by Rosie Thomas
She would have to be very careful.
‘I know. Richard, I…’ She was going to tell him that she liked him. Admired him, whatever it was. Fancied him, then. But it sounded too banal.
‘Yes. Yes,’ he said quickly, so as not to have to hear anything else.
He turned a little on one side and hunched his shoulder. Alice lay still, waiting for whatever would happen next. Almost at once she fell into an exhausted sleep.
In the morning she crawled out of the tent and found Richard already outside, testing the air. It was cold and completely still. And then, when she lifted her face she saw that the heavens were thick with sparkling motes. Tiny pinpoints of ice cascaded out of a clear sky and caught the sun as they spiralled downwards. It was celestial confetti and the beauty of it took her breath away.
Diamond dust, that was what Margaret had called it.
‘I’ll think of you, with diamond dust falling,’ she had said when they parted.
To think of Margaret, and home, was to open channels that Alice wasn’t ready to navigate yet. Instead, she stood with her face to the sky, soaking in the glamour of the day and the place. Her concerns shrank, she felt her whole being shrinking until she was no more than one of the points of ice, and the awareness of infinity comforted her.
The sound of Richard’s voice made her jump. ‘We’ll get a day’s work in. Bad weather’s coming,’ he called.
They ate porridge, pulled on their windproofs and began on the new section of the Bluff.
Alice remembered it, oddly, as a perfect day. She threw herself into her work, into the rock page of the history book. The reckoning of years by the hundred million soothed her and silenced her racing thoughts. In the middle of the afternoon, just as she was beginning to tire, Richard called her over. From a section of black mudstone, residue of the ocean that had once covered this spot, he had hammered out a fossilised mollusc, complete in every detail. He laid it in the cup made by her gloved hands.
‘I don’t know what this is. Look at the whorls, there. It’s a species I don’t recognise.’
His voice was hoarse with excitement. He looked like a small boy on his birthday.
His elation touched her, caught fire in her too. ‘It’s a good day.’ She smiled.
That night the wind started again. It was a different wind, which came at them with a roar, then rose to a howl of fury.
CHAPTER NINE
As far as Rooker was concerned, sometimes the place was claustrophobic while at others it could be almost companionable, but being there mostly just meant that you quietly did your work, you slept or rested or drank a little, and you let the days slide by.
Everyone on the base responded differently to living at Kandahar.
Antarctic life suited the easy-going Phil and Valentin, whereas the more highly strung Arturo and Niki were often moody. Jochen’s thick-skinned insistence got on other people’s nerves as well as Laure’s, and he was often the focus of criticism that he always ignored. Russell was too experienced an Antarctic hand to be anything but efficient and professional. Now, Rooker found, without Richard Shoesmith’s constant interfering presence life was even more straightforward. Doing things his own way, he unloaded materials from a pallet that had been brought ashore by ship at the beginning of the season and began to build the A-frame skidoo shelter on a rock foundation behind the base.
It was heavy work, but it wasn’t particularly difficult. Rooker went at it steadily. He called Phil or Russell over to help him when he needed a second pair of hands, but mostly he was alone. That was nothing new, but the empty brilliance of the air and the monochrome landscape provided fewer immediate distractions than he was used to. Or maybe the certainty that he would have to stay here meant that his mind wasn’t always working around the question of the next destination, like a tongue around a jagged tooth. Whatever the reason, thoughts and memories that he was adept at suppressing seemed to rise closer to the surface.
It wasn’t just that he thought about Henry Jerrold because Richard Shoesmith brought him to mind.
He even began to hear her voice in his head, as clearly as if she had crept up behind him.
Darling? Jimmy, darling, is that you?
Once he even whirled round, but all he found was Laure who had brought him an unnecessary mug of coffee.
Her smile glinted at him. ‘Won’t you have it before it goes cold?’
‘No. Thanks,’ he said. He turned back and swung the mallet to drive in icy wooden pegs.
At night he was tired enough to sleep.
