The Ice Lovers (19 page)

‘What's this?'

‘The helicopter off the Resolute. They had an accident last year, near Bluefields. They were flying and lost their vis, two Navy pilots. Easy enough to happen.'

‘Have you ever lost visibility in the planes?'

‘A few times. Helicopters are more unstable than planes, though. They're more manoeuvrable, but you've got less control.'

‘You fly them too?'

‘Used to. I loved them. They're like toys, you can make them do almost anything.' The photo gallery froze on an image of Luke next to a Twin Otter. Behind him was a grey-white murk.

‘Weather looks terrible,' she said.

‘It was. I flew one of the Otters over, picked them up, and flew them to Midas. The doctor stabilised their condition. Then I flew them here, and out to Punta on the big plane.'

The photos slid into each other: more flat grey snowfields, evidence of poor contrast, eventually presented to the Ministry of Defence, the two pilots in their uniforms, bandaged and on stretchers, one with a broken leg, their arrival at Midas, the medevac flight from a stormy base, the Araucaria trees and dingy sheds of Punta Arenas.

‘They had a lucky escape. The planes were still on base, but only just. We were due to fly out for the winter in a week's time.'

For a moment Nara wondered why he was showing her all this – to impress her, to confer upon her an understanding, in advance of her first Antarctic winter, how she had entered into a stark terrain of life and death, where anything was possible.

A figure appeared outside the window. In the darkness, she could just make out the profile. Alexander was looking at something – the moon perhaps, just risen. He would have been unaware of the light coming from the office behind him. He stood fixedly, as if at attention. She knew this stare of his, rivetted, unnatural. It was one of the first things she noticed about him in the Islands. She envied him his self sufficiency. She had been too much alone and she craved the company of people. On the ship, when they were both on the observation deck, she went over to the railing, where he stood in his contemplative posture staring into the ice, and asked him to read the ice for her. He did, but after a few minutes he went away, saying he would be back, but he did not return. She tried to copy his invincibility but after a while she became self-conscious. She looked too much like a woman waiting for a man who would not return.

‘His heart is locked away.'

She was not sure she had heard Luke correctly.

‘You won't get it,' he said. ‘No one will, probably. I'm a man. I know,' he said.

‘You know what?'

‘I know. I just know – men like that.'

‘Because you're just like him? You set someone up, then punch them in the face. Because you have no heart?'

‘I don't know. I don't think so. I hope not.' Luke pursed his lips. ‘Sometimes it just doesn't work out. You don't know why the other person doesn't respond, or wants to take another path. In any case there is no why. You just have to accept it and move on.' He paused. ‘I don't know, he seems –' ‘I know what he seems.'

They sat in silence, then, swilling wine in their glasses, not looking at each other.

‘I just can't stand to see you – waste yourself.'

Nara flinched at the word. ‘What do you mean, waste?'

‘Yes, as in go to waste: your kindness, your experience, your love. Your body.'

Something in the way it emerged from his mouth – fatherly, disinterested, yet with a trill of the sexual underlying it – caused a faint disgust to flicker through her.

Luke put down his wineglass. She watched him stand: lean frame, dark hair, although greying now at the edges. A serious, intelligent face, angular, moody and changeable. She had seen this man every day for four months, with his trousers of many pockets, capable shoes, a trainer/hiking boot hybrid all the pilots seemed to wear and which squeaked in the waxed corridors of the base, his forearms muscled and weathered from the sun, the platinum watch on his wrist.

She had never known anyone like Luke before, she might never know his like again. But she had not given him what he wanted. Perhaps it would not have been so much to yield.

‘Keep this.' He handed her the plastic bull with the little flag of Cataluña tied round its neck, yellow with thin red stripes. ‘For luck.'

She told him that she would miss him.

In return he said, ‘Goodnight.'

The Air Unit office was his domain, not hers. But she sat there anyway, long after his departure, turning the plastic bull over and over in her hands.

