The Nature of Ice (19 page)

A homeward-bound parent lumbers up the hill with a swaying gait, its belly bulbous with krill. The jet coat gleams, the white-feathered chest pristine after days spent flying through the sea.

Freya looks up from her camera. ‘Is everything okay, Chad?'

‘Yep.'

She shrugs. ‘You seem quiet, that's all.'

He watches the greeting ritual of the adélie pair as they exchange guardianship, the swaying and bobbing of heads, the press of feathered bodies. Freya's camera drive whirrs. His morning confrontation at the workshop is still raw as a graze.

Before leaving this morning he'd defended himself like a man on trial.
I was asked to help her
, he told his workmates.
Talk to Malcolm if you have a problem with it.
Chad can't decide which irks him the most, Adam Singer's inference that he's no longer needed, or the prospect of giving this away.

Freya leaves her camera and joins him for a time, sits hugging her knees. ‘They may smell bad,' she surveys the rookery, ‘but there's nowhere else I'd rather be.'

The newly arrived parent turns its attention to its young, leaning down to open its beak. The siblings vie with one another, each craning to be foremost in the receipt of food.

You're hardly first prize in anyone's raffle, matey
, Adam had hissed plenty loud enough for Chad to hear.

‘It seems like a good system,' Freya says. ‘Both parents taking equal responsibility for rearing their young.'

‘That's the way it ought to be,' he mutters.

Freya rises, props her tripod against her shoulder and waits. ‘You ready?' she says gently.

‘You go on. I'll stay here a while.'

‘Shall I stay here with you?'

‘Nope.'

He registers the huff in her response: ‘Suit yourself, then.'

Suit yourself.
Stay or go. Would it matter to anyone but himself?

He gives a nod and away she marches, heading over to the island's sunny side.

FREYA SITS SURROUNDED BY THE wonder of new life. She refuses to let anyone's doleful mood prevent her from revelling in the delights of hundreds of adélie chicks, none older than a week, soft, fragile things so small she could cup a pair in her hands. She watches a parent tend its baby, another pair reuniting. Freya is struck by the penguins' dedication in caring for their young, by each parent's reliance upon its mate. When they return to Antarctica to breed, they navigate south through hundreds of kilometres of open water and across sea ice, relying on some internal GPS to reach the same site on the same island where they nested the year before. There's extraordinary skill, she thinks, in finding your way across difficult terrain; in trusting that your mate will be there waiting for you.

Today is her first summer solstice in Antarctica—the longest day of the year, she'd reminded Chad, who, throughout the morning, has been pensive and quiet.
I don't need reminding
of dates
, he had snapped at her.

She tumbles the rock she has found, twists it so it glints like a semaphore mirroring the sun. Her hands carry in their shape the hands of her father—narrow fingers curved in an outward sway, speckled fingernails above rising keratin moons.
Snap!
Freya likes to imagine her father walking the Vestfolds beside her, well pleased by the name an early Norwegian captain chose in honour of his home province.

She has a memory, the Indian Ocean, glittering with the colours of a new vocabulary as their ship approached port. Her father had pointed to a sign:
Welcome to Western Australia
.
Vestfold
, he'd squeezed Freya's hand,
the west side
.

The duplex they moved to, long since knocked down, perched on a hill a stone's throw from the beach, within sight of a city skyline punctuated with building cranes. If they were to cross the escarpment and keep driving east, Papa said, they would watch earth turn red and bush grow sparse, see where scrub gave way to an endless expanse.

Her father brimmed with talent, yet his photographs of everything he found majestic about this vast western state met rejections from dealers in Norway and Europe where his work was shipped. A man not easily deterred, he produced new, larger landscapes for galleries in the city, and sent them to the eastern states as well. Each prospective buyer shook his head doubtfully at a Norwegian wedding photographer turned artist; even the best-known photographers failed to sell their work as art.
Who but a foreigner
, the string of nos and sorries implied,
would put creative passion and their life savings into
the back of beyond?

