The Ice

by Laline Paull

  ‘We don’t need them.’ Sean looked at him. ‘From now on, we can do our own expeditions. I bet Kingsmith’ll fund us.’

  ‘Fine. But let’s come back alive from this one first.’

  They decided to make a circular route of their own, and as they sledged and switched over, and as Sean ran with the sled and leapt on, and the pure clean wind rushed over his face, and the jingle of the dogs’ traces made music, he thanked Joe Kingsmith with all his heart for this chance.

  And then finally we were back on our own glacier, and far below lay our own fjord and the dots that were Thule and home – the spot we had been longing for during the endless, tedious months.

  We called a halt and waited for Uvdloriark to explore the crevasses between us and home, and while I sat there Knud walked over to me and gave me his hand.

  ‘Many times during the summer,’ he said, ‘I didn’t believe we could go on. But now that we have completed such an expedition together, we ought never to be apart again. Wherever we go in the whole world, we must always stick together.’

  I have heard many speeches in my life, most of them stupid libels on friendship and loyalty at banquets or meetings, but there on the glacier Knud dared put into a simple declaration exactly what he felt. I replied in kind. It is seldom men have the courage to do what they want to do and say what they really think, especially to other men. But Knud said these things, and I never forgot those words while he lived, and I shall never forget them so long as I live.

  Arctic Adventure: My Life in the Frozen North (1936)

  Peter Freuchen

  27

  On Tuesday morning, like a general achieving the ridge before the opposition mustered below, Sean was the first in court. He’d slipped out of the White Bear early and walked the city walls, then gone to a chain café in the town. Its soothing weekday hustle calmed his racing mind. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday: Over.

  He felt the brisk heavy tread on the floorboards and caught the aroma of a Cohiba Siglo VI before his lawyer was upon him, ebulliently well-rested and thumping down into his seat with a cheerful grin. Then came Mrs Osman, looking as if she might have slept in her black suit, and today allowing her two young aides to pull the document cases for her. They had the air of monks from some martial sect. She returned her counterpart’s greeting pleasantly enough.

  ‘So showy,’ Sawbridge murmured after they had passed. ‘But makes the family feel cared for. Done it myself.’ And then he allowed Sean quiet reflection, before the ordeal to come.

  Sean kept his eyes from any one face, and his testimony simple.

  They were in the cave. The cave had collapsed. Tom was on one side, he was on the other. Tom tried to get back across but slipped and fell into a crevasse.

  ‘It was completely black, except for my head torch. But I crawled to the edge, and there was nothing. My beam went about twenty feet, and I could see the sides where the ice had broken apart. It was very deep, and then my beam wouldn’t reach any further. I couldn’t see Tom’s head torch. It was just black. I called out, I called to him. But there was nothing. I was frightened. I thought I was going to die too. But I pulled myself back and I felt my way along, trying to get up to where I thought the opening was. I was terrified I would slip into the crevasse as well. I didn’t know how long the torch would last. I couldn’t hear anything and I didn’t know if the others had got out in time. Everything had fallen and crashed, the whole cave had collapsed, there were bars and huge chunks of ice everywhere and I had to crawl. I just kept trying to move up and find the tunnel. I can’t remember clearly after that.’

  Sean is on his belly, he can hardly breathe but he knows oxygen is vital so he forces himself to control his gasping. The beam of his head torch picks up a jumbled plane of surfaces, matt and shiny, white, grey, blue, transparent. His mind and body are throbbing, he can’t tell if he’s injured, if he’s bleeding and that’s the pumping feeling – but he knows he has to move or die.

  He hauls himself forward on his elbows, a huge weight of ice dragging on his right leg. He hauls through and keeps going. Too much vapour – overspending – slow the breath or suffocate. Slower … can’t call to Tom because no shouting, no disturbing vibration, he remembers that too – burning feeling on his face – takes his forehead off the ice, do not stop! Keep moving up, keep forcing forward – get help – buried alive if he stops, then they’re both dead. In training: under an hour to survive before hypothermia or asphyxiation or both set in. The torch beam is still steady, but batteries don’t last forever. Find a gap, keep moving, stay calm.

