The Nature of Ice Read online

  The shape of his crooked smile emerges through the developing agent. Freya has not before examined him so blatantly: tawny hair tied back in a ponytail, straight white teeth beneath a crooked nose. She gauges the mildness in his eyes—gentle eyes, flecked with the sadness of an unspoken past. Never married, no partner, an only child—parents and grandparents, all his family, gone.

  Freya wonders why she feels compelled to print the portrait of herself. She won’t give it to Marcus. Lord knows it will not be one her mother would show—Mama is forever encouraging Freya to pose with her best side before the camera’s unforgiving eye. Only Papa believed his daughter’s mark of birth a blessing. He saw it as a charm. Didn’t she share her name with the Norse goddess Freya, Chief of the Valkyrie, our own little Daughter of Time? One day, he’d said, she too would fly in the image of a bird and sprinkle summer sunlight, your shining armour sparking the aurora’s lights.

  Freya places the image in the enlarger. For the most part she is resigned to the stain on her face that brands her, but it still jars to see her birthmark inky black beneath the darkroom’s coloured light. She steps back from the face projected on the baseboard to assess its repugnance, surely why strangers turn and stare.

  She tried explaining to Chad why she shies away from the face of her lens. I take photographs because they let me be part of a world that’s as beautiful as I care to make it. Why would I, she touched her cheek, or anyone else, choose to be reminded of this?

  Chad stood silently until she finished speaking, then extracted her camera from her hands as if not a word had sunken in.

  How is it, he said, that someone with so much courage has so little faith? He knelt on the ice and framed her face against the sky. You can’t begin to know what other people see. Chad stayed quiet for a time, intent on composing the image.

  What do you see? she asked, her voice steadier than she felt.

  I see someone who’s been holding herself down for too long.

  He made it sound as simple as a choice.

  Here I am looking through the camera at a woman who tells me she’s sensitive to beauty—he stopped.

  He kept his finger depressed on the shutter, photo after photo. Stay exactly like that.

  The portrait stares at her from the baseboard of the enlarger. She forces herself to look away from her birthmark to the unruly shock of fair hair turned orange in the darkroom’s light. It maddens her, this tangled mess across her face. She isn’t beautiful, not by a long shot, yet there’s truth in this portrait, her face flooded with joy. And something more. She has disciplined her feelings for so long now, used her camera as a shield from disappointment, from every kind of want. The face before her, caught unguarded, reaches through her camera’s eye. It jolts her to recognise her own desire, to be exposed in such a way.

  Wind, Drift, Drift, Wind

  December 1912

  THE INCESSANT FLAPPING OF THE tent, burberry canvas slapping against three reindeer fur bags; the smarting of his eyes from air thick with smoke—the Far Eastern Sledging Party were camped two hundred and sixty miles east of winter quarters, one month out, now holed up in the blizzard for a third dreary night.

  Propped in bags on either side of Douglas, Ninnis and Mertz drew on pipes, their faces as wizened from cold and wind as those of the sealers they’d encountered at Macquarie Island on the voyage south. Ninnis’s fingernails were embedded with grime, his hands the texture of hide. His cheeks bore a ring of raw, frostbitten skin. At winter quarters Ninnis would not have let a day go by without standing before the mirror and parting his hair down the centre, just so, before combing it back in a slick. Now it hung around his face like a helmet, lank and oily in contrast to the russet frizz sprouting from his chin.

  Both men looked as stiff-backed and sore-buttocked as Douglas felt from lying cramped too long on an unyielding bed of ice. Neuralgia coursed an electrical charge across his left cheek and down the side of his throat. The pain felt fire-poker red, eclipsing the pulsing of a lip swollen and burst from exposure to the wind. To add to his discomfort, he needed to visit outside.

  Ninnis dealt with his own suffering by remaining uncharacteristically quiet, though not even the torment of two fingers so red and swollen with whitlows they looked as though they had been slammed in a door could deter Cherub from his daily ritual of journal writing. Even with his cack-handed grip of a pencil he still managed fine penmanship—with his theatrical mannerisms and epicene sensibilities Ninnis should have trained as an architect or calligrapher, anything but a soldier. Douglas knew that Cherub shuddered at the prospect of returning to his battalion in a few months’ time.

  The phrases Douglas saw scribed on the open page of Ninnis’s journal prompted a glimmer of a smile that set his lip smarting anew: Verily I say unto you … the great and glorious fact must occupy a line by itself … Mertz, needless to recount, was like iron … alas and alack, our dearly departed bow-wows (a ghastly business) …

  Gadget, Jappy, Fusilier, Blizzard. Douglas had carried out the first ghastly deed.

  Gadget simply cannot keep up; she’s entirely unfit to pull, he’d felt compelled to remind his two companions when her ladyship, not content with riding atop the sledge, took to chewing through the leather straps holding fast the cooker box.

