The White Darkness Read online

  “Your uncle, at home, his profession is . . . ?” ventured Sigurd.

  “Yes!” I said. “I know.”

  Sigurd was fazed only for a moment. “You like maybe the animals; the birds and the seals and big whales, yes?”

  “Evans Bay. The Ross Ice Shelf. Scott. All that. Not saying anything against Amundsen, I don’t mean just because he killed his dogs and didn’t die and I know Scott was a snob and drew lines across the tent floor with his socks and everything but I can’t explain it—or shot peening, my uncle he’s a shot peener, but I can’t explain that either.” I realized I was shouting but there was nothing I could do to adjust my volume. Even the silence that fell between us was deafening. “I heard penguins stink,” I said, to fill it.

  “I heard that also,” said Sigurd. “That is a very attractive skirt.”

  “Is that the itinerary? Can I see it?” I demanded.

  He gave me his sheet of paper, bowing slightly from the waist, and insisted I keep it; he would get another for himself. I studied it so intently and for so long that I did not see either what it said or when Sigurd moved off. When I looked up, he was moving around the room once more, continuing to light up groups of partygoers like sparklers. The Adélie penguins stampeding around the penthouse restaurant gradually returned to their roost inside me, molting and shivering with posttraumatic stress.

  “I feel sick,” I told the coat stand, and went and sat on the stairs with my orange juice. The sheet of paper Sigurd had given me wavered in and out of focus. It was headed Welcome to “The Ice,” and listed the lectures that would be on offer. It even suggested that each of us might like to prepare a talk about our own particular interests, to deliver to our fellow travelers. Perhaps Hell might like to freeze over first.

  My mind for some reason strayed to Maxine’s first date with her Internet lover Waldron. She gave us a talk on that, too; a public lecture—not quite illustrated, but near enough. She recounted it so languorously and with such relish, sitting on the teacher’s desk at break time, head thrown back, legs crossed, shoes dangling from the tips of her toes. She told us of the roses he brought her, the BMW, the wild party they had gone to, given by Waldron’s famous friends. . . . When she got on to the kissing part, I left the room, her laugh pursuing me down the corridor.

  Now I sat on the stairs and wished I were Maxine —almost wished I were Maxine—wished I were anyone, really, who could go to a party and come away the happier for it. For a while I was so filled with self-disgust that it did not leave space on the stair for Titus to sit down beside me. Then I moved over and hugged the banister. “Why can’t I do parties, Titus? What’s wrong with me? Parties are supposed to be fun.”

  “I purposely never learned to reverse on a dance floor. That way the ladies would never want to waltz with me,”said Titus, sitting down beside me. “Not twice, anyway.” The color was high in his cheeks from the heat of the restaurant.

  “‘I heard penguins stink.’” Did I really say that? It’s like saying, ‘I smelled a duck quack.’”

  Titus smiled down at his orange juice. (He doesn’t drink either.) “I got the gist.”

  But I needed reassurance on a much larger scale. The tears were painful behind my eyes. “You never fitted in either, did you, Titus?”

  He shrugged. “I was Army. The others were Navy men.”

  But I persisted. “Everyone says you were quiet and you kept yourself to yourself. Like me. And Scott had trouble getting you to come out of your shell.”

  “Bagatelle!” said Titus unexpectedly. “While we were kicking our heels at Hut Point, waiting for the off, we played a lot of it, bagatelle. Like pinball, yes? You know how the ball bounces down the slope?”

  “Unless the board’s dusty.”

  “A badger-hair shaving brush, that’s the thing. Only proper use for a shaving brush in my opinion—dusting a bagatelle board. Anyway—where was I? The thing is not to push too hard, you’ll agree, or the ball rebounds straight back where it started. Take it gently and it bounces its way down the board—ping-ping—until finally it sinks home into a hole. 15. 250.” His long fingers cut leisurely arcs through the air, following the descent of the bagatelle ball. “Eventually they all fit in somewhere. Every last one. Everyone.”

  “Except for the dead balls at the bottom. Like me.”

  Titus glanced furtively over his shoulder, then lifted his eyebrows at me.

