The Chilling, page 10
‘Yes,’ he said, handing out the glasses. Ignoring Kit’s sigh, he then proposed a toast. ‘To good health,’ he said, standing up and raising his glass, ‘and to fair weather for our Petrel friends. May they soon be found.’
‘Hear, hear,’ replied the group.
From his seat at the end of the table, Dustin saw Kit position her pill next to her bowl. It remained there for the entire lunch, much to his frustration. As he ploughed through his rice and lentils, he kept looking up under his brows to see if she’d taken it. Each time he spied the tablet, it made him more irritable. He mechanically shovelled the food into his mouth, spoonful after bitter spoonful.
When Kit stood up to take her bowl to the kitchen, he abruptly stood too. ‘Kit,’ he said, trying to conceal his annoyance, ‘are you going to take that?’ He gestured to the oval capsule she’d left behind.
‘Oh,’ she said, apparently surprised. ‘Of course.’ She picked it up.
‘Of course,’ echoed Dustin, mustering a fake smile.
Now, alone in the lounge area, he took a deep breath. It was just the beginning of their stay, and he was having trouble keeping his irritability in check. He worried that things were only going to get worse.
11
It would have been better, thought Kit, if Nick had been stretchered from the ship to the shore. But when the medical team considered his size and weight, and the hazards of carrying him across the ice, they abandoned all thoughts of a stretcher. Instead, he was asked to get off the Zodiac dinghy and walk across the harbour with the assistance of Dustin and Dr Sidebottom. Kit offered to meet them at the wharf in case she was needed—in case Nick collapsed and someone had to run for help, she thought.
When she arrived, the doctors were already flanking the stooped giant. As the taller of the two, Dustin took most of Nick’s weight. The doctor’s face was contorted with effort, the strain showing in his eyes. Despite the blowing gust and the cold, he was sweating.
Nick’s few belongings—some donated clothes and toiletries—were packed into a nylon gym bag lying open and exposed in the snow. Kit did her best to zip it up with gloved hands.
He looked excitedly about him, peering over Dustin’s head. His face was bathed in a euphoric light. ‘Hey, Kit!’ he yelled, struggling to make himself heard over the wind. ‘Hey, is this the ice of the bay? Is there water underneath us?’
‘Yes,’ she called back, smiling and hoisting his bag over her shoulder. ‘This is Wineglass Harbour. But you needn’t worry—the ice is pretty thick, I’m told.’ They were standing on the fast ice of the bay, a few metres from land.
‘Oh, I’m not worried.’
‘Just don’t walk on any cracks, okay?’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘Good,’ she said, ‘because if you fall in, I won’t come and rescue you.’
Nick laughed, oblivious to her seriousness.
‘We’re trained not to,’ she responded, deadpan.
When the doctors stopped to reposition Nick’s weight, she stopped with them. He beamed at her. He was resting against Dustin’s shoulder, seemingly unaware of the burden he was placing on the smaller man.
Nick reminded Kit of a drunken Elvis impersonator. His unwashed hair was slicked back extravagantly from his forehead, his large sunglasses had dipped down his nose, and his eyes were shining. ‘How are you?’ he asked her.
The wind momentarily abated, and all went quiet. He locked eyes with her, and her traitorous heart skipped a beat.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, pleased to see he’d recovered from his anguish.
‘How are the seals?’ he asked. ‘Still chipping away?’
‘Yes, still chipping, as far as I know. We’re going to see them tomorrow.’
Dustin threw her an inquisitive look. She looked down, her cheeks warming.
Once Nick felt ready, they headed to the waiting Hägglunds. It took them back to the Red Shed, where Nick would be free to wander within the confines of the main sleeping and living quarters, from the kitchen to the mess to the entertainment area, and also a little way outdoors, depending on the weather.
Kit had suggested that like all station members, Nick should be allocated light roster duties such as cleaning the floors and peeling vegetables. That way, provided he wasn’t too weak and unwell, he’d be kept occupied for the next week, until the evacuation flight arrived.
