When he finally opened his eyes, he was Sigurd the Charming again, calm and cheerful and ready for anything. “Ah!” he said. “Clever.”
“This wasn’t my idea, you know? I never wanted to go looking for Symmes’s stupid Hole!”
Just then, the crackling voice of Uncle Victor came over the loudspeakers: “What people fail to grasp is . . .” It was as if he were right there with us, in the van. What if he had heard me! I sweated at the thought of my treachery being overheard—waited for Victor’s crackling voice to reproach me. Gradually, though, I remembered watching the silent CCTV, the angry dumbshow between father and son. No. Victor had not heard my terrible disloyalty. Somewhere there had to be an intercom that would let us communicate with the men in front, but with the van so stacked with fuel cans, it was out of sight and reach.
There was an overpowering smell of diesel. Fuel cans lined every wall and were piled up to the roof. On the breakneck career down the ice chute they had been wedged in too tightly to move. Now, with one gone, the remainder wriggled and turned like restless sleepers, their sides sweating diesel where the cap seals weren’t perfect. The floor was taken up by stacks of red boxes with transparent lids—prepacked provisions for use by sled trekkers. How Victor and Manfred must have labored to load so much kit, while Camp Aurora lay cocooned in its drug-induced sleep.
Outside, the Shelf was a hollow sphere of a world quite worthy of John Cleeves Symmes. There was no horizon, only cloud and cloud shadow with nothing to mark where one ended and the other began. The ground was a geometric pattern of lilac and gray and white. Some of the lines were lumps and creases in the surface. Some were shadows cast by the lumps and creases. Some were cloud shadows. Now and then, Victor wrenched on the steering wheel to avoid hitting obstacles that were not there. We were driving through a painting by Escher, a hall of frosted mirrors. I watched it out of the window until it became just a pattern: two dimensions, flat, unreadable.
The sun was a burnished silver disc, like a button to press for your money back.
“Does your dad have a satellite phone?” I asked Sigurd.
“No chance. Do you know how much they cost?”
I thought of Victor munching on the card out of his mobile, chewing on its delicate contacts. Not that it would have been much use to me here. But I might always have spoken to my mother from Paris, or South America. I suppose that’s why he did it. Now I might never . . .
The van began snaking and weaving. Manfred must have leaned his head close to Victor’s microphone, for we could just hear his voice over the intercom. “You are sleeping, my friend,” said the voice soothingly. “Permit me to drive for a while.”
At the best of times the never-ending sameness of the Shelf is mesmerizing. On top of that, I doubt Victor had slept for two hours together since Paris. His voice, even distorted by static, sounded slurred and vague. “I can sleep to order,” he said. “Sleep’s a state of mind. Habit. Turn the lights out, get into bed: Of course you sleep. Sleep out of habit, most folk. State of mind. Nowt better to do with their nights. Me, I’ve trained myself up . . .”
And on we went, through the hours that should have been dark but weren’t, through the trembling, milky miasma of the Barrier.
Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the surface would change to sastrugi or a royal icing of frozen snow. There would be sharp steps up, or one side of the van would lurch over a solidified snowdrift. For the most part it was a shining lake of platinum puddled with mirror-bright patches of platelet-snowflakes—as if a billion sequins had been squandered over the ice. Sometimes—the worst times—there would be a sharp step down, and my internal organs would cram together under my rib cage like sheep in a slaughterhouse, terrified.
Once or twice the brakes came on hard as Uncle Victor, dozing off at the wheel, woke and reflexively slammed his foot to the floor. Then the two compartments would close up, the fuel slop, the sled cannon into the back step, the Ski-Doo clatter into the sled. Sigurd and I stopped looking out the window. We looked instead at the fuel cans piled up like some gigantic supermarket display—and starting to shift. Any one of them was heavy enough to crush us if it fell. We stood up, trying to brace the cans in place, feeling the loose diesel run down our arms. The fumes were sickening, and pretty soon pieces of black rag seemed to blow in front of my eyes. My head began to pound. “Stop! Please stop!” we yelled. One of the topmost canisters shot over my head and landed on the bench where we had just been sitting.
