The White Darkness Read online

  Dedication

  For Richard Oates or Titus Morant

  Epigraph

  The mind is its own place, and in itself

  Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

  John Milton, Paradise Lost

  Author’s Note

  Dear Reader,

  This is a story set in the present day. But if you don’t already know about Captain Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole in 1910, it might help to read the account included as a postscript (here).

  . . . Of course you could just plunge in, taking my word for it that Scott, Oates, and the rest were an amazing breed of men, whose memory shouldn’t be lost under the snows of Time.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One: “Titus”

  Chapter Two: Freeze-Frame

  Chapter Three: Swallowing Sim

  Chapter Four: Dreams

  Chapter Five: Sigurd

  Chapter Six: The Ice

  Chapter Seven: Talk

  Chapter Eight: Worlds Within Worlds

  Chapter Nine: Solar Corona

  Chapter Ten: A Slight Change of Plan

  Chapter Eleven: The Heart of the Barrier

  Chapter Twelve: Glasstown

  Chapter Thirteen: Diamond Ice

  Chapter Fourteen: “What Each Man Feels in His Heart, I Can Only Guess.” —Scott

  Chapter Fifteen: Looking Back

  Chapter Sixteen: Underground

  Chapter Seventeen: Open Wounds

  Chapter Eighteen: “If You Want to Please Me Very Much, You Will Fall Down When I Shoot You.” —Oates

  Chapter Nineteen: “Between You and Me, Things Aren’t Quite as Rosy as They Might Be.” —Oates

  Chapter Twenty: “It Was Not a Very Big Hole.” —Oates

  Chapter Twenty-One: “Oh! He Was a Gentleman, Quite a Gentleman, and Always a Gentleman!” —Tom Crean, of Oates

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Fire and Ice

  Chapter Twenty-Three: “I Do Not Regret this Journey.” —Scott

  Postscript: Scott of the Antarctic

  Many Thanks

  Bonus Material

  How This Book Came About

  Advice for Aspiring Writers

  Researching Antarctica

  Making People

  The Facts and the Fiction

  An Interview with Geraldine McCaughrean

  About the Author

  Books by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  “Titus”

  I have been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now—which is ridiculous, since he’s been dead for ninety years. But look at it this way. In ninety years I’ll be dead, too, and then the age difference won’t matter.

  Besides, he isn’t dead inside my head. We talk about all kinds of things. From whether hair color can change spontaneously to whether friends are better than family, and the best age for marrying: 14 or 125. Generally speaking, he knows more than I do, but on that particular subject we are even. He wasn’t married—at least, he wasn’t when he died, which must have substantially cut down his chances.

  Uncle Victor says I shouldn’t marry at all. Uncle Victor knows about these things and he says that “marriage is a bourgeois relic of Victorian sentimentality.” That suits me. No one would match up to Titus. And we have a kind of understanding, Titus and I.

  Uncle Victor is marvelous. He’s done so much for us—for Mum and me, I mean. And anyway, he’s just so clever. Uncle Victor knows a fantastic amount. He knows at what temperature glass turns to liquid, and where Communism went wrong and how the Clifton Suspension Bridge was built and just what the Government ought to be doing; you can’t fault him. He’s read books about everything: history, geography, politics, astrology, animals . . . the Fount of All Knowledge, Dad used to call him.

  I would get stuck doing my homework, and Dad would say, “Ask the Fount of All Knowledge.” And I’d telephone Victor and he would tell me. Quite often he knew more than the teachers, so they’d think I’d got my homework wrong, but as Victor says, “What teachers don’t understand is that the body of learning is still growing. They reckon it stopped the day they came out of college. That, or they’re plain ignorant. Lot of ignorance in yon schools.”

  It’s true that none of my teachers knows much about Antarctica. When Dad and Victor and I went to Iceland, one of the teachers had been, too, and knew all about Dettifoss and the hot springs and people having stinking saunas in their backyards. But none of the teachers at school has been to Antarctica. Some of them know about Scott of the Antarctic going to the South Pole and not coming back. But they mostly mean John Mills in the movie. I don’t.

