Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  But underneath the tightly patrolled skin of the town, a rebellion slithers. Trailer park violence in the nearby Army base accommodation, Masonic gatherings above the furrier’s shop — the same place our society of unofficial bohemians holds weekly screenings of avant-garde French films — and of course the attacks on women.

  I want to get out of this place untainted, but by what? Not only that delusion it brews, that here you have reached the apogee of life. Toronto and Montreal are stressful. Have you seen the traffic? In other countries people kill each other, just like that! No, a larger threat is its glutinous energy that seems intent on sucking the life force out of you, with its gleaming cars that purr down avenues in slow motion. I feel I am moving through gelatin; the air itself has given up and elected entropy.

  “Would you like another coffee while you wait?” The waitress has a note of sympathy in her eye. She thinks I am being stood up. I decline. I am still in the grip of the dream I had the night before, about the river, the man.

  In the dream there was a man who was my father, or stepfather — the dream-man was neither the man I wait for now nor Mark nor my grandfather, but an unknown man with coal eyes and dark hair, thin and vital, in his mid-forties perhaps.

  In the dream he was my father but there was something awry about the relationship; it was not a normal father-daughter scenario. He was very angry with me, he felt I’d betrayed him. Something had gone terribly wrong between us. But he did love me. I could feel it. In the dream I killed myself because of it, or he let me drown in the river. We were in the water in any case. It looked like a giant river, too big for this country, even — the Amazon, perhaps. He held me in his arms.

  Passion. I could feel it in his arms, his being, like a force field, a fanatical energy. I have never encountered or inspired such an emotion in my waking life. But I recognized it in the dream as electric, a current to live your life by. It would be a life lived like an elongated dream. An obsession.

  He is now very late. An alarm begins to tug at the edges of my skin. A kind of premonition.

  I feel certain the dream I had the night before was important. The dream has left me with a certainty I can’t articulate to anyone. It is too spooky.

  I feel I will meet my father again in the future. By then I will be someone else, and he possibly will be too. I will be older than him, maybe. But we will know each other still and our hearts will thud against our chests painfully, with a spasm of recognition. We will confuse what we feel with fear and we will want to hurt each other. We will not understand where this instinct comes from, or what we once were to each other. I have read about reincarnation. I feel the power, the possibility, of it now in my life. How each time we come back into this realm our previous memories have been erased, and we start somewhere new, with the innocent faith required to face life, with all its hazard and pain. We start again, as someone else.

  “You never call me by my name,” he says. He has arrived, at last. His mouth has that disappointed curve I will see again, many years later, on the mouth of the man I will call Loki.

  “I don’t like names,” I say.

  We are eating ice cream. He has ordered caramel crunch. After a couple of mouthfuls, I shove the bowl away.

  “What’s the matter with your ice cream?”

  “It’s too sweet. You never call me by my name, either,” I say.

  “Name taboos,” he says. “In some cultures you can never address your sister-in-law by name, for example.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because … it’s usually about …” he stalls.

  He manages an effortless change in topic. He jumps from one moment to another without hesitation, like crossing a river on a shattered causeway of stones.

  Years later I will study anthropology and realize what kind of sandbar he had nearly stranded himself on. Name taboos exist between in-laws, often. You cannot use your sister-in-law’s name, because by naming her you might want her, you will give voice to our instinct to desire the forbidden. They are about controlling desire; often they are a specific bulwark against incest.

  After our meetings in those long blue evenings, I take overly circuitous routes home. I find myself walking alone for blocks and blocks, my internal rear-view mirror invisible but positioned.

  Girls pass me, in twos and threes, clumping together for safety. How can he resist these teenaged girls, the killer, with their stringy legs, their neon green halter tops? Their perms and crimped hair in imitation of Pat Benatar, Paula Abdul. They’ve been watching MuchMusic from distant Toronto, trying to figure out what is in style out there. The purple nail polish like individual molten bruises on their toes. The scent of young flesh.

  I am new enough in the world that I still struggle to separate the things in progress versus things which are definitely over. High school is over. My life in this town is nearly over, although I must wait two more months to be fully released. The summer days swirl into each other. I can only tell they are passing from the cobalt shadows they throw on the future, how, like the evenings, they lengthen, before diminishing.

  2.

  NIGHT FLIGHT

  hummock

  A hillocky conglomeration of broken ice formed by pressure at the place of contact of the angle of one ice floe with another ice floe.

  March 5th

  Minus ten today. A different cold hovers on the fringes of the air now. Sharp, like needles, but unlike the cold at Ice Blue, a dampness curls around it, making it sink into our bones. I feel something inside me — some buried capacity — respond to this new calibre of cold. An old stiffening.

  On the runway now the cold slices through my three fleeces. I feel a slight pain in my lungs. New oblique winds take swipes at me as I run back and forth from the top of the airstrip to Jenny Island. I find the hollow grandeur of the island oppressive, now. I don’t know when this change took place, or what it means.