It is winter now. All around the continent the ice tightens its grip. Beneath the surface, winter water is collecting in thermodynamic colums of vertical mixing; threaded through them is a deep layer of very cold surface water.

As water cools, it gels on the surface. Hydrostatic pressures are higher on the floating ice shelves, and this lowers the freezing temperature of the water, and the ocean below the ice shelf deepens its frost. Deep in the ocean, far beneath the continent, Antarctic bottom water churns, dense, depthless, blind with blackness. The Antarctic icefield is a self-reinforcing system: land, water, air – they all depend on the ice. Ice makes more of itself, becomes more itself. In becoming, its being is strengthened. The pack forms.

Water is slow: the Antarctic circumpolar waters circulate the world oceans every one thousand years, creating velocities of cold, eddies, thermal columns which govern the great currents of the oceans – the Gulf Stream, the Humboldt – and which affect the planet's climate. In this process, the sea ice is key; it acquires structure through sinews of ice crystals, it melds, binds into a static ice scuplture garden.

Less is known about the continent, its processes, its intents, than anywhere else in the world, apart from the deep oceans. It is a cold terrestrial moon, another planet, this cold node of the known world.

The day of the plane's departure was overcast and cold. Nara walked over to the plane alone along the gravel path leading past the accommodation block and across the runway.

She found Luke in the hangar, supervising the payload, calculating fuel. She watched as they loaded the plane. She said goodbye to the summer base commander, to the Met man, who had left his five-day forecast behind for the winterers, pinned to the flight map. After that they would have to predict the weather for themselves.

Luke emerged from the fuselage. He was wearing his orange ventile jacket, the one he had worn in their days in the Ellsworths. He had told her how this jacket had been invented during the Second World War, how it had saved the lives of Allied pilots who crashed in Greenland, in Iceland. ‘That's its genius: the wind passes through you, but you don't feel it.'

Now he said, ‘I almost want to say, if you need anything, let me know.'

‘I know, but you can't help me, here.'

‘No, I can't.'

The chief pilot was calling him from within. Luke turned to her. His expression was difficult to read: ecstatic, but grave; a grain of regret, but also the happiness of release.

He said, ‘I'll see you in October.'

She nearly said goodbye, but at the last minute caught herself.

The door is closed with a groan more human than mechanical, and the plane's propellers start to chop at the air slowly at first, in fits and starts, then building to a smooth rotation. The plane remains on the apron, all four propellers spinning, the plane trembling while the pilots run through their checklist and speak to Stanley on the HF for the latest weather. Then the plane begins to move, tentatively at first, as if it has not yet decided to leave. It taxis to the southern edge of the runway where it executes a deft, balletic turn, and lines up at the end of the airstrip, where it stands, its trembling now a shudder. A roar, and gravel spews as it charges. It is already flying when it passes the hangar apron. When the plane has cleared the icebergs in the cove it climbs sharp, then banks right to turn around the peninsula where it disappears, hidden by the hill back of base. When it reappears it is flying low for the traditional fly-by past the comms tower. At the height of the laboratory roof it comes back over the runway, the propellers whipping the dust. Behind her the cook says, holy fuck. Just at the moment when the plane's position seems untenable, when gravity is about to reach up to snatch it, the pilots climb and the plane soars over their heads. She sees the pale underbelly of the fuselage, hears the roar of the propellers as they chew the air above her. A single shaft of silver sun breaks through the clouds and flashes off the fuselage. The silver slash stays with it as the plane journeys upward and begins to be consumed by cloud. She watches as these points of silver light congeal in her mind, absorbing their negative radiance, the grey of clouds, lead and pewter dispersing, until she is only looking at a place in the sky where the plane had been.

PART V
Wintering

1

Life began in burning ice and biting flame. In the south, Muspell was fiery. The fire shone all day and all night. Only those who are born to it can endure the heat. Niflheim is in the north. It is an icy realm, swept by vast currents of snow, gelid rivers, frozen lightning.

