The Nature of Ice Read online

  Mind and memory spin with imagined outcomes. A picture of the gaping chasm in Hobart’s Tasman Bridge refracts from the ice. He sees Ma more clearly than he’s pictured her in years, her ruddy face blanched with shock, her hands clenching the wheel of her Morris as it plunged through a blackened gap that moments before was bridge.

  Splayed out before him, tumbled across the ice of the fjord, Chad makes out splashes of colour, the brilliant hue of lichen that is not lichen at all but the last of the station’s fresh oranges, brought by Freya as a treat for him. In this surreal instant, he finally understands why the taste of apricot makes him gag when they once rated as his favourite fruit. The carton would have rested on the back seat of Ma’s car, filled with fruit picked that afternoon from his grandparents’ tree. Never once in his replay has he watched the box upend as it does now, fruit by the dozen dancing on the inside windscreen like a downpour of rain.

  The channel of the Derwent River, cold and soupy dark beneath a blanket of Sunday night fog, would have folded in around her. Before, Chad has always halted his thoughts here. Part of him knows she was killed on impact, or knocked unconscious and drowned. But lurking at the edge of his vision is a ghosted image of her pawing at the window of every vehicle he’s ever driven, willing him to picture her trapped in the river alive. He feels the weight of water bearing down upon her car, rising chill and briny around her feet no matter how hard she struggled with the door or tore at the window whose broken handle his father had never bothered to repair. Beyond the shuddering thought of her drowning he feels disdain for cause and effect, for chance, providence, for his own unwitting part—a vet’s needless prescription, for pity’s sake, to safeguard his sutured leg. When his father had dug in his heels and declared Ma overanxious, that Chaddie will be fine, that he, for one, wasn’t driving an hour out to flaming Swansea for antibiotics they didn’t need and couldn’t afford, Chad had lain stock-still in his bed, in anguish at being the subject of their argument, momentarily forgetting his own painful leg.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Ma had huffed. ‘I’ll take the Morris, and I’ll make a proper job of it.’ Not the hour’s drive to Swansea but double the distance to Hobart, to prove a point.

  Dad had growled, ‘Don’t be a bloody-minded fool, Sal.’

  ‘Bloody fool yourself,’ Ma snapped back. ‘At least no one can call me a bone-idle fool.’

  Don’t go, Chad’s eyes had pleaded when she’d leaned down to kiss him goodbye.

  FREYA LIES IN A SHALLOW melt pool curdled with oil, beyond the open seam her wheels have clipped. Chad will not remember later how he lifted the bike to pull her leg free because his senses are swamped by her silence, by his own panic, by the aching cold of her skin on such a still and balmy night. He is alarmed at the limpness of her leg and checks for a break, squeezing and bending the limb without eliciting complaint. He feels a stronger wave of fright and orders, Move your toes!, which Freya does compliantly, speaking softly, I’m alright, Chad; I’m very cold, as if it were he in need of soothing. He leaves her only long enough to grab his sleeping bag and spare clothes, the medical kit buried in his pack. He peels off her sodden clothes and dresses her in his woollen shirt. He lifts her onto the sleeping bag and straps her leg as gently as he can.

  He will remember, will covet the memory, below a sky giddied with gold, of holding the bundle of her against him, too roughly perhaps, wrapping an arm to envelop her with warmth, stroking her hair, resting his hand against her icy, blemished cheek and willing her to be still.

  MIDNIGHT LIGHT SATURATES THE WALLS of Bandits Hut, varnishes the timbers of the bunks. Outside, the cry of snow petrels, inside a whirr of heat. She has missed her golden sunset, but he needs no camera to capture the night, to spool to memory the filmic quality of the room. The accident on the fjord has begun to fade, helped by the warmth of the hut, by a hot meal, by the feel of her skin as he winds a fresh bandage around her leg.

  He sits silently at the edge of the bed, studying her face, aware of her hand weighted upon his arm. She reaches up to cup his face and in her touch he understands the question asked. He presses her fingers to his lips as proof of all he feels.

  It drowns him, this want.

  Stay, she whispers, drawing him down beside her.

