The Ice Lovers (6 page)

‘You know, that's exactly what I was thinking. My exact thought.'

After that, she could not remember them speaking any more. They must have fallen asleep together, meaning at the same time.

The following day they fired up the engines; it was time, the pilot said, to see if they still worked. Without authorisation from base there was no question of them actually taking off, but there was the risk of the aircraft freezing to the ground.

For the first time the pilot allowed her up on the wings to help him unblank the plane. At first she struggled with the tension on the wires, how cold they were to the touch, even through her gloves. In the end she had to take them off and blow hot air on the layer of rime ice that had formed overnight in the storm. The tips of her fingers burned, and she put them in her mouth.

‘Let's just get her going,' he called out to her. ‘Get in.'

She scrambled off the wing, down along the fuselage, and slipped through the co-pilot's door. He started the right engine first. The propeller whipped until it was a blur of black and white stripes against the white of the snow. He fired up the left engine and the plane began to shake.

He frowned.

‘What is it?'

His voice came through the headphones. ‘Generator.'

He radioed base. ‘Hey – we've got a faulty generator down here.' His voice was tight with anger. ‘I wish you guys would fix this once and for all. This is what – the third time this season? What about when BZ conked out over at Berkner? How long did it take you to get it back? A week?'

The reply was a rush of static. ‘Sorry,' came the voice of the comms manager. It sounded more than distant, rather a voice sieved through space and time, from another planet. ‘The ionosphere is acting up again.' He was referring to the electrically charged layer of the atmosphere that extends from eighty to four hundred kilometres above the earth's surface, and which absorbed much of the short wavelength radiation from the sun.

But that only happened at sunset, she thought, when a refraction of the rays of a setting or rising sun at certain angles caused havoc with radio communications. She checked the pilot's watch and was shocked to see it was 11:30 – at night, she assumed. Back on base, far to the north, there was no night, but the sun dipped toward the horizon around midnight, a hovering gold and mauve beacon. She hadn't seen the sun in two days, but behind the storm it was travelling round and round, above their heads, in an ellipsis.

The propellers slowed, then stopped. The pilot turned to her. ‘Well,' he said, ‘just like the old explorers, then.'

That night she dreams of him, and it is all so real, not like a dream or even a memory but a silhouette of experience unhappy to have been confined to the past, restless to be admitted to the present.

His skin. Like those rainforest woods: padouk, mahogany. His hair, much thicker than hers. To her he seems a more vital creature. Alive. Sudden flares of temper. All the glaciologists she has met are like this; flinty, obsessed. He is generous, hasty, like travel.

Her fingers trace the concave hollow between his belt – still a boy's belt, a piece of elastic, fabric, a cheap buckle – and his stomach. The quiver of a thin muscle, a glade of wiry hair. His smell there is not unfamiliar to her, nothing about him is unfamiliar, it is as if she has been poured into his bones, or he into hers.

In his body she sees not sensuality, vacant and common, but the edges of her dreams. This man is not an accident, but nor is he luck.

How quickly he has become necessary. He moves her. If this weren't the case she could take him or leave his barbed comments, his glossy eyes. He is inside her, somehow. He is her.

She woke up. The Otter was cold now, the Tilley Lamps long since burned down, the pilot asleep in the tungsten light of the polar night.

Tent days, the pilot called them, days when you were only waiting – waiting for rescue, for the weather to shift, waiting to be told what to do – days when time became an obstacle. Nara wondered how many days he had spent like this. She looked for signs of patience in his face. But his face, although thin, was not haggard with endurance. It struck her again that she was in the presence of a man with un-ordinary powers.

As for time, it was not the clammy indistinctness of the hours which unnerved her so much as the whiteness of their environment. Even under cloud the snow glared a hollow grey-white. On the rare occasions when they saw the sun, the white glint of the snowfield burned her irises. The whiteness seeped from the world around her, and entered her so that her thoughts were the white-yellow of raw silk, slippery, they followed one another without destination or will. If she ventured outside she was deprived of any perspective. She felt instantly seasick. The constant uncertainty of whether she was putting her foot in snow or air, the strain of guessing where the surface might be, waiting at any moment to feel herself pulled waist-deep into the snow, her shoulders hooking on a ledge of a crevasse, exhausted her. The pilot held her lifeline with one hand, with the other he cooked dinner, as was his habit. She was on the end of a fishing line and she was moving into whiteness. The blur in her mind grew and grew until it became an intense stinging buzz.