Between these two realms lies Midgard. Here it is mild, warm, a perpetual summer's evening. In Norse myth, these tepid latitudes were where most people lived, and were built for – neither in fire nor ice but a pleasant if undramatic realm between. But Midgard is sickening, becoming violent in its moods, driven by erratic currents.

The first sign was the rubbish. It accumulated, fermented and stank. Initially I thought: it's no worse than a strike, a protest over working hours. So we have to live with house arrest, it might last a month, two months. But viruses could, theoretically, travel on air. Or anyone who came to visit your house, any friend or official bearing advice. And so we had to seal ourselves in with tape, and commit to not opening a door until we were told it was safe.

I watched the plants on my balcony wither, yellow, droop, then die. I stood so many times, water bottle in hand, my hand on the sliding balcony door. Only the vision of myself in a hospital bed, or worse, at home in my own bed, putrid, bloated and decomposing, stopped me from opening it.

The dog owners had a dilemma. I saw them, sometimes, in the wedge of gritty green that passes for a park in front of my flat. They wore little white masks and looked around them, constantly, as if they could spot it coming. The dog owners, once so willing to share tips and observations, to let their dogs sniff each other, became tense when another approached. They backed themselves up against trees and looked the other way.

After a few weeks the dog owners stopped coming to the park and this stiff choreography ceased. Perhaps, all over London, dogs were spontaneously combusting, unable to hold in anymore the shit and piss and energy which drove them to tear back and forth across playgrounds and parks.

Plague Ground – a sub-editor's triumph. Next to the headline was a photograph of a deserted swingset. Playgrounds had become incubators of disease. The parents, sitting on a park bench, watching their children scramble through jungle gyms, slide down the metal sliding board. Everyone smiling and laughing as the sun glints off the slide, silver and sure, more throb than light.

A virus has a brain, an engine, a black heart. As for its DNA, the normal rules of sickness and sickening, tried and tested on so many vulnerable bodies, plashy and defenceless as the fens that were at the same time being inundated by the rising sea, did not apply. The backwards logic of this particular sickness meant that if you were young and healthy you were more likely to die, the middle-aged and even the elderly sometimes survived, because the virus overwhelmed the young body more quickly, spurred on by the vitality of youth. The body was so eager to pass it on, eager to be an accomplice in its own destruction.

Airports shut, the wispy contrails disappeared from the sky, as did the familiar whine of aeroplanes powering down over London as they took their place in the landing queue for Heathrow. I missed that sound, of hydraulics, the groan as the plane's bellies slit open and landing gear dropped down, more than I ever would have believed.

The signs of the unravelling came in November 2012; they were small and at first indirect: a sudden lack of fresh milk in the supermarkets, then the almost instant disappearance of UHT milk. Mothers with young children had official priority at supermarket queues, which began to be staffed by police, or, in some cases, Territorial Army reservists. At the beginning I would walk into a supermarket and see it invigilated by people in combat fatigues and camouflage patiently helping an old woman with her shopping trolley, and reassure myself that this was a good sign, this was quite normal, considering.

The first defections came from the ambulance crews and the paramedics. Even though they had received doses of retrovirals, and had priority for preventative and curative treatments, they got sick, and died, one by one. The virulence of the virus' communicability was plain. Next were the front-line medical staff, the immigration officers, the police. Once they saw their colleagues sicken and die within a matter of days they too thought twice about turning up for work, Hippocratic oath or no. Calls for volunteers were put out; those who answered them were deemed suicidal. Their families deserted them, they were shunned by friends. They too – over 70 per cent of them, the official figure – died.

It won't happen to me. It will happen to someone else. As it turns out, we are simply not very good at imagining our own deaths, we refuse to believe in them. We kept going to work; there we were on the Tube, ineffectual white masks over our noses and mouths, like an army of surgeons heading for the operating theatre, incubating viruses in canisters. Seven to ten days later, over half the occupants of a carriage where a carrier had been standing, would all be on respirators, ‘fighting for their lives', as the free rags with their steady diet of celebrity and threat would later put it.