by Jean McNeil
3
On the ship I decided to keep a diary, but found I could only write about the weather:
December 5th, 2016. We have been at sea now for three days.
Lead sky polished by sunbeams. Tobacco undersides of icebergs, stained with brown algae. Toothpaste mints: greens, blues. Sallow oyster sky on overcast days. Sky and sea, sky and sea, and the ice a mirror between them.
On our journey to the Antarctic, every day everything changed: the light, the sea, the birds who accompanied the ship, ecstatic to be given a free supper from the krill churned in our wake.
The forgetting started there, on the ship. The mind intent on avoiding pain is shy, elusive; one of those small slinking animals. Anything might set it off – the sight of a plum, a candle, skin of the same hue. A cold finger on my wrist, where my husband used to touch me, to get my attention. Not a loving gesture, more a controlling one – I never realised that at the time. Perhaps these memories wait for us, until we are in some careless endgame stage, and we can plunge into them again and again, as into a warm swimming pool, in the time before we die.
What is the direction of the flow of memory? From the heart to the mind, or the other way around? The ice rivers here flow in a one-way system: from the interior plateau to the sea, downward, funnelled between rocks, called ‘runs’. It is these ice rivers that are pumping out the majority of icebergs excreted by the Antarctic and Greenland.
Psychologists say that memory is born only when an experience is definitively past. But it might work differently in the Antarctic; the lack of new input, the isolation and the unchanging society combine to create the impression of stalled time. Because time never ends, nothing is ever past, and memories do not form. They have to be constructed afterwards through a laborious process of isolating pieces of time. To remember is like visiting a ruin. Jungle palaces, strangled by vines; there we are only tourists in our pasts.
On the ship I realised I no longer thought of the way Eric walked, the flowers he liked, the spot on my throat where he used to kiss me. Other memories, more delicate and dangerous, which my mind avoided as if they had suddenly been furnished with spikes, also vanished.
If memories begin when experience is definitively over, then when does the forgetting start? Only when we are dead, I suspect. I had died there in London, with Eric, and so there was no more memory or thinking or forgetting to do. For years, I felt like a stone. I thought: I can take anything they (I didn’t know who I thought these ‘they’ were) throw at me, now, because I am no longer human, I am only part of the landscape. Of the money problems, the weather, what was happening in the world I thought – but this is ordinary unhappiness, we’re built to take this. This isn’t really a country to be happy in, anyway. When has England ever been a place to be happy?
I had choices in those years: I could have become austere, I could have been thwarted. Bitterness would gouge my edges like rust. I waited for a choice which did not taste like cold steel in my mouth. Life became an anteroom, somewhere I hung out after the fact, because I had allowed myself to be betrayed, and stupid people worthy of betrayal belonged in waiting lounges, while others flew to throbbing foreign cities. Then, when I was firmly ensconced in this blue room I would argue the other side: everybody’s been betrayed. So what? People are completely unreliable, every story you’ve ever done, every war you’ve ever covered, has been about that. Did you think you were above ordinary sexual betrayal?
For a long time, maybe a year, I had difficulty sleeping, difficulty letting go. Partly because these silent arguments between myself and myself, this civil war between two internal factions I hadn’t known existed, refused to be silenced. Partly I couldn’t sleep because it mimicked death, consciousness closing down, the slipping away, followed by a blow, monumental and instant, then a darkness.
I remember turning off the old analogue televisions. Now, with digital, they just snap on and off. Before, the screen never extinguished itself instantly, but remained for a moment, burning – a small white light, nearly invisible, in the middle of the screen. A reluctance, a last look back, a longing.
4
Those first days of the voyage David spent on the bridge. It hummed and blipped with capability – radar, satellite pictures, GPS screens, neon diagrams of the ship’s engine and hydraulics systems, depth soundings of the ocean floor. On the radar icebergs showed as untidy yellow wedges. The ice-field lay far in the distance still, the officers said, inside the Antarctic Convergence.
He could feel the continent long before it arrived. Soon he would taste that flint air again. The dryness scratching at his throat.
The day before they crossed the Antarctic Convergence icebergs began to appear. David thought of the iceberg as an environment of collapse, a puzzle. It had detached itself from its home, and was now only intent on melt. Glaciofluvial processes had choked it out, until there was nowhere for it to go. Lacustrine formations. Ogives. Eolian processes. Gelifluction – he loved the language of melt.
Change was not a simple manoeuvre, performed by temperature rises, flux, ablation, water from ice and ice to water. In human lives, change required crisis which in Greek, as he had never forgot, since doing a single Classics option outside of his social sciences Tripos at Cambridge, means decision. The krisis is the moment when you walk down one path and forsake the other.
There had been few such moments in his life. For as long as he could remember, David’s life had been mapped out, as if an advance cartographic team had been sent into the territory of the future.
