The Ice Lovers (20 page)

The fight was silent and almost invisible. They were unconscious while the virus wended its way through their bodies, attacking organs systematically: liver, lungs, kidneys. Then the hospital staff stayed away, there were no more respirators, and people too ill to walk crawled to hospitals only to lie down in cold corridors and die.

In more organised and stalwart countries, things were better. The scenes of chaos and cowardice were not as common in Germany or France, with their relatively dispersed populations, their better-ordered systems of authority. Where had the fighting spirit of the British people gone? What about we shall fight on the beaches? Commentators wrung their hands; we had become a mercenary nation, in thrall to profit and fear. Then began the large-scale desertions of those who were employed to save lives, the looting, the random attacks, the failure of public transport and other essential services.

We were confined to my flat, Eric and I, secure in our cocoon of automated systems – internet, telephone, television, heating, electricity – feeding off the stockpile of food and water which I had dutifully created after the first warnings of the coming epidemic.

I busied myself with ordering my boarding passes alphabetically by country, so that I could see all the places I had travelled to over the previous years, places I might never see again. I put all the books on my bookshelves in alphabetical order and straightened them on the shelves, tugging their spines into a neat procession as I had been taught to do the summer I worked in a bookshop as a student. I invented a game for myself in which I would plunk my finger on a place-name in the back of my world atlas, and then identify its latitude and longitude.

Eric was restless. He would say to me, ‘I have to go out.'

‘Go where?' In the plague world there were no buses, no tubes, no planes, no cars.

One morning I woke up and Eric wasn't at home. The door was unlocked. He left a note: out for a walk.

I panicked, but there was nothing I could do, no one I could call. He'd left his mobile behind. He will just go for a walk, I reasoned, and then he will come home. He will not pick up the virus floating on the air, it doesn't work like that. You have to be in close contact with someone, in order to contract it. He will go for a walk and then he will come home.

We are supposed to reckon with our lives in these moments of fear and terror, to swear change, to take oaths, enter into elaborate pacts with deities that may or may not exist.

But I found I just wanted to go on living, as I had before the sickness. This was all I wanted. I wanted Eric home, his sweetness, the deep pleasure of his smell. As if my genes and cells could rest, next to him. But Eric did not come home.

We arrived on base four weeks ago, just before Christmas. My stay here should be over by now, my original departure date was to be tomorrow.

The news came from Cambridge, but within minutes we could have read it on the internet. The base commander called an emergency Sit Rep. The borders are closed, he said. No one can get in or out, anywhere. A spike in infections, most of them contracted on long-haul flights. There are fears that another pandemic will build again, three years after the initial scourge, but this time in spring and summer, when it will be harder to control, harder for people to stomach the necessary house arrest, holidays ruined, children driven mad by enclosure, rubbish accumulation. These fears cause every Western industrialised country to take drastic action.

The night we hear this, we are hushed at dinner in our cafeteria. We know what we have escaped: mob scenes in airports, panic. Although there are no cases in the Falkland Islands or southern Chile, the authorities there have also suspended entrances and departures. No one can get in and out. So we have to stay in the Antarctic, we are told, until someone figures out what to do with us.

I've had so much less time than I thought I would have for writing, for research. Because I've unwittingly joined the Army, I was required to do three days of field training, followed by a co-pilot trip down to King George Base, followed by a mystery stomach bug – there are no viral infections here, the air is too dry, the population too endogenous. I thought I would conduct interviews, but there is no one on base who knew her, apart from Luke, the pilot, and he has been flying off base during the weeks I have been here. Now this surprise of our enforced confinement and I can't think. I am stunned by this turn of events. The claustrophobia is back, as if it has only been in remission these past three years.

After the base commander's announcement I try to talk to David, but he has to make phone calls. I imagine he has some hotline to the prime minister's office, and that he can press a button and eject us all out of here. I see little of David. I suspect he keeps himself apart from me, out of expediency. I'm not popular, or rather my motives aren't, so why would he want to be seen as my confessor, my accomplice. Who knows what this writer will dig up? Who knows what confidences she will betray? She is a spy in a place where she does not know the rules, where she does not belong.

