Out of the Ice Read online

  I turned down another street and saw Travis up ahead, wheeling a red skidoo – a snowmobile, similar to a quad bike but with skis instead of tractor wheels, like a motorised sled with a windscreen in front of its long, low seat – out of a shed I hadn’t seen yesterday.

  ‘Hey there, Laura,’ he called genially as I walked up. If he was annoyed I hadn’t returned to his table last night, he was hiding it.

  ‘So a nice warm Häggie for the lady? Or would you prefer a skidoo? Or both. I can take you down in the Häggie and leave a skidoo there for your return. Or you can drive yourself but I wouldn’t advise it until you’ve been there once. We went out yesterday and flagged the way for you.’

  ‘I’d like you to show me.’ I didn’t add that it was also regulation to do it that way. Would he really have let me go off alone?

  We then went through a lengthy process of approving my pre-approved field trip. Unlike the days when it was just entered into a logbook, this was all computerised. Supposedly more efficient but it took forever, particularly because Rutger wasn’t with me, which the computer didn’t like any more than I did. Finally, we were cleared to go.

  Travis led me to where he had a Hägglunds prepared with a tow-tray that was carrying a strapped-in skidoo. So, he’d just been testing me after all.

  Today’s Hägglunds was painted with penguins and seals.

  ‘Your artist-in-residence was busy,’ I said.

  For a moment Travis looked bemused. ‘Oh, him. Yeah, he painted fast. Bit of a lowlife. Drank like a fish. Then scampered off home quick as you please. Family emergency. I don’t think he was cut out for the cold. Or the lack of girls.’ Travis grinned. ‘That reminds me. Tonight’s a theme night. Come as your favourite fantasy. I can organise a costume if you like. We have a store.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ I said, thinking it actually sounded grotesque. I was used to fancy dress nights, which were another Antarctic tradition, but usually they were on weekends and good, wholesome, light-hearted fun. Down here if they were anything like last night I couldn’t look forward to it.

  ‘Häggie awaits. Hop in.’ Travis went around to the driver’s side.

  In the front cabin there were pin-ups of bare-breasted women. I caught my breath. In the Australian bases there was no way they’d have anything like that, and I doubted the British Antarctic Survey would allow it either. In fact, I was certain. Alliance seemed to operate outside the established rules. Travis caught my expression, and quickly ripped them down.

  ‘Beautiful day for a motor,’ he said as he fired up the engine and we crawled into the street. Travis drove slowly until we were off the base, then roared the Hägglunds to life.

  ‘Don’t you love it?’ he cried as we raced along. ‘Best place on earth!’

  I felt a familiar surge of happiness as we flew across the ice. We were heading towards the coast, bright green flags mapping out the safe drive zone. Red flags stood sentry over the dangerous thin ice. ‘Point out everything I need to know?’ I asked.

  ‘Will do,’ Travis replied cheerfully. ‘Would you like me to come in with you when we get there?’

  ‘I’d love you to. But I can’t . . . You know it’s an Exclusion Zone.’

  ‘Asked and answered.’ He winked. ‘But I’ll give you my cell phone number. If you’re worried, just call.’

  ‘So my phone will work at Placid Bay?’ I’d brought it in the hope it would. Around all Australian bases we had good reception these days, but the whaling station was a distance out from Alliance.

  ‘Well, not right there, it’s too far away. But as you’re driving back you’ll get into range.’

  I was uneasy about being alone in a foreign place, particularly with the hostile reception I’d received. I had a shortwave radio with me, but I didn’t know who I’d connect with at base if I needed to use it.

  As we roared along Travis dutifully pointed out the terrain, and I carefully observed. He told me he’d fitted the skidoo with an on-board computer that warned of danger areas. I was relieved I’d have that in addition to the flags pointing the way, but it also paid to hear as much as possible about the problem spots. On the ice, a thorough safety code was vital.

  After thirty minutes, Fredelighavn rose before us.

  The buildings were much larger at ground level, towering wooden structures in all the colours of the rainbow. ‘Wow,’ I said, ‘I hadn’t expected that.’

  ‘Different, hey? More colourful than you thought?’

