Cold Earth, page 1
COLD
EARTH
SARAH MOSS
For Kathy, with thanks.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
NINA
RUTH
JIM
CATRIONA
YIANNI
BEN
NINA
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Copyright
NINA
I couldn’t sleep, the first night here. It was partly excitement, the relief of finally being in Greenland, and partly the light. I think I’d expected midnight sun to be obviously exotic, but it’s only slightly different, as if the sun has looked away, and you know what I’m like about sleeping in the day. It felt as if I ought to get up and do some work. I lay there, hot in my sleeping bag, eyes prickling as if I’d got sand in them, and stared at the tent until it seemed to stare back. You were right, I should have got round to a trial run in the park. It’s not as easy as it ought to be, putting up tents. The sides looked increasingly lop-sided as the night wore on. I did check for stones before I spread the groundsheet, but the longer I lay there the more stones I seemed to be lying on, and after a while it was clear to me that one of them had a long straight edge and was therefore man-made and in all probability a gravestone. I tried not to think about it. I closed my eyes and counted my breathing, remembering the voice of that Scottish woman on the relaxation tape. Let your fingers soften. Feel your wrists loosen. Shame she sounds like a headmistress moonlighting as a phone-sex worker. Let the tension flow out of your shoulders.
It takes a long time to set fire to a church. Their voices come up the valley in the dark, sniggering and swearing like schoolboys. The stones will never burn, and the turf roof takes a while to dry out, but at last something begins to crackle and pale smoke rises in the dark sky. The men holler and leap as the windows glow orange and the dancing light shows twisted shapes on the ground between the church and the river. A cry echoes over the water from the waiting ship. The last few deaths were not quick or easy. I shiver, huddled on damp turf behind a rock, and try not to think about what will happen to the women on board when the sailors return to the boat. Screams carry a long way across the quiet sea.
I sat up, the tension flowing back. Sometimes it’s better to be stressed and awake. Reality is bad enough without having to bear unearthly presences as well, though the headlines I saw at Heathrow open the contested border between one’s worst imaginings and les actualités. It’s usually a mistake to think about the news, I know, but worse when travelling, and a particularly bad idea to think about people you love and the news at the same time when you’re nowhere near either of them. There’s something about dislocation that makes the news seem horribly probable in a way that it doesn’t at home. I want to admit now that I don’t really like travelling. I never have. I’ve been pretending to be brave and sophisticated these last four years, but honestly a cottage in Cornwall, by train to avoid possible pile-ups on the M4, is probably about as far as I’d go if left to myself. Which I do not wish to be.
I do like being a well-travelled person. It sort of makes all those trips worthwhile, the status, and I know I’m good at planning, but in fact I’ve always wished that meticulous organisation would displace the obligation actually to go. Maybe I should work for one of those bespoke travel agencies with the art nouveau fonts, putting together exquisite tours for people untrammelled by cost. I always worry most the night before going to America. I like the idea of America, of people who are able to entertain the possibility that strangers might be worth talking to and that there are circumstances in which one might reasonably wish to order lunch in a restaurant after 1.30 pm, but with hours to go before take-off the dark side of freedom becomes apparent. I’ve seriously thought about hijacking planes after changing my mind over the Atlantic. Officer, there’s been a terrible misunderstanding. Take me home. Do you know how many serial killers they have roaming the US at any given moment, looking for random strangers such as lost Englishwomen whose partners are busy in some gallery on whom to perpetrate acts of arbitrary violence? Do you know how many European tourists have been shot by American householders for coming to the door to ask directions? Not to mention drive-by shootings. It’s insane to risk a perfectly well-ordered life for some whim like going to America. I always plan to like the hotels, bathrooms sanitised for my protection and lots of clean sheets, but a paper banner saying something is ‘sanitised’ doesn’t mean it’s clean. How much effort would you put into a bathroom that’s going to be used by people you never see? And in the South it’s hopeless, I simply couldn’t make myself understood. Not even in French. I was too ashamed to tell you that one day I got faint with hunger in that town outside Atlanta because I couldn’t identify a shop selling food and all attempts to communicate with waiters ended in mutual incomprehension and painful embarrassment. I gave up and spent the day lying on the bed rationing the last of the jelly beans and reading Daniel Deronda. I did better in Greece with no Greek.
