The Ice Lovers (25 page)

She had always felt a compulsion to shoulder other people's tragedies. This was a more selfish instinct than was immediately obvious; it allowed her to draw her own boundaries, to see how much she could take. She would absorb displacement, rape, murder, starvation, all that while harbouring an underhand assumption that by putting herself in their path, on behalf of others, she would be granted a celestial immunity from their effects in her own life.

All that changed in late 2012. She stopped travelling, because no travel was allowed. Her diary was empty of places and tasks. Instead it read: Feb 15: Someone has cloned my debit card and bought £800 worth of kitchen tiling. Feb 20: Can't get up in the morning.

Helen realised many things in that year: how she refused to believe in the wholesale destruction of the planet, even while she worked on stories about war, environmental collapse, climate change. How angry she was: she wanted to erase nations, for the harm they had done. She wanted to erase the easy cynicism she saw in her own country, which had become nothing more than a money-obsessed dissolute old victor, a serial adulterer who held values of loyalty and truth in open contempt.

From the sick pride of nations, the bad faith, the Antarctic would save her. Because she would be in a continent owned by no one. She would go, for the first time in her life, to nobody's country.

Luke slid open the doors to the aircraft hangar. Inside, three Twin Otters huddled. He walked around them, running his hands along their fuselages, over the rivulets, the embossed penguins-and-propellers emblem. He knew each of their quirks – the fickle generator on BZ, the sticky trim on BC, the bounce of BB, how it flew into the sky more eagerly than the other planes, thrilled to snag the updraft. The Twin Otter was the world's greatest bush plane, and for him it was a creature, a living thing.

He stopped beside BB, the plane he had flown down to the Ellsworths that year. That trip was the beginning of everything. For years, he hadn't felt that way about anyone – not on base, in Stanley, in Calgary, where he spent his summers. While he was married there had been one or two women he had found attractive, yes, but he was married and that was that. Then after his marriage had ended, he'd felt… nothing; this solid nothing, cold and hard, coagulated within him. He would call it an iciness, but he knew now how many names there were for ice, how many properties it had, and that it was a more complicated substance than most people suspected.

He leant against the cool fuselage of the Otter. He should speak to this woman writer about Berkner, he should tell her what happened. Then he would finally be free.

For the first time in years, he wished he could talk to Nara. The desire was so powerful he thought he might cry. Everything they had done together, everything they had exchanged, had ended in the appearance of this woman four years later, picking over the bones of those moments. As for the woman, Helen, he might like her personally, in different circumstances, but he distrusted what she represented. He thought Helen misguided in her entire project. Nara was dead, that much was true. And while the truth could perhaps be pieced together after the fact, it would never be whole again; the fissures and fractures are too deep. And what would such an archive yield anyway? A record of desire, or thoughts, or deeds. But nothing to match the splendour of life, those days they had flown together in the empty Antarctic skies, or sat in silence as fog blanketed the base. He wanted to tell Helen: don't you know that the truth can only be lived? If you go looking for it after the moment is over all you will find are ashes, cinders.

He found himself walking to the laboratory that had been Nara's office, now occupied by another marine biologist, hoping to find her there. He stood in the doorway and addressed Nara's empty chair. Why aren't you here? Where are you? As much as he wanted to speak to her he wanted to grasp the sense of having loved her, or at least the memory of it. Since Nara what had there been? Encounters. Squall people who formed and dispersed on his horizon.

There would be a war, soon, he thought. It would be fought over oil and ice, in the form of water, in the form of its potential. No one cared much about the ice itself; to them it was just an obstacle. Wars would happen, yes, they were part of the unending bloodsport in which the human race engaged, and he would continue to fly over the ice sheets, as long as they existed. Because in order to exist, he believed that you need a witness – someone who is consumed by you, concerned for your survival. Otherwise what were we? A mirage: half-human, half-smoke. A ghost.

3

Nara's visions started around the time the sun went away. If she closed her eyes, they were there; she had the impression they were looking at her always, but were invisible. Only on the dark screen of her eyelids did they make themselves known.

