The White Darkness Read online

  What’s wrong with me? Do I lack curiosity? Should I want to know about this thing Maxine so loves talking about? Am I supposed to crave the touch of acned cheeks? Am I supposed to lie in my bed at night hungry for the caresses of inky fingers with bitten nails? Maxine says so. Nikki does. I just . . . can’t. To me it’s like that party game where you push your hand into different bags of vileness and have to guess what you are touching. If sex has anything to do with . . . with that word Maxine likes so much—the f-word—she can keep it. It must be violent and angry and scary and crude. The thugs are welcome to it—the kind who shout it at each other in the street. And what did his brother’s car have to do with it anyway?

  Not that Sigurd was like that boy, of course. Just . . . unexpected. In point of fact I was very glad for someone to talk to about the Great Quest. How would we get there? What if Vicenzo wouldn’t fly us to secret map coordinates up on the Polar Plateau? What if it was dangerous—treacherous—somewhere the plane could not put down? Would the two men want to climb down into the Hole when we got there? What if the weather changed and we could not set off at all before it was time to go home?

  Not that Sigurd could answer any of my questions, but it was a relief just to ask them. He seemed to know almost as little as I did. All he was sure of was that I shouldn’t call my mother. In fact, every time I mentioned wanting to call her, he changed the subject, and that usually involved kissing. I must say, it was a very effective way of changing the subject: Mum went clean out of my mind. It was really rather nice, too—except for the slight feeling Sigurd was being kind—doing me a kindness—like a neighbor who volunteers to teach you to drive for free. And while we kissed, I couldn’t quite help thinking, “Well, that’s my diploma in Kissing out of the way,” and “This’ll get Maxine off my back,” and “If my friends could see me now!”—which seemed a bit scummy of me.

  I’m not sure kissing ought to be a thinking kind of pastime.

  Stupidly, I was still hoping the Quest for Symmes’s Hole wouldn’t interfere with the scheduled trip west across the Ice Shelf to see Scott’s hut at Terra Nova Bay. I know: All that stuff is just history, dead and gone, whereas Symmes’s Hole is here and now and about to change the entire future of the world. Even so. To have seen where they all slept, ate, kept the ponies, read books, played bagatelle, and sang to the music of a Pianola . . . to have flown over the very spot where Titus died . . .

  “I won’t come on that one, if it’s all the same to you,” said Titus with Sunday-school politeness. “I went once before and I didn’t enjoy it.”

  The wind dropped briefly the next day. There was brilliant sunshine. Sigurd and I were in T-shirts and sunscreen, messing about on the skis, snowsuits rolled down to our hips, like skinny moths emerging from chrysalises. Manfred and Victor were pacing the perimeter of the camp. There was no longer any need for them to pretend they were strangers, unacquainted. (I couldn’t see why there ever had been a need.) Now no one was the smallest bit interested.

  For everyone else in Camp Aurora was ill. The scheduled excursion to Byrd Base was canceled. With the radio out of operation, there was a palpable sense of unease among the Pengwings Expeditionary Force. The reporter from Maine did have a satellite phone; Jon had one, too, but with everyone wanting to use them, the batteries were getting low. And the Siple Coast was no place to get ill. Early that morning, people began searching the sky, straining their ears for the approach of the weekly DC-6. There was a feeling that everything would be all right if only the plane came, offering an escape route; if only they were no longer totally alone at the bottom of the world.

  I had guessed rightly that Mimi was not the only one wanting to cut short the holiday. The Pogsbaums, the journalist, the honeymooning colonel and Hue Fah, and Ms. Adolphus all had their cases stacked beside the blue-ice runway. Talk of lawsuits and refunds had tailed away; they had no energy left for outrage.

  Noise travels vast distances through super-cold air. We heard the plane ten minutes before it became visible. As Clough watched it through his bird-watching binoculars, I thought I saw the same look of joy on his face as when he first glimpsed a snowy albatross.

  It approached, one wing forward, battling high-level winds, tiny and frail at a distance, putting on weight as it came in for its inelegant, slippery landing. The groggy Pengwings Expeditionary Force, hands raised to shield their faces from the snow blow, looked like devout pilgrims whose prayers had brought deliverance and a big gray steel chariot winging out of the sky. The camp doctor crawled out of bed to lay hands all the sooner on the medicines he had ordered. The journalist from Maine leaned aside to be sick yet again, but with the air of a man who knows his sufferings will be rewarded soon, in a better place.