At last Manfred must have glimpsed our plight on the CCTV, because his voice came faintly over the intercom, urging Victor to stop, telling him about the shifting cargo. Another sharp jab on the brakes. The provisions boxes came sliding along the floor, shunting into our legs, sharp-cornered and bruising.
“Have we turned over?” said Victor’s voice, quizzical, puzzled, sleepy. The mesmerizing flicker of shadow, the swirl of snow, the lack of horizon had at last defeated him. The harder you look where you are going, the less sense you can make of it, this funnel of light revolving like the inside of a huge pipe as it rolls downhill. Vertical and horizontal lose all their meaning in a place without horizons.
Manfred opened the rear doors, letting in Cold sharp as a hatchet. As he righted the fuel cans, he was muttering under his breath, warning Sigurd to remember what he had been told. (What had he been told? I wondered. To treat the young lady with chivalry?) Sigurd and I climbed down and stood with our heads back, letting the wind blow into our noses, the snowflakes fill our mouths. When I went to look, Victor was asleep over the steering wheel, eyes quivering behind their lids, at the bottoms of sockets deep as shell holes. I stood beside the truck watching him sleep, wondering what he was dreaming and whether Mum or I featured at all in his dreams, ever.
Deaf Sym wasn’t the first one to hear it, of course. Manfred suddenly lurched up behind me, reached into the truck, and cut the engine. The Hagglund gave a shuddering sigh. He might as well have turned off a force field, for the Silence came at us in a rush, set our ears ringing, came clamoring around us like a shrill swarm of wasps: Silence. It was a while before I realized that Sigurd and Manfred were hearing something more. They were hearing another engine.
An aircraft.
At home there is nowhere you can stand—the playground, the garden, the high street—and not hear the drone of an airplane. But here in Antarctica it is the rarest of sounds.
We pulled our snow goggles into place and scanned the sky. What direction was it coming from? We cupped our hands around our ears and turned to all four points of the compass, but the sound was filling the sky like a cloth soaking up blood. The whole hollow sky reverberated with engine noise.
I looked at the Hagglund under its white tarpaulin of snow. I looked at our snowsuits, all pastel pale. How would it ever spot us? I looked at Victor slumped over the wheel. Should I want them to spot us?
Was it a routine flight or a search plane? A ski-plane that could set down beside us on the ice? Or an airliner at 50,000 feet, en route for Australia? Was it a military plane delivering personnel to the Scott-Amundsen Base? Or the Law in pursuit of those who had drugged an entire campful of people and stolen away in a half-million-dollar vehicle?
Sigurd pulled a red provision box out onto the ground and pried off its plastic lid. He shook the contents out onto the snow.
“What are you looking for?”
“A flare! A flare!” said Sigurd. “They’ll see a flare!”
“That’s food,” I told him, and he kicked the box with the side of his foot. It went an amazingly long way, skidding on and on, slowly revolving. Our eyes followed it hypnotically. “We couldn’t let off a flare anyway,” I said. “The air’s full of diesel. The whole van would go up. Flashback. Flashover. Backdraft. Something . . .” He blinked at me vacantly. “Sigurd, you’ve got diesel all over your clothes—you’d go up like a torch!”
But despite me saying it—and perfectly loudly—Manfred the Viking reached into his breast pocket and took out a big gold l
ighter, thumb resting over the flintwheel. His goggled face turned like an automaton’s, as he ran his eyes over the whole length of the Hagglund, from its gaping rear doors, along the roofline heaped with fuel cans, to the front section where Victor lay sprawled over the steering wheel, sound asleep. Seeing the lighter, Sigurd gave a howl of terror. “No!” he said. “No, please! What about the backdraft?”
The Viking, mishearing him, patted his breast pocket. “I have it safe.” He thumbed the flintwheel.
Sigurd looked to and fro between the lighter and the diesel-stained arms of his snowsuit. “No, please . . .” He stooped to scoop up snow and rub it along his arms, trying to wash them clean.
I know when not to bother speaking. I know when people aren’t open to reason. Dad used to light bonfires sometimes, to scare away the jackals he said were looking in at the windows. . . . I climbed onto the truck’s steps and began to drag on Victor’s arm, trying to pull him out of the driving seat. His seat belt was holding him in place.