The creatures had long white faces and slit eyes. Their expression was difficult to describe; it was not indifferent, nor benign, nor threatening; rather it was a flat evaluating look. They were making decisions, she felt, coming to their own conclusions about her, trying to decide what they wanted from her.

She began to feel the will of a presence – a disembodied thing, not a person, but not an object, either – looking at her. On those winter nights when sleep refused to overtake her she lay with her eyes closed and the white faces foamed out of the darkness of her mind. It was as if they had taken a cold interest in her. They had been there all along (they existed, she was certain), but she had attracted their attention only now, for some reason. When she opened her eyes, they dispersed. But the impression of something threatening in the landscape, a rigid intelligence which cared nothing at all for her, for them, for anyone, remained.

She became afraid to sleep. What was happening to her? She was a scientist, well-educated, rational, schooled in materialism, empiricism, the process of hypothesis and evidence, she was an agnostic, and an entirely ordinary person with ordinary powers and capacities – the last sort of person to see ghosts, or spirits, or to lose her grip on reality.

She was prepared to accept that the polar night offered an uncanny clarity, that people and spirits might intermingle in its dark pane. Many of the old explorers had experienced hallucinations, even temporary madness, which had been dispersed by the return of the sun. But still, there was something real about these apparitions, with their canny children's eyes, their cut-out faces. On one of those nights she asked them, what do you want with me? They did not answer but remained on the inside of her eyelid for longer than usual, forming and reforming, as if from smoke.

Over the winter her visions sharpen in focus, the Viking-Aliens, and sometimes wolves who give her a disapproving but not exactly menacing stare. At times she has a powerful sense of a great consciousness passing through her hands, her lungs, possibly her mind. Mostly this happens while she is diving, when she is far underwater, away from the realm of man. Here among her giant sea-sponges, the starfish and seaspiders, she felt a living, breathing thing that slipped through her fingers, like a multitude of fish. It was sleek and ungraspable, on its way to another destination.

How amazing, that knowing and believing are not after all the same thing: she knows these things are real – the intergalactic Vikings, the world-spirit in the ocean – but yet she does not believe in them. At the same time, she believes in them, but she cannot know them; there is no experiment she can devise to confirm their existence.

She tells no one about these grandiose, spooky fantasies, or her feeling that the pulse of the world was quickening, that somewhere a giant heart was beating, louder, faster.

That winter Alexander teaches her about ice. There are the icebergs: glacier bergs, ice islands, tabular bergs, growlers, bergy bits, brash ice, blue ice, dirty ice. The sea ice: the pack, ice floes, hummocks, ridges, pancake ice, stalactites, undersea ice, frazil ice, ice flowers, rotten ice. The coastal ices: shore ice, piedmonts, glimmer ice, ice cakes, fringes, grounded ice, anchored ice, ice shelves, ice lobes, streams, rime ice. The mountain ices: cirque glaciers, piedmont glaciers, valley glaciers, pinnacles.

She knows that Alexander undertakes lone missions around the Point, to catalogue the ice. He contravenes all the rules by not tagging out on the tagging board. He will not talk to her about his motives, but she understands: this is his fleeting rebellion against the rules that their whereabouts be known at all times, against the tagging board – the base equivalent of CCTV, which will be introduced within a year, after Alexander's accident – his attempt to carve a crucible of privacy, however small, in this secretless place.

Midwinter Dinner is followed by a ceilidh. The cook plays fiddle, the vehicle mechanic has been practising his accordion. June 21st, midsummer in the northern hemisphere, is the Antarctic Christmas.