I’ve been happier in Europe but not much. I liked the food, but they kill people on purpose quite often in Corsica, and I worried about bombs all the time in restaurants. Italian roads are dangerous, the Swiss have almost as many guns as the Georgians and even the Danes are given to drink-driving. The real reason I wouldn’t go to Russia was the horror of making a fool of myself in a place where I can’t even read the alphabet, and I applied for that conference in Rome after you planned the trip to Japan. I am sorry. The only place I really enjoyed was Iceland, so cool and beautiful and safe. Do you remember sitting on that hillside after picking all the blueberries? We could hear only birds and wind, and chocolate didn’t melt even though it was August, and then later those German backpackers told us it was thirty-five degrees in London. When I rule the world I’m going to set a maximum midday temperature of the point at which good chocolate makes a noise when you break it.
I thought Greenland would be like Iceland, but I wasn’t expecting this to be easy. Honestly. It’s not one of those times I get over-excited and then fail to cope with the real thing. The headlines made it worse, and remember it was you who insisted I come when my nerve failed at Heathrow. (I keep wondering how many nerves fail at Heathrow, but it’s like a wedding, isn’t it, once a person has set off down the aisle or the check-in queue the current of ritual is overpowering.) I can still hear the beating of your heart against my ear and feel the roughness of your cheek against my forehead but I can remember only the words I use for your smell. You stroked my hair and told me I’d like it when I got here, like Australia, but the thing is I didn’t like Australia. It was too hot and all the women in Sydney were too elegant. I grant you that neither heat nor elegance is a difficulty in Greenland. I didn’t mention the headlines, didn’t want you to know that I was thinking about it, but I held you so that now I can still feel your body against mine. Where it belongs. It felt, as it always does feel, an act of violence to walk away from you, there in the departures lounge. I hurt myself when I leave you. If I had looked back I would not be here now. Heat rose behind my eyes. I bit my lip and checked my watch. Hours to go. Claire says trying to keep your eyes open is a surprisingly effective way of getting to sleep. I stared at the pink canvas and waited.
As the flames crackle and the turf roof dries and begins to singe, someone is trying to get out. The sweet smoke of a turf fire rises in the silent valley, and the sheep move nervously towards the river. The priest is trapped in there. I saw him slip in, during the killing, and now I can hear him begging to get out. The glass in the windows – brought from Norway at great expense – has fragmented and fallen onto the soft grass of the churchyard, but I do not think he will get out that way. Flames are reaching up through the window-frames and the timber door is smouldering. He has stopped praying. The noise he is making now rings across the valley and the water in the darkness, and as the flames rise I see a hooded figure in the window, arms stretched out towards the running river and the empty houses. I am sure he sees me, standing in the pasture where I can feel the heat on my face. The smell of burning changes. The stones at the bottom of the bell-tower are blackening and the bell begins to toll softly as the roof falls in and the sky brightens in the east.
