The Ice Lovers (16 page)

‘We talked about everything.'

His mouth twisted into an odd shape. He did not wait for an answer. ‘I'll come back later. Will you still be here?'

She nodded. She stayed late in her office that night, telling herself she had to stay anyway to analyse her samples, then input the data, then correlate it. With one half of her being, she knew he would not return. With another half, hope thrived so sharp she was afraid.

It was one in the morning when she left. She was shocked to open the door and find a kind of darkness on the other side of it – it was too translucent to be called night, exactly, but neither was it the floodlit day-in-night she had become used to. She had completely forgotten night existed. She put out her hand to feel it, tentatively, as if she were touching velvet or the pelt of a dark animal.

With the return of night the weather changed. Night meant colder temperatures, the land freed from its twenty-four-hour solar oven. In mid-February the sun narrowed its expansive ellipsis in the sky and Nara found she had a shadow, suddenly, after months of walking alone.

Luke invited her for a drink in the shed that doubled as his office. It was a wooden survivor from the eighties, a type of Portakabin hoisted above the ground on wooden pallets beside the hangar. Here the pilots made their tea and the mechanics kept inventories of parts.

‘I dragged out the old maps for you,' he said. ‘Back in a sec.' He stepped outside and returned with a bottle of Bailey's. ‘I keep it outside, in the shadows between the hut and the hangar. I like it better chilled. If I let the sun get at it, it would boil.'

‘It's colder now,' she said. ‘Even though it's still summer.'

‘This time of year the weather starts to go a bit changeable. It's always the way: once the Otters start twitching to get away, the weather closes in. I see it year after year.'

‘How much longer will you stay?'

‘Oh, we'll take the Dash back around the 8th or the 10th, depending on weather. So I've got a good ten days left, at least.'

‘Do you know the route you'll take back yet?'

‘We knew the ferry flight routes about a month ago. They can change, of course. Anything down here can change, any time.'

He poured her a glass. She slid the thick cream around her mouth. The chill cut through the cloying sweetness.

‘I like your office,' she said. ‘It feels like being in a caravan, like we're on holiday.'

‘It does. I used to sleep here, in the old days.' He told her of the days when people used to sleep all around the base, because the pitrooms were full or when the new accommodation wing was being built, and regulations were not adhered to as strictly. ‘People would bed down in P-bags in the sledge store sewing loft, they would sleep on the floor in the wooden container we're sitting in now – anywhere with some heating,' he said. ‘There was a certain –' he paused, ‘– intimacy to base then. It's become rules-and-regulation-health-and-safety. It was more like home in those days. As much as a place like this can ever be home.'

He extracted books of maps and flight manuals from the shelf. Something was missing from the picture. Everything else spoke of time passing and disuse, but there were no mites streaming in the light, no dust particles, no fluffballs or spiderwebs, no signs of the lives of small creatures, of parasites and scavengers, because no insects could survive in the Antarctic, and the cold flint of the air kept paper, wood, or steel pristine.

‘I look at this often,' he handed her a book. She read the spine: Historical Maps of the Antarctic.

‘It's amazing to think that Aristotle imagined the Antarctic, before anyone knew for certain even the Arctic existed.'

‘When was that?' she asked.

‘Around 330
bc
, or so the book says.' Luke sat down opposite her. ‘And that was a time when the known world was the Mediterranean.'

Nara found the first map drawn of the continent. In its corners lurked sea monsters, half dragon, half whale. She read the explanation:

Aristotle speculated in Meteorology that the earth was a sphere, divided into northern and southern zones, each identical, but opposite. Even before Aristotle, ancient geographers suspected that the world was a globe which spun on axes, that the fiery realms to the middle of the earth at the equator were countermanded by frigid realms at the axles of the spinning globe. These were wastelands to Aristotle, and for hundreds of years afterward, peripheral and uninhabitable, they remained frozen possible apocalypses, unmapped and feared.

