This time there are no hitches. Nev meets us at the airport. He hurries us through to the other side of the building where our bags are waiting. He’s been keeping them in his office since we left last year. It’s early morning in Christchurch, and the warmth of January’s summer sun clings to our faces.
Birdie hugs him. ‘No Welland?’ she asks. ‘I’m disappointed.’
‘He’s got a lot on at work,’ Nev says, then laughs. ‘It’s a bit early for him, to be honest. It’s only seven, and he doesn’t start work till half past eight. He says he’ll see you when you get back.’
‘So we’re really actually getting to go this time?’ she says.
‘Two hours to lift-off,’ Nev says. ‘Can’t believe it myself.’
‘Brilliant,’ I say. I shake his hand and add a manly hug for good measure. I’m quite fond of the bastard, really.
‘Hi, guys,’ Warney’s voice echoes out of the open door. ‘D’ya remember everything I told ya? Better get your kit on if ya don’t wanna miss the check-in.’
‘Bloody hell, mate,’ Birdie shouts back. ‘I’d forgotten how big and loud you are.’
He comes marching out and raises a threatening fist which turns into one gentle paw of a bear hug.
‘And how smelly,’ Birdie laughs.
‘Bugger off, missy.’ He wipes his eyes. ‘Take care, will ya?’ He turns and lumbers back into his domain.
‘Don’t bother with the long johns and vests,’ Nev says.
‘Just pull the bloody stuff on over your street clothes.’
We do as we’re told. All our stuff still fits. Which is a bit of a surprise to me. I suppose babies don’t grow that fast, after all. We’re done in about five minutes. I go round the corner for my second cigarette and feel a bit wobbly. I can’t smoke near her now, of course, and should stop, really, but I can’t. I’ve brought three months’ supply with me, plus the duty-frees I got at the airport on the way here.
When I look round the corner, I see Birdie’s face as if it’s for the first time. It’s alive, so alive. Everything about it moves. She’s so excited by this. Her eyes, the corners of her mouth, her hair. It’s all in a flurry of motion. And her smile. It’s just so … so strong, vulnerable, alive, warm … all those things. There are words in her smile which don’t exist. She moves me with her happiness. It’s like seeing her for the first time.
‘What you looking at?’ she says when I stumble across to her, still full of the effects of the smoke.
‘Just you.’
‘Come on, kiddies,’ Nev calls. ‘Got a briefing to get to before we get on the plane.’
We groan.
‘Listen – you’ve got tons of briefings to come. Better get used to it,’ he says. ‘No point complaining. Put up or shut up.’ He’s smiling. ‘Let’s go.’
We join the queue. We show our passports, check in our bags. There’s a bunch of people in the same semi-dressed state we’re in. All with big boots. It seems silly in this heat. The briefing’s stuff we know already, and a bit about safety on the plane. Then we‘re herded onto the bus that’s going to take us to the plane.
‘Better put your ear plugs on as soon as we get on the plane,’ Nev says as the bus heads out across the glistening tarmac.
I can’t believe how big the plane is up close. You could drive the bus onto it. When we get out, I’m shaking. This is really where it starts. I can’t believe it.
‘When you get in there,’ Nev says, ‘just head straight for the back. There’s a door with a porthole there. There aren’t any windows anywhere else.’
‘What?’ Birdie shouts over the noise of the crowd.
‘Just follow me,’ he says and leaps up the stairs.
He’s right. There are rows of seats at the front, and a long line of seats along either wall, but no window. And after twenty rows of seats in the middle, nothing except freight. They had told us it was a freight plane, and would probably be uncomfortable, but I hadn’t taken it that literally. I should’ve done.
Nev heads down the narrow aisle on one side. Most people are choosing the seats in the middle, because they look like airliner seats. We take our coats off, flick the braces of our salopettes off our shoulders, sit down. I get my ear plugs out of my pocket.
‘You’re sure we need these?’ I ask.
‘Yeah,’ he says.
‘But I won’t be able to hear you talk.’
‘You will, mate. Trust me. And anyway, you’re better off getting some sleep. Five hours in here. That’s a lot of talking. Sleep’s best because, when you get this close, every minute seems like an hour.’
‘Do we get to go up into the cockpit?’ Birdie asks. She points at the steps that lead up to another level about ten feet above ours.