That night in the back of the Otter she asked him where his accent was from.

‘Canada.'

‘Which part?'

‘I'm from a province next to the Atlantic Ocean. You won't have heard of it.'

‘I lived in Canada for six years.'

‘You did?'

‘My father was a university professor. He got a job there, and we went with him.'

The pilot nodded, but did not say any more. Normally, she would have pressed him to talk about a country they suddenly had in common. But she detected a hesitancy, whether an instinct for privacy or a lack of interest in origins, his or hers, she couldn't tell. And here they were so exposed to each other; she did not want to annoy him.

They slept and ate and went outside to get snow, or to pee, or empty their bowels. They read and talked. They would take turns melting snow for water, transferring it to another pot, then dividing it in two; in the remaining pot they poured dehydrated mashed potatoes. Sometimes she couldn't finish hers, it was too heavy for her. Manfood – it was still called this, thirty years after the Antarctic had been evacuated of the last of the dogs and the dogfood and manfood boxes had been separately labelled – had a high caloric content, to help cope with the cold. They finished their meal with chunks of seven-year-old Bourneville chocolate (‘quite fresh, in Antarctic terms,' the pilot said) then hung the Tilley Lamps from the metal loops in the fuselage, and read. She was only truly warm in her P-bag. Even then a fringe of damp, a buzzing cold needle of air, pressed at her edges. She began to dream of immersions, of being surrounded by warm water. A bath or a shower took on an almost supernatural appeal.

‘I'd love a nice wood fire,' she said.

‘Did you ever read that story “To Build a Fire” by Jack London?'

‘I had to read it in school. I didn't like it very much.'

‘Why not?'

‘I think I was spooked by stories of hunger and luck.'

He laughed.

Suddenly, she felt desperate. ‘You don't think it's serious? The situation we're in?'

‘No, I don't. Not like in that story, anyway. But it wasn't just his luck, remember. He was warned by the old-timer not to do the journey alone.'

She nodded. ‘Like Captain Scott. He was warned, too, wasn't he – and he still went ahead and trusted to luck.'

‘Something similar, I suppose,' he said. ‘They both thought luck was on their side.'

‘What do you miss, down here?'

‘Red wine, Syrah or Merlot preferably, grilled fish, something fresh and meaty. Monkfish. Dancing. A hot shower. Heat of any kind. Wood-panelled rooms, animals, music...it's easier if you don't think of things that are impossible.'

‘But you think of them, still.'

‘We're all perverse that way, don't you think?' he said. ‘I only want things I can't have. When I find out I can have them, I don't want them anymore.'

She agreed. ‘Almost everything I want, I can't have.'

‘You wanted to come to the Antarctic, you must have. Nobody comes here without wanting it badly. And you got what you wanted. You're here.'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘We're definitely here. Wherever here is.'

A silence followed, long enough that she took the conversation to be over. But the pilot's voice interrupted her drift toward sleep.

‘So what is it that you want so much and can't have?'

‘A man.'

‘So you ran away from love.'

‘I ran toward something better. That's how I think about it. What about you? I mean, are you married?' For days she had been skirting round this question, trying to come at it from the correct angle.

‘Me? Well, I got married when I was twenty-eight. We had three children, quite quickly I suppose. It's just what you were supposed to do, to get on with it.'

She wondered how long ago twenty-eight was. He might be twenty years her senior; it was hard to tell. He inhabited what was for Nara an indefinite age, too young to be her father, too old to plausibly be her lover. Although really, she supposed, there was no real limit on the latter.

The wind cuffed the plane once more and set it rocking. The pilot mumbled something then, some mild disbelief, or was it laughter? She asked him what he meant but heard nothing in return. In another moment she heard his breathing alter. He had fallen asleep.