  In the general way of things, I don’t know much about anything. Uncle Victor says I’m “the victim of a shoddy education system.” But I do know about the Polar Regions. The bookshelves over my bed are full of books about the North and South Poles. Icebound almost. A glacial cliff face teetering over my bed. I remember, the night after Dad had been rushed into the hospital, one of the shelves sheared off and crashed down on me. I woke up thinking the house was collapsing—books gouging at my head, bouncing off the bed frame, slapping flat on the floor. I looked at the hole in the wall and the brackets on the pillow and I didn’t know what to do.

  About the shelf. About anything.

  So I went back to sleep, and dreamed that I was sailing toward the Ross Ice Shelf, and that crags were splitting off its face, plunging down, massive as seagoing liners foundering.

  Come to think of it, Uncle Victor gave me most of my ice books. Every birthday and Christmas. Books about The Ice and the North Pole; about Shackleton and Scott, Laurence Gould and Vivian Fuchs, Nansen and Barents, Franklin and Peary; about penguins and polar bears, whales and seals and boreales . . . About Captain Lawrence Oates—the one they called “Titus.” Uncle Victor understands how the whole idea creeps up on you like pack ice—pressing in and pressing against your head, then crushing the hull and tumbling inside. . . . If we ever did a project at school on Antarctica, I could shine. Like Mount Erebus in midsummer, I could, I could shine!

  Except that I don’t think I would choose to. It’s all bound up with Titus, and I know better than to mention Titus at school. I do now, anyway. I made that mistake once. I won’t do it again.

  “Symone has a pretend friend! Symone has a pretend friend!”

  It was the conversation about kissing—or snogging, as they invariably call it. Like the ant nest in the larder: You think you’ve done everything to be rid of it—that it can’t possibly come back again—but there it is: “How many boys have you snogged?” There is no right answer. You say “none” and you’re sad and frigid or they know someone whose brother would be willing to snog you for cash. You refuse to answer and you are sadder still—or hiding something, or prefer girls, or . . . It’s not that they care; they only want to tell you how many they’ve snogged—chiefly because they like saying the word. It makes them feel as if they are wearing red underwear. But on and on they go: “How many boys, Sym? How many boys have you snogged?”

  Why is it that all the words to do with sex are ugly? Words to do with love aren’t. No wonder Titus thought women were a nuisance. No wonder he died without ever . . . getting mixed up with all that.

  Anyway, I said that I could do without it. (At least that’s what I tried to say. I don’t explain things very well out loud.) I tried to say that I was happy to stick with imagining for the time being, thanks all the same. Later, maybe. If I ever met anyone who could compare with Titus . .
.

  And after that I was the mad girl—sad, frigid, and mad, all three—the retard who had an imaginary friend: “Like little kids do, oo-hoo. Like little kids do!”

  The day I came into school and said my dad had died, I heard Maxine say to Nats, “Don’t worry. I expect she just imagined it.”

  So that’s when I sealed myself inside. Laced up the tent, so to speak. Filled the locks with water so that they would freeze. That’s when Titus and I looked at each other and decided we could do without them, so long as we had each other. “You and me now, Sym.”

  “You and me now, Titus.”

  “Warm, isn’t it?”

  “Who fancies a trip to Paris, then?” said Uncle Victor.

  Mum was surprised, because money’s been so short lately.

  “It’s one of those newspaper promotions,” said Victor. “Free tickets on the cross-Channel train and two nights in a two-star hotel.”

  I wanted Mum to smile and widen her eyes and say “How lovely!” because it was such a kind thought. It seemed wrong of her to pucker her forehead and look harassed and confused. It’s not the last place on Earth a person might want to go, is it: Paris? But Mum just looked uneasy. “Sym has exams coming up.”

  “Say again?”

  “Sym has exams.”

  “The child worrits her life away on exams! Exams in what? What are they trying to measure? Her potential? Her usefulness? Her knack at taking exams, is all! You’d like to go to Paris, wouldn’t you, girl? Cradle of Art and Town Planning?”

