The Chilling, page 21
He also knew that there was no use trying to fool himself—the onslaught of his past was waiting for him.
•
Once he’d settled at Macpherson, something shifted. To cope with the uncertainty, he’d busily gathered information and filed it away. He did so in the hope that, little by little, his former self would emerge, like a stick figure in a Heilbronner Test. To begin with, he would have only a few branches, not the whole tree. But then the rest would appear and he’d have a complete picture. In his conversations with others, he used those branches as temporary lifelines. He stuck fast to what he knew in the here and now, and filled in the blanks with humour and wordplay. He kept his hands busy and made himself useful. It was like the doc had said: he knew how to walk through a door and make a coffee. So he ventured outside, he mixed drinks, he did the dishes, he fetched ice, he played games, he went for a drive, he helped at the bar.
And, of course, he sought out Kit, whenever he could.
There weren’t many opportunities to talk to her; she was either out in the field or in the surgery. But he looked forward to seeing her at mealtimes. Amid the din and chatter, he’d study her from across the table. She’d be talking with Sally, and her eyes would crinkle when she laughed. With others, she was quiet and reserved, but with her friend, she always seemed happy and at ease.
Before the meeting with Anna, he’d asked Kit in the hallway, ‘Do you think she’ll like me?’ He was fishing, of course—he couldn’t help himself. He was really asking: what did Kit think of him? Was he the kind of man she might like? It mattered to him.
Later, she’d unnerved him by speaking his own thoughts: you should remember by now. She was right. He was not suffering from a brain injury, he’d had time to rest and recuperate, and he was physically strong. The prolonged memory loss bothered him as much as it bothered her. There’d been a few fragmented thoughts—vague and shadowy images—that had flitted across the surface of his mind. There’d also been flashes of negative emotion: anger, fear, resentment, regret, and something like guilt … or shame. More than once, it had occurred to him that his own mind was protecting itself: it didn’t want to know who he was.
Now that the whole picture had emerged, he wanted to shove it back down. Now he knew for certain: he was not the kind of man Kit would like.
His first instinct had been to get away. With surprising ease, he logged his plans, commandeered a Hägg and headed out to the Ranges, where he spent the night alone.
He had consumed almost a whole piece of paper and was admiring the spitballs on the dash, when he heard the sewing-machine engine of a quad. He cocked his head with a frown and peered out into the void.
Someone was coming.
31
As Kit navigated the route to the Ranges, towering wind scours curled around her quad like surf waves about to crash. The arching walls cast dark blue shadows over the ground, so that she had to look even more carefully for slots—crevasses covered by only a thin layer of snow. She hoped that she wouldn’t see any large holes. She was following a reasonably safe route marked out by steel drums and moraine lines, the rocks at the edge of glaciers; she was also using a hard-copy map and a GPS. But she was alone, and she didn’t want to take any chances.
When she arrived at South Mascot, it was late in the afternoon and getting close to twilight. The white-brown peaks glowed and glittered in the light of the setting sun. She knew she wasn’t far from Nick’s last location, so she stopped the quad to get her bearings. Easing off her goggles and her blizz mask, she let the cold air burn at her cheeks and throat. Despite the pain, she was relieved to be free from the suffocating mask.
As she pulled the map from her pack, a sudden wind gust blew it out of her gloved hands and off over the ice. ‘Fuckin’ hell!’ She looked disconsolately after the flapping piece of paper, wondering if it was worth the effort of retrieval. It would probably be blown about Antarctica for the next two hundred years. She felt bad about that, but her legs and feet were heavy and frozen from the journey.
A laconic voice called from behind her. ‘What the ice gets, the ice keeps.’
Kit spun around, and there was Nick, tall and dark against the glowing apricot horizon. Her heart skipped a beat. He was grinning widely at her.
Of course, he would have heard her coming. He must have seen her quad from on high and skied down to greet her. He was dressed in a red freezer suit, his goggles pulled up, leaning casually against his ski poles.
