Below Deck, page 18
I open my eyes, and Luciana tells me about winter’s bark, how the Yamana chewed it for its vitamins and used the leaves to brew spicy tea. How they peppered sea lion with its seeds.
We emerge onto a beach of smooth stones. Large rocks at the water’s edge are encrusted with mussels. We sit among wildflowers and wisps of grass. Martin hands out cheese sandwiches.
Behind us, the earth is uneven mounds beneath grass, like a green sheet laid over sleeping bodies. Martin tells us that if you dug down into the mounds, you’d dig through thousands of years of history. ‘Fish bones, mussels, clothing …’ he says, explaining how the Yamana would heap their leftovers in piles that then built up over the centuries.
I touch my hand to the earth and imagine the stories buried beneath.
‘The Yamana were a water people, weren’t they?’ Joan says.
‘Yes,’ says Luciana, ‘they hunted on the channel in canoes, lighting fires in the boats to keep warm while they caught sea lions in nets made of kelp.’
‘What happened to them?’ I say, though, knowing the truth of the dead trees in the valleys, there is a weight deep inside me, a sad knowing before Luciana even answers.
‘Some have survived, but many were wiped out by the Europeans,’ she says, gazing out across the channel.
I think of Joan’s comment about the Louvre. This is our history too.
‘I often try to imagine myself here a thousand years ago,’ Martin says.
I close my eyes, imagining forests of kelp and sea bugs, spiders and crabs.
‘It makes me sad,’ Luciana says, ‘to know how much is missing.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘And scared for the future.’
Martin finishes his sandwich and goes over to a nearby bush, picking off a handful of berries. He passes one to me. ‘There is a saying that if you eat one of these berries, you have to come back to the island.’
I take one and pop it in my mouth. It’s as sweet as it is sour.
At the end of the trail, there is a lonesome post office, with a sign reading the last post office at the end of the world. I buy a postcard and write:
Dear Mac,
You wouldn’t believe the colours I’ve seen.
Tomorrow, Antarctica!
All my love,
Oli
snow
The gangway onto the Sea Spirit is wobbly. Or I am wobbly. Or both.
A member of the crew who is welcoming people aboard notices my hesitancy. ‘First time at sea?’
‘Um …’
‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘You’ll have your sea legs in no time!’
‘Hopefully,’ I say, and step aboard, feeling the ship lurch beneath me. The movement, back and forth, is tender. Both gentle and painful.
I’m shown to my cabin. Its walls are made of dark wood with smooth varnish. I flop back onto the bed as an announcement comes on over the speaker calling all passengers into the main cabin for a safety briefing.
In the main cabin, everyone takes a seat in armchairs that are bolted to the floor. This ship is made for big waves.
The woman who welcomed me aboard walks up to the front of the room and introduces herself as Salma, the expedition leader. She’s tall with broad shoulders and long black hair. There is something about her that makes me feel safe; it’s not her size, but the way she speaks about the Drake Passage. She has an acute awareness of the ocean’s unknowability that instantly reminds me of Mac.
As she runs through the weather forecast, a woman sits down in the chair beside me, whispering an apology to Salma for her tardiness.
Salma smiles and introduces the latecomer. ‘Everybody, this is Brooke, she’s our resident glaciologist.’ She then goes on to introduce the rest of the crew.
After the initial briefing is over, members of the crew hand out life jackets.
Brooke turns to me. ‘Have we met?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘You look wildly familiar. Are you famous?’
‘Not at all,’ I say, laughing. And then she laughs too, and with the curve of her smile, a scar appears. It stretches from the edge of her lip to the corner of her eye. I tilt my head and ask, ‘Are you?’, because in the crease of skin, in the depth of her laugh, I too find something familiar.
Brooke shakes her head. ‘Sometimes, we just know, right?’
I think of Maggie. How meeting her felt more like a returning. Two rivers meeting, flowing from the same spring.
I extend my hand. ‘My name’s Oli.’
Brooke doesn’t shake my hand. She leans across and hugs me. And I have this strange feeling that we’ve been here before.
When the briefing is over, Brooke invites me to the bar for a drink.
‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I’m exhausted.’ I’m playing nervously with a ring on my finger. My hands are shaking.
Perhaps she notices, because she asks, ‘Have you been at sea before?’
‘Not for a while.’
‘You anxious?’
‘Just worried I’ll get seasick,’ I lie, and I think she can tell, but she doesn’t push me further.
‘Rest up,’ she says.
I smile. ‘Yeah, see you round.’
From the porthole in my cabin, I watch rigid mountain peaks soften into smooth, sloping hills, the earth unravelling into the sea, until land is a mere smudge on the horizon. And the sea is all around me. Opening out. Closing in.
I climb into bed, my legs trembling. Dinner is called, but I can’t move.
I pull the blankets up to my neck and squeeze my eyes shut, but all I see is ocean. And it’s suffocating. Because the weight of the sea is oppressive. I feel it everywhere, like I’m on the ocean floor. In ocean mud. Wrapped in coils of seaweed. Tied up. Blue-bound. Buried in an underwater cemetery. My cries silenced by a water so vast I feel it will take centuries for my words to reach the surface.
I roll over and turn on my bedside lamp. Finding my purse, I pull out the sleeping pills my doctor prescribed for the plane. I go to the bathroom, fill a glass and swallow the pill with a mouthful of water. Shuffling back across the room, I get into bed and lie down on my back. Staring at the ceiling, I wait for the pill to draw my eyelids down. For it all to empty out.
Hours later, I wake with beads of sweat strung around me like a necklace of pearls. I sit upright and wipe the sweat from between my breasts with my nightshirt. It’s awfully hot in here. I need air. Real air. Night air.
I switch on the lamp and get up, pulling on my thermal stockings and snow pants, my thermal top, fleece and down jacket. I put on my gloves, snow socks, beanie and hiking boots. Lastly, I wrap a scarf around my neck.
I’m burning up.
He was in my dream.
Four years later, and he was in my dream with the pungency of fish guts raining down from the heavens.
He was in my dream the way he was in me. Unbearably. Then, now, forever? Cum dripping down my thighs.
He pulled out, but he never left. That’s what it is. That’s what kills us. It’s the incessant lingering, the hanging on, so that in still and silent moments, I feel him. When I’m stopped at a traffic light. Or in the pause before the shower turns on, waiting to feel something else. I feel him inside me, still there, spreading himself, spreading himself wide red, making himself big. And there’s an expanding inside me, an expanding like a pipe is pumping air into my lungs so that they fill with someone else’s breath, filling, filling, my ribs pulling apart. Skin stretching. Skin tearing. Blood and cum. Someone else’s breath in me, breathing for me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.
I scramble up the stairs to the upper deck, push through the door, burst out into darkness.
We choose to breathe, don’t we?
I stumble, roll my ankle, trip, hit the deck with a slam that echoes through bone, a slam that makes me feel alive. I clamber to my feet, grip the handrail; drag myself along the starboard deck to the bow of the ship. I seize the railing with both hands as the boat sails over a peak in the swell, surfs down the back of it, smashes into the oncoming wave, sending sea spray flying like a flock of silver birds in a frenzy. The sky is pressing down, leaning in on me. The ship lifts on another wave, and the sky seems so close I think I might puncture it, burst through the skin of the night, disappear into the beyond.
The ship shivers. Surfs down. Slams into him. He’s here. He’s always here. He stalks me. Still. In the sanctuary of dreaming. He stalks me.
I cling to the rail, blood pulsing, my knuckles white. The night is wet velvet. I inhale. The air cuts my lungs, slices open flesh.
The boat lifts, surfs down, slams. My body is thrust against the rail, and out of me, in the darkness, comes something animal, something feral. I scream.
I scream not in the way the damsel in distress screams from the tower. I scream the way tectonic plates tear apart on the ocean floor, silt and sand and cracked rock. Lava spewing from the abyss. Hot lava spewing from me. I roar.
Feel myself split open. Flesh cleaved apart. Silt and sand and cracked rock. Lava bubbles up. He bubbles up. I ROAR. The sound rips open my throat. He’s scratching, clawing, still holding on.