  ‘It just didn’t look like that from the air.’

  ‘That’s because you were seeing the roofs and bits and pieces. Looks red from above, doesn’t it?’

  He was right. It had looked uniformly red. Not the purples and pinks and blues that were unfolding on the horizon. In Antarctica buildings were always painted strong colours to help them be seen in whiteout blizzard conditions, but these colours, while still bright, were elegant.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said before I caught my words. How could this slaughter yard ever be beautiful? How could it be more than a graveyard, a terrible monument to an abusive past?

  And yet the buildings kept revealing themselves as we approached. It was a picturesque village.

  ‘Whoo-eee,’ whooped Travis, and turned to me. ‘Knew you’d love it! Wait till you walk around inside.’

  ‘Have you been in?’ I asked, confused.

  ‘They don’t track us on weekends – time off, we do what we want. Best diving on the island. We could go some time?’

  ‘Certainly,’ I said, ‘if I wanted to break every rule in the book, which I don’t.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he shrugged, breaking eye contact.

  It infuriated me Connaught had a culture of staff that thought nothing of ignoring protocol. I would be including that in my report.

  ‘Do others go with you on your weekends away?’ I asked casually.

  ‘Yeah, of course.’

  ‘Well, then, perhaps I will some time.’ I smiled. Finding who had been in the Exclusion Zone would now be a priority, and best if I did it from the inside.

  Travis slapped my thigh. ‘Thought you’d come round.’

  I flashed him another smile, then quickly grew serious. We were miles from base and I didn’t want him to think I was encouraging intimacy.

  ‘If you drop me off by the first house, that’ll be fine.’ We stopped by a bright purple house raised high, presumably on stilts that were buried in ice. It had a highly angled corrugated- iron roof tethered to the ground with thick steel straps. Icy snowdrifts swept up the steps to the porch, but the doorway was accessible.

  I strapped on my backpack, inside which was food, a second jacket in case the weather turned, the shortwave radio, emergency flares and bottles of water. I flung a second bag over my shoulder, which held my phone, tablet, digital camera, a sophisticated GPS, a high-powered torch and a first-aid kit. Travis quickly manoeuvred the snowmobile onto the ice and hung a helmet with a full-face visor on its handlebar.

  The buildings stretching around us reminded me of Burano, a colourful village on an island I’d visited when I went to Venice years ago. I’d been desperately trying to take my mind off the loss of Hamish and breaking up with Cameron, and the gorgeous buildings had surprised me, momentarily lifting my spirits. These houses of Fredelighavn were similar, luminous in rich plum, fragile pink, deep sienna, pale blue, indigo, orange, yellow, ochre. All were timber, with horizontal boards cladding the walls and corrugated-iron roofs rusted a uniform red. In some places I could see the wooden stilts raising the houses above the ice that was piled high around the streets; ice that blocked windows in places, the result of blizzards powering through over the years. But in recent times there had been warmer summer temperatures and ice-melt, and that, with the help of the engineers, had left the buildings remarkably visible. There were also mountain ranges to the north and south of the village, and across the island to the west, which had provided protection.

  ‘Sure you’ll be okay?’ asked Travis, leanin
g towards me protectively.

  I nodded, quashing my apprehension at going in alone.

  ‘I’ll be seeing you, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll have that costume waiting for the party. Be back by eight, okay?’

  ‘If I’m not, come searching.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I will.’ Travis looked at me seriously. ‘Have a great day.’ He grinned and his face lit up. Good little brother, I thought, taking care of family.

  I waved as the Hägglunds took off, its rubber treads flying across the ice. As the hum of the engine receded, I became aware of the deep silence surrounding me.

  I took another look at the purple house with its extraordinarily steep roof. It had faded white wood in its two front colonial paned windows and around the porch that protected its front door. All its paint was peeling but had been preserved in the cold, dry air – enough to give an absolute impression of what it would have been like in its heyday. It was cute and Norwegian, a little piece of home. On the edge of the world.

  I laughed and was alarmed at the echo of my voice. I listened for other sounds. In the distance, I could hear the distinct wall of noise of an Adélie penguin rookery. I breathed more easily, relieved to be near something familiar.

