The Feel of Steel (2 page)

The Goddess of Weeping

A
fter work I went along the hall to Tina's flat for a game of Scrabble.

I took some champagne to drown whatever private troubles each of us might have had, but we agreed we'd get the game moving before we cracked the bottle. Tina is a brilliant player. My only ambition in Scrabble is elegance of vocabulary, but hers is to whack down seven-letter words and pass four hundred. She always thrashes me. It's restful. Also she's got a Lazy Susan so you can spin the board to face the next player without disturbing the arrangement of the tiles. I like a neat board, and so does Tina.

As she was digging out the set and I was sliding the champagne into the fridge, I heard a weird sound.

Our building is in the most densely populated suburb in Australia, or so they say. Summer comes, the windows
go up, and it's shocking what you overhear. Neighbours curse and smash crockery, or make love loudly, or fart in front of the TV, or pedal busily on a squeaky exercise bike. Eventually you adapt, and go about your business quite serenely. It's a selective deafness.

But in Tina's kitchen that day, I couldn't identify the noise I was hearing. Was it even human? It was spaced out into groups: every five seconds or so, a slow downward run of vocal sounds, like barking. Was it coughing? An asthma attack?

‘Can you hear that?'

We cocked our heads and stood still.

‘Is it a dog?' said Tina. ‘Where's it coming from?'

We hurried out barefoot into the hall. In the booming acoustic space, we could tell at once that the sound was coming from the flat next door to Tina's. We tiptoed up to its front door. It wasn't a dog, or a sick person, or an asthmatic. A woman was in there, and she was crying.

We froze on the landing.

‘Who is it?' I whispered.

‘They only moved in yesterday.'

‘Do you think she's all right? Should we knock?'

‘But we don't know her,' said Tina.

On and on went the invisible woman, letting out her dropping runs of lamentation, rhythmic and regular as musical scales. We stood there with our hands over our mouths.

‘Is anyone in there with her?' said Tina.

‘I hope she's not suicidal.'

We each pressed an ear against the door panel.

No voice spoke, in the closed apartment. No one was abusing the woman, or comforting her, or urging her to pull herself together, or telling her it wasn't
worth
having these feelings. She wasn't trying to be discreet, to spare anyone embarrassment, to muffle or discipline or ironise her howling. She didn't care if her puffy eyelids and distorted mouth were making her ‘ugly'. And her crying wasn't the feeble snivelling you sneak away into the spare bedroom to do, or the sly, self-pitying tears you squeeze out in secret over the ironing board and scorch away. No, it was open-throated, deep-chested, full-voiced, solitary weeping.

She was not a woman in need of help. She was a woman in luxury. Shameless, unabashed. Facing sorrow and paying it full, slow, thorough attention. It was leisurely. It was impressive. It radiated the authority of a religious ritual whose origins are lost in time.

‘Don't let's knock,' said Tina in a low voice.

But we dawdled outside the locked door, leaning on the wall, not looking at each other. The weeping and sobbing rolled majestically, tirelessly forward.

‘I can't remember the last time I bawled like that,' said one of us.

After a while we crept back to Tina's dining room table, set up the Scrabble and began to play. She surged ahead of me within two moves and we settled into our accustomed hierarchy. Usually we wise-crack in foul language and screech a lot as we play, but on this day we laid down our tiles quietly and gently. Every now and
then I would get up from my chair and hold a tumbler to the wall and put my ear to it, the way spies do in books. The sobbing gradually became softer and less urgent. The spasms spaced themselves further apart, and finally they stopped altogether.

‘We could put a note under her door,' said Tina. ‘We've got some champagne, when you're ready – Tina and Helen.'
We began to giggle. I went to the fridge for the bottle, pulled the cork and poured three glasses. Tina and I looked at each other. No way was I going to knock on the door of the goddess of weeping, to hand her a tumbler of cheap champagne. Neither was Tina. It would be impertinent. Some things are beyond the social. We returned to the game. The third glass stood there pointlessly fizzing.

The intercom gave a muffled squawk. Tina buzzed the visitor in and opened her front door. Two sweating removalists in singlets thumped up the stairs and barged in, lugging the furniture of a bloke who had just rented Tina's spare room. It abuts the one in our flat where I have my desk. I flicked my eye over his sparse belongings as they were carried past, and noticed with vague concern a bass guitar and a powerful-looking amp.

