Cold Earth, page 20
I took a deep breath and opened the tent and crawled out. The next breath felt like a bruise to the chest, like the first morning after a blizzard when it’s forty below and you step out of the kitchen into the yard and your body doesn’t quite believe it. Yianni had the lantern going again, and he was kneeling on the ground with the stove between his knees. Catriona’s and Nina’s heads peered out of the pink tent as if it were one of those Chinese New Year dragon costumes.
‘Cold.’ I tried to stop my teeth chattering.
‘Not so bad for the time of year,’ said Nina. She and Catriona giggled again. It’s like when the girls are in a silly mood and it’s getting tiresome. You’d think she might find ghosts we’re all beginning to believe in more sobering than her own delusions.
Ruth’s zipper went. She breathed out and a small cloud hung in front of her face. She pulled her scarf up over her head like an Italian grandma going to Mass.
‘Coffee?’ she asked.
‘Just fruit.’ The stove flared and Yianni knelt back.
The pink Hydra disentangled itself and Catriona crawled out.
‘Yianni? How much fruit is left?’
‘More than enough.’
She blew on her hands. ‘But how much? Because it’s our only vit. C, isn’t it?’
‘There’s enough.’ He turned to pour water, put the pan on the stove. ‘We’ve got vitamin tablets.’
You used to tell me they were growing pills, do you remember? When I was worrying because I wasn’t the tallest in the class anymore? You said they were pills to make sure children grew just as tall as God wanted them to be, and they had to be taken with milk, which left me with the idea that somewhere in the Bible God showered his chosen people with Vitalife, maybe along with the milk and honey. Milk, incidentally, inhibits iron absorption. Orange juice would have been a better bet. Right now I’d give a lot – not that I’ve got a lot, of anything – for either.
By the end of breakfast we could see a faint outline of the mountains against the sky. I have come to know each rock. I look along that skyline and know what makes each hump and decline. There was a new point on the hill-top.
‘Looks as if someone built a cairn in the night,’ said Nina. ‘See? And this time you know it wasn’t me, unless you think I could have climbed over Cat and got up there in the dark.’
‘You said you had lots of torch batteries,’ said Ruth. Her scarf shadowed her face.
‘Still do. But you can’t think I’d climb up there in the middle of the night to build a pile of stones?’
Ruth shrugged in the half-light.
‘How do I know what you’d do?’
‘How do you know it’s a cairn?’ asked Ben.
‘We robbed their graves. They build memorials. That one’s where they can watch us every hour of every day until we leave.’
‘Which could be in two hours. Come on, Nina. Enough.’ Yianni stood up and stretched. His bones cracked and Ruth winced. ‘So. Washing up first. Pack the stores, pack your belongings. Tents down. Everything over the river ready to load when the plane lands. Final search of the camp.’
‘Are you going to try the phone again?’ Catriona was scanning the mountain top. ‘Is there – no. Never mind. Oh God. Look.’
We looked.
‘What?’
‘I thought I saw something. Moving up there. By that – cairn. Someone watching us.’
‘Well.’ Ruth stood up. ‘If there is, maybe they’ll be able to tell us what’s going on. But I can’t see anything.’
‘Me neither.’ But Ben glanced around, behind the ring of faces.
‘I told you,’ said Nina. ‘It’s just a matter of whether they move in before we get away. At least it’ll be fully light soon. We’ll be able to see.’ She shivered.
‘It’s whatever it is seeing us I don’t like,’ said Catriona.
‘Oh, for God’s sake. If you give me a torch I’ll get some water and wash up.’ Ruth banged the plates together and took the bucket down to the river.
The hardest bit was ferrying everything across the river. We’re all used to the stepping stones by now, but it’s different when you’re carrying things. The tents and rucksacks were OK, slung on our backs, but the last bits of food and all the finds were packed in boxes. We formed a row across the stones – the closest collaboration, it occurred to me, since we arrived – and then we were left with the five long boxes.
‘If you drop any of these I will kill you and bury you at sea and say there was a freak polar bear encounter,’ said Yianni.
We were still strung out across the stones. He stood on the far bank, next to the pile of boxes, which looked, in the end, smaller than the boulders grazing the field.
