The White Darkness

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “Whenever the winter winds become too strong,

  I concentrate on you! . . .”

  The snow on the other side of the rumple at least looked soft—no risk to our ankles. Sigurd and I jumped down together.

  There was no time to fetch out the ice axes hanging from our belts—nowhere to sink their blades. We didn’t go straight through, mind. Like snowy quicksand, the loose crystals swallowed first our boots, then our legs. A slightly different color, yes, I thought. Then, like sand through the neck of an hourglass, obeying gravity, the snow under our feet fell away, and we fell with it. A crust of snow had masked a crack in the ice: face powder over a scar. Now, with a peculiar brittle sigh, the snow crust subsided into the fissure. We fell like hanged men through the scaffold trap, feet first, perfectly vertical, out of the blinding brightness and into a gloom as blue as deep water or Death.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Underground

  The jerk was so sharp that I thought the rope had cut me in half. Sigurd’s greater weight stopped my fall, began to draw me up and him down, but we collided in midair, a tangle of limbs and rope and screaming, and clung to each other, swinging sickeningly to and fro. Snow from the collapsing crust of the crevasse came down on our heads like Niagara—solid, smothering cataracts of snow grit caking us with cold. I thought I’d suffocate. I thought the weight would snap the ropes. I thought the tank would plunge down after us, on top of us. I thought the Ross Shelf had cracked like a skating pond and that below me was nothing but the Ross Sea a mile down.

  I thought that my hearing had been restored in the moment of my death, because my own screaming was so loud, but it was Sigurd, his chin on my shoulder, screeching into my ear. Then he made the mistake of looking upward, and his mouth and nose filled up with falling snow and that silenced the banshee wail. His eye sockets, too, filled up with snow. His hat was gone, his head bare but for a crest of white, as if he had been cursed with instant old age. Skull-white and eyeless, this gargoyle clung to me, its mouth spewing snow.

  Around us hung a blue world. Wherever sunlight penetrated the crevasse, the pure, ancient ice shone an iridescent blue—the color of swimming pools or the Caribbean Sea. From the lips of the opening hung countless sheets of wafer-thin ice, like the filters of a baleen whale, shavings of turquoise glowing with sunlight.

  Sigurd struggled and thrashed about, setting us swinging again. I blew in his face until his eyes at least could open—Calms the oil that greases the . . . something-or-other . . . can’t remember what—but he grew no calmer. His throat and nostrils were clogged with snow and he was suffocating. When he coughed, a mouthful of snow hit me in the face, but I doubt if he knew he was rid of it, because it had burned his gullet and tongue.

  “Please hold still. Hold still, please!” My face was so cold that I couldn’t shape the words. His ice axe was rammed against my stomach, and I was afraid of it tearing the fabric or cutting through my rope. Sigurd went on struggling and grunting and trying to break free of me. Perhaps he thought I was holding him down underwater—that he could float to the surface of this blue fjord if he could just break free.

  “Don’t struggle! Keep still!” I said, knowing he wouldn’t understand me. Never could, never will be able to make myself understood. A goldfish speaking gibberish, that’s me. “The knots’ll come undone if you don’t keep still!”

  Instantly Sigurd froze to catatonic stillness, his arms so tight around my body that I could not properly breathe. Above us, the roar of the tank grew and grew until it drowned out everything. I could picture Victor singing along to the music, thoughts flung far ahead into the realm of underground aliens. With the ridge of ice in his way, he wouldn’t even see the crevasse on the other side—not until he came over the crest. Every yard he advanced lowered us, on the ends of our rope, deeper and deeper into the blue ravine. “Look down, Victor! Please look down!” Into the slot of sky over our heads came the shadow of the Hagglund: an interruption to the sunlight, a noise big enough to crumble the Transantarctic Mountains. Then, suddenly . . . silence. Not idling or the crunching of gears, but a juddering sigh and another cascade of snow.

  In slamming on the brakes, Victor had stalled the engine. Now I could picture the twin vans straddling the ice rumple, steam rising off the hood, the smell of diesel rich in the air, the Nansen sled hanging back like a weary toddler. Our ropes threaded through the tie bars were the strings of twin puppets. Giant puppeteer, two puppets dangling. Uncle Victor’s puppets. Pull us up, Uncle Victor!