  Ninnis and Mertz had conveniently busied themselves with other duties when they saw him drag the rifle from the sledge. They needn’t have feared. He’d not ask another man to undertake such a task.

  Just the same, Mertz had helped butcher Gadget and her unborn pups into twenty-four rations, all wolfed down by the other dogs except Shackleton, who gave her entrails one guarded sniff then turned up his nose. Ninnis had paced to the far side of the sledge to puke in the snow.

  Douglas had never known such an odd, endearing fellow. In early 1911 Ninnis had sashayed into their London office trussed up like a turkey in his fancy suit and bowler hat, volunteering to help with the expedition and might he come along? Ninnis had proven his worth through trying months of fundraising and again at winter quarters. Although Douglas had made a public show of stacking away copious volumes of Ninnis’s London Illustrated magazines (page upon page of drivel the roundhouse could have put to better use), and Ninnis’s clothes boxes, buried beneath a verandah-ful of snow, contained more finery than Douglas had owned in his life, when it came to mucking out the dog verandah, bringing in the daily ice, or emptying the roundhouse drum, Ninnis was an ever-willing volunteer. In spite of his comical affectations and a wit that could wound, every man warmed to Ninnis—with the possible exception of big Walter Hannam, who dubbed the hut alcove Snyde Park Corner. (On the occasion Hannam took to his bunk, groaning and bilious, after bolting down two tins of sardines before realising they were spoiled, Ninnis had cried, For mercy’s sake, Hannam, if you really are going to die, best you toddle off inland as far as you can so we can make a dog food depot out of you for Dr Mawson’s sledging journey. Poor Hannam, doubly aggrieved.)

  Mertz lay propped on his elbow on a pillow of burberries, his charcoal beard covering his throat like an overgrown hedge. X apparently felt less inspired by these idle hours to fill his journal with brilliant literature. English openers punctuated each line of German:

  6. Dezember: Drift, Wind, Wind, Drift …

  7. Dezember: Wind, Drift, Drift, Wind …

  8. Dezember: Wind, Drift, Drift, Wind …

  Douglas felt momentarily contrite when Mertz caught him looking. X smiled and laid his journal open on his lap, as if to show he didn’t mind.

  ‘I rehearsed in my head the dramatic part.’ He pronouned it dwamatic and began to recite, entirely from memory, another passage from Sherlock Holmes. ‘A hound it was,’ Mertz boomed in his thick accent, drowning out the flapping of canvas, ‘an enormous coal-black hound, but not as mortal eyes has ever seen. Fire breaks from its open jaws, the eyes they glow with a smouldy glare. Muzzle and hackles light up with flames.’

  Neither Douglas nor Ninnis corrected Mertz’s English, instead N
innis howled with such comic effect that Douglas forgot his neuralgia and joined in.

  ‘Never,’ Mertz went on, ‘never in the strangest dreams of the disordered brain can a thing more hellish be imagined than a dark form and savage face that breaks from the wall of fog …’

  Douglas marvelled at X. The Swiss had adapted without complaint to an Australian diet laden with meat. Coached by Ninnis and Madigan, his English vocabulary had exceeded expectation. X had begun his apprenticeship in the vernacular with a shock of seaman’s curses learnt from Aurora’s crew on the voyage out to Hobart; then at winter quarters had added a further swag of idioms to his repertoire. These days X could rival Walter Hannam with his Gee whizzes and Up the bloody spout and Didn’t’alf come a cropper, all delivered with a European flavour which sent the crowd into hysterics.

  Douglas squirmed, unable to delay the moment any longer.

  ‘Rears.’ He nudged Mertz apologetically.

  ‘As sooner we deliver,’ X sprang from his bag and reached for his burberries, ‘as quickest we return.’

  In easier conditions Douglas would have left the tent on his own, kept private the act of squatting into the wind, a rag or sheet of sanitary paper at hand, or if nothing else a fistful of snow. But when the windchill of a seventy-miler plummeted the temperature below zero degrees Fahrenheit, with the force of air eddying and spiralling anything in its path upward around the body, taking a crap—the most personal of bodily functions—became one more act of brotherhood.

  The atmosphere was bright with midnight sun but in the howling drift they could see less than three yards ahead. X kneeled in the snow on the leeward side of the sledge with a canvas sheet gripped in his outstretched mitts and the lower edge of the cloth pinned to the snow with his knees. The screen had naught to do with modesty. Douglas squatted before Mertz, the rounds of his moon-white buttocks in full view of his comrade. Moulded together, Mertz looped his arms around Douglas to close the skirt of canvas about him and save bare flesh from frostbite.

  One saving grace of a slurry-in, slurry-out diet of greasy hoosh: the motion was quick.

