The Lost Swimmer (37 page)

Kate McMillan, an ornithologist and close friend, had just arrived for the season. A lanky 185 centimetres tall, thirty-three years old, she was pale skinned and freckled, with a shock of unruly red hair that shimmered in the sun. She was doing a fine imitation of Charlie Chaplin as she fell into rhythm with the waddling penguins, causing no disruption as she placed coloured rocks on to the ground for them. Red, blue, orange, yellow.

I looked down at my tablet and watched the images being streamed by the huge fixed camera that we'd set up yesterday with the help of our base engineers. Built like a tank in hard grey steel, the camera was programmed to swivel randomly to record the breeding cycle. It zoomed in to an enormous close-up of a penguin eye, black with a white rim around it, as the bird snapped up Kate's red stone. Then it zoomed back out to the chaos of the rookery where fights were erupting over the new pebbles. The penguins were completely trusting of our presence. Their predators were in the sky and sea, so they held no fear of us. Like all wildlife in this pristine wilderness the Adélies hadn't seen the awful destruction humans were capable of inflicting. It was a land of innocence.

Suddenly there was a huge close-up of my face. Behind sunglasses, my expression was ambiguous, even though I was happy. My dark hair was looped up messily; my olive skin pale from not having seen sun since April. The camera zoomed out – I was tall and technically not overweight but I was reminded how much digital images could fatten one up. I must do more exercise now the warmer weather was here.

The camera swivelled back to the penguins. I took notes. Today I was carrying out an Environmental Impact Assessment on how the camera might affect the Adélies. Trained as a marine biologist, I had made my name studying the relationship between penguins and their tiny crustacean food, krill, in the Southern Ocean. Then I'd spent a decade with my true loves, cetaceans – researching families of whales and dolphins – before undertaking a second doctorate in environmental science to ensure I stayed competitive. Antarctica was the one underpinning strength of my life, and I'd do anything to be here.

I was down this time on an eighteen-month contract with the Australian Antarctic Division, the longest I'd had – normally it was a twelve-month gig, but I'd taken the Station Leader position in the middle. It would be my final summer before I had to go back to Victoria. Having been in the ice for a year already, there were a few quirks setting in. Kate said I had
the look
– like I was gazing through to a far horizon. I knew it in other winterers but I hadn't realised I had it myself. Even when you're surrounded by a small group of people in Antarctica, you're still more on your own than anywhere else. The landscape is broad and wide and your vision runs to it. You live in your head, the present can flow to the past – you spend hours reflecting. The other day I'd gone outside missing my left boot, and it was only when Kate laughed that I was
toasty
I realised I was standing in my sock. Toast is what the Americans call ice fever – when you start to burn out and the mind plays tricks. Everyone gets a bit toasty over winter, but I was generally fine.

Although I'd almost forgotten what the other world looked like. And best of all, I was on leave from my university in Melbourne where I'd torched a few bridges, which I knew meant I'd be stuck at Associate Professor level for some time. I adored my team of fellow scientists but I'd had a blow-up with a group of the most senior professors in my department. I shuddered at the thought. I was in no hurry to get back, even though I was passionate about my Antarctic Studies program that was growing more popular every year. I loved this generation of students. They looked at people directly, judged you for who you were in that moment, so different to the baby-boomers, who were always nosy.
What do you do? Are you married? Do you have children?
The students didn't take jobs as a birthright, unlike the old worn academics, too scared or greedy to leave, huddled over their posts like fat spiders. Of which my mother was one. Cristina Ana Alvarado, Professor of Spanish Linguistics and Culture, stalwart of her School; a proud migrant success story.

We were Spanish, and
sacrifices
had been made. In Extremadura in Western Spain, cherries grow in abundance in Valle del Jerte. That's where my Granny Maria was born and raised, and my Papa Luis, a place so beautiful they never wanted to leave. But they were ten years old at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and were sent on a boat to England in 1936 in a desperate attempt to keep them safe. Their parents perished in the war, killed by Franco's brutal Nationalists. Maria and Luis, heart-broken, yearned to go home to the little family that was left, but it was too dangerous. They grew up in London and as young, exiled adults they married, and my mother Cristina came along in 1951. That's when they vowed that whatever happened in their homeland they would stay in England to make a better life for her, a decision that sat heavily. Cristina felt responsible, and always tried to outperform. But she shattered their dreams when she met my Dad, Mike Green, a young medical intern from Adelaide, who swept her off to Australia.

