Cold Earth, page 22
I don’t remember Mom making my quilt – it was already there for me when memories began – but I remember her making Holly’s and then Hannah’s, leaning over the bump to reach the sewing machine and calling me to feel when the baby kicked. The shock of someone’s feet inside my Mom. I tried to think about the Greenlanders in their big house up the hill. They knew how to stay warm, with thick stone walls and turf roofs and fireplaces where you could spit-roast an ox, if you had an ox, which they didn’t. They spent the winter gathered round the fire, spinning and telling stories and maybe not so much to eat but enough, enough dried fish and dried berries and frozen seal and goose and ptarmigan and grains from the summer harvest to see you through to spring.
Every time I opened my eyes I could still see Nina’s torch glowing. There was a murmur of women’s voices, and I closed my eyes again and remembered the women’s fellowship nights, when I used to sit at the top of the stairs and smell the different perfumes and the waves of cold air as the door opened and closed. Later, Holly would join me, and she’d wriggle down a few steps on her front and peer through the banisters like someone engaged in urban combat to see what kind of cake was going and if any of the good stuff, the layer cakes and brownies, was going to be left for us. Once I was old enough to stay up and pass the coffee, I used to pass cookies up to Hannah and Holly, and I guess once Holly was old enough she smuggled the less sticky stuff to Hannah. Are you still doing that, Mom? It’s the second Thursday today and you’re six hours ahead. Maybe right now Hannah’s opening the door to Mrs Pearson and taking her coat up to the bed, and Mom’s taking the Tupperware box and oh-ing as if she didn’t see the pineapple upside-down cake every month for the last twenty years. Though I guess it’s more likely Hannah’s gone out, off in someone’s car with her friends.
I must have slept. I woke to hear crying. Nina’s torch had gone off and someone was sobbing, the long, low notes of a person who’s been going a long time and has no reason to stop. It could have been Ruth, grieving, or Nina in fear, or Catriona losing hope. It might have been one of the Greenlanders, and it doesn’t seem to matter very much anymore. Living or not, being here now seems a good enough reason to cry. The shaking had stopped. My hands throbbed with cold but my feet were still numb. I remembered Uncle Bill telling us about the time Grandpa stayed out too long in the cold ploughing and got his fingers frostbitten, and his hands turned black and swelled up like a corpse’s before the nails sloughed off and the skin began to repair itself. And Holly didn’t stir a step outside without gloves until May. They must have known how to deal with frostbite, the Greenlanders, with their saunas and fur mitts. One of the outbuildings here looks like a sauna but we’ve no fuel, of course, and it’ll be a cold day here in hell before Yianni lets us burn the turf. Sorry. Not hell, of course. There is still the hope of salvation, a warm heaven, a Valhalla of steaming mead and roaring fires.
I keep trying to pray. The phrases are too worn. I can’t find the words anymore. Faith must be stronger than suffering; Christ crucified shows us how the image of God in man can withstand pain. I’m so cold and so hungry and I’m sorry about this but so scared, of cold and hunger and of what cold and hunger might do to us all. It is easy to feel forsaken.
A shot rang out. Always wanted to say that. It’s like ‘follow that car’. I said that once – well, ‘follow that bus’, when I missed the Greyhound out of Chicago by about thirty seconds. Apparently they hear it quite a lot, cab drivers. Anyway, it wasn’t a shot, of course. If we had guns we could shoot birds, or even a seal. It was fire, the repeating fire of burning wood, and the smell carried too. But with the smell of logs, the smell of the big room on the farm, came the smell of roasting meat, and with the shots ringing out came the soundtrack from the bad moment of a bad movie, the kind of movie the girls should never see. Nina’s tent, I thought, as if battery torches could somehow set fire to icy, fire-retardant canvas, but the smell was wood and the voice was male. No wood in Greenland, except for that drifting boat. I sat up but, God forgive me, I was too cold. Too tired. And when I woke again there was silence and darkness and cold.