Kit ignored the remark and wasted no time with polite greetings. ‘Shouldn’t eat 6753 and 6247,’ she said. ‘That would be sixty-seven degrees fifty-three minutes south, wouldn’t it? And sixty-two degrees forty-seven minutes east, yes? The South Mascot Ranges.’ She gestured at the surrounding peaks.
His smile dimmed, and he nodded.
In primary school, Kit had been taught a popular memory trick for the points on a compass: ‘never eat soggy Weet-Bix’. It had helped her to remember north, east, south and west in the right order. But only when she’d seen the coordinates on her laptop screen did she realise the significance of the handwritten note in Nick’s pocket. ‘Never eat’ had been misremembered as ‘shouldn’t eat’, or south-east. He didn’t have a food allergy. The note was a reminder of coordinates—for this location.
‘So why are you here?’ she asked, with a hint of impatience. ‘What have you remembered about this place?’
Nick looked up at the sky. ‘It’s going to be too dark soon—we better get to camp,’ he said, gearing up to ski further down the slope. ‘I’ll explain there.’ He headed away from her. ‘I’ve made us dinner,’ he called over his shoulder.
Kit was ambivalent. No one knew where she was, she’d lost her map, and now she was alone with Nick in the wilderness. What on earth was she thinking?
She’d wanted to know why the coordinates were so important to him. She’d wanted to know what he remembered, and her curiosity had gotten the better of her. She hadn’t thought about what would happen once she found him.
As a precaution, she pulled the radio out of her pack and called in to base. ‘This is Kit. Prudence, do you read me?’ She waited, but only white noise came through the speaker. She pressed the button again. ‘This is Kit … Is anyone there?’ Still, there was no response. In frustration, she threw the device back into her pack.
Casting a rueful glance at the darkening sky, she followed Nick down the slope.
•
Dinner, as it turned out, consisted of a ration pack: a meagre collection of freeze-dried meats and out-of-date chocolates from the Hägg. The meat tasted like salty smoked bread, and the chocolates were rock-hard and barely sweet. When Kit asked why they were eating emergency supplies, Nick said that after one night he was already sick of two-minute noodles. They ate in silence while watching the mist swirl about them in the sky behind the mountain peaks. His tent was set up in an area relatively protected from the wind, but it still flapped manically whenever a breeze passed through. Once it became too cold, they crawled inside and lay in companionable silence, trussed up in their sleeping bags in the dark.
After a while, Nick spoke. ‘I’ve been here before, you know.’
‘I gathered that.’ Kit burrowed deeper into her bag, her feet painfully numb.
‘It came back to me, after the encounter with Skelly. It was like remembering a previous life or something—a previous incarnation. I was here three years ago, the last time I was stationed at Macpherson. I was with my workmate Jason Weathers and another guy, Curly Hollow, our team leader. We were taking ice core samples to estimate fluctuations in snowfall over the past thousand years or so.’ He hesitated, and for a while Kit could hear his breath coming in halting rasps in the darkness. ‘Except we weren’t just taking core samples. We were also being paid to do a survey for an American oil drilling company—well paid, too, I should add.’
‘An oil drilling survey?’ asked Kit, frowning. ‘Doesn’t that contravene the Madrid Protocol?’ The protocol expressly forbade any Antarctic activities related to mineral resources, other than for scientific purposes.
‘Sure!’ He sounded a little too cheerful. ‘If you don’t have the right environmental approvals, then of course it violates the protocol. But you know that there are ways around that, right? If anyone asked, we were part of a geological science program, not a commercial mineral exploration. The Antarctic Division didn’t know anything about it. The company didn’t want to attract an international outcry, especially after all the flak the Russians copped with Lake Vostok.’ Kit recalled that some scientists had opposed the Russian drilling project because it could contaminate the lake. ‘The company instructed us to fly under the radar.’ He laughed bitterly, then spoke with remorse. ‘Shit, it was so stupid to get involved … I can see that now.’ He sighed. His sleeping bag rustled as he turned to face Kit. ‘But I needed the cash, I needed a break,’ he said. ‘I had a new wife—I couldn’t keep leaving her alone for months on end. We were drifting apart even before I left for the winter. I just needed a break.’ He took a deep breath, and she felt a touch of sympathy as she recalled Anna on the small screen in her elegant shirt and gold jewellery.