‘Hell, yeah,’ he says, ‘But they tend to wait till we’re over the pack ice, and that’s at least three hours away.’
‘Oh, well,’ she says. She does up her seat belt, and mine. Puts her head against me and closes her eyes.
‘You not even going to wait till we take off?’ I say.
‘I don’t think this’ll be much different to normal planes, do you?’
‘I guess not.’
Nev’s shaking me. ‘Wake up, you lazy Pommie bastard,’ he shouts into my ear. ‘We’re over the pack ice.’
I stumble over to the door with the window in it and look out. I can see only tiny channels of water. The rest is floating ice, stretching away in all directions, filling the horizon. No big bergs yet, though. To be down there, sailing through it, must be a different experience than just to watch it glide by from up here. Terra Nova took a couple of months to travel the distance we’re about to cover in hours.
‘You’ll be able to see better from up top,’ Nev says.
Birdie’s awake by now. We both walk gingerly to the front of the swaying plane and clamber up the metal stairs. The pilots, even younger than her, are reading their flight plans, checking the lights on the black instrument panel again and again, while the plane steers itself.
‘Howdy,’ one of the guys says. ‘Great view, eh?’
‘Amazing,’ I say. The sea looks calm, no noticeable swell, harmless, even. ‘We’re a long way up,’ he says. ‘It’s much rougher down there than it looks.’
‘I can imagine,’ I say.
Birdie says nothing. She doesn’t even smile. After five minutes up there, we climb down again.
‘Better sleep some more,’ Nev says. ‘Landings are normally pretty routine unless there’s a penguin on the runway.’
There is a penguin on the runway, though, and a stomach-churning moment when the plane seems about to touch down, only to speed up again and rise back up into the air. I’m nearly sick, but it passes. Five minutes later we’re on the ground. Pegasus airfield. We’re not on land at all. It’s sea ice, thick flat sea ice.
The plane spews us out. The cold hits me in the stomach like a fist. Only when I’ve recovered do I notice the group of people waiting to get on.
‘Quick turnaround, is it?’ Birdie asks, pale under the overcast sky.
‘Coupla hours,’ Nev says. ‘Get the freight off, new freight on, and off again. You don’t wanna leave a plane that big on the ice for too long. You never know what the weather might do.’
‘We’ll pick them up at the base,’ he says. ‘No worries ’bout that.’
We get into a waiting four-wheel drive, white flecked with dried mud. The fan’s whirring loudly, and wafts warm air through the car. The radio crackles, and we catch snatches of transmissions between the bases and other cars. It’s like being in a cab. Until I start to listen more closely. They’re talking about the state of the ice, about where’s safe and where not. The anarchy of nature is real. It controls everyone here, where all existence is determined by the environment.
The road is marked by safety flags, a chaos of colours bright against the varying shades of white, and fluttering manically in the wind. We reach the main junction, signposted by a crowd of flagpoles, tyre marks and ragged mounds of white and grey. This is where land meets ice, where pressure ridges form higher than buildings. One implacable force against another. In a few weeks it won’t be safe to walk here, when the relative warmth of summer weakens the ice, and the island wins its battle for the time being. Ten minutes later, we’re decanted from the Jeep into a long green building. Hot, cold, hot. Nev pulls open one of the doors.
‘Boots off,’ he says. ‘And coats. Make sure you keep your water bottle full all the time. And keep drinking. Otherwise you’ll dehydrate. You must drink. Even if it makes you piss all the time. Even if you don’t feel like it. And in the cold, you won’t. Thirst kills. This place is like the desert.’
We follow him through the unfamiliar, carpeted corridors, through a warren of homeliness and functionality. The air is dry, and there’s the constant hum of air conditioning. The walls are cream, as if to offset the brilliant white light reflected in from the ice. And every section of the building is closed off by heavy fire doors we have to force open. As we walk, Nev points out what’s what, what’s where, and why it is where it is. We drop Birdie’s bags in the room she’ll be sharing with two other women. She throws me a hungry look as Nev drags us onwards to the room I’ll be sharing with him.
‘I know it’s a pain,’ Nev says, ‘that there aren’t shared quarters, not even for married couples. Problem is, there’s just not enough space.’
