pulls him upward, as if he were a child, lifting him in jerks, saying, I’ve got you, lad. I have you, over and over. Ma’s voice sounds gruff but not unkind. The layers of tinted glass begin to peel away until all that surrounds him is the palest veil of baby blue. Ma whispers she will have to leave him when they reach the light.
I know, he says, though it hurts to speak and he wishes she could stay.
ERECTED
TO COMMEMORATE
THE SUPREME SACRIFICE
MADE BY
LIEUT. B.E.S. NINNIS, R.F.
AND
DR. X. MERTZ
IN THE
CAUSE OF SCIENCE
A.A.E. 1913
Melbourne
Sunday, 9 November 1913
Dearest Dougelly,
The Aurora leaves on Tuesday & I must add a last letter to my little pile. And I do hope it will be the last letter I’ll need to write you for a very long while. This separation has been quite long enough. We shall feel almost estranged …
We sent you a joint wireless—perhaps you didn’t get it? I met Eitel, Hurley and Hunter. I like Hurley. They were very good & I had a private view of the film the Aurora brought back in 1912 when we were away …
Dearie I hope you & I are going to be happy. There is so much to discuss before we are married that I can’t write in a letter. You understand, don’t you, quite, when I repeat that it isn’t Paquita of 1911 you’re coming back to? I may have changed in ways you won’t like but on the whole I don’t think so. We are very different in some ways—but that shouldn’t prevent our happiness. Its to be ‘give and take’ on both sides.
I’m longing for your return to put me at rest. It is very difficult not to think of the future. 21/2 years is a very long time out of our lives. Oh well 3 months only now. Heaven give that we aren’t disappointed in each other. Our wants are different now we are both older. Oh my dear man, come back and reassure me that all will go well with us. I have lost confidence, not in you, but in the future. I want your love again. It has been hard to do without it so long.
I wonder will you return to Hobart or Adelaide. In February the former would be the pleasantest but Adelaide seems the likeliest. Capt. Davis has promised to let me know. It is no good depending on you to. If you had wanted to wire you could have. To answer mine & your brothers wire would not have upset the men down there. However everyone has their own way of thinking.
Mother & I will be waiting for you wherever you return. If we know in time, of course …
My dear, dear man. Until February—I love you & the next time I say that it will be in your arms. And will be responded to, I hope. One sided correspondence is the limit.
Your own
Paquita
NORTHWARD
BOUND
THE VOYAGE SOUTH HAD OPENED her eyes to the ice. Now, the passage home—the last of the bergs wound in fog, stretches of pack ice giving way to achromatic sea—reduces Freya’s field of vision as if she were looking through a soft-focus lens. On the ship’s helicopter deck, she stands with her eyes set astern, looking through a veil of mist, drawing images from her memory. With each increment of latitude they cross, her recollections of Antarctica feather at the edges. Even the sharpness of her final days at Davis Station has receded. It seems foolish, now, to have worked herself into a panic after her trip to Walkabout Rocks and woken Kittie in the middle of the night. As secretive as thieves they had removed from Freya’s studio every DVD.and canister of film, locking irreplaceable images in Kittie’s office for fear they might be tampered with. The echo of Adam Singer’s threats still murmurs in her dreams.
Aurora Australis crosses the Convergence, that innocuous blue line winding over the ship’s chart to define the boundary of Antarctic waters. Only now does it undulate with meaning, for never has she felt so cast adrift. In the space of a day crisp air dissipates, the atmosphere warms, air turns sultry on her skin. She folds polar layers away, and though it’s only nine or ten degrees Celsius outdoors, the dress code around the ship turns summery.
A wandering albatross appears to track their route, weaving over the wake, swooping to pluck some glinting morsel churned to the surface, rising briefly to wheel around the ship. With each monotonous hour of ocean, Freya’s thoughts are tugged at and pulled askew. Most of those aboard turn their gaze northward, their anticipation of home palpable, but her eyes stay fixed on the bird. She contemplates the number of days and degrees it will take before the albatross peels away, a sign that the ocean is running out. Other than to breed the wanderer has no cause to turn to land; this body of steely water is its domain.
Freya sleeps during the day and walks the decks at night. So quickly now, evening light fades. As she climbs the outside steps of the ship she sees a faint smattering of stars across the southern sky. Only when she reaches the ship’s bridge does she set her sights forward, gaining some comfort from the substantial span of ocean that still buffers her from the prospect of home, from a decision too life-changing to begin explaining to her husband in an email.
Some of the ship’s crew are new this voyage but the captain, with the same boyish sweep of hair, remembers her from the trip down and nods as if they’ve been sailing this ocean together half their lives.
‘Down next season?’