‘This is another handy one.' Luke handed her Antarctic Maps and Place-Names Gazeteer 2007.

‘But isn't this out of date now? It's nearly five years old.'

‘Not really. The ice might move, but not much else changes. It takes years to even assign a new place-name. There's a committee that regulates naming in the Antarctic, did you know that? But they haven't got much to work with. Everything's still Ross this, Shackleton that. At least in the British Antarctic. There's so little human history.'

‘I think it's a relief, sometimes, to be in a place where there's hardly anything of human civilisation.'

‘I don't know,' he said, a wistful look in his eyes. ‘As time passes I miss museums. I miss human comforts. Maybe I've just been coming here too long.'

‘But there's a thrill in being able to survive somewhere you're not supposed to be at all,' she said. Every day they were reminded that the Antarctic isn't habitable, that only five industrial food freezers and VSAT dishes and a generator and a desalination plant and regular shipments by sea and air made life at all viable, even for a small number of people. ‘Sometimes I think we're not supposed to be anywhere at all, on the planet. And it's only in coming to the Antarctic that you realise it.' She paused. ‘I feel closer to the planet, here. To how it works. Sometimes I even think it's speaking to me.' She laughed, to show she was not completely serious.

She did not tell him that lately she had begun to hear a voice. It was not inside her head, rather it came to her from a long way away. Like a train heard in the distance, at first very faint, building and building. Some force was gathering on the horizon. Also, there was something else – the voice told her that whatever was coming had been programmed – whether into the species or into the holographic game most of humanity took for reality – and that this something had to do with payback for something long, long before humanity even existed.

He gestured out the window of the Portakabin. ‘I know, it's this landscape, it does some strange things to your mind. I used to be obsessed with it. Maybe I still am. Every year, I try to get away, I think of taking a job flying helicopters for search and rescue in Scotland, or bush planes in the Northwest Territories. And every year, I come back South.'

‘It's a magnet,' she said.

‘It is that,' he said, nodding solemnly.

They were quiet then and their silence was like in the Ellsworths. She had never felt such ease in silence with a person she hardly knew at all.

‘You know,' he said, ‘you remind me of a character in a novel.'

‘What kind of novel?'

‘I don't know. Even your name. Nara.' The use of her name sounded wrong. Something in the way he said it emerged as old-fashioned, or foreign or both. ‘I mean old novels. I'm sorry, I haven't read much, but I do know what I'm talking about. A woman – not quite modern, I guess. Those serious, adoring women.'

‘They were too easily destroyed, the women in those novels, by some philanderer, by bad luck, by life not living up to their ideals. I don't want my life to end like that.' Her voice was unhappy.

‘Well, nobody says you're going to.' He pursed his lips – a sign, she knew by now, of annoyance. ‘I just think you're special, that's all. There's something different about you. You're not a run-of-the-mill person.'

She looked at the man opposite, who she might yet call friend. He would leave soon. He would fly one of the planes that now sit in the hangar up through the world, passing from snow to ice to the rough late summer of the Falklands to the subtropics, the tropics, the wet Caribbean, through springtime Texas, landing in the tail end of the Canadian winter. He is allowed to leave, and even if he weren't, he could still escape. I have the keys to the airplane. She has heard him say this, more than once, when he was fed up with the place.

‘Well,' he said, ‘it's two-thirty in the morning.'

She said, ‘I never know what time it is on base.'

‘Time doesn't matter here.'

They walked back to the main building together. The emergency lights of the base lit their way with a thin, yellow light.

Their names hung together, alone, on the tagging board; everyone else was signed in.

‘Goodnight,' she said, and for the first time since she arrived on base two and a half months ago there was night to bid welcome to.

‘Goodnight.'

In the middle of February, the field operations manager decreed that Nara and Alexander should help shut down King George Base, five hundred miles down the peninsula, for the winter.

She did not see him until they were both in the hangar, waiting for the pilot. They would fly down with another pilot, not Luke; this man, George was his name, was younger and less experienced than Luke and needed to clock up hours at the end of the season.

