Cold Earth, page 16
‘You live in a village?’ asked Jim.
‘No. Just a farm. Like here. But with the computer.’
‘Which isn’t working?’
The man paused. ‘No internet. This is not unusual. A few days, it comes back. A few days, it goes. My wife knows these machines.’
He glanced back towards his horses.
‘Ours isn’t connecting either,’ said Jim.
‘I will send your message. We must go now, we stay in a hut tonight. Come, Henrik.’
‘Thank you,’ said Jim. ‘Goodbye!’
‘Goodbye. I enjoyed meeting you,’ I said. ‘Nina?’
I sounded like my mother. She didn’t reply.
Jim and I watched as the horses led the river of sheep away round the headland. The noise of bleating faded fast, and we were left with a new silence.
‘I guess that’s it,’ said Jim. ‘I wish I knew what was going on.’
‘You will. Soon enough.’
We began to climb back up to the site.
‘We going to tell the others?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Secrets do groups no good. There isn’t much to tell, anyway. He wasn’t very specific.’
‘Mmm. Odd that they’ve lost internet access as well.’
‘You think the internet’s caught the plague and died?’
‘It’s odd,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
We came to the pit. Catriona and Ben were working on the third burial while Yianni was making an outline of a fourth.
‘Any news?’ asked Catriona.
I looked down at her. Her hair, as always, was escaping from under her bobble hat, and her face was pink with cold. She wiped her nose on a glove that had been used for that purpose before.
‘Not much,’ I said. ‘They say the epidemic’s still spreading. I don’t think they knew anything very detailed.’
‘Their computer at home is down, too,’ said Jim. ‘I don’t like the sound of it.’
Catriona looked up, mouth open. ‘Where do they live? Not near here?’
‘Three days away. On horseback. They’re staying in huts while they collect the sheep. It’s probably only about fifty miles.’
‘What’s wrong with their computer?’ Yianni asked.
‘He didn’t really know. Something with the connection. Sounds like ours.’
‘Oh.’ Yianni put the string down on the ground. ‘Could be coincidence?’
‘Easily.’ Jim climbed down and looked at Yianni’s work. ‘It probably is. I guess the chances of finding neighbours with computer glitches are high. It’s just with the epidemic. You can’t help but wonder if – well, if the sites aren’t being maintained.’
Catriona dropped her trowel onto what sounded horribly like a skull. ‘Sorry. What, that bad?’
Jim shrugged. ‘We don’t know, do we? And as far as I can see, we’ve got no way of finding out.’
In the silence, a bird’s wings creaked overhead. I looked up to see a raven wheeling against the white sky.
‘It’s quiet now,’ I said. ‘Without the sheep.’
Wind sighed. The sea was rough and we could hear waves, a gull. Nothing else.
‘Traffic and TV and computers are going to seem very loud, aren’t they?’
‘Let’s hope so,’ said Jim. ‘Let’s hope so.’
Digging went well the rest of that day. We got both skeletons out, one missing both hands, bones severed cleanly above the wrist with something very sharp indeed, one with the left side of the skull and jawbone sliced off and a cut mark in the collarbone where the blade had stopped. Quick deaths. Probably instant for the head trauma. I’d expected Nina to disappear again, probably followed by the discovery of some strange but inconclusive event in the valley, but at one o’ clock she appeared suddenly on the edge of the grave. She looked down.
‘I’ve heard those ones,’ she said. ‘Making a noise.’
‘Is lunch ready?’ I asked.
‘If you want to call it lunch. I’ve put out food for you.’
She vanished again, but when we came down we found all the plates laid out on a blanket. She’d arranged concentric circles of crackers with what looked like pâté and pumpernickel with some kind of caviar, to be followed by tinned peaches and ginger biscuits.
‘Pâté?’ asked Catriona.
‘I brought some odds and ends,’ said Nina. If she’d had an apron she’d have been smoothing it.
‘Pretty good odds and ends. Caviar?’