And I realise. Here I am. I’ve been here. Tied up, blue-bound, for years. On the ocean floor. In ocean mud. But now, the ocean floor is moving. Lava pours. It courses through cold purple caves, spreads, I am all spreading. I am moving. I am rising.
I scream, ‘HERE I AM. I AM HERE!’ And in that instant, I feel him explode through the surface. Hot red sprays across black night.
‘HEAR ME!’ I scream. ‘HEAR ME NOW!’
Tears are pouring hot pink. Here I am. I am alive. I am open. I am here. I wipe my eyes on the back of my sleeve. Here I am. I survived. I survived!
I breathe in and the night sky fills me up with seashells and salt.
Sick yellow flowers into stars. Here I am. I choose to breathe.
glacier
I run into Brooke on the staircase on my way to breakfast.
‘Good morning,’ I say.
‘Great morning,’ she replies, and I laugh.
Brooke looks at me quizzically. ‘You look different.’
‘In what way?’ I ask.
‘Like you’ve got your sea legs back.’
My smile pinches my cheeks. ‘Yeah. I guess I have.’
She pats me on the back. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘I’m hungry.’
Two of the artists I exhibited at WOMXN in London, Holly and Vivienne, are on the expedition. We find them at the breakfast bar and I introduce them both to Brooke. Then we all join Joan at a table.
Over breakfast, we talk about where Holly and Vivienne have been since the show. Holly has been in New York, Vivienne in Paris.
‘I never thanked you properly,’ says Vivienne. ‘After the show, people started to take my work a lot more seriously.’
I feel myself swelling with pride. ‘So they should,’ I say.
‘I still struggle to get people to take my work seriously,’ Brooke says, laughing. ‘Especially men. Especially men I’m dating.’
‘Ha!’ says Joan. ‘I know the feeling.’
‘They’re probably intimidated,’ Holly tells her.
‘With me it’s the opposite,’ says Brooke. ‘They all try to make me smaller. One guy I went out with referred to my DPhil at Oxford as my “little project”. Another used to say I worked with “ice and stuff”.’
Holly says, ‘My last boyfriend asked when I was going to get a real job!’
And we all crack up.
‘Well,’ says Brooke, ‘I realised down here, standing at the foot of a glacier bigger than they could ever imagine, that I’m a fucking superstar.’
‘Hear, hear!’ says Joan, raising her glass of orange juice.
‘And you know what?’ says Brooke. ‘I fucking love my life. I don’t need to be with someone unless they add to it.’ Her smile is wider than the sky. ‘I’m not afraid of the risk of being woman.’
And to that, we all clink glasses.
Later, those of us not affected by seasickness gather in the main cabin for games of cards. We play Shithead and I laugh until my sides are sore. But it feels good, this ache. Because it’s born out of something unashamedly honest. And I don’t care that I suck at this game, because I feel like I’ve won, either way.
At lunch, Salma announces that we’re halfway to Antarctica, but adds that a growing swell is likely to slow us down.
‘The Southern Ocean,’ she says, ‘is a great place to learn patience.’
When we wake on our third day, the swells that peaked overnight are slowly dying. The boat is steadying. Salma gathers everyone in the main cabin for the morning’s announcements. She tells us we’re nearing the peninsula and says there’ll be a prize for the first person to spot an iceberg.
‘Congratulations, everyone, for surviving the Drake Passage!’ she says and we all cheer loudly.
At breakfast, I learn that one of the chefs, Alex, is Australian and has a tub of Vegemite in the kitchen. I spread it over my toast for the first time in years, grinning like a child.
Brooke finds me making a coffee. ‘It’s safe to go outside,’ she says. ‘The swell’s dropped off enough.’
‘Should we eat brekkie on deck?’
‘You read my mind.’
I fold my toast up in a napkin and take my coffee back to my room, where I rug up. I haven’t been outside since we entered the Drake Passage, and now that we’re much further south the air is shocking. It’s a cold that completely consumes. Like falling in love. Total and unapologetic.
Brooke meets me on deck, and we walk together up to the bow.
‘Hey!’ someone calls out.
We look up to the bridge to see a woman in uniform waving.
‘Who’s that?’ I ask Brooke.