The plane’s not coming. We sat again, through the grey coldness that passes for day. More of the river is frozen and we’re running low on fuel. There were crackers, and when we’d finished I went round and picked Nina’s crumbs out of the turf and ate them. I meant to finish Waverley but I can’t concentrate enough for a sentence. It’s not terrible. I want you to know that. I’m cold and tired and hungry but as time passes it’s not so bad. I’m back with you a lot, back home peeping through the banisters or pausing on the landing to hear the girls’ breathing before I go to sleep, sitting at the table watching Mom chopping onions and singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic off-key. When the end comes, it’s not going to be too bad, and I want you guys to know that with the last beat of my heart and the last breath in my body I loved you all.
CATRIONA
The plane hasn’t come. I hope you were waiting for me. I was thinking about you, cooking the chicken curry that was such a disaster last time, and Rudi going round the market for cheap fruit to make that weird mousse jelly thing his mother sent the recipe for. I bet the candles for the table are exactly where I left them, unless Tibor’s been over this summer, and I bet neither of you has chopped an onion since I left. I thought I’d get back and there’d be the smell of coconut in the hall and you’d be in your room, playing poker on the internet and eating cookies your mother posted ten days ago from Canada. Rudi would be working, but when he heard us he’d come out and be irritating, stop you telling me what happened with Tibor. I’ve no gossip to offer in exchange, I’m afraid. Unless we find a way of using condoms to catch fish, they’ll be coming back as intact as I am. But it was a kind thought, and instead I could tell you all about the small-town Midwesterner from Harvard, the grieving New Yorker and Nina, and then when Rudi goes back to his room leaving the washing up you and I could sneak out to LJ’s and come home giggly long after he’s in bed.
*
Only the plane didn’t come. It still might. There’s no reason why not. They know where we are, and they must know we’re still here. Maybe they just think we want extra time, or they’ve got the wrong date, or there’s been a technical problem and later today we’ll hear buzzing in the sky and we’ll never tell anyone we thought the end was nigh. I think we all do think that, now. There’s a certain relief in it, like the time I should have been doing Highers and got caught truanting in the National Gallery, and all the consequences I’d been dreading for weeks were at last a reality to deal with rather than a worry nagging me through the night. Here we are, at last, the Bomb exploded, the Ice Age under way, the giant asteroid landed, the apocalypse settling into Act II. Plague has swallowed you all up in the night and we’re the last people on earth, even though I know perfectly well that epidemics don’t work like that. The successful pathogen doesn’t kill all its hosts.
The problem is, this dig hasn’t been as well planned as you’d hope, and we’re already running out of food. Ending with a whimper. This morning we got it all out. There are three packets of crackers, two packets of noodles, a bag of what Nina calls MDF (mixed dried fruit), half a tube of tomato purée, half a box of dried skimmed milk and two packets of angel delight. We’ll know we’re starving when any combination of the above looks like a good idea. I’ve got some Kendal mint cake, Nina’s got a tin of capers and some chocolate so serious it comes with a handwritten label. Ben has a few M&Ms left in a big packet and the other three either didn’t bring any treats, have already eaten them or are still hiding them. It’s probably the highest concentration of refined sugar for several hundred miles but it’s not going to keep six of us going for very long at all. You could probably eat it in an afternoon while writing up without noticing.
We tried to talk about survival but we didn’t get very far. I think postgraduate students may be an evolutionary dead end, though you’d think archaeologists would have more of a clue than mathematical logicians, say, or experts in late Latin poetry. Nina, who works on nineteenth-century travel writing, knows all about the expeditions that didn’t make it, but so far her suggestions are limited to wondering how the Franklin survivors cooked their colleagues, since the chopped up bones were found in cooking pots, and suggesting that there ought to be some way of catching fish using tights.
‘What, fishnet tights?’ I asked. She doesn’t look that kind of person, and anyway, surely not here.
‘No. Marks and Spencer’s best wool. They’re very warm.’
‘Well, in that case you don’t want to use them for fishing, do you? Nutter.’