  Bowl of chaos

  January 1913

  TODAY WAS FINE WEATHER AND they had agreed to go on at all costs. But here they still were, cocooned inside their bags, cramped within the tent. Xavier continued to grunt and toss—sleep, delirium—the line between the body’s need for rest and failure to survive spiralling to a blur, it seemed to Douglas.

  He read back through his journal, trying to make sense of the past days.

  30 December

  Xavier off colour. We did 15 m, halting at about 9 am. He turned in—all his things very wet, chiefly on account of no burberry pants. The continuous drift does not give one a chance to dry things, and our gear is deplorable …

  Xavier’s waterproof pants and helmet were two of the many essentials on Ninnis’s sledge to be swallowed by the crevasse. Xavier wore an extra pair of under-trousers to compensate, but the wind froze his wet clothing and wicked heat from his body. Their sleeping bags were sodden and heavy from sleeping on a mattress of snow. The cold struck home as it never had before. Douglas had taken to wearing his burberries inside the bag, so wretched was the shivering that racked his malnourished body until sleep dulled the brain from feeling.

  From the start Xavier had made hard work of digesting the dog meat. When had he crawled back into the tent complaining of dysentery, gripes in his stomach? Douglas had assumed the gnawing pains were no greater than his own. But then X almost kicked over the contents of the primus without his usual sorry, sorry, instead grizzling about the dripping tent and how it was that dog meat could boil for so long and still be repulsive and far too tough to chew.

  Though nothing good could be said of the dog liver’s foul tinny taste, it provided additional substance and could be demolished in an instant—a blessed relief after endless chewing on moistureless ropes of meat. And it was unlike X to complain, puzzling to see him out of sorts.

  ‘We’ll hoist the sail tomorrow,’ Douglas said again to buoy him up, ‘try for another splendid fifteen-mile march and really make some inroads.’

  Xavier scowled. ‘Tent. Sail. Tent. Sail. We lose eleven hours yesterday putting up and putting down, boil-ups of dog and tasks for nobody’s real purpose.’

  Douglas had been completely at a loss. They had to pull together—in every sense—if they were to survive.

  31 December

  Keeping off dog meat for a day or two as both upset by it.

  ‘A new year, Xavier.’ They had toasted 1913 with carefully husbanded perks: two and a half ounces of chocolate each, a minuscule helping of beef and lard pemmican, cocoa, three-quarters of a biscuit. Scarcely a feast for a doll, it had left them hungrier than before.

  3 January

  Mertz boiled a small cocoa and had biscuit, and I had a bit of liver …

  Did 5 miles but cold wind frostbit Mertz’s fingers, and he is generally in a very bad condition. Skin coming off legs, etc—so had to camp though going good.

  Damp clothes added to the friction caused by walking and chafed their skin raw. Open sores on his fingers refused to heal. Skin shedding from their limbs and private parts. Peelings of it, and body hair, lined their underwear and socks. At one point Mertz had reached over from his bag and plucked a perfect skin cast from Douglas’s ear. He could have done the same in return.

  4 January

  Mertz in bad condition so I doctored him part of day and rested …

  Xavier’s face had aged beyond his thirty years. His skin, stark against his jet beard, bore a sickly pallor with darkened rings around the eyes—likely a mirror image of Douglas’s own. Their bodies were permanently cold and the skin around the hair follicles had pimpled like the hardened nodules of a nutmeg grater. Their alimentary systems were badly affected by short rations—Xavie
r’s worse than his own. Surely lack of sustenance and continual exposure to the weather had brought on X’s ailment.

  5 January

  I tried to get Xavier to start but he practically refused, saying it was suicide and that it much best for him to have the day in bag and dry it and get better, then do more on sunshining day.

  Douglas tried to persuade him, Just three or four miles, even if we can’t see through the drift properly. Back and forth they argued, X refusing to be swayed. Finally, We’ll rest today, Xavier. But tomorrow, and every day after that …

  Xavier nodding through a veil of shame and tears.

  6 January

  Got off 10.30, Xavier not being able to help at all. Did not raise sail though favourable breeze—surface very good and downhill. Surface slippery, so occasional falls. Quite dizzy from long stay in bags, I felt weak from want of food. To my surprise Xavier soon caved in—he went 2 miles only in long halts and refused to go further. I did my best with him—offered to pull him on the sledge, then to set sail and sail him but he refused both after trial. We camped. I think he has a fever, he does not assimilate his food …

  Xavier’s heart seemed to have gone. This morning Douglas had found him in a pitiful state. Slow, so agonisingly slow the job of easing him out of his bag to remove his trousers and clean him. Xavier had grown so feeble that the best he could do to assist was kneel doglike on his bag with trembling limbs and his head hung low.