  “The thing is, girl, to keep going. Take them again and again and again till they all finally score.”

  “That’s called cheating, Titus.”

  “So? I thought you were intent on fitting in. Sometimes cheating is necessary. You’ll find your slot one day. . . . And I’ll have you know I did fit in. You have to rub along when you’re living on top of one another in a hut at the bottom of the world. Even more so in a tent. Doesn’t mean to say you can’t keep something back. Reticence. Reserve. Uniquely British traits, but requisites of a gentleman, in my opinion. When I had nothing to say, or it was better not to say it, I kept quiet, yes. Biscuits keep best in a communal tin. But opinions? I don’t think so.”

  And he looked at me with that level, penetrating gaze of his—self-contained and certain, and needing no one’s good opinion. And I needed no one’s good opinion but his. And the sound of Maxine’s laughter, the words on the blackboard —“Sym Wates is a sad loser”—swirled away like loose snow in a blizzard. The Adélie penguins grew calm and rested their beaks on their chests. Their heartbeats slowed to normal.

  Chapter Six

  The Ice

  By traveling west on the way here, we gained the best part of a day. Does that mean that by the time noon gets to England, it will be secondhand really, covered in our footmarks and fingerprints?

  There are other days I would like to lose:

  —the day the dog got run over;

  —the day I wore my hearing aids to school for the first time;

  —the day the garage people came and repossessed the car, because Dad had not made the loan payments;

  —the day Dad looked across the breakfast table at me and asked Mum, “Who’s that?”

  At first the doctors thought Dad had been doing drugs. It took Victor to write down all the signs and symptoms and history of the illness to prove it was a virus attacking the central nervous system. It began soon after Iceland, I think. Dad began to injure himself on the equipment at work. Then he started to forget things—birthdays, appointments, zip codes—then to crash the car. Even when he thought he was holding a mug of tea upright, it would spill out into his lap and scald him. He forgot names: first friends and customers, then family. He got so frustrated and afraid that he went wild sometimes, ripping the cloth off a set dinner table, shouting, and smashing things. He couldn’t tell the difference between people on the TV and people in the room. Even photographs had the power to taunt him. He couldn’t tell the difference between doors and cupboards, searching for his clothes in the toilet, trying to get out-of-doors by way of the fridge. It was like living with a punch-drunk fighter—speech slurred, hands bruised, temper lost without a trace.

  “Who’s that?” he asked, looking at me across the breakfast table.

  “That’s Symone, dear,” said Mum, high-pitched with horror and tenderness. “That’s our lovely Sym.” And for a moment a flash of recognition made Dad’s eyes stagger in their sockets.

  “Over my dead body!” he screamed. “I won’t have it in the house. Don’t mention that name in my house!” And he threw the tin of syrup so that it hit the mantelpiece and we all sat and watched the syrup drip, drip, dripping into the grate like big amber tears.

  As early as Punta Arenas the lectures began. Clough could not wait any longer than that to tell us about the diet of the kelp gull, all the different cormorant species, whether a sheathbill was a true wader or not, how to tell the difference between a dark-mantled and light-mantled sooty albatross. We members of the Pengwings Expeditionary Force sat on the hard, tubular-metal chairs in the Fuego Hotel
bar and watched him talk.

  Quite quickly I began to sink, like an oilless duck. To keep myself awake I compared his performance style with Uncle Victor’s during his regular Tuesday-night lectures in the conservatory. Clough scored only 5- for diction, 4- for animation, but 8- for hand gestures. Victor usually scores straight 10 s for everything, of course . . . except hand gestures, which never progress much beyond that screwy jab of his forefinger.

  “What would you give a talk on, Titus? If you were a talking kind of man.”

  “Beagle breeding,” said the man in my head. “I had some lovely pups coming along when I left India. Or how to keep a pet deer in your coal store. Less success on that front, mind. Mine got loose and ate the memsahibs’ roses.”

  “Not polar conquest?”

  “Why dwell on my weaknesses?”

  “And so now we come to the most southerly of the fulmars . . .” said Clough.

