When Birdie starts crying, I don’t know how to react. I nearly put my arms round her, but I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do. Has she told them about our weird relationship? God knows. So Welland is the first to do something. He steps towards her, and pulls a perfectly folded handkerchief from his perfectly pressed trousers.
‘It gets a lot of people like that,’ he says quietly, shielding her from the rest of us. ‘To read it from a source you’ve never seen. From an actual diary written there and then.’
‘Sorry,’ she says as she wipes her nose.
‘Don’t be sorry.’ He doesn’t ask for the handkerchief back. He’s probably got loads, anyway, in a perfectly ordered dressing-table drawer. ‘I promise what I’ve got to show you next won’t make you cry.’
He takes us out of the room by a door at the back, one I wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t led us to it. Out in the windowless corridor, he rummages through his pockets again and gets out a key to open a heavy metal door.
‘Storage cupboard,’ he says conspiratorially.
‘And what exactly do you keep in here?’ Birdie asks.
‘Everything that’s not out there. Everything precious and fragile. Our conscience.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘You think it’s just a turn of phrase I’ve practised?’
‘No.’
‘And it isn’t. Museums are repositories of living things, not just shelves full of dead history. Good museums make history live again. It’s just that governments and bureaucrats don’t always give them enough money. Every time I come back here, I feel the pulse of memory, the heartbeat of history, the quivering timeline that binds together all ages.’
‘Nice speech,’ she says.
‘I mean it.’
‘I can tell. But I have my own spirits to find.’
‘I hope you do.’
‘Come on, then, show us what there is.’
We walk past row after row of metal shelves until we reach a gloomy corner of this immense cupboard. He bends down to the bottom shelf, pulls out two wooden boxes. He lifts them, with an audible wheeze, up to the metal trolley and puts them down with a crash.
‘I hate history being so fragile,’ he says. ‘Dive in,’ he laughs.
Birdie approaches the boxes with care, as if she were expecting something unpleasant to leap from them.
‘It’s fine,’ Welland says. ‘They’re framed photographic plates. And they’re just brilliant.’
She picks one out and holds it up towards the nearest neon light.
‘Bloody hell,’ she says. ‘It’s Cherry.’ Turns to Welland. ‘Are these original?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘All of them.’
‘Unbelievable,’ she says. ‘Unbelievable.’
‘Digitised?’ I say.
‘Not yet,’ he says. ‘So much to do, so little resource.’
There are hundreds of these plates. Photos of Shackleton, of Scott. There’s one plate of the northern party after their winter marooned in the cave. They must have washed and brushed up before the photo was taken, though, because they don’t look dirty or bedraggled. We spend over an hour going through the plates one by one, and exchange only the occasional word, the odd question. We know these people. We’re familiar with their faces. We’ve lived with them through the books we’ve read. They’re like our family. Even I have to swallow hard to make the emotion drain away before it reaches my eyes.
We finish going through the boxes of the past. The wood feels smooth under our fingers. We help Welland put them back onto the shelf. How long till they’re looked at again? I can’t help thinking that all these things need a bigger audience to become really alive again. New Zealand is so far away from the rest of the world. Even what’s in the glass cases out there needs more people to see it, to appreciate it, and understand it. To remember what it was like before life became so easy. Before we could use our satellite phones to be rescued from mountain tops and deserts.
Where do these things really belong? Out there, on the Ice, in the huts? Or should they be continuously journeying from museum to museum, around the world, so the world can remember them? I don’t have an answer. I don’t have a bloody clue. Perhaps I will when we’ve been to the huts, especially Scott’s. If we ever get there. Bloody weather. That’s one thing that’s changed. When they sailed there, the weather was just another obstacle, to be seen out. For us, it’s a show-stopper.
‘Great stuff,’ Birdie says, fully restored. Back to her impatient, lithe, hungry self. ‘Let’s go there now.’
‘But your exhibition opens tonight,’ Nev says.
‘Oh, what fun,’ she says. ‘I’m supposed to be going, aren’t I?’
‘Yes, you are.’
‘As long as you don’t tell anyone who I am.’
‘We won’t. No one else actually knows.’
‘Good. It wouldn’t do to destroy the mystery.’
‘What made you become Storm Moon?’ Welland says.
‘My parents. Me getting pissed off with them and their obsession, initially.’
‘That’s perverse,’ he says.
‘I thought they were ignoring me, that they’d looked past me as a person, lumbered me with the name of someone I had nothing in common with. So I made up my own persona, and started running wild with spray cans. Childish things at first. No thought of becoming a cult.’