Now she accompanied him and the doctors to the door of his donga. Without seeing inside, she knew it would be like every other bedroom in the elaborate maze of the upstairs sleeping quarters: a narrow cave, with a single bed, a bookcase, a wardrobe and a desk all crammed into a space no bigger than a public toilet. The furnishings would be in blonde wood and chrome metal, and the colour scheme would be bland and relatively inoffensive—with the likely exception of the quilt cover. Hers was a landscape of paint vomit in garish green, yellow and red.
Kit deposited Nick’s half-empty bag on the ground and started to bid the men farewell.
Nick nudged her elbow and leaned down to speak to her. ‘Thanks for all your help,’ he said, flashing his charming smile. ‘I really appreciate it.’
She glanced up at him, and their eyes met. A look passed between them. It was gone in an instant, but it was definitely a look, thought Kit. She didn’t know what it meant, but she knew one thing: it made her uncomfortable.
12
Marion found it difficult to sleep with the noise of the cracking, the continual grinding and groaning of the ice beneath her. Several times in the night, she had woken in panic, the memory of Tom’s death still vivid. There was always someone on watch, but she’d scramble out of the bivvy anyway, especially if a crack sounded nearby. The irony wasn’t lost on her. They’d been stuck in pack ice on the Petrel for three weeks, praying for it to break up; now that they needed it to remain compacted, any fragmentation was looked upon with dread.
Thankfully, for almost a week they hadn’t experienced anything like the shocking blow of that day when the ice split apart. Regardless, a sense of hopelessness had spread among the crew. Since then, there had been no sign of helicopters or SAR teams despite the clearing of the fog and the release of flares. Morale was at an all-time low. No one wanted to speak to anyone anymore. In the morning, most of them stayed in their bivvies. A few wandered around with slumped shoulders or sat listlessly on the ground, their eyes dull and staring.
Curly, Marion and Thorn agreed to convene an emergency council of war around a fuel stove on the ice. Thorn had asked to meet with them because they were senior personnel and veterans of Antarctic expeditions.
They needed a longer-term plan. Their supplies were almost gone; they hadn’t been extravagant with food, but in anticipation of a speedy rescue, each person had consumed at least three small rations a day. They were also running dangerously low on fuel to light the stoves to melt snow. Soon, things would be desperate. Good hydration was essential, and regular meals had helped to keep the crew warm and energised. The effort required to light the stoves and fix a cup of tea had also kept them focused and in the moment. Now they needed to think ahead—and strategically. It was becoming clear that they might not be found for several more days or even weeks. They might not be found at all—but no one wanted to say that out loud.
Thorn had been their voyage leader on the Petrel and had remained their leader on the ice. During the evacuation, he was the one who’d barked orders to bring the bivvies, sleeping bags and supplies. A tall man with a red beanie and a black beard, he was easy to spot doing the daily rounds in the campsite and talking to despondent crew members. He oversaw the rationing of food—mainly biscuits, chocolate and pemmican, a blend of dried meat and fat—and he made sure everyone was keeping hydrated.
Marion knew that Thorn was starting to get on Curly’s nerves. As they waited for the meeting to begin, he asked, ‘Have you noticed how Thorn refers to everyone by their last names?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘what of it?’
They were seated outside on their packs, enjoying a rare moment of respite from the wind.
‘He reminds me of an engineer I used to know in the mining industry in America. He used his fists to settle arguments. Thorn’s just a bit too dictatorial for my liking.’
Marion murmured something noncommittal. She liked Thorn and got on well with him.
‘Technically,’ continued Curly, ‘he isn’t even our voyage leader anymore. When we left the Petrel, the voyage officially ended.’
‘Sure,’ said Marion, spying Thorn emerging from his shelter. ‘Here he comes. Why don’t you tell him that?’
Curly snorted, prodding at the ice with his boot.
‘Lovall, Hollow,’ Thorn greeted them.