Freya remembers her parents arguing over money, her mother's distress that her father poured
the last of our savings
into film and paper, chemicals for the darkroom, photographic trips away.

Three more months, Solgunn. Just three more months.

Her mother pleaded,
Think of your girls
.

Once, when her father was away, Mr Madsen, his agent in the city, called in to their home at Floreat Park to return the unsold photos.
Girls, say hello to Lars
, their mother said.
Lars
, she called him, all aflutter. Mr Madsen greeted Freya and Astrid with a little bow,
How do you do, little lady? How do
you do?
Her mother's laugh, strange and girlish at things he said:
real coffee!
, and
my word
to a second slice of kromkake.

When Freya found the boxes in her parents' attic filled with her father's early landscape prints—beautiful compositions alive and lustrous with light
—
she asked her mother,
How could
Papa give up something he loved this much
?

Mama wound her cardigan around her waist.
Your father
chose to put his family first. We were new to this country. You
can't begin to understand.

She didn't want to understand Mama's sobs behind closed doors, her father's voice as sharp as steel. Enough to watch as joy and laughter leached from her father. Papa no longer stretched on the grass beside her to help count the stars. He stopped his morning swims and runs along the beach. He never sang his old college songs, and spoke to her in English all of the time, even at home. He talked of leaving the coast, moving away from the
stinking city
, up into Perth's foothills; as if an escarpment, a rise of several metres, would somehow change their lives.

Freya stops mid step, removes her tinted sun glass to register the colour. Close to shore, adélies torpedo out through the lead, some landing squarely on their feet, others skidding on their belly and easing to a stop. Their feathers glisten as they march towards the rookery, pausing only to pass the time of day with those outbound. Freya sees Chad in the distance down by the rocks, staring at a sea that even the midsummer sun seems unable to penetrate, a band of indigo ink abutting the impossible blue of the Antarctic sky.
A world of colour
, Douglas Mawson wrote
, brilliant and intensely pure
. She pictures her father marvelling at the layers of colour through the ice, the hues of the evening sky. She thinks of him finding the same peace that she feels in this timeless expanse.

Papa hardly used his new Leica, but packed it away in its leather case and shoved it to the back of a high cupboard that would be opened once or twice a year. In two years he had outgrown his home darkroom business and purchased a building and adjacent land in a rundown part of town, four blocks east of Perth's only other commercial darkroom. At the end of the third year he hired a girl to keep the books and a technician to run the printing and processing. He removed himself to the opposite side of the darkroom door, his focus honed on making profits grow.

He left this world as he'd lived in it; a life arrested, a career that culminated in a toast of wine with his accountant and darkroom manager, celebrating a successful bid to take over the business of his biggest competitor. And yet there would have been enough work for both of them—her father had said as much himself. As if refusing to be party to soulless gains, her father's heart attacked this last betrayal of his spirit.

FREYA SEES CHAD STRETCHED OUT on the rocks near the bikes, his head resting on his pack. She scrambles down to sit beside him, breathless, certain he will love the treasure she has brought him.

‘Close your eyes,' she says. ‘Hold out your hand.'

Reluctantly he plays along. She lays the rock plain side up and presses his hand closed around it. She watches as he unfolds his fingers to reveal an unremarkable stone striated with rust and a few lines of grey.

‘Turn it over,' she prompts. ‘Turn it to the light.'

She sees his surprise at the swathe of miniature garnets studded across its face. He smiles for the first time all day, bedazzled by the band of glittering gems.

‘You like it?'

‘Very, very much.'

He turns the cluster so it glisters in the light. ‘Lovely.' he smiles, flashing it at her eyes. He tries to pass it back.

‘No.' She beams. ‘It's yours to keep.'

Chad examines the stone in his hand. ‘Freya,' he says quietly, ‘it isn't yours to give. It belongs here in Antarctica, where you found it.'

She feels her face flush. ‘It's just a rock. You like rocks.'

He returns the stone to the palm of her hand and just as she did to him, wraps her fingers around it.