‘I started reading about the expedition, about their deaths, saw Wilson’s work, and the colours of the ice. Found out that governments weren’t doing anything to preserve, conserve, protect. Not the buildings, not the continent. It made me angry. And then I came across Blek le Rat’s work, and started spraying images of ice and stencilled slogans.’
‘Sex on the ice is hot.’ Nev snorts. ‘That’s quite some political statement.’
‘You taking the mick?’ she says.
He holds his hands up. ‘No way.’
‘It’s about climate change,’ she says.
‘Oh yeah,’ he says.
‘Seriously … And I guess it must be quite exciting to –’
‘I believe you,’ he says.
‘We all know global warming’s one of the main reasons for the work at the huts,’ Welland says. ‘The freeze and thaw cycles getting more extreme, the wet wood splitting when it freezes.’
‘That’s what gave me the idea to support you, not just because I wanted to get out there, if we ever bloody get there.’ She grinds her teeth. ‘And with the Pole centenary coming up there’s a great opportunity to create public awareness of how real global warming is, and to kick those politicians’ arses.’
Nev shakes his head, smiles.
‘But you’ve still got a soft spot for Bowers?’ Welland says.
She nods. ‘I’ve got his name, haven’t I?’
‘Although he was a bit of a jingoistic old boy?’
‘Yes, despite that. Whatever he thought, and whatever kind of man he was, he carried the weight of that expedition. The planning, the packing, the observations. His resistance to the cold. He was an astoundingly resilient man. He never kept still, apparently. He was always doing something.’ Her eyes light up as she talks of her namesake.
‘No one can argue with that.’
‘It’s just sort of weird that nowadays he’s considered in this narrow view of what his politics were, almost, rather than being thought of in the context of what he achieved, and what he almost achieved.’
‘What do you mean – what he almost achieved?’ I say.
‘No one’s ever done what Scott and Bowers and the others tried. There’s never been a completed walk from Cape Evans to the Pole and back.’
‘But there’ve been people who’ve skied across the whole continent on their own.’
‘It’s not the same. That journey’s never been made and completed.’
‘D’you think anyone will ever try it?’ I say to Nev.
‘I don’t think so,’ he says.
‘Why?’
‘Well, no dogs or other animals are allowed, for starters. And that’s one reason no one’s ever tried Amundsen’s route either.’
‘And the fact that where he started from doesn’t exist anymore.’
‘Well, yeah, but they could start from an approximate point.’
‘Anyway …’
‘Anyway. To reconstruct Scott’s walk properly, leaving aside the dogs and ponies, you’d have to spend two years out there. You’d have to lay depots one summer, and then do the walk the next.’
‘Couldn’t you just get planes to do the depot-laying?’
‘I suppose you could, but that wouldn’t be an exact reconstruction then, would it?’
‘If there’s no dogs, you might as well have planes.’
‘And, besides, I’m not sure the Yanks or the Kiwis would support it.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Well, rescue effort-wise and stuff like that. I don’t think any government would like people to go over there and die.’
‘But is there anything to legally stop them?’
‘Not really. But it’d be bloody expensive.’
‘So why didn’t you do this trip privately?’ I ask Birdie. ‘Wouldn’t it have been easier than involving any bureaucrats?’
‘It would have,’ she says. ‘But if the weather’s shit, I wouldn’t have been able to force them to fly either. And it wouldn’t have been giving anything back. It wouldn’t have helped the huts or made a statement about climate change. It would’ve been something really selfish to do. And I didn’t want to do it that way. I want something good to come from my search for an answer.’
‘And we’re very grateful,’ Nev says.
‘Don’t be,’ she says. ‘If not me, someone else would’ve done something.’
‘Not any government,’ Welland says.
‘Why?’ I say.
‘It’s not strictly politically correct, is it, to celebrate Scott or anything that happened during the Empire? That’s why the anti-Scott brigade have been so successful.’
‘Well, fuck them,’ she says. ‘It’s all bollocks. If more people remembered what happened then, or were taught about it objectively, maybe they’d learn from it.’ She shakes her head. ‘It pisses me off.’
‘That’s why you’re here,’ Nev says. ‘And we’re lucky enough to know a cult hero.’
‘Quite,’ Welland adds.
‘D’you think I’ll make a difference?’ she says, suddenly fragile again.
‘I hope so,’ Welland answers. ‘Otherwise everything we’re doing is wasted.’
Back at the hotel, I knock on her door.
‘Hang on,’ she shouts.
‘OK,’ I shout back.
A minute later, she opens the door. She’s wearing the silk outfit I bought in Singapore. It doesn’t cover very much of her body. Her skin looks even paler than usual against the brightness of silk colours. And her hair even more blonde. She’s gorgeous. Part of me just wants to grab her now, love her now.
‘What?’ she says.
‘Nothing.’
