Sun at Midnight

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘What are we doing next?’ Alice asked.

  Phil nodded at the skidoo, its bright-red fairing and rakish windshield incongruous but reassuring against the sweep of glacier. ‘You’ve got to learn to handle this.’

  ‘Yess.’ Alice pounded her mittened fists in delight.

  ‘Not just roaring around, mind. Basic mechanics, how to fix a simple problem in the field, recognise a problem that you can’t fix. Most of that we can do back on base, but you can have a bit of a turn now. Don’t think you’re going to get to drive everywhere, though, or you’ll put Rook and me out of a job.’

  Rooker. If he remembered asking her whether ‘Peel’ was an invitation or a command, he hadn’t shown it. Sometimes she found herself watching him, but he gave no sign of noticing her scrutiny.

  Alice perched astride the big machine while Phil patiently showed her the controls.

  ‘Brake, throttle. Keep her level, head that way off the glacier where there’s no crevasses, don’t go careering away into nowhere or I’ll be jumping off and leaving you to it. Remember to steer.’

  At first she could only inch along with the motor racing, then she accelerated too hard and they shot forward so fast that Phil yelled and snatched at her waist to stop himself falling off. They ran up a snow bank and the skis tilted at such an alarming angle that Alice was sure they would overturn and be crushed. She yanked at the handlebars and they zigzagged in the other direction. Phil clung on while she fought for control.

  It took a few circuits before she got the hang of it. But then she found that she could do it. It was as easy as riding a bicycle and five times as much fun. She raced the machine over the frozen waves of snow, bouncing over crests that shone like beaten egg white. She could turn tight circles and forge uphill. The cold stung her face and her thumbs ached from gripping the controls but her face was split in a wide grin of delight.

  Phil said laconically, ‘You’re just about okay at the fun part. Let’s go back and you can change the plugs and clean the fuel filter. Tomorrow we’ll do the snow cave. If you’re good you get to spend the night in it. With me.’

  ‘Can I drive us back now?’

  ‘And put me out of a job?’

  But he did let her. As they swept down the hill towards the base, Alice saw the little cluster of utilitarian buildings, the brave red standing out against the ice.

  It looked like home, she thought.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  They heard the gnat’s buzz of the helicopter engines before the black speck appeared, emerging out of a sky curdled with soft cloud. Rooker and Phil had prepared a landing square in the snow and erected marker flags to provide some definition for the pilot. Everyone else who was on the base looked up from what they were doing and went outside to watch the arrival.

  The red and white Squirrel hovered briefly over the landing area, then settled like a roosting bird within the flagged square. The down-draught from the rotors whisked loose snow into a miniature blizzard before the engines were cut. A moment later the pilot and his number two had taken off their headsets, climbed down and unloaded a couple of bags. They were the first visitors Alice had seen on the base.

  She had been ready to leave since breakfast time. But there had been a series of delays while Santa Ana considered whether the local weather was good enough for the helicopter to set out, and monitored the conditions at Kandahar and what it was likely to meet at Wheeler’s Bluff. The flight to take her and Richard out to the field had been off and on again twice already, and it was now early afternoon.

  As the morning dragged by and Niki reported yet another change of plan, Russell had explained that it was always like this.

  ‘Waiting for flights. Waiting for weather. Don’t expect to go anywhere in Antarctica until you’ve actually left. And don’t expect to arrive until your boots hit the snow. There’s always the chance of a mid-flight turnaround.’

  She sighed and slumped in her chair at the mess table. Richard was impatient to be off too. He stood at the window and fiddled with his watch strap, then asked Russell yet again to go through the list of responsibilities that he would take on as Richard’s deputy.

  ‘No worries,’ Russ said.

  But now, at last, the transport was here.

  The pilot handed over the cargo bags. There were fresh vegetables from the supply ship that had just reached Santa Ana from Punta Arenas at the tip of Chile, and there was mail. Alice hadn’t been away long enough for much mail to reach her, but there was an airmail package from Pete.