  I tried to tell myself that I was in the most southerly city in South America—our last before we reach the Antarctic Circle—that tomorrow I would set foot on The Ice. . . . Pengwings was the only outfit in the world that actually flew tourists there instead of subjecting them to weeks of being sick over the rail of some Russian icebreaker. Given my fear of drowning, that was kindness past all my deserving. What is more, when we got there, Pengwings would fly us to lots of places the ships couldn’t get to. Including Hut Point! What could possibly be any better?

  But the flight south from Buenos Aires, the dull exhaustion of endlessly traveling, had sapped all the excitement out of me. How much was it costing Uncle Victor for us to be traveling with Pengwings? How much was it costing to sit here, listening to Clough describing skua eggs? And was I turning into my mother that all I could think about was the cost?

  “But which is the biggest of the mollymawks? And which the smallest?” inquired Clough. (I think they were rhetorical questions.)

  Victor was starting to breathe out through closed lips—a sure sign he was falling asleep. If I woke him up, he was bound to put Clough wise on the markings of the black-browed albatross. Better, though, than for him to start snoring. I whispered in his ear, “What will it be? Your lecture. On. When it’s our turn?”

  When he turned his face toward me, there were deep, dark circles under his eyes. “Say again?”

  “What will you tell them about?”

  Joy swarmed upward from his mouth, till his whole shiny face was alight. “Won’t tell ’em!” he said, thrusting his head so close to mine that our noses banged. “Won’t tell ’em, girl! We’ll show ’em!”

  Fossils, then. He must have brought along his photo collection of fossils. He can fit a two-hour slide show on a couple of CDs. I know: I’ve seen it. I smiled and smiled, but the news trickled down through me like iron filings.

  “Now, the krill population is crucial—it goes without saying—to penguin reproduction,” said Clough, proving that it did not go without saying at all.

  Titus groaned, turned up the collar of his leather jacket, and slid slowly down in his chair, arms crossed, a look of martyrdom pinned in place by his eyebrows. “Oh well, as Napoleon once said, Come what may, there’s always Death.”

  “Cold hands, Titus. Cold hands.”

  Next moment (or so it seemed), Victor was jabbing me with his elbow, insisting I look. We were aboard the DC-6, swallowed up inside the huge roar of its engines, and flying out over the Southern Ocean. I had chosen not to sit by the window—not wanting to see so much sea. Now Victor insisted I look.

  Down below—an iceberg.

  Like something lost overboard from a container ship, angular and square. The pilot flew lower so that we could see through the water to the vaster bulk of ice below. A half mile of ice. Acres and acres of ice. As natural a phenomenon as the white cliffs of Dover—except that the cliffs at Dover aren’t carved out of elephant ivory. Cameras buzzed and whirred. But there was really no way of judging bigness—nothing to place against it for scale. Through the TV-shaped windows, it looked like TV footage of an iceberg. The extraordinary color of the sea I put down to a sun filter in the window glass. Nothing could be so inky blue. None of it was real.

  An hour later, the plane collided with some invisible barrier and dropped through the air. Cold engulfed the cabin. We had crossed the Antarctic Circle, and it was as solid a thing as an electric fence. We had rammed the pillar of cold that stands perpetually over the Antarctic’s frozen sea and land. Below us was a curding of sea ice—here, there, and everywhere—a mosaic of white puzzle pieces saying, “Solve me! Solve me!”—the makings of a self-assembly world waiting to be glued together.

  And then there it was: the perfect whole! The dazzling white shield of Antarctica, clinging to the curve of the planet! And I had to close my eyes.

  I don’t mean that I dared not look. I mean that the brightness forced my lids shut, like thumbs pressing on my eyeballs. The sheer blistering, agonizing dazzle of sunlit ice clawed, until tears welled over my lids and the irises screwed tight shut.

  Jon handed out sunglasses to those of us who’d left home thinking to go to Paris and who hadn’t thought to unearth ski goggles from the suitcase. Huge, molded things they were, like the dentist uses, too broad for my head, so that I had to hold them in place. But now, at least, features emerged—the filigree lace of blown snow on volcanic rock; the fancy knotwork of a seal colony; the towering ruck of an ice barrier, snow pluming off its rim; dark hummocks of stone that were really the tips of mountains buried up to their necks; the black axeheads of far-off mountain ranges.

