The Ice Lovers (24 page)

Into this desert walked Nara. He was so unalert he didn't even notice her until she was sitting there in the cockpit, beside him.

He banked and turned northwest over the Lassiter Coast; he was only an hour from base now. Beneath him he saw the wreckage of ice sheets. It was not a melt, but a slivering. When an ice sheet breaks up into the water it looks as if someone has tipped over a vat of needles. The water hovers at the freezing point, perhaps one degree above, and the needles melt. Now the coastal water was nearly always two degrees above zero in the summer, and the ice sheets dissolved like icing sugar.

Another season was nearly over, another season of flying glaciologists, aerial mappers, surveyors, ice-core drillers, into the scene of their destruction. He loved working with scientists, even if he lamented the destruction that drew their interest. Science was a refuge, he considered, the only asylum from the vulgar scrum of politics. Scientists were wise for the simple fact that they were disinterested. He always liked those ice corers, geologists, glaciologists he worked with and for; less so the VIPs, the ministers, the royal family members on fly-by-night visits to the Antarctic to raise their environmental credibility. They sat in his plane, flying over the most amazing landscape on earth, and did paperwork or fell asleep. And he would sit in the cockpit and shake his head, the sour expression Nara would notice in the Ellsworths playing with his lips.

She would not be there. She hadn't been there for years, now. No one knew where she had gone, just as no one knew why desire came to an end, or what to do when it did. But he had no doubt Nara had been one of them, the lovers of ice. To be enchanted by ice takes a particular kind of soul, he considered; most people saw death in the frozen continent, they saw lack. It took a strange nature, a person somehow divorced from themselves, from their interests, their destiny, to appreciate its pale fire.

The woman found him quickly, the next morning in fact. She was about forty, he guessed, possibly younger. She was slim, not tall, not short – an indefinite person, the sort who wouldn't stand out in a group. She'd obviously been on base long enough to pick up the garb. She was dressed in the full Antarctic uniform: fleece, Polar Research Council T-shirt underneath, moleskins, standard issue woollen socks.

She held out her hand. ‘I'm Helen. You've probably heard of me.'

‘I have,' he said. ‘Listen, I'm a bit tired. Why don't we talk tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. From what I hear, we've got plenty of time to talk.'

‘Sure. Whenever is good for you. Just let me know.'

She would have to find him, to lure him. Both understood this perfectly well.

The following night he gave a talk and a slideshow on the salvage work on Midas III. Everyone came – fifty-six people ranged around tables in the dining hall, the evening gathering outside.

He explained that Midas IV, the new base, would have to be moved inland from its present position. That was what the director of the Polar Research Council had determined on his visit to the base, a thousand miles to the east. They had radared the ice shelf and it was ready to fracture somewhere around the position of the present base. As for Midas III, Luke explained, the ice shelf had broken off a year previously, taking the old base, by then only three miles from the edge of the shelf, with it. Midas III set sail, now buried in a twenty-mile-long iceberg. The Polar Research Council had to find a way to get onto the iceberg and dismantle the base, Luke explained. He was asked to provide air support, although most of the dismantling had to be done by ship.

‘It was a delicate operation,' he explained. ‘They had to pull the ship up next to the iceberg, and anchor it, even though they are mooring and it's moving. My job was to fly there, landing on it as if it were still part of the landmass. I could still see where the old skiway used to be. But icebergs are more prone to crevassing. Because their bottom, however deep, is in contact with the ocean, they split and fracture. At worst, you could lose a plane down a crevasse.'

Helen stared at the photographs projected on the screen: the Mercury, the Astrolabe's sister ship, moored alongside the iceberg, men driving small tractors to the edge of an ice cliff, lowering down beams, drums, canisters, containers with gigantic cranes. Luke landing on the iceberg, coming in for one run to strafe the ground with his skis, to see if any crevasses opened up.

When Luke finished his talk there was a question and answer session. ‘Why don't they just leave the base there?' Helen asked.

