Authors: Ann Turner
We ate a quick meal of hot soup and biscuits in companionable silence. Kate was often not much of a talker, which always amused me given how loud her beloved penguins were. Afterwards, we slipped into sleeping bags and lay on single stretchers crammed close for body heat. Kate was absorbed in the footage the camera was recording and was now reprogramming it so that she could control where it filmed. I looked across at her screen and saw the penguins hunkered down, becoming white with snow and ice until they were indistinguishable from the landscape.
I checked my satellite-tracking app and found Isabel and Charles huddled together between the tripod legs, snug on their new nest. I, too, had found my mate down here once: at twenty-seven, in the abandoned Norwegian whaling station of Grytviken on South Georgia Island, I’d married Cameron Stewart, a dark-eyed, dark-haired, intense marine biologist the same age as me. We were part way through a summer investigation of humpback whales, which at that time were in decline. The bloody, awful history of the whaling station should have made us sad, but we were young and deeply in love, and instead it brought out an unexpected fighting instinct. We wanted to do something to respect the whales, to mark and pay homage to their terrible destruction. There was a small museum, and the woman in charge was also a chaplain. Cameron and I were sombre and respectful as we took our vows in front of empty pews in the old timber church that had been built for the whalers.
That night we slept in a tent by the harbour and stuck our heads out to watch the glittering array of stars in the deep sky, listening to a recording we’d made of humpback whales singing. Three pods, each with their own song, which the males sang to find their mate. They were eerily musical, sharing notes and arrangements with human compositions, like ethereal, modern performances.
We spent the next two weeks on board the
Antarctic Explorer
with a group of American scientists, diving with the humpbacks in their crystal-clear underwater world, vivid colours refracting light. With the rhythm of oxygen from my scuba tank, my protective diving gear keeping me in a warm cocoon, I felt more alive than ever before. We followed the humpbacks’ songs, which developed each day and grew more complex. A high note here, a bass note there, a new coupling of tones. Our bodies vibrated as the songs swept through us. We named the whales, photographing them, memorising the distinctive black and white markings on the underside of their tail flukes. Each pattern was unique, like a fingerprint; there were no two alike. My favourite humpback was Lev, a calf, about ten months old. He was a friendly clown and had already found himself in trouble, with a diagonal scar running across his flukes. He’d swim so close I could touch the long white pleats stretching from his mouth to his belly.
My phone started to ring, and I couldn’t hide my reaction when I saw who it was. Kate glanced over, registered the caller, and waited to see what I’d do.
‘Is it okay with you?’ I asked. She grinned, green eyes lighting up. ‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world.’ I punched her on the arm and put the phone on speaker.
‘Hi Mum.’
‘Laura, haven’t you received my messages?’ Cristina Ana Alvarado’s strong, resonant voice boomed out. I could imagine her sitting where she always did at her kitchen table, running long fingers through stylishly-cut brown hair. Mum was an older, more fashionable version of me. Same olive skin, same dark eyes. I’d always wanted to take after my dad; he had brown hair and black eyes too, but he still managed to look like a white-bread Anglo-Saxon.
‘Sorry, I’ve been busy.’
Kate snorted, too loudly.
‘Who are you there with, honey? Is that Kate?’
‘Yes, we’re in the field.’
‘Hi Cristina,’ called Kate. Mum asked Kate how she was, but before waiting for an answer began to speak earnestly. Once she started, it was challenging to get her to stop.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen the news?’
‘No, Mum, I’ve been—’
‘That’s the problem down there. You forget about everyone else.’
Kate nodded exaggeratedly and whispered, ‘That’s the point.’
‘It’s awful,’ said Mum. ‘I’ve just got home from a protest march. Those poor refugees are desperate. They’re drowning in the Mediterranean as they try to get to Italy. And more innocent children have washed up on the shore, just like that little boy.’
My tablet beeped – Mum had sent a photograph of two girls, no more than six years old, neatly dressed in bright red parkas and jeans, lying face-down in shallow water, tiny arms stuck out to their sides, as if they were trying to hold hands. Drowned.
‘Australia needs to take more refugees, it’s barbaric.’
I nodded, unable to speak. The wind roared, rocking our Apple hut violently, and the connection broke up. Mum was still talking as the call was lost. I sat back, staring at the photo. Kate leaned over, and reeled away in shock. ‘Wish I hadn’t seen that,’ she mumbled, quickly refocusing on her penguins. ‘Your mother’s right, we should be taking more.’