‘It’s only lumpfish. And I’m afraid it’s black with food colouring. But it travels well. I thought it would make a change.’
She seemed to have changed channels, from horror films to cookery shows, overnight.
‘Thank you,’ said Jim. ‘It looks great.’
We sat down and began to pass plates. Even Nina took a cracker.
‘Nina?’ said Yianni. ‘Is this the last canned fruit?’
She froze and looked up. ‘There’s only a week left. I thought you’d like it. I was trying to help.’
‘I do,’ he said. ‘It’s fine. I just thought. I was keeping some back.’
We all looked at him.
‘Just in case.’
‘In case what?’ I said.
‘It’s always good to have a reserve.’
‘In case what, Yianni?’
‘In case the plane doesn’t come?’ asked Catriona.
‘I’m sure we’ll be fine. Sorry. Don’t worry about it.’
We ate in silence. I am looking forward to coming home, having a bathroom and a bed and not having to see any of these people ever again.
‘Is there a problem, Yianni? Something we should know about?’ I asked. ‘Some reason you know why we should be saving food?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no problem. It’s a good lunch, Nina. Thank you.’
Later, as dark fell, I excused myself and went down to the beach. I like beaches in the dark. That last break we took, the guesthouse in Maine, we used to stay on the beach every night watching the waves flash white in the darkness and the last birds calling. We held hands, walking over the pebbles, and sometimes clambered out to sit on the last rock where the sea surged at our feet. I kept hoping he’d ask me to marry him, sitting there between his legs with my back cradled and his arms around me. He never did. It would get so dark we couldn’t see where to step and we’d slither back up the shingle and go for dinner at one of the seafood restaurants and then head back to the four-poster, which had been turned down with chocolates on the pillow. He never asked. He was never going to, was he? That’s what you knew. He didn’t want to marry me. He didn’t want our babies. I was his present, not his future.
This evening I walked along the stones alone, on the other side of the sea. Moonlight moved jaggedly over the waves, and as I came to the corner of the bay I saw a shape tossing against the rocks. I teetered out to it and heard the thud of wood on stone and they were right. There is a boat, an old wooden one, rolled sideways, nudging at the shore. A dinghy adrift, lost from some dock, carried east on the current. I sat above it, watching the wooden seat tipping wildly. I wanted to climb into it and push off, but I guess the wind and current that carried it across the ocean and up the inlet have come to the end of the road and will bang the wooden sides on the rocks until the boat breaks up. After a while I came back up to the tents, and now I’m here again, sitting writing in a sleeping bag by torchlight, listening to the night and counting the days until I can come home. When I do – if I do – I think I might like to come and see you again. Will you have me back?
JIM
I’ve been postponing writing this, hoping it wouldn’t be necessary. Maybe it’s still a dramatic gesture, to write as if we’re not coming back. To write, come to that, as if although we’re not coming back someone’s going to find this and send it to you. To write as if you’re still there to read it.
Three days ago, we were getting ready to come home. The odd thing is I was kind of sad to be leaving. It has been so quiet since the sheep left. The birds had been massing on the water, shrieking and flapping like over-excited kids going on a trip, but flight after flight had left, low arrows sweeping the waves. The Norse would have been out on the water killing all they could, using these few weeks when there is still meat on the wing and the ground is cold enough to keep it. I thought about you, Dad. About you and Uncle Bill going out on the lakes, that time I went with you and realised that killing birds was never on the agenda. Those guns were just an excuse, weren’t they, a ticket for a day spent rocking quietly on a little boat under the sky, away from Mom and Aunt Patty and all us kids. And unless my presence inhibited your heart-to-hearts, your outpourings of your inner lives in Deer Creek, you weren’t even talking. Just sitting there watching birds while the guns slept under the lifejackets in the bottom of the boat. I never told the girls.
