The Ice Lovers (29 page)

His unravelling began with a footfall which sunk into snow to his thigh. Then a tipping, as his long body leaned downslope into the unexpected sinking. After that, a handbrake which failed to arrest his topple, then, with his right leg, a slip. Very quickly he was sliding down the sharp drop underneath the cliff, to the sea.

He carries no ice axe. It is just a walk around the Point, the Antarctic equivalent of a stroll around the park.

The fall and scrape of ice against his young, hard body created immediate drag, but not sufficient to arrest his fall. He can feel the bruises forming, their heat and swell. Baggy capilliaries, flush with blood and hurt.

With a relaxing of the angle of the slope, the drag on his body increases, and he slides to a stop just short of the shoreline. He tries to stand, but cannot. Adrenalin is masking the pain of a fractured tibia; the break occurred, unnoticed by him, two seconds previously when he had put out his leg in an attempt to arrest his slide. The shiver of pain he receives if he tries to put his left leg to work means he would not be able to walk, or swim, he cannot climb back up the glacier. In another, colder, year – cold enough for the sea ice to form – he would have been able to drag himself across the sea ice, around to the wharf, and home.

He is only four hundred metres from the base's door, close enough for rescue, but his name is tagged in on the tagging board. He never tagged out, for his missions around the Point. He is not a man to be known or controlled.

He knew that everyone assumed he was lying low, after what happened, that he was avoiding her. It might be another day before anyone thinks something is wrong, and knocks on his door.

Before he can form a response – whether regret, rueful laughter, or grim determination – he is flooded by a fear so powerful he stops breathing. The fear is spiked with panic and pain and in its heart lives a dark, worming purpose. It invades him from all directions, enters every pore, a stampede of snakes.

He has just realised that the overhang of the slope means no one can see him. The way he has fallen, he is out of sight.

Three hours into the flight they called PNR. On base, the siren whooped over the runway for the first time in months. Base radioed them. It was Alistair, the comms manager. ‘The cloud mantle has dropped.' Chris' reply was immediate. ‘How much?' ‘From 5,000 to 1,000 and dropping.' ‘Why didn't you tell us half an hour ago?'A crackle of static, before the answer. ‘Because half an hour ago it was at 5,000.'‘That's impossible.'‘No, it's not. It's a different place here in winter, Chris.'‘What's the coverage?'‘Eight octas.'‘We're past PNR, you know that?'Another static pause. ‘Roger. We've sounded the siren. The runway is clear.'‘We're going to need some help to land this thing,' Chris said. The bite in his words: this thing – that was new to Luke. ‘We'll have to get them out there with flares, just in case.' Luke nodded. It was the only way.

Luke never thought: if we ditched, that would be it. He always considered that he could get the aircraft down, no matter what – get it down in some form. Landing was for him a moment of grace, of suspension, power and accomplishment. He could not imagine it ending in disarray, in explosion and charred skin and kerosene. He didn't know if this were optimism or recklessness, only that for him landing was the fullest expression of his competence as a pilot. In those moments when he set an aircraft on the ground he felt a surge of power, and he knew he would never have consented to live a life in which that feeling of mastery and control was not possible. He dreaded the murk and hedge of most people's existences: squabbles with the boss, jockeying for position on the commuter train home. He was free from all that, and secure in his power. Only ten or twelve men in the world could do what he was doing now, and one of them sat beside him. If they couldn't do it, nobody could.

Nara was short, so she was assigned the position in the middle of the runway. As a short person she ran less of a risk of being injured or killed by the plane's landing gear and wheels. Tall men were positioned at the edges of the runway – their flares were the crucial signals, they would keep the pilots from landing on the edge, or worse, off the runway entirely.

Fifteen years previously a man had been up on a mast doing some rigging at Midas base when the wheels of a departing Twin Otter severed his head from his body. The pilot hadn't seen him. Nara had never given the Midas incident much thought. Now, she considered it: a headless body in the snow, his bloodied orange boiler suit. The same plane would have had to return to fly the body out. She wondered what had happened to the pilot. She wondered if Luke knew him.