  The crew came in and lounged at the table, lanky in their red flight overalls, drinking coffee and exchanging gossip with Russ and Niki. One was called Andy, the other Mick.

  Andy grinned at some question of Russ’s. ‘Too right. Sandy Wilmot? Christ. Last I saw of him was in Neil’s bar in Christchurch. Man, that was a night.’

  There was a din of people talking over each other, the new arrivals making the small space seem even more crowded. It was strange to see unfamiliar faces in the accustomed places around the table. The pilots brought a draught of the outside world with them, a place beyond the carmine walls of Kandahar that had seemed too remote to bother about.

  Alice found a corner and opened her package from Peter. The letter was short. He told her that he missed her and that he was sorry. ‘I acted like a total prick’ were his actual words. She unfolded a couple of sheets of thick paper enclosed with the note and saw two charcoal sketches of herself. In one of them she was sitting with her head bent and a hank of hair falling across her face, and in the other she was looking straight into Peter’s eyes. She remembered the night he had done them, not long after they had first met, and how impressed she had been by the way the quick strokes captured more of her than seemed possible in just a few black lines. Pete drew well, and she had wondered why he didn’t do more work like this instead of concentrating on welding spars of metal into cages for discarded shop dummies and broken fan heaters.

  A Polaroid photograph fell from between the two drawings. It was a picture of Pete, standing beside the construction that had been preoccupying him before she left. He was pounding a clenched fist into the palm of the other hand and smiling in triumph. The metal ribs and spars with their festoons of found objects reared above him. She noticed that he had incorporated the dismembered typist’s chair.

  ‘PS. Finished it!’ he wrote. She stared at his familiar features and tried to remember exactly how she had felt about him. And she wondered who had taken the picture.

  A hand touched her shoulder. ‘Are you ready?’

  Richard glanced from the photograph to Alice’s face. She saw that the crewmen had stood up and everyone was streaming outside. She folded the letter and sketches round the photograph and stowed them inside her parka. Then she hoisted her kitbag and followed them.

  Rooker had stripped down the second of the base’s two skidoos, and he and Phil slung it beneath the helicopter’s fuselage. He conferred with the pilot now about the security of this and the rest of the weighed camp baggage as it was loaded inside the machine. Richard and Alice handed over their personal kit for stowage. Russell patted her shoulder and told her that when she came back she would be an old hand.

  ‘I don’t know about that. But I’ll be glad not to be such a no-no.’

  No-no was Phil’s catch-all word for her, meaning knownothing. It was politer than fingy, which translated as fucking new guy.

  Valentin hugged her against his barrel chest. Niki saluted before turning back to the radio room. Jochen and Laure and Arturo were all out at work.

  ‘Come back to us soon,’ Valentin shouted as the pilot waved her into the helicopter. She blew him a kiss as she took one of the three rear seats next to Richard. To her surprise Rooker swung in after them.

  ‘You’re coming with us?’

  ‘You’re going to refit the skidoo yourself?’

  The doors were shut. Alice took the headset that Andy passed to her over his shoulder and put it on. The rotors started tur
ning, the helicopter trembled on its skis and as she watched the hut roof sank out of sight. The machine briefly hovered, the pilots’ voices crackled in her headset and she looked down past Richard at the furious eddies of snow driven upwards in their ascent.

  ‘Kandahar, Kandahar, this is NZ20. Airborne.’

  ‘Roger NZ20. You are clear,’ Niki answered.

  The helicopter rose higher and swung in an arc. Alice saw the sheet of bay water tilting beneath her, the scumble of rock and glacier, then the base was way below and behind them as they headed south-east, into the field. She felt her stomach turn over, partly with vertigo and partly with excitement. She was longing to see what lay beyond the horizons of Kandahar, and she was looking forward to the demands of an isolated field camp with a mixture of fascination and apprehension.