  “I’d like to go up the Eiffel Tower,” I said.

  Mum’s face accused me of treachery;in mentioning the exams, she had thrown me an invisible hint and I had fumbled the catch. Why can’t she say things out loud? Why does no one in this house say anything out loud? Anyway, why wouldn’t she want to go to Paris? Uncle Victor is only trying to cheer her up! “Can’t we go after the exams?” I said, trying to satisfy them both.

  “Lillian will write you a note, won’t you, Lillian: Regret any inconvenience manner of thing. The only real school is the School of Life!”

  It’s one of Victor’s favorite sayings, that.

  It suited me. Every way I look at it, it suited me. No chemistry exam meant no studying either. I loved the thought of telling Nikki I wouldn’t be around for the chemistry exam because I was going to Paris. I’d send her a postcard, in case she thought I was making it up. The weather outside was horrible, but even Paris in the pouring rain had to be better than school and exams.

  So I got the weekend suitcase out of the loft, and Mum packed it and canceled the dentist and wrote a note to school and got some euros and found some guidebooks at the library and looked for the passports and vacuumed the house (in case we all drowned in mid-Channel, I suppose, and neighbors had to break in and were scandalized by the state of our carpets). Meanwhile, Victor found a 360-degree virtual view from the top of the Eiffel Tower, on the computer. He had his passport in his jacket pocket—said he carries it with him at all times. It made him sound like a spy waiting for his next mission.

  “Can’t do chemistry next week,” I told Nikki, casual as anything. “Be in Paris.”

  “Lucky cow,” said Nikki without looking up from her magazine. She was filling in a questionnaire to find out what kind of boy she should date.

  “Two nights and three days,” I said.

  “Oh la la,” said Nikki flatly.

  The article was called “Foto-Fit!!!” Exclamation marks infest all Nikki’s magazines. Like head lice. Given the amount of time she spends with her head in a magazine, you’d think Nikki might have caught some, but oddly, whenever she speaks, there’s no sign of an exclamation mark anywhere.

  “Uncle Victor is taking Mum and me.”

  “Can’t he afford a week?”

  Beside each question in the questionnaire was a row of photographs: boys’ faces, boys’ legs, boys differently dressed . . . “PICK THE BUFFest BOY!!” was the caption.

  “The Eiffel Tower. Everything,” I said.

  “Snails’ legs,” said Nikki with a grimace.

  Even Titus was mildly intrigued by the magazine article. “Buff? Buff as in polished? Well-bred?” he said inside my head.

  “No, Titus.”

  “Buff as in blindman’s?”

  “No, Titus.”

  “Buff as in ‘Steady the Buffs’?”

  “I don’t think so. . . .”

  “Buff as in stark naked?”

  “Captain!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Buff as in ‘fit,’” I explained.

  “Ah,” said Titus, but he looked doubtful.

  So I assured him, “You’re fit. You’re really fit!”

  And he agreed: “Up to a point I was very fit . . . until death set in. Death is inclined to undermine one’s fitness.”

  “No, no. Not that kind of fit. ‘Fit’ as in ‘handsome,’ I meant.”

  But now he looked plain mutinous. Words ought to retain at least some of their meaning from one century to the next, or conversations can’t keep their footing.

  Actually, I’ve never looked at a boy and thought “fit!!” or “Be still my beating heart.” Those obscene jerks they offer us with their forearms; trying to outdo each other in dirty words at the back of the bus:none of that stirs me to curiosity—doesn’t stir me to anything, except perhaps a slight desire to see them fall off the bus into the path of oncoming traffic.

  “We’re going on the Eurostar,” I told Nikki, but she was engrossed. Of course I should have been telling my teacher, really, not Nikki. The letter from Mum was still in my skirt pocket; I wanted to hold off asking until it was too late for Mrs. Floyd to say no.

