“Katie, my Katie,” Chloe said. “Will you bring me back a real live polar bear – a polar bear kitten – to be my pet?”
“Oh, sweetie, there aren’t any polar bears at the South Pole.”
“And my teacher says are you going to write a blog and can you –”
“Enough with the questions,” Daniel said, laughing as he came down the wheelhouse stairs.
He came over and gave Katie a hug. She felt the real affection behind it. What good people Rachel and Dan were: so devoted to Chloe, lovely parents. When she was with them Katie felt part of that magic circle, enveloped in the warmth. She was almost as much of an aunt to Chloe as she was to her brother’s little boys. Chloe clasped her small hands around the belt of Katie’s jeans and rocked back and forth as she smiled up at Katie.
Katie realized with a pang that she was going to miss her and she thought that Chloe would miss her too. A year is a long, long time in the life of a five-year-old.
She hoped she was doing the right thing. Look on the bright side, she told herself, she’d always wanted to go to Antarctica and it was true, what she had told Rachel, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. Very, very few people got to winter over there. She’d be doing useful work there. And she’d already had a lovely email from Sara, the doctor on the base, saying how glad she was that another woman – and a woman with medical training at that – was coming to join her.
But on the other hand, for four months it would be completely dark – night and day – and the temperature could drop to minus seventy or below. And for eight months, she’d be shut in with nine other people – nine strangers, all men except for Sara – with no means of escape. At present her family and friends were all in good health but if, for instance, her mother or her brother should become ill, it would make no difference, there’d be no coming back…
“What have I let myself in for?” she asked herself.
CHAPTER 3
NORTH NORFOLK
That first morning at the cottage, Marmaduke saw that Flora’s car had gone. There was still food in his bowl and the cat flap was open, so he had a happy day roaming his territory. He expected that Flora would return in the evening. But she didn’t come, no one came, and by the next morning he was very hungry. He managed to knock the big box of cat food off the counter and attacked it with his teeth and claws. The kibble lasted for several days and, spread over the kitchen floor, it also attracted mice and even a rat or two, which he quickly despatched and ate. When the food was gone, the mice returned to nibble the cardboard. But when he had caught and eaten them all, life became harder.
He had always been a keen and skilful hunter, but he had hunted simply because it was in his nature. He had never needed to provide for himself before now. He was a big cat and it took a lot of work even to take the edge off his hunger. Water was not a problem. There was a pond at the end of the garden.
Now that Flora wasn’t there to keep him in at night, he became nocturnal, hunting at night and sleeping during the day. When, now and then in the grey dawn, prowling through the wet grass, he encountered a fox, they eyed one another with respect and passed on their way.
Flora had sometimes left him alone in the Cambridge flat, but then a neighbour came in to feed him and make a fuss of him. Here there was no one and he was uneasy. He was used to being petted by Flora and he was a cat that needed brushing daily. Although he washed himself assiduously, his fur was growing matted.
Between hunting trips he crept upstairs and curled up on the bed or in Flora’s open suitcase. It smelled of her and that comforted him. At home in Cambridge he knew when Flora was due home. No one came up the track, but if they had they would have seen, day after day, a big long-haired tabby cat coming punctually to sit beside the gate every evening at six o’clock.
CHAPTER 4
ANTARCTICA
The flight from Port Stanley on the Falkland Islands to Rothera on the Antarctic Peninsula had taken five hours. At Rothera she had boarded the little Twin Otter aircraft that took her on to Halley Research Station. They had landed only briefly for the pilot to leave supplies, to dump a bag of mail, and to collect one – email hadn’t entirely taken the place of real letters. A change in the weather was forecast and they hadn’t lingered in case they left it too late and the pilot couldn’t get Katie out to the Wilson base – or couldn’t get back himself.
Now she was on the last leg of the journey. Thank goodness all the preparation was over: the endless list-making, the challenge of making sure that she had everything, absolutely every single thing, that she would need for eight months from books to Tampax to her favourite chocolate. Anything she didn’t have now, she’d have to do without, because where she was going, there were no shops, no mail, no Amazon. Her mother had given her a large jar of Marmite “just in case”, though Katie was pretty sure that they’d have that on the base. The place was well-equipped. There was a decent library of books and DVDs (there wasn’t enough bandwidth for Netflix) and she also had dozens of books on her Kindle. There was music on her iPhone.
She’d been invited up to the cockpit to sit next to the pilot, an avuncular Edinburgh Scot called Robbie. Looking out of the window, the sheer scale of the landscape staggered her. For the first time she fully grasped how far she was going – truly to the end of the earth. Her eyes began to ache. Not from the glare – she was wearing sunglasses – but from the effort of trying to focus when there was nothing to focus on. There were no landmarks, nothing to break the monotony of ice and snow, just the shadow of the plane moving below them.