‘Don’t.’ Nina, straddling the shore and the first stone, shifted her weight. ‘I don’t want to be scared of you as well.’
Their eyes met for a moment and I looked away. There are, however, records of the Greenlanders encountering polar bears in the winter. We are far enough North.
‘Yeah. Let’s come off the stones. We need to carry these guys together.’
‘Pall bearers,’ said Nina. ‘Jesus, I hope that plane comes.’
Ruth stepped back onto the shore beside Yianni.
‘I’ll take one end,’ said Yianni. ‘Jim? You’re more my height.’
The Greenlanders must have had the same problem. The lucky ones died in the summer when burial was easier in the soft ground and falling into the river less of a problem for the bearers. It was Yianni, not me, who fell in, and although he swore till even the watchers on the hill must have turned away he did not drop the box. It meant we had something to do when everything was stacked on the far side, trying to warm him, digging out a change of clothes and making a drama of getting the girls to go behind a rock while he changed. Two rocks. Ruth and Nina can’t even share a boulder.
By 7.53 we were all sitting on our backpacks on the flat ground above the river, close enough to the chapel that I felt uncomfortably overlooked. I gazed back towards the campsite, where rectangles of etiolated grass were all that was left of our settlement, and understood why farming peoples are so interested in the anthropology of nomads. It must take a different kind of confidence to leave no signature on the land. We will have left something, something a good forensics team would find and a good archaeologist be able to interpret, but actually the most obvious sign of our presence will be what we have taken away.
‘That should be visible from the air, anyway,’ said Nina. ‘Until the grass grows back.’ She was following my gaze.
‘They know where we are,’ said Yianni.
He looked at his watch, and then up at the northern sky. From whence cometh our temporal salvation, if at all. The fog was gone and the sky was white and blank as a dead screen.
‘Did you try the phone again?’ asked Catriona.
He didn’t meet her eyes as he nodded.
‘Oh.’ She fiddled with the zippers on her backpack.
‘So what’s the plan?’ asked Nina. ‘We wait all day and then when it gets dark, what? Put the tents back up?’
I concentrated on the plane out of Nuuk, being pushed back into a padded seat as the nose lifts and the aisle tilts, the pretty girl who offers me a drink when the seatbelt sign chimes off, the free magazine with pictures of shiny people doing shiny things in Copenhagen.
‘The plan is that the plane comes and we get on it and get the hell out of here, isn’t it?’ Ben was already drumming his toes on the ground.
‘OK.’ Nina was enjoying this like it was Debating Club. She is a member of something called the Oxford Union, which is not a union. ‘What’s plan B?’
I heard your voice, Mom. ‘Let’s not borrow trouble.’ Sufficient unto the day. I don’t think I’d ever said it before.
Nina stretched. ‘There’s a difference between borrowing trouble and making a contingency plan. In a few weeks, we might really regret wasting a day of light waiting for something we kind of knew wasn’t going to happen.’
Yianni stood up and I tensed, ready to leap in this time. He turned and walked a few paces towards the river and then back.
‘OK. I agree there’s no point us all sitting here for – as long as it takes. Go. Do whatever you like. Just don’t put more than twenty minutes between yourself and this field and turn back the minute you hear the plane.’
‘OK,’ said Ruth. ‘I’m going for a walk. To see the next valley. I’ll call you if there’s a troglodyte settlement.’
She began to walk fast up the river bank, leaping from one clump of reeds to the next.
‘Don’t go too far,’ called Yianni. She didn’t look back.
The rest of us sat a moment. 8.04. Around eight hours till dark, though I presume they’d aim to fly back in daylight as well. It’s not that far. Half an hour, Nina says, in a plane smaller than a car, where you can see the pilot turn the windscreen wipers on. Nina came on the plane because Yianni didn’t want to subject her to horses. So the latest it might come, if it is coming, would be about 3.30. Seven and a half hours.
‘Come to the beach?’ Nina asked Catriona. ‘We can look for the perfect shell.’
‘Don’t take anything from the beach.’ Yianni seemed to be talking to his boot, which he was rubbing across the grass as if he’d trodden in dog dirt.
