Cold Earth, page 10
Sorry. You don’t want to know about that. You think I should ‘tune out that voice’. Tell James what I need to tell him and understand that time passes. Well, that voice is mine, it’s the uber-voice, the voiceover, of every breath I take. You tried to make me tell another story but I’m talking now and you can’t answer back, you with your perfect life and all the answers. With your blond hair and your suntan and your statuesque feet in your Volkschue sandals. I used to sit there, you know, and look at your toenails, like little pink shells, and the way the hair grows straight and shiny on your legs. Most guys have body hair like pubic hair, wool not satin to touch. Most guys cover it up at work.
Anyway. Greenland. I suppose it is beautiful, in a bleak way. The others seem to like it. Catriona keeps mentioning the light and Nina seems to take pleasure in the shore. There were flowers, which I hadn’t expected, but they’ve wilted and died now and it’s getting colder day by day. The digging is good, I can still work – so you were wrong about that – and it makes me tired which means that hours pass at night without me having to endure them. But I don’t like it here. You wouldn’t think that in the midst of missing James I’d have any longing left for plumbing and heating and doors that close, but I do. I expect you think that holds the seeds of my recovery, that one day I’ll think so much about flush toilets and ceramic hair-straighteners that I won’t think about James, when the truth is I’d shave my head if it would give me a few more seconds in his arms.
Sorry. I came here to think about Greenland, didn’t I? There are six of us. Yianni is running the dig. Greek. British-Greek, if the British did hyphens, which they don’t. Catriona, Scottish girl who paints and doesn’t wash. Nina, British, blonde, neurotic, literary critic not archaeologist, much indulged by Yianni who has a crush on her. Jim, nice Christian guy from Iowa who somehow pitched up at Harvard. Ben, from the north of England via Madison. We are living in a circle of tents in a field next to the site and none of us has been more than a few hundred feet from this circle since we arrived. The others, except Nina, are working on the Norse Greenlanders and really care about this dig. I keep thinking I shouldn’t be here, running my film of burning and fantasising about hot showers and somewhere to cry unheard, but after I gave up on you I knew I had to leave New York. I still couldn’t face the apartment, James not tipping his chair back in the kitchen and not leaving his shoes for me to fall over on the mat and not having the radio on loud in the shower. Not leaving Sur le Vent from duty free in a ribboned box on my bureau or Roussillon underwear beneath the pillow. The last few weeks, I was staying in the library till it closed and then hanging about in Barnes and Noble until words blurred on pages and I couldn’t remember what I was reading. Then I walked back to Plum Street, almost hoping for a trigger-happy mugger, and went to bed in the dark so as not to see that he wasn’t there. I dreaded sleep in case I turned to fold myself around his back. Some nights I woke, found he wasn’t there and padded through to the lounge to tell him to stop sleeping in front of the TV and come to bed. Mornings were a long time coming. At six I went straight to Starbucks for coffee and a muffin and then back to the library, walking to fill the time until it opened. There are a lot of people spending too much time in Barnes and Noble and I was getting to recognise them.
I’m not really very interested in the Norse Greenlanders. It was Prof Ekstrom’s idea to send me here, trying to save my doctorate if not my mind. (And he’s right, you know. The doctorate is worth saving. Research has a value independent of its perpetrators, and independent of your view that psychological integrity is the only thing that really matters. It doesn’t. You can be happy and boring and stupid and self-absorbed and you wouldn’t have to look far for an example.) It’s not exactly a dynamic culture – that goes on doing the same thing for five hundred years until everyone’s dead. They died of conservatism, going on trying to grow grain because it had worked at the beginning, before the temperatures fell in the 1400s. There were too many of them to survive that degree of climate change but I don’t see any evidence that they tried very hard. They’d have needed to learn from the Inuit, of course, and probably ditch their big farmsteads with the volcanic underground heating and streams diverted through the kitchen. Some of them even seem to have had saunas when they should have been saving every scrap of fuel for cooking. What you can grow in Greenland takes a lot of cooking. The Greenlandic Inuit were nomadic because that’s what the land can sustain and those Norsemen, arriving at a time when British monks could grow grapes, never grasped that what they thought was normal was the warmest it had been for centuries. They must have seen the winters getting longer and harder and the harvest smaller year after year, and I’m sure some of them bailed out, back to Iceland or west to Vinland, but many of them seem to have hung on. People have found dogs butchered for food and middens full of limpets. Can you imagine trying to feed your family on limpets? Your kids, with their hair even shinier than their shoes. My guess is most of them just starved to death in the end, though only anorexics and lost explorers really die because they don’t have enough calories to power a heartbeat. If you can get to that point, it’s probably a pretty good way to end things. Most people don’t. In famines they die of dehydration from diarrhoea, communicable diseases and maybe vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Not as good as heart failure but better than burning. Nina has nightmares about the starving ones but I can think of worse. Can’t stop thinking of worse.
