The Nature of Ice Page 11

  The odour of tinned fish and cayenne pepper lingered from dinner, mingling with the stink from the slops bucket where tea-leaves floated on a fatty scum. The bucket also held the remains of the morning’s culinary debacle—Grab them while they’re hot, boys!, a futile cry; the nightwatchman’s scones, hot or cold, were as palatable as pumice stone.

  Douglas groped through a wilderness of long johns and woollen socks, cardigans and burberries—clothing provided at great expense to the expedition, now heedlessly slung onto nails. Finnesko boots lay higgledy-piggledy around bunks, their sennegrass liners kicked off and thrown onto desks mounted with sewing machines and microscopes. One good whiff of eighteen fur sleeping bags infused with the aroma of unwashed bodies would send a weaker man to his knees. He scowled at the most indolent pair—eight hundred applications from young men all around Australia who’d have given their right arm to be part of the expedition and here was John Close, their ‘physical culture expert’, forty if he was a day, snoring on his bunk at 7.30 pm, The Strenuous Life laid open on his chest. Reserving energy for his own interests was their illustrious surgeon, Dr Whetter, brazenly swotting for his final medical examinations on expedition time.

  Walter Hannam sat alone with his journal. The wireless man had been a portrait of misery since yesterday evening— Black Sunday as he named it, the date that one of the masts crashed down. The puff anemometer had recorded the limit of its capacity: two hundred and two miles an hour. Douglas was blown off his feet retrieving the instrument from the hill. Hurley, outside to record the phenomenal conditions, had been lifted off the ground with his cinematograph, photographer and eighty-pound camera deposited in an unruly heap on the rocks. The remaining mast they had lowered this morning for fear it might be blown down onto the hut. All hope of communicating with the outside world dashed. One more notch to failure.

  Ninnis, the day’s rostered cook, stood at the end of the dining table clutching a wooden spoon as he relived, scene by tedious scene, the latest version of his recurring dream. ‘The entire hut was transformed into a theatre.’ He wielded the spoon like a baton. ‘The Doc’s room was the actresses’ dressing room and while the play was going on our fellows were constantly coming in and out of it in polar kit. In the next breath I was arriving home at Paddington Station. Or was it Victoria? Let me think. No, no, I’m almost certain it was Paddington. I say that because—’

  ‘Moving along, Cherub!’ Hurley roared.

  ‘No matter,’ Ninnis continued, undeterred by a chorus of jeers. ‘After I arrived home and had my bath, the first thing I asked my mother was whether Captain Scott had reached the South Pole and she said yes, then duly proceeded to weep.’

  ‘First to the pole and to show the Norskies the honour and glory of man hauling.’ Bickerton, their patriotic Brit, licked his spoon clean, ready for pudding.

  Hurley thumped the table. ‘Dogs over man hauling. My wager’s still on Roald Amundsen and his team of dogs.’

  ‘Five squares of chocolate says you’re wrong!’

  ‘Raise you five,’ another rallied.

  ‘In all my dreams about returning home,’ Ninnis wheeled on, ‘no one seems the least interested in the expedition. Last night, for instance, I knew we hadn’t sledged a yard, and I kept on pointing out that our work was not finished, that I was home only briefly.’

  Ninnis’s ceaseless recitations of failed sledging and thwarted homecomings irked Douglas immeasurably. At the start of September they had all been hoodwinked by three perfect days of calm. A change in our fortune, he’d declared like a fool. They all raced outside, eighteen lunatics leaping about in the snow and hooting like residents of Bedlam. Hurley had added twelve dozen plates and half a mile of cinematograph film to his collection. Douglas had spent every daylight hour helping to dredge the bay, at one point breaking through thin ice beside an open lead, immersed to his armpits in a bath of ice. Johnny Hunter’s eyes stood out on stalks at the sight of his benches and workshop floor and the dinner table piled high with treasures from the deep. In those three serene days they had done as much scientific research as in nine and a half months at this wind-ravaged site. On the fourth day of dredging he had looked up to see a wall of drift billowing down the ice slopes and tumbling helter skelter across the bay towards them. Within seconds the first squall hit, followed by a devil’s onslaught of wind that sent them racing shoreward, the sea ice splintering dangerously beneath their feet. A minute’s delay and they’d have blown out with it. And not a break in the weather since—their hopes of early spring sledging dimming with each new blast of wind.