“Please! Mr. Bruch, please!”Sigurd begged. “Don’t!”
“What about the Hole?” I called, as I snapped the seat belt out of its slot. “Don’t you want to find Symmes’s Hole?”
Uncle Victor roused up and frowned at me blearily. “That’s my girl,” he said. “Not far now.” And his body, which had been spongy with sleep, began to resist my efforts to pull him out of the cab. His fists clenched the steering wheel. He’s strong, Uncle Victor. I knew I was no match for him once he was fully awake. The reek of diesel was everywhere, like the noise of the plane.
“Uncle, could you maybe get down . . .”
“Say again?” The more I pulled, the more he roused up and resisted me.
Manfred Bruch stood gazing up at the sky, cigarette lighter raised.
“Mr. Bruch! Mr. Bruch, sir! Please!” begged Sigurd, backing out of the lee of the truck and into the never-ending rip and rasp of the wind. But the plane did not materialize. In Antarctica, sound travels immense distances. It might have been two miles up or fifty miles away; there was no knowing. No knowing, either, what Manfred Bruch was about. Dad used to say jackals were watching him through the windows; there’s no point asking what’s going on in another person’s head.
Gradually the stench of fuel dissipated. So too did the engine noise. The Viking put away his cigarette lighter—though come to think of it, the last time I’d seen it, that bulky gold obelisk of a lighter, it had belonged to Mimi Dormiere-St.-Pierre.
“Bite to eat, lass,” said Uncle Victor, rousing fully. “Make thysel’ useful and fix us a bite to eat, eh? What’s today? Thursday? Think on. My day for fish.”
I climbed down and walked slowly out to where the red provision box stood on the ice. Its side was dented from Sigurd’s kick. Towing it along by one of its cord handles, I turned back toward the Hagglund—which looked suddenly tiny. Even the small distance I had put between me and it rendered the four-ton Hagglund as small as a Matchbox toy. A Matchbox toy lost on some great expanse of white linoleum under God’s bed.
“Thursday was always a holiday in India,” said Titus, coming to help.
“We’re in the middle of Nowhere. That’s where we really are.”
“You can’t make a melodrama out of a pig’s ear,” said Titus, and he repeated, “Thursday was always a holiday in India.” His hand closed over mine to help pull the provisions box. It weighed nothing once he was pulling.
“So tell me what we did on Thursdays, Titus. In India.”
“We went after the jack. Took the motorbike out for a spin. Saw to the dogs. Went for a picnic.”
I suddenly pictured what might have happened if Manfred had flicked the wheel of that lighter, and my legs unaccountably refused to carry me. So I crouched down and ransacked the red box until I found a jar of Swedish sild that looked a bit like fish: It would do for Victor’s tea—as soon as I could stop my legs shaking and get it back to the Hagglund.
“Can I come next Thursday, Titus?”
“That would be ripping, Florence.”
Sometimes I’m not me at all, you know? Sometimes, when I need to get away farther than usual, I’m Florence Chambers.
Oates asked her out when he was twenty-two—signed himself “Your ardent admirer”—but her mother said no, she couldn’t go, so they met in secret once or twice and he took her photograph and that was that. He was still talking about her ten years later, in Antarctica.
So sometimes I’m Florence Chambers. And Titus and I meet and change history by secretly eloping, and I follow him from assignment to assignment: South Africa, Egypt, India, Ireland . . . living in disguise near the barracks, and he confides only to his very best friends how much in love we are; Deighton, for instance, his kennelman and mechanic and army valet and trusty companion. Deighton has a whole subplot.
What?
And I ride on the back of Titus’s motorbike, and look after his pet deer and exercise his horse in the cool, misty mornings, and afterward we curry the sweat from its flanks, the horse in parentheses between us, our arms mirroring each other as we brush, the tail splashing us each in turn, amid a smell of saddle soap and straw, because if Titus were ever to love a woman, it wouldn’t be anyone helpless or feeble who cried for want of an airplane or out of fright and couldn’t make her legs stop shaking or keep her wits about her or marshal her facts; it wouldn’t be anyone like that; it wouldn’t be anyone like that; no one like that.
What?