As usual, on its takeoff run the Otter barely needs to get going before it is airborne. They were off the ground before she could register the surprise of an escape from base one last time before winter.

Without the possibility of flying the plane, the whole venture lost much of its thrill. Her hands literally itched to take the controls. She dared not ask George, although he was friendly enough, masculine and jovial without being crude.

Nara and Alexander watch landscape slide by below. Water channels snaked into the sea at the base of glaciers, loose pancakes of ice dot the open sound. Three years previously, the King George Sound had opened completely for the first time in known history. For perhaps for many thousands of millennia the sea ice had formed fast on its waters. Around ten years before, cracks had started to appear along the perimeter of ice cliffs, widening with each summer until channels of open water snaked through the sound.

The pilot banked right. ‘There's the hut.'

She pressed her face to the cabin window and saw a red dot on a white sheet and felt a pang of familiar betrayal. She thought they were going to a place, somewhere, but actually they were just going to a hut.

The genny mech and the carpenter were there to greet them. It was an hour's journey from the skiway to the hut; they would take the skidoos for twenty minutes, then leave them where the snow ran out and walk the rest of the way. The Eros glacier which had once spilled down from above the field station was retreating half a mile a year. ‘They say that as late as the 1990s you could taxi right up to the door,' the pilot said.

She helped the pilot blank down the plane. Three much taller and stronger men stood below her while she clambered onto the wings and hooked the ropes into the apertures as the pilot hammered ice screws into the snow. When she finished she jumped down, launching herself from the footring outside the cockpit door.

‘I assume you learned to do that down in the Ellsworths,' Alexander said.

‘The pilot taught me.'

‘What else did he teach you?'

‘How to wash dishes.'

‘Ok, enough chatting,' the pilot said. ‘Let's get going. We've got the all clear from the Met but you never know. We don't want to be stuck here for weeks, do we?'

The trail to the hut followed the perimeter of King George Sound; on their right was a black mountain of scree; to the left the thawing sound stretched in front, across to the mainland, thin snakes of blue water backed by sloping glaciers.

It was not very cold, but already the sun had lost its sting, its ability to bore a hole through the chill of the air, its solar furore. Now the air was simply limp and cold. A blue shimmer to the sky, the reflection of the open water revealed by leads in the sea ice, embroidered the white-sheet blankness of the ice cap. Stranger, though, were the black mountains. Darker than basalt, and much less grainy, they shimmered. When the sun caught their flanks, they glowed as if lit from within. Inside these, hills of dark, soil fossils were trapped. They were so easy to uncover, Nara had heard, that you could go for a walk anywhere, at any time, and brush your hand against the scree and a shape would emerge. Trilobytes, small lizards, birds and even small dinosaurs, all etched into the rock.

They each carried a backpack; in it was alpine rope, a change of clothes, sunscreen, water, an overnight bag in case they had to lay up. For each stride the men took, she had to take two. Alexander looked over his shoulder to see if she was all right. Nara knew he did this because he was well-broughtup, taught to be gentlemanly. None of the other men looked out for her, and she struggled not to notice this, then not to be angered by it, then not to be grateful when Alexander gave her his automatic, frowning look of non-concern – but somehow he was concerned. It was the emotional indifference that hurt her. He was as concerned for her as he would be for any woman.

They turned a corner and the hut came into view, a red dot at the bottom of a mountain of more black scree. Inside, the station was a polar country cottage: coffee thermoses lined up on the wooden counter, yellow plastic washing-up basin, washing-up liquid, bright orange bottles of sunscreen everywhere. A stuffed owl twirled above the desk where the radio equipment sat – a laptop, a VHF, ancient box files from the 1960s, the 1970s. On the table sat an empty gin bottle surrounded by little yellow cans of Schweppes soda water. A frying pan with ‘Pilot Repellent' scrawled on its base in white-out liquid hung above the squat Rayburn stove.