  A snowstorm blanketed base. After so many years away from it I had become unused to cold. There is a vigour in cold, of course; it awakens, with its ethereal, negative energy. It feels easier to think in cold. Blizzards, on the other hand, force you inside yourself.

  I watched as Christmas stencils formed on the windows of my office. I paced back and forth, bouncing between the Brecon Beacons (Scenic Wales calendar: May) and the flat, hot sands of the Gower (August).

  Deep winter of the kind I experienced each year of my life in Canada always put me into a cryogenic slumber, emotionally, a state from which it felt impossible to emerge. Hunger, taste, desire, all sunk within themselves, cowed by the hostility of the outside world. This was one reason I haven’t missed truly cold winters all these years in England: while I am alive I want to feel alive.

  The day before, Tom and Lanier had flown up to Stanley to collect provisions for the coming month until the ship arrived. They had to return the same day because the weather was closing in.

  “Is that common, to fly up and back in one day?” I asked Tom before they set off. I knew this meant ten hours’ flying. We barely had ten hours’ daylight on base now.

  “It’s knackering,” Tom agreed. “But we’ve got to do it.” They had a twenty-four-hour window to fly the last crew of non-essential personnel north, pick up supplies for winter, and return. The day after that they would leave for good, taking Steward the FOM and the remaining two air mechs with them.

  I was still in bed when I heard the plane take off early in the morning. That afternoon, around five, the PNR siren sounded — the last Point of No Return of the season.

  PNR was one of the Antarctic tropes which no one explained; like the bing-bong, or internal PA system on base, everyone expected it was self-evident. The Point of No Return is the place at which the plane no longer has enough fuel to return to the point of origin — say, the Falklands. It is committed to land no matter what the weather does. So if the weather worsened
and the runway experienced whiteout conditions, or the cloud level suddenly rose above 12,000 feet, where ice crystals begin to form, the pilots would have to keep on coming to land at base, even if there was a danger the plane could ice up. Base had to be ready should an emergency landing be needed, so the PNR siren rang out over the base and the runway with its sharp, plaintive bleat.

  A couple of years before, Tom had told me, the weather had “crapped out” — pilot-speak for zero visibility — and he and Lanier had to land the Dash with no visibility and no visual references from the landscape, relying on instruments but without the aircraft guidance systems used by airports in the rest of the world.

  Everyone on base was mustered to put on a boiler suit and handed expired flares. They lined up at the end of the runway and, when the Dash was expected, lit the flares over their heads, in a human runway light beacon.

  In the dining room we all listened to the siren. “That’s it, folks,” Steward announced. “The last PNR of the season.” Now so much of life on base was about the rituals of leaving and ending, looming abstinences: the last banana, the last cucumber. Even for those of us who were not staying for the winter, it felt as if we were about to walk the plank.

  About half an hour before the Dash was due, I went with Darren, one of the St. Helenan cleaners, to watch for the plane’s arrival on the veranda of the accommodation block.

  Darren was one of a triumvirate of young men from the island who worked each year as domestics on base. The Saints, as they were called, were related. They were gentle-humoured; I never saw them look anything other than content. They had beatific conferences by the juice machine, conversing in a rollicking island patois. They did not join in with the fancy dress parties and quiz nights, but we could hear them talking and playing cards in their pit rooms every evening.

  Darren stubbed out a cigarette. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m so homesick now I need to smoke.” He was not looking forward to the trip home on the Shack, as the Ernest Shackleton is called, which had a reputation for unpleasantness at sea. “I’m the kind of guy who gets seasick in the bathtub.”

  We scoured the sky for the four over-wing lights to appear somewhere over Jenny Island. We had never seen the Dash land at dusk before.

  “Where are they?”

  The runway lights were lit for the last time in the season; in two days’ time they would be covered with old oil drums. Drifts would accumulate around them, creating obelisks, wind-scoops, cornices.

  “There she is.”

  We saw four sparks of light under a black sky. Behind was snow-capped Jenny Island. The Dash emerged from the sky, flying slowly over the ice-choked bay. We watched it drop lower against a sunset of chilled silver. I felt a shiver go up my spine. Even though I had witnessed the pilots’ skill many times by now, I still couldn’t believe what they did. The Antarctic gave their exploits the tang of heroism; in this case flying up and back to the edge of civilization in a day, returning in near-dark to our slumbering colony.

  That night Tom came to find me in my office. He sat down wearily, perching on the edge of the chair. Even flying the Dash for the short stints when I had been given the controls had exhausted me, and he and Lanier had just flown ten hours.

  Everything had gone according to plan, he said. “Just a routine marathon.”

  The colour had drained from Tom’s face. Soon he would be gone. He was perhaps my only friend left on base. His imminent departure had become a doppelgänger — something that looked exactly like Tom, but wasn’t.

  He excused himself and rose. “Well,” he said. “Goodnight.”

  March 8th

  A blizzard hits. The Twin Otters are twitching to get away but they can’t. “Typical,” Tom says.