They lined themselves up, backs to the runway, facing Adélie Island. Dressed in red padded boiler suits, hard hats, any reflective gear they could find, one line at the south end of the runway, one line to signal the turn onto the hangar apron. They could not even see Adélie Island; it was lost in the blanket of fog and low cloud that had smothered base, and so quickly.

They waited for the shear: they would feel the plane before they heard it. The strange sound dynamics of the Antarctic meant that sounds did not creep up from a distance as they usually did, but burst from a vortex.

There was nothing more to be done than to hold these flares aloft in the dark, waiting for the roar of the plane to come upon them.

At 11am blue and gold soaked the southern horizon. The light lasted for only ten minutes, but it was enough to show Nara Alexander's tracks, where they stopped, close to the edge. She inched her way out to the overhang and looked down. Little whirlwinds of panic in her mind, lashing her to the moment, to a sudden gripping inertia.

The sound of her voice was alien to her. The silence consumed her shout as if she had never made a sound at all.

She did a quick calculation: fifteen minutes to get back to base – no, twenty, from the precarious position she occupied. Fifteen minutes to get geared up, to get the field assistants on search and rescue duty out here. Fifteen more minutes to pull him up.

He was not moving. She could see that from where she stood.

She had rope, two snowstakes, a sling, her harness, jumars, karabiners. In fifteen minutes, she could get down to him herself. She could put a sling on him. If he were conscious, he could jumar up. If not, she would leave him down there with the sling, and go and get the field assistants.

She pounded in the snowstakes, fashioned a triangular sling to equalise the distribution of her weight, and roped up. She had no crampons, only her winter boots.

She lowered herself over the ice cliff, her crampon-less boots sliding uselessly on the iceface. On the way down she was so dehydrated she could barely swallow. She was breathing heavily, so that her breath condensed in globules of frost, which stuck to her eyelashes.

They would take the southeast approach. Descend to 9,000 feet, bank right. Every summer they did this two, three times a week. Their wide-angled approach to base was high enough to clear the peaks which jut all around them. They would fly in from the south, into a stiff, capricious wind.

As they levelled out, base and the shoreline were obscured by cloud. Peaks of mountains they were used to seeing in summer, bared, their chocolate-hued basalt providing markers for their approach, were now covered in snow. Ahead was only a white definitionless land; inside the emptiness were mountains, lethal granite towers. At last they saw a familiar landmark: the island's peaks prodded the tops of the cloud. If it weren't for Adélie Island, they would not have been able to even find the base.

Then, puncturing the cloud, a small throb of red light – the human runway beacon. It went against all their training to have people in the way of the landing track of an aircraft. But then you couldn't really train for what the Antarctic threw at you.

‘We're too high. We're going to have to drop out of the sky.What about bergs?'

‘Comms man says there are none on the path in. Let's hope he's right.'

The pilots took their last look at the steel mountains, wide-hipped, inevitable, overlain with sheets of fresh snow. Then ailerons curled down over the wings, and the plane descended into cloud.

The roar did not come upon her from the outside; the machine came from inside her body. She dove to the ground, the flare still in her hand. The fuselage sleeked above her, its underbelly congealing out of the air. She lifted her head from the runway in time to watch it touch down, then to be covered with a spray of gravel and snow. She lay on her back on the runway, the expired flare held aloft in her hand.

The winter base commander stood above her. He extended a hand, which she grasped. She thought he was going to joke, to laugh at her, splay-limbed on the runway. Usually, he was the joking kind.

‘Christ,' he said, pulling her to her feet. ‘That was close.' She took off her glove and reached her fingers toward Alexander. When they encountered his throat they felt no warmth, but there was a throb, muted, insistent. His lips were blue, and his extremities were cold. But the overnight temperature had not been very low, for the Antarctic winter, so he had survived.