The archaeology, I will admit, is suggesting more interesting possibilities. We haven’t made much of a start on the chapel yet, but there are signs of burning, which would seem to fuel the pirate-raid theory. And the burial pit, apart from having tipped Nina over the cliff-edge of psychosis on which she appears to live, has the potential to complicate recent thinking on Norse–Inuit relations. It’s on the hillside above the barn, which is strange given the proximity of presumably consecrated ground around the chapel where they could have had an orthodox burial, and it’s big but not deep, unless there are more burials under the ones we’ve found so far. Yianni’s anxious that we might not finish the site this season, and also, I think, anxious either that the epidemic scare might mean people want or need to leave early or that it might be hard to get back next year. He’s pretty much leaving the pit to me, anyway, and there’s some peace in having a kind of room of my own, even if it is a grave.
Nina was helping but she bailed out the first afternoon, before we’d uncovered the first skeleton. She’s been screaming and shouting in the night since the beginning, having nightmares that seem to get worse, or at least more disruptive, as the days go by. You’d love it, a pretty Oxford graduate with fully-paid-up delusional fantasies. Plath on Prozac. It’s bad enough being dragged out of dark and silence into the cold light of night by someone else’s terrors, but much worse when she expects us to interact with them too. ‘There was someone there,’ she keeps saying. ‘Yianni, I heard footsteps. Yianni, I heard breathing.’ Half your luck, I think. I hear no footsteps and no breathing. No feet and no lungs, no rising ribs, no ticking heart under the quilt beside me, no hair feathered on the pillow, no arms to reach for in the night. If sleep is so bad she should stay awake and think about going home to her fiancé who has, she says, already booked the restaurant for her first night back. Remember I told you James had had me make a booking at Pablo’s for that night? I didn’t tell you they called while the police were still with me in the apartment, to say they weren’t opening ‘out of respect’. Oh OK, I said, of course. Thank you. Respect for James, I thought, not thinking. And are you OK? asked Juan, as if he already knew. It was the first time I had to tell someone he was dead and I held the phone and stared at the policewoman, the striped tabs on her jacket, the dandruff on her shoulder. No, I said, not really OK. Not great, not today, because the thing is. Well, the thing is, it seems that James. James is dead. Then I handed the phone to the policewoman and stood there, having no reason to move.
Sorry. Self-torture, they say, the few people who kept listening after the first few weeks, meaning self-indulgence. Move on to the next stage, keep up with the American grieving schedule. Nina came and sat on the edge of the burial pit, swinging her legs like someone fishing off a dock while I was working down to the level of the first burial. Come on in, I thought, the water’s lovely. I knew she was scared of bones.
‘It’s only digging at the moment,’ I told her. ‘Tell me when you see changes in the soil and I’ll take over.’
She looked at the sky and didn’t say anything.
‘Start in that corner?’
She walked around the edge as if it were full of snakes.
‘They’re only bones. We’ve all got them. They won’t bite.’ Or walk, or eat, or kiss, ever again.
‘They did,’ she said. ‘Once they bit.’
He had shaved that morning, taking up the bathroom when I needed to go meet Ekstrom. His jaw smooth, the cinnamon cedar aftershave and toothpaste on his breath, a nick on his top lip that I kissed before he left. Two hours later it was smashed across the dashboard and burnt to fine ash.
Nina walked off and I went on digging, making my way through increasingly friable loam. The wind got colder, whipping my hair into strings I knew I’d be too tired to sort out. It’s too cold, now, to wash in the river, and even when I do manage to wash my hair in the bucket it’s still damp in the morning. I kept going as the clouds darkened and the wind rose, sheltered by the grave. I would have buried him in his Italian suit. Linen rots slowly and I would have liked to think of it there with him as flesh fell from bone, but his body was no longer the shape of clothes. He bought that suit in Rome, carried it home as hand luggage as if it were myrrh for the baby Jesus. He’d only worn it twice, Kate’s wedding and Joel’s bar mitzvah. It didn’t seem worth the money to me – money Kate or I could live on for weeks – but I guess a good suit never dates. I could give it to Paul but I won’t. It lives in the wardrobe next to my red dress, in memory of our dancing at Kate’s reception.
I was working across the pit but the soil in one corner was noticeably darker and more crumbly than the rest. I stayed there, smoothing the soil away as if I didn’t want to wake him, and by the time I came to something long and smooth rain was beginning to drizzle onto my stiff shoulders. I covered it again, patting it like a sandcastle, and went to find Yianni. Bones, unlike the living, need to be protected from the rain.
Yianni was sitting in the entrance of the finds tent with the laptop balanced on his crossed legs and a notebook at either side. He looked up.
‘Found anything?’
‘Somebody’s long bone. But it’s raining. Do you want me to get a canopy up?’
He leaned forward, peering round at the sky. Colour was already fading from the hills. ‘Tomorrow. It’ll be dark by the time we’ve got it up.’ He looked the other way. ‘Is Nina up there on her own?’
‘Of course she’s not. She left hours ago.’
He put the laptop down and crawled out.
‘I haven’t seen her. I’ve been doing this a while. The battery’s running low.’
‘Shame it’s not wind-powered,’ I said. You’d think he’d have realised that solar power is not an obvious technology for Greenland.