  Once, the pilot pointed out specks of blood. Not blood, no: a man-made settlement where everything was painted red. But I chose not to believe in weather stations and trucks and prefabricated igloos painted fire-engine red. I preferred to believe in meteorites nicking the planet’s skin, needle-sharp starlight pricking it, the blood of dogs and ponies . . .

  Hours more passed—hours rendered tiny by the immensity of the land beneath. And then: a blank.

  God sketched Antarctica, then erased most of it again, in the hope a better idea would strike Him. At the center is a blank whiteness where the planet isn’t finished. It’s the address for Nowhere.

  The emerald ice floes, the mosaic of growlers on a navy ocean, the tortured contortions of glaciers meeting the sea—these things had been beautiful as we passed over them—but the interior? That empty, featureless plateau, rising up and up to high-altitude nothingness with no feature fixing its center—it mesmerized me. The idea of it took me in thrall. It was so empty, so blank, so clean, so dead. Surely, if I was ever to set foot down there, even I might finally exist. Surely, in this Continent of Nothingness, anything—anyone—had to be hugely alive by comparison!

  I was leaning all the way across Uncle Victor’s lap, trying to get a better view, trying to make it real, so I could not help seeing his hands gripping the armrests. His fingers were clenched so hard around the upholstery that the padding had peeled clear off the metal framework.

  “Are you all right, Uncle?”

  His clenched teeth raised ridges of muscle across both cheeks in the shape of handlebars. And I realized that he was concentrating too hard to hear me. I realized that, ever since England, he had been driving all the trains, steering all the buses, holding all the airplanes in midair by sheer force of will.

  And why? Just to get me here. Knowing how much I wanted it. How kind is that?

  “Thank you, Uncle Victor,” I said. “Thank you for bringing me. Thank you so much.”

  “Say again?”

  We landed on a runway of blue ice pitted by the sun’s heat into a potholed ice rink, raising a blizzard with our own propellers, bounding and bouncing on and on and on, unable to brake, slewing from side to side until flatness and melt holes brought us to a halt. Madame Bolognese-sans-Pierre prayed loudly. Brenda and Tillie held hands and shut their eyes. The colonel asked his bride for one of his heart pills.

  But I wasn’t scared! Such things don’t scare me. I don�
�t know why. Maybe it’s because I have Titus to look after me. Or maybe I’m too scared of Life to be scared of getting killed.

  Even when we climbed down from the plane onto the blue ice, and tottered and slithered and clung to each other, helpless, out of our element, I could only laugh: Usually it’s just me falling over my own feet. Even when, within the hour, the DC-6 took off again, marooning us, alone, at the bottom of the world, I was glad to see the back of it. It left behind a legacy of silence—immense and solid. The clamor of silence was so loud that it herded the other visitors into a nervous huddle, cowed.

  Didn’t worry me! Me, I know silence. I knew all along it would be here, waiting. Me, I do silence.

  Camp Aurora is on the eastern coast, the Siple Coast of the Ross Sea—well, on an island just off the Siple Coast—though there is no sea to be seen. No seagulls or cotton candy or guesthouses with No Vacancy signs in the window. (The vacation trade is never going to be big around here: The whole of the Siple Coast is Vacant.) No water in front of me, no crash of breaking waves, no killer whales or dolphins or seals or penguins, nothing wet for hundreds of miles, in fact. I liked that. I’m not fond of deep water.

  Oh, the sea was down there somewhere, all right, but sealed under a lid of everlasting ice, then sugar frosted with snow. I stood on the edge of Camp Aurora, where icefalls tumbled away from me like frozen river rapids and formed a buckled chute downward onto the Ice Shelf that exists in place of the sea. And I looked westward across it—hundreds of miles of flat, frozen nothingness.

  I tried to convince myself I was standing on land—on the shore of a sea. But it was impossible. The Ice doesn’t differentiate between land and water; it just smothers the whole continent, from the middle outward, then keeps on spreading outward over the sea, roofing over huge sea inlets for a thousand miles. This was the ice tray in God’s fridge, three thousand feet thick.