Then Jim asked what tights were and we all got sidetracked into a discussion about hosiery and transatlantic translation. Jim and Ben said there was no way of distinguishing tights from stockings in American English and we had to wait for Ruth to come back and say ‘pantyhose’, which Nina said sounded much ruder than tights. It was all preferable to giving any further thought to cannibalism. I do not want to end my days in Nina’s pot with thyme and angelica. (It sounds like a folk band, doesn’t it, Catriona, Angelica and Thyme? Better a folk band than a recipe.)
Ruth remarked that we’d live a long time on a seal. Ben said he wasn’t sure about eating seal, what about trichinosis, and Nina said it wasn’t the eating that bothered her, she’d even cook it if someone handed her a nice flat steak.
‘We haven’t got a gun,’ said Jim. (Good.) ‘How would you kill it?’
‘The Greenlanders managed,’ said Nina.
‘The Greenlanders had lots of practice,’ I pointed out. ‘Not to mention a whole summer to get ready.’
We’re spending nearly all our time by the tents now. We all looked around for handy weapons.
‘I suppose we could make some kind of bow.’ Ben sounded as if he was supposing we could make some kind of nuclear-powered robot.
‘Out of what, a laptop carrier?’ asked Nina.
‘A tent pole,’ I said. I was rather proud of that.
‘I think you’d need to practise,’ said Jim. ‘I mean, I don’t think we can hope to make a bow and arrow out of a tent pole and then just go out and kill a seal with it.’
I caught Nina’s eye and started to laugh, and then we all did. It’s not funny. I am cold all the time and can’t get warm, even at night, even sharing Nina’s tent. Cold hurts. The chilblains on my hands are turning dark purple, like bruises, and when I can feel my feet they hurt as if they were forced into boots two sizes too small. My jeans are gaping round the waist, which I still find rather exciting, the thought of all the baklava and chocolate cake and pizza I’ll be able to eat later, but I suppose it won’t be so exciting in a few weeks. My bones hurt when I sit on the rocks. Imagine having a bony bum. I hope you’re there, reading this. I hope you get the joke.
‘Have any of you ever actually killed anything?’ asked Nina. ‘Apart from an insect?’
‘I don’t kill insects,’ I said. I remembered all those bees in your room when the cherry tree was blossoming.
‘What, not at all?’ Yianni was trying to sew up a hole in his glove and none of us girls was helping him on principle, although we were all watching and thinking what a mess he was making. Nina had threaded the needle and I told her she was betraying the sisterhood.
‘Mosquitoes,’ I said.
‘I hit a rabbit, once. In the car,’ said Ben. He shivered. ‘You could feel the bump. On the way back it was still there, with its eye on the road. Horrible.’
‘You mean you didn’t stop and finish it off?’ asked Ruth. Ruth is calm. We need calm. I imagine she could finish off anything that needed it.
‘My dad’s got this pond, in our garden,’ said Jim. ‘So you get frogs? And one day I was mowing the lawn, I’d have been about
ten –’
I put my hands over my ears, but it doesn’t really work. It’s like trying not to watch a scary film, sometimes, round here. Except that films end, and you go back out into the street where the need to buy bus tickets and find the keys clears death from your mind.
‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to know.’
Yianni jabbed his finger with the needle and sucked it. The glove looks as if it’s mutating into a sock.
‘So the primal killer instinct isn’t exactly raring to go?’ said Nina. ‘What about limpets?’
We found a lot of limpet shells on the site, but on the other hand we found some butchered dog bones and that doesn’t seem like a good idea either, even if we had a dog.
‘Maybe they’re nice,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s the next great seafood discovery.’
I could see her thinking about limpet noodle soup or limpet and oatcake porridge. I pulled my sore hands into my sleeves. Limpet sorbet.
‘This is survival,’ I said. ‘Not cookery.’
Nina stopped smiling.
‘It’s not either at the moment,’ she said. ‘There’s no lunch.’