  Conversation lulled when Douglas sat back down at the table and watched Ninnis scrape a shameful quantity of uneaten salmon kedgeree back into the pot.

  Ninnis threw him a defiant look, flushing like a schoolboy. ‘I shouldn’t expect the bow-wows will complain. We’re all of us human, we all make mistakes.’

  Every mistake a Championship, in the local vernacular, Ninnis nominated a Crook Cook for another evening meal made inedible by him misreading Mrs Beeton’s recipe: tonight 1 oz of butter, finely-chopped parsley, salt and pepper, grated nutmeg had become two ounces of salt, two ounces of pepper, a spoonful of red-hot cayenne pepper and never mind what else.

  After the first few mouthfuls, Bob Bage’s face turned puce and Walter Hannam launched into a sneezing fit. Douglas had pushed his plate aside with a few choice words for both the cook and his messman. Their genial Swiss had gallantly finished his serving, all the while dabbing at his forehead. ‘Englishmen like their food spicy.’

  Ninnis lifted his pot of discards. ‘Mrs Beeton, Mrs Beeton,’ he began. ‘Since we eighteen fellows of Commonwealth Bay first tiptoed over the threshold of the female domain and embraced the fair sex’s noble work, has any other lady’s name reached such giddying heights as that of Mrs B? Why, Mrs Beeton’s heavenly image presides over our wee kitchen like a ship’s figurehead, a bibbed apron over her gown and in her saintly grasp a wooden spoon.’

  Douglas halted the babble. ‘Do we have any words of sense written for the Blizzard?’

  ‘Joe finished his.’

  ‘Let’s hear it then.’

  Joe protested, claiming his article for the Adélie Blizzard newspaper needed a lot more work.

  ‘Let us be the judge of that.’

  Madigan brought the loose pages from Joe’s bunk. ‘Genus Homo. Sub-Genus Blizzardia,’ he read out. ‘Blizzardia dropemalli. In the vernacular known as X, this species is noted for the number and vigour of its championships. Size medium, nature excitable, perpetually hurried.’

  The crowd broke into a fresh round of cackles as Mertz went to take a bow and knocked a mug from the table.

  Madigan turned to Ninnis. ‘Blizzardia cherubis,’ he read. ‘Form very elongated and angular, posterior regions feebly developed. Elegant in appearance, this species is very particular in regard to hair arrangement, this being usually parted exactly in the centre. It lives chiefly on the prospect of accruing medals.’

  ‘But doesn’t care for fish,’ Douglas muttered, at which the men erupted into such raucous laughter that John Close woke in his bunk with a start.

  Madigan continued. ‘Another characteristic is that of speech, which is typically of the La-de-da type.’

  ‘Wretched lies!’ Ninnis clutched his chest. ‘Yet another dagger through my heart.’

  Madigan turned the page. ‘Here’s one for the Chief. Blizzardia dux ipse.’

  Joe, the author of the piece, mumbled and scratched his head. Silence fell like a blanket over the table.

  ‘Dux ipse,’ Madigan repeated, ‘leader of himself.’ He eyed Douglas mockingly. ‘General form elongated. Aspect austere, occasionally relaxing. It is somewhat dreaded by other species, particularly cooks, though it is not so ferocious as its appearance sometimes suggests. Amongst its more particular idiosyncrasies, it is extremely critical in culinary matters.’

  Hurley snorted, breaking the silence.

  ‘Hear, hear,’ Ninnis cried. ‘And
lives mainly on the grilled bones of mere mortal chefs.’ He gave a dramatic flick of the head and strutted out to the dogs’ verandah with his pot of salmon kedgeree.

  Bob Bage at the sewing machine inside winter quarters

  DRESSED

  TO KILL

  ‘THE GUYS HAVE BEEN HERE.’ Freya hears Elisia at the other end of the dress rack, searching through the larger sizes.

  In preparation for tonight’s Dressed to kill party, Kittie, Freya’s closest friend at the station, has mounted an expedition to the dress-up room.

  Freya holds up a pair of false breasts covered with scraps of a beige slip, hand stitched and edged with lace. Good grief.

  ‘This, girl, is you.’ Kittie pulls out a glittering, powder-blue gown. ‘This would sell for a mint in a Sydney retro store.’

  Freya takes the dress, measuring the split against her thigh. ‘You must be joking.’

  ‘Try it on,’ Kittie urges. ‘You can never tell till you have it on.’