  The day is a blur of snow. We are not allowed outside, other than to go to our pit rooms or the laboratory. These we can find in the whiteout, out of habit. Otherwise we risk wandering off in the blizzard and becoming disoriented.

  The news comes at sit rep. A weather window will open tomorrow. Tom and Lanier will fly the Dash north, taking the met man, Xavier, Steward, the air mechs, and ten others with them.

  I couldn’t sleep last night. All night I lay in my bunk bed, staring at the pink and grey swirl of the mattress above me. Base is so different. The shags, storm petrels, and elephant seals have moved on. The atmosphere between those of us who are left is thickening. There is an astringent current within it, like milk threaded by lemon juice. It might sour.

  The day and night before the Dash left I struggled with my instinct to be on the plane. A voice I may not have heard before but which lived inside me began to whisper, then, more urgently, to speak aloud until it was almost a shout: Go.

  I had asked to stay until the last ship out because I wanted to witness the finality of the closing down of summer. I felt sure that this scenario would play a part in the novel I would write based on this experience. But was there another reason — was this an obscure game I was playing with myself, to test my resolve, or even to test fate? Did I want to put myself in a rescueless place to see how I would respond?

  People had been left to overwinter unexpectedly in the Antarctic before, although not recently. If something went wrong with the ship, I didn’t know what would happen to the twenty-one of us who were hoping to resume our lives in the English spring. The planes certainly wouldn’t come to get us. They would be in Canada by then, undergoing summer maintenance. I already knew that Base R was scheduled for a late uplift, and that for various reasons no other Antarctic organization was extracting its personnel from so far down in the continent so late in the season, when the sea ice would be thickening. There might not be any other ships in the area to extract us.

  On Tom’s last day, I showed him my two most recent books. He had been asking to see them.

  He flipped through them, pages and pages of accumulated words. “I don’t understand how you can sit down and write all this,” he said, finally. “Make it all up. I’m sorry, but I just don’t get it.”

  “I don’t either,” I admitted.

  “What drives you to do it?”

  “Because I can, I suppose. What drives you to fly?”

  “Because I love it. It’s the power it gives me. I don’t think I could be an ordinary person.”

  “People who don’t know how to fly are ordinary?”

  “No, not exactly. I meant I didn’t want an ordinary life. I wanted to see things few other people have seen before. I wanted to live on my wits and my skill.”

  “It’s the same for me.”

  But as I said these words, I wondered. To be a writer in the Antarctic was an even more ridiculous occupation than usual. There, everyone could do something of immediate use — navigate a RIB in the ice-choked waters of the bay, plot a course on a nautical chart, dive beneath the ice and identify twenty species of sea cucumber, fix a diesel generator or manage air traffic control or fix a Twin Otter or study UVB-resistant Antarctic moss.

  Base society was suffused with a particular elixir — so many people there emitted a force field of personal power, constructed, as in Tom’s case, from years of technique, practice and experience. They had been military logistics officers, they had been pilots in the RAF, they had sledged across the ice field for days, they had spent months in cold ice domes coaxing ice tubes from the continent in order to know the planet’s future. Base required you to trade on your personal expertise or, if that was not in the equation, on the power of your persona. Writers, on the other hand, are usually introverts; their personas are projected onto the page, in part I think to absolve themselves from the necessity of projecting a version of the self solely aimed at lodging itself in others’ minds. You might only know who they are by their books. Otherwise they move through the world like ghosts.

  “I don’t know how you do what you do, either,” I admitted. “When I think of what could go wrong —”

&
nbsp; “I never think about it.” Tom’s voice was uncharacteristically stern. “Remember that. Never think about what could go wrong.”

  I wished I had been less conflicted in my life. I have been driven to be a writer in order to expiate these conflicts, which multiplied effortlessly.

  “Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to be what I am.” As soon as I said this, I heard its adolescent ring. I knew he wouldn’t tolerate it.

  Sure enough, a flash of impatience moved across his face. I had always known Tom had the capacity to be dismissive, to have little truck with ambivalence. But it had never been directed at me before. “Well, then don’t,” he said.

  He was impatient to leave base, I saw. His mind was elsewhere — on the blue miles of sky he had yet to traverse.

  Along with Simon the base commander and Melissa the doctor, I was given the honour of being in the official sending-off party. We crossed the runway with the departing summer personnel. Everyone, including Xavier, had changed in the last twenty-four hours. They had an air of detachment, ready for their imminent re-entry into the real world.

  Tom and Lanier went ahead some hours before to prepare the Dash. They’d received the latest wind charts off the internet and their faces were creased with concentration. Conditions were okay, Tom had told me, although they could have been better. “Our only divert is Punta,” he said. “Marsh is shut. Something military. The Chileans aren’t telling us.”

  We waited on the apron as the passengers boarded. I could see Tom and Lanier in silhouette in the cockpit. They were moving around, taking checklists out, flipping dials. Eventually Tom reappeared wearing his distinctive peach-coloured pilot’s Ventile jacket, that genius invention from the Second World War.