Anyway, when the quietness came here you could see what it was going to be like in winter. Every day there was more dark and longer cold. It seemed like the plants were withering and dying before our eyes as the birds and animals went away. It was like creation on rewind, back towards darkness and the void, and it seemed a shame not to stay and see it out. There must have been pleasure as well as fear, don’t you think, as the time came to burrow into the house and tell stories while the landscape outside died and turned white? Rest, at last, from the bright nights and hard work of summer? It seemed like the real Arctic, the Arctic I wanted all along, was just beginning when we were going back to cities and rain and electric light. Sometime, I’d like to stay a winter up here, live through the dark weeks and see the promise of light slowly but surely realised. But not now, not with these people.
‘But the Greenlanders would have taken electric light like a shot. Come on. Instead of rendering animal fat and trying to sew by firelight?’ said Nina. ‘You’re romanticising.’
We were washing and labelling the last finds from the hall, a set of bone loom weights that meant the occupants had left in a hurry. Looms were big and intricate and necessary. You wouldn’t leave one behind unless you really had to.
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But they must have liked it here. At least at the beginning. They left the bright lights of Iceland. And Norway.’
She put down the pen – a freebie from Christie’s auction house – and blew on her hands. The fingers sticking out of her cut-off gloves were purple, the nails turning blue.
‘You don’t want to go home, do you?’
‘Of course I want to go home,’ I said. ‘We always knew this would end. I’m worried about my family.’
I am. All the time. We have so little information here, a few words from a shepherd who doesn’t speak English. I don’t know if vast swathes of America are desolate, flapping doors, abandoned vehicles and rotting bodies, a disaster movie with all the special effects, or if the hospitals are busy and vulnerable groups are showing increased mortality. I don’t know if it’s you or me who needs to be worrying.
‘Yeah.’ She picked up the pen again and wrote out the label in her copybook italic writing. ‘But you’re not going back to your family, are you? You’re going back to Boston.’
I thought about the house. She’s right, you know. I forget that I’m not coming back to you. It is old and pretty but it’s cold and nobody really keeps it clean. We all think the mess is someone else’s responsibility. Mostly Harris’s. And most of my crowd are abroad with fieldwork this year.
‘Doesn’t mean I’d rather spend the winter in a tent. I like it here, that’s all. Doesn’t mean I don’t like being home as well.’
She shrugged. ‘I can’t wait. I’m only not counting hours because I can’t multiply by twenty-four in my head. I have to do twenty-five and then I forget how many ones to subtract at the end. At least we’ll know, then.’
See, Mom? An Oxford PhD and she’s still counting on her fingers. I poured a few weights from hand to hand.
‘I guess David’s waiting for you.’
She looked away. ‘Don’t. I hope. I can’t think about it.’
‘Yeah, well. Me too. All of us.’
The long grass bowed and moaned and the water darkened under the wind.
‘How long have you guys been together?’ I asked.
‘Four years.’ She wrote another label.
‘And you’re planning the wedding?’ She’s asked me enough personal questions, and not always with sympathy.
She twisted her ring. ‘Not exactly. I mean, I wish we could just have a civil partnership. I can’t see how feminists can get married.’
‘Most feminists were married,’ I said. ‘Virginia Woolf. Simone de Beauvoir. Wasn’t Mary Wollstonecraft married to Shelley?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Students always think that.’ She went on for a while about the family life of Mary Wollstonecraft and someone else. ‘They got married because she’d been a single mother for years and it wasn’t fun. Not because either of them approved in theory. De Beauvoir and Sartre weren’t married. That was the point. And lots of feminist critics would say the Woolf marriage was an argument against.’
I took a course on modernism back in college.
‘I thought he looked after her when she was mad and stopped her killing herself?’
Nina bagged the last of the weights. ‘She managed in the end. Anyway, I’m not going to get married because Leonard Woolf nursed Virginia. Lots of husbands drive their wives mad and then don’t look after them.’
I looked at her.
‘What?’
‘You sound better.’
