by Rosie Thomas
Rooker’s hand shot out and clamped round her wrist. His grip was like a steel band and it hurt when she tried to shake it off. ‘Don’t be a fucking idiot.’
‘Let go, Rook. I’m going to work.’
He glared at her, then gave a sharp hiss of exasperation. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve got less sense than I gave you credit for.’
He let go and turned away, and she was surprised by how uncomfortable it felt to have disappointed him.
‘I’m not coming with you. I’ll stay here with the radio.’ He tossed a hand-held radio to each of them. ‘Call in every thirty minutes without fail. If I don’t hear from you twice in every hour I’ll know you’re dead, and I’ll pack up and get back to base.’
‘I will make a note in the log of your refusal to accompany us,’ Richard said.
‘For Chrissake, Shoesmith, this isn’t 1913. Write whatever you like in your fucking logbook. I’d do it before heading out into that blizzard, though, because you might not get the chance to do it later.’
To Alice, as they were ready to leave, he murmured, ‘You really don’t have to go.’
‘I know I don’t have to. I’m making a choice.’ She hastily pulled on her fleece hood as she spoke, and he untwisted it for her so that the face opening fitted snugly over her eyes and nose.
She crawled in Richard’s wake out into the snow.
It was like her first day in Antarctica all over again. Snow worked its way behind her goggles and into her hood, and for a few seconds she was sure that the air was too thick with it and too cold to breathe, and she would suffocate. She half walked and half stumbled into the whiteness, her stinging eyes glued to Richard’s back. Don’t stop moving. Don’t lose sight of him.
As soon as they were underway she knew that it had been a mistake to leave camp.
The skidoo seemed to be suspended in a dense white vacuum in which up and down were meaningless. She knew that they must be moving forward because the engine was engaged and the tracks were turning, but there was no way to tell. There was no view ahead, no landmark to steer by, only blankness. It was utterly disorientating. Richard was navigating by compass bearing. They were crossing the glacier towards the Bluff, moving parallel to the crevasses that had become familiar in the last few days, but ahead and to the side there was only the unbroken wall of blowing snow. She gave up the attempt to see what was coming and ducked her head instead. At any moment they might plunge sickeningly into a cleft in the ice. She had seen it happen to Lewis on a clear sunny day. She tried to hold herself in readiness for the jolt and then the terrible drop.
Instead, the skidoo engine stopped and the wind hit her full on again as Richard climbed off. Ahead, so close that the invisible crest threatened to topple on them, the black contours of the Bluff were just visible through the blizzard clouds. Without waiting to take stock, Richard was immediately plodding across to the rock. With his hood up and his head bent he looked like a robot. Alice battled grimly in his wake.
They attempted to work, although it was clear from the outset that there was almost no point. The wind was so strong that it tore the pages of their notebooks and threatened to snatch instruments out of their hands. It was impossible to talk, only to shriek above the gusts, and it was too cold to take off mittens or goggles for even a few seconds at a time. Richard pressed himself against the snow-plastered rocks and began sweeping them bare with his parka sleeve. As soon as a patch of fossil-bearing rock was exposed the snow obliterated it again, but he pressed closer still, trying to shelter the section with his body. He chipped at the rock with his hammer. There was no hope of labelling a sample bag, even of holding on to it for long enough to seal up the specimen. He dropped the chunks of rock loose into the pocket of his parka.
Alice watched in dismay, anxiety swelling in her chest.
After thirty minutes she was frozen. Her cheeks had lost all feeling and the skin of her lips was welded to the ice building up in the layers of fleece and Gore-tex covering her mouth. Her hands and feet were numb. With infinite difficulty she extracted the radio from her inner pocket and tried to huddle in on herself to call Rooker. Her lips tore painfully as she tried to speak.
‘I read you. Over.’ His voice was steady.
‘We’re trying to work. Visibility nil, conditions deteriorating. Over.’
‘Are you coming in?’
‘I’ll try to make him.’
