The Nature of Ice (27 page)

‘I'll catch up.' Freya slows, bemoaning the need to pee and the rigmarole involved.

She finds a ridge of ice along the tide crack that shields her from view and begins the chore of removing layers of clothing. She strips off her ventile jacket to access her overall straps beneath. Her bare hands ache with cold as she fumbles with zips and clips and tugs at buttons and velcro tabs. She peels down windproof trousers, her yellow overalls, her woollen work trousers, her long johns and finally her underwear. She crouches on the ice in the wind, her weak leg held out at an angle, trying to bunch loose clothes in one hand, gather her shirt-tails in the other. Cold stings her bare skin.

‘I'll take your camera bag,' Adam calls from the other side of the ridge. ‘I'm heading out to the plane.'

‘Leave it,' she answers. ‘I might still need it. You go on ahead.'

To her annoyance he's there when she emerges dishevelled, fumbling with clips. He has her camera bag propped on his shoulder.

‘Adam, I like to have it with me so I can use it.'

‘Come on,' he pleads. ‘Let me feel useful. You might want to get used to it.' He nods to the plane parked on the ice, its paintwork gleaming. ‘They're off to Mawson Station tomorrow, your alter ego with them.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘McGonigal's shooting through.'

Freya halts. ‘Are you sure?'

‘Positive. He surprised us all a few days ago. Said he's had a gutful of the people and the place.'

She feels Adam's eyes on her and does her best to hide dismay.

‘These things are never easy,' he says kindly.

She remains silent, refusing to be coaxed into any conversation that could give herself, or Chad, away.

‘You can't blame him, Freya.' Adam speaks gently, privy, it seems, to matters so intimate that it rocks her to think they've been shared. ‘It might be best for both of you this way.'

Freya wills him to stop but he's like a dog with a bone. ‘He was down here twelve months before you showed up. He would have been off his tree after spending a winter with twenty blokes. Twenty-one,' he winks, ‘counting Elisia Hood.'

She nods, her head a world away.

‘You probably stopped McGonigal going insane.'

THE CASA BANKS, TIPS ITS wing abruptly as if caught unawares by something below. Through the window, Freya catches sight of a tiny dark speck—impossible to tell whether it's a mountain or a stone. Perceptions of distance, size, perspective—a photographer's sphere—are shot to pieces against the infinite planar of ice.

As the plane descends, readying to land upon the ice shelf, objects on the ground sharpen and reveal themselves. Freya looks down upon a circle of tents faded to assorted shades of orange from their varying tours of duty. A larger Weatherhaven tent, its striped shell of blue and gold not yet bleached by sun or wind, looks as cheerful as a circus top. In the middle of the camp, plastic food bins sit in snow like the stones of a fire ring. At their centre, as if to mark this place, rises a cairn of ice topped with a bedraggled red star. Cairn and star hold fleeting claim upon the ice, staking a compass point, a grid reference, a name upon a map that is, for a time, the Amery Ice Shelf Summer Camp.

The co-pilot hauls boxes and bins from the body of the plane and passes them down to a chain of outstretched arms. From inside the fuselage Freya hears the splutter of an engine followed by a roar. The waiting group breaks into a cheer. The pilot ushers people clear as he reverses the overhauled skidoo brought out from the station, a carton of beer tethered to its back, down the plane's ramp and out across the snow. Slumped a distance away, sporting an ungainly lean, a second, wounded snowmobile—its frame warped and buckled—looks a sad and sorry sight. Just wait until Malcolm gets wind of it. Freya watches the broken skidoo being hooked and winched into the plane like a harpooned whale. The vehicle's fate will rest on a dieso's report,
skidoo knackered
, or a miracle cure by those same mechanical wizards.

Freya is directed to the big top, which accommodates a makeshift mess and field laboratory. The mail satchel she delivers from Davis is filled with printouts of incoming emails, letters from friends on station, old copies of newspapers emailed daily to the station.

Freya has to look twice to recognise Travis, the young field assistant she travelled down with on
Aurora Australis
. He gives her a wry smile. No longer the clean-shaven, baby-faced boy she remembers, his bearded face is sun-browned and lined, lips cracked, his hair hangs lank to his shoulders. Travis looks harder, rougher, has acquired an Antarctic edge. He hovers over the table. ‘Anything for me?'