  On hands and knees Douglas followed Mertz, two cavemen groping their way back through the tent’s flapping vestibule. He drew off his gloves to toggle off the burberry chute.

  Douglas changed his socks and stuffed the damp pair into his armpits to dry. Not a trace of warmth remained inside the moulting reindeer bag, whose hair found its way into every mug of tea they drank.

  The hopeful anticipation of summer sledging had slid to frustration by early November. Douglas half-expected the stir-crazed crowd at winter quarters to run a Calcutta sweep on the makeup of the six sledging parties that would fan out from winter quarters to explore the hinterland and coast. He spent hours in his cabin juggling names and abilities: the trio led by Frank Bickerton, the Western Party, would make use of the defunct aeroplane converted to a tractor-sledge and explore the coastal highlands west of the hut. Cecil Madigan was the clear choice to head an Eastern Coastal Party which would investigate the coastline in the opposite direction—leadership became Madigan more naturally than it did Douglas himself. He paired brute physical force with scientific expertise, choosing large, robust Frank Hurley to bolster magneticians Bob Bage and Eric Webb on an extensive man-hauling journey to the south magnetic pole; this Southern Party was to record magnetic observations en route. Smaller, lighter men in the form of Herbert Murphy, Johnny Hunter and Joe Laseron would act as the Southern Support and accompany Hurley and the magneticians as far as practicable. A second support group, the Near-Eastern Party, would assist Madigan’s trio, then undertake mapping the coastline from winter quarters east to the large glacial tongue.

  A charge of neuralgia made him wince and he toggled up the bag around his chin.

  Ludicrous to ever have imagined big Walter Hannam squeezing into a fur bag sized for the body of an Eskimo; and Hannam had seemed relieved, almost chuffed, to be left in charge of the hut and daily recordings.

  Ninnis packed away his journal and eased down into his bag, his face ragged with pain.

  ‘Your fingers still troubling you?’

  Ninnis nodded.

  ‘Try to get some sleep. We’ll look at them in the morning.’

  ‘Night, night,’ Ninnis said.

  ‘Sleep tight,’ X cooed.

  Douglas hoped it would be so, thinking how pain could scramble the unconscious mind. These last nights he and Ninnis had been taunted by dreams vivid and bizarre. Douglas’s father had appeared before him, filled with scholarly wisdom, delivering a warning that Douglas couldn’t make out, his father’s face so sad and real that when Douglas woke he searched the tent. Ninnis frequently dreamed of arriving home and being unable to stay there, of needing to return to the ice to finish his work. His latest recurring dream was of Captain Scott and his party returning from the pole, all dressed in new furs, thundering by with a vast team of dogs. Ninnis woke Douglas, shouting, ‘Hike! Hike!’ as if to spur on his own dogs. Both Ninnis and Douglas envied Mertz the way his dreams satisfied his waking cravings, replete with soufflé and mountain berry pie.

  The fifteenth of January, he had instructed each party leader, the fifteenth at the latest. Captain Davis and Aurora were expected back in the first half of January to relieve them, and even then they’d be in for a mad dash west to retrieve Frank Wild’s ancillary base before a new season’s ice hemmed them in. How far along the coast will Wild’s party be? someone asked the unanswerable question; only Providence knew if Aurora had even made it safely home last summer. If any team should be late returning, Douglas warned, God help them for he would not be answerable for his actions. They had neither ship’s coal nor surplus funds to cover delays, and the wellbeing of Wild’s party and the success of the expedition all hinged upon prompt timing. Each set of eyes in the hut—sixteen of them blue-eyed, Mertz once noted—absorbed the grim prospect of being left behind in this frozen Godless site.

  There had been no question that the sixth and final team, his own Far Eastern Sledging Party, would travel the longest and potentially most hazardous route with the dog teams and include the two dogmen to tend to them. He acquiesced to Mertz’s request that his skiing expertise could be employed to front-run the dogs—if and when the terrain allowed.

  Douglas told himself he had chosen Ninnis and Mertz for their skill with the dogs—and why not also choose a pair who worked hard and made his life easy? But in truth he chose them because he enjoyed their company and had come to care for them as brothers. He chose Ninnis and Mertz because there was no Ninnis without Mertz, no Mertz without Ninnis; they came as one inseparable unit.

  SUMMER

  SOLSTICE

  BEYOND TURNER AND MAGNETIC ISLANDS, too close now to ignore, a line of ocean rests as quietly as a lake. Two weeks ago he and Freya could have driven their bikes beyond that line; then, the sea ice stretched to the horizon.

  Chad sits in silence at the high point of the island, looking out past Freya and her camera. The adélie rookery is alive with new-born chicks that crane their beaks towards the parent at the nest. When they hear their parents call, the chicks peep beseechingly, frantic to be fed.

  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, o
r 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.