  There: a black triangle in the jumbled plane of ice. He might be imagining it or there might be air movement, he closes his eyes to feel it better.

  Tom.

  He calls it, but in his mind not with his voice and lungs. It’s death if he stays and it might be death to try, but he worms forward on his elbows into the black hole until his helmet jars and stops him, so he has to try to take it off, fumble the strap and clip – he uses his teeth to pull off his glove – and push the helmet aside. It drags hard and painful on his ear and scalp, but he pushes on, feeling it scrape deep into his back as he forces forward into that hole where there is different air—

  —like an animal, he can taste it, taste air, because his rational brain has gone. In his panic, he forgot his torch was on his helmet and now there is only dark and cold and the pressure of the ice around him, death touching him on all sides, but like a blind worm he does not stop, he uses his bare head as a ram when he has to because pain is a sharp tool and even a parasite has the will to live and this is what he now is, some ancient ice parasite working its way through the ice-giant’s gut—

  That thought fires him with rage and powers his boots against the great bastard’s intestinal wall; he will get himself out through the mouth or the eye or the arse or the skin – he makes himself a great pulsing worm for the rhythm to keep moving, writhing, the friction melting just enough space to give him passage—

  Sean’s will powers him on, hauling and forcing this length of meat and bone and cartilage through the tight hard spaces, even though the ungainly weight is too much and he only wants to rest – but thought of failure whips him on and gets that sack of meat thrashing its legs and almost vomiting with the effort—

  He shoots forward into black air – and a wall of ice slams him from underneath.

  TOM – the name does not stir his lungs or tongue but drops down instead into a hole in his mind and vanishes.

  In the blackness, Sean’s mind moves, then his body. He is not dead. He feels space around him. He fell.

  ‘Tom!’ This time the sound comes out. He hears the acoustic bounce. He calls again in different directions. In the blackness, one side is solid, but the sound quality changes to the other. He crawls forward, blind but sensitised—

  Tom, Tom, Tom—

  In the blackness like a drum beat, reaching forward using Tom’s name for echo-location, he feels a drift of air ahead. The ice beneath is starting to dip down. He slips and grabs but there’s nothing to hang on to, steeper and faster – then a gasp as something blocks his hurtling force. Impact but not pain. His mouth full of soft snow. He struggles out into a howling black snowstorm.

  Sean turned to the coroner.

  ‘I was so lucky. Somehow I got into another part of the cave system and was able to get out. The rest of it is all in the Sunday Times interview I did afterwards, that Mr Sawbridge submitted.’

  ‘I know, Mr Cawson, and thank you. But as I am not a Sunday Times reader, I missed it three years ago, so what you say is fresh to me. I did see you had included it, but I chose to wait to hear your own account live, rather than an edited version. Though of course we all edit our memories, it is unavoidable.’

  Sawbridge did his push-up move on the chair in front. ‘Your Honour, it sounds as if you’re suggesting—’

  ‘That memories are subjective; indeed I am, Mr Sawbridge. Mr Cawson, can you continue?’

  Sean nodded. To his
surprise, he saw Martine’s face, a pale beacon in the spot beside Sawbridge. He had not registered her arrival.

  ‘I knew we’d gone in at midday, an hour after the eclipse. At that time of year, the light’s almost gone by about three, and when I – when I came out into the drift, it was dark. So it could have been three, or ten – I had no idea. I couldn’t see any lights, I couldn’t hear anything over the wind. The weather had totally changed. All I could think was that I couldn’t be on the ice cap because I’d fallen, but I couldn’t see the mountains. I didn’t know what to do except get back into the tunnel, because at least that would provide shelter, but I couldn’t find it.’

  The wind is a devil screaming in his ears, trying to kill him with the sound. With numb hands, Sean struggles to tighten all his toggles: jacket hem, sleeves, hood, trousers. No Tom. No skidoo, no survival suit. He is going to freeze to death on the Midgard glacier, or a bear will get him – that thought sparks his vision fractionally keener, searching for a different movement in the snow. The pumping fist of muscle in his chest goads him on. Shelter or death.