As Marion moved over to make room, he sat next to her, placing a gloved hand on her shoulder. She pretended not to see the annoyed glance Curly flicked at him.
‘Okay,’ said Thorn, getting down to business, ‘we have to talk about the food situation. It’s clear that we need to keep moving.’ The wind picked up and lashed at their heads, underscoring his point.
Marion nodded. From the corner of her eye, she saw that Curly was clenching his fists inside his pockets. ‘I’m open to suggestions,’ she said.
Thorn cleared his throat. ‘We should keep moving along the firmer ice, along the Lars Christensen Coast,’ he said.
It occurred to her that Thorn didn’t want to give them a chance to speak—he didn’t want to hear any of their ideas. He was keen to get his own thoughts out on the table, to determine the direction of conversation. Marion knew what could happen when other people voiced their suggestions first: it tended to have a bandwagon effect in which everyone jumped on board and blocked off other possibilities. It had happened with Nick and Jason many times. The friends always stuck together, thick as thieves, and backed one another up.
A long-time colleague, Curly was adept at dealing with Nick and Jason in difficult work situations. The trick, he said, was to divide and conquer. If he needed the team to think outside the box, he would introduce an idea separately to one of them—usually to Jason, who tended to be more pliable—but make him think it was his own idea.
She was interested to see how Curly would deal with Thorn now that the other man had taken the lead.
‘Are you sure?’ countered Curly reasonably. ‘Won’t that take us too far from the Petrel? Will anyone be looking for us out along the coast? It could be risky.’
‘The risk,’ said Thorn in clipped tones, ‘is staying here.’
Curly pushed his fists deeper in his pockets and straightened his back. If they’d been standing up, Thorn would have towered over him by at least a head. But perched on the ground, they were on a level. Marion suspected that Curly was sitting up straight to make himself look bigger.
‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I am just wondering about the wisdom of straying too far from the ship.’
Thorn made a derisive noise in the back of his throat. He smiled in disbelief and shook his head.
‘What’s wrong with staying put?’ asked Marion. ‘Or even heading back to the Petrel?’
‘What isn’t wrong with it?’ Thorn started counting off a list on his fingers. ‘We don’t know precisely where the ship is, for starters. And if we try to find it, we’ll be in danger of the ice coming apart or thinning out, as it did before. In the meantime, we won’t have a reliable food source—’
‘It’s not like we’ll be trekking hundreds of miles,’ said Curly, ‘we just have to head back in the direction we came—’
‘It will be like finding a needle in a haystack.’ Thorn’s voice was mildly belligerent. ‘The compasses won’t help us if we get lost in a blizzard. We could hit a whiteout, or the sun could be hidden from us for days, and we won’t know where we are—we’ll either freeze to death or starve.’ The expression on his face was pure contempt, a look heightened by his bloodshot eyes and deathly pallor. In less than a week, he’d aged about ten years.
‘Okay, so what would you like to do then?’ said Curly, making his classic move. Marion knew they could sit there offering counter-suggestions to Thorn all day, only to have them knocked back again and again. The best way to stop the cycle was to get him to make a suggestion of his own.
With barely concealed irritation, he said, ‘We should use the compasses to keep moving along the fast ice attached to the coast.’
Marion could see that Curly was considering this option. The great thing about Curly was that he liked to weigh up every side of a proposal before proceeding. His mantra was something British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had once said: ‘quiet, calm deliberation disentangles every knot’. There would always be a solution, Curly would say—he just needed time to find it.
But time, unfortunately, was something they didn’t have. They’d already stayed put for almost a week in the hope the SAR team would return. Their food supplies were nearly gone. And Thorn now awaited a response.
‘In the Arctic,’ suggested Marion in the silence, ‘the Indigenous peoples would use fast ice for hunting and travelling. We could do the same here. We’re likely to find colonies of seals and penguins scattered along the shoreline, and we can eat them and use their blubber as oil—we’ll need both the food and the fuel.’