No. I opened my eyes again and the pink stared back. Calm thoughts. Sometimes it works to count the good things from the day before and in the day to come, even if the only thing to look forward to is eating. Tomorrow is another day but at least there will be breakfast. I reminded myself that the stones are only a problem because I’m still thin, not yet like my mother, and forgave myself all the things I ate on the way. Crisps at Heathrow, in case it was my last chance until the autumn, foreigners tending to show a strange resistance to the charms of salt and vinegar flavouring. There’s a good bakery at Copenhagen airport and I made the most of it, knowing that rural Greenland won’t run to bakeries and being fairly sure Yianni wouldn’t let me build an oven. I expect you could bury cakes with hot stones on the beach, the way Nic and Mike did with the clams at Rock Point, but of course the egg supply would be difficult. Anyway, I had some nice pastries and a very good chocolate cake. Not too sweet. And then it occurred to me that there wouldn’t be ice-cream here either and there was a sort of gelateria, though in the end it looked better than it was. Synthetic flavours in the raspberry, and the chocolate had a lower cocoa content than I do. I had two hours at Nuuk and ate a pizza more out of boredom than anything else, which was all right considering it was in an airport in Greenland. I bet the first tomato landed in Greenland after the Second World War. I
So I was lying there thinking about food, and wondering what ingredients Yianni had brought and what I could do with them, trying not to think about you or dead people or the news or what time it was and how much sleeping time I’d wasted trying not to think about things. I breathed deeply for a bit and then wondered about getting up and going for a walk, and then something outside the tent made a horrible wrenching, tearing noise right by my ear, as if dead hands were forcing themselves up from the grave. Slowly I turned my head, but whatever it was cast no shadow and I couldn’t tell if that was because of the angle of the sun or because it was a supernatural presence. I lay with my joints locked, trying to hear more terrible sounds over the thudding in my ears, and it came again, behind my head. I remembered about the windigo. You were away when I wrote about the windigo, but it was part of that stuff about cannibalism, which has more to do with nineteenth-century travel writing than is quite seemly. The windigo is a monster described to Hudson’s Bay Company traders by the local Native Americans. It was once a person who ate human flesh and went mad with the desire for more. You can tell a windigo because it sneaks around camps at night emitting a whistling noise that only the intended victim can hear. I wondered if the people in surrounding tents could hear the flesh being ripped and munched, and if so, whether there was anything I could do to stop it turning to me next. The tent sides quivered in the sun and I held my breath. I wondered how much you would mind if I got eaten by a monster my first night away, and then I thought how much I would mind if you did. Then I started to cry properly and sat up, recklessly alerting all the cannibals and monsters in the valley to my presence. One of them bleated and scampered off, little hooves drumming the turf. An alternative interpretation of available evidence would suggest sheep.
I lay down again and banged my elbow on the probable burial site. The tents are across the river from the church and I’m sure we’re not camping on consecrated ground, in which case I decided any burials would be suicides or, more probably in medieval Greenland, secret murder victims. (I know nobody puts memorial stones over secret murder victims – Here Lies the Body, I Dunnit – but that wasn’t obvious at two in the morning, OK?) There’s a ghost story in one of the sagas William Morris liked about an isolated little bothy at the side of a mountain track, a place for benighted travellers to wait for dawn. Sometimes an angry dead man came out and stabbed everyone while they were asleep. The screams carried down the valley when the wind was in the right direction and the villagers would send for the priest before investigating. I wriggled about, wondering about inscriptions, and started to get cross that Yianni had let me sleep on the grave of a bloodthirsty wraith. I suppose archaeologists have to cope with these things but he knows I don’t like them. Being cross is even worse for insomnia than being scared. The sun moved round so hot pink light came straight onto my face and seagulls started shouting at each other. I gave up on sleep, feared that the nearest I’d get to a shower would be a very cold river and wondered if there was anywhere to pee.
After the fire, an old woman comes out from the silent farmstead and walks down the hill to the church. The walls stand, but the roof has gone and smoke is still rising into the pale sky. A wind carries the smoke at a slow diagonal towards the sea, but the smell of burnt wood hangs in the air as I stand by the river.
The woman moves slowly, like a heron walking, but she is not lame. White hair ruffles around her uncovered head and her grey cloak streams in the wind. When she gets to the church she takes her hand from her cloak and throws something through the window-hole into the smoke. It is heavy like a pebble and glimmers. She turns towards the river and raises her arms, and then begins a low chant. Her voice is strong, and the words carried on the wind are Norse, not the Latin of medieval prayer. I think she knows I am here, but I cannot run from her and panic rises in my throat.