His father was Vicar at Great Tew, one of those Cotswold villages on the itineraries of American bus tours in search of the Brideshead Revisited version of England. His younger brother Ben had loved growing up there among the stone cottages, the fields with their furtive sheep, secretive forests of ancient pines, rumoured to be undisturbed since Arthur’s time. But for David it had been a velvet coffin, a place so comfortable you didn’t notice you were actually dead. Of course many heroic men had come from similar places; the moist hedgerows and hydrangeas of England had spawned an entire generation of the horizon-obsessed, men who flung their lives into deserts hot and cold. David could understand why; the only way to neutralise the excess of gentility of such places, their killing reassurances, was to fling yourself at anything wild in a desperate attempt to feel alive. Not being born into an age of exploration, David put his energies into science, then government, but for him these were only tickets to the wild places where he would either find or lose his soul.
Ben had gone to Oxford, and he to Cambridge. This had formalised the rivalry between them. He could see the logic in it: Ben was the more outwardly ambitious and his ambition had a brute muscularity to it. Cambridge, the slightly more effete and intellectual institution of the two, suited David’s wayward, questioning nature. They both came out with Firsts, but no one in the family congratulated them. Such a performance was simply expected.
Wood-panelled rooms, candlelit dinners where the ritual decreed no electric lighting could be used, a medieval reenactment of monkish scholarly solidarity, more men than women – he remembered his education in fragments, visual puzzles. A certain terror of being a ‘failure’, although in truth failure was a disaster zone he might visit, briefly, as a tourist.
He learned his capacity for self-questioning later, and self-doubt came only in his late twenties. I must have been insufferable, he thought. Only a character like Kate, with her angular confidence, her lack of interest in being understood, could have found him attractive. She was unusual among women in that she did not want anything particularly emotional from their marriage. Outwardly graceful, with a powerful public charm, inwardly she recoiled from love; it was not repression, only her nature – she had been born that way, with the sinuous arrogance of a young prince. He had liked that about her. She would never cling, never make him feel the claustrophobia he felt in the company of many women, who seemed only to want him for the transformation he could enact, in the form of children
. He saw this as a game of cold strategy dressed up as family. Or maybe he had simply met the wrong women.
Day two, day three. They were doing oceanography on the way down. Every year they did CTDs of the transport in the Drake Passage. From his perch on the bridge he watched the instrument go down, he watched it come up.
A thought dangled in his mind, an ugly puppet. I would like to love someone, but I love someone already. Why then this yearning? And then, I don’t want to give up. Is that the only reason? This interior judge, a stranger until recently, interrogates him. Is that all you can come up with? He tried to keep these thoughts under control by imagining himself wringing their necks. He took each thought in his hands as if it were a delicate animal, and squeezed until he heard it rasp and choke.
He lurched; the ship hit one of the rolling breakers the Drake Passage threw up, and he was thrown sideways.
Yes, he was happy, because he was going to the continent-sized paradox again, the giant mirror at the bottom of the world where the purity of the ice is equivalent to water that has been distilled three times. What he feels for the place is unmistakeable; that is what love feels like, to him, always: a narrowing in the heart, a constriction. As if he will have a heart attack. As if he will die.
He has not made love in a long time, or been made love to. He wonders if this is something you could forget how to do.
He came to look for her, knocking on her cabin door. This alone surprised her, that he should seek out her company.
‘We’re about to pass Elephant Island. You should take a look. It’s not often the ship takes this route…’
‘Just give me a minute to get dressed.’
Once on the deck, the wind tore at their throats. They had only been outside for a few minutes, but already she was cold.
‘Do you want to go in?’
‘No,’ she shouted over the wind. ‘I just need a few minutes to get used to it.’
Elephant and Clarence Islands were visible on the horizon; a pair of black crags half-covered in cloud, steep rock clad with ice.
‘There,’ David pointed to a miserable beach of scrappy rock covered in penguin guano. ‘That’s where my great grandfather survived.’
David reached in his pocket and brought out a small bottle. ‘Family tradition,’ David said, unscrewing the cap. ‘As soon as we see Elephant Island, we both have to take a drink. I didn’t think to bring an extra glass. Sorry. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘No,’ Helen said. ‘I don’t mind.’
The ship steamed toward the island. It was half shrouded in cloud. On the one side, dark rock streaked by ice. The island sheared the cloud open with its sharp rock.
‘On the lee side that’s Gnomon Rock. Terrible-looking place, isn’t it? They say it has the worst weather in the world.’
‘What exactly happened to your great-grandfather here?’
He told her the story, in snatched, breathless phrases, severed by rushes of wind.
‘They thought this place was their salvation, but I think the first night they spent on the island was their worst, in their entire journey. Even the ice floes were an improvement.’
Wet, cold, hungry, they had not slept for days. The winds tore down their tents. We thought for sure we would die, his great-grandfather had told him. No one admitted to it later, but yes, we were prepared to die in that place, that night.
Now here he was, sailing past it in comfort, on a modern ice-strengthened ship. A four-course meal in the salon, jackets and ties, gin and tonics in the bar. What separated him from a starving man, exposed, frozen, lost on that narrow shore, was only time.