Catriona shook her head. I don’t think she’s been to the beach since a wooden dinghy blew ashore one night a couple of weeks ago. Nina saw faceless pirates in it and Catriona got scared.
‘I’ll do some painting. I packed my paints on the outside in case there was a wait.’
Nina shrugged. ‘OK. I’ll stay here, too.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ said Ben. ‘Might as well stretch our legs. Could be a long journey home.’
‘Could be,’ said Nina.
They left. Yianni stared into the horizon again. 8.13. I don’t know if you’d see a plane first or hear it. I guess it depends on light levels and wind direction, but the only sound here now is the wind. My guess is we’d hear almost anything happening within a good few miles. Yianni unfastened and re-threaded a strap on his backpack.
‘Are the field notes all finished?’ I asked.
Catriona was leafing through her artist’s block. Landscapes in shades of grey flashed like cartoon images.
‘Yeah,’ Yianni said. ‘I might look through them. Make sure it’s all complete. Maybe a few more sketch maps. While we’re here.’
He looked over the valley again. No wonder the Greenlanders didn’t make maps. Land must have divided into what they knew as well as their children’s faces and what was entirely extraneous. Little reason and scant means to travel overland outside their own farms. Yianni rifled through his laptop case. I looked up the valley. Ruth was climbing fast, a red and green insect scurrying towards the loose stones. The new cairn was still there, black against the pale sky. I wondered if she was heading that way.
Out at sea, white waves rolled down dark water. When I sat quite still, silencing the rustle of my coat and the scratching of my fingers staying warm in the pockets, I could hear the higher notes of Nina’s voice and then, to my surprise, Ben’s laughter. Nina appears, some of the time, to be back with us, the way she was in the beginning. Now other people are seeing her visitants. And Ben’s good with her, good at not being scared. I glanced back up to the cairn. Ruth had reached the bottom of the scree and slowed down, but it looked as if she was still closing in on the cairn rather than aiming for the next valley.
8.21. I pulled my Bible out of my pocket. The one Grandma gave me. It’s getting worn. I once heard Hannah ask her if penguins went on the Ark or just swam through the Flood, and they went off to her bedroom to look it up and see what the Good Book said. Goodness only knows where Grandma found a text for that one. I remembered her reading the Christmas story to us all on Christmas Eve that last year, after I read The Night Before Christmas to the girls and even Holly pretended to look for reindeer in the yard. If we are still here at Christmas… Stop it. Don’t think that. I hope Hannah knows she’s still young enough for The Night Before Christmas.
I started at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel. I kept seeing the church at home, the shiny wood of the pews and the holly and ivy and red ribbons around the altar and under the windows. The candles standing tall against the white walls and the gleaming cross up front. That time Holly realised on Christmas Eve, the first time she could really read the carols, that the Baby Jesus and Christ crucified were the same person. He went back to God, you told her. He came here to be with us and then he went home. What about his mom, she kept saying. What about the Baby Jesus’s mommy watching him being nailed up? Not the Baby Jesus, you said. Grown-up Jesus. Nearly as old as Daddy. Now then, where shall we hang your stocking? She didn’t mention it again. Do you remember? You went off and talked to the pastor about children and the crucifixion and he gave you a bunch of books that lay around the kitchen right through Lent, mostly under the pile of letters and Hannah’s drawings and forgotten shopping lists, which I guess is still on the kitchen table. Come Easter we were all primed and all she was interested in was the egg hunt. And now it’s chasing boys.
It’s almost hard to read those parts of the gospels now, I know them so well. My mind skipped ahead, from the innkeeper to the angels, the shepherds to the sages. Herod, and the Massacre of the Innocents.
At 8.51 Nina and Ben came back. I saw her look quickly into the northern sky and then up the valley. Ruth was now working her way along the shoulder of the hill, towards the pass.
‘Nothing’s happened,’ I said.
‘My painting’s happened.’ Catriona shook back her hair and looked up. She’d painted me and Yianni and the boulders, all sitting hunched on a wash of grey-green punctuated by clumps of reed. The sky was blank.
Nina smiled. ‘That’s lovely. It’s like those Norse folk tales where you can’t tell what’s a tree and what’s a troll.’