  The flight took forty minutes. Rooker leaned away from her, his close-cropped head turned silently to the view beneath. On her other side Richard exchanged matter-of-fact comments with the pilots. Alice stared straight ahead through the curve of windshield. A white and blue and greystippled immensity of space unrolled, crumpled by the chaos of vast glaciers edging to the sea. Near the brink of the peninsula the whiteness was gashed with rock crests that appeared as black as ebony, and further inland there were the peaks of nunataks. These were the tips of huge mountains, protruding through the great mantle of polar ice. Alice realised that her mouth was open and her eyes were stinging from gazing so hard. A draught of pure adrenalin surged through her, pulling her upright in her seat straps. She swallowed and became aware of Rooker looking round at her.

  He smiled, an unpractised version, but the warmth did light up his black eyes. ‘Yeah,’ he said. He didn’t have his headset on so she couldn’t hear the word, but she saw the way that his lips formed it, felt the click of a connection between them. Her cheeks were suddenly hot.

  After a while the pilot said, ‘See ahead there? One o’clock?’

  She craned forward against the chest straps of her seatbelt. In the distance there was a long black-and-white ridge of rock, rising out of the tumbled ice and snow like the fin of a great sea creature from the ocean. Some time during the age of the dinosaurs a huge eruption of jet-black doleritic rock had burst upwards from the earth’s molten core, squeezing through and buckling the layers of sedimentary siltstone. Even at this distance Alice could see how the igneous dolerite lay like a heavy black chocolate topping on the paler sponge-cake layers of the lower cliffs. This was their destination, Wheeler’s Bluff.

  The helicopter put down on a flat expanse of bare blue ice about half a mile from the cliff. The wind had scoured the snow off the surface here, so the pilot could see exactly what he was settling on. When the engines stopped the machine almost bucked in the wind. Even before the doors opened Alice could feel why the ice was bare.

  The full force of it hit her as she ducked beneath the resting rotors. It tore at the hood of her parka as she tried to pull it up over her head and made her think of the first time she had stepped out of the hut. There was no turning back to shelter here, though.

  The men set about the unloading. Rooker and Andy unleashed the skidoo chassis from its sling underneath the body of the helicopter and towed the haul bag containing the detachable parts alongside it. Mick tossed bags of kit and boxes of rations out to Richard who stacked them on the ice. Alice pulled her weatherproofs round her and ran to help. The pilots wanted to get back in the air and on their way to Kandahar before the weather deteriorated any further. There was a sledge that would be towed behind the skidoo, and Alice took the unwieldy packages from Richard’s stack and loaded them on to it. The work was strenuous and after a few minutes she forgot the cold and the wind.

  It took Rooker half an hour to reassemble the skidoo. Well before he had finished, the crew were in their seats in the Squirrel, exchanging weather information with Niki back on the base. Rooker refilled the fuel tank that had been drained for the flight. Covertly, Alice watched him working. He gave the job all his attention, and his movements were quick and precise. Now he jumped astride the machine and turned the ignition key. The engine caught at once and he drove the skidoo in a tight circle, revving it hard.

  The pilot leaned out of the Squirrel and urgently waved his arm. Rooker held up two fingers. Meaning two more minutes, perhaps. He dismounted, lifted the casing off the engine and checked it over again. Then he gave the thumbs-up.

  Richard and Alice stood back. Rooker glanced once at Alice and she thought she read speculation in the look. ‘Anything else?’ he asked Richard.

  Richard ran his eyes over the mounded sledge. ‘That’s it,’ he said.

  Rooker was already sprinting to the helicopter. ‘Have a good week,’ he yelled over his shoulder. ‘See you.’

  A minute later the Squirrel lifted off the ice. Alice saw Andy’s face framed in its headset and a hand lifted in a wave before a whirl of driven snow made her crouch down and shield her eyes. A minute after that the helicopter was just a red dot busily homing on Kandahar.

  She looked around her. For hundreds of miles there was nothing but ice, wind, rock and Richard Shoesmith.

  He was busily coupling the sledge to the skidoo. ‘All set?’ he shouted.

  The plan was to drive closer to the Bluff, where the rocks would afford some shelter from the wind, and set up camp there. Alice raised her arm to show that she was ready; trying to make herself heard over the wind already felt like wasted effort. She climbed into the sledge and found the brake. It was a lever toothed with metal, and if a crevasse opened in front of the skidoo she would jump on the sledge brake as hard as she could and pray that the teeth would bite into the ice and hold them both.