The new lodger himself appeared. He looked cute, with his buzz-cut and ear-ring, and also neighbourly. He sat with us at the table and accepted the third glass, while Tina began to tell us the story of how she'd heard ghastly screaming, a couple of days before, and had rushed out into the lane and seen through the second-storey window of the building opposite, in broad daylight, a bloke
systematically bashing another bloke over the head with a baseball bat.

It was the kind of city story that ‘made one gasp and stretch one's eyes' – and yet at the same time I felt that, if I lived round here long enough, I would cease to be surprised. I would have to acknowledge something that I already knew in my heart was true: the fact that people, even the ones you trust, the ones you are closest to, are capable of anything. Anything at all.

Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice

T
hey say that tourist ships to Antarctica, even more than ordinary human conveyances, are loaded down with aching hearts. Deceived wives and widowers, men who've never been loved and don't know why, Russian crew forced to leave their children behind for years at a time, grown women who've just buried a beloved parent, people with cancer travelling to the cold before they die. They say people come here looking for ‘solace'. And then there are the married couples: how calm the old ones, how eager the new! – but isn't a couple the greatest mystery of all?

The hats. Oh, they're terrible. One woman broaches the deck pulling on a thing shaped like a sponge-bag, made
of purple polypropylene. A little old lady is wearing a grey wool bonnet straight out of a Brueghel painting. A young bloke in spectacles sports a cap of multi-coloured segments, topped with a twirl and several small silver bells.

My own headgear, a hideous borrowed job featuring red earmuffs and a peak, is still stuffed into a corner of my suitcase, down in cabin no. 521 which I'm to share with a perfect stranger called Robyn (and I've forgotten my earplugs).

So far, an hour after we've embarked from Ushuaia, an Argentine port in Tierra del Fuego, I am still stubbornly refusing to believe in the cold, though my fingers have shrunk so thin that my wedding ring keeps sliding off, and my eyes and nose are streaming.
If you fall over
board
, states the Lonely Planet Guide grimly,
you will die
. I'm not the Antarctic type. I'm hanging out for a short black. I'm not adventurous, and I'm too sad to be sociable with strangers.

Stop whingeing
. As the late summer Saturday afternoon draws on, we chug down the Beagle Channel, a body of calm water that splits the bent nib of South America into Chile and Argentina. The channel lies along a row of harsh, impossibly sparkling-topped mountains, each with its diaphanous scarf of cloud. Our ship is the
Professor Molchanov
out of Murmansk in the former Soviet Union, where, they say, scores of ships lie at anchor, unused, unwanted, rusting – the detritus of empire. Our crew is Russian; our captain, though only thirty-eight, is an ice-master.

‘I look young,' he says, ‘but I am old inside.'

He is also, various women agree later in the bar, ‘a dish'.

‘Haven't you taken a seasick pill yet, Helen?' asks Terry, a vet from Brisbane. ‘Take one. Take it
now
.'

I obey. By 8 p.m. I am nodding off at the dinner table among my fellow adventurers, most of them shy, many of them older than I am. In the early hours of Sunday morning we turn out of the Channel and into the Drake Passage – where, while everyone but the crew is sound asleep, we hit a force-seven gale which will rage unabated for two days and nights.

The pills knock out nausea, but the simplest tasks – going to the lavatory, getting dressed – become Herculean. Robyn and I lurch past each other in the cramped space of our cabin, flung against walls and cannoning off cupboard fronts. Somehow a lifeboat drill is achieved, after which we hibernate. Our porthole is bisected by a madly tilting grey line. I am in love with my bunk, so narrow and perfect, like the single bed of childhood.

Sometimes Ann, the
Molchanov
doctor, materialises next to my drugged head, holding out a bottle of lemon-flavoured water, a handful of dry biscuits. Morning and evening a quiet voice comes over the tannoy into the cabin: this is Greg Mortimer, eminent mountaineer – Everest, K2 – and leader of our ‘voyage'. (No one calls it a ‘tour' or a ‘trip', and since the storm began I have stopped seeing this as pretentious.) He has a knack of saying only what's required, without embellishment. To city people disturbed by the screaming wind, his voice is
comforting. ‘Sleep well,' he says at night, like a competent, benevolent father.

By Monday evening the huge waves smooth out. People creep from their burrows. Some have, incredibly, been unperturbed, attending learned disquisitions in the bar on the habits of penguins. Other voyagers confess to having spewed in public – a great leveller. Thea, the woman in the Brueghel bonnet, shows off a carpet-burn the size of a dollar coin on her forehead. Everyone is friendlier since the storm: now we are shipmates.