‘It’s not finished.’ She dipped her brush in the film canister of water she carries and began to add the curve of the river to the background.
Ben sat down near me. ‘What’ve you been doing?’
‘Not much.’ I put the Bible away. ‘How was the beach?’
He shrugged.
By 9.30 Ruth had disappeared into the next valley.
Nina looked up from Romola, another George Eliot which I remember Rachel saying was unreadable when she took a Victorian Women Writers course. ‘She must be more than twenty minutes away.’
Yianni was still reading through his notes, though I’d been watching him for a while and he hadn’t turned any pages. He didn’t look up.
‘There’s not much I can do, is there? I’m sure she’ll come back if – when – the plane comes.’
‘We wouldn’t know if anything happened to her,’ Nina persisted. ‘You told her not to go out of sight.’
Yianni looked up. ‘You want me to go after her?’
‘I’m just saying.’
Catriona put her sketchbook down and weighted the top page with her paintbox. ‘Pass me a couple of those little stones, Jim? By your foot?’
She tore out the sheet and laid it carefully on the flat of her backpack, a pebble at each corner. Yianni turned a page and noted something in the margin. Nina had gone back to medieval Florence and Ben was leaning against his pack with his eyes closed. His breathing was too fast for sleep.
‘I might go up to the hall,’ I said. ‘Have a final look round.’
No one replied.
I was half hoping to find a bootprint or a candle end, some sign that the other person in the valley had a physical mass and modern accessories, but the hall was as quiet and empty as the day we arrived. I stood in the doorway, where we found a scattering of small, sharp objects dropped by people taking fiddly work to do in the light. Catriona said that on some North Atlantic islands there seems to have been a late medieval tradition of burying a baby or small child under the threshold and Yianni said he knew of no Greenlandic examples. Doesn’t mean there aren’t any, but we didn’t lift the huge flagstone at the door. Unless the shoreline has changed a lot, they’d have been able to see a long way out to sea from here. Women watching for sailors home from the sea, or just the men bringing home fish, which would be pegged out on wooden racks to dry against the winter. We have nothing, you know. We’ve done the opposite of what the Greenlanders did. We’ve spent the summer eating all our provisions, and the only things we’ve harvested are dry bones and pots dropped and smashed five hundred years ago.
I stepped outside to look at the sky. Nothing. I scanned the sea, as if someone might come that way. As someone did, long ago, square sails rising over the horizon, telling the people at home to kill the fatted lamb and open the best mead. That, or run for the hills. I looked along the shoreline, concentrating on the point where the land curved away into the next inlet, the place where the shepherds emerged into our valley. People can travel along there. Surely if it can be done on horseback, it could be done on foot?
Something caught the back of my coat. I turned, glimpsing, I guess, my own shadow, and in the next room a stone rolled. I didn’t want to be there anymore, and I set off down the hill, trying not to look behind me, thinking about coming home for the weekend, sitting round the table and trying to describe this place to you.
Catriona was still painting. Nina was still reading. Yianni was still staring at his notebook. Ben had got his plane ticket out and was colouring in all the o’s on the back of the folder.
‘Checking the date?’ I asked him.
He looked up and reddened. ‘Just checking. I hadn’t seen it in a while.’
‘Passport?’
‘Yeah. Here.’
Nina looked up. ‘Gosh, that looks very new and shiny. Mine’s in rags.’
‘Yeah.’ He pushed it back into the wallet. ‘The other one went through the wash.’
‘Oh.’
She went back to her book. Ben went back to his colouring. Catriona had arranged some pebbles in a nest of reeds and was painting each reed individually onto her pad with a brush the size of a matchstick. She stippled dark brown stripes on the dead yellow-green. Ruth was invisible still and I began to wish I’d gone with her. 10.27. I thought about heading off on a walk of my own and remembered the hand plucking my coat. I thought about checking my own passport and tickets, as if I hadn’t put them into the top of my rucksack first thing that morning, sealed into a Ziploc bag in case of rain. I thought about waterproofing my boots. I thought about trying to read some more of Matthew. I thought about trying to shave, so I wouldn’t look like a tramp on the plane, even if I can’t help smelling like one.