  A wind of a thousand fists screams him off his feet and he’s face down again, pummelled and kicked every time he tries to stand. A tiny part of his brain understands he’s facing down the slope – the blows spin him but most seem to come from behind – it’s coming down the mountain. His brain clings to that information, it’s important – yes! Because katabatic wind comes off the land towards the sea. The wind will drive him down to the fjord, to take his chances with the bears.

  The wind has another idea. It lifts him up and hurls him about like a ragdoll thrown in a tantrum. Sean stumbles and falls until he can’t get up any more. The wind shrieks in triumph and he knows exactly what is happening, but it’s really not so bad at all. Because he’s stopped struggling, his mind unclenches and he lets it wander. He feels as safe and comfortable as if he were in an igloo, like the Inuit made so cleverly.

  Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen learned the skill. The best of friends, like him and Tom. Rasmussen and Freuchen, Cawson and Harding, the four of them in sealskin anoraqs, they would build one in no time.

  We don’t need to make it big, not everything has to be big to be good, Sean, we’ll just do what we can – get up, you lazy bugger.

  Sean turns his face to Tom’s voice, the effort coming from a thousand miles away. Tom is right there beside him in the snow, showing off how he can dig with his bare hands. He grins as Sean copies him, but much, much slower. They keep going, they’re getting there, they’ve made a hole in the snow – or rather uncovered one, and Sean gets into its smooth curved sides and curls into the foetal position, out of the howling wind and punching fists. And somewhere on the slopes of Midgardbreen, beneath the ice cap of Midgardfonna in the archipelago of Svalbard, two men lie lost beneath the ice, one deep, one shallow.

  ‘It was a miracle I survived. I don’t remember being found, just waking in the Sickehaus the next day. I only know I gave statements because I was told. But I don’t remember.’ Sean clamped his right hand under his armpit and felt it moisten. He became aware of his shirt sticking to his back, and the adrenal sweat smell that rose from him.

  ‘All I know is that cave fell in on us and Tom slipped down. Somehow I got out. Inspector Brovang found me.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Cawson.’ Mrs Osman adjusted her ill-fitting jacket. ‘Thank you for revisiting that … ordeal … for us. My questions are less to do with the fact of your survival, and more to do with how Tom was not so … lucky.’

  Sean nodded respectfully. Here it came.

  ‘We will later be hearing from an expert witness … a glaciologist … that the structures of ice-caves, wherever they are found, can never be relied upon for stability. But that you had every reason to think that this one … on Midgardbreen … was safe enough to venture with your partners.’

  ‘I did. Yes. And so did Danny Long and Terry Bjornsen, both of whom have masses of polar experience and live there year-round.’

  ‘Yes. I did note that. So a gap opened up in the … floor? Of the cave known as the Great Hall. Is that correct? How wide was it? Could you describe it? I am trying to get a sense of the danger.’

  Sean stared at her a moment.

  ‘It was very hard to see. Everything under our feet had shifted. There was water, it made everything slippery, or Tom could have jumped it.’

  ‘It sounds very frightening.’ Mrs Osman frowned down at her open file. She shook her head and used both hands to lift the mass of papers, bristling with Post-it notes. ‘I’m sorry, a moment …’

  Sawbridge’s deep audible sigh signalled his opinion of her competence. The coroner tapped his pencil.

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry, here we are …’ Mrs Osman looked up again. ‘How would you characterise your relationship with Mr Harding?’

  ‘We were friends from college. From 1988 to Tom’s death. Three decades.’

  Mrs Osman inclined her head encouragingly.

  ‘Would you say it was a stable and constant friendship?’

  ‘Very much so.’ Sean felt a tremor as he said it.

  ‘Though it was not without its … gaps. Was it?’ She looked down and turned a page. ‘Because when I looked at your written statement delivered to my chambers, and also to the coroner … apart from finding it very helpful – for which I thank you and Mr Sawbridge for the foresight – I did wonder … If there was a time when you might not have been … so close. A gap of maybe seven or eight years, during which time you had no contact with Mr Harding.’ She studied her file again. ‘Until you resumed contact, and shortly afterwards, Mr Harding came on board with your consortium, the – Fairlight Group. That you used to make your purchase bid, for Midgard Lodge. Registered in Jersey.’