She yawned and rubbed her temples. She felt a sense of disorientation, some of it no doubt jet lag. She had been flitting between time zones. At Edward Wilson she would be returning to UK time. Technically Antarctica was in every time zone – or no time zone – because the longitude lines meet at the poles. In practice bases chose the time zones that they wanted to operate in. Imagine! You could choose what time you wanted it to be! It was part of the general weirdness of it all. She looked at her watch. Three o’clock. She’d be in ample time for dinner. Then she remembered. Despite the fact that the sun, though low in the sky, was still shining, it was actually three o’clock in the morning. That would account for how she felt. A couple of lines of verse came into her head: “And this was odd, because it was the middle of the night…” Where did that come from? Oh yes, Alice in Wonderland… “The Walrus and the Carpenter”…
The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright –
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
Lulled by the sound of the engine and the monotony of the view she fell asleep and dreamed that she was Alice walking with the Walrus and the Carpenter. But it wasn’t a beach, it was an endless ice floe. A crack appeared and she found herself floating away while the Walrus and the Carpenter gazed after her.
Katie woke up with a jerk. There was a crackling in her headphones and, “Nearly there,” Robbie said.
At first she couldn’t see anything, then she spotted a series of red specks against the white. The plane began to descend and the specks became blocks like pieces of Lego arranged end to end. The wings dipped as Robbie circled the base and Katie saw that it was built to the same kind of design as Halley Research Station: a string of red modules mounted on posts. There was a line of buildings a few hundred metres away: that would be the summer camp. Further off was the telescope, sited in what was called the Dark Sector, well away from the light pollution and radio pollution of the main station, though linked to it by a line of flags on poles. As the plane got closer the modules were less like Lego pieces, more like cartoon characters: like SpongeBob SquarePants, one of Chloe’s favourites. Perched on what looked like sturdy trouser-clad legs they looked as if at any moment they might swing their legs in unison and march off across the snow.
The plane was descending. So th
is was it. This was where she was going to spend the next eight months. She felt a prickle of something that was both anxiety and excitement. At one end of the makeshift runway – no more than a flat piece of ice – stood two figures dressed in red, vivid against the snow, sweeping their arms above their heads in a gesture of welcome.
“Ah, that’ll be Sara and the Boss,” Robbie said. “Sara’s a good lass. She’ll see you right.”
“The Boss?”
“Graeme. They call him the Boss, because he looks a bit like Kenneth Branagh playing Shackleton in that film, and Shackleton was always called the Boss. And then, Graeme actually is the boss. He’s the base commander.”
“Does everyone gets a nickname?”
“Aye.”
“So what’s Sara called?”
“Doc.”
“That’s original.”
Robbie laughed. The skis hit the runway and the plane began to slow. Katie unlocked her harness, climbed down the ladder from the deck, and put on her parka and gloves.
When she opened the door, she was dazzled by the brilliant light and the cold made her gasp. It was like being slapped in the face. The mucus in her nostrils froze and the cold, dry air rasped in her throat.
The roar of the engine ceased and a profound silence fell.
The smaller figure came towards her. She was so much muffled up that it was impossible to tell anything about her except that she was tall.
I hope I’m going to like you, Katie thought. No, that’s not right. I will like you. I have to like you.
Sara pushed up her sun goggles and Katie saw brown eyes creased in a smile. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you,” she said, and Katie knew it was going to be alright.
“The other guys are asleep,” Graeme said, “we try to stick to a twenty-four-hour cycle. They did offer to stay up – or some of them did –”
“But we thought you’d be tired,” Sara said, “and you’d probably prefer to meet them all in the morning.”
Katie was grateful. “You were right.”
They helped Robbie and the co-pilot unload the plane and stack the crates and bags onto a trolley. A sack of mail. Katie’s bags. A crate of oranges. Meat. Fresh fish. “Chef will be thrilled,” Sara said. “The last fresh food until October. Let’s get it inside before it freezes.”
Katie wheezed, as she carried one of her bags up the steps to the first module. Sara put a hand on her arm. “Take it easy. It’ll be a few days before you get used to the altitude. We’re about two thousand eight hundred metres above sea level.”
Graeme said, “Let these lazy so-and-sos do a bit of work for a change.”
Robbie laughed and clapped Katie on the back.
“Sure you don’t want to come back with me? Last chance. I’m loath to leave you here with these lunatics.”
For a moment Katie was almost tempted. It had all happened so quickly. Too quickly. She laughed and shook her head. She hadn’t come all that way to duck out at the last minute: of course she was staying.
The plane had to be refuelled. When it was ready to leave Katie and Sara went back outside to watch as the plane took off and grew smaller in the blue-white sky. It seemed important to go on watching until it dwindled to a dot. When at last it had disappeared neither of them spoke. This was it: it would be eight months before another plane flew in. Katie felt better now that it was too late to change her mind. She’d almost been afraid that she would panic when it came to the last moment. She hadn’t and whatever happened now, she would have to deal with it, simple as that. One day at a time, she told herself, and already she was closer to the end of her stay, if only by a few minutes.
As if Sara had read her mind, she put a heavily padded hand on Katie’s shoulder and squeezed. “It’ll be fine. Not saying it won’t be tough at times, but – well, not many people get to do this, we’re members of an exclusive club. On the whole continent there are only about seven hundred of us wintering over. That’s something special. Make the most of it.”
“It’s not your first time?”
“Nope. I was here last winter. Come on, let’s get back indoors.”