  Manfred and Uncle Victor were there, waiting to greet the film crew. The contents of the toilet and the trash bins were bagged up for shipping out: as if Antarctica were some pristine sheepskin rug to be kept clean.

  “No pollution allowed, you see, Titus. These days there’s a Keep-Antarctica-Tidy rule. You don’t drop your chocolate wrappers or juice cartons or paper tissues. . . . You don’t pee on the snow. You don’t vomit. You don’t . . .”

  “You don’t say?” said Titus. “And there’s us, we made such a mess. All those food dumps. All that abandoned equipment. All those butchered ponies. And dogs. And dead explorers.”

  “No. Not dead explorers. Not according to Uncle Victor.” I said it tentatively, wanting some hint from him. “Not you, anyway. Victor says you found Symmes’s Hole. Victor says you found help.”

  “Really?” said Titus with that slight sardonic inflection in his voice. He picked a crumb of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. “Well, that’s all right, then.”

  Manfred and Victor helped push the steps into place for the passengers to disembark. A party of four mountaineers descended, come to acclimatize before going climbing in the Victoria Mountains. There was an Otter pilot, come to relieve Vicenzo. There was no one else.

  Calor gas for the stoves. Newspapers. But no cameras. Shrimp cocktail and smoked salmon. But no film crew. Manfred climbed into the plane himself to look, as if they might be too airsick or shy to emerge, but there was not so much as a reel of film aboard.

  “I cannot imagine . . .” said Manfred, stamping about, clawing at his hair, swearing at the sky. “I am so sorry, Victor! I cannot guess what has happened!”

  Uncle Victor, if he was upset, showed no sign of it.

  “I fly back to Punta and see what is happened!” Bruch insisted.

  “Please yourself,” said Victor with a shrug. It seemed to trouble him very little either way.

  “One whole week gone! Wasted! I am pained to my soul!” exclaimed Manfred Bruch. “But what can I do?”

  Victor shrugged. “Catch up with me.” He pottered away with his distinctive rolling gait, whistling tunelessly. His nose, cherry red from sun and cold, gave a misleading impression of jollity. There again, I don’t think he was angry; he simply had no brain space or thinking time to spare for minor changes of plan.

  Manfred ran after him. “What? You will not start without me, I think? You will wait one week? I go; I come back on next week’s airplane. One week is small time to wait!”

  I don’t think Victor even heard him. He certainly did not hear Jon announcing the meeting in the Leisuredome. I had to run after him and fetch him back, like someone with Alzheimer’s wandering off. Like some old person. “Uncle Victor! There’s a meeting!”

  Inside the Leisuredome, Uncle Victor took a chair near the door, but I looked around for Sigurd, so as to sit next to him. He was not there. So I walked back to the men’s tent to look for him.

  It smelled quite different from the women’s tent—less perfume and more sweat. Everywhere at Aurora had the slight smell, too, of unwellness. My eyes groped at the dark—and there he was, rolling up his sleeping bag.

  “Guess what. There’s a meeting.” He looked up sharply and groaned—just for an awful moment I thought he was groanin
g at the sight of me, but it must have been the prospect of yet another meeting. Soon I realized he was not going to get up and come—could not be bothered to attend. “What if it’s important, Sigurd?”

  “Someone will tell it to us.”

  The dark interior of the conical tent was still for once, with little wind to rattle it. A gimballed lamp hung from the apex, glimmering dimly, lending a sacredness to this shrine of socks, thermal underwear, guidebooks, and cameras. It was easy to see where Uncle Victor slept: The oblong of his sleeping bag was completely immaculate, decorated with orderly lines of possessions: compass, keys, notebook, pencils, vitamins, three passports . . . I was touched to see a dozen packets of batteries for my hearing aids. How many did he think I got through in the course of a month? I opened the notebook to see if it was a record of his dreams—“Columns. Black and white or color. Pleasant or not. And the setting. That’s all you need.”—but it was simply crammed with page after page of mathematical calculations: graphs, etas and thetas, cosines, geometrical shapes and asterisks, logarithms, fractions, and equations. The writing, sprawling at the start, became smaller and smaller from page to page, as if Victor realized he might run out of space. There was a newspaper cutting, too, about the discovery of Antarctica’s first complete dinosaur.