‘Liar.’
‘You look amazing.’
‘You think so? Honestly?’
‘Yes. You know that’s what I think.’
‘I know nothing for certain. I can’t read people’s minds.’
I sit on her bed. It’s still light outside. Spring here seems much more cheerful than spring back home.
‘What do you want me to do tonight at the gallery?’
‘Nothing. We’re just visitors. No one knows who we are.’
‘Do you really do this all the time – go to your exhibitions anonymously?’
‘Always have. Always will. I don’t want people to make judgments based on me. I want them to judge what I paint. I don’t want someone to like my pictures just because they fancy me, or to hate them because they don’t like the way I look. I want the paint to speak. I’m not important, really.’
‘But you’re the painter.’
‘I’m a medium no more important than the canvas or the paint.’
‘That’s a weird thing to say.’
‘It isn’t, really. I am talented, OK, I know that, but that’s not entirely the point. For writers and painters what’s important is the message, to get their voices heard. And I think my voice would get lost if people started judging me, my appearance, my body, instead of the paintings.’
‘But do you think your voice is heard? And what do the paintings mean? Don’t some people think you’re just ripping off Wilson?’
‘Some people do think that. I don’t. I’m interpreting him in my own way. What I do is different to what he did. It’s on a much bigger scale. But without the experience of having been out there. And it’s not all based on Wilson. More and more of it is about something else.’
‘So what is your voice trying to say?’
‘Art doesn’t always have to be beautiful. We don’t always have to paint things that are nice to look at. There is beauty in ugliness, redemption in horror.’ She sits down next to me, and leans up against me. ‘Getting in front of the public, though, that’s a question of luck. And if it happens, you’ve just got to keep going. Be focused. Think of nothing else. Rely on the fact that we all read different messages into different things.’
‘I suppose we do,’ I say, enjoying the weight and warmth of her body. ‘I’m just not a very arty person.’
‘You don’t have to be,’ she says. ‘All you have to do is feel, not think.’ She reaches out and takes my hand. ‘Lie down here with me for a moment.’ She stretches out on the bed. ‘Come on.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t ask. Just do.’
I stretch out next to her. On my back. She nestles up to me. The last rays of sun make a pattern of sparkle and shadow on the ceiling. I never want this moment to end. I just hold her hand and say nothing. I’ve never been quiet for so long. I’ve never been this happy. Time stretches out ahead of us. I close my eyes and disappear.
‘Adam,’ she whispers.
‘What? Shit, we’ll be late.’
‘No, we won’t. Plenty of time for you to get changed.’
‘What do you mean, get changed? I’ve got nothing else to wear. You didn’t tell me I’d need to get poshed up.’
‘We don’t. I don’t. I just wanted to wear what you bought for me.’
‘Sorry I can’t match you.’ I sit up.
‘Maybe you can. Just have a rummage in the wardrobe.’
Intrigued, I get up. I can’t keep up with her. She makes me feel slow. I open the wardrobe. It’s almost empty. Except there, hidden on the left, there’s a suit bag.
‘Go on, take it out,’ she says from the bed.
‘How did you –?’
‘Don’t ask, just do.’
I lay the plastic bag on the bed to unzip it. Soft, pale green material shimmers at me.
‘Go on, put it on.’
I pull the material gently out. It’s a silk suit. Its green ebbs and flows in the light.
‘How d’you know it’ll fit me?’
‘I read you measurements, remember. And what you didn’t write down, I guessed.’
I turn for the bathroom.
‘Don’t be stupid. Try it on in here. Don’t pretend you’re embarrassed. You’re not in bad shape.’
I strip down to my boxer shorts and socks. I’m very conscious of the grey hair on my chest.
‘Oh, hang on,’ she says. She jumps up, skips across to her dresser and pulls out a black T-shirt. ‘Forgot to put this in the bag with it.’ She hands the shirt to me. Kisses my chest before I’ve a chance to pull it on. ‘You smell nice.’
‘Thanks.’
I get dressed as quickly as I can. The cloth feels wonderfully smooth on my skin. And the suit fits. Perfectly.
‘Cool,’ she says. ‘Have a look in the mirror.’
So I have a look. I don’t really see anything different to normal. Just an average man in a posh suit. I must admit, though, that I look thinner than I expected.
‘Now you’re as gorgeous as me,’ she laughs. ‘What a couple we make.’
‘We do?’
‘For sure.’
‘You shouldn’t have bought this.’
‘Yes, I should. I wanted to.’ She wraps her arms around me. Pulls my face down to hers, and kisses me. ‘Now stop asking stupid questions. It’s time to go. I just hope this is our last night in Christchurch.’
‘Together?’
‘Together.’