Interesting. People talk about it being hot—boys being hot, love being hot. But it’s more like a blizzard, really. Whiteout. Or a kind of madness. Like the imagination: It’s a different place.
Obliteration. I know that’s how it would be now, if Titus and I were to make love. I know. I have the knowledge. Of course I do. I’m an animal, aren’t I, full of ancient instincts? Instincts as old as the Human Race. Instincts as old as the dinosaurs, almost. It’s good to know. A bit late. A bit irrelevant, since no one takes their clothes off here, and anyway I’ll be dead shortly. But it’s good to know how it would have been.
So, like Snow White in her coffin of glass, I think I’ll just wait here to be kissed and raised back to life. About ninety years from now. That will be soon enough. I’ll just lie down here, and Titus can lie down beside me and I can get a few things clear—a last few outstanding questions. Like they say at the end of whodunits: just a few things I don’t understand, Titus.
“Is there life after death, Titus?”
“Well, I’m alive, aren’t I?”
Don’t understand. Always so contrary and argumentative, this man in my head. Always wanting it both ways.
“I was alive in the thoughts of my mother when she slept in my old bedroom; now I’m alive in your head, for the duration. I continue to exist in the fevered jungles of your unusual brain. That’s why you have to go on.”
“But no Heaven?”
“Don’t know. It’s not Judgment Day yet. We should both find that out simultaneously.” “And ghosts?”
The wind teems with mile-high ghosts of blown snow, bending and flexing across the white landscape. But none of them are Titus. He is at peace—buried somewhere here—intact like that Jurassic dinosaur, preserved in the very instant of death. Somewhere near here, Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates lies preserved by the cold that cradled him in its arms before any woman could.
I could sleep here. Like him. I could do that. Look. Even without meaning to, I’ve lain down full-length. Falling snow has obscured my ski suit already. I look as if I’m dissolving into the ground. “I’ll just stay here, Titus. Your body’s here somewhere. It’s a good place to be.”
“No it’s not.”
“Duh. Course it’s a good place. You’re here, aren’t you?”
“No. I’m not,” says Titus, and none too gently. I wish he would just lie down and be quiet. Of course he’s here. His body is preserved in the ice somewhere, even if it is lonely and separated from the tent with his friends in it.
“I’M NOT HERE!” He’s shouting it now. Perhaps he thinks that without my hearing aids I can’t hear the hero who lives inside my head. Silly man. Why deny it? He went to such pains to make me admit the truth—that he crawled out and died in the snow. Forget Symmes. Forget nesting planets-within-a-planet. . . . No. A shallow grave. An eiderdown of snow. Right here, maybe! Just a few inches below me now! His body just a few inches below mine . . .
“THE ICE SHELF IS MOVING, YOU FOOL!” shouts Titus. “The surface is moving! All the time! New stuff welling up in the center, pushing the old ice outward! Only a few miles a year but never stopping—on and on and on! Carrying everything with it: Bill and Birdie and the Owner wrapped in their tent. Taffy Evans under his cairn: all carried along inside a river of ice—all the time sinking lower, like dead fish. Sinking through the ice, the saltwater gnawing the ice from under them!” He is shrieking now—so loudly that it pains my eardrums and makes me screw up my face, splitting my lips, leaking warm blood into my mouth. “In the end the Shelf ships everything into the sea! To wash about in the sea! Lawrence Oates hasn’t been in Antarctica for years, Sym! Twenty years ago his body dropped out of the bottom of the ice shelf and into the sea! OATES IS GONE! His body was food for the leopard seals and the crabs!”
“NO!” Sheer horror makes me pull myself up onto my knees and arch my back to shake it off. Wet drowning dark. Squirming, teeming, grotesque life down in the savage, restless cold. I hold my breath, because I’m already there in my imagination—in the ocean—delivered there on a bier of ice. Snow White’s coffin of glass fractures around me into shards of pain, and I have to arch my back repeatedly to shake off a stiff shell of snow. In the small of my back it creaks like old age.