‘She’s always right on those things,’ I said.
It’s just everything else she’s wrong about.
Like sending this terrible photo, already lodged in my mind, opening a portal into my memories that were pouring in, unstoppable. When Cameron and I had returned from Antarctica, I’d discovered I was pregnant. My mother heard the news of the marriage and pregnancy at the same time. I thought she’d be livid but she was ecstatic. In one swoop my family life improved, and Mum mellowed. Cam and I set up in a rented house in Elwood by the sea. We both had postdocs at Melbourne University and our world was each other, our work and most centrally our ever-growing, cutely kicking, adorable soon-to-arrive baby boy. Mum started a second career purchasing baby clothes and all the trappings of prams and bassinets and toys imaginable.
As the days grew closer to my full term I stopped working. Mum and Cam helped set up a cosy room filled with mobiles of penguins dangling from the ceiling, and colourful posters of whales of every species on the walls. We bought new furniture, and arranged the clothes in drawers from zero to twelve months. We were like blissfully nesting Adélies.
When my waters broke, Cam, Mum and I went to hospital as planned. Everything was going perfectly until intense pain exploded in me, and blood flowed like rain. Our baby was coming, clawing his way out in monstrous bursts, but something was terribly wrong. Specialists raced in and took over from the midwife. The contractions were fast. Too fast. I was rushed to the operating theatre. Mum held one hand, Cam the other, as I was wheeled along, and then to my horror they had to leave. An oxygen mask was clamped on my face, I was given blood to replace the gush of red seeping out, and rapidly prepared for an emergency C-section. Doctors swarmed. An intravenous drip in my arm and a general anaesthetic were the last things I remembered. When I woke up, my life had changed.
As I opened my eyes, the recovery room was silent. I looked around, waiting to hear for the first time the beautiful cry heralding my baby’s arrival, expecting him to be close in a crib. My mother was nowhere to be seen. Cam, dark eyes sunken and bruised from tears, broke the news. Placental abruption. Sudden, unexpected. Starving our boy of oxygen. The doctors were unable to save him.
Stillborn.
Cam held me tight.
I asked to see my baby. The midwife was crying as she carried him in, swaddled in a hospital blanket, and placed him gently on my chest. Nothing made sense. He was beautiful, perfectly formed, with a head of black hair like Cam. Even in this miniature state I could see that he would take after his father – straight nose, narrow, pointed chin like an imp. I held his tiny crinkled hand and kissed him. My baby was limp, with no heartbeat. That wasn’t possible. He’d been bucking playfully inside me for months, with a strong, healthy, throbbing heart.
He was as white as snow. A white I’d never seen.
We called him Hamish. A Scottish name, like his father. The midwife offered to take photographs. Cam said no. Every instinct in me needed to bathe Hamish, dress him in his soft blue pyjamas and wrap him in his own new woollen blanket. I was slow and careful as I washed his dark hair, my body numb and aching simultaneously. I tried to keep him warm, but he was as cold as ice. Cam stood shivering beside me, crying softly. He reached out his hand to touch Hamish; pulled it back, unable to.
After the funeral, with the pale coffin so small it looked like it housed a doll, we packed away the ultrasound scans of our growing boy, but we left his room furnished, with the penguin mobiles and whale posters. We kept his clothes. So many clothes. Cam and I couldn’t talk about it. Milk still came, useless. I was fragile for weeks from the caesarean. I couldn’t concentrate or care about my research. Mum tried to be supportive, but she was furious with the universe. It brought all the losses the Alvarados had faced rushing in. I blamed myself, my mind churning. What had I done? I hadn’t smoked, drunk alcohol, taken drugs; I didn’t have high blood pressure, wasn’t overweight. I’d had none of the risk factors. But I was certain it was my fault, and I knew my mother blamed me too. She said I was being irrational but I couldn’t shake the feeling. I withdrew further and further.
Cameron and I tried for another child, but nothing happened. I wanted a baby desperately, to raise a little boy or girl so differently to the way I’d been brought up. I wouldn’t dominate; I’d make sure not to drive the father away. But Cam and I just weren’t the same after Hamish. Two miserable years later we separated.