‘They can't. International regulations require us to dismantle it.' Eventually, he explained, the ice shelf would melt and disappear beneath the waves. The base would become sea junk, excreting toxins.

‘But surely it would be no worse than any shipwreck,' Helen said.

‘You never know what's in those chemical containers in the laboratories,' Luke shook his head. ‘You just don't know.'

After the talk David caught her arm.‘It's incredible, isn't it?' he says. ‘What they can do, here.'

She agreed. ‘Who would have thought they could dismantle an old base on a moving iceberg.'

‘The pilots here, there are only ten or twelve men in the world who can do what they can do.'

Luke turned his head slightly, as if he had overheard them. Helen watched as he turned off the projector and the photographs of tractors, cranes, the ship dwarfed by the ice cliff, all dissolved into a dark screen.

Luke was just as Nara described him; in four years he had not changed – perhaps a deeper line etched here, a loosening of skin there, but he was still that dark-haired man, a wellmade if not handsome face, grey-blue eyes, in good shape, a man who, at twenty-five, must have been startlingly vital. His Army training had kept him in condition well beyond the years when it ended – Helen had seen this, too, with other men of a similar age in their late forties or fifties, in Afghanistan. These men never lost their military bearing, however much they might have wanted out of the military. That life put its stamp on them.

She approached him. He glanced in her direction, then away. Eventually he said, ‘What is it you're writing again? A book?'

‘Yes, a book.'

‘On what?'

‘On death. Death in the Antarctic, specifically.'

‘Oh, well.' Luke laughed. ‘You've got plenty of material, then.'

She said, ‘You must see her everywhere, here.'

He stared at her for a moment. ‘Memories fade, don't they, with time?'

She shook her head. ‘I don't think they do.' She paused. ‘What did you think of Alexander?'

‘He was – ' he stopped. ‘Am I being interviewed here, I mean, formally?'

‘I'm not the police. I don't conduct formal interviews. We're just talking.'

‘I don't think talking with you people is ever just talking.'

She wanted to say, us people? What category have you assigned me to? Lawyers, insurance salesmen? Spies?

‘I sat for years with her, just here – ' he flung out his arm toward one of the cafeteria tables.

He said no more and turned away, possibly so that she could not see his face. Helen had the impression that everything within him had curled up into a protective posture, a question mark of silence.

‘I've got to pack up here,' he said, gesturing toward the projector, the laptop.

For a second Helen wondered if she should tell him about the Wintering file, then decided against it. She nodded, then walked away.

I can hear…what it is saying.

He and Nara sit in the Air Unit office. Between her fingers she is twirling the little plastic bull of the bottle of Sangre de Toro he had given her as an end-of-summer present.

It is the night he'd flown into base for the medical evacuation, and he is so tired. He and Chris are on four-hour shifts; every four hours they fight their way through the wind and snow over to the hangar to check that the heaters are preventing the aircraft from freezing to the spot. He is so tired from the effort of rescue, from flying five hours worrying about icing, about knottage and windspeed and fuel and power, and yet he cannot sleep.

He needs to talk to her. It will be another two months before he sees her again. This is still in a time when two months away from her feels like a sentence, a miserable longing.

Who is talking?

Not who. What. It has a voice. It tells me – it comes from the earth. It's not human.

But if you can't hear what it is saying, how do you know it's speaking to you then?

I don't. It's just a – a feeling. Or a signal. It's more like a signal I'm picking up, from a long way away. I'm trying to understand what it's saying.

He is thinking: she is sensitive. Perhaps too sensitive for this place.

It says God doesn't exist.

He snaps back to attention. Does it?

It says that it is God, or rather that God is in it, that it is His embodiment.

That's not so outlandish, he thinks. I've heard that before. Perhaps it isn't so serious. Perhaps she will be okay, yet.

Now, four years later, he sits in his pitroom, the storms of early winter howling outside. He has never been on base in the winter, apart from the medevac he did that year in early August. He has no experience of this live animal called winter which paws at his door as if desperate to come inside.

When has he last thought about God? Not since that night, possibly – the last night he drove the road to Digby Neck.

