Fresh air. If there’s one thing I can always rely on to settle my nerves, more than alcohol or cigarettes or the gym, it’s a good dose of fresh air.
Right before the exit to the deck is a door marked with the figure of a man and a woman, reminding me that I haven’t emptied my bladder for hours. I grab the handle and push, but it only opens a few inches before it hits something. Or someone: Marco, standing in the small space in front of the two stalls.
He suddenly straightens up from the surface beside the sink, his fingers flying to his nose, rapidly brushing and sniffing. Right behind him is Stefan, who snatches something off the other side of the sink and shoves it into his pocket in a single movement. It’s quick, but not quick enough to disguise what is clearly a baggy of white powder and a credit card. I take a step back, hands up, but Marco grips the door.
‘It’s not what it looks like.’
I check the passage on both sides, but it’s only me here. ‘It is exactly what it looks like.’
‘Please.’ He steps forward, eyes wide with panic, rubbing a finger back and forth against his upper lip. ‘My kids.’
‘Marco.’ He’s standing too close, but gets closer.
‘My ex – if this gets back to her, that’ll be it—’
‘Marco.’
He falls silent, blinking rapidly.
‘Where did you even get it from?’
He jerks round to Stefan, who won’t look me in the eye. It tells me everything I need to know; it’s not much consolation that the gear belongs to him, but at least it means Marco wasn’t stupid enough to smuggle it through Customs himself.
‘My boss—’ Stefan says.
‘Shut up,’ I hiss to them both, adrenaline surging like a geyser. ‘This show is my life, all right? You do this on my show, I’m taking no fucking prisoners. Do you understand?’
‘Yeah,’ Marco mutters. ‘Okay. Yeah.’
I nod to Stefan. ‘Flush it. Do it now.’
He thinks about arguing it for about half a second, then Marco takes over. He forces his hand into the smaller man’s pocket, then goes into the stall and flushes.
‘There,’ Marco says, coming out. ‘Done.’
I hold the door open and glare at them both as they file past me, shamefaced.
But Marco pauses in the corridor. ‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ he asks in an anxious whisper.
‘You should have thought about that first,’ I tell him, letting the door close behind me as I go into the vacated bathroom.
When I’m finished, the passage outside is silent, and I make my way towards the exit to the deck. I take a moment zipping myself into the yellow jacket – an ugly thing Dee’s owned for years, but which I now discover is unbelievably warm – and pull the cord to fasten the hood around my face. Then I haul the heavy door open. The rush of cold is instant, snatching the air from inside me, bringing tears to my eyes. I blink until I get used to the dark, then shut the metal door.
The sky is completely black, but the vast, immaculate landscape of snow and ice glows like a low-wattage moon. Blue-white, as if lit from within.
And it is, truly, breathtaking. Not only the ice sheet that the ship is moored against, stretching for miles. Or the sheer size of the mountain and the one behind it and the one behind that, their swathes of rockface that have evaded the coverage of snow impossibly black. Or even the endless fathoms of icy water to the starboard side, dotted with anarchic, irregular ice structures drifting silently alongside us.
It’s the emptiness. It is oppressive, terrifying, absolute. We’ve travelled maybe fifteen, twenty miles, but it’s as desolate and remote as the face of Mars. White, white, white everywhere, and the mirror-stillness of the water. Nothing makes a sound. I’d imagined fierce weather here, but now there is not a whisper of wind.
It’s as if the whole landscape is waiting.
I take a step towards the front of the ship, then another, reaching for the railing as soon as I can. I should not have come out in these shoes. But something draws me forward.
The thought is in my mind before I can barricade it: how there are mere inches of deck between me and certain death beyond the ship. How easy it would be for a body – my body – to slip into the water.
There’s that dark impulse that goes with vertigo sometimes, what they call l’appel du vide, the call of the void. A compulsion to throw yourself off the very height that terrifies you. My face and my gloveless hands are already burning with the cold and I know I should go back. But I can’t make myself turn away. There’s no raised edge to the top deck, just a double line of cable held up by a series of vertical posts. I lean out over the wire rope and breathe it in.
At the edge of my vision there’s a sudden quiver of light. Green, blue, impossibly bright. Flickering like a banner, unfurling endless tendrils of colour that whip across the sky. The Northern Lights.
It breaks the fugue, and I am suddenly elated. I’m a million miles from home, I’m in a different world, a different universe, reborn – clean and perfect, beyond any drug I have ever taken. I can’t take my eyes off it. I shout, not even words, into the sky. I am laughing.
The familiar weighty clang of the door behind me. Footsteps, but I don’t turn, not until the very last second, when I feel them coming close.
Too close.
The force from behind, against my back, knocks me off my feet. I grasp for the cable but it’s not enough, and I am falling, tumbling into the pitch-darkness.