The Nature of Ice (16 page)

Freya sees Malcolm nab the walking sandwich board by the frame of his placard, which is illustrated with a skull and cross bones and the words
Tommo's Tired Stew.
He ushers the sandwich board, along with a male field assistant clad only in a G-string and wielding a whip, towards the door. ‘Exit right, you clowns. I didn't see cruel or lewd written on the noticeboard. Back up the stairs and rethink your wardrobe.'

The windows have been masked to block out the sun; a disco ball and strobe light spins a mosaic of silver mirrors around the walls, and Elisia cues an evening's worth of dance music.

First away is Ian the physicist, so often preoccupied in a cloud of atmospherics, who steps onto the dance floor with his colleague, Becky, wowing the crowd with a command performance of the Rumba.

Freya tells herself to stop after the first bottle of champagne— Marcus abhors drunk or raucous women—but Kittie keeps pouring and Elisia keeps toasting; soon the three cavort their way to the dance floor. Elisia entices Chad to join them—a circle of four emboldened by costume and wine, dappled by mirrors streaming lazily by.

The floor becomes a press of bodies, Tommo the chef and Frankenfurter escaping the crowd to dance an intimate tango off to one side. The music slows, bodies sway; the lights swirl around Freya until the horizon becomes a blur of shoulders and heads. She turns to Chad, who has abandoned his costume keeping only the tail, which continues to cause havoc each time a passing shoe pins its tip. She doubts she can stay upright without someone to steady her, each turn of the floor giddier than the last, the room aglitter with flashing lights. Freya props her head against Chad's arm but still the room weaves by. Within its arc, eclipsed by the strobe, she sees a menacing beak and glinting eyes fixed upon her. When she lifts her head she realises she was foolish to flinch. All that stands before her is a slightly out of focus 007, Adam Singer's arm outstretched, the barrel of his gun searching out her head. A mocking wink. Kapow.

FREYA NURSES A HANGOVER THAT four tablets, a litre of water and a slow Sunday morning in her studio have been unable to shake.

Forty-five years after the expedition
, Marcus writes,
‘Joe'
Laseron, the biological collector, looked back
:

>> One phase of our expedition is indelibly impressed on my memory. When eighteen men are herded together in a space twenty-four feet square for over a year, in a climate so severe that the greater part of the time must be spent indoors, and when these limited quarters must serve for sleeping, cooking, eating, and for the pursuit of many specialised callings, [this] indeed is the test of true comradeship. It was in these trying circumstances that the expedition can, I believe, make an almost unique claim.

Hurley's photo of Bob Bage at the sewing machine inside winter quarters shows an orderly chaos, the close-packed living Chad had spoken of.

Freya pings a quick reply, ignoring her throbbing head and whatever mistakes are bound to catch her husband's eye. She shuts down her laptop and reaches gingerly for her pack.

Glasses. Gloves. Lights. Door.
Thud.

She's joining Chad to hike to Lake Stinear then on to the lookout. Freya has limited herself to one digital camera and she paces down the hill grateful for her feather-light pack and the rest day.
Sunday
. No Saturday chores, no backlog of films to catalogue, no images to burn. A day of play all over the polar world. When Chad phoned her studio an hour ago to ask whether she was fit enough to take a walk she'd responded in a rush of enthusiasm,
no worries
, flattered he would choose to invite her on this, his free day, her bravado belying a pounding head.

She watches a GP glide south along the coast—and laughs when she realises she's used the Antarctic acronym for giant petrels. Next she'll be spouting
blows
and
blizzes
, loading the bike with a
rat pack
, sorting recyclables to be
RTA
'd to Hobart on the
AA
, answering
roger
and
copy that
without a moment's pause
.

After an ambivalent introduction to Australia, years of her childhood spent struggling to unpick a new country's jargon, it still puzzles Freya how the vernacular, through some invisible process of osmosis, became a part of her. These days, to Mama's disdain, Freya struggles to recall her mother tongue. Apparently it is not all lost; Marcus says he loves the trace of Norway in her speech, that the quaint expressions she used in the year he taught her at college were what first tweaked his heart.