  Rest, Xavier. Try to sleep now.

  Douglas had toggled X up in his bag to warm him but he thrashed in a strange kind of fit, needing to be held down for fear he would damage the tent.

  If they could not travel eight or ten miles each day, in a day or two they were doomed. Perhaps he could pull through on his own with the provisions at hand—but how could he possibly contemplate leaving his companion? And yet how could he abandon Paquita, lie idle and shivering in a makeshift tent—two sorry souls waiting for death? To be within a hundred miles of winter quarters and be faced with such a choice was awful.

  Today was 7 January 1913; Aurora was due at winter quarters. They were expected back on the fifteenth, the fifteenth at the latest, he had instructed the others.

  Douglas propped Xavier’s head against his chest and supported his jaw. Beef tea dribbled from the spoon. Come on, now. It will do you good. Small sips.

  Their chance was slipping away. It was not for himself that he minded, but for Paquita, his innocent girl who had no inkling of his fate. He imagined her spirit shattered after all these months of waiting, the despair of his non-return and the unanswerable how? when? She had a right to understand the fickle allure of ice that had snatched her mate away, to know the manner of her betrayal.

  Ninnis had been running alongside his sledge when he crossed the crevasse, while Mertz’s weight had been distributed across his skis, and Douglas’s own along the length of the sledge. Douglas and Xavier had talked it through for days, nights, unable to sleep, certain now that the concentration of Ninnis’s weight onto a single footstep had caused the snow bridge concealing the crevasse to collapse. Did Cherub have a sense, through his strange, recurring dreams, that he would not return?

  The chance of a search party happening upon their bodies this far out was infinitesimal. They were separated from the hut by one hundred miles and another formidable glacier. The stories of their journey on the plateau—the telling of three lives—were held inside their diaries. Unthinkable that they might also be silenced, entombed within a cap of ice.

  XAVIER WOULD DRINK NOTHING NOW. Douglas drained the tea himself and wrapped X in his arms to stem the shuddering.

  While he felt sorrow and regret for himself, it was shame that racked his conscience at the prospect of letting down all those connected with the expedition—all who had believed in him. But as he supported Xavier and stroked his hair, his shame changed shape to guilt at the vehement wish that his companion would surrender quickly to death so that he might go on.

  He prayed to God to help them both.

  OUTSIDE A RISING WIND, DRIFT eddying around the tent, the atmosphere a bowl of chaos. Xavier fitted again, his jaw clenched in the strange, inexplicable way of the dogs on the ship. Again he fouled his trousers and Douglas cleaned him with handfuls of snow. Xavier was sliding deeper into delirium, his speech incoherent.

  At eight in the evening he opened his eyes and glared unblinkingly at Douglas.

  ‘What is it, X?’

  Xavier gave a guttural cry and yanked himself to a sitting position by grabbing the tent poles. With an implausible strength he seized a leg of the wooden frame and snapped it from its apex. He struggled to escape the prison of his bag, the burberry tent slapping his face, his efforts as painful and pathetic to watch as a dog with a broken back. He flung out his arms at the tent, hit Douglas, punched at anything within his reach. Xavier moaned as he thrashed, O Yen, O Yen, over and over, the incantation to his God or his pain or whatever meaning lay within his words vying with the wind that wailed across the ice.

  Douglas held him down—until he quietens, he told himself—There, Xavier; hush, old friend, a bodyweight of sorrow pressing down like a pillow on his face.

  PAQUITA

  DELPRAT

  ‘MCGONIGAL. RIGHT ON CUE.’

  Malcolm beckons Chad into his office with his pinkie, the gesture a momentary diversion from scratching his newly trimmed beard. Freya sits at the corner of Malcolm’s desk, her injured leg propped on a chair, staring, gloomily, through a window of white. The bay, normally in panoramic view from the station leader’s office, remains obscured by driving snow.

