Out of the Ice (3 page)

The dining room was simply a shell with tables and chairs and a few comfortable sofas up one end, but Georgia managed to fill it with her exuberance. She came at me with open arms. I stood and hugged her. ‘You need to fatten up,’ she said. ‘I can feel your ribs.’

‘Lies will get you nowhere.’

‘Tell that to a jury.’

She hugged me again, a great bear hug. There was nothing halfway about Georgia. If you were in, you were in.

‘Missed you,’ she said. ‘And thanks for your notes. I feel completely up to speed. We’ll have our formal meeting Monday, just to make sure everything’s covered.’

‘Absolutely,’ I agreed warmly. Meetings with Georgia were always good fun. ‘How are your kids?’ I asked, and she punched my arm. Hard. ‘Mad Greek
dag
,’ I said. ‘What’s all that about?’

‘Can’t think about them. I just hope Jeff does his bit. Between you and me, I nearly didn’t come. Stacey’s doing her final year of school next year, and I’d like to be there at the start. But she told me I had to be in Antarctica or I’d drive them crazy. Even Alex weighed in. Just as long as I call every day, he said. And David sends his regards,’ she added casually. I froze.

David White was my second ex-husband. Yes, I have two of them: the one area where I’ve outdone my mother. In my early thirties I was desperately lonely when Antarctica called again. Returning to the icy wilderness had given me the first twinge of happiness after the loss of Hamish. It was a summer assignment studying whales in the Southern Ocean, with emphasis on how global warming might be affecting all the different species.

Our Station Leader that season was David White. He was tanned, blond-haired, blue-eyed, with a footballer’s body; the physical antithesis of dark-haired, brown-eyed Cameron – and the difference didn’t stop there. David, like Georgia, was a police detective who’d held a lifetime fascination with Antarctica. He’d won the job because he was gregarious, solid and adult, like he’d never even been a child. He made us all feel secure.

I was out in the field much of the time but when I came back, David was keen to hear my stories, particularly when I dived with the humpbacks and saw Lev again – now a fully grown forty-tonne whale, still with his diagonal scar and the black and white fluke markings I remembered vividly. As I swam near, Lev had moved his giant body gently with his long pectoral fins, like wings, so as not to crush me. He was as friendly as ever.

When the season ended David and I went back to Victoria, and two months later we caught up. He was stationed in Torquay on the Surf Coast and had a house further along the shore at Aireys Inlet. From his family room, perched high on a cliff, I saw migrating humpbacks the first day, their sleek black bodies surging through the aqua sea, hurling themselves high out of the water, breaching, then rolling playfully onto their backs to reveal their white pleats. They were following us from Antarctica, migrating to warmer waters for the winter. I grabbed David’s binoculars from the windowsill. I could barely believe it as one whale started to lobtail, beating the water with its tail, its giant flukes rising up like a black and white butterfly – with a diagonal scar running through. My skin prickled, I flushed with joy: it was Lev. As I noted with excitement the date, time and location of the sighting, I couldn’t help thinking it was a sign. I spent the rest of the year commuting up to Melbourne for work, returning to the fresh sea air at Aireys that revitalised me, and David who made me feel better than I had for a very long time. One morning he carved a question in the sand.
Marry me?
We were so happy, how could I not?

It was David who had introduced Georgia to Antarctica. That was a year before everything went wrong between him and me.

‘DVD night tonight,’ said Georgia. ‘I’ve chosen a ripper. Quite arty-farty. Reckon you’ll like it. Now do the vacuuming.’

Saturday was chores day at base. I considered myself lucky only to be vacuuming. Bathroom duty was much worse.

•  •  •

The dining room lights were dimmed and Georgia, beer in hand, stood at the front to introduce the film to the audience of winter tradies and newly-arrived scientists, mechanics, electricians, engineers, and an extra cook for the summer season. And Fran, our doctor, who had spent the past months growing a crop of hydroponic tomatoes but now faced the prospect of many more people to care for. (We loved Fran for those tomatoes – it was the only fresh fruit we had all winter.) We’d grown from a group of nine to about four dozen. The base was buzzing.