Dad was from establishment stock, and going through a belated hippy phase. I arrived on 25 January 1977, two weeks after their marriage on a wild stretch of South Australian beach, much to the shame of Granny Maria and Papa Luis.

My childhood in Adelaide was perfect. We lived in a small house on the waterfront at Grange, a windswept seaside suburb. I learned to swim by the old wooden jetty and each summer pods of dolphins would arrive, ducking and weaving through the pale green waves. I'd run with the local kids along the beach, keeping up with the sleek grey fins as they rose and dipped. And sometimes there'd be another fin, one that stayed on the surface, cutting through the waves in a thick black silhouette. A shark; a white pointer. At weekends there'd be a tiny plane that would circle the sharks and crowds of swimmers would flee, screaming, onto the baking sand. And when the tide was low I'd lie in warm pools, telling stories of dolphins and whales in faraway oceans to my friends.

All that changed when Dad, who'd excelled as a researcher in biological medicine at Adelaide University, found a promotion in Melbourne and we had to leave. I was devastated. I was nine years old.

We moved into a big creaking house in a dark leafy street in suburban Kew, so far away from the beach. A green desert. And then one year later, Dad moved out.

Mum ached to go back to London but she had a job as a lecturer, teaching Spanish, and as with all Alvarados she stayed to make a better life for her daughter. She insisted that I take my first surname – in Spanish tradition that meant her maiden name. I would be Laura Alvarado. I longed to be Laura Green. I worshipped my father and loved that he – and therefore I – was Australian. I blamed my mother and wondered what awful things she'd done to make Dad go. I'd grill her; she'd never answer. I saw Dad at weekends for a couple of years, and then he moved to Sydney and was, more often than not, too busy to come down, or have me up to visit.

That left Mum and me in the too-big house in a cold, foreign place.

A penguin started pecking curiously at my leg, pulling the trouser fabric, letting it go, pulling again.

‘No rock here, my love.'

He looked up curiously and pecked again. Another penguin dropped a stone between the tripod legs of the camera. The pecking penguin waddled off and returned with a blue stone of Kate's, dropped it on the leg of the tripod where it rolled off. I photographed them and made notes, concerned the camera may have been erected on their annual nesting spot. They were tagged with tiny radio antennae that stuck out through their oily feathers on the back of their necks. I looked them up on my satellite-tracking app – Isabel and Charles. I would follow them; make sure the camera didn't disturb them.

Elsewhere, young penguins arriving for their first breeding season were trying to coerce their way into established partnerships to no avail. They'd rush in when one penguin was away, only to be pecked out, like a game of musical chairs, but they never won the chair. I sympathised. The camera swivelled and took arbitrary shots.

My nose started to freeze and a familiar sensation rushed through me. A storm was brewing. Down here, anything could change at any second. I looked across to Kate. She'd felt it too. I threw on my jacket and signalled for home; Kate gave me the thumbs up. We put on our skis.

The wind was fierce as we tilted against it, slowly making our way cross-country through icefields stretching wide to three horizons. Gales had whipped the surface into sastrugi, small ridges like frozen waves, with little peaks and troughs shadowed blue beneath sky that was turning a dark, foreboding grey. We took care to keep to the flagged area our safety engineer had set out, away from deep ice crevasses that could be fatal. In Antarctica, people normally moved around on motorised equipment but we preferred to ski and it was much less disruptive to the Adélie colony. Our tiny Apple hut, a round red dome of warmth and shelter – looking just like its namesake, a cheery red apple – was a welcome sight in the vast white. I tried to pull open the door, but the wind kept blowing it closed. Kate helped, and together we managed to force it ajar long enough to slip inside. Shutting it, there was a beautiful muffled quiet. A blizzard was forming, and the katabatic winds, roaring downhill from the inland ice, grew so strong that everything started to rock.

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 the empty pews in a tiny church that had been built for the whalers.

That night we slept in a tent by the harbour and stuck our heads out watching the sparkling 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 ringing. I reacted as 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 Alva-rado'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 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 speaking 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, lying face down in shallow water, tiny arms stuck out to their sides, like they were trying to hold hands. Drowned. My blood drained from me.