The whole place is unreal to me, in my jet-lagged state. It has the touch and scent of being alive. It has a sense of history, and not just in the photos that line every wall, the age-worn noticeboards and the scuffed skirting boards. There have been adventures here. People have left from here and never returned. People have met here, and fallen in love or formed friendships for life. It breathes.
‘Right,’ Nev says. ‘Almost time for our first briefing. And that’ll be base safety and conduct.’
‘Yippee,’ Birdie says. ‘That’s the one I’ve really been looking forward to.’
Two hours later, we know we’re not allowed to leave the base unless we tell someone. We’re experts in when it’s compulsory to take radios with us and when not. We’re all too aware of the weather conditions and how quickly they can change. This is when Birdie almost throws something at the person leading the session. As if we didn’t bloody know already, she whispers, red in the face, hair ablaze against the dark chairs. At least Nev doesn’t desert us, sits through the talk with us, although he must know the presentation off by heart now.
‘Come on,’ he says when it’s over. ‘Time for some grub. And then I thought we’d go up Observation Hill.’
The canteen, drenched in sunlight, looks like a modern addition to the rest of the base. Sparkling stainless steel counters, long tables topped with hard-wearing Formica, elegantly curved chairs, and a row of windows opening out onto the pressure ridges and the blurred shadows of the huge seals on them. When the Antarctic night comes, the windows will be dark except for the moon and the stars. A darkness blacker and thicker than ink, a darkness I don’t think I could survive.
Birdie’s eager, and loads her plate as full as she can. Skips over to a table, starts talking with some folks who, it turns out, are here to do some weather research, and who’ll be staying here through the winter. They have no doubt they’ll find the sea ice being melted from below by the warm water that’s coming further south every year.
Nev nods. ‘I reckon we’re not far off not being able to transport stuff to the huts across the Ice,’ he says. ‘It gets more and more dodgy every year. The worst thing is that soft sea ice doesn’t look much different to the solid stuff. That’s another thing we need to look out for.’
‘Wasn’t there a plaque out there for a guy who’d gone through the ice with his truck?’ Birdie says.
‘Unfortunately,’ Nev says. ‘Poor bastard. Didn’t have a chance. And that was in the fifties when it was a lot colder here in the summers than it is now. It would have been minus fifteen in those days, and it’s only minus five today. So you’ll not need your long johns or anything like that to go up Obs Hill. But don’t forget your sunnies, your hats and gloves.’
Les, one of the base managers, drives us. It takes fifteen minutes, up and down the curves of the island, along what looks like a real road. Birdie and I don’t touch. It’s the excitement and the nerves, and not knowing exactly what people will think, even though we’re married. Are we going to tell Nev she’s pregnant? Maybe we’ll wait till we get away from the base.
We pull up at the foot of Observation Hill, climb out of the car into a gusting breeze. The hill looks like a slagheap, with different shades of grey, only lightly sprinkled with snow. I have to keep reminding myself it’s summer here. It feels cold to me, and I’m glad of my gloves and heavy coat.
It’s almost a thousand feet high, this hill. It crumbles as we make our way up, its scoria, its lava, giving way under our boots and rustling off down the slope, which is steeper than it looks. I puff and pant. And Birdie, that tiny, fragile soul whose fainting is why I’m here, storms up ahead of me, full of the energy of new discovery, her feet making new tracks on the well-established paths. It takes me an age to catch my breath once we’re up there, next to an enormous cross.
‘So this is Cherry’s cross,’ Birdie says into the now biting wind.
‘Not just his,’ Nev says.
‘But it was Cherry who suggested the inscription wasn’t it?’ she says.
‘Yes,’ Nev says.
The continent rolls away all around us. There is no horizon, because there is no end to this plain. Even the Transantarctic Mountains across the bay don’t hinder the view. This landscape is eternity made physical.
‘They used to climb up here to see if the ship was coming back,’ Nev says. ‘And to look south to see if the polar party was coming in.’
‘But they never did,’ Birdie says.
‘They never did.’
The writing on the cross is faded by the constant wind. But we can make out the inscription. Birdie reads it out loud into the growing gale.
In memoriam Cap. R. F. Scott, Dr E. A. Wilson, Cap. L. E. G. Oates, Lt. H. R. Bowers, Petty Officer E. Evans R.N.
Who died on the return from the South Pole March 1912.
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield …
When her voice breaks, I turn away to hide my tears and look into the unfathomable distance.