‘This is a classic, set in the place I love almost as much as here. Can you guess where?’ Georgia swigged her beer and topped it up straightaway from a large bottle. ‘Open your eyes to Venice. Take it away.’ She motioned dramatically to a bearded engineer who stood at the back of the room working the projector.

A little girl in a red raincoat was playing by a pond. Donald Sutherland appeared, sitting in a comfortable cottage, looking at a slide of a church. I caught my breath. I’d seen it before, and every ounce of me wanted to run from the room. The little girl in the red raincoat, his daughter, was going to drown in the pond. I couldn’t move. I shut my eyes when it happened.

In Antarctica, there are rules. It’s important to stick with the group; at times, that can save your life. If I left now it would send a terrible signal, because Saturday film nights were bonding exercises. In such a vast and potentially hostile environment, social isolation can set in, and Station Leaders always tried to forge connections between expeditioners.

I forced myself to watch the eerie landscape of Venice, its dark alleys where Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland get lost, the child – or
was
it a child? – in the red raincoat scampering away into the night. The body of a murdered woman hauled, upside-down, from a dank canal, her clothes falling away to reveal bruised flesh.

I knew that
Don’t Look Now
was a good film, a great film, but I grew increasingly hot and claustrophobic, aware of the stale air from so many more people at close range. I was relieved when the lights came up.

Georgia was quickly by my side, hand gripping my shoulder as the audience clapped appreciatively and I joined in.

‘Good, eh?’

‘Brilliant.’

‘Been to Venice?’

‘I have.’

‘Love it?’

I nodded. I did like Venice. But in the daytime and on the Grand Canal, not the malevolent, disjointed, empty Venice we’d just seen.

‘Jeff and I are taking the kids once Stacey graduates. We’ll stay at my favourite pensione, Hotel Leone Alato, in a little alley near St Mark’s Square.’ Georgia’s grin was so dazzling it warmed me up.

‘Got a moment?’ she said.

I followed her into the small room that doubled as the communications centre and Station Leader’s office. Georgia plonked herself behind the desk; I sat opposite.

‘Strictly speaking I should wait and tell you this Monday, not on your night off, but the final approval’s just come in.’ Georgia had been steadily drinking through the film so was even more forthcoming than usual, but I had no idea what she was talking about.

‘There’s a field assignment for you at Alliance Station.’

I stared at her mutely as she smiled broadly back. We both knew that Alliance, a British base on South Safety Island in the Southern Ocean, was strictly off-limits to all but a team of elite scientists and a small support staff of technicians.

‘An Environmental Impact Assessment of Fredelighavn, the old Norwegian whaling station at Placid Bay,’ she continued. ‘There’s a push by some in the International Antarctic Council to open it as a museum.’

‘What!’ I blurted. ‘But no one’s allowed in because of the seal and penguin colonies. Not even the staff at Alliance.’

‘That’s being disputed,’ Georgia replied matter-of-factly.

‘Why? No one should go there. I’ve seen a few pictures from the seventies before it was closed off. It looked like paradise.’

Georgia nodded. ‘That’s why some people want to open it. They allowed a team of engineers in last summer to do a safety check. There’s no asbestos, so unlike places like the old whaling station at Leith on South Georgia, tourists could go in safely. The buildings are evidently in very good condition, and with global warming there’s been ice melt. That, and with some help from the engineers, has meant most of the sheds and houses are accessible.’

‘What happens to the wildlife?’ I asked, concerned.

‘That’s what you’d assess. Along with the suitability of the site.’

‘I hate tourists,’ I bridled. ‘Why do they need access to so much of Antarctica? Can’t they just leave it alone?’

‘There are many who’d agree,’ Georgia replied. ‘Including, from what I hear, the staff at Alliance. The scientists don’t want a bar of it. But Chile and Argentina are really pushing.’

I smiled wryly at the thought of my Spanish compatriots who hated the British, who also laid claim to some of the very same parts of Antarctica as the Brits, including South Safety Island.

‘The Chinese are thinking of building a base on the island but there’s a lot of quiet diplomacy against that,’ said Georgia. ‘Some think if Fredelighavn’s opened, the Chinese will choose somewhere else. It’s all just more jockeying for position before the Protocol expires.’