She tottered the few steps to Richard and thumped him on the back. He half turned, startled and then impatient. Alice waved her arms, signalling enough and let’s go back. Sharply he shook his head, then held his splayed hands up at her to signal ten more minutes. She knew what he was thinking. Against all the odds, these might be the crucial minutes. This minute, or the next one, he might make the great find.
She hunkered in beside him, counting the time away. Once, she looked back over her shoulder. The skidoo was gone, or rather it had turned into a rough snowy hump indistinguishable from a dozen other lumps of rock.
He had had long enough now. She grabbed his shoulder, pulling him away from the rock face. Okay, he signalled. Wait. Alice knew that she was beginning to panic. She slowed her breathing and made herself watch as he took out the compass to get the reverse bearing for their journey back to the camp. His head bent and his shoulders hunched while the wind assaulted him. Then he dropped the compass.
In an eye-blink the instrument hit the ground beside his boot, hung for a second in the ruff of soft snow mounded around his tracks, then toppled again and began to slide. It gathered speed, skidding faster, out of sight down the small slope to the glacier. They were so cold that they hardly moved. There was no point in plunging after it. It was gone for good.
Two things, Alice thought, her numb brain slowly working. GPS reading, get their exact position. Then call Rooker. Rooker had the back-up compass.
The GPS unit was in her inner left pocket, on the opposite side from the radio, against her body where it would be warmest. Richard was close beside her. The red of his parka dully vibrated against the rest of the white world. He saw what she was doing and tried to take the unit out of her hand, but she gripped it hard and punched the buttons. There were seconds to wait while the system searched the skies for satellite signals from which to take the coordinates. She stared at the little screen through veils of snow.
Instead of the reassuring digits of a reading, a neon-green message flashed at her. Weak signal. It meant that the positions of the navigational satellites inexorably wheeling over the continent were not in their favour. The little unit could not currently get a fix accurate enough to pinpoint their position.
She stared upwards, as if she could see into the skies and will the satellites into place. But there was nothing except the wind, driving loose snow in ever-increasing gusts. Nothing to see. In zero visibility and without a compass the 600 yards back to camp might as well be 600 miles. She turned to Richard. She could hardly see his face, but his expression seemed oddly clear. There was resignation in it and there was also a kind of wild satisfaction. This was meant to be. This was destiny.
She could even hear his voice, as if the wind transmitted his thoughts straight into her head. Here I am. I’m ready.
Her own consciousness bawled an answer. I don’t have a death wish, even if you do. My destiny’s different from yours. I am my mother’s daughter. I will be a mother myself. Nothing will stop me.
Richard’s arm was pulling at her. She thought he wanted her to sink down in the snow with him. Violently, she shook herself free. If the GPS presently failed her it would function soon. In the meantime there was the radio.
‘Rook? Rooker, do you copy? Please, do you copy?’
‘Alice. Report please. Over.’
She blurted out what had happened.
‘Listen to me. Don’t move. Take what shelter you can against the rocks. Huddle together. Monitor the GPS. I’m coming to get you. Over.’
‘Thanks.’
I’m coming to get you. The simplest wor
ds, Alice thought, but lovelier than the most beautiful poem ever written.
Richard had moved two steps away. He was leaning forward with his forehead against the Bluff wall, his arms spread out as if to gather it up. She hauled at him, pulling him down into an angle between rock and slope. There was a tiny diminution of the wind here. She drew him closer and he responded by putting his arms round her. They half lay and half crouched, in a parody of an embrace.
She didn’t know how much time passed. Time and her heartbeat slowed together, but she could feel the baby kicking against her stomach wall. It was always wide awake at this time of day.
Then she became aware of a noise that wasn’t the wind. It was whistling and the banging of metal on metal. It came and went with the gusts of wind and driven snow, but it was coming closer. She pushed Richard away and struggled to her feet.
‘Here!’ she yelled. ‘Rook-er. Rook-er. Here!’