  There was too little headroom to stand up, and something very kindergarten about the two of us on our hands and knees. We looked as if we were playing dinosaurs. I wondered whether I should tell Sigurd that Madame D-St.-P thought he was cute—thought his dad was even cuter. The dinosaurs nosed closer. Another week’s wait, and his father back in Punta Arenas, and here we were at the end of the world. Sigurd’s rolled sleeping bag gradually unrolled itself between us like a lolling red tongue.

  Then I saw his backpack hunched against the tent wall. “You’re packed!”

  “Of course. My father and I, we fly back to Punta to find the film crew.”

  “But why do you have to go?”

  For a second he looked like an actor who has forgotten his lines. “My father and I, we do not travel separate. Never.”

  “Are you very disappointed?”

  “What?”

  “About the film crew.”

  “Oh. Yes. Naturally. But it is small delay only. Nothing to worry.”

  “You’re a quick packer,” I said. Not ten minutes could have passed since Manfred climbed down from the plane fuming and apologizing. And here was Sigurd already packed, his sleeping bag the last thing to stow. And why did he need to take all his kit with him if he was coming back in a week?

  Twin diplodocuses, we knelt there looking at each other, me waiting for him to say something, he not saying it. In fact, he didn’t say a word. He simply advanced, nylon leggings whistling as they brushed the ground cloth. I backed up, disrupting Victor’s tidy, tidy belongings with my boots.

  Get out of my head, Maxine, with your dirty words and your dirty jokes. Get out of my head, cosines and coordinates. Get out of my head, Nats, with your sensible advice. Get out of my head, killjoy questions about backpacks and eBay and The Crimson Slippers. I want to take all my bagatelle dead balls back and shoot them again and again until they all . . .

  Sigurd moved closer, smiling, stretching out his neck, turning his head on one side.

  Suddenly the flaps cracked back and Manfred’s blond bush of hair burst into the tent. He shouldered his way indoors saying something that must have been Norwegian, though it sounded like Maxine’s favorite swear word. His eyes unaccustomed to the dark, he called Sigurd’s name twice before seeing the two of us, nose-to-nose on our hands and knees. Then his face resolved itself from Viking raider to film director as he recognized me.

  “Time to go,” he said, and Sigurd reached almost eagerly for his backpack. “Time for everybody to go,” Manfred added hastily. “At this meeting it is said all people must leave. Because of the sickness. You should go pack, Miss Sym.”

  A slight change of plan. Most regrettable, but there it was. Pengwings had decided to cut the tour short, on grounds of health and safety. In a matter of hours we would all fly out of Camp Aurora aboard the DC-6.

  One week instead of three. Highly regrettable.

  Albatrosses instead of aliens. Most unfortunate.

  Health before heroics. Such a shame.

  A slight change of plan.

  Sym’s Home instead of Symmes’s Hole.

  Like rogue fireworks, relief and disappointment tore through me in opposite directions: relief and disappointment at Manfred Bruch’s sudden return; relief and disappointment at the thought of going home and of leaving this place; relief and disappointment at the collapse of Victor’s plans.

  I tried to imagine the terrible journey home alongside him, his hopes in rags thanks to a bout of food poisoning. I looked for him, to say how sorry I was. I looked for him to ask where he had stowed the big suitcase. I looked for him to ask if we could possibly come back again soon. I looked for him to tell him there was a farewell party beginning in the Leisuredome. “Mimi! Have you seen my uncle?”

  “Saw him leave the meeting before the end, but . . . sorry, honey, no.”

  Finally I caught sight of him, outside the confines of the safety flags, a tiny figure in the vast white landscape, moving like an emperor penguin on its long arduous trek between the teeming sea and the gaping mouth of its hungry chick.

  “I heard” was all he said when I told him the trip was at an end. But when I tried to sympathize, he just laughed—fondly—affectionately—and hooped his arm around my neck. “Don’t fret, lass. Never you fret. All’s on course.” His bare hands were deadly cold. I put my mittens on them, and since the mittens were attached to my snowsuit, we had to walk back to camp as if we were folk-dancing, promenading over the sastrugi.

