The White Darkness

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “No! Uncle! Please! Don’t leave me here alone! Stay here with me! We should stay together! We shouldn’t get separated! Everyone says . . .”

  But genius has taken over—as genius always has, tyrannizing Victor’s life, shouting in his ear that he is a man of destiny and dazzling merit. He has suddenly realized that without his big, down-filled overjacket he might fit through the ragged throat of the ice chimney. So he tugs and rends at the fasteners, throws aside his bear-paw mittens to find the tag of the zipper, shrugs his shoulders out of their quilting, his arms out of the sleeves, his wrists out of the cuffs—forgetting the small fact that, along with the jacket, he has taken off the harness as well.

  The slick whistle of neoprene rubbing against ice, and he is gone, hands over his head. I am standing on the sled. I reach out—try to grab something, anything—but pitch up against an empty funnel.

  Even so, his face, in falling, is turned up toward mine, so I see the look that crosses it. Realization. True enlightenment.

  Dark takes him in the blink of an eye.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Oh! He Was a Gentleman, Quite a Gentleman, and Always a Gentleman!”—Tom Crean, of Oates

  Bulging obese with Uncle Victor’s jacket crammed on over my own, I sit for a long time at the foot of the ice chimney, sheltering in its lee, my back against its pocked and goitered surface. The appalling wind slices across its opening, as over the neck of an empty bottle, howling.

  “Good riddance,” I say, trying the phrase on for size, zipping the jacket as high as the zipper will go.

  “Oh?”

  “He destroyed me, Titus. He murdered my dad. He’s murdered me.”

  Titus also sits with his back to the funnel, eyes screwed up so hard that his white teeth are bared. The hollow between his cheekbone and jaw is deeper now, the skin stretched almost transparent. With a penknife, he is cutting through the laces of his boot, from the top of the shin all the way down, click, click, click.

  “The bastard destroyed me!”

  He doesn’t contradict me, because a friend isn’t a friend who tells you black is white. He simply says: “As Scott destroyed me. But do you think he meant to? Do you think it was done with malice?”

  Why can he not be angry? Now’s the time to be angry. Not before, with me. Now. “Well? You hated Scott! Now I hate Victor, just the same!”

  “Me, hate Scott?” He seems surprised.

  “Yes, the Owner! You did, you hated Scott!”

  “Hate him? I loved the man.”

  “After what he did to you? After the way—”

  “Oh, at first I couldn’t abide him. Skipped Sunday service because Scott led the prayers. Couldn’t stand his vain, sanctimonious, two-faced . . . Let’s just say I harbored un-Christian thoughts about him sometimes. Whenever we were in the same room. Sometimes when we weren’t. But in the end? Out on the Barrier? In the end, I loved the man. We all did. Loved every hair of his head. Because his heart was good and his intentions were sound. And because . . .” He looks around him at the Plateau’s white maze of hazy alleyways, as if the right leafy words might blow past. His voice is as soft and dizzying as smoke around the brain. “God save us, girl, who else was there to love? It would have been a precious foolish thing, to waste time hating each other.” And he stops what he is doing and lifts his arm, so that I can lean in against his chest and press my forehead against the damp wool of his cardigan. I can smell his sweat. Long time now since he and the others stripped to their drawers to wash with handfuls of snow. Ninety-one years.

  “Everyone loved you, Titus. Always. The magnificent Captain Oates? Everyone who met you. Everyone loved you.”

  “Ah! That’s Death for you,” he says with a twitch of the nose, dipping his eyes in embarrassment. “Does wonders for a man’s reputation, don’t you know. There’s simply nothing like it for making people speak well of you. Come on. Time to go.” But we continue to sit and watch the covers of the sled flapping in the wind, the two empty harnesses rolling over and over on the ends of their ropes. Hatred erodes in the wind. I daresay I shall shed it all in time, along with my hair.

  “I could always say—when I get home, I mean—I could always say Victor did find Symmes’s Hole,” I suggest. “Died bravely making the Greatest Scientific Discovery of All Time. Who’d be any the wiser? Or worse off? Who’d care?”

  Titus fixes me with that penetrating stare of his;the one that would make a charging bull elephant stop, think twice, apologize, and saunter off.