  ‘Perhaps you can explain to your cohort here the function of an incident report.’ Malcolm turns to Freya. ‘Chad’s filed a few in his time.’

  Chad pulls up a chair beside her. ‘What’s wrong, Freya?’

  ‘What is wrong,’ Malcolm enunciates to Chad, holding up a sheet of paper like a stray sock, ‘is that here I have an incident report, signed by your partner in crime, that reads like an account of a Sunday picnic—all that’s missing is the chicken and champagne. While here,’ he grabs another page from the printer and snaps it, ‘is a dieso’s report advising that we have yet another bloody quad bike—let’s see, steering arm bent, suspension arm rooted—to add to our growing inventory of equipment under repair. The diesos have enough work on their summer program without you blokes adding to the list.’

  Chad takes a deep breath. ‘The bikes got us home.’

  ‘Not to mention our illustrious artist-in-residence here,’ Malcolm continues, unbothered by squalls hammering the windows behind his head, ‘who hobbled into my office this morning like a lame mule. What the bejesus happened out there?’

  Before Chad has a chance to speak, Freya turns to face him. ‘I told him I wasn’t paying attention.’ She looks and sounds jaded. ‘The sun was in my eyes, the lead was wider than I thought. I was going too slow to cross it and too fast to stop.’ She turns back to Malcolm and Chad guesses that she’s repeated this story a dozen times before.

  ‘She was unlucky,’ Chad says. ‘Her back tyres clipped the edge of the lead.’

  ‘The bike toppled,’ Freya says. ‘It went over and slid, and I went with it.’

  ‘What were you doing, McGonigal? Sitting back on your haunches watching the show?’

  ‘Chad was right in front of me,’ Freya lies. ‘He pulled the bike off my leg.’

  ‘Why didn’t you radio in right away?’ Malcolm looks as gruff as Chad’s old headmaster, lacking only a cane. ‘We could have got a helo out there.’

  ‘We would have,’ Chad said, ‘if the VHF hadn’t gone in the drink.’

  ‘We were so near Bandits Hut. And when we got there, I didn’t see the need to call it in.’ She turns away from Malcolm to face Chad again but she doesn’t meet his eyes. ‘It was a mistake, Chad. The accident … I wasn’t thinking properly when we were out there.’

  ‘You’re damned right on that count,’ Malcolm snaps.

  Chad feels hi
s gut tighten. He turns to Malcolm. ‘I don’t understand the problem. We went on to the hut, re-strapped Freya’s leg and elevated it. Nothing was broken. She seemed fine—’ He glances in her direction, waiting for a confirmation that was not forthcoming. ‘We stayed at Bandits overnight and the next morning Freya spoke to Charlie on the nine a.m. radio sked. Then we drove back to the station. End of story.’

  End of story, Malcolm mouths.

  ‘Freya, you did nothing wrong,’ Chad begins, but she only looks away.

  Malcolm wrinkles his brow in confusion. ‘Don’t take me for a turkey, McGonigal. Does she look fine to you? Does she?’

  She looks decidedly overcast.

  Malcolm scratches inside his thermal collar like a dog beset with fleas. ‘Synthetics. Loathe them.’ He scowls at Freya. ‘I hope you have plenty of catch-up work to fill in your time.’

  ‘Why?’ she says, an edge in her voice.

  ‘You won’t be going out again until you’re cleared by Dr Ev. She says you’ll be out of action this week and most likely next.’

  ‘No!’ Freya cries. Chad has never seen her so upset. ‘We’re due to go out with the Casas before they leave for Mawson Station. You agreed.’

  ‘I can’t help unfortunate timing,’ Malcolm pontificates, rocking in his chair. ‘Antarctica is an unforgiving place, Freya. Especially for the novice. Now, we’re all of us human, all fallible.’

  Chad shakes his head: Malcolm on a pious roll.

  ‘You had a close call this time,’ Malcolm drones on. ‘My advice is to consider this a valuable lesson for the future. If I were you—’

  ‘You’re not me, Malcolm, and I have all the valuable lessons I can stomach for now—an injured leg and your words to remind me of my inexperience and poor judgment.’ She turns back to Chad. ‘I didn’t mean this to involve you,’ she says quietly. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for any of it to happen. It was all wrong.’