When I woke up the sun was stronger, and I was far too hot in my pyjamas and down bag. A ‘two-person tent’, I discovered, is big enough for one small person, some chocolate and a lot of books. I kicked one of the poles as I tried to wriggle out of my sleeping bag and the whole thing tilted sideways. I heard Yianni laugh outside.
‘Don’t stand there laughing at me,’ I said. ‘Hold it up while I get out.’
His shadow moved up the shiny pink canvas and he grabbed the apex of the poles. I tipped forward and stuck my head out. I was glad I’d come. The valley is flat and green and the river runs like a road down to the rocky shore. The ruined farm buildings we’ve come for are scattered up the valley, mainly under the steep, scree-covered slopes that overhang the river and the bright pastures. The sea was dark blue that day and big pieces of bright white ice still drifted in the lapping waves, but the sun was warm and strong on my face and even Yianni, who if you remember wore a jumper in York in June, was wearing the shorts and T-shirt he had last year in Crete. I scrambled out into the sun and stood barefoot on the coarse grass.
‘Sleep OK?’ he asked. He’s grown his hair, but the resemblance to that statue of Paris in the Cast Gallery is undermined by the beginnings of a beard.
‘No,’ I said. ‘What’s under that stone?’
‘I don’t know.’ He patted my arm. ‘I haven’t lifted it up yet.’
‘Then how do you know it’s not a grave?’
‘I don’t. But it would be an odd place for it.’
‘It’s the odd ones you’ve got to worry about.’
‘Nina, anyone buried here has been in the ground at least five hundred years.’
I looked round. Sun and purple pyjamas make wraiths seem unlikely.
‘Any chance of some hot water for a wash?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s a perfectly good river over there. We can’t waste paraffin on washing, we need to boil the drinking water. Go on, it’s invigorating.’
I looked at him. I think invigorating is what I said when we got him into the sea at Brighton. Nevertheless, cold is transient but dirt gets worse. I found my towel and headed for the river, picking my way over the prickly turf and thinking that the Norse women must have walked this way dozens of times a day. He’d put up four tents in the little field bounded by broken drystone walls, but there was no sign of any of the others. Yianni was sitting on a stone facing up the valley, writing in a notebook. I stepped across the pebbles on the river bank and dipped my foot in the water. Even though I knew it was meltwater from the glacier, the water was colder than you’d think it could be without setting. I looked up at the ice and clenched my teeth, knowing that if I didn’t wash in the river I wouldn’t be washing at all, not for weeks. Foot back on the warm stone, I glanced round at Yianni. He was still looking away, so I dropped my pyjamas on the rocks and floundered in, sitting down before my mind registered the pain in my feet and legs. For a moment I thought I’d never move again and would be found by the next generation of archaeologists, a mad Englishwoman frozen in a Greenlandic river, and then I crawled out, feeling the sun and breeze stroke my bare skin, and struggled back into my sun-baked pyjamas without drying myself.
Yianni looked up as I went by, my feet now numb to the prickly grass.
‘Invigorated now?’ he asked.
If I’d relaxed my jaw he’d have seen my teeth chattering, so I tried to sweep on as if I wasn’t wearing wet pyjamas. There’s no way of entering a tent with dignity, and it collapsed on me as soon as I crawled through the flap.
I heard voices while I was struggling to get dressed in a tent which kept subsiding, so I didn’t hurry. I guessed the others had arrived but I could see no reason to expend energy trying to deal with whoever had escorted them, and I was hoping the horses might have gone by the time I came out. The horses were one of the things that could easily have stopped me coming. Yianni’s always claimed that there’s no recorded case of horses noticing and exploiting their superior strength and size, so I don’t know why he let me come on the plane with the tools. He made the others travel by boat as far as the supply ship goes. After that there aren’t any roads, it’s boats, planes or horses. But he’s promised he’ll splash out so we can all leave with the finds on the little plane. When he said that I knew he was expecting burials to dig up, biological material that is, like me, too unstable for long journeys.