‘I don’t think the grant would stretch to a turbine. Did Nina say where she was going?’
I shook my head. He went over to her tent. She pays more attention to that pink tent than to her clothes.
‘Nina? You in there?’
‘Perhaps she’s down on the shore,’ I said. ‘I’ll spread some tarps in the pit, shall I?’
‘Please. I’ll come up and look in a minute. I just want to check Nina’s OK.’
I took my time, smoothing out the crackling plastic and foraging for stones to weight it with. Then I arranged the squares as if piecing a quilt. I haven’t done any sewing since James died, not even for Lisa’s baby. He must be crawling now. I remember telling Lisa James was dead and then realising that she’d called to tell me she was pregnant. I used to say, tell me how you are. No, really, I do want to know. Better to have something to think about. But not that. Not that Lisa and Jake are making babies James will never see. He liked babies, but he was great with older kids. He’d have liked yours. When we took Bradley to the Science Museum last year, the two of them went off together, pressing buttons and taking turns on the consoles. I snuck off to the café with a copy of Le Figaro that I’d found at the kiosk in the park, and when they came to meet me Bradley talked about the specifications of spaceships for nearly forty-five minutes while I ran my eyes over the back page and James made sketches for him. We would have had babies, later, when I’d got tenure and he could cut back at the bank. I’d have swapped the Pill for folic acid and given up the brie. There was no sex, the last week. The night before the accident I stayed up late working on my notes, and when I came to bed he’d given up waiting and was already asleep, his finger still marking Travelling Light in Kashmir. But at the weekend I’d missed a pill, nearly took the chance and then remembered Kate’s termination and didn’t. And that was it, James’s DNA erased like the smallpox.
I vaulted onto the side of the burial pit and stood up. Down by the camp, the paraffin light glowed, and the stove flared close by. Figures moved about, their shadows flaring huge and then tilting away across the tents. The sea was dark and quiet and a grey light cracked the horizon. I set off towards the lights, picking my way over the dark turf.
‘Tucked up for the night?’ Yianni was stirring a steaming pan of what looked like water and smelt like compost.
‘Yes. But we’ll need a canopy tomorrow. Unless you’re sure it won’t rain.’
‘We’ll need a canopy. Ruth, when did Nina leave you?’
I shrugged.
‘I didn’t check the time. She didn’t stay long.’
‘Did you see where she went?’
‘I was digging. The pit’s too deep to see out.’
Catriona put a handful of spoons on top of the pile of plates at Yianni’s feet.
‘She’s not in her tent,’ she said. ‘And I’ve looked on the beach. And around the chapel. It’s not as if there are many places to go.’
‘Was she upset when she left?’ asked Yianni.
‘She’s been upset all along,’ I pointed out. ‘She’s scared of bones.’
‘She’s a bit fragile.’ He stirred the water again and glanced up. ‘Was she distressed?’
‘I guess. She certainly didn’t want to be there.’
Catriona clattered the spoons on the dish. In the low light the fronds of her hair waved like snakes around her face. ‘I’m worried about her.’
‘Where was everyone else?’ I asked. ‘Wouldn’t you have seen if she’d walked into the sea?’
‘No,’ said Yianni. ‘Supper’s ready. And if we haven’t seen Nina by the time we’ve finished I’m going to call the coastguard on the satphone.’
He ladled out compost water, and then fished for the inevitable noodles.
‘Chicken noodle again?’ asked Jim.
‘There’s chocolate pudding.’ Yianni passed him a plate.
‘Maybe it’s a good thing Nina’s not here,’ muttered Ben. Last time we had ‘chocolate pudding’ Nina read the ingredients aloud and said that if it were produced in the UK it would have to be described as chocolate-flavoured pudding because it had no cocoa content whatsoever, and added that if Yianni had brought dried eggs she’d have been able to make us pancakes. So could I, I thought, lacy crêpes the way Papa taught me when we were living in Saudi and boredom drove me to elaborate kitchen recreation. The first time I cooked for James I flambéed them, proper crêpes Suzette made with a bottle of Cointreau that left me living on pasta until the next scholarship cheque came through.
We started eating. Ben struggles with noodles and I kept my eyes averted.
‘She wouldn’t walk into the sea,’ he said, ‘would she?’
‘No,’ said Yianni. ‘I don’t think so. At least, not unless something happened.’
‘You don’t think she’s been seeing things again? Does she – you know – hear voices?’
‘No,’ said Yianni. He put his plate down. ‘She’s not sick. I wouldn’t have invited her. I know she had some depression but she’s been fine for years. I mean, she was off medication by the time I met her and that was before she got together with David.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t seem very fine now. What was it with the boots?’
‘Sleepwalking, I guess,’ said Yianni.
‘Unless we believe her,’ said Catriona. ‘I mean, I did hear something one time. A guy line. She said she saw someone and maybe there was something.’
‘Don’t you start,’ said Ben. ‘Don’t let her get to you. It’s too easy, here on our own. You’ll have us all chatting to the Greenlanders. I bet you wouldn’t have noticed anything if she hadn’t told you about it.’