There was a red blur, just visible through a momentary lull in the blizzard. The whistling was a sharp high note and the banging oddly reminded her of Kandahar, with all the associations of safety that went with it. Alice ran forward to where she had just glimpsed the red parka, but there was nothing – only snow and wind, and now the whistling seemed to come from an entirely different direction. Disorientation made her dizzy.
Then the clanging was beside her, right at her shoulder. She whirled round and saw Rook. He had a whistle between his teeth and he was banging two metal saucepans together. The Kandahar meal signal. Alice remembered now that Captain Scott and Shoesmith and the others had gone out from Hut Point to search for one of their team-mates lost in a blizzard, and had used just the same means of making a loud noise. If Richard was also recalling this he gave no sign of it. Dazedly he pulled himself upright and looked around as if he didn’t recognise his surroundings.
Rooker uncoiled a rope and secured the three of them. They shuffled forward in a line, like old men defeated by the fury of the weather. Ten steps brought them to a mound of snow and a few minutes’ frenzied digging uncovered the skidoo.
Half an hour later Alice was crawling into her sleeping bag. Her teeth were chattering and she shivered as if her bones were going to crack. Rooker poured boiling water on to instant soup mix and handed her the steaming mug, then passed a second mug to Richard.
Richard had barely spoken and nor had Rooker, except to give terse instructions. But from being mute and apparently shocked Richard was regaining his composure. ‘That was well done,’ he told Rook now.
‘I can’t say the same for you.’
‘I do my job, which is to lead this scientific expedition and to make the necessary decisions. Your job is to provide transport and safety back-up. Which you did very competently today. Thank you.’
Richard was trying hard to be generous in the face of his own discomfort, but Rooker wouldn’t see it that way. He was no diplomatist. ‘You went out in appalling conditions and then you dropped the bloody compass. You could have died out there, which is up to you, but you were risking the life of another team member as well as your own…’ He spat out the words.
‘I went of my own accord,’ Alice interrupted.
Rooker glared at her. ‘And you are a fool.’
She held his gaze. ‘I know that. Thank you for coming to the rescue.’
‘That’s enough, Rooker,’ Richard snapped. He drained his mug and put it aside. Food didn’t stay hot for long in the iced-up tent. ‘I’m going to radio Kandahar now for an up-to-date forecast and then make a plan of action for the next few days.’
After he had gone to the other tent Rooker scoffed, ‘A plan? To cancel the blizzard and call in the helicopter to ferry us comfortably home? But not until he’s found the crucial dead snail that’ll win him the Nobel Prize, I suppose.’
Now Alice was shivering with delayed shock rather than cold. They were safe for the time being and she didn’t have to go out into the blizzard again, that was all that mattered. She had no energy or appetite for bickering with Rook, or with Richard either. She huddled up silently with her head on a pile of damp clothing. Rook glanced at her, then put his warm hand inside the mouth of her sleeping bag to feel the temperature of her neck. With his other hand he stroked back her hair. Then he pulled the bedding close around her and lifted her up so that he could put his own hat on her head.
‘You’ll warm up soon, then you can go to sleep. None of us is going anywhere for a couple of days, whatever Shoesmith’s goddamn plan may be.’
Alice smiled vaguely. Drowsiness was already enveloping her.
The storm continued for two and a half days.
Alice slept for at least half the time, finished the biography of Samuel Pepys that she had brought from base, then devoured a thriller that Rooker lent her. Richard had become even more withdrawn. He spent most of the time in his own tent, reading or writing notes, so she and Rooker were thrown together. He lay opposite her, impassively studying the roof of the tent or propping himself on one elbow to listen while she talked. He was a good listener, Alice discovered. She told him about Oxford, and Trevor and Margaret. She described Pete and Desiderata, and Rooker laughed at the sound of the sculpture. She promised to show him the Polaroid picture of it when they got back to Kandahar.
‘If we ever get back.’ She sighed. The hated wind was so familiar that it had become part of her, like chronic pain.
‘We’ll get back,’ he said easily.