CHAPTER 5
“It’s not like the old days, when roughing it was a badge of pride,” Graeme said. He heaved one of Katie’s bags onto the bed. Divested of his outdoor gear, he turned out to be a tall, well-built man of about fifty with close-cut blonde hair and a stubble beard. “For those of us who wintered over in the original Halley station it’s sheer bloody luxury. In my view, when you’re cut off from the rest of the world for eight months at a time, you need all the comfort you can get. Some of the younger guys think that detracts from the romance of wintering over. Not me.”
“We still call bedrooms pit-rooms by the way,” Sara said.
There was the sound of a door opening down the corridor and a man in a dressing gown came out, yawning.
“I heard the plane leave,” he said, “and I’m thinking that I’ll see if you want anything.”
Sara said, “This is Chef, aka Ernesto, aka Mother. This is Katie.”
He thrust out a hand. He was young, mid to late twenties, Katie guessed, and dark with a five o’clock shadow. “Good to have you on board. Coffee? Scrambled eggs? We’ve still got real eggs. A nice cup of tea?”
Katie looked at her watch. It was four o’clock. “I think I’ll wait and have breakfast at breakfast time.”
“Best to get into the station routine,” Graeme agreed.
“I’d love a cup of tea, though.”
Sara said, “Why don’t you two guys get off back to bed? I’ll make Katie a cup of tea.”
The two women went along to a kitchen, gleaming with stainless steel and spotless. It opened onto an equally pristine dining room. Katie liked the clean lines and pale colours. This was only the second year that the base had been open: nothing had had time to get scuffed or worn.
Sara brewed the tea and set out biscuits. They sat down opposite each other. Now that Sara had taken off her outdoor clothes, Katie saw that she was solidly built. She had shoulder-length brown hair tied back and large, mild brown eyes. She was perhaps late thirties, a bit older than Katie at any rate. She wasn’t wearing a ring – probably single then, but she was wearing a small silver cross on a chain around her neck.
“I hoped we’d have another woman on board,” Sara said. “It’s a bonus that you’ve got medical training. Nice to know that I won’t end up having to take my own appendix out.”
It wasn’t quite a joke. There had been a famous occasion in the early sixties when a Russian doctor on a Soviet base had carried out his own appendectomy under a local anaesthetic, while a driver and a meteorologist stood by, holding a mirror and handing him instruments.
Katie smiled. “Let’s hope it won’t come to that.”
“Tell me about yourself,” Sara said. “Where did you train?”
“I did my medical degree at Imperial College. It was intercalated with a year of microbiology and that was what made me decide to go down the research path. But I thought I’d better leave my options open in case I decided to practise after all, so I did my foundation years before I switched to a PhD. After that I got a couple of research grants. Then I had trouble getting any more funding and I decided to apply to the programme. And here I am.”
No need to tell Sara more than that. A lot of people had to move on from doing research in their mid-thirties.
Sara nodded. “I did something similar – went into research, but in the end I missed the contact with other people and went back and did my GP training. Then I came straight out here. I’m not planning to do another year. Two is enough. I’ll be going back to join a practice when I go home.”
“What happened to the bloke I’m replacing? I didn’t hear exactly.”
A shutter seemed to fall over Sara’s face. Katie wondered if she’d made a faux pas by asking. But it was only for a moment. Then she answered readily enough. “Kevin? That was just unlucky. He’d only gone out to shovel snow into the
meltwater tank.”
She looked out of the window and Katie followed her gaze. Outside the landscape stretched away like a frozen sea, ice crystals glinting in the blazing sunlight.
“There was a blizzard,” Sara said. “Visibility was terrible. We found him lying unconscious some way from the base. He must have got disorientated – that can happen all too easily. We think he slipped and hit his head when he went over. He didn’t remember too much about it. We carried out an emergency evacuation and flew him back to England.”
“Will he be OK?”
“Yeah, yeah, they think he’ll make a full recovery in due course.”
This seemed a pretty truncated account of what must have been a dramatic event. And what did “in due course” mean? But Katie got the definite impression that further questions wouldn’t be welcome. Perhaps it was regarded as bad form on the base to dwell on things that had gone wrong or might go wrong. Given that from now on, whatever happened, there was no question of flying anyone out, that probably made good sense, psychologically.
Sara went on, “Minor accidents are much more common. That’s mostly what the base doctor has to deal with. Everyone is screened before they come out here, after all. And they are mostly young and healthy men in the first place.”
She yawned.
“Don’t let me keep you from your bed,” Katie said.
“You know, I think I will get my head down for an hour or two. The blackout blinds are very effective, by the way.” She levered herself up from the table. “Breakfast’s between seven and eight, lunch at twelve, dinner at seven. Oh, and there’s smoko around ten in the morning.”
“Smoko?”
“An Antarctic institution. I suppose it actually was for smoking originally. It’s just a coffee break now. There’s another break at teatime. Ernesto’s a red-hot baker and there’s usually some kind of cake. Food tends to loom very large here.” She smiled at Katie. “Oh, and if you want to explore, go ahead. There are no locks except on the loos.”
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