He would see it so clearly from the air in the planes he would fly years later, gliding over the narrow, gouged province of his birth on his way to more worldly places.

Digby Neck is unique; he doubts there is anywhere like it in the world – a long, thin ribbon of land, bordered on one side by a gigantic bay raked by the highest tides in the world. On the lee side, dunes, hair grass, a smaller narrow bay. The large bay drains twice daily, refilling, driven by the most powerful tidal gyre in the world. Here the difference between high and low tide is fifteen feet. On the mudflats, sand pipers, clams, Junebugs, sand worms, quahogs, mussels, barnacles are exposed, their skins glistening in the sun. Overhead crows, hawks, bald eagles, and seagulls wait to spot the glint of the sun on flesh.

The tide does not arrive, it storms. You can see it on a silver wave, coming. On the other side of the neck is a thin bay, much more static. For some reason the tide does not penetrate here.

He has to make a decision: whether to leave, or to stay.

Every night that week he drives the Neck, with its narrowing road. At the end, toward the open mouth of the bay, the spit of land fragments into three narrow islands. Here ferries must be used to cross the water, tiny four-car ferries, engineless, pulled across the sand banks on a chain.

He secures the jeep, looks at his murky headlights clouded by the corpses of wasps, bees, mayflies. The road narrows toward the end, were there is only one lane. Hair grass on one side, sand dunes. The hair grass thin, resinous, like violin strings.

He has lived in this narrow province all his life. This is where he grew up, learned to fly at the local glider club, before going to Florida to train, then to the UK, then South Africa, then the Army, then Scotland, then the Falklands, and finally the Antarctic. Punta Arenas, Santiago, Cape Town, the Falklands, those Southern Hemisphere rim-named places he frequented and their turbulent, empty seas: he would develop a fascination with the southern hemisphere, because it was so empty of land and people in comparison to the northern half of the world, but also for its difference – the stars, the sky, plants, birds, the wind. The Antarctic he will think of as the place where the wind is born. He is a pilot, and he lives by the wind.

He is twenty-four and his girlfriend of four years is pregnant. That October, she will have their child. He knows what he should do: marry her, settle down here, give up dreams. Drive from Zellers to Canadian Tire, along hushed wooded highways, misted vaulting valleys. And one day, if he can stand it for long enough, he will bring his daughter here to Digby Neck, to watch the tide fill the Bay of Fundy, then retreat.

Driving the road to Digby Neck that night for the last time he knows nothing of his future, nothing at all of the woman he will marry and divorce, the lonely flat roads he will drive with her at the bottom of the world, Cape Agulhas, Struisbaai, Arniston, sand dunes there too, an emerald empty ocean beyond them. Why is it that we can't see ahead? He will never accept how life is so gauged against our survival; if only we could see around corners, he thinks, we could protect ourselves from our futures, from our fates. After Luke's talk, Helen retreated to the laboratory which had become her office. On the walls were maps: a geophysical map of the Antarctic, showing the four south poles – geographical, magnetic, relative inaccessibility and ‘true', and an Ice Extent map, which showed how the Antarctic doubled in size due to the growth of winter sea ice. What was she doing in this place? She yearned to see a painting, or antiquities, to see green, to meet strangers.

On her computer screen was Nara's Wintering file. On this precise date, March 5th, four years earlier Nara had written, In the Antarctic time feels like something to be got through, rather than lived. The present is only about endurance. Here, the only things that exist are the past and winter.

2012, 2013, 14, 15: these are the numbers of Helen's recent past, numbers filled with trips, assignments; November 2012 in her diary of that year read: November 6: Baghdad Airport, where she went to do a story on the newly reopened airport; November 21: Kandahar, where she would research a story about the aftermath of the British Army's pullout from Afghanistan, the instant clandestine economies which sprung up to fill the void, the private armies, the reversal to warlord practices. The past was only vacuums and eddies quickly filled by more time, so that within months it was impossible to say what had really happened in a particular place. Time cauterised events like wounds closing in on themselves.