  I put on my skis and set off in the direction of the sea. The village was deep and set back from the coast at this point. I couldn’t even see the water, but I could see the tall smoke stacks from the whale-processing cookeries on the shore. To my left, a distance away, huge oil tanks, about fifty in number – round, with pointed roofs of corrugated iron – rose up the slope of the mountains. I knew from my time at Grytviken that some would have held the whale-oil, and others fuel-oil. A network of underground pipes would connect the tanks to the cookeries, from where the processed whale-oil would be pumped up to the tanks, and then, when the ships came, pumped out to them for delivery to markets across the world.

  In the reverse direction, the fuel-oil would be brought from Norway and pumped off the ships, to run the generators for electricity.

  My skis swooshed on the ice. I looked back to the skidoo, sitting beside the purple house. It was my escape route back to base. I felt a moment’s queasiness at leaving it.

  No one else is here, I kept telling myself, trying to block out the knowledge that Travis had come when he wasn’t meant to – and that he’d been with friends.

  ‘That was on a weekend,’ I mumbled aloud.

  I focused on the task ahead and moved down a street with colourful houses on both sides, their tin roofs kept firmly in place by steel cables fixed to the ground; in a few places the ends of harpoons were visible – the wires must have been attached to the harpoon, and then the harpoon stuck through the ice, its barbed, pointy end digging in to the earth below. Silence evaporated: the houses were creaking and cracking in the cold. Some sounded like they were sighing, as if they were alive. I stopped, feeling like I was being watched. I looked around, but there was no one there. My breathing grew rapid, little clouds of heat puffing into the clear day.

  I was beside a house painted pale lemon, with a hot pink porch and windows. I was eager to get to the penguins, but my survey included the houses. As a kid, I always ate my least favourite food first, saving delicacies like jamon for last. I hadn’t changed. I took off my skis and trod up the slope of ice that covered the stairs. I put my hand on the doorknob that was carved in the shape of a whale and shuddered at the thought of what had gone on at Fredelighavn.

  The door made a high-pitched brittle sound like snapping bones as it swung open. I paused on the hearth and peered inside. Everything looked as solid as the engineers had reported. There was a short passage and a set of stairs leading up to another floor. I flicked on my torch. The timber floorboards sank as I walked; they were dry and fragile but intact. A pretty pink lightshade hung above me and the passage walls were painted in lime green. I drew in the air, an odd mixture of stale wood and fabric, and salty freshness from the sea.

  The first room off the passage was the lounge. With all its furniture. I stepped back in surprise. When they’d left, they’d taken virtually nothing. I hadn’t been able to find the date the whaling station had closed, but looking at the design, it seemed that time had stopped here in the late 1950s or early 1960s. That would fit with other whaling stations like Grytviken, which had closed in 1963 when the slaughter had been so great that there were no whales left. But of course on South Safety, they would have had to end the slaughter by 1961, when the Antarctic Treaty came into force, because native wildlife became protected.

  I ran a gloved hand around my chin and it made a noise like rubbing on paper – my skin was dehydrated from the cold. I walked around the small lounge room. There were bright fabrics on the two lounges, two armchairs and curtains, all in a loud pink blossom pattern that reminded me of a Marimekko design. The kind of thing people were buying now for its retro beauty.

  This sort of homeliness was like nothing I’d seen down here, and I found the domesticity strangely alarming. I had to try hard to remember I was in Antarctica.

  One of the coffee tables was made from a pale European wood. Larch perhaps? It was from an older period. An antique. On it was an ashtray; I almost expected a smoking pipe. Then I smelled something and turned. On another coffee table sat another ashtray – and this one was full of cigarette butts. I went over rapidly to see if they seemed recent. There were bright pink lipstick marks on at least half the butts, but it was impossible to tell how old they were; Antarctic air is so dry and freezing, it preserves. The butts could have been here for weeks, months, years or decades. I took photos, intrigued. My guess was the butts were original, from the fifties. At this time, I would touch nothing. After my report there would be another team sent in to forensically go through everything.