‘You wanted to save your marriage,’ she said softly.
‘Yes, things were pretty grim between us. We’d planned to start a family, but we had no support—my parents were dead, hers were overseas—and my job kept taking me away. I wanted to change things, to keep us together.’
‘I get that.’ She thought of her failed attempts to have a baby with Elliot. ‘Sometimes, you can be so consumed by a goal, you’ll do anything to make it happen; it can blind you to reality.’
He murmured in agreement. ‘I learnt that the hard way. I only made things worse in the end.’ She could hear the regret like a hollow rattle in his chest.
‘It must have been painful to retrace those memories.’ She paused for a moment, choosing her words with care. ‘But if you can remember everything … what happened on board the Petrel? Where’s the crew?’
He snapped out of his reverie. ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember what happened on the ship. I remember arguing with Jason on deck. But everything else is just blank.’
‘What were you arguing about?’
He gave a short, sharp laugh. ‘That’s the part I wish I hadn’t remembered.’
There was a long silence. Now it was Kit’s turn to twist around and face him. In the dim grey light, she could almost make out his features, the gleaming of his eyes and the whiteness of his teeth. But his expression was cloaked in shadow.
‘We were near here, maybe five kilometres or so north,’ he said. ‘We were in the planning stages of setting up a borehole in a subglacial lake beneath the ice sheet. It was the site the drilling company had designated for us, based on some aerial radar surveys they’d done. We had just got started for the day, but the weather was crap. A fog was coming in, visibility was extremely poor, and the wind was wearing us down. We were about to pack it in when we got a radio call. It was a bad signal—we could hardly make out anything at first—but we knew it was a mayday call with coordinates. Someone was in trouble.
‘Later we discovered a British Antarctic survey plane had gone down with five people on board. At the time, though, it was just one man’s panicked voice over the radio. He said, “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is Twin Otter something-or-other. We are lost in a whiteout, and our instruments are malfunctioning.” He gave their last known position as a few kilometres south-east of the Ranges. We responded, but we never got a response back—just complete silence.
‘After a while, Curly turned off the radio. Jason went to relay it in, but Curly grabbed the radio out of his hand. He didn’t want Jason to contact the authorities. He didn’t want to draw attention to the drilling site. The company had instructed us not to tell anyone our exact location or to discuss our work with anyone—our payday depended on it, you know. Curly argued that the aircraft’s emergency beacon would have gone off, alerting the Macpherson and Davis crews of its GPS location. It was only afterwards that we discovered the heavy landing must have destroyed the beacon, so nobody knew where they were.
‘Jason and I argued with Curly. As a compromise, we decided to Hägg out to the location and offer first aid if we could. It wasn’t hard to spot the plane—it had left an oil streak about a kilometre wide. The site was a mess of twisted metal buried in snow. We searched the site but couldn’t find any survivors.’ He took a deep shuddering breath.
Kit could see why he’d wanted to forget about it—Dustin’s psychogenic amnesia theory now sounded rather plausible. ‘What happened then? What did you do?’
There was some shuffling and rustling, as Nick changed position onto his back. It was as if he’d forgotten Kit was in the tent with him, just as he’d forgotten her in the hallway. He was reliving the events in his head. ‘That night,’ he said, ‘we agreed that we’d never tell anyone what we’d seen and heard. You have to remember—’ he added hastily ‘—we thought a SAR team would respond to the beacon. We didn’t realise that the wreckage wouldn’t be found.’
‘Still hasn’t been found,’ murmured Kit. She recalled Alessandra’s discussing the lost Brits at their first meal on base.