One evening he was standing at the locker beside his bunk, folding clothes. He had flung them on the line in the generator hut and the shirts and trousers had stiffened into careless creases. His back was to the room and his head was full of voices that he was trying not to hear. Then someone put a hand on his shoulder.
He didn’t think about it. He just spun on his heel and pinned the guy back against the wall, fingers and thumbs splayed against his throat.
Phil’s alarmed eyes goggled at him. Russell had been lying on his bunk listening to his Walkman, but he levered himself upright now.
Rooker let his hands drop. ‘Christ. I’m sorry.’
Phil coughed and massaged his neck. ‘Remind me not to upset you. Did you think I was Shoesmith? How seriously is this place getting to you, boy?’ With his concern his Welsh accent grew stronger.
‘I didn’t. It isn’t. I was thinking about something else.’
Russell and Phil glanced at each other.
‘It can affect you. Isolation, confinement,’ Russell began.
‘It was just an automatic reaction, all right?’ Rooker snapped.
He put his half-folded clothes on the bunk and left the room. He closed the door as gently as he could, but a second later Phil followed him out into the main room. Niki and Valentin were in the radio room, talking to the Ukrainians on their base further up the peninsula. Everyone else appeared to have gone to bed.
‘Why are you so fucking angry? All the time? I’m just asking, you know,’ Phil said.
‘I said I was sorry.’
‘Yeah, you did. It doesn’t matter. But if you want to explain anything about why a simple tap on the shoulder makes you go for a man’s throat, you know, you can be my guest.’
Rooker would have liked a drink, but the bottles were where he and Phil usually stashed them, in the zipper bag under Phil’s bunk. To reach one he would have to confront Russell again, but maybe Phil would go for it.
‘Do you want a whisky?’
Phil hesitated, looking at Rooker as if he was trying to work something out. ‘No. Thanks all the same,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m just going to go to bed.’
Rooker stood still, staring at the crumbs on the oilcloth table cover and the grey smeared eye of the computer monitor on the desk by the wall. The sky outside the uncurtained windows was luminous dark-blue. A feeling of pressure that he recognised as sadness squeezed at his heart.
He put on his parka and went outside. The wind that met him was restless, turning in circles and raising eddies of snow. Rooker balled his fists and stuck them deep in his pockets. For no particular reason he walked around the perimeter of the hut. There were crates and empty gas cylinders stored against the walls. A skua shifted on its rock, staring at him without rotating its head. As he passed the window looking into the living area, Rooker saw the door of the women’s bunk room open, and Jochen came out. He looked red-faced and displeased. He had been making a try for Laure, Rook guessed, but he didn’t look as if he had got quite far enough. But if it now meant that Laure would stop following him around, Rooker was happy with that. He had shaken Edith off and he had no intention of replacing her.
He walked along the shoreline, wishing that he had a whisky flask with him. He passed the place where he had sat with the woman geologist, Alice Peel, and climbed over the outcrop that separated it from the little bay with the natural rock steps. As always, being in this tiny amphitheatre of rock and ice quiete
ned his mind. He sat down halfway up the flight of steps and watched the brash ice undulating with the waves.
Memory was a curse. Whenever you stopped moving, it came up on you like a fog. That was why he preferred cold places, where the wind assailed you if you hesitated for too long. Places like this, where to keep moving was to keep warm. To stay alive.
Jimmy, darling, is that you?
He closed the door carefully, because slamming it always made her headache worse. He found her lying on the daybed in front of the television. Her hair was yellow, the colour of pale straw, but the roots showing at the parting were as dark as his own.
‘How was school today?’
‘Okay.’
‘Give me a kiss, then.’
When he leaned over she smelled of bourbon and talcum powder and indoor sweat. It was a hot day, but she had the blinds drawn. She was watching a movie. Big faces filled the screen and then mouths kissing. The volume was turned right down, though. She didn’t ever listen to the words, just looked at the images. Words made her heart ache, she used to say. Jimmy Rooker thought that everything in her life made some part of her ache.