She stood up. ‘I’m OK. At least you all saw that boat. I mean, we might be haunted but I’m not mad. Or madder than the rest of you. I’m going to the loo.’
Loo is English for bathroom. Nina explained it to me at the beginning. Flush toilets began to spread in England in the nineteenth century when the battle of Waterloo was big news. Water-closet, Waterloo. Our nearest flush toilet is more than fifty miles away. She walked across the grass, shying suddenly as though something had peeked out from behind one of the rocks, looking around before she ducked into her tent for paper as if she were using an ATM somewhere risky. Her delusions seem so specific. It’s weird, when I think about people hearing voices and seeing things that aren’t there I’ve always assumed they’d be obviously insane, probably talking nonsense, smelly, acting like the more worrying tramps in Boston. Nina seems normal, at least in an eccentric British way, except that what the rest of us have been insisting are nightmares are clearly beginning to happen in the day as well.
Later, we were sitting around the stove after dinner. Ben and Nina had gone down to the river to fill the water-breakers for sterilising and the rest of us were huddled over cups of coffee. At seven o’ clock, it was fully dark and too cold, really, to be outside. I thought about Mom dishing up and shouting up the stairs to Hannah and Holly.
‘I just want to say, while she’s not here,’ I said. ‘I think Nina’s seeing them in the day as well. She’s acting weird. Moving away from things that aren’t there.’
‘Oh God,’ said Yianni. ‘Really? Did she say anything?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But she wouldn’t, would she? She knows we think she’s mad.’
Catriona blew on her coffee. ‘She might not be. Maybe they are there and we’re making some kind of unconscious adaptation not to acknowledge them.’
‘Maybe,’ said Ruth. ‘But wouldn’t you say that a group decision not to perceive hostile spectres in an isolated situation fits some useful definitions of sanity? I mean, we could all go mad if we let ourselves. Quite easily. But we don’t.’
‘I suppose. And I do think I know what I can see. I mean, you can’t really start doubting your own sensory data.’
‘No,’ said Ruth. ‘You’d go mad.’
There was a silence. Waves broke on the rocks.
‘So is it better to tell Nina she’s having delusions or better not to contradict?’ I asked. ‘Because as far as I can see, telling her she’s deluded makes her feel mad, which makes her more unhappy, and not telling her reinforces the delusion, which presumably isn’t good for her either.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Yianni. He swirled his mug. ‘It’s only another two days. I just hope it all settles when she’s back home.’
‘Not our problem,’ said Ruth.
There was another pause.
‘Yianni?’ Catriona ran her finger around her mug. ‘Yianni, you do know that the plane is coming for sure? Even if we don’t e-mail?’
‘They’ll come. They know we’re here.’
‘But the arrangement was that you’d e-mail. Was that just to confirm the time?’
‘Something like. They’ll come.’
He was looking down. I couldn’t see his face, in the dark.
‘What about the satphone?’ I asked. ‘Have you tried?’
We heard voices and a torch came wavering up from the river.
‘The plane will come, OK? What we need to do is concentrate on finishing off and clearing up the site.’
‘You’re not planning to come back?’ asked Catriona. ‘Next year?’
He was still looking down. ‘Who knows. About next year.’
The voices were closer.
‘Anything might happen.’
‘You know,’ said Catriona. ‘I think I really believe the world will end in my lifetime. I’ve always thought the evidence was there. I think I believe it now. Without having to convince myself.’
‘People keep thinking that,’ said Ruth. ‘Think about all those cults that barricade themselves in and then have to blow themselves up when God doesn’t do it for them.’
‘I know,’ said Catriona. ‘I’m not planning to do anything about it. But someday someone’s going to be right.’
‘Right about what?’ asked Ben. He dumped the water-carrier in the stores tent and started getting the sterilising tablets out of the box. ‘Won’t it be good to have water that doesn’t taste of chlorine? And juice and soda?’
‘Beer,’ said Yianni. ‘Cold beer. And glasses of wine with dinner.’