‘We wanted to get the ground survey done, otherwise it would’ve all been for nothing. We would have gone there and risked our reputations for nothing. And you have to remember, the Brits were dead. There was nothing anyone could do for them. They were going to stay dead whether we told the world we’d seen them or not. Over the next few days, while we were getting the work done for the company, it hung over our heads. I kept seeing the crash site in my mind, and I was worried someone might have been alive and we’d missed them. But Curly and Jason kept saying there was nothing more we could have done.’
‘But what about later, Nick?’ asked Kit. ‘When you came back and heard that the plane was reported missing, why didn’t you tell someone then? Why didn’t you mention you had the coordinates?’
He rolled over, turning his back to her.
She sat up in her bag and stared at his shadowy outline. Then she touched his shoulder, pushing him gently. ‘Nick?’
He remained silent and motionless for a while, then said, ‘I wish I had. It pretty much destroyed my mind—it destroyed my life.’
Kit pulled her hand away. ‘And what about the British families? Weren’t their lives destroyed too, by the not-knowing, the anguish and despair of waiting to hear news of their loved ones?’
He turned to face her again in the semi-darkness. ‘You think I don’t still feel guilty about that? When it all came back to me, it was like stepping out of a warm room into a hailstorm of guilt and shame. It was something Skelly said—he asked me about Jason. They used to hang out and smoke dope together in Hobart. He asked me how Jason was going … Skelly just assumed I’d remember him, God knows why. It was such a random question, but it did the trick. I remembered our last argument on the Petrel. Jason was so consumed by rage, I barely recognised him. He thought I was going to destroy his reputation, that he would never work again. He threatened me—he told me …’ Nick hesitated and took a deep breath. ‘That was why I had to come here, to the Ranges. It seemed like the solution to everything. I couldn’t mention anything before, because it wasn’t just my career and reputation I was putting on the line, it was also Jason’s and Curly’s. But I thought if I just came here and “stumbled across” the plane wreckage, I could report it—finally. Three years too late, of course. But hey, better late than never.’
‘And have you found the crash site?’
‘Some of it. I’ll take you there—if you want to see it.’
At first, Kit didn’t know how to respond.
After a while, Nick bunkered down in his bag and placed the sleeping mask over his face. They’d spent the entire night talking, and it would soon be morning.
She made up her mind. ‘I want to see the wreckage. Take me there. Then we can report it together.’
•
They awoke at first light and followed the moraine lines a little further to the south. On their way through the snowfields on foot, they made quick but careful progress. As a precaution, they were roped together, with about fifteen metres or so of line between them. The area was pitted with crevasses, most of them small to medium-sized but some as cavernous as backyard swimming pools.
When they came to the spot, Nick pointed without saying anything. Kit was surprised to see obvious wreckage wedged deep into a small crevasse a few metres away. The fuselage and one grey wing were still visible, and a few numbers could be read at the side. ‘I’m amazed a blizzard hasn’t blown it apart,’ she said.
‘Oh, it’s definitely moved over the years. And of course … the bodies aren’t here anymore. I think the skuas got them.’ He looked off into the distance.
They moved nearer. Up close, Kit noticed that the paintwork was scratched and the tail section was missing, but otherwise the fuselage was well-preserved; its half-submerged position in the crevasse had protected it. The sharp edges of metalwork, where a wing had been torn off, gleamed like new in the sunlight. There were even a few shards of glass in the windows.
Kit rested her ice-axe under one arm, pulled off her top layer of gloves and removed the lens cap from her digital camera. She started snapping pictures.
‘There’s a bit more over there.’ Nick indicated a spot nested in a ridge of wind-sculpted snow known as sastrugi.
Peering over, she could see something grey sticking out only a few metres away. She sidestepped across the carved ridge, looking carefully at the ground. Then she came to a sagging patch of snow that was slightly different in colour and texture from the rest. There was a fine crack, no thicker than a pencil, down the side.