‘Do you want some tea?’ she asked, but she didn’t take her eyes off the kiss. It was a long one. He went through into the kitchenette and looked in the fridge. There was a carton of milk and some leftovers that had been sitting there for a couple of days. He put a finger into a dish of congealed gravy and tasted it, but it wasn’t improving. He ate a bowl of cornflakes instead.
When he had finished he washed his bowl and spoon, and put them on the draining board; then he made a cup of Nescafé with sugar, just how she liked it, and carried it through to her. The kissing had finished, at least.
‘You’re a good boy.’
‘Why don’t we go out for a bit? It’s a nice day. We could go for a walk.’
He imagined how it might be. They’d walk down the road and turn into Main Street, saying hello to people they met, then maybe they could cut down the side of Paulina’s Hair Parlour and take the path to the river.
‘I can’t, not now. Lester’s coming round.’
Jimmy didn’t say anything, but he thought it. Bloody, bloody Lester. He was always around, these days. Lester wore a mulberry-red silk scarf knotted round his neck and a belt with a buckle in the shape of a pair of hands shaking. He would flutter around her, telling her that she was beautiful but she should make more of herself, maybe a brighter lipstick, maybe a new hairstyle. He would lift the strands of straw hair in his ringed fingers and fluff them out, and their two faces poised one above the other would make identical pouting expressions in the mirror.
Jimmy knew that she was beautiful, but not in the way that Lester meant.
‘I’ll go and see if Gabby’s home then,’ he said.
‘Gabby? All right, darling. Don’t be late, will you?’ Her voice was vague.
With Gabby Macfarlane he went down to the ponds. Gabby was a thin, watchful boy who had moved down with his family from the North Island somewhere. He was a year older than Jimmy, but he was in the same class. They sat on the bank of the big pond, watching the fish rise. They seemed just to kiss the surface and ripples spread in perfect circles to mark the spot. Neither he nor Gabby had a fishing rod, so they threw stones at the ripples instead; then further along the bank they found a pile of concrete fence posts waiting to be dug in to replace some splintered wooden ones.
It took the two of them to lift one post and totter to the water’s edge with it, but when they swung it between them, then let go, it made a huge and satisfying splash. Soon, every post had sent up its oblong coronet of silver-khaki water. After that there was nothing much to do, so they wandered home again. Lester was sitting beside her on the sofa, drinking and giggling.
‘You are nothing but a troublemaker, Rooker,’ Brice, the headmaster, had told him. The farmer had been to the school, and Jimmy and Gabby had been hauled out of class.
Rooker nodded. It seemed easier, less of a battle all round, just to agree with him. ‘Yeah,’ he said.
It was too cold to sit any longer on the rock step. That was good. He jumped up and began walking, fast, because his nose and hands had gone numb. Keep moving, that was the idea.
In the morning, Phil came out to breakfast wearing a helmet and boxing gloves. He dodged and feinted around Rooker, who looked startled and then laughed. Rooker was glad that the little Welshman hadn’t taken against him after all.
Laure looked up from the book she was reading. ‘Is it one of your jokes, Philip?’
‘Nah, matter of life and death,’ Phil answered.
‘English sense of humour.’ Jochen sighed.
‘Welsh, if you don’t mind.’
Rooker blocked a punch. ‘Did you bring those with you, just in case?’
Phil shook his head. ‘Sullavan supplied them. Leisure activities. There’s ping-pong in one of them crates, as well.’
‘Is there now?’
Valentin stood at the window yawning and scratching himself. ‘You boys will always be arsing around. Meanwhile we have snowfall.’
Niki monitored the weather reports, his long, melancholy face clamped between the twin protuberances of his headset. Today the helicopter had been scheduled to come from Santa Ana, then fly on to Wheeler’s Bluff to pick up Richard and Alice. But the Chileans reported heavy snow and winds gusting up to fifty knots. There was no flying.