Around 9 p.m. we gather on the bridge to keep vigil for our first iceberg. This far south, in February, it doesn't get dark till after eleven. The bridge is a serious place, of work and watching. The Russian officers are big blokes smelling of cigarettes, with moustaches and silver teeth, and voices that rumble up from deep in their torsos. They murmur to each other, slip out on to the deck for a smoke, stand at the wheel or bend over charts spread on drawing boards. We are shy of them and keep stepping out of their way.

Out on deck the air is gaspingly cold but the evening sky is pretty, the water a steely, inky grey-blue. Suddenly there's a moon, riding tranquil between layers of bright cloud. Leaning over the rail I see my first tiny chunk of ice go bobbing past, very close to the ship's side. At once I'm seized by an urge to compare it with something – with anything: it's the size of a loosely flexed hand, palm up; like a Disney coronet with knobbed points; as hollow as a rotten tooth. For some reason I am irritated by this urge, and make an effort to control it.

Inside, the bridge is warm and dim. Thirty people stand about talking, but intent on the greying line that divides sea from sky. There it is – there's one. And another. The first iceberg is only a pale blip on the horizon. The second is greyer, straighter-sided, more ‘like a building'. Night thickens as we approach them. Iceberg no.1 is unearthly, mother-of-pearl, glowing as if with its own inner light source. People grow quiet, their social chatter stills. The only sounds are the buzz and hum of the radar, the dull rumble of the engine, and out on deck the rushing of the wake.

Then somebody begins to liken the iceberg to a face. ‘It's got a sad eye. See its nose?' On and on people go: it's like a sphinx, a Peke's face, an Indian head with its mouth open. Again I am secretly enraged by this, and by my own urgent desire to do the same. I stare at the iceberg as it looms two hundred metres away on our port side. It gleams with a pearly purity. It's faceted: creamy on the left, whiter on the right. It looks stable, like an island rather than something floating. Water riffles around its foot. I strain and fail to see it only in abstract terms. I don't want to keep going ‘like, like, like'. But I can't stop myself.

On Tuesday morning we slip out of the Bransfield Strait into the misty mouth of the Antarctic Sound. While dressing I glance out the porthole and see a tremendous
iceberg – big as two houses – shaped like a chunk of frozen cloud sliced off by a downward stroke of a spatula. The tilt of its top is the cleanest, most perfect line I've ever seen. Rush up on deck, rugging up as I run. The water is as flat and as lumpy with ice scraps as the surface of a gin and tonic.

In the fog the monster bergs are everywhere.
Mol
chanov
cruises among them, gently. Each one is fissured, flawed with a wandering seam of unnatural cellophane blue-green, almost dayglo: older ice, someone explains, more densely compressed. A lump of ice needs to be only the size of, say, a small washing machine for this faery green to be present in it, like a flaw in an opal.

‘Unrool, idn't it,' murmurs big Dave the diver, a Queenslander with huge square teeth.

It's hopeless, trying to control the flood of metaphor. People cry out in wonder. Look – a temple, with pillars. The white ridged sole of a Reebok. There's one with a curved spine. Hey – an aircraft carrier! A flooded cathedral. Somebody's been at that one with a melon-baller. Suddenly, we glide into an area of small ice chunks, like the aftermath of an explosion – pieces no bigger than a folded sheet, a dish-rack, a car engine.

Exhausted with the ecstasy of it, you turn your eyes away for a moment, to rest – and the sun breaks through the cloud cover to reveal a whole further field of icebergs – great flaring blocks of perfect, piercing silver.

The fog lifts further. There it is – the Antarctic Peninsula, a continent of dark rocks, of ridged and bony snow. They want us to climb into an inflatable, flat-bottomed
zodiac and
set foot
on it? My stomach rolls with excitement and fear.

I wish I didn't have to write about this. I wish I could find a silent spot and hide in it to gaze and gaze; or crawl back into my bunk and sleep off the wonder.

Instead I go to breakfast. There's bacon. You can smell it all over the ship.

Our first trip ashore, to Brown Bluff, is apparently to be about penguins. Urk. I've got feather-phobia: birds revolt me. We are told that our behaviour on land must leave no trace: no ‘toileting'; no food or drink; and we are strictly forbidden to take anything away, not even a shell, a stone, a tiny bone. Tubs of water will be provided on
Molchanov
's deck for our return; we must scrub every scrap of penguin shit off our boots, or else the air inside the ship will become unbearable.