‘I can’t go on doing all the talking,’ she said suddenly. ‘I don’t know anything about you.’
There was a cold moment when she knew that he was going to snap at her and retreat behind the shutters. But instead he said awkwardly, ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Where did you grow up?’ she asked, startled into banality.
He told her that when he was a small boy he had emigrated with his parents from England to New Zealand. His mother had come from a landowning family in Northumberland, and his father had been an actor and a singer. He had left his wife and son not long after they had settled, and neither of them had seen him again. His mother had died about seven years later, Rook added abruptly.
‘Then what happened?’
He had been sent back to England, to live with his mother’s brother and his wife. A childless couple, who didn’t like children very much.
‘That must have been hard.’
‘It was.’ His tone and his expression indicated that he didn’t want any more questions.
Rooker lay on his back. The tent inner wheezed and strained under the assault of the wind. He laughed shortly. ‘Do you know what? Everything that Richard Shoesmith says and does reminds me of Uncle Henry Jerrold.’
‘I see,’ Alice said. She didn’t really, but it was at least a partial explanation for Rook’s animosity.
On the evening of the third day the wind died away. They crept out of the tents and saw the sky clearing of ragged pewter-grey clouds. A stillness descended on the snow-blown expanse of the glacier and over the black teeth of Wheeler’s Bluff. Niki reported from Kandahar that the helicopter pilots hoped to reach them tomorrow.
Twenty-four hours later the Squirrel buzzed down towards the familiar contours of the bay. The landscape looked less familiar now because solid sea ice had formed in the deep U-shape of water that sheltered the base and the big berg was frozen in the centre of it. As she looked down through the Plexiglas bubble in the nose of the helicopter and saw the tiny carmine-red huts and the scribble of poles and antennae enclosing them, Alice felt almost drunk with relief and exhilaration. Luck was still with her. She had risked another expedition to the Bluff and survived with her secret intact.
As Kandahar came closer she thought that it looked more than ever like home.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
By the end of February the bay was solid with ice, a full month earlier than the year before.
Down here there’s no such thing as normal, Arturo had said. An average season is a meaningless concept in Antarctica, where unpredictabi
lity is the only constant. But even so, contradicting themselves, the old hands agreed that this was an unusual summer.
Blizzards alternated with days of eerie calm when not even a breeze stirred the EU flag on its pole. The sun sank lower over the glaciers and the skies flared with lurid refractions of multiplying suns and rainbows. Every day these light shows were brutally extinguished by flooding darkness that grew longer and colder with each successive night. Cold stalked the Kandahar people whenever they left the fragile shelter of the huts. When a gale blew it scoured tears from their eyes, which then froze and glued their eyelids and lashes together. Winter was opening its jaws wider as the sun deserted them.
The bay had frozen almost overnight. The loose chunks and shreds of bergs welded together and thick ice mounted between them in solid wave forms. The stranded berg was now just a bigger ziggurat that tilted out of a plateau of similar spikes and shards, all trapped until the next spring’s thaw would set them free again. For the Kandahar people it was a morning’s scramble over the uneven meringue-white glinting ice to reach the berg and to be able to touch its cobalt-blue innards. Richard and Russell went out one morning with Phil and Rooker to assess the state of the bay and its accessibility to the relief ship. For something to do, Alice accompanied them.
The berg ice was fluted with dozens of vertical rills where bubbles of trapped air had escaped and in rising to the surface had precisely chiselled the ice to resemble cathedral pillars. She stood with her mitten resting against the grooves of one pillar as she gazed into the berg’s hollow heart. The voices calling out around her sounded small and reedy, as if at any moment a great blanket of silence might descend and muffle them all for ever.
The men could only agree on what was already obvious: there was no question that the bay wouldn’t thaw again before next spring. The ship wouldn’t be able to enter the bay when it returned in the middle of March; it would take an ice breaker to achieve that. They were faced with a choice of making their way out on foot, over the sea ice to open water, or of bringing in the helicopter to ferry them and their belongings to the ship’s side.