  ‘Might I ask my learned colleague where exactly she’s going with this?’ Sawbridge tipped his head to the side and smiled. Mrs Osman ignored him.

  ‘I ask because it looked to me as if a … gap … might indeed have opened up between you. And I wondered why.’

  Sean interlaced his fingers and took a deep breath, the way he had read could work as a stress management technique. He wanted to yell at Osman to say what she wanted, not lay traps – but that would alienate the room.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘We didn’t exactly fall out, but there was a serious difference of opinion. Political not personal, but there was fallout.’

  It was a Sunday in February. Tom had come for lunch and to discuss his latest breakup with Ruth Mott. Sean was of the opinion he was better off without her, but Gail thought he should propose and be done with it, then they would both know where they stood, and commitment could carry them through the difficult bits.

  Somehow the conversation had strayed into the minefield of what shape that could take, between a man and a woman, and having recently strenuously denied his latest philandering, Sean felt increasingly under attack. Thinking to save him, and simultaneously drawing a picture with Rosie, Tom had changed the subject to next Saturday’s march in London, to protest the imminent invasion of Iraq.

  ‘I can’t,’ was Sean’s immediate reaction. ‘I’ve got a meeting.’

  ‘On a Saturday?’

  ‘Sean’s a workaholic now.’

  Sean heard the sadness in his wife’s voice, and the guilt made him angry.

  ‘Yes, on a Saturday. It’s the only day everyone can do it.’

  Tom added a shark to Rosie’s picture, and she nodded seriously, approving it.

  ‘Sean, you’ve got a profile. People would take notice if you joined in. There is absolutely no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, this will be an illegal invasion.’

  ‘But if there are—’

  ‘IF! But so far, there aren’t! Tell me one good reason we should go ahead.’

  ‘I’ll tell you a reason it will happen,’ Sean said. ‘I’m not saying it’s a good one, but it’s the truth. This invasion is going to happen whether you march or not, because it is in the interest of the global economy to en
d the uncertainty.’

  Tom and Gail stared at him. Then Tom laughed. ‘I’m sorry; for a moment there I thought you said—’

  ‘Yeah I did.’ Sean felt suddenly quite drunk. ‘It’s very simple. The banks want war. So that’s what’s going to happen.’ He looked at Rosie’s picture. ‘That’s brilliant.’

  ‘It’s completely immoral!’ Gail cried.

  ‘It’s a shark.’ Rosie was upset by the atmosphere.

  ‘I didn’t say it was right, I said it was what was going to happen.’ Sean felt the cat rubbing his ankle, as it did when it detected stress in the family. He took the picture from Rosie. ‘A very scary shark! But listen to me, marching will not make a blind bit of difference. The money’s decided. That’s how it goes.’ He gave the picture back to Rosie, hating how Tom was looking at him.

  ‘I cannot believe I’m hearing you talk like this.’

  ‘It’s economic realpolitik.’

  ‘Sean it’s disgusting, it can’t be true—’ Gail looked like she was going to cry, and Rosie actually started.

  ‘For god’s sake I’m not saying I want war’ – Sean took a huge slug of wine to control his own anxiety – ‘but the banks hate uncertainty, everything is on slow, people’s livelihoods are going to suffer it if goes on much longer.’

  ‘More people are going to die very soon if it doesn’t! You’re going to sit back and do nothing?’ Tom covered his glass against a refill, and Sean thumped the bottle down.

  ‘Tom, don’t talk to me like I’m responsible for all this and you’re trying to save everyone – you know you’ve been a bit too sanctimonious for a bit too long.’

  Tom got up. He folded his napkin, kissed Gail, and turned to Sean.

  ‘Thank you for your hospitality.’ He bent down and kissed Rosie. ‘Oh please don’t tear it up, it’s such a good drawing.’

  ‘You see how you’ve upset everyone?’ Sean stood up. ‘You can’t go, you can’t bloody well drive! I’m just telling it like it is!’