‘That’s our captain, Georgia—she’s a weapon,’ Brooke says, and I laugh.
A moment later, an albatross appears above the starboard deck. I tap Brooke on the shoulder, ‘Look! Look!’
‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ Brooke says as the bird soars across the bow of the boat in front of us, wings stretched out wide, a smooth shadow flying over the deck. ‘She’s young,’ Brooke says. ‘She’ll grow to be twice that size.’
‘Incredible,’ I whisper, thinking of Mac. And then. Of Maggie and Coco. Of another sea in another time. Flashing before me. Flooding back. A memory so palpable, I feel I could reach out and touch them. Hold their hands.
I think of Robynne. Home, here, in Antarctica. And I can hear myself asking Mac, all those years ago, on the Sea Rose, ‘Do you ever wonder what the point was?’
‘The point,’ he’d told me, ‘was that she lived.’
Brooke grabs my arm, and I’m drawn back into the present. ‘Oli!’ she says. ‘Look! Over there!’
Looking in the direction in which she is pointing, I see it. Our first iceberg. A bold white block on the horizon. We run into the main cabin to let the others know.
Salma is by the stairs.
‘Iceberg!’ I shout. ‘Iceberg!’
Brooke laughs. ‘Don’t shout that! Haven’t you seen Titanic?’
Our first landing is at Half Moon Island, a crescent-shaped sliver of rock.
Before we disembark the ship, we have to vacuum all our clothing to remove any trace of flora from South America, and wash our expedition boots in a quarantined room. I’m wearing so many layers, I seem to waddle, not walk. ‘Like a penguin,’ says Brooke.
We climb down off the stern deck into inflatable boats called zodiacs. In my boat are Salma, Brooke, Vivienne, Holly, Joan and Alice, a sculptor and textiles artist from Australia. She has a head of thick red hair that makes me think I’m among Vikings. Fearless women, braving the sea at the end of the earth.
When we land on the beach, Brooke points out an old wooden boat, shipwrecked at the end of the island.
I imagine the men who landed here more than a hundred years ago. Ghosts climbing out of the boat. Footsteps on the moon, this cragged half.
Brooke helps me out of the boat. Waves lapping at the shore, like gentle kisses in the middle of the night. Smooth pebbles, rounded and softened by this intimacy.
‘A real penguin!’ Brooke says, pointing to a cluster of penguins up on the ridge above the beach. ‘They’re chinstrap penguins. Look at their faces—it’s like they’re wearing hats with little straps around their chins.’
Vivienne climbs out next, holding her camera high to save it from being splashed by a wave. ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘They’re adorable!’
I help the others out, then we push the zodiac off the beach so Salma can return to the ship for another group.
The sky is wide open. Clear as crystal. I remember how, at dinner, Salma had said, ‘Antarctica is the lungs of the planet.’ I breathe into it. Into the sky. Feel the entire world flowing through me.
We wander to the end of the island, where a huge cliff face juts out vertically from the earth. Rounding it, I gaze up, feel a wave of awe wash over me. The cliff face is blackened, as if charred, with tendrils of orange lichen rising up like tongues of fire. Around its base, sea lions lounge, blending in so well with the landscape that Vivienne almost walks into one. It rears its head, eyeing her. She takes a step back, saying, ‘Sorry, hon. You do you …’ and the rest of us burst into laughter.
Back on the pebbly beach, I notice, all along the shoreline, are strange jelly-like creatures, each dotted with a blood red spot. ‘What are they?’ I ask Brooke.
‘They usually live in the waters around South America, but because the water is getting warmer here, they’re all coming south.’
Holly asks, ‘Is that a bad thing?’
‘Yeah,’ says Brooke, crouching down for a closer inspection. ‘They eat the same plankton as the krill. Which means that, for the first time, the krill are having to compete for their food source.’
‘So there’ll be less krill?’
Brooke nods. ‘Exactly—and everything here relies on krill.’
Overnight, we sail from the South Shetlands archipelago down to the Antarctic Peninsula. I wake to Salma’s voice over the loudspeaker giving the weather report and mapping out the day’s activities, starting with kayaking after breakfast. There’s a knock at my door.