  “Well, all right, I won’t say it. But I hope he found something. Paradise. At the bottom of the hole. Some kind. Paradise. We were very fond of him once. The family. I think. If I can remember.” My skin is so cold that my tears feel like molten lead running down, running down. Sobbing hurts the vertebrae of my spine, too, but it can’t be helped. It would be a precious foolish thing, to go on hating Uncle Victor for the rest of my life; and the rest of my life doesn’t really allow time for postponing the tears.

  “Tell you what, dearie. Given the whole Universe to choose from, I doubt God would site Paradise down here, in the U trap under His sink. Eh? God, this is an awful place, Sym. Can’t we be cutting along now?”

  But I haven’t the heart to bend my leg, put weight on it, raise myself to my feet. I roll onto hands and knees but go nowhere—abject, submissive under the whip-cracking wind, fawning on the jostling snow ghosts in the hope they will spare me for another day, another hour. At any moment the fragile glass rink of the Devil’s Ballroom may crack and open under me. What the Hell. How could the blackness down there be any blacker than the hole inside me?

  “Hey, Sym! I trust you are not forgetting: You are with the fortunate Captain Oates? You may shelter under my good luck.”

  “Oh, goody.”

  “What? I told you before: I’m the luckiest of men! Think! Two years more and it could all have been ours: the Great War! Lice and rats. Drowning in mud. Shrapnel wounds. Mustard gas. One among millions known only unto God. Would that have been somehow preferable? Is that what you wish on me?”

  “You might not have died in the Great War.”

  “Well, then what would you call lucky? If the dogs had come?”

  “Yes!”

  “Rescued in the nick of time—on my thirty-second birthday?”

  “Yes!”

  “And just how much would this horse-riding, boxing, camel-racing, sailing, cricketing, skiing, motorcycling, soldiering man of yours have enjoyed life with amputated hands and feet? No one could ever accuse me of that kind of bravery.”

  And Titus beams: his sunniest of smiles. “Instead, what were we, the five of us? Household names! Celebrities! Scott and Birdie and Doctor Bill and Taffy and I!”

  “The Famous Five.”

  “I should decline to know of Enid Blyton, but yes, The Famous Five.”

  “Without the cakes and buns.”

  “Or Timmy the Dog.”

  “Oh! Timmy the Dog! If you’d had Intrepid Timmy, you could have sent him off with a note in his collar to fetch help!”

  “Eaten him, anyway.”

  That’s how it’s done, you see. It’s the same way people get horses out of burning buildings. When the whole world’s on fire around you, you use a blindfold. Everyone needs someone like Titus for a blindfold.

  That reminds me: I must retrieve my snow goggles. I crawl across the ice to find them, then turn toward the sled. The wind slides me along on my fleecy knuckles and neoprene knees. I’m a hockey puck skidding toward the goal. There is no possible way that I can haul the sled on my own. So I pull all the dregs of food out of it—biscuits, raisins, curry powder, cocoa powder, glucose tablets—pour them into a plastic bag, all in together—and push it into my sleeping bag. I push that inside Victor’s sleeping bag, along with the foil blankets. The wind has stolen all but one of the skis.

  “Those Norskies had their heads screwed on right, you know. They could even sail better than I could,” says Titus.

  “
Everyone could sail better than you, Titus. You were a liability in a boat.” But I take his hint to use the remaining ski as a mast, and the covers of the sled as a sail, as Amundsen did, scudding home from the Pole. At least then I can sleep inside it. Or be easier spotted from the air.

  But stupid, stupid, stupid, ignorant, mindless, useless idiot fool that I am—victim of a shoddy education—I unlace the sled covers without turning the sled side-on to the wind.

  With a crack like a galleon losing its mainmast, the wind swoops under the covers and fills them. Faster than a life jacket inflating, the sled swallows the full force of the plateau wind, rears up, leaps into the air. It has absurd ambitions to fly, this slab of steel and fiberglass, this thing that has wrenched my guts into piles of spaghetti with its massive, immovable weight. Its runners slice through the air a hair’s breadth above my head; then it crashes down on its prow and somersaults away across the Devil’s Ballroom—end over end, spinning and waltzing to the music of the wind.

