The Ice Lovers

by Jean McNeil

  ‘I assume you learned to do that down in the Ellsworths,’ Alexander said.

  ‘The pilot taught me.’

  ‘What else did he teach you?’

  ‘How to wash dishes.’

  ‘Ok, enough chatting,’ the pilot said. ‘Let’s get going. We’ve got the all clear from the Met but you never know. We don’t want to be stuck here for weeks, do we?’

  The trail to the hut followed the perimeter of King George Sound; on their right was a black mountain of scree; to the left the thawing sound stretched in front, across to the mainland, thin snakes of blue water backed by sloping glaciers.

  It was not very cold, but already the sun had lost its sting, its ability to bore a hole through the chill of the air, its solar furore. Now the air was simply limp and cold. A blue shimmer to the sky, the reflection of the open water revealed by leads in the sea ice, embroidered the white-sheet blankness of the ice cap. Stranger, though, were the black mountains. Darker than basalt, and much less grainy, they shimmered. When the sun caught their flanks, they glowed as if lit from within. Inside these, hills of dark, soil fossils were trapped. They were so easy to uncover, Nara had heard, that you could go for a walk anywhere, at any time, and brush your hand against the scree and a shape would emerge. Trilobytes, small lizards, birds and even small dinosaurs, all etched into the rock.

  They each carried a backpack; in it was alpine rope, a change of clothes, sunscreen, water, an overnight bag in case they had to lay up. For each stride the men took, she had to take two. Alexander looked over his shoulder to see if she was all right. Nara knew he did this because he was well-broughtup, taught to be gentlemanly. None of the other men looked out for her, and she struggled not to notice this, then not to be angered by it, then not to be grateful when Alexander gave her his automatic, frowning look of non-concern – but somehow he was concerned. It was the emotional indifference that hurt her. He was as concerned for her as he would be for any woman.

  They turned a corner and the hut came into view, a red dot at the bottom of a mountain of more black scree. Inside, the station was a polar country cottage: coffee thermoses lined up on the wooden counter, yellow plastic washing-up basin, washing-up liquid, bright orange bottles of sunscreen everywhere. A stuffed owl twirled above the desk where the radio equipment sat – a laptop, a VHF, ancient box files from the 1960s, the 1970s. On the table sat an empty gin bottle surrounded by little yellow cans of Schweppes soda water. A frying pan with ‘Pilot Repellent’ scrawled on its base in white-out liquid hung above the squat Rayburn stove.

  They all had a list of end-of-season tasks to do. As these were read out, Nara caught sight of a newspaper on the floor. She picked it up. Three front pages were taken up with pandemic stories: the dead, the survivors. Epidemiology. Maps with red, blue, hot pink, green zones. Hospital staff in full biological-alert protective clothing, yellow and orange suits, white masks, police, grounded airliners. Weeds growing between the cracks on tarmac. She felt a flurry of panic. When had the nightmare returned? It was a few moments before she saw the date: the newspaper was nearly a year old. She hadn’t noticed because newsprint did not oxidise in the Antarctic.

  ‘Ok, time to go to work.’

  She was given a girl’s job – to close up the food store (dubbed ‘Tesco’s’), and to shut up the caboose, which functioned as overflow accommodation. At least they didn’t suggest she do the dishes.

  The pilot sat down to talk to the Met back at Adelaide on the VHF. When she returned after doing the Tesco’s inventory (‘stacking the shelves’, as the genny mech had put it) he was still sitting there, wearing a similar expression to the one she had seen so often on her pilot’s – for this is how she thought of him, to distinguish them – face during those days in the Ellsworths.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘We’re not going back tonight.’

  ‘Oh,’ she nodded. ‘What’s the word on the weather.’

  ‘Horace says it’s going to mank out. I still don’t trust a computer model. Even if they’re right most of the time.’

  ‘What does the Met say?’

  ‘He toes the Horace line. They all do, these days. I remember when a Met man was capable of making a prediction based on weather obs and feel. But we’ll get out of here tomorrow. So says Horace, anyway.’