Out at the Bluff, Richard reported that he and Alice had been left tent-bound by the blizzard. Billows of snow were flying upwards, whirling like tornados. They had four days’ supply of food left and were rationing themselves in case they should be marooned for longer. At Kandahar itself the wind was less vicious, but Valentin was right. Snow had closed in again.
‘I think maybe Richard will be quite comfortable.’ Jochen grinned. ‘Especially since he has lost one tent.’
Laure looked prim.
Rooker and Phil devised a game. They took the ping-pong bats and ball out to the skidoo shelter and played a version of squash. The ball ricocheted around in the confined space as the bats smashed at it. Rooker was handicapped because he had to stoop, whereas Phil could more or less stand upright, but Rooker’s longer arms gave him a better reach. Shed squash caught on. Everyone joined in, even Laure and Arturo, and Valentin drew up a competition ladder. Without Richard, and with no outside work to be done, the industrious culture on the base rapidly broke up. People lounged around the mess table playing cards after dinner and there seemed little point in getting up early in the morning for another day of waiting. Into this relaxed atmosphere the e-mail from Sullavanco arrived like a reprimand.
Russell had been monitoring Richard’s work messages for him and on the fourth day of bad weather he read a communication from Beverley Winston. It announced that Lewis Sullavan planned to make a personal visit to Kandahar in the week before Christmas. He would be accompanied by one of his assistants – ‘probably myself’ – and a media crew. He would fly in to Santa Ana and be ferried down by helicopter. He planned to stay for two days, then travel on to New Zealand.
‘All the above arrangements are, of course, weather permitting,’ Beverley Winston concluded.
Russell flung himself back in his chair. ‘Jesus H. Christ,’ he groaned.
‘Trouble at home?’ Phil murmured.
‘Fifty thousand times worse than that, mate. Trouble at Kandahar.’
‘What?’ Phil read over his shoulder. ‘Oh, dearie me. Let’s have a look at the dates.’
He consulted a Sullavanco calendar that was pinned to the wall beside the terminal. No one at Kandahar ever knew the date or even what day it was. Life was governed by quite different principles.
‘It’s less than two weeks.’
Russell buried his head in his hands.
When he heard the news, Jochen threw his big head back and roared with laughter. ‘That’ll bring old Rich back from dallying in his tent with a pretty geologist, eh?’
Niki passed on the news in that even
ing’s radio schedule with the Bluff.
Richard’s voice fairly crackled out of the receiver in response. Just as soon as the weather eased enough to allow the helo to take off, he would be back and preparations would be put in hand. In the meantime he would speak to Russell.
Russell came back from the radio room with a long list of instructions. ‘You’d think it was Queen Liz herself coming to stay.’ He sighed.
Valentin and Arturo were the finalists in the shed squash tournament. Rook’s height had told against him in the end, and Phil had been beaten by Arturo’s combination of cunning and agility. Everyone crowded round the shed during a lull in the wind, listening to the metallic plang-kerplang of the ball hitting the aluminium sheeting of the interior, and taking it in turns to peer in through the crack in the door. Laure jumped up and down like a cheerleader, shouting their names in turn. Then a fierce rally ended in a meaty slap and a howl of agony from Arturo. A second later he lurched out of the shed door with his hands cupping his nose and blood dripping down his chin. He was yelling in Spanish.
Valentin burst out in his wake. ‘He got his silly head in the way. Bat smack in face.’
Jochen took Arturo’s wrists and dragged the hands from his face. Arturo shouted louder as snow and wind drove into the crushedstrawberry remains of his nose.
‘Uh-oh,’ Jochen muttered. He took him by the arm and propelled him inside.
Valentin and the others followed. Valentin shrugged his shoulders up to his ears and spread his shovel-sized hands. ‘I didn’t mean to hit him. Little maricón.’
Of course not, Phil and Rooker agreed. It could have happened to anyone.
‘Shed squash. It’s a man’s game and a man must take risks,’ Phil said solemnly.
In the hut, Jochen had Arturo in a chair with his head back. He shone a torch up each pulpy nostril and into Arturo’s eyes while Laure laid out dressings and syringes.