No white, eternal rest, then? Nothing but a bulldozer of ice pushing me down and out to sea? This place doesn’t want anything or anybody! It’s so intent on being pure that it spits out everything living, everything that’s ever been alive! The carcasses of Scott’s useless ponies, the carcasses of Scott and Evans and Birdie and . . . What kind of graveyard spews out its dead? I hate it! It’s like a patch of leprosy on the planet—can’t feel cold, can’t feel pain. . . . All the time it’s sloughing its dead, white skin—purging itself: those bloodstains from Amundsen’s chopped-up dogs, all the droppings from those sled ponies and explorers and ecotourists and penguins and seabirds and dinosaurs and . . .
I don’t want to be in this frigid bitch of a place! I don’t want to be in a dead place that doesn’t even want my dead body! I don’t want to be shouted down by this bastard never-ending wind! I don’t want to be shipped into the sea out of the bottom of a glacier! I don’t want to be food for the leopard seals and the crabs! I want to be somewhere that wants me!
And I rise to my knees and then my feet, gloves dragging across the snow—put them on, Sym, put them on. Can’t feel my hands. Wind shoving at me, bullying me, so that I reel from side to side, lumbering along—a dinosaur—gasping and groaning and swearing and staggering, my feet sliding off to right and left, my oozing eyes shut. Beside me, Titus is carrying the pain—I can see it behind him in the shape of a sled; he leaning into the harness, the runners balking and biting into the granite-hard ripples of ice. So chivalric. Always the perfect gentleman . . . His shape is blurred by swirling snow, but now and then—when he turns to urge me on—I can see his face quite clearly, even through my closed lids. His beauty has been blackened and pitted and eroded away like old stone. Hardly recognizable. His cap is gone. He is wearing no boots, and only one of the reindeer-skin finneskoes that ought to cover his socks. His hands are bare.
The sun dies. Wind-driven snow rages at us, infuriated to see two interlopers still on their feet, intent on beating us down. But Titus is to one side of me, shielding me from the worst gusts—the ones that would lift me clear off the ground. He is shielding me from the fear, too, carrying it for me. Always the perfect . . .
Every moment my body heat is being peeled off me, like gold leaf off the Happy Prince. No pain now—only a blizzard of sleep and a very, very slow and distant drumming, which is my heart or maybe my soul not liking to be penned up any more in such a little space. There is a calculation I could do to work out my life expectancy. If I could just be bothered. But Titus is alongside me, so Time has no reality anyway. It might be the twenty-first century. It might be 1912. Minutes or whole years might be passing, but he is carrying Time, too, inside his useless, frost-bitten fists. Always the perfect . . .
Always.
Can’t get one hand back into its glove. Get it into a pocket, Sym, into one of the pockets. Can’t feel the opening. Can’t see around the great bulk of my quilted body to guide my hand home into the side pocket of Victor’s big jacket. So put it inside the jacket, Sym.
Victor’s jacket never fully zipped up over mine. I push my hand inside, into the no-warmth of my armpit, into the interior map pocket that doesn’t have a zipper. Hand almost too swollen to fit. Doesn’t feel any warmer—doesn’t feel anything. Must be warmer. Fingers start to hurt as though they’re dipped in acid. Blood trying to flow through. Fingertips start to scald and throb—even to feel. Can feel, for instance, that the pocket is not empty.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Fire and Ice
Fancy equipment. Really nifty. Worth a fortune. The girls at school would really covet this. Chances are, though, it doesn’t exist. Just an illusion. Delusion. Hallucination. Hypothermia does that to you. The mind starts to play t
ricks.
Tricks? The mind’s a three-ring circus! Music. Lights. Happiness. Wonder. Color. All my life I’ve gone there when Life got too drab or unkind or lonely or miserable, and it’s hardly ever let me down. Why should I wonder at the stunts it’s pulling now?
Red, for instance. Red like the silk skirt twirling in the changing-room mirror. Red like the blood on my snowsuit. Red, like a London mailbox agape for all those postcards of penguins. That’s what I’m seeing. I don’t blink in astonishment at it. Normally the body does things like blinking without being asked. At the end—in the cold—it stops volunteering: to blink, swallow, shiver, think, breathe . . . The nonexistent red island, in its sea of white, blurs in and out of focus; the liquid in the membrane of my eyes is trying to freeze. With my good left hand, I pinch my eyelids together until the liquid thaws and I can momentarily see again. How funny. How very twenty-first century. In Ancient Days the prophet Elijah saw a chariot of fire swinging down out of the sky to carry him off to Heaven.