  Just then, there was a huge thud. The ground moved under us. A nearby corniche of drifted snow collapsed and smashed, like a wave hitting shore. The snow all around changed color, swallowing the glow of the explosions just then ripping through the DC-6. Within the transparent rag of red flame, the huge metal shape of the aircraft began to move, subsiding, settling, sashaying across the melting ice until the runway was too liquid to any longer support its weight. Then it keeled over onto one wingtip.

  Smaller explosions sent fire washing outward in lavish swags that engulfed the piles of luggage, the bagged litter, a row of safety flags, and a Ski-Doo. The fuel tank of the Ski-Doo itself exploded, tossing the machine high into the air to crash back down on the kitchen tent. In the heat from the fire, the surrounding wall of the toilet, built from blocks of ice, leaned outward and fell. One leg of the radio mast melted; it keeled over and, with nightmare slowness, fell across the parked Otter ski-plane. The tents filled with the blast of hot air—swelled up, bloated, straining at their guy ropes. The red plastic of the Leisuredome, though ninety yards away, lost its shine and went brown, like an apple rotting.

  The wind, which had left Aurora in peace for half a day, chose that moment to pick up again. It gave a whistling murmur of interest and scurried through the camp, fanning the flames, whipping up loose snow, sending the black smoke spilling and swirling between the running figures, worrying at the clothing of those too shocked to run.

  Only one person was killed. The American journalist from Maine, who avoided meetings and parties, had gone to the luggage standing stacked beside the runway to stow his laptop, and had been caught by the first explosion.

  Perhaps a flying chip of ice, perhaps metal fatigue, had holed the wing and allowed aviation fuel to trickle out of the tanks. Perhaps some spark, some fault in the complex membrane of electrical cables, had ignited it. It was an old plane. But it would take aviation experts to account for exactly what had happened. In the meantime, the Pengwings Expeditionary Force stood gaping at the charred remains of the chariot that had come to carry them home and had succeeded only in returning one man to his Maker.

  Ten minutes later, Mimi was still hysterical. Ms. Adolphus had fainted twice. Colonel Oliver was prostrate i
n his tent, while Mr. Pogsbaum sat in the snow as if it were a beach in Florida and absently hacked away with an ice axe until he had made quite a trench. Tillie and Brenda were covering up the remains of the journalist, using two bright orange trash bags; his Iridium phone lay nearby, melted into a chunk of tar. Bob was trying to contact McMurdo Base on Jon’s phone, but the battery was flat. Jon himself walked up and down, arms wrapped tightly around his aching stomach, weeping like a little boy. The warning flags were still burning on their canes like eerie candles.

  Silence laid siege to Camp Aurora: an implacable army of silence pressing in, standing too close, leaning too hard against the compound, breathing menace. Black petroleum smoke, still belching out of the carcass of the DC-6, scattered black smuts over the white landscape, offending the snaky horizons, which promptly crawled away. Color drained out of the sky, and detail blurred. Soon there was gray in every direction, gray that the eye struggled to make sense of and failed. Only the arrowhead shapes of the tents in the foreground said: THIS WAY UP. The weather was trying as hard as we were to rub out what had happened. Or was it trying to expunge us: us puny, noisy, troublesome, destructive interlopers?

  I put my arms around Uncle Victor and he put his arms around me.

  “It’ll be all right, Uncle, really it will,” I said, thinking what Mum might say to comfort someone, thinking: He doesn’t have Titus, like I do. He has only me.

  He sighed deeply and treated me to a smile of pure joy. “Grand, lassie. It’ll be grand. Let’s make everyone a nice cup of tea!”

  Fear must be very tiring. Within a couple of hours, people hysterical with fright, isolated and unable to escape a desolate, hostile wilderness, were all sleeping peacefully. The long pink hours dyed the cloth of the tents and made them glow. The wind rattled at the skeleton of the dead plane, tearing free the odd strut or piece of steel cladding to fall with a clanging clatter through the wreckage. And yet everyone slept. No radio contact had been established with McMurdo Sound, Scott Base, Patriot Hills, or the outside world. No help was on its way. And yet everyone slept.