  I run. I run and run and run—not after it, but in the opposite direction—into the haze, cold ripping at my throat, feeling the ice juddering under my feet: BOOM BOOM BOOM! It’s the noise of a hurtling sled prancing and cartwheeling, over and over, slamming down repeatedly onto a drumskin of delicate frozen snow. It is a noise loud enough to walk on.

  When, finally, the ballroom floor is holed—when the Nansen crashes nose first through the fragile platform of ice—when the glass shatters—the fractures spread out with the speed of shockwaves, crazing the entire landscape. From the edge of the Devil’s Ballroom, not knowing if my feet are on plate glass or solid ground, whether I have run far enough or whether I too will fall, I stand and watch the Devil roll up a section of his ballroom floor and reveal the basement beneath.

  I shut my eyes sooner than see the drop.

  On and on, the noise of catastrophe. Then a silence like the end of the world.

  “What, not dancing?” whispers Titus into the nape of my neck.

  “No. You and I were always wallflowers.”

  “In that case, perhaps we should be leaving. I’ll rustle up a coach-and-four.”

  When there’s enough sun to cast a shadow, I’ll use my body shadow and wristwatch to keep my bearing. I’ll be a sundial. Of course I’m not sure which bearing I want to keep; I’ve only a memory of the GPS in the tank telling me it’s northeast or north-northeast. At home in the summer, when Victor taught me how to do it, using the sundial in the garden, we had to adjust for British daylight time. Just a hunch, but I reckon you don’t have to adjust for British daylight time down here.

  I suppose vampires must get lost everywhere they go. Is it vampires? Who have no shadows? I’m a vampire, then. In the White Darkness I have no shadow.

  Doesn’t surprise me anymore that the wind could pick up the Nansen and chuck it through the air. Seen chunks of ice as big as cars burst volcanically out of the ground in a pumice cloud of snow and ice—just kicked there by the wind. Twice, gusts picked me up and threw me thirty yards. Victor’s extra jacket cushioned me. Like blubber on a sea lion. I’d like to say I picked myself up after I landed and exclaimed, Oh, Toto! I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore! but that wasn’t what I said. An ancient language, Anglo-Saxon, and very useful when all that’s holding you to the ground is a pack of ghost dogs with their teeth in your thigh.

  The sun gives more back than my shadow. I am clambering over the monstrous carcass of some dead, fanged dragon—a morass of rocks and peaks and glacial slides that take the feet from under me and spill me down long chutes of white pain, when suddenly—a flash of light on glass. For the longest time, I assume it’s ice. But because it holds my attention, my face turns toward it, and whichever way my face turns, I can’t help walking, so I walk toward it. It reminds me of the sun flashing in the windows of the Hagglund as it drove away. Eventually the flicker and flash turn into twin circles of light.

  Glasses?

  Extraordinary. Impossible. A hallucination. An illusion. Except that it happens.

  “I found my little white pipe on the way back from the Pole,” says Titus. “Dropped it on the way going, found it coming back. Raised my spirits no end.”

  Victor’s glasses. The lenses from his glasses, I mean. I have to take off one glove to pick them up. Raises a laugh, if not my spirits. What a fluke! What a fantastically futile fluke! It makes me laugh out loud—bark like a dog, dislodging the ice crusted around my nose and mouth and hanging from my eyebrows and fur-trimmed hood. Good for Uncle Victor! Keeping me on the straight and narrow. Keeping me on course. Keeping my eye on the . . .

  The lenses lie in the palm of my hand, the teardrop bifocals looking dolefully up at me. Then I can see through them into his eyes, into his face, into the time before we got here. My uncle Victor. When Dad died, the one sight that made me cry was a pair of his shoes in the hall, molded into the shape of his feet. Things. It’s things that get to you. Silky blouses slithering onto a railway platform; a budgie in a bank; a mobile phone spinning on a glass-top table.

  “Sorry. So sorry,” I say to Titus, sinking to my knees. “I’ve tried, but I can’t do it. My eyes hurt too much. My leg. Too tired. Need to lie down. Need to stop.”

  “Canty up, Sym! See it out! Just keep in my lee!”

  Like good King Wenceslas . . . “in her master’s steps she trod, where the snow lay dinted. . . .” But Titus is making no footprints, or else the blizzard is filling them in the instant. In any case, I haven’t the strength to take one more step. Sorry.