  That was why I was so angry that Travis had been. Had he touched anything in Fredelighavn? Contaminated anything? I assumed the previous engineers wouldn’t have disturbed the site last summer, because they were trained and briefed.

  I took more photos of the room and then continued down the passage. On my right was a tiny bedroom containing a single bed covered in a thick blanket with a pink woollen crocheted rug on top. Lovingly handmade and not so lovingly left behind. A flea-bitten Steiff teddy bear lay propped on the pink pillowslip; one eye was missing, the other glassy eye stared out accusingly, as if it blamed me for its abandonment.

  Colourful floral curtains seemed eerily new. There was no deterioration at all. On the walls were pictures of horses cut from magazines, and on a dressing table stood little carved wooden horses, cows and goats. A sweet rural scene, totally incongruous with where we were. Why couldn’t the little girl at least have taken these tokens with her?

  These artefacts would have to be carefully preserved and conserved and moved into a main museum building. Tourists couldn’t be let loose in such an environment. A Steiff teddy would be stolen for sure. It was so cute even I wanted to pick it up. I photographed it instead.

  I moved on. Slightly down from this room on the opposite side was another small bedroom. This one had carved wooden models of sailing ships, and a series of beautiful wooden fish painted brightly in blues and reds and yellows and greens. There were little white yachts sailing jauntily on the cotton curtains. The bedspread was again crocheted, but in a deep blue. The little boy loved the sea. What had he thought about the whales? And why had he left his carvings, which were clearly painstakingly made and with great pride?

  It was like plague had come and wiped this family quickly off the earth, but I knew that couldn’t be the case.

  I walked further into the belly of the house and arrived in a neat Scandinavian kitchen full of carved, pale wooden cupboards. A gorgeous teak table was bathed in sunlight streaming through the window. I couldn’t believe my eyes: there were blue and white coffee mugs still on the table, with a brown liquid in them, frozen solid. Why had these people left in such a hurry?

  I went to the nearest cupboard and opened it. Cans of herrings, sardines, pork and to
matoes were neatly stacked. I opened another cupboard: paper bags of sugar and salt and rice stared out at me.

  Ernest Shackleton had left his supplies at his famous hut in Antarctica, as had Scott. They were entirely preserved. I therefore shouldn’t have been surprised and yet I was. They had been explorers and left their provisions for future need and also because they couldn’t carry them. Here we were at a port, or a harbour at least, where boats came and went with their cargo.

  Why was nothing packed up?

  Had they intended to return?

  I would have to co-opt historians to shed light before I finalised my report.

  At the back of the house was a latrine-style toilet: a raised timber box with a hole in it, similar to those the explorers such as Mawson had used in their huts. The wooden lid was closed. I had no intention of opening it.

  I retreated through the house to the front staircase and looked up. Shadows were falling through a fine lace curtain, flickering on a forest-green wall.

  Was it safe to go up? I knew I should probably wait until Rutger arrived, but the engineers’ report had given the houses a clean bill of health last summer, and I was curious. My feet creaked on the stairs, the wood worn into mellow grooves. Every year they’d acquired this rich patina thousands of whales had been slaughtered. Suddenly I wanted to run. For the first time in years I yearned to go back to Melbourne to my mother and hide in our big family home in Kew. It held some bad memories but nothing like this.

  I reached the landing, my hand resting on the smooth wood of the railing, polished from wear to a fine, silky feel that was almost warm to the touch.

  On the upstairs level was the master bedroom. Again, the decor was fashionable 1950s. There was a small double bed with a striking cover in a geometric print of yellow, pink and green. The woman of the house surely loved it.

  And yet had left it behind.

  There were exquisite carvings of marine life, predominantly whales, capturing the different species in profound detail. Had the man who made them also slaughtered them? I had no doubt.

  Perplexed and sad, I retraced my steps and went out the front door into the clear, cold air. I was thankful to be back in the street, away from this abandoned home. I made notes on my tablet, realising I hadn’t taken anywhere near enough photographs. I called it The House of the Carvers, in a nod to Pompeii. That’s what it had felt like because it seemed to have been so quickly vacated, as if the family were fleeing a volcanic eruption.