‘A one-off,’ she says, failing to sound bright.
‘That’s what they all say. Eh, Parksie?’ The sailor at the wheel, his face ruddy with acne, blushes in reply.
> The captain flicks fair hair from his eyes. ‘I signed on for one summer. Same as Parksie. That was eighteen years ago.’ He nods at the ocean. ‘Once a place gets into you …’
AURORA AUSTRALIS DOWNLOADS EMAILS TWICE each day. The communications room swarms with bodies; screens flicker, computers hum, keys click-clack. Three messages wait in her inbox, not one of them, Freya registers, from Marcus.
Dr Ev writes from Davis Station:
>> Now that things have quietened down around here, I’ve finally found some time to clear the backlog. A while ago you asked about the effects of starvation, why Douglas Mawson survived while Xavier Mertz did not. I can’t offer anything conclusive but here are some thoughts to consider. The photos in various publications show Mawson as a tall, wiry fellow. Alongside him, Mertz looks considerably shorter with a stocky build. All things being equal, Mertz should have fared better on starvation rations than Mawson, given their different body types. Mertz, though, found eating the dogs—who he had come to love as pets— repulsive, the meat indigestible. It would have been as tough as old boots given the emaciated state the poor creatures were in. Perhaps when they divvied up the food Mertz ate a larger portion of softer, more ‘palatable’ pieces, i.e. the liver. Neither men had any way of knowing then that Greenland dog liver contains toxic quantities of vitamin A. Mawson had a harrowing trek home, hair falling out in clumps, festering boils, skin peeling away. Although he was savvy about nutrition in terms of calories and sledging rations, the effects of vitamins were not understood for another fifty years. He died in 1958 so would never have heard of the debilitating effects of hypervitaminosis A.
I should add a proviso that the vitamin A theory as the cause of Mertz’s death has been challenged, with reasonable cause, in recent years. One peer-reviewed article in the MJA calls for a re-evaluation and proposes severe food deprivation as the outstanding contributor. It also suggests that Mertz was affected emotionally after Ninnis’s death, and suffered from cold after losing his burberry trousers and helmet to the crevasse. In my view, this last factor plays a big part in the equation. You can appreciate what a dramatic difference the wind in Antarctica makes. Mertz’s ability to maintain his core temperature would have been seriously compromised, particularly with an insufficient diet. Mertz was an elite athlete in terms of cross-country skiing and he was an experienced mountain climber, but that didn’t necessarily equip him for a 500-km march through snow. Mawson, on the other hand, had proven his abilities on a record 2000-km man-hauling trek during Shackleton’s 1907–09 expedition.
Some say Mertz died from exhaustion, that Mawson survived because he simply refused to die. Incidentally, Mawson set out on his trek weighing 95 kilograms and returned to Commonwealth Bay, thirteen weeks later, weighing 51.
Robert Scott’s men (1910–13 South Pole Expedition) were likely vitamin C deficient before they even began their race to the pole. During the winter leading up to the trek, in addition to poor food choices, they all smoked like geysers. I remember a radio interview that said Scott’s provisions included 35,000 cigars!! (Makes the Davis Station chocolate rations look paltry.)
There’s a suggestion that this lack of vitamin C, and also of B-group vitamins and total kilojoules, exacerbated by smoking, contributed to the failure of Scott’s group on their return trek from the pole—they died in their tent on the plateau just 11 miles from One Ton Depot.
How does this relate to your question? Mawson also took tobacco and cigarettes to Commonwealth Bay and rationed them out weekly to the men, but he himself was a non-smoker (albeit a passive one with a hutful puffing away). If Mertz smoked—and I believe he did—then a deficiency in vitamin C, on top of a long winter of inactivity, may well have contributed to his demise out on the ice.
In any case, there’s more to survival than physical ability. Some people derive extraordinary strength from their belief in a higher power. Then there are the stories you read of Holocaust survivors and prisoners of war, how those who had someone to come home to—a reason to keep living—withstood astounding privation while others around them perished. Mawson was a determined leader, an ardent scientist. I’d hazard a guess that on both counts he was a force to be reckoned with. Perhaps his will, sheer bloody-mindedness, call it what you will, helped get him through.
Best wishes for your exhibition—Ev
Freya prints out the email to file with her list of things to follow up. Already her imagination is off on a tangent—she will travel to Commonwealth Bay, photograph winter quarters, even start on a larger study of Scott, Shackleton, all the polar explorers from the Heroic Age, and their huts, from Commonwealth Bay south to Cape Royds. She couldn’t possibly do the field work on her own.
In the second email, Astrid, ever the big sister, writes to confirm Freya’s arrival time in Perth.