It's worth remembering
, he'll invariably segue,
that the written
impression you make on your photographic clients also counts for
a lot
. And off he'll go correcting her spelling and grammar.

A quick pitstop at the dark and dingy expiries container. Freya digs through the plastic bins, looking for a glint of purple foil in the piles of out-of-date food. Right now her lowest priority is the station-wide contest to find the oldest chocolate bar; any chocolate will do. Not yet halfway through December and her new monthly rations are gone. Despairing, she throws herself across sacks of packaged rice to reach the unsorted supplies pushed against the back wall. She riffles through dehydrated dinners and instant potato, waterproof matches, miniature jams. She digs through an entire seam of Vegemite, stacks tins of butter and plum puddings to one side, perks up at a rustle, only to deflate at the sight of packet after packet of silver-wrapped sledging biscuits. Finally she grasps a rectangular wedge, hard, tessellated; more are buried beside it. She extricates two precious blocks of chocolate, drawing a mental map of where to find them next time, and rolls onto her back to proffer thanks.

On closer inspection, however, the old-fashioned white wrapper of the fruit-and-nut bar is as foxed as the pages of one of Marcus's first editions. She relinquishes the antiquated bar and pockets only the fresher one—still well past its best. Everyone has their limits.

She bolts the rest of the way, bursting into the foyer of the living quarters to find that Chad has already turned over his tag and marked their expected return time on the whiteboard. She feels an unexpected sting to see a third name listed, and quickly reprimands herself. Elisia Hood, she reminds herself as she enters the lounge to greet them, is a treat to have around.

THEY TRUDGE THROUGH KNEE-HIGH SNOW to reach the shoreline of the lake. Freya has never seen Chad so relaxed; he and Elisia are reminiscing about their winter months. Elisia came to Davis Station as the wintering dieso and, like Chad, opted to stay a second summer to help out with the planes. They try to include her and she does her best to join in.
Which one
was Beacon? Three days straight as slushy during winter!

Freya finds herself trailing, has to quickstep to match their thundering pace as Elisia tells her about their winter crossing of the Sørsdal Glacier to the Rauer Islands. Eight of them, half the station, had set off in two Haggs and struck bad weather, the poor visibility obscuring the cane line—bamboo wands staked along the ice to mark a safe route. ‘Chad, Beacon and I drove twenty hours without stopping; pea-soup conditions all the way.'

Chad slows to match Freya's pace, to describe how they made ten days worth of pre-cooked dinners ready to zap in a microwave oven that they carted along in the back of theirH agg.

‘Meals on wheels!' Elisia cries.

Chad grins. ‘In the case of the Hagg, snacks on tracks. How about Beacon's laksa, Lis? How good was that?'

Elisia hits him. ‘What about my lasagna?' and off they forge, reliving each meal.

Then Elisia throws her arms to the sky. ‘The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was—minus-fucking-forty on the way home. Remember, Chad?'

‘Who could forget?'

‘We pitched the tents in a circle like a small tepee village,' Elisia says. ‘Microwave beeping in the Hagg. I brought my sound system. The Waifs, Keb Mo, wafting over ice. And both nights,
both nights
, auroras to die for.'

Chad moves back to Freya's side. ‘It's true.' He lights up, as animated as she's seen him. ‘The sky was unbelievable. Intense pink, blue, the white so strong it blotted out the stars. You would have been in seventh heaven.'

‘Wow
,'
Freya says. Really, she's impressed. What she would give to see just one good aurora. She feels a prickling awareness of her lower status as a summerer—one of the lightweights who blow in and blow out at the end of the season. She lets herself drop back, in a huff at God knows what.

At the far end of Lake Stinear, Elisia waits for her to catch up. ‘How'd you fare this morning? As green around the gills as I was?'

‘Biliously green.' Freya confesses, vowing never again to drink champagne. She hesitates. ‘Last night, Lis, did I do anything . . . stupid?'

‘Do you mean, was I the only one to notice you and that man over there looking cosy on the dance floor?' Elisia turns to her. ‘Can I say something to you, as a friend?'

‘Of course you can.'

‘Chad's been very good to me. He's one of the most genuine, honourable people I know. I'd hate to see him hurt.'