  Dinner was spaghetti Bolognese with dried onion. They ate together at the tiny wooden table, next to the bunk beds. A motley group, one unlikely to be found sharing the same living space anywhere other than in the Antarctic – the carpenter, an old winterer (this was what they were called, those who had spent the previous winter on base, by this point in the season; she was ‘a winterer’ now), red-faced, quite young, probably, who had spent two years doing voluntary work teaching carpentry in Indonesia. This was all she knew about him. About the generator mechanic, also an old winterer, she knew even less – from his accent she deduced he was a Yorkshireman. And them.

  ‘I haven’t seen a child in a year and a half,’ the genny mech said.

  ‘Nor a cat.’

  ‘Nor a flower. A real one. Not that plastic stuff they put on the dining tables on Saturday night.’

  ‘Car. Truck. Random motorised vehicle.’

  ‘Oh,’ the generator mechanic’s expression was cryptic.

  ‘A car.’

  ‘Bathtub.’

  ‘Dog.’

  ‘We did animals already.’

  After dinner, they all went for a walk. The sunset was good, the genny mech told them, if viewed from a higher point, because it set more to the west now, rather than to the south, and threw very pretty colours onto the half-melted ice sheet of the sound.

  They started out for Benemnite Valley just after 7pm. At first they walked as a group, all stopping at the same point to shuffle away dirt and gravel, hunting for fossils.

  Again she fell to the back of the group. She wanted to give the impression that she desired to be alone. She did not know why. Perhaps it would impress Alexander, her composure, how much she did not need him, now.

  At one point he stopped on the path. She caught up with him. There they were, in the largest and most empty wilderness on the planet, and she could not avoid him.

  They fell into step together easily. He kept his head high, alert, scanning the landscape. The others moved on. They wanted to climb Pyramid, the 2,500-foot peak behind the hut. Surely he would want to climb it too. She wanted to say, you go ahead with the others. I’ll be fine. But he stayed with her. He did not seem to mind her silence. After a few minutes she heard it again, that nameless sound she had first noticed in the Falklands. A low hum emanated from inside her, a contented, reassuring silence skirting the edge of sound.

  ‘Look –’ he pointed to a strata in the rock. ‘Pre-cambrian. I wonder what we’ll find here.’ He scraped away at the rock. Fossil-hunting in this manner was technically outlawed – regulations, again – but everyone did it.

  He looked up the sheer side of the rockface, frowning. ‘This looks do-able, on a traverse, at least.’

  ‘You mean rock climbing?’

  ‘Yes. It’s ice-free. It’s not frost-shattered the way a lot of rock down here is. You think you could climb this?’

  ‘If I’d brought my gear, yes. Why don’t you climb the mountain with the others? It’ll be dark soon. I’ll stay here.’

  ‘Because I don’t feel like climbing right now.’

  She nearly said, but you’ll never get here again. Take the chance. In the Antarctic, you need to seize the moment, or the moment disappears.

  The instant stinging happiness she felt in Alexander’s company returned, all at once. She noticed again the subtle physical characteristics that others missed; how delicate he was in his extremities: hands, feet, ears, how this delicacy sat so uneasily with the emotional flint of him. He had the gift of never looking the same twice. There was always some change, some almost unnoticed difference in his hair, his skin, the marks and scratches and scars of him.

  They returned t
o the hut in near darkness. Clouds of breath-vapour condensed before them.

  ‘This is the first time I’ve seen my breath,’ she said.

  ‘Can you smell the seawater?’ Alexander asked.

  ‘I haven’t smelled anything in months.’

  Nara and Alexander slept in the caboose that night, in bunks, side by side, listening to the hum of silence.

  ‘Think about it,’ he said, ‘we’re here in a caboose, sleeping in bunk beds, and there’s no one between us and the South Pole.’

  ‘I’m glad I’m not here alone.’ What she meant was, I am so happy you are here with me.