‘I'll keep it myself, then.' Even to her own ears she sounds like a pouting child. She wishes she'd never picked it up at all.

He glowers at her. ‘Does anything I say or care about mean anything to you?' He runs his hands through his hair and turns away. ‘Why would it? Do whatever the fuck you want with it.'

‘Of course it does. Of course I care. What's wrong with you today? You're like a bear with a sore head.'

He rests back against his pack. ‘I've had a gutful of trying to work things out.'

‘What things? What are you talking about?'

Freya waits until finally he speaks. ‘Malcolm wants a carpenter to go to Mawson Station to work the second half of summer.'

‘You can't go!' She surprises herself with her outburst.

‘No one else wants to. The others say they've done the lion's share of work since they got here, that I should be the one to raise my hand. It's fair enough.'

‘It's certainly not fair. Speak to Adam. I know he'd listen—' She halts at Chad's odd look.

‘Trust me, Freya, you don't know. Anyway, it's no big deal.'

She's almost afraid to ask. ‘You don't mind going?'

He glances from the stone up to her face. ‘Is there a reason to stay?'

‘There's a trillion reasons.' Freya plows on, not daring to acknowledge the undercurrent: ‘Anyway, you should have first say. The Division asked
you
to stay on an extra summer because they needed you here at Davis Station. Not at Mawson.'

He offers her a crooked smile. ‘You needn't be concerned about your project. There's a score of people who'd be itching to help you out. Adam Singer, for one. You can finally choose who you want.'

She rolls the stone in her hands. ‘I have exactly who I want.'

The words hang in the air between them.

‘My best mate Barney Foot is over at Mawson. Our Antarctic days go back to the eighties.'

Freya struggles not to sound aggrieved. ‘What sort of person, other than maybe a Flintstone, has
Barney Foot
for a name?'

Chad smiles. ‘The Feet, they're known as back in Tassie. He and his two boys live just an hour's drive from my place. You'd like Barney. You would have loved his wife. Maggie was a wonderful woman. An artist.'

‘What happened to her?'

‘Killed in a car accident a few years back.'

‘I'm very sorry,' she says quietly. ‘Chad, you have heaps of good friends here, too. We don't want you to go.'

‘Are you representing the entire station now?'

‘I'm speaking for myself. I like being out here with you. Sharing all this with someone—with you.'

He pats her shoulder paternally. ‘Nothing's decided. The Casas won't leave for Mawson until after New Year. There's time to figure something out.'

Freya slumps on her pack, eyes fixed on the rift that angles out across the sea ice towards the line of ocean. She ought to get up off the ground, fetch her other camera from the bike. She ought to photograph this vastness, this day, sea ice yielding to the ocean. She remains motionless, detached from the surrounds.

Chad points to the horizon. ‘Sea ice will soon be gone.'

She can see that for herself.

‘We've had a good run with the bikes,' he adds, to which she musters a
yes
.

He says he is pleased, for her sake, the ice has held so long.

He turns to her. ‘You think I should stay then? See out the project together.'

She answers carefully. ‘You have to do what's right for you, Chad, nobody else.'

‘What's the right thing for
you
, Freya? What do you want?'

‘It doesn't matter what I want,' she says, suddenly frightened. ‘This is about you, not me.'

‘Have it your way.' He gestures at the garnet stone. ‘What will you do with it?'

She turns the rock again in her hand, summoning a round of courage. ‘Is it so very wrong to want something, knowing it's wrong, wanting it anyway? What if it were just for a while?'

Chad hesitates. He meets her gaze. ‘You're the one holding the stone,' he says quietly. ‘I think that's for you to decide.'

Furthest East

December 1912

THE SNOW PETREL CIRCLED HIGH above Ninnis's sledge, tracing the parhelion that circled the sun and seared through cloud. Too soon their tiny visitor flew northward, its wings a flutter of farewell. How was it that the lingering impression of such a beautiful thing—the first living creature they'd seen outside their own circle in weeks— could gladden the heart, quieten the soul, turn Douglas's thoughts homeward?