  “Have you out of there presently, don’t you fret!”

  “Presently,” I said to Sigurd.

  “Pezenty,” he said back to me, mouth stiff with cold. And we hung there, faces as inexpressive as poker players. I brushed the snow out of his hair as best I could and blew it off his cheeks.

  “Reader’s Digest,” I said. “When you get home, you can sell your story to Reader’s Digest. Pay you a bundle.”

  “No kid?” he said, and a while later I saw his tongue moving behind his rigid lips in that way I had mistaken for prayer but which was actually Sigurd counting imaginary money.

  “This happened to Captain Scott, you know? He and Taff Evans. On the first trip, the 1904 trip. They got out fine! Just took a while, that’s all! They reckon that’s why he made Taffy one of the five, you know?”

  “’Ive?”

  “One of the five who tried for the Pole. One of the five who—”

  “Don’t finish that sentence, Sym,” Titus advised.

  “Well, anyway, they reckon that spending time like that—like this—made them . . .” But that was another sentence I couldn’t finish. There was a terrible kind of intimacy in hanging face-to-face, clinging tightly to each other, but I didn’t want Sigurd to get the wrong idea about what was going through my head. . . . If he was anything like Maxine, he’d just think I meant Scott was gay. There are only two kinds of love in Maxine’s vocabulary: straight and gay. Friendship doesn’t figure.

  Another flurry of snow trickled in from the rim, and Sigurd tilted his head at a sound I could not hear. “What is it?” At first I thought it must be Victor singing, or Lee Konitz’s saxophone. But gradually I realized that the paper-thin stalactites—the rigid leaves of sea-blue ice above us—were resounding as the snow brushed over them. Wrapping my legs around Sigurd’s body, I reached out with the ski pole and tapped the largest. It made a bell-clear note, like a clock chiming. The highest were far out of range of my lousy hearing—like the music only angels can hear. Or dogs.

  Sigurd smiled, hearing far better (one of the angels, obviously). He took the ski pole out of my hand and tried it for himself. His arm muscles were jerked by spasms of cold; he could not open them fully away from his body at the armpits. But the vagueness cleared out of his eyes, and the effort of listening—even when I could not hear—fetched my own brain back from the dark.

  “When I came home from South Africa . . .”

  “Yes, Titus? What? I can’t remember!” I could recall some of the things on the tray, on Uncle Victor’s tray, underneath the embroidered tray-cloth, when he was training my memory—Pelmanism, “time-wasting”—a whistle, a fork, a pen, a peg . . . but I didn’t want those. I wanted to remember what had happened at Gestingthorpe when Titus Oates came back home from the Boer War. Because it was high summer then, and I needed to think warmth.

  Sigurd tapped away at the tubular bells of ice, reaching out for a wider and wider range of notes. I noticed he had enough of a beard for the green sunblock to stick to each separate hair. He played the ice with all the ferocious delicacy of a conductor bullying an orchestra. “At home I play keyboards,” he confided, splitting his lips to say it, and making them bleed.

  “When I came home from South Africa,” said Titus, “two hundred and eighty people sat down to a village dinner of beef, mutton, plum pudding, and brown ale. Not to mention the children’s tea: bread and butter and jam and tea. There was a procession led by my sisters—and a steam roundabout—and s
wings; coconut shies and a brass band playing patriotic songs. The local paper wrote a piece about me fit to curl one’s hair with embarrassment. Indeed I trust my sisters cut the paper up to curl their ringlets with, since Ma obliged me to stand up and talk some jingoistic tosh, and the paper quoted me.”

  And I passed all this information on to Sigurd—whole sentences and everything—because Titus seemed to think it would help to pass the time. “His mother had the church bells repaired, in thanksgiving for his safe return,” I concluded.

  But though I could picture it all, however hard I tried I could not hear the church bells Mrs. Oates had restored, couldn’t hear the summer sky choke up with the clamor of them, and it filled me with completely irrational rage to see Sigurd making music—to have the church bells show me their open mouths but hear nothing, nothing, nothing. . . .

  “Who is this Oates character?” said Sigurd.