I felt so displaced I moved back in with Mum, which was a terrible mistake. We’d argue and make up and argue in a revolving psychodrama. And always, the face of my beautiful baby Hamish hovered. As soon as I closed my eyes. As soon as I woke.
I caught my breath, a hot flush burning my cheeks. In Antarctica ghosts could visit.
The blizzard was shrieking. I listened to the familiar roar, feeling the force of wind and ice and snow raging across the continent. It comforted me, even though it brought mortality knocking. Life could be so easily extinguished in extreme cold, if you were caught in the wrong place. Life was fragile. With sadness, I closed the image of the two drowned refugee girls, sickened by the injustice that they’d had to flee their homeland, only to meet death rather than a future of hope, the shared migrant dream.
I lay back and kept listening to the wind, grateful to be warm and sheltered, and then I tapped open a journal:
Bio-Medicine International
. Mum had always wanted me to study Spanish literature, but there was something in my head that relaxed when I observed minute details with clean precision and recorded facts and figures, and I was addicted to collaboration, the teamwork that gave me an endless stream of tiny, tight-knit families.
As Antarctica howled, I scrolled to the long article by my father, Professor Michael Green, on the influenza virus and how susceptible the world was to a massive pandemic, greater than anything we’d ever seen. I kept abreast of Dad’s research, even though I hadn’t seen him since I first graduated from university, following in his footsteps with my science degree. When Hamish died, Dad had sent flowers and money, and written expressing his condolences – but he couldn’t come to the funeral because he was overseas. Since then we’d had email contact, and left occasional phone messages. For the past decade Dad had been either away or too busy when I tried to catch up with him in Sydney. It saddened me, but I knew it was Mum’s fault. I looked so much like her, and she’d treated him so badly. That didn’t stop me feeling angry with him on my own behalf, but I always found myself slipping back into admiration. Dad had become a pre-eminent scholar, the most respected microbiologist in his field in the Asia–Pacific region. At least I could enjoy reading his work. It couldn’t hurt me.
Or so I thought.
2
T
he morning was clear and pristine, as if the storm had forged everything anew in this ancient land. My heart swelled at the sight of endless white ice, lurid green flags marking out the safe path, red ones off to the edge warning of danger, as my skis made a rhythmic whoosh. Apart from the echo of cracking icebergs out to sea – smaller bergs calving off their mother-bergs – and the sound of my lungs working hard, there was a profound silence.
I relished this time between camp and base. In between those two different worlds – one of quiet focus, the other of group camaraderie – was a space that no words could describe. It was a place I’d give my life for.
I took it slowly, but far too soon the great red shed that formed the heart of our base grew large on the horizon, with quad bikes scooting up and away as people arrived back and others left for field trips. The base was still ensnared by sea ice which, as summer arrived, would melt and allow ships to sail close to unload their cargo. The buildings scattered along the coast gave the feel of a rundown frontier land. I envied Kate, who had stayed back in the Apple hut and would be joined this morning by Gretchen, another ornithologist who’d be her partner in the Adélie research. I’d only check in physically from time to time but would monitor the rookery every day via satellite. It would take three months to finalise my report on the new camera but in the meantime I’d oversee the continued repatriation of waste around the base, working with a team of newly arrived engineers. Beneath the ice were layers of domestic rubbish buried deep, leeching harmful contaminants, which had to be excavated. But before that, we had to deal with the surface waste: barrels filled with oil and an assortment of chemicals, old batteries, pipes, cables, and other refuse that in the past had simply been junked in the garbage field. Everything discarded must now go back to Australia. It would be a long, slow process: the barrels were leaking, and couldn’t be easily moved. Here in the clear, freezing air, human waste and the uncaring ways of decades ago stood out like beacons of neglect. I often wondered if people back home would be less polluting if what they were doing was so starkly noticeable. Here you couldn’t miss it.
‘There you are, you dag!’ Georgia Spiros’s voice rang through the gaping dining area as I sat down to hot porridge. In her mid-forties, Georgia was tall, athletic and graciously slim, with sparkling black eyes and a grin that could melt ice. A senior detective in the Victoria Police, this was her third time as Station Leader – she’d just arrived to take over from me for the summer. The Australian Antarctic Division employed leaders from all civilian professions, who took leave to work in this extreme land.