It is early February, and winter is just around the corner. ‘Winter comes fast in Antarctica,' the base commander tells me. ‘Soon we'll see night again.'

I don't say, I can't stay here, and list the reasons why: my flat, my plants, my friends, my mortgage. I don't say, a winter in the Antarctic will ruin me. There's no point saying any of this, because we are all in the same boat. The planes can't leave, the ship which brought us here, the Astrolabe, is in dock in the Falklands, and is forbidden to leave. The British and Argentine navies are patrolling the waters, escorting cruise ships back to Punta Arenas or Stanley, where the ships and their inhabitants will sit in quarantine.

At dinner that night the plumber jokes, ‘Well, at least if we're stuck here for the winter you can write your book.' The panic in my stomach is so sudden, and so severe, I feel I will throw up.

I go to speak to the base commander. Gerry is given to reading poetry and philosophy. I see Stendhal on his reading shelf, next to Rilke. He sees me spying his books. ‘Lots of time to read down here, over the winter. I'm working my way through the classics.' A steady, sensible type, Gerry is from Fort William in Scotland; a climbing-outdoorsy-kayaking sort of town, he tells me. He works the summers up there in an outdoor sporting centre and does the winters down here. He never sees winter, only summer in the north, followed by summer in the south. But this year he will spend winter in the Antarctic. Fort William is so warm now, he tells me, that the winter sports scene has all but shut down. No snow on the mountains means no challenge for the ice climbers, who now go to New Zealand, where the climate has been remarkably untouched by the global pattern of change.

I ask Gerry what he thinks will happen to us.

‘To tell you the truth, I don't know. I talk to Cambridge about it every day, who talk to the FCO, who talk to the Falkland Islands Government, who say they want to maintain a shutdown. They could send the ship and put us all on it, but where would we dock? The ship can only carry food enough for all of us for thirty days. It's a risk.'

‘And the planes?'

‘The planes are grounded. They are only certified to fly in Antarctica now, or to the Falklands.'

‘But if we all got on a plane and went to the Falklands, what would happen?'

‘Well, first of all, only sixteen of us can get on that plane at any one time. They might scramble a fighter plane from the military base, and force us to turn back. Although we'd probably have to land, by that point, there wouldn't be enough fuel. The Chileans wouldn't allow us to land at Marsh, that's for sure. They've been very accommodating, considering the political situation, but with a global influenza alert I don't think they'd let us in.'

‘So you think the military would let us die, ditch in the ocean, before they'd let us land in the Falklands.'

‘No, I suppose not. They'd probably let us land, and then put us in quarantine.' He pauses. ‘But tell me, would you rather be here, free to move about, to eat what you want, and safe from the virus, or would you rather be locked in a shed in a military base in the Falkland Islands?'

I don't answer, because I am not sure what I feel or think. ‘And if we stay here?'

‘We have food here enough for a hundred people to last the winter.'

‘But we're only fifty-six people.'

‘That's right. That's what I mean – contingency. We have enough food for twice our number, and it will get us through the winter, and then into next spring, when they could get a ship in.'

‘So you think that's what they'll do, then? Leave us here.'

‘I'm asking for your discretion. Don't go broadcasting this around base. And it's not as if I'm in the know, either – go and ask the FCO man. He likely knows more about what's really going on than all of us combined. But yes, I think it's their best option, and cheapest, too, by the way: to keep us here until things settle down.'

‘What about our civil rights? We're being kept here against our will.'

‘I think you'll find that civil rights have been suspended everywhere, and the human rights of people in the Antarctic is the last thing on anyone's mind.' He pauses. ‘It's the safest place to be, in the world right now. Imagine that, we're the envy of everyone, down here. We can go skiing, we have enough food at our fingertips. We're our own little society, we generate our own solar power, we desalinate our water, we have our own sewage plant. And no one who is diseased is going to get here, to get at us. We're safe.'