  The teachers at school don’t like me. Uncle Victor says so, and he ought to know; he always insists on going to Parents’ Evening now that Dad’s gone. Uncle Victor says teachers are a “barrier to enlightenment,” so he spends a lot of time up at the school trying to enlighten them. The geography teacher in particular seems to vex him: “You learn your subject [he told her once], then regurgitate it year after year! Around and around, staler and staler. Like astronauts drinking their own piss.” I don’t think Miss Cox took in his argument: didn’t take in anything except the p-word.

  The next string of photos in Nikki’s magazine was not of boys but of their interests—a computer, a car, an iPod, a football, a book. As if boys can only have one interest.

  “Where are the horses?” said Titus. “I’m a horse man.”

  “That would count as cars, I suppose. Or sports. How about sports?”

  “Well, polo, of course. I played tennis a lot in Egypt. Raced camels. Boxed in India. At Hut Point, before we set off for the Pole, we played soccer to keep . . . er . . . oh dear . . . fit. And ice hockey. Are you including motorized sledges among cars? Motorized sledges are a waste of time and money. For a thousand pounds I could buy myself a team of polo ponies.”

  “Not anymore, you couldn’t. How about music?”

  “So long as I don’t have to dance to it.”

  “Books?”

  “Aha, well. Perhaps the books for my major’s exam.”

  Cold hands, Titus. Cold hands. It’s what he wrote asking his mother to send him, the day he set out for the Pole: the books for his exams. He would need them, he said, when he got back.

  Sometimes, quite unbidden, Titus says something and it’s as if he has laid icy hands on the back of my neck. But why, in that instant, did other words congeal against my brain? Sooner chemistry than Paris.

  Maxine drifted past.

  “Sym’s uncle’s taking her to Paris,” said Nikki, and a surge of happiness went through me, because Nikki had been listening after all.

  “What, for a dirty weekend?” said Maxine. With any thought behind it, it would have been a vile thing to say. But Maxine doesn’t do thinking. Maxine is just so full of sewage, she only has to move sharply to slop over at the mouth.

  “Vacation,” I mumbled.

  “Me, I’d go d
own to the Moulin Rouge—get off with all the rich men”; and wrapping her arms behind her head, she shut her eyes and flicked her hips at us. “But don’t you bother, Sym”—looking me over, contempt weighing down her eyelids—“you can’t give it away for free, can you?”

  I could feel my cheeks burning, my guts churning. What’s wrong with me? Is there something wrong with me? What’s wrong with me? We’re fourteen. It’s illegal. “Adults only,” it says on the box. And yet everyone I know at school seems to be pushing and jostling to play. Or talking about it. Lots of talking about it. And what with not being a talker, really, and not wanting to talk about it anyway . . .

  Nikki began doodling glasses and mustaches on the boys’ faces in the magazine. “Bet your uncle drags you around loads of dreary art museums, Sym,” she said, filling up the awful silence, dredging me out of Maxine’s sewage. And I thanked her by nodding and wincing and smiling ruefully.

  “’Spect so.”

  “In the rain.”

  “’Spect so.”

  “I’m game. I’ll come,” said Titus brightly. “We were always going on holiday when I was young. My adoring mother fled the English winters”—and he gave his low, ironic laugh. “Thought the cold might be the death of me.”

  That’s right, Titus. Put things into proportion.

  And I cheered up instantly, knowing that he would be there in Paris, and Maxine wouldn’t.

  The trains at Waterloo Station were all as shiny and sleek as intercontinental missiles. A mere excursion to the other side of the Channel seemed beneath their dignity—film stars finding themselves on a weekend’s camping when they had been expecting to go to the Cannes Film Festival.

  “Have you been, Lillian? Sym?” said Uncle Victor loudly, from some distance away. Mum tried to ignore him, but Victor only repeated it more loudly still: “Have you been? Think on. You should both go before we set off!”—offering to mind our shoulder bags while we found the station toilet.

  “Sometimes!” hissed Mum under her breath, investing the word with a wealth of pent-up embarrassment and resentment.

  We were no sooner back than the train doors opened with a mechanical gasp that seemed to come from inside my chest. I didn’t lift my foot high enough to clear the step, stumbling into the train. Elegant as a swan, me.