>> Prepare yourself. Mama’s organising an Antarctic slide presentation and you’re the guest speaker. It started out as a book club gathering, now she’s talking about hiring the Kalamunda Hall.
Sigh.
Freya’s niece, Sophie, has her own news to add.
>> We have a dog! Maximillius (Max to his friends) is an adorable beagle with velvet-soft ears. Some low-life abandoned him at Dad’s work. Bestemor says he’s as good as her ducted vacuum system because he hoovers up every crumb in sight. Max is waiting to meet and greet you. xxxxoooxxxx
>> Astrid again. It’s been 40-plus for three days straight (one guess who’s been left to walk the hound). I thought we might all have an early barbecue at our place the first evening, if you’re not too tired. I’ve left several messages with Marcus but he hasn’t phoned back.
Freya feels a flutter of homesickness and pictures herself with Astrid and Sophie, the three of them floating in the pool. Sophie would be doing her utmost to entice her grandmother in but Mama would be shaking her head, waving her hands, shooing her granddaughter away—the weather’s too hot; the water’s too cold.
Freya scrolls to her last email, from Kittie.
>> Greetings Freya,
How’s life on the AA? Here at Davis, we’ve had our first official blizz—winter’s on the way.
The following may be second-hand news by now. If not, I’m truly sorry to be the bearer of crap tidings but you need to know what’s been happening around here.
The night before last, Adam Singer called your home in Perth and spoke to your husband. Adam gave some bogus name, claiming he was a friend of yours down here. He apparently talked to your Marcus for ages, chitchatting about the season and Antarctica, buttering him up as only Adam knows how. He eventually went for the jugular, asking was there anything he could do to help because your affair—Adam’s words, not mine—with Chad McGonigal had become public knowledge around the station and you’d left on the ship in a very distressed state.
I know, unbelievable.
BTW, the above came from Dr Ev who heard it from our esteemed station leader. Adam didn’t count on the fact that your husband would phone Family Support at AntDiv. They were brilliant. The Division sprang into action and traced the call back to Chad’s phone PIN, which was a crock because Chad’s over at Mawson Station and apparently working out at the field huts. It was like a courtroom here last night, seventeen of us assembled in the dining room presenting our alibis to Malcolm. After the conversation you and I had had about Adam it was obvious who the culprit was and I was all set to have a quiet word in Malcolm’s ear. As it turned out Ev beat me to it. She’d gone over to the Green Shed the night in question to organise the chocolate rations and saw Adam going into your studio, which at the time she thought was odd. Then during last night’s ‘interrogation’ Adam dug his own grave by claiming he was out on a walk to Lake Dingle at the time, saying, when Malcolm quizzed him, that he must have forgotten to turn over his tag. The next thing we knew, Adam was hauled into Malcolm’s office and read the riot act. Methinks Adam’s working days for AntDiv are numbered. Charlie always said he was the one bad egg in the basket.
I’m sorry, Fr
eya. I figured you’d rather hear this now than face things cold when you get home. Calm seas—xx Kittie
PS Keep in touch. I’m an email away.
Freya sits benumbed, oblivious to the bustle around her, staring past the monitor, through the porthole that reveals a surge of ocean each time the ship rolls. She pictures Marcus answering the phone, responding to the friendly tone in the stranger’s voice. She shudders at the stealth of Adam’s attack—words honed razor sharp to cut a husband’s faith in two. She gauges, by her own anaesthetised shock, the hurt Marcus would have felt as he’d sat alone through the night, reflecting, filling in the blanks from her dwindling emails, replaying her evasive answers to his questions, systematically putting things in place until he pieced together a core of truth from Adam’s words.
She rereads Kittie’s email and feels a sorrowful kind of pride in her husband for summoning the courage to phone the Division. She pictures them talking over the ugly allegations.
The ship rides up at an angle and runs along the swell. Freya grips the table edge and waits until it levels out. Perhaps strangest, at odds with this wave of protectiveness she feels towards her husband, is the easing of the burden of a lie now that Marcus knows. This is not as she has planned to tell him, yet she feels she has been dragged out from under a tonnage of deceit.
Charlie appears at her side. ‘Got a minute?’ He directs her along the hallway to the empty dining room. ‘Quieter in here.’ He sits down beside her and slips his reading glasses into the case clipped to his pocket. ‘I’ve had an email from the radio officer at Mawson Station. Scally’s an old mate. He told me something on the quiet—it concerns a friend of yours and I think you ought to know.’
She raises an eyebrow at how quickly gossip spreads in Antarctica. ‘You’re ten minutes too late, Charlie. I already heard from Kittie.’
‘Kittie?’
She reminds herself Charlie is only being kind. ‘Kittie told me what’s been happening. Adam Singer; the phone call.’