She checks the bundle in her self-appointed role as postmistress. ‘Nothing, I'm afraid. Sorry.'

He slumps into a plastic chair beside her and extracts a crumpled wad of paper from his pocket. ‘Do me a favour when you get back? Type this and email it to my wife.' He unfolds the pages. ‘The address is at the top. If she writes back you can send it over on the next plane.' His hands tremble.

Freya hesitates. ‘
If
she writes back?'

Travis nods. ‘If you ever decide you want to fuck things up at home, try phoning your wife from a floating ice shelf in the middle of nowhere on a ten-dollar-a-minute satellite phone that keeps cutting out.'

‘Those nosy little satellites have a lot to answer for.'

Travis barely reacts, devoid of the eager optimism she remembers from the ship. ‘That'd be the same night,' he says, ‘you've come
this close
to being wiped out in a crevasse on a skidoo, because you have this stupid idea that wouldn't it be good to hear Leila's voice after being marooned out here for three months.' He shakes his head. ‘Who, as it turns out, is off her tree at a nightclub, along with one of your white ant mates who's promised to look out for her while you're away. She's screaming at you from her mobile, bawling you out because you weren't there for her twenty-third birthday, or for Christmas, or New Year, or right now when she really, really needs to feel close to someone.'

Freya closes her eyes against the image, only to picture Marcus at home, oblivious to her deceit. Whether you're the one away, or the one waiting at home, everything hinges on trust.

‘Life was good when I left home. I came down here thinking this would be the chance of a lifetime. What a joke.'

Their voyage south feels an age ago. ‘I'm so sorry.' She's sorry for them all: Travis and his wife, she and her husband. And Chad, leaving tomorrow because of her. ‘Travis, the Casas leave for Mawson Station tomorrow. As I understand it, they won't come out here again before they bring you guys back to Davis Station in February. Shall I ask Charlie to radio you any news we hear?'

‘Depends what kind of news.' Then he shrugs. ‘Who gives a flying fuck. Give the comms guys something to laugh about.'

‘Charlie's not like that,' she says quietly.

DURING THE RETURN FLIGHT FREYA'S camera rests on her knees, the vibration of the plane's engines burring through her limbs. Adam dozes in the seat in front, his feet resting on the buckled red skidoo. It feels ludicrous to admit that she was once attracted to a man as vain and boorish as Adam, his charm surface deep. She thinks of Travis—damaged and altered—and begins to see how Antarctica affects people in odd, unpredictable ways. She looks out the window but her focus turns inward, replaying conversations. She feels, within the waves of sadness, a double-edged admiration for Chad, for his strength and self-reliance: he has the courage and conviction to turn and walk away. She thinks of her marriage and questions whether she would have the fortitude to do the same.

They fly over endless rifts of ice. Directly below, three frozen rivers converge into the headwaters of a glacier. From here the mass of ice begins its slide towards open water, set in motion by its own colossal weight. Only when it reaches the ocean will the river of ice complete its course, unfolding like a Herculean hand and releasing immense frozen fingers into the sea.

The birthplace of bergs. Ice bobbing and turning. Weightless. Free.

GINGER
EASES DOWN AMONG THE hills of the Vestfolds and lines up the plateau pegged out with black blocks. Freya can see the bank of fuel drums and beyond them the figure of Elisia Hood hurtling snowballs at the two engineers. The plane pulls down on skis and bounces once, twice, before sliding over snow and easing to a stop.

The door of the Casa opens to a beaming, breathless Elisia, clumps of snow tangled in her hair. Freya wishes she could bottle some of Elisia's cheer, take it home and keep it by her side.

Elisia takes one look at the broken skidoo and whistles. ‘What happened to the poor driver?'

Adam shrugs and gives the bumper a kick. ‘It's cactus. If it had been up to me I would have left it in the crevasse. Let the plateau swallow it up.'

Elisia has a deft way of flaring her nostrils to show disdain. ‘And how exactly would that solve the problems of the world, Dr Adam?' She bellows into the plane. ‘You don't just chuck something out the minute it's busted. You'd never get anywhere in life.'