Me, I see a Hagglund all-terrain amphibious vehicle.
It’s just standing there, like a hot-dog vendor waiting for trade on a Saturday night. Perhaps it’s a Flying Dutchman of a truck, a ghostly vessel doomed to cruise the gutters of Antarctica until Captain Sigurd finds a woman who loves him for himself.
Have a long wait, the little shit.
Or maybe I’m the ghost. And this is the job allocated to me for all eternity—to haunt the frozen sea lanes of the frozen Ross Sea forever, driving a ghostly Hagglund. Are ghosts prey to weariness? Do ghosts sleep? I want nothing now but to sleep. Had a ten-story building collapsed on me, it couldn’t weigh heavier than the sleep bearing down on me right now. To pull myself up the metal steps at the rear is to climb a slippery pole up out of black molasses wearing concrete pajamas.
Certainly Sigurd’s face says I’m a ghost, when he sees me through the window. “You can’t come in!” he says. (Me, I do lip-reading.) But there is nothing he can do to stop me, sitting as he is, surrounded by upholstery and empty food containers, two blankets and two sleeping bags. He has wrenched every cushion out of its seat to pile around him. A guy, buried up to his neck in a bonfire of foam pallets, only his head sticks up out of the top. I doubt he has moved for a day.
“You ran out,” I say.
“Go to Hell!”
“Of diesel. You ran out.”
“Can’t come in. Is he with you?”
And I nod, because I think he must mean Titus.
“Can’t come in. Can’t come in. Can’t come in!”
“First-aid ’ox,” I tell him. “Ad’enalin. I’n dead.”
And then the sleep enfolds me, in black, billowing clouds, forbidding breathing, preventing me from ever crossing the immensity of frozen wilderness between me and the first-aid box on the shelf beside my hand. I topple forward on top of Sigurd, my skull hitting him in the face with a gristly crack.
And I am burning on a gridiron. Sparks prick every nerve ending. My skin is scalding. My tendons shrink and shrivel up short till the bones crack. There are skewers buried hilt-deep in my elbows, knees, shoulders, hips. Flames of pain in every color of the spectrum wash over me, flaying my flesh and crazing my skull into a dozen unmendable shards of pain. The circulation coming back hurts like rats chewing on my tendons. Cramp, but in seventeen places at once. Didn’t they use to tear traitors apart with hooks buried in their flesh and tied off to galloping horses? My rib cage subsides over the hot coals and my skeleton falls apart. And still the fire is powerless to melt the core of cold inside me. Coming back to life isn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy.
“I fried the engine,” says my worst enemy, violently rubbing my back and arms and legs. “Turned off too quick. Bang. Melted something. Shut up, can’t you?”
No, I don’t think I can. I wasn’t aware I was screaming. The headache is so bad that I can’t form words or move my hands, only scream. I’m conscious that it’s a fearful waste of energy to scream, but it takes me a long time to stop.
The van looks like a flophouse—cushions and limbs everywhere, empty adrenalin syringes on the floor. Disgrace. Offends my tidy nature. Sigurd and I lie in each other’s arms, conserving body heat, as the books tell you to do. It is the most unromantic clinch since Germany embraced Poland.
Even in melting the ice, heating the ice water over the Primus to make a warm drink, the last of the Primus fuel runs out and the blue flame dies on its wick, like hope extinguished. The black currant juice comes at room temperature. Unfortunately the “room” is a stalled vehicle in the Antarctic wilderness. At some stage Sigurd has tried to suck ice to quench his thirst. It just about destroyed the surface of his tongue and the insides of his cheeks. His face has the look of an anorexic gerbil. His nose, where my forehead struck him, hasn’t even the energy to bleed.
But who am I to talk? There’s an owl pellet where my brain used to be. I can barely remember my name. There is nothing in my head for a long, long time, except surviving, and I’m not even sure I want to do that. Then Sigurd asks, “What happened to him? Is he dead?”