  Richard nosed carefully forward and the tow rope tightened. Slowly, they began to move over the blue ice.

  It was 9 p.m. before they had camp set up.

  By the time it was done Alice was sweating with exertion inside her windproofs, but she was pleased with the way she and Richard worked together. The skidoo and unloaded sledge were parked right in the lee of the rocks and the skidoo was protected by a nylon cover, pegged down and weighted with rocks. The two yellow pyramid tents were up, openings facing away from the wind, the food boxes and cooking gear stowed inside one and the geological and climbing equipment inside the other. Two inflatable mattresses had been blown up, one for each tent, placed on karrimats and topped off with sheepskin underblankets, sleeping bags and waterproof bivvy bags. There was even the blue flag with its circle of gold stars, stretched taut by the wind from a telescopic metal flagpole.

  The sun was low and long steel-grey shadows flooded out from the Bluff. Snow rolled towards them in hazy drifts off the ice sheet. When she stopped work and stood still to ease her aching muscles, beneath the wind’s constant refrain she could hear the absolute silence.

  Richard was putting up masts for the VHF radio antennae. She crunched across the snow to help him.

  ‘Time for some food?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d say so.’

  In her tent – the one in which the kitchen had been established – Alice lit the Primus. She filled a pan with snow and sat back on her heels. The tent’s interior glowed a soft yellow and the Primus’s roar and its kerosene scent took her back to holidays in the mountains with Trevor.

  ‘Hello, Dad,’ she said softly. ‘Here I am.’

  Richard and she would take turns at being cook for the day. Most of their meals, two-man portions packed in a box for each day, were freeze-dried but for tonight Russ had sent out chicken portions and prepared vegetables in Ziplock bags.

  When the snow-water came to the boil, Alice made mugs of tea, then threw handfuls of rice into the remainder. Tonight there would be fried chicken and vegetable rice.

  At 10 p.m. Richard finished the prearranged radio schedule with Niki and presented himself at Alice’s tent door.

  ‘Dinner is served.’ She grinned up at him.

  They talked about the rock sections they would make and measure tomorrow. Richard rec
lined against her mattress. His aquiline, handsome face was masked by a thickening beard and the yellow light of the tent blotted out the anxiety lines etched between his eyebrows. Alice was sharply aware of the tiny compass of their camp and the hostile miles that cut them off from Kandahar. Richard and she might have been the only people in the world. The training that she had done at Cambridge and with Phil seemed suddenly inadequate to equip her for survival in this harsh, isolated place. Kandahar now represents civilisation and safety, she thought, with a tremor of amusement.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ she said, as Richard licked his tin plate clean and peered into the saucepan to see if there might be a spoonful of leftovers. There were apples and chocolate for pudding, and Alice passed his share across to him. He polished his apple on his fleece leggings as he waited for her question.

  She hesitated, wanting to admit to some of her anxiety without sounding too vulnerable. ‘Why haven’t we got a field assistant out here with us? Phil, or Rooker? Isn’t that more usual? I suppose I’m worried that I won’t be able to do everything I’m expected to, because it’s my first time.’

  She added this in case he might think that she was being critical.

  Richard weighed his apple in his hand. ‘It’s a fair question,’ he said after a moment. She broke her chocolate into squares, lined them up and put the first one into her mouth. Thick sweetness melted on her tongue.

  ‘It’s easier to provision a two-man camp. There’s less kit and food to transport. It also means we’re not taking out a man who would be just as useful, probably more useful, back on the base. But you are right.’ He sighed, then flicked her a glance as if he was wondering whether or not to level with her. ‘Those aren’t the real reasons. The truth is that I prefer it like this. Without extraneous people. You and I know what needs to be done and we can do it. It’s simpler. It’s peaceful. Isn’t it?’

  And it was. Out here, even the wind seemed less an aggressor and more a fourth dimension of the landscape itself.