What she will remember of those Otter days in the coming months: hunger and luck, the manfood too heavy for her to eat, the cold gnawing at her like a small, sharp-toothed animal. Their luck, if you could call it that, of a two-day field trip turned into ten. Awkwardnesses. Mad days connected to each other by a wire. If I tugged, you would feel me. Leaving the plane to relieve herself, trying to locate the pee flag in a whiteout, the lifeline on her back, the pilot discreetly turned away. Lemon stains on the snow now frozen to blocks of urine-ice. On the second day polar agoraphobia overtook her and she did not want to leave the fuselage; the pilot had to all but shove her out. Terrible constipation because she could not bring herself to defecate anywhere he might see her, the stalemate broken only by the blizzard that arrived on the third – or was it the fourth? – day and which offered her complete cover. Blinded by so much white as she squatted, vulnerability but also a strange power coursing through her. The thrill of their aloneness; who has ever been so alone? Pilots shot down in wartime, she imagines. The terrible story of Amelia Earhart and her navigator, crashed on a near-invisible Pacific atoll, only skeletons and one of the navigator's shoes left. Did they starve to death? Did they make love? Did they devour each other?

We're safe, he'd said, once, cooking dinner. There's no need to worry.

Don't worry, I'm not worried. And they'd laughed, and after dinner spent an hour trying to find synonyms for the word: preoccupation, anguish, concern, doubt, hand-wringing, brooding, getting worked up, anxious, tense, despair, dark night of the soul. I always liked the sound of that, she'd said, but with a ‘k', the man on the horse, you know, who comes to save you: all I want is a dark knight of the soul.

Right away the pilot is there, floating around the dark fuselage of her dreams; in her dreams they are both suspended, gravity-less, as in a space capsule. His dark blue eyes framed by eyebrows of a certain, definite cast. His hands, surprisingly delicate and small. In her dreams he says, ‘We're safe, don't worry.' Even within the dream she thinks how much of life is contained in this dispute between safety and danger: illness, family, dying, hope. Life is not safe, she remembers her mother saying, her voice hissing on the final word. Her beautiful, vengeful mother who had too much disappointment invested in such thoughts to risk optimism, like a dark day of rain that refuses to brook the light.

When she awoke the pilot was talking – at first she thought to her, or possibly to himself. Then she realised it was base on the radio.

‘Well never mind…' A hiss of static. ‘No we're ok down here.'

She went forward, her head bent in deference to the low ceiling of the fuselage, and slid into the co-pilot seat.

When he'd finished talking, she pointed ahead and asked, ‘what's that?'

The pilot squinted at the windscreen. ‘What?'

‘There are people,' she said, simply. A haze had settled in her eye. But within it, very small, were the black shadows of people on the move, perhaps – a ring of people, dancing in the snow. They were towing what looked like a snowmobile.

‘I don't think there's anything there.'

She closed her eyes, opened them. The figures were still there, black dots against a grainy canvas of white, round and shapeless, like peppercorns scattered on snow.

‘It's a mirage. The air's so clear here, there's no pollution or haze. But also there's nothing to get a fix on in your visual field, and if one thing appears – a tent or a ridge or an island, your eye magnifies it. Isn't that interesting, how for us, emptiness is a magnifier? Everything looks a third closer than it really is. Even pilots misjudge the distances sometimes.'

She shook her head. She couldn't get the vision of the people towing the skidoo out of her mind.

‘The less there is to see, your eye compensates by making things bigger, or manufacturing things to look at. That's why you have the hallucinations, the fata morgana, when sailors start to see towns and cities, or other ships, or icebergs. You usually see what you want to see most: a rescue ship, your mother,' – he hesitated, gave her a careful look – ‘or other people, in your case. But there's nothing there. That's one of the things you watch out for, as a pilot,' he went on. ‘In a whiteout, you start hallucinating horizons, then you ignore what your instruments are telling you, then you begin to tip the plane down. They call it the dead man's spiral. The eye sees what it wants to see, not what's there. You have to train yourself not to see what you hope for. It's strange, when you think of it, that hope can kill you.'