  ‘I wish it was my size.’ Elisia takes a second, hopeless look along the rack.

  Freya manoeuvres her head and arms through the openings, then Kittie clips together a tackle-box worth of hooks and eyes.

  ‘I can’t breathe,’ Freya moans.

  ‘Shush. You don’t have to breathe.’

  ‘It’s too tight. I can’t stand tight clothes.’

  ‘Stop complaining and turn around,’ Elisia says. ‘It’ll loosen up.’

  ‘What did I tell you?’ Kittie beams. ‘It was made for you.’

  Elisia tips her head to one side and frowns.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘The bust.’ Elisia wiggles the bodice. ‘She could do with some boobs.’

  ‘Couldn’t we all.’ Kittie sighs. Seized suddenly with the same idea, they grab the hand-sewn set of fake breasts and stuff them down the front of Freya’s dress.

  Elisia and Kittie cheer when she does a little twirl and shows off the thigh-high split. Kittie claps and Elisia chortles as she struts up and down the dress-up room, her sparkling décolletage flaunting a lopsided cleavage.

  ‘PLENTY OF GLITZ AND GLITTER around the traps tonight.’ Malcolm turned aka Count Dracula, eyes Freya’s shimmering blue gown.

  Charlie gives her a whistle as she walks through the foyer; he has her spin around. ‘Very swish.’

  ‘You scrub up alright.’ A sparkie raises his beer in a toast when she walks into the lounge.

  ‘You look lovely for a change,’ says one of the scientists. Thank you to the evening’s gold medallist of backhanded compliments.

  Even the best-looking man on the station, Adam Singer, sets down his gun and bows. ‘Freya, you look sensational. Good on you for dressing up.’

  Freya curtsies in return. ‘You look quite suave yourself, 007,’ and in that exchange she feels an unspoken tension ebb and wash away. As she walks past him she senses the lightest touch on her bare back, so fleeting she wonders if she’s imagined it.

  The only one who doesn’t offer comment is Chad, standing fixed to the floor, a sight to behold in his crocheted shawl and tatted bonnet, a basket of treats clutched between his paws.

  ‘What big ears you have.’ Taking a sweet, Freya has to sidle past his bulk, treading on his tail on her way to the bar.

  The room soon fills up with the usual suspects: Frankenstein’s monster, wicked witches, pirates with home-made cutlasses, Darth Vader, an applaudable Frankenfurter—the shaven legs of Anastagio, an engineer, accentuated by stiletto heels and fishnet stockings, are voted the shapeliest of the night. Women slink through the door in black, Charlie and his Angels make an entrance in white. And no gathering steeped in a century of cross-dressing peculiar to Commonwealth bases could be authentically Antarctic without a gaudy array of hirsute, ruby-lipped maidens in fishnet tights and little lacy numbers.

  Freya sees Malcolm nab the walking sandwich board by the frame of his placard, which is illustrated with a skull and cross bones and the words Tommo’s Tired Stew. He ushers the sandwich board, along with a male field assistant clad only in a G-string and wielding a whip, towards the door. ‘Exit right, you clowns. I didn’t see cruel or lewd written on the noticeboard. Back up the stairs and rethink your wardrobe.’

  The windows have been masked to block out the sun; a disco ball and strobe light spins a mosaic of silver mirrors around the walls, and Elisia cues an evening’s worth of dance music.

  First away is Ian the physicist, so often preoccupied in a cloud of atmospherics, who steps onto the dance floor with his colleague, Becky, wowing the crowd with a command performance of the Rumba.

  Freya tells herself to stop after the first bottle of champagne— Marcus abhors drunk or raucous women—but Kittie keeps pouring and Elisia keeps toasting; soon the three cavort their way to the dance floor. Elisia entices Chad to join them—a circle of four emboldened by costume and wine, dappled by mirrors streaming lazily by.

  The floor becomes a press of bodies, Tommo the chef and Frankenfurter escaping the crowd to dance an intimate tango off to one side. The music slows, bodies sway; the lights swirl around Freya until the horizon becomes a blur of shoulders and heads. She turns to Chad, who has abandoned his costume keeping only the tail, which continues to cause havoc each time a passing shoe pins its tip. She doubts she can stay upright without someone to steady her, each turn of the floor giddier than the last, the room aglitter with flashing lights. Freya props her head against Chad’s arm but still the room weaves by. Within its arc, eclipsed by the strobe, she sees a menacing beak and glinting eyes fixed upon her. When she lifts her head she realises she was foolish to flinch. All that stands before her is a slightly out of focus 007, Adam Singer’s arm outstretched, the barrel of his gun searching out her head. A mocking wink. Kapow.