She could not see a way to get him out of there on her own; she wouldn't be able to jumar them both up, his weight was too much for her. If he had been conscious, she would have been able to convince him to climb out. She didn't yet know about the fractured tibia.

She would have to leave him, and go for help. She stood up. The familiar dark pewter mantle of cloud hung over the point.

Again, she felt its presence: the grinding, like a wheel, a mechanism, gigantic and diffuse. Whatever it was, it was older than them, better than them, and so much more powerful. This skulking force brooded around him like a scavenger looking for a way into a house. She recognised it as the same giant eye that looked at her so casually at night in her bunk, when she couldn't sleep and the visions refused to disperse. But she was fierce, now, she was in life and at the height of her powers. She bared her teeth against it and felt the hairs bristle at the bottom of her neck. Her growl sounded like one of the fur seals, there was nothing human about it. With this growl she fended this presence off, because Alexander was not able to. The presence mooched about, disappointed, then slunk away.

His dark skin was so pale, his lips the lightest blue. He looked like a religious statue.

She spoke to him. ‘I have to go and get help. Can you hear me?'

She saw an eyelash flutter.

‘I'll be back in half an hour. Don't stop breathing. Don't fall asleep.'

Another flutter of an eyelash. His mouth opened, very slightly.

She turned her back on him and began to climb.

The propellers kept spinning while the pilots went through the post-flight checklist. If they were going to leave right away they would keep the number one engine running in case of generator trouble. But taking off today was a remote possibility, now that there was fog. The takeoff track would take them over icebergs, and they needed visibility.

She glimpsed Luke through the cockpit window. From the back of the aircraft two figures, stiff with fear, strangers, emerged – the doctor and the air mechanic, a Canadian who had never been to the Antarctic before, pressed into leaving the summer behind by an offer of a substantial bonus and a vacation in Hawaii.

Luke appeared last and walked down the stairs. He took off his gloves – a summer habit. Soon he would put them back on.

‘Good news,' Luke said. ‘We're staying for dinner.'

The smile which emerged from Nara then came from her deepest being. He had come back.

Dinner that night was lavish: Uruguyan beef with parsnips, fresh carrots from the Falklands, candles on the tables, plastic flowers in tiny vases.

After dinner Nara went down to the surgery. Alexander was hooked up to a saline drip which had been slowly warming the core temperature of his body over the past several days. He was conscious now, although he refused to speak to her, refused to even look at her. But he could not stop her from sitting beside him.

‘We had salad. With avocado. They brought a crate of pears from Uruguay.'

He turned his face away.

She said, ‘You're leaving tomorrow.'

Finally, he looked at her, a strange look of barren triumph. ‘You must be glad I'm going.'

‘I'm glad you're alive, that's all.'

His face was still drawn and bloodless from cold. ‘I don't understand,' he said.

‘You mean you wouldn't have done the same for me. You mean you think I saved you because I am in love with you.'

He stared at her for a while. In his mind, she knew, doors were opening and shutting themselves; these were his thoughts, his decisions, no more anchored in the world than hers were, but so much more vital and buoyant, because he did not think, he only felt, and this was the source of her fascination for him. She had so wanted to be true and wild, like him. She had so wanted to be free.

Luke was tanned; that was the first thing she noticed. But he was transformed in some other way, also physical. He looked much more vigorous than the Antarctic version Nara had said goodbye to five months before. This place takes its toll on people, she thought, and considered her own extreme paleness, how thin she had become.

This shimmering envoy from the northern hemisphere summer sat down opposite her but kept his hands planted on his thighs, as if he might use them as a lever at any second, and get up and go.

‘I can't believe you came back.'

‘Don't take this the wrong way, but I didn't have much choice.'

‘You look exhausted.'

‘Well, flying down here in winter, you never know…' he gestured obscurely toward the window. She followed his gaze there and saw a black square of night; in it, their reflections.

‘That's an amazing thing you did, out there,' he said. ‘He was tagged in, I hear. There was no reason for anyone to worry.' When she said nothing, he prodded. ‘So why did you?'