  In an effort to make me hear, he hit harder at the delicate leaves of ice hanging over our heads, and one of them fractured and fell: a sword of Damocles. I felt it brush my leg as it dropped—down and down and down—into the colorless dark. The crevasse was so deep that whole seconds passed before we heard it shatter. Suddenly Sigurd was unable to raise the ski pole or play another note. A moment later the pole slipped from his grip and fell too. Hatless and wet haired, he had begun to change color below his green war paint. The snow that had filled his mouth had burned his gullet, and his soft palate was starting to blister.

  “Don’t let him die, Titus,” I said. “I like him.” And, like a plea in mitigation, “He does play keyboard!”

  “Ripping,” said Titus. “Prefer the Pianola myself. Flick of a switch.”

  “You always were a lazy so-and-so. Make yourself useful. Go and show Victor how to put the Hagglund into reverse: he never got the knack. Flick of a switch.”

  “All right, but be so good as to remember what I said: Motor sledges are a waste of time and money.”

  Once the stalled engine could be persuaded to restart, Uncle Victor did find reverse, no trouble. He did back away from the crevasse, and we were drawn up out of our blue gully toward a brilliant slit of pink sky. Two puppets dangling from either end of Uncle Victor’s string. On the way past, we used our axes to smash the ice leaves, so as not to cut ourselves on their razor-sharp edges. I don’t remember what sound that made: the destruction of those exquisite glass organ pipes built from the teardrops of whole generations of angels.

  And he was right, of course, Uncle Victor. If we had not been walking ahead of the tank, it would have driven straight into the crevasse and killed us all. If I had begun to doubt the truth of the things Victor said, the business of the crevasse made me think twice. Victor is a genius with an IQ of 184. And he has a Plan, which is more than anyone else does around here.

  He bundled me up in sleeping bags and clothes, with the red silk skirt, with his tweed jacket and flannel nightshirt and anything he could find in the big suitcase. He rubbed my arms and spooned sips of warm black currant juice between my lips. I tried to tell him that Sigurd was colder than I was, but he said, “First things first,” and that he could not spare his right-hand girl, his apprentice, his journeyman, his Sym. The bifocal parts of his old spectacles looked like teardrops rolling in the lenses.

  “Uncle Victor,” I said, touching the ice pocking on his cheeks. “Remember what Shackleton said to his wife?” My voice came out thin as the steam off tepid juice.

  “Say again?”

  “Shackleton. Wife. When he turned back. Gave up. No South Pole.”

  Uncle Victor began to sing something without a tune. But I persisted anyway, hiding behind Ernest Shackleton for safety. No one thought ill of Shackleton for loving his wife. No one thought ill of Shackleton for giving up ninety-seven miles short of the Pole and turning for home. No one thought ill of Shackleton because he wanted to live more than he wanted the glory. “‘I thought you’d rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.’ That’s what Shackleton—”

  Before I had even finished speaking, Victor turned away. I thought he hadn’t heard me, but he had.

  “What about you, boy?” he asked, starting to chafe Sigurd’s limbs, to rub warmth back into his body with a fistful of woolen sweater. “Suppose you’d like to turn back, too. ‘Better a live donkey,’ eh?” Sigurd blinked up at him, eyes bloodshot to the color of port wine. “You’re not your father, lad! You have opinions, I’ll be bound! Press on or turn back? The vote’s split, manner of thing. You can cast the decider!”

  For a long time, Sigurd’s eyes fixed on the same things mine had—the four mugs of steaming juice on the table—(four?). Then he said: “I very much want to go on, sir. If you think we can reach Symmes’s Hole, I truly want to see it! I told my father he’d got you all wrong. I told him he was scamming the wrong man. I told him: This Briggs man is really on to something!” Sigurd rolled his head from side to side on the leather seat, and his golden hair fell across his face. I raised myself on one elbow and stared at him. Catching sight of me, his eyes filled up with tears. “Oh, I don’t know!” he burst out. “I don’t know if it’s there or if it isn’t! I only know . . . I only know . . . that I love Sym! And wherever she goes I have to go with her! See her through! See her safe through!”