The Brontë sisters invented a whole town full of people, didn’t they?—Glasstown—and wrote stories about it in microscopically small handwriting. Anything rather than be cooped up in a gloomy rectory in the middle of a god-awful moor: Glasstown.
Anything rather than share a school-bus ride with Maxine and her huge repertoire of filthy jokes. Glasstown.
Anything rather than remember Dad lighting bonfires from my books, to keep imaginary jackals away from our windows. Glasstown.
Anything rather than drive over a frozen sea, with people who are not what they seem, toward a gaping hole in the Earth.
“Just you and me on a Thursday in Glasstown, eh, Titus?”
“Just you and me, Florence,” said Titus. “Though may I make bold to observe: Sigurd the Golden One calls his father Mr. Bruch?”
“You think I didn’t notice?”
“In that case, let us picnic.”
“What’s sild?”
“Oh, specialité de la Maison Amundsen, ma chère. Sardines in formaldehyde. You’d stick with well-cooked pony hoosh if you were I.”
Chapter Twelve
Glasstown
The Shelf isn’t beautiful. It isn’t anything. It’s like a carpet warehouse where you can go to buy Nothing by the square foot. Broadloom nothingness. But Nothing was so much better than what was coming that I started to think of the Shelf as beautiful—a beautiful vacant antechamber to tomorrow, with nothing to do but sleep and eat and imagine. A sort of Glasstown-on-Ice.
“Somebody built an ice town on the Ice Shelf once, Titus. Thought he’d capture the sublime essence of Life, living on the limit.”
“‘Only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous,’ as my hero Napoleon once said. What did this gentleman ‘capture’ exactly?”
“Major depression. Life was meaningless. God was dead, that sort of thing, I think. Not a successful experiment.”
“I’m surprised it was only God who was dead by the end of it,” said Titus.
Little by little, the huge wall of fuel cans shrank until there was room in the back van for us. We found the intercom for communicating with the driver’s van, but we did not find the reason to use it. Sigurd and I could sit comfortably enough to sleep now, and Manfred and Victor had agreed to share the driving. The Viking seemed to like this arrangement. Maybe he thought if I was allowed to ride up front with my uncle, I would mention the punch or the incident with the cigarette lighter. But as the hours rolled away and the kaleidoscopic flicker of sky and ice sucked us down its revolving tunnel of edg
eless light, I became less and less sure what I had actually seen earlier on.
This isn’t somewhere that you can trust what your eyes are telling you. Maybe Manfred had simply taken a minute or two to comprehend the danger of a naked flame. Or perhaps he had just been teasing. I thought of asking Sigurd if his dad had a really weird sense of humor.
I thought of asking why he called his father “Mr. Bruch.”
I thought of telling him about my dad and asking if he was afraid of his, too. . . . But already he was behaving as if nothing had happened. Nothing. He was smooth and cool and charming again, saying all the right things. It was incredible. “He must have nerves of steel,” I told myself, humiliated by his courage. They were all three so brave:Victor and Manfred and Sigurd! They didn’t seem frightened at all, whereas me . . . What a coward! What a gutless, spineless . . .
I tried to forget everything I had ever read about the Ross Ice Shelf—about Antarctica. I wanted not to look—wouldn’t look, I decided. I would turn inside and be with Titus. That was best. Wake me when it’s over. But even my imagination was rigid with fright. I had trouble conjuring up Titus’s face.
So I concentrated on the Hansel and Gretel trail—all those empty fuel cans, caterpillar tracks, splashes of green diesel, sild jars, an empty peanut butter carton, urine stains as orange as Sunny Delight. I held the list in my mind, adding to it, memorizing an aerial picture of all the clues we had left in our wake.
Victor, when I was little and he was training my brain, used to put two things on a tray, then three, then four, then five, then cover them up and I would have to remember them. He said it “flexed the thinking muscles.” In the end I could remember thirty-two things. Apparently Victor’s record was eighty-eight, though I never saw him do it; he said it would be showing off and anyway it would dishearten me, since I could manage only thirty-two. I remember, Dad came in and I wanted to show him what I could do, but he was on his way out to a job. “Ah. Pelmanism,” he said. Just that. “Pelmanism.”
The White Darkness Page 11