We spend too much time just sitting, hoping. There’s only a few hours of light each day and we come out of our tents clumsy as bears and sit and talk about what we might do. Walk along the coast and find a farmhouse, Ben says, but we know perfectly well we haven’t got the energy or the equipment. It might be nicer to die of exposure in a few days than starvation in a few weeks, but dying later seems better than dying sooner. There’s always a chance the plane will come. Nina says the history of polar exploration suggests that unless you really know what you’re doing, like Shackleton, it’s better to stay put and wait for the cavalry, though this, of course, assumes that the cavalry aren’t being ravaged by an epidemic, and she did add that it can take a year or two. We talked about building up one of the little rooms in the hall, cutting turf and roofing it in, but Yianni won’t hear of ‘desecrating’ the site, which appears to be sacred to the professional advancement of Yianni Papadatos, not a cause for which the rest of us are particularly eager to martyr ourselves. We talked about trying to light a beacon on the hill top, but once the fuel runs out, which is in a few days, we’ll need anything else we can burn to melt ice for drinking. It’s not as if we’ve seen any ships or planes out here anyway. A few plane trails, maybe, at the beginning when the sky was blue and the ground was warm, but nothing low enough to see us. The second day we were waiting, Yianni and Jim laid out stones to make an arrow shape pointing to our tents, but in the morning the stones had been moved, and anyway, I can’t imagine that anyone who missed ten tents would see a stone arrow in a field of boulders.
You see, there is someone or something here with us, moving things. It throws stones out of the mist and creeps around at night, moving things. I know this sounds mad. I can imagine you looking up at Rudi and not knowing whether to believe me. (I’m imagining, I realise, that this will somehow be posted and fall into the hall with the takeaway menus and overdue bills. I’m sorry, by the way, about not leaving a cheque for the phone bill. I guess by now you’ve either lent me twenty quid or been cut off. And I’m sorry about not leaving enough rent. I’m sure my parents will help, if you ask them – get the address from college – but I suppose, again, either you’ve sorted it out or been evicted. Sorry.) It took me a while to believe in them, these presences or inhabitants or whatever they are. At first I thought it was just Nina. I don’t blame you if you don’t believe me, I see that like archaeologists, anthropologists can’t afford to see ghosts, but Ruth’s the only one here who’s so thoroughly educated she can discount her own sensory data as culturally produced. I know what I’ve seen. What I hear.
The snow fell last night. We’ve had little falls before, an icing-sugar dusting over the rocks, but this is the full Arctic extravaganza experience with special effects, including, at last, the Northern Lights. It’s got me painting again. I did some good ones, before it started to be dark so much, and before we had to thaw all the water. They’re all in the folder in my rucksack. I thought that was it but I’ve started again now, sitting in the entrance of the tent until I can’t control the brush and then coming back and getting back in my bag until my fingers thaw and then going back out again, as long as it’s light. There’s something about painting ice with watercolour, the way the same medium is out there as a solid that looks like light, and in the little pot for my brush. Painting water with water, it’s like trying to paint glass. I had a go at the Northern Lights but it’s a waste of paper and paint. There will be ways of painting electricity in a dark sky with watercolour on A5 – Marguerite Donaldson would be able to do it – but I can’t. I know, I’m like the people who went on dancing on the Titanic or whatever it was, but one might as well. We all are, with our jokes about food. Dancing on the way down. Laughter and art are forms of defiance, a way of staying human. And it’s not as if I’d otherwise be out there strangling polar bears with my bare hands and dragging them home for Nina to casserole. It passes the time and if we do get out of here, I’ll have some great paintings. Like being Keats or Sylvia Plath but then surviving to rake in the glory, Nina says, but don’t rely on my paintings for the rent. (You couldn’t rely on Plath or Keats for the rent either, Nina adds. Or in fact any really good poet she can think of, except possibly the later Wordsworth, who is less good than the earlier and less reliable Wordsworth. Now you know about Nina.)
Nina’s here. We’ve been sharing a tent since the plane didn’t come. I can’t imagine what it’s like for the others, spending so many hours entombed in the dark on their own, but Nina’s got torch batteries and books as well as useful observations about the relationship between poetic genius and financial reliability. I’m not going to die bored, as long as Nina’s around, and that must count for something.