I tell the comms manager I need access to Nara's files. I say there are some research facts I need to check.

‘I don't know where they are,' he says. ‘But you're free to rummage around on the old drives. She would only have put her public files there, but you can try.' He gives me a quizzical look. ‘You're not doing this as a make-work project, are you. I mean, given the news.'

‘I meant to do it all along. I just didn't think I would have time.'

I file through the old drives, the archived music, field assistants' reports, winter trip reports, inventories of equipment in the sledge store, lab reports, drafts of projects. Then, buried within a file unhelpfully titled ‘Science', a directory with her name. The folders inside are all about experiments: CO2 uptake, carbon uptake, CTDs, Sea-Squirts, Chemical Analyses, Mass Spectrometer and Experiment Design. In a folder labelled ‘home' I find a file. I try to open it, but it is password-protected. I ask the comms manager. ‘Nothing I can do,' he says. ‘Unless you know the password, that is.' I try various passwords, but none of them work. Why should they? I know so little about her – not her mother's maiden name, the name of her first lover. Nothing which might unlock the key to her existence, never mind any random combination of numbers and letters she might have used. Then I think of something, out of the blue, and try the word: polargirl2012. The file blossoms into life.

It is called Wintering.

2

At the lookout point over Charcot Bay three plain crosses marked the deaths that had happened on base. Two were for a Canadian-crewed Twin Otter which took off too heavy and failed to clear an iceberg in North Cove. The third cross marked the sea-ice incident. There were no bodies underneath, buried in Antarctic shale. The bodies were long gone, flown back to their home countries, or never found.

Helen and David stood looking out into the bay. A beam of sun sunk under the horizon, tracing the edges of the glacier with a cold yellow.

‘She died somewhere out there.' He pointed to the southwest, past Adélie Island. ‘The plane came down on the sea ice, which was breaking up at the time. The island is only fifteen miles away, but that's fifteen miles over disintegrating sea ice. They took the RIBs, but by the time they got there it was too late. They couldn't even find the body, although they dove for it.' He paused. ‘I flew with her down to Ice Blue that summer, it must have been about six months before she was killed. We just happened to be on the plane together. She was going to input fuel, and I was on my way to see Mount Vinson for the first time. She was so – so thrilled. She was so enthusiastic, like a child. It reminded me of what I'd felt, my first few seasons down here.'

‘You don't love it here anymore?'

He looked away, as if stung by her question.

‘It's the simplicity of life here I like,' David said, finally. ‘Deal with the cold, survive, do the job at hand.' He paused. ‘Once you've known this life, you never forget it. It – it holds you, in some way. It's like a marker you measure the rest of your life by.'

They turned their eyes back into the sun and Helen felt the pull of the horizon: thinking, now the sun will sink, now, now, now. But the sun remained in the sky, stalled just above the horizon, hovering over a sea greasy with congealed ice. Mountain, ice, water, sky; and those unnameable colours: lava, tangerine, mauve and another colour, nameless, between rotting plums and black – the black-purple of dog's gums, or embers in the middle of fires, when they have burnt low.

The sun will be extinguished. Only animals, burrowers, hibernators, will survive. Raptors – hawk-eyed animals: eagles, owls, lions. They tell me this. At night they appear on the dark screen of my eyelids. The world will be only glittering snow and cold, ice. Cold stars in the sky, their dazzling silver light, like swords. Dark horses graze into a starved future.

This is what the planet was saying, Nara wrote. The voices she heard only very rarely spoke in words, but when they did she transcribed their message in the Wintering file.

David appeared in the doorway of the unoccupied laboratory Helen had taken as her office. He found her staring at the computer. When she saw him, she changed the screen.

‘They'll pull us out of here before winter. Don't worry.'