Freya blinks. ‘He's hardly interested in me! And I'm certainly not out—I'm married, Elisia.'

‘Yes,' is all she says.

‘Lis!' Chad beckons her over to the ridge where he is rummaging through a collection of rocks.

‘Gotta go. He could be on to Lasseter's Reef.'

Freya stews over Elisia's words, distressed that the very act of speech carries the momentum to make something out of nothing. It unsettles Freya to find herself lured into even imagining the idea.

She watches Elisia striding across the ice, her plait of fair hair bouncing on her back. Freya thinks Elisia radiates more natural beauty than any other woman on the station. She exudes an aura of calm. She never wears a scrap of makeup, even on Saturday nights when the station dresses up for dinner. Elisia is taller than Chad, her build as athletic as it is strong. She has proven photogenic too: as part of Freya's portrait series, she set up lights in the workshop and photographed Elisia welding, sparks showering her overalls and safety glasses. Freya envies Elisia her sense of place, her practical knowledge and skill at mending broken things.

Is there a place in Antarctica for artists like herself? Except for Chad, she can hardly align herself with the trades. Nor would the sciences claim her as their own—which is probably as well: just walking through the laboratories makes Freya tingle with unease, sends her clamouring for a breath of untainted air.

She senses that some on station think her project frivolous, her title of artist-in-residence a sham. Freya can guess at some of the opinions expressed:
The way the government wastes public
money on the arts.

One way of cadging a free ride south.

Malcolm, she is sure, would give short shrift to any whisper of elitism.
God forbid Frank Hurley or Herbert Ponting hadn't
gone along to photograph the early expeditions. Freya is adding
a twenty-first-century account to the layers of Antarctic history.

Meanwhile some from the workshops refuse to believe that photography rates as work.
Come to get your playmate?
Adam and the other chippies gibe when she goes to meet Chad.

Freya waves back when Chad beckons from the brow of the hill. She races to catch up but when she reaches the crest they have already bounded ahead, snatches of their laughter scudding by on the wind.

At the lookout Chad produces mugs from his pack. ‘Tea.' He extracts the first thermos. ‘And coffee, strong for those who need it.'

Freya sips her coffee, resting against her pack while Chad and Elisia fossick among the rocks below. Through Chad's binoculars she can make out the Sørsdal Glacier's scintillating diamonds of light. To the east the repeater mast of Tarbuck Crag glints in the sun. She has never questioned the phone in her studio, or that she can hook up to the internet any time she likes, but suddenly it strikes her that it all began a century ago in a tiny wooden hut. None of the men at winter quarters, Marcus told her in an email, were even aware that in late September 1912, a few weeks before wind felled and smashed one of their masts, they had made history—the Macquarie Island relay station picked up snippets of morse code from the radio officer at Commonwealth Bay:
Having a hell of a time
waiting for calm weather to put up more masts.

Sheltered from the breeze, wrapped in her jacket, hat pulled low, she feels the sun's glow radiating warmth through her.

Freya stirs to Chad nudging her. ‘Wake up, sleepyhead. You've been out for nearly an hour.'

Dozy, she reaches for his outstretched hand so he can help her up but fails to grasp it firmly. She reels backwards, leaving her glove behind in his grip.

Chad winces as she lands on her pack. ‘Ouch.'

‘I'm okay. I'm officially awake.'

‘Sorry, sorry.' He returns her glove. ‘I was born under the sign of slapstick.'

Only then does she register the band of waxen skin on her finger. Furtively she retrieves the wedding ring from inside her glove and hides it in her hand. ‘I'm the careless one.'

As Marcus likes to remind her. She marvels now at a ring's capacity to enact its marriage vows and dominion, the circle of wedding-white as good as a brand upon her skin.

Winter Quarters
Commonwealth Bay
Adelie Land
9 November 1912

My very dear Paquita

This is the first occasion since landing in Antarctica that I
have addressed myself to you in writing, though daily a warm
glow of life feels to have crept in to me coming from the far
distant civilised world, and of course it can be from none but
you.

I have concluded, once again, that it is nice to be in love,
even here in Antarctica with the focus of the heart strings far
far away.