  FREYA NURSES A HANGOVER THAT four tablets, a litre of water and a slow Sunday morning in her studio have been unable to shake.

  Forty-five years after the expedition, Marcus writes, ‘Joe’ Laseron, the biological collector, looked back:

  >> One phase of our expedition is indelibly impressed on my memory. When eighteen men are herded together in a space twenty-four feet square for over a year, in a climate so severe that the greater part of the time must be spent indoors, and when these limited quarters must serve for sleeping, cooking, eating, and for the pursuit of many specialised callings, [this] indeed is the test of true comradeship. It was in these trying circumstances that the expedition can, I believe, make an almost unique claim.

  Hurley’s photo of Bob Bage at the sewing machine inside winter quarters shows an orderly chaos, the close-packed living Chad had spoken of.

  Freya pings a quick reply, ignoring her throbbing head and whatever mistakes are bound to catch her husband’s eye. She shuts down her laptop and reaches gingerly for her pack.

  Glasses. Gloves. Lights. Door. Thud.

  She’s joining Chad to hike to Lake Stinear then on to the lookout. Freya has limited herself to one digital camera and she paces down the hill grateful for her feather-light pack and the rest day. Sunday. No Saturday chores, no backlog of films to catalogue, no images to burn. A day of play all over the polar world. When Chad phoned her studio an hour ago to ask whether she was fit enough to take a walk she’d responded in a rush of enthusiasm, no worries, flattered he would choose to invite her on this, his free day, her bravado belying a pounding head.

  She watches a GP glide south along the coast—and laughs when she realises she’s used the Antarctic acronym for giant petrels. Next she’ll be spouting blows and blizzes, loading the bike with a rat pack, sorting recyclables to be RTA’d to Hobart on the AA, answering roger and copy that without a moment’s pause.

  After an ambivalent introduction to Australia, years of her childhood spent struggling to unpick a new country’s jargon, it still puzzles Freya how the vernacular, through some invisible process of osmosis, became a part of her. These days, to Mama’s disdain, Freya struggles to recall her mother tongue. Apparently it is not all lost;
Marcus says he loves the trace of Norway in her speech, that the quaint expressions she used in the year he taught her at college were what first tweaked his heart.

  It’s worth remembering, he’ll invariably segue, that the written impression you make on your photographic clients also counts for a lot. And off he’ll go correcting her spelling and grammar.

  A quick pitstop at the dark and dingy expiries container. Freya digs through the plastic bins, looking for a glint of purple foil in the piles of out-of-date food. Right now her lowest priority is the station-wide contest to find the oldest chocolate bar; any chocolate will do. Not yet halfway through December and her new monthly rations are gone. Despairing, she throws herself across sacks of packaged rice to reach the unsorted supplies pushed against the back wall. She riffles through dehydrated dinners and instant potato, waterproof matches, miniature jams. She digs through an entire seam of Vegemite, stacks tins of butter and plum puddings to one side, perks up at a rustle, only to deflate at the sight of packet after packet of silver-wrapped sledging biscuits. Finally she grasps a rectangular wedge, hard, tessellated; more are buried beside it. She extricates two precious blocks of chocolate, drawing a mental map of where to find them next time, and rolls onto her back to proffer thanks.

  On closer inspection, however, the old-fashioned white wrapper of the fruit-and-nut bar is as foxed as the pages of one of Marcus’s first editions. She relinquishes the antiquated bar and pockets only the fresher one—still well past its best. Everyone has their limits.

  She bolts the rest of the way, bursting into the foyer of the living quarters to find that Chad has already turned over his tag and marked their expected return time on the whiteboard. She feels an unexpected sting to see a third name listed, and quickly reprimands herself. Elisia Hood, she reminds herself as she enters the lounge to greet them, is a treat to have around.

  THEY TRUDGE THROUGH KNEE-HIGH SNOW to reach the shoreline of the lake. Freya has never seen Chad so relaxed; he and Elisia are reminiscing about their winter months. Elisia came to Davis Station as the wintering dieso and, like Chad, opted to stay a second summer to help out with the planes. They try to include her and she does her best to join in. Which one was Beacon? Three days straight as slushy during winter!