‘Well, excuse me for living,' his voice booms back.

Freya climbs down the ramp and jumps into ankle-deep snow. ‘Can it be fixed?'

Elisia shrugs. ‘Won't know until we try.'

21 miles south

January 1913

A LEADEN GLARE, SAGGING CLOUDS, a sharp rise in temperature—the first swirl of snow corralled him to a halt, a stern reminder that he was scarcely strong enough to pitch the tent in calm conditions, let alone in gusts of wind and flurries of snow that would soon wind up to blizzard.

The euphoria of crossing the glacier had propelled him onward to the beginning of the western slope, two miles, three, each terrace a harder, steeper goal than the one before. Seized with hope at glimpses of coastline and a berg-studded bay, he had turned a deaf ear to caution running through his weary, weary mind and discarded his worn crampons and alpine rope. He had flicked his crevasse stick at the glacier and watched it skittle downhill.

It was unfair that he should be held back now by changing weather when he was eager to go on—caged within a wilting tent with a saturated bag and freezing feet.

Hair, human and reindeer, formed a russet halo on the snow around his head. The lining of the tent held a skin of rime from exhaled air. Outside, torrents of snow pressed down until the whole enclosure stood no higher than a coffin. The base of his skull hammered out a strange new pain that brought an image of blood vessels swelling in his brain. The perpetual craving for food racked his body and addled his mind when he tried to calculate how long it was humanly possible to spin out the remaining two and a half pounds of food—a normal day's rations.

Providence had let him come this far, had dragged, cajoled him, drummed him on, step after step, with endless rhyming lines of Robert Service:
Have you suffered, starved,
and triumphed, grovelled down, yet grasped at glory, grown
bigger in the bigness of the whole?

Providence had chafed his body raw until it bled, punished him with the science gone to waste—three hundred miles of surveyed coastline, notes on glaciers and ice formations locked inside his head.

Done things just for the doing, letting babblers tell the
story, seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul?

It had shamed him with an imagined sea of admiring supporters and an image of forty thousand pounds scattered to the wind by the festering hands of a man with grandiose ideas. Up every slope and over every ridge the voice dragooned like a drill sergeant,
Duty! Duty! Duty!
—kicked him when he crawled.

Only when he held out the sun compass and angled his thoughts to Paquita did the world ease to a hush. In warm, glinting light he remembered her capacity for kindness and love. In the refraction of sun on a circle of glass he knew that nothing meant more than honouring a pledge sealed with a diamond ring and upholding his promise to return.

The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do
things; then listen to the Wild—it's calling you
.

He had paid his dues to the Wild. Let him reach the plateau and find his bearings; let him make it home.

HE TRUDGED INTO WIND WITH petticoats of drift flouncing at his waist. He moved like a hobbled mule over last year's worn sastrugi that finally marked his direction beneath his feet.

He had marched five miles over undulating ice on a bearing north 45 degrees west when a flash of black ticked the corner of his eye.

He turned and paced closer; he held his breath, uncertain that his mind was not betraying him, believing in miracles only when he touched the cairn with its bunting of black cloth wound through hewn blocks of ice.

Douglas seized a red bag weighted beneath the snow, the frisson of recognition as sweet as the promise of its contents. He ran his thumb across a seam, seeing, for the first time, the painstaking labour and devotion in Paquita's careful stitches.

The note inside the tobacco tin made him catch his breath. The date: 29 January 1913—today. He scanned the plateau for figures, tempted to abandon the sledge and run to catch the party but seeing only ghosts swirling in the drift. When had they left?

29-1-13

Situation
    21 Miles S 60 E
of Aladdin's Cave.

Two ice mounds one
14 M S 60 E of Aladdin's Cave
the other
5 miles SE of Aladdin's . . .

—the first has biscuits
chocolate etc.

Please find biscuits,
pemmican, ground biscuit
tea etc.

Aurora arrived Jan 13th.
Wireless messages received
All parties safe.

Amundsen reached Pole
December 1911

—remained there 3 days
Supporting party left
Scott 150 M from Pole in
the same month

Bage reached 300 M SE
17' from Magnetic Pole