‘One day part of the glacier across the bay broke off and caused a tsunami, a thirty-foot-high wave, to rush across the bay at them,’ David went on. ‘The men were completely exposed on this tiny strip of shore. They watched it coming. They were – transfixed, I think. They couldn’t move, they could only wait to die, because there was no higher ground – the rocks were covered with ice, the glacier above them un-scaleable. But loose ice in the bay broke its crest and the wave swept under them.’
Each day presented some new challenge to the men’s survival. They had no real hope of rescue, only faith. They went ashore in April, and Shackleton and three of his men left for South Georgia. May, June, July passed. From August 1st, each day they would rise in the morning and pack up their belongings. Each day they would say, Today maybe the Boss will come for us. They had no way of knowing that Shackleton and his men had survived the journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia in the lifeboat called the James Caird, shunted across 640 miles of the wildest sea in the world in a leaking wooden dinghy with a makeshift sail and no shelter. By rights Shackleton should have been dead, and his men abandoned to madness or cannibalism or both on Elephant Island.
But the Boss did come, just in time. Two men were ‘on the point of losing their reason’, as Shackleton later wrote. It took the Boss three attempts to get to them, each time he tried to ram through the ice to them, increasingly desperate. Only five miles of ice separated Shackleton from his men. Once he was close enough to fire a gun, but it sounded too much like a glacier calving and the men did not heed.
For much of his life, David had been thinking about who Shackleton was. He read biographies, he met his relatives, and learned of his charm, his pathological optimism. He was not sure if such characters existed anymore. What had driven them from the world?
If his great-grandfather had not been rescued, finally, on Elephant Island, he would not exist.
But did he possess those men’s steely core? He has seen it, in so many members of his family, and in other people descended from the explorers. They are a clan: vast, dispersed, one of those sprawling families who can’t remember exactly how they are related. Like the famous actress he met once, a descendent of Scott on her mother’s side. He can’t get her face out of his mind: a classical face, completely unforgiving. She had the unusually prominent vein running from the skull and transversing the forehead, a feature he remembered from his great-grandfather’s stories of her ancestor, the great explorer. ‘You could tell when he was angry,’ his great-grandfather had said, ‘because this vein stood out on his forehead, throbbing like a live wire about to explode.’ The actress had a doer’s face. David had inherited the face of a thinker. They separated like that in his family: on the one side the doers, the engineers, Army Majors, the explorers. On the other side the scientists, historians. There was no one ‘artistic’ in his family. Yes, the actress had something of his great-grand-father’s self-containedness as well as her own ancestor’s heroic profile. Although she herself was small and fine-boned, like a sleek little horse, but with the inner core of molten ice. At a drinks party her eyes had rested on him, and he found himself captivated by their icy grip. She was one of them; he wondered if she knew it.
David passed the bottle to Helen. She tipped it up, took a draught. ‘Thank you for surviving on that lonely shore, against all odds, to come back into the world and to give us David, who joins us here on earth now, because of your perseverance, your optimism, your faith. Thank you.’ She handed the bottle back to him. ‘Sorry, I’m a cheap drunk. No. Cheap speech-maker.’
‘I’m in government, I’ve heard plenty of cheap speeches. Yours isn’t so bad. To my forebear, and to Elephant Island, for failing to kill him.’
The Island came and went. There was no trace of those nights spent under the upturned boats, the raging wind, the men blinded by blubber soot, wet to the skin.
They stayed on Monkey Island far longer than either of them meant to, until they finished the bottle of Scotch.
I am being given a chance for a new life, with this trip.
How rare, to discover a portal back into life, through this frozen world. Alive-yet-dead; dead-yet-alive. Would she ever again feel herself to be truly part of life? She is haunted by the thought that she is just a dreaming ghost. On waking, she will discover she is not alive at all, as when ghosts rattle around a beloved house unt
il they can be convinced they are dead.
We do not own our bodies, we do not own our fates. As it ages, Helen’s body is becoming her mother’s body. Her fate is not her own, either, but has been decided by something else.
David, too, has been disowned of something he thought his. His great-grandfather’s experience has seeped into him. He has been abandoned on a blasted shore. This knowledge is lodged in every cell. In his cells, reindeer wander through the snow. Seals loll in brown pools of blood and urine, the shores slippery with penguin and albatross guano. When the men lay down in their tent that first night on Elephant Island, their body heat melted the guano underneath them. They awoke to find their tent lifted from them by the katabatics sliding down the steep ramparts of the glacier. The stench was unbearable. Their place of salvation was no more than a fresh hell.
David returns to this place every year, under the guise of a professional migration. But the truth is that his body is not his own, his fate is not his own. At times he wonders if he even owns his memories. The tough pale grass which looks like no other grass he has seen in his life, the stern stone covered with a mustard-coloured lichen, hard and ruptured, like barnacles. All this is embedded within him because he felt so at home, the first time he came to this rim of the world, the distant Southern Ocean. So this is where I belong, he thought, amazed. He was right, he had been unburdened from a dangerous misperception. He did not own his memories. He did not own his past. These had been bequeathed to him by a force he could not name, and he was merely their caretaker. In the end he would have to hand them back.