  He did not answer, and in another second she heard his breathing alter. He had fallen asleep.

  2

  The Antarctic has no autumn. The planet tilts and suddenly it is winter, which comes with a volatility and a darkness unknown anywhere else on the planet, including the Arctic. In the previous week they have lost three hours of light. With the darkness comes an internal emergency. She registers it first as panic in her stomach, it feels heavy and palatial, as if she has eaten too much food.

  As their days together on base diminished, Luke talked to her more and more of his marriage. He seemed hungry for her perspective. She had no experience of anything as grave and durable as marriage, and was flattered that this older experienced man would be hungry for her opinion. Once received he was avid and possessive with it, although he stopped short of being possessive of her, personally, a restraint which impressed her. Perhaps he really did think she could explain what had happened to him, and why. Perhaps that was all he wanted.

  They arrived at the Cross. They stood side by side, surveying the bay. In the evening the cold lustre of the water shimmered unevenly, like a drawer of knives caught in a dull sun.

  ‘When did you get divorced?’

  ‘Last year. No, eighteen months ago, now. Time flies when you’re miserable as well as happy, it seems.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She met someone else. At least that’s the end result.’

  She had been prepared to probe further, carefully. But the bitter stab in his voice stopped her in her tracks.

  After a while he spoke again. ‘Every time I asked her, she would deny it. The closest she ever came to saying something was when she said, but you weren’t here.’ His eyes were dark and clouded – an altogether different expression from the annoyed, stubborn glint she had seen in situations where circumstances, mechanics, wind patterns were against him.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Who the hell knows where I was? On the ice cap, in a tent, cooking dinner on the Primus with a couple of scientists. Or here, where we’re standing now.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s not like I thought I was the only man on the planet. But we were married. I thought we had a good marriage. I thought that meant something.’ There was another long pause. ‘Every time, I thought, I believe her. She denied it and I believed her. I don’t understand how we can know and not know something at the same time.’

  ‘Knowing and believing are two different things,’ she said.

  A shadow passed across his face. ‘I don’t feel like that anymore. Thank God. I’m just waiting, I think, for the pain to go away. People say a year and a half isn’t very long. But I wonder, this kind of pain might be like a disease, one that’s never really cured. It just comes and goes and I’m waiting for it to go into remission.’

  ‘But you had many good years, which is so much more than a lot of people get from the experience. I think with marriage, the fact that it ends overshadows everything that went before, everything that was good.’ Even as she said this she thought, what could she know of his ex-wife, of Luke’s life away from the Antarctic? She would never meet his exwife, or see his family home in Scotland. Life down South was like that – you knew only the Antarctic version of the person, you never saw their other life.

  The sky was grey and leaden now. Standing there, looking out to sea with Luke, Nara felt an obscure yet powerful impulse to know this place, to feel it hers. It was impossible, when faced with the landscape’s indifference – impossible not to want to depend on him, not for survival, but for something even greater, although as yet obscure.

  She looked at Luke and remembered that he knew how to take an aircraft into the air, knew how to land it on an ice sheet. There were not twenty men in the world who could do what he did. She struggled now to see him as just another man, a pilot, someone she had been thrown together with by circumstance. He had become something so much more; the embodiment of a dream she did not even know she had – to fly, to be freed from the grasp of gravity.

  The following day she did not see Luke, nor the day after. He must have been busy in the hangar, coming over to base only to eat his meals late, after everyone had gone to bed. The next day she heard that the pilots would have to fly up to Stanley and return in the same day because the weather would close in. They had only one day’s window to fly the last crew of non-essential personnel north, pick up some supplies, and return.

  She was still in bed when she heard the plane take off early in the morning. Later that day, five or six in the afternoon, the Point of No Return siren sounded over the runway. He would be back within two hours.

  Luke came to find her in the lab office that night. He sat down, wearily, perching on the edge of the chair.

  ‘You look tired.’