The Antarctic Treaty was drawn up in 1959 during the Cold War and came into force in 1961, reserving everything south of latitude 60°S as a place for science, with no military activity allowed; all sovereign claims were frozen. In 1991 the Madrid Protocol went further and banned all mining, but this was coming up for renegotiation in 2041. Although countries could stake no new claims, squatting on land with base stations was a game they played. There were likely vast oilfields and other riches to exploit beneath the ice. Countries were getting prepared.

Personally, I would have excluded tourism in the Treaty too – but they probably hadn’t even thought about it in 1959.

‘I might be biased,’ I said.

‘Nonsense. You’re too good a scientist.’

‘I could look at the evidence, I suppose.’ Fredelighavn was the stuff of legend. South Georgia Island had six disused whaling stations, but Fredelighavn was the only one on South Safety. All the stations had expanded over their years of operation into small industrial settlements, but Fredelighavn was rumoured to have the most remarkable architecture, which was now overrun by the most extraordinary range and abundance of wildlife. I felt a magnetic pull to the promise of a natural wonderland.

And Alliance itself was an unusual base. The name, like those of most British bases, came from a nearby geographical location, Alliance Point, at the southern end of Placid Bay. But it had turned into another alliance: the British worked closely there with Americans and Australians. There was speculation that scientists studied viruses at Alliance. I’d once read a fleeting reference in one of my father’s articles that led me to the same conclusion; it was nothing specific, but I’d always been curious. It was another incentive to take up the offer.

‘There was a full background check on you,’ said Georgia. ‘You know no one’s allowed there lightly, and this is a very important study. You were deemed politically neutral. Only people like me are aware how much you hate tourism. Your penguin and whale studies are revered.’

I tried not to blush, pleased they’d seemingly ignored my trouble with the professors in Melbourne. I knew those men would have done everything they could to hurt my chances.

‘What about the Antarctic Heritage Trust?’

‘You’ll be talking to them, of course. If anything comes to fruition, they’d be the ones implementing. But the Council wanted someone at arm’s length. They also want you to go to Grytviken Museum to check it out.’

I drew in my breath.

‘What?’ she said.

‘I’ve been to Grytviken. Got married in the church.’

Georgia’s eyes opened wide. She didn’t know
everything
about me.

‘I’m sure it’s changed – I haven’t been for over a decade,’ I said.

‘Cruise ships stop there. It’s a favourite place.’

‘I know.’ It wasn’t the first location I’d want to go to. I blocked the memories as quickly as they came: the ghastly flensing platform where the whales were cut up, the sheds full of the whale-processing machinery. And where I’d been so drawn to Cameron Stewart that I’d vowed to spend the rest of my life with him.

‘And Nantucket,’ Georgia continued.

‘I’ve never been there,’ I said, pulling myself back to the present. Nantucket. An island north of New York, across the Atlantic Ocean from Norway; another home of whalers plying their murderous trade.

‘They have a state-of-the-art whaling museum and—’

‘Am I the right person for this job?’ I interrupted before she really got going. ‘I’m not that keen on whalers.’

‘You’re respected. You’re an expert. And people believe you’ll be fair. Fearless even.’ Georgia gave me a pointed look.

I grimaced. Being fearless is what had landed me in the mess with the professors. And with David White. Yet clearly I was coming out of that all right in these quarters.

‘What about my current duties?’

‘We’ll get someone down to replace you. They want the report by the end of March. There’s a lot to do. The Australian Antarctic Division’s given their permission and sends their apologies for the short notice. Everything ran late getting approval from all the participant countries. It’s a delicate matter.’

I paused, torn between desire to see the fabled place and a deep repulsion at what went on there. And I also wanted desperately to support those who were backing me.

‘So, I guess I’ll go,’ I said. ‘Best to have some control of the situation if they’re going to open it up as a museum. And if the AAD’s put me forward, I certainly don’t want to cause trouble.’

Georgia laughed heartily. ‘You’d be mad not to go. I can’t wait to hear what it’s like. And even though you’re stationed at Alliance, you’ll be reporting to me, and the AAD, which in turn will report to the International Antarctic Council.’

‘Who’ll be my team?’ I asked, excitement growing.

There was a moment of awkward silence.