Sun at Midnight. Rosie Thomas
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to believe it in this moment of perfect stillness. When he closed his eyes, apart from the faint breath of cold on his face, Rooker thought he could be in a vacuum. The depth of silence was crystalline and absolute, without the smallest possibility – a certainty anywhere else in the world – that it would be shattered in the next second by a jet passing overhead or a burst of distorted music or the whine of traffic.
Apart from the nine people currently occupying the two huts on a small bluff that made up Kandahar Station, the nearest human habitation was at Santa Ana, a Chilean base that lay 120 miles further up the peninsula. The Chileans maintained a snow ski-way for fixed-wing aircraft, and the Kandahar personnel had flown in there and then been transferred by helicopter to Kandahar. In partnership with the Chileans, Lewis Sullavan had leased for the summer season a pair of New Zealand-owned Squirrel helicopters with two Kiwi pilots and a mechanic. The machines and their crews would be based up at Santa Ana, but they would be available to transport Kandahar scientists out to field locations too remote to be reached by skidoo and sledge. Rooker envied the pilots. He would have liked to fly over the wilderness of glaciers, watching and trying to secondguess the extreme weather, but there was no chance of that. His fixed-wing licence was out of date and he had only flown a helicopter a handful of times.
The silence expanded and thickened around him. He could feel it almost as a physical mass pressing inwards against his eardrums. In the ten days since they had arrived here, the peace had soothed him. He escaped outside as often as he could.
The hut was crowded. He found it difficult to live at such close quarters with the disparate group that Shoesmith had assembled here. Dr Richard Shoesmith was the expedition leader. Rooker had taken an instinctive and immediate dislike to him, but the rest of them were mostly all right. It was the mass function that he recoiled from. People were always talking, trying to make themselves heard above the hum of the other voices. They wanted to make their mark, all of them. Even the jokes were often about scoring points off someone else, or about forming miniature alliances. Sometimes the spectacle touched him, at other times he laughed with everyone else, but he found it impossible to join in properly. The layers that protected him had thickened to the point of impermeability.
Since he had left Edith behind he had grown accustomed to being alone. Before that even, a long time before that, he had stopped looking for company, except for sex or for someone to drink with. He drank on base, of course, although Shoesmith didn’t allow private supplies of alcohol. There was always drinking company, as there was everywhere else in the world. Neither Phil nor Valentin took any notice of the prohibition either. But Rooker didn’t want to know about their lives outside Kandahar, or to know what they dreamed of or hoped for. They didn’t ask him about his life and that suited him perfectly.
Outside, alone, he felt comfortable. The play of light constantly amazed him. The quality of it could change ten times in an hour, going from milky translucence to blade-sharp clarity to a thick yellow glow. He would sit on a rock with his hands hanging loose between his knees, almost oblivious to the cold, just watching.
McMurdo, the American base on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, had been nothing like this. In the summer season McMurdo could house over a thousand people. It had bars and buses and a constant round of parties, and he looked back on it now as just a more boring and much harsher version of Ushuaia. It had been too populous and insulated for him to feel the powerful presence of the ice, and because he had been working as a shuttle-bus driver he had had few reasons ever to go beyond the base and the airfield. Unless it was over to drink with the Kiwis on Scott Base a couple of miles away. But it was lucky that he had worked that meaningless long-ago season, because it was the magic phrase ‘previous experience’ that had secured him this job. He had been taken on by Sullavan and Richard Shoesmith to manage transport, and to act as base mechanic and maintenance man.
That was easy enough. Rooker was good with machinery. He had almost five months ahead of him now, and all he had to do was drive the Zodiac, fix skidoos, and keep the water and the generators running. He felt, at long last, that he had travelled far enough. No one would try to reach him or come pushing up against him here, nudging him for reasons or responses. At McMurdo, planes were constantly landing or taking off. There was always the lure of other destinations. But here, unless a helicopter came in from Santa Ana or a ship arrived in the bay, no one could arrive or leave. Including himself.
He could keep a certain distance from the eight other people. He had a corner that he could curtain off in one of the men’s four-bunk pit rooms, and outside there was always the mercurial light and the silence that was only ever shattered by the wind.
No, he suddenly remembered, it would soon be nine, not eight.
Nine people, because there was another scientist arriving today.
Shoesmith had made one of his ponderous announcements over breakfast: ‘As most of you already know, Dr Alice Peel, from Oxford, will be arriving later today. Please do everything you can to make her welcome.’
Jochen van Meer, the station’s medical doctor, had raised his thick blond eyebrows and grinned across the table at the other men. ‘It will be a pleasure.’
Eight, nine, Rooker thought. It made no difference.
A shadow flicked over his closed eyelids and he sat up to see what it was. A big brown skua gull had landed a yard away, and now it cocked its head and gazed at him. The skuas ringed the rocks outside the door of the base, scavenging for scraps of food, and they quickly learned to follow the sledges further afield. He rummaged in the zipped pocket of his parka, found a lint-coated square of chocolate and threw it to the bird. There was a snap and the fragment disappeared into the hooked beak.
The radio crackled in his inner pocket. Shoesmith’s voice broke out of the buzz of static. ‘Base, this is Kandahar Base, Base to Rooker. Over.’
‘Copy you,’ Rooker replied.
Everything about Shoesmith, including his radio manner, was irritating.
As soon as they met, at the hotel in Punta Arenas before the flight south, Rooker knew that Shoesmith had the English public schoolboy’s conviction that what he did was right because it was always done that way. He had confidence, it seemed to Rooker, but it wasn’t rooted in competence or insight.
The trouble was that his voice, his manner, even his pink, handsome face, reminded Rooker of Henry Jerrold of Northumberland, England, whom he wanted to forget for ever.
Rooker listened to the leader’s instructions. While the glaciology team was working, Richard wanted him to come back to base with the skidoo and ferry the French biologist to one of her penguin colonies. After that, the supply ship was due. Rooker was to take the Zodiac out through the loose ice to meet the new arrival and bring her ashore.
‘Roger,’ he said.
He fired up the skidoo and the skua launched itself away in a long, confident glide. Rook nosed his way back along their outward ski tracks until he reached the point closest to the others, then dismounted and plodded across to tell them where he was going. His boots sank almost to the ankles in the soft snow cloaking the ice.
‘You are not leaving us out here the whole night with no more than one sandwich?’ Valentin laughed.
‘Don’t you fret, Val, we can walk home, no problem. It’s Rook who’ll have to worry when we do get in,’ Phil threatened.
He left them to their flagging, uncoupled the sledge and raced the skidoo back to base. The outward journey had been slow because he and Phil had stopped to test the snow ahead with a long probe wherever there was a shadow or a dip. Too many dogs and sledges and even men had vanished from history into the bowels of the ice for it to be worth taking any risks. But now he drove at full speed, bouncing along with the cold stinging his cheeks and the front skis skimming in the safe tramlines of their exploratory journey. The trail stretched ahead, a thin smudge winding into the blank distance. Exhilaration curved his mouth into a wide grin.
The base was six miles away. As he came over the last rise Rooker saw it lying ahead of him in a sheltered bay, two tiny carmine-red dots against a sweep of snow with the pack ice and a tongue of inky water as a backdrop. Escarpments