  “Give it to me, Sym!” says Titus. “Give it to me to carry.”

  “What?”

  “The pain, Sym. Give it to me.”

  “Oh. No. No, thank you all the same.”

  “Give it to me, Sym! Give it to me to carry!”

  “Not to worry. Don’t trouble yourself. Why should you?”

  “Because I’m the one who loves you enough. I’m the one who cares if you live or die.”

  It’s true: Everyone needs a reason to stay alive—someone who justifies your existence. Someone who loves you. Not beyond all reason. Just loves you. Even just shows an interest. Even someone who doesn’t exist, or isn’t yours. No, no! They don’t even have to love you! They just have to be there to love! Target for your arrows. Magnetic Pole to drag on your compass needle and stop it spinning and spinning and tell you where you’re heading and . . . Someone to soak up all the yearning. That’s what I think. That’s what I deduce. I’ve mustered my facts. And that’s what I—

  “Give me the pain, Sym! I’ll pull it for you. Are you tired? I’m not! I’ll carry the weariness, Sym!”And he leans over me, his face close to mine, his cheek rubbing mine. Sharp with beard, it scratches my cheek like frostburn. When he takes his face away, it is ice pocked, the blue lips split and bleeding, the corneas of his eyes scraped red by the iron-filing flecks of ice in the wind. I ought to protest harder, but it is pleasant to be loved. Everyone knows that.

  “You’ve done enough,” I say.

  People are always expecting things of him. Wanting him to have been perfect. Wanting him to have been braver than they ever could be. I won’t impose. I wouldn’t have let him go outside in the first place.

  “Listen to me, Sym. I got it wrong. I should have walked out earlier. Then my dying might have made a difference. Five days earlier, and it might have made a difference. Five days when the others could have eaten my rations! Five days less of marching at the pace of a man crippled in both legs. Each morning it took me three hours to put on my boots—three hours when the others could have been pressing on! Five days earlier and the last blizzard might not have pinned them down. Five days earlier and they might have made it to One Ton! But I funked it. I didn’t want to die alone. God knows, I wanted to be dead, but I didn’t know how to commit suicide without a gun. They refused to leave me behind in my sleeping bag, though I begged them. . . . My hands were gone. I couldn’t even take the coward’s way out. My hands were gone, girl, so I couldn’t get the
morphine out of my pocket. So I waited and I hoped to die, but I didn’t and I didn’t, because . . . because—who knows why? Because I was made so deep-down, ingrained stubborn—or because I was so damned fit to begin with—or because the pain hadn’t finished with me.”

  Poor Titus. He doesn’t understand. It’s not dying or bravery or The Ice that makes him wonderful—indispensable. It’s not the dagger of ice in his heart but the sliver of India’s sunshine. It’s being lousy at spelling, and crying for joy when his horse won a race, and thinking he could sail a yacht because his grandfather was an admiral, and chasing his own motorbike down a mud-baked road, and keeping a deer in the coal store . . . It’s the color of his eyes and the silken rope of his voice. It’s being thirty-two and beautiful as a dog moon. . . . He shouldn’t have gone outside. Young men ought to be left to grow old. Friends ought to stay together. I would have made him stay out of pure selfishness—because I couldn’t have brought myself to part with him. I would have let him stay and be afraid, like ordinary people are. Like me.

  “I hoped I’d die in my sleep, but I didn’t! So—God love them for it—my good, my dear, my beloved friends unlaced the tent flap—do you really think I could have undone frozen knots, with my fingers gone?—and I crawled out of the tent and let the blizzard do me the last kindness. But I’d waited too long! So in the end my death didn’t change anything—didn’t save anyone! Let me make a difference this time, Sym! Give me the pain.”

  The pain in my eyes is less, it’s true. While I keep them shut, it’s less. So I don’t open my eyes, even though I can still sense his face a breath away from mine. It is enough, knowing it’s there.

  I understand the game now, Nikki, Maxine. I could answer the questionnaires in the magazines now. What is passion for? It’s for when the words run out. That’s when to come down out of the nursery: when you can’t see the stairs for the white, glaring darkness, but you don’t care anymore if you fall. When there’s nothing left between sky and earth or as far as the eye can see, except Need. It’s like a blizzard unpicking flesh and bone and what’s real and what’s not. . . .