In the outside world the summer has turned volatile: thunderstorms, flash floods, savage weeks of kiln-like heat which turned the fields of the Mediterranean into ceramic. In the Pacific a red tide of algae wiped out krill stocks. Grey whales are dying in unprecedented numbers, their corpses clogging currents just as horses abandoned by the conquistadors once bloated the horse latitudes. Seven small islands in the Pacific were evacuated due to King Tides; on the internet Nara saw photographs of flooded homes, schools drowning in brackish water, the children's desks full of suctioning molluscs. In the North, light rains down on the planet, caused by bursts of solar fires which are now accepted to be adding to the catastrophic droughts in Australia, in Kenya. On the internet the news is full of picnics, sunscreen – everyone wears factor 75 now; too thick to be absorbed, it covers the skin in a thin layer of white zinc, and photographs show armies of pasty-faced sunbathers, like extras in a film set in the Elizabethan era.

But in the Antarctic they are safe. There is turkey, presents, a Christmas tree, the windows are dark squares onto a moonlit snowfield. There is even mistletoe.

They eat and drink and dance reels. At some point in the party, Nara finds she is being forced near Alexander. He, too, is being driven toward her. The fiddle and accordion blare in her ears.

They have all been kissing under the mistletoe. Not chaste pecks on cheeks, but full-on kisses. It is some kind of midwinter dare.

Someone says, ‘the only two people who haven't kissed.'

Nara looks at the mouth she has kissed before, although not recently. A cruel, casual, deeply sexual mouth.

They both manage to break free from their captors. The desperation in their limbs gives them away. They are both ready to fight, just to not have to touch.

Everyone backs away, against the wall. They dissolve into the shadows, they go to get a beer. The winter won't be the same, from now on, knowing that among their number are two people who despise each other.

On July 22nd the sun came back. The winterers knew the date in advance – the sun returned to the peninsula either on the 21st or the 22nd of July each year, depending on the weather and subtle changes in the rotation of the planet.

At 11am the winterers assembled at the south end of the runway, facing southwest, looking into the still-dark sky. The moon was a wolf, a loping shadow creature inside a white mist of stars.

They stared, in silence, into the darkness. At first the light was only a movement deep inside the sky. But then an invisible shift inside the light revealed a sudden garnet glow. The first ray of sun to fall on their land in months came so fast, and the light so searing, that many had to close their eyes against it. Nara was one of the few who defied the urge to blink and was rewarded by a rush of black, as if it were being thrust from the sky by a giant hand, come roaring across the half-frozen bay. Then the stab of green, as sudden and unexpected as an explosion. Then the dark receded from the green energy, draining back over the sea. Flutes of light spread, then, refracted between the mountaintops and narrowed into spires. Emerald light leaked from the sky's indigo hem, and on the outskirts of the light, where the sky faded back into darkness, stars glittered.

A group of twenty-one people, dressed in parkas, in hats and mukluks, stood there in their line at the bottom end of the runway, their torsos and legs in darkness, their faces slowly tilting, like flowers, to face the sun. No one spoke. The wind threaded its way between and through them. For twenty minutes they watched as sunlight shared the sky with the moon: one half yellow, that watery yellow of winter Mediterranean cornfields, the other a brittle silver. Then another shift in the light, an imperceptible nudging, and the spires dismantled themselves. And then, with another glimmer of movement behind the horizon, far away and inside the light, the sun sunk away.

A blizzard paws at the windows. The wind is from the south – the coldest, most driven of the Antarctic winds. In the skies, high above them, temperatures of –190°Fahrenheit help to form nacreous clouds, those clouds of raw pearl created only by extreme cold temperatures, the clouds Luke promised she would see in winter.

Inside, a group of five people sit at the cafeteria tables, playing Twenty-One. It is Nara's turn to be the croupier. She slaps the cards down on the table.

Alexander leans back, extends his arms and shoulders over the chairs around him, widening his scope, also creating a shield.

She comes to him. ‘Stick or twist?'

She waits. He stares at her, shrugs his shoulders.

‘What do you want me to do, read your mind?'

‘Isn't that what you are, a mind reader?'

That night, she sits alone in her pitroom. The blizzard is still going strong.

I love

I love –

Words shred themselves in her mind until it is full of their tattered silks, like the flags they fly on base and which are ripped to shreds, after only one winter, by the wind.

She finds him in his room. She walks straight in and sits on his bed. He perches, wary of her proximity, on the chair.