And the thought is more powerful than adrenalin. I pull myself to my feet and throw open the door and shout and shout, loud as a mewling kitten: “TITUS! TITUS! WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU?” Curtains of light, intricately embroidered with sprigs of snow, billow out from an open sky. I shout over my shoulder, “Didn’t you see him when I got here? He was right beside me! Which way did he go?” but there’s no reply from Sigurd either. The icefields shift under their restless tillage of snow blow. Dizzying movement is everywhere. But none of it is Titus. There is no lame, hunched figure hauling a shadowy sled; no nonchalant, shirt-sleeved soldier smoking a pipe; no sulky explorer leaning his chin on the grip of a single long ski pole; no Inniskillen Dragoon steering his horse with knees and crop; no leather-jacketed scruff chasing his runaway motorbike across the sastrugi. I look and I look, but there is nothing and no one for a thousand miles. I call and call, but he won’t come when I call. He always used to say: Women are a great nuisance.
Sigurd is petrified. “He’s out there? Your uncle’s out there?”
“Of course not. Victor’s dead.”
Relief caves him in at the chest. “Did you kill him?”
“No. You did.” It’s not true and it’s not fair, but he deserves it. I don’t terribly like Sigurd whatever-his-name-is.
“So who are you talking to?” he asks, high-pitched, crouching up on hands and knees, tongue poking the burned linings of his cheeks.
“Someone who helped me. Someone I need inside my head.”
“You’re mad! You’re just as mad as he was!” And there’s a kind of awe in Sigurd’s voice, as if I’ve finally managed to rise above the unremarkable into the realms of scary. “Shut the door, will you?”
I will. But first I face out toward the glaring expanse of the Barrier, where sometimes palaces float and suns multiply and miracles occur. “God bless and keep you, Titus, until you come home.”
“Shut the door, you mad—”
And I do.
I can’t bear to be the one who finds out the bad news—that it’s unusable. So I get Sigurd to reach inside Victor’s jacket—into the map pocket—and fetch out Mimi’s stolen satellite telephone stashed there.
Up until now, it quite slipped my mind.
Victor was not totally mad, then. Not as mad as I accused him of being. He did have a plan for getting home from Symmes’s Hole, after we got there. He was going to phone for a lift. Not entirely mad, then. Just mad nor’-nor’east.
Mimi’s ritzy Iridium 9505 still has the price tag stuck to it: $2,800. And it is still switched on. If it weren’t, it would be about as useful as a house brick, since we don’t know the PIN. I suggest calling 999; Sigurd says it’s American so we should use 911. I say maybe only the price tag is American. He says it’s the nationality of the satellite that matters, not the telephone. But neither number sets phones ringing in New York or Punta Arenas or Chr
istchurch or the Falklands. We neither of us know the dialing code for the UK. So in the end we press last-number-dialed, and get some raucous friend of Mimi’s.
“Hi there! Fern isn’t here right now. Well, I guess you worked that one out for yourself, he-hee-heee! But I want you to know I’m really and truly S-A-D to miss your call, so if you’d like to . . .”
The telephone chirrups once, its battery staggering with cold and weariness. “Speak real slow, now, and don’t forget to say what time and day you called, ’cause naughty me, I don’t always check out my messages and sometimes I’m gone overnight—though don’t you go getting the wrong idea, know what I mean, m’ sweetheart?”
The telephone cheeps again, its heartbeat failing as surely as ours will within the day.
Finally the signal to speak. I give the geographic coordinates of our position (guesswork) while Sigurd clamors, “Mayday Mayday Mayday! Emergency! Emergency!” in the background. My speech is as slurred as any drunk’s. After the battery gives out, we sit with the thing between us, looking at it as if it might come spontaneously back to life. Strange to think of our voices escaping this frigid wilderness and lying coiled in the corner of some stranger’s living room in Maine or Florida or Los Angeles.
How long before Mimi’s friend checks her answering machine? What chance of her hearing the garbled message or taking it seriously? What chance of our words reaching the right ears, or of rescuers caring enough to search? What price good weather? What chance of clear skies? What likelihood of being spotted from the air?
And yet we sleep, because at least we’ve done something, re-aroused the possibility of surviving, whereas before, both of us had quite stopped believing in rescue. We eat every last scrap of food there is—curry paste, cling peaches, fish roe, raisins, cocoa, indigestion tablets, milk powder, and three fruit gums—then bury ourselves in the upholstery and sleep.
The White Darkness Page 22