  I don’t know what my face showed—nothing, I suppose, since I assumed I was dreaming. I know Uncle Victor grew, then and there, in stature. His shoulders spread. His head lifted. His eyes closed as he savored Sigurd’s words. He was hearing something he had never heard before, not even from me—someone perfectly in tune with his Plan. “Well, that’s grand!” he breathed in a whisper. “Eh, that’s just grand, lad! Because it means I can tell you now.” He paused so that we would both know he was saying something truly momentous. “It’s you who’s the crucial one, lad. Not t’other—whatsisname—that Bruch item. Means-to-an-end is all he ever was.” Victor was kneeling between the two bench seats. Now he laid a hand on each of us, in a kind of benediction. Giant puppeteer, a puppet on each hand. “Made it part of the deal, I did, that Bruch brought his boy along. ‘A mate for my girl,’ I told him.” And Victor smiled, as if truer words had never been spoken. “You’re the crucial one, lad. Not that con man of a father. You and Sym! That was always the way I had it fixed up in my mind!” He pulled a red provision box toward him, upended it, and tipped the contents out on to the floor—thrust at us boxes of raisins that our hands were too cold to open, flapjacks and cake bars in untearable foil. “Eat! Eat!” he urged, fetching us our mugs and his own, pausing only to pour the fourth away out the door. “Plenty more when we get there! Plenty more when we reach Home!”

  The East Essex & Halstead Times

  A stirring homecoming for local war hero (cont’d from page 1)

  . . . the lieutenant’s conspicuous valor. We are indeed proud of him.

  Lt. Oates looks better than one might expect, considering his experiences at the front, although a bullet wound in the thigh still causes him to limp.

  It was annoying about the snowsuit. I don’t know how you mend neoprene. Mum would know. Mum would mend it for me on the sewing machine. Maybe I can use electrical tape. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it was sharp, that fragile wafer of ice, blue as sheet steel and still trembling with music as it fell. The edge on it was sharp as a razor. Shouldn’t surprise me. It’s just that I’d have thought to feel it at the time. Such a spectacularly deep cut.

  Mum could have kissed it better. If only she were here.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Open Wounds

  I notice Titus limps more than he did.

  In Antarctica, in the cold, wounds don’t heal, they reopen. It’s Nature in reverse. After South Africa, the bullet wound in Titus’s leg healed and left nothing but a long ragged scar in his upper thigh. But in the Antarctic it would have opened up again, flesh parting from flesh, laying bare the bone. Healing in reverse.

  My father didn’t like me, and now that he’s dead, there’s nothing I can do t
o make him like me. I thought I’d gotten over that. But wounds unheal here. It troubles me more and more, not less and less. You have to be pretty useless for even your own father not to like you. So how can I seriously expect anyone else . . .

  “Who says?”

  “Who says what, Titus?”

  “Who says that your father didn’t like you? Wasn’t me.”

  “Well, Uncle Victor . . .”

  “Oh, him. The man who says the Earth’s hollow.”

  I thought about this. “But it feels true that Dad didn’t like me.”

  “Ah.”

  And he did not press the point, because friends aren’t friends who tell you black is white just because you want it to be.

  Anyway, I have someone else now who loves me.

  Dear Nikki,

  Who would have thought it? The boy called Sigurd is in love with me! I would send you a photo if I had a camera. My hair is freeze-dried and there are sores around my mouth. If I stay here long enough, my body hair will start to grow till I look like a yak. But hey! They say love is blind, don’t they? They say it’s the person inside. Get thee to my lady’s chamber and tell Maxine, let her paint an inch thick, it’s the girl inside who counts. Yesterday Sigurd and I were wound in each other’s arms for half an hour, and if we hadn’t been down a crevasse and dying by degrees, I might have sat on the teacher’s desk when I got home and told you all how it was—my legs around his waist, making music. Uncle Victor says there are no rules here, no stupid social niceties. He says we should get to it, that thing that Maxine calls love.

  Tell Mum I’m sorry.

  XSX

  “Well, what was I supposed to say?” Sigurd said once we were under way again and Victor was up front, driving. “If I’d said any different, I’d have gone the same way as Bruch. Which of those drinks on the table do you think I’d have gotten if I’d said, No, Mr. Briggs:I want to go back, Mr. Briggs. Let’s go home, Mr. Briggs. Your stupid John Symmes was an even bigger loser than you are. The cup with the vitamin C, d’you think? Or the one with the arsenic?”