  ‘I am. I can’t stay long. I’ve got to hit the sack.’

  ‘Did the flights go all right?’

  ‘Oh yes, everything went smoothly.’ He paused. ‘But I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Oh, some of us had a party in the sledge store. After the Saints called time in the bar we got a bottle and went to sit in the sleeping bags in the sewing loft. We talked ’til four in the morning.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come to get me? I would have come.’

  ‘I thought about it,’ he said. ‘But I thought you were already asleep, probably.’

  As his girlfriend, official or unofficial, she would have had a certain status on base. She would have been privy to these private impromptu parties; most importantly, she would have had his company, which she loved. She wondered if he were demonstrating to her, subtly, the things she was forfeiting, or might yet forfeit, in the future.

  Luke rubbed his forehead, now very freckled from the sun, with his hand. Nara had seen him do this before, in the Ellsworths. It seemed to be a gesture of fatigue, but it had within it a note of despair.

  They’re loners, these pilots. A scientist had said this at dinner one night and the judgement had lodged itself in Nara’s mind. Perhaps they had turned him into a loner, those cold hours in the cockpit. All the years he had been married, he had told her, an internal compass had guided him, pointing in the direction of his house, his children, his wife. Now that it was all over, his compass swung round and round in wild speculative loops, now north, now south, just as in the days before GPS, when he had to find his way based on the earth’s magnetism, and the extreme pull of the geomagnetic pole had distorted his compass.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was hoping to get back in time to have a drink with you, but the truth is I’m just bushed.’

  Sentences were being constructed inside her, then just as quickly dismantling themselves: Don’t go, I need you. Please take me with you when you go.

  She would do whatever he wanted, she would learn to love him, or come to love him, because that invisible turning point had not yet been reached, she would still have his love, she would still live in the real world, with its diminishing oil stocks, its failed wheat harvests, its rumours of an epidemic illness that would kill millions, its swollen seas, drunk on melting ice. She wanted the real world in all its mortal glamour, and not this snowbound antiseptic colony.

  Luke’s eyes glistened with fatigue. Soon he would be gone, for good – or for seven months, and how these months stretched in front of her, an endurance test, whit
e and cold with silence. His imminent departure had become a doppelganger – something that looked exactly like Luke, but wasn’t. She saluted this creature in the corridors, dreamt about it at night, ate her meals with it by day.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘goodnight.’

  She flips on the dim light of the aquarium. Her sponges, sea-spiders, worms, sea-sponges, glow in the semi-darkness. They had gone into winter mode now and were slumbering. They hibernate by a genetic mutation which stops ice crystals from forming inside their cells as the temperature drops and they descend into a cryogenic sleep. This natural antifreeze is what keeps their blood liquid in subzero waters, through the three-month-long Antarctic night.

  But she is waking them up, warming the water in the aquariums very slightly, turning the lights higher to simulate increased UV exposure. The monitors attached to their hearts blip louder, and faster, as in hospital wards when patients go into cardiac arrest, she half expects them to start blaring at her in a single pitched howl.

  This is what the voice tells her: that the pace of the world is quickening, heating up, ice shelves moving toward the ocean with a new purpose, toward some disastrous deliverance, an astounding regeneration. Even if she did not hear the voice, the SHALIB Ice and Snow Database at the University of Colorado would tell her so. It shows graph upon graph ascending, always, never turning down. The upward swing is sudden and unstoppable. Carbon dioxide did not change much in the first eight hundred years of the last millennium, but it has shot up 30 per cent in the past two hundred years, the graphs show. The temperature cycle graphs illustrate the warming and cooling of the planet, long troughs, followed by sudden spikes, like a cardiograph.

  Here in the soundless Antarctic, she is certain she can hear it: the planet’s racing heart, beating with a new frantic purpose.

  As they rounded the Point a rotten-egg smell came on the wind: sulphur from the ionised seawater in the sewage treatment plant.

  Nara said, ‘You won’t be missing that smell, I suppose.’