‘But no one will be searching for us along the coast.’ Curly looked straight at Thorn. ‘Do you want to spend the winter out on the ice? Because that’s what we’re facing.’
Thorn shut his eyes and breathed in impatiently, as if he couldn’t believe Curly was being so stupid. With his eyes closed, he said, ‘The coastline here runs towards the Mawson Coast, a couple of hundred kilometres away.’ He opened his eyes. ‘No one is coming here for us—we’re God-knows-how-many miles from the Petrel by now. If they can, they’ll be tracking that fucking lifeboat anyway.’ He gestured dramatically into the distance. ‘This way, we’ll hedge our bets. We could eventually end up at Wineglass Harbour and Macpherson. It’s better than trekking back across the bay to find the Petrel, where we’ll just end up hopelessly lost and starving, if we don’t drown first.’
‘But the weather’s been unpredictable from hour to hour,’ said Curly, ‘and from day to day. How do we know the ice will remain fast along the coast? How do we know it will be safer than staying put?’
‘I’m not suggesting it’s going to be easy. I’m just suggesting we navigate our way along the stable ice towards Macpherson, as best we can.’
‘Whatever plan we decide on, we need to put it into action as soon as possible,’ said Marion with diplomacy. ‘Now that we’re on starvation rations, in just a few days we won’t have the energy to go anywhere.’
Thorn and Curly nodded, finally agreeing about something.
‘We should go where we know the food will be,’ said Thorn.
Curly took a ragged breath. ‘All right,’ he said in resignation. ‘Let’s head for Macpherson.’
Clearly revelling in the triumph, Thorn straightened his neck and turned to Marion for approval, but she looked away. The conversation was over. She tightened the hood of her coat and struggled to her feet.
As Curly stood up too, Thorn spoke suddenly and pointed at him. ‘You’re the first one I’m eating,’ he joked.
Curly gave a short laugh. But as he walked away, Marion heard him mutter, ‘Not if I eat you first, you prick.’
13
The teleconference session with Nick’s ex-wife, Anna, was scheduled for his second night on the station. Everyone agreed that sooner was better than later. It was hoped that the face-to-face meeting would have therapeutic value—or shock value, at least—for Nick. They arranged to place the call via satellite just after dinner. With some help from the communications team, Kit set up a computer with a large screen and a portable webcam in the library.
As a formality, Dustin asked Nick to remain in his donga at first, while the station medical team—namely Dustin and Kit—spoke to Anna alone. The doctor told Nick that they wanted to prepare her, so that Nick’s complete memory loss didn’t come as a surprise. Kit knew this was disingenuous, because she’d seen Dustin’s longwinded email to Anna about the amnesia. He’d persuaded her to participate by suggesting she could be the key to her ex-husband’s recovery: Nick might be prompted to remember particular events and feelings by talking with someone who knew him well.
The true purpose of the preliminary chat with Anna was to ask some rather delicate questions about Nick’s state of mind before he came to Antarctica. Dustin was convinced that there were preexisting psychogenic reasons for the prolonged amnesia.
Kit and Dustin seated themselves in front of the monitor. They were perched on two white plastic chairs with the cluttered bookshelves of the library as a backdrop. When Anna appeared on screen, her forehead loomed large and shiny, and her eyes were huge and alien-like. She was leaning over her computer, adjusting the webcam. Kit could see down her top, where a gold necklace swung to-and-fro, and her breasts shook gently in the dark recesses of an apricot silk shirt. Her first impression was of a stylish woman with expensive taste in jewellery.
Kit cleared her throat. ‘Anna, can you hear us?’
The woman sat down and brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. ‘Yes,’ she said. The audio made her voice thin and tinny. ‘I can hear you.’
‘Hi, Anna, I’m Dustin, the medical practitioner here at Macpherson,’ he half-shouted, waving at the screen. ‘And this is Dr Kit Bitterfeld, my medical assistant.’
Feeling rather silly, Kit waved wordlessly into the webcam. They’d agreed that Dustin would lead the conversation and she’d jump in if needed.
