Patrick
LOCKET ISLAND
Circumstances just kind of collided in that moment, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
But . . . hey! Result!
We carried on walking until we were in the middle of the penguin colony. Every so often she stopped walking and put her mouth up to be kissed. It felt a bit public with our audience of small tuxedoed gents, who weren’t shy about staring at us. But when a girl like Terry puts her mouth up to be kissed by you, hell, what you do is you kiss it. And with each kiss I got more and more panicky about her expectations and how I wouldn’t be able to fulfill them, but at the same time I just wanted more of her. I wanted every bit of her, physical, mental, emotional, the whole shebang. If God had come up to me right then and said, “Patrick, my son, you have two choices. Choice A: I will grant you world peace, or Choice B: you can stay with Terry in Antarctica forever,” I swear I’d have decided on staying with Terry in Antarctica forever. I’d have said yes to that one straight off, no kidding.
After about the twentieth kiss, Terry said, “This is going to be hard to hide from the guys.”
“Um, hate to disillusion you, Terry, but I think they already know,” I told her, sweeping my arm round at the thousands of beaked faces looking at us.
“Not the penguins, you dope! The other scientists.”
“Do we need to hide it?” I asked. I was sort of in the mood of shouting it from the rooftops. Or iceberg-tops, or whatever.
“Yes, Patrick, we do,” she replied as if it was a no-brainer.
“Terry, sneaking about really isn’t my style.”
“Nor mine,” she said, “but needs must.”
“Why must needs?”
“For starters, they’ll worry. They’ll think I might desert them and the work. They may even worry I’ll go back to Britain with you.”
Why does the future always have to come busting in and spoil everything? Life always throws problems at you, doesn’t it? Just when everything’s going swimmingly, another problem pops up, and there you are, trying your darnedest to work out what the hell you can do about it.
I have—let me see—all of five and a half days’ worth of a relationship with Terry left before I have to go back to the other side of the world with Granny.
“So this is it, then? This is all it is. A few kisses in the snow?”
“Kiss me again,” she said.
I obliged.
We clambered up another slope together, stepping over gullies full of snow and polished pebbles. The sunlight warmed our backs. The ramparts of ice all around glinted white, with glossy tints of green, blue and turquoise. Terry knew exactly where she was going.
“Look!” she said, pointing. The all-black penguin, Sooty, was there in front of us, on his nest. He had a kind of smug look about him, I thought.
“Still no sign of any eggs,” Terry said. “He seems pretty determined, though. Who knows if he’s found a partner or not?” She cares so much about these things. I like that about her.
As we scrambled back the way we’d come, I spotted a shiny seal sunning himself on a rock. He fixed us with a bland kind of gaze. He was all podge and flab and made me laugh out loud. But Terry said seals are the archenemy as far as Adélies are concerned. Not so much on land, but underwater they’re lethal. A seal will hide just under the surface of the sea and grab the unsuspecting penguin by the feet. Then they’ll shake him ferociously from side to side and beat his body against the ice until he’s dead, a pool of red seeping through the white waters.
“Let’s get back to Pip,” we both said at the same time. Maybe we’d been enjoying ourselves just a tad too much.
Luckily, Pip was doing just fine. He’d stopped off at one of the penguin crèches without our encouragement, a great sign for his future. He was happily running around with a gang of penguin chicks. It’s such a relief that his social life hasn’t been too hampered by his human upbringing. Just as well he’s now got that tag on his flipper, otherwise he could easily get mixed up with the others. Much as we love Pip, he does look pretty similar to the rest. His orange tag showed up well among the yellow ones of the other penguins.
Adults were returning to the edges of the crèche and each calling to their young. The kiddos recognized the voices straight off and made a beeline for their own parent with stunning accuracy. No way were they going to miss any chance of a helping of regurgitated krill. Pip tried it on a couple of times with the bigger penguins, but nobody fell for it. They weren’t going to waste their precious regurgitations on an intruder, no matter how cute he was.
“Sorry, mate!” I called out to him. “You’re going to have to come back with us until you’ve learned how to catch your own fish.”
Pip turned his head and surveyed me. I swear he understood every word. Anyhow, he came scooting toward us. When he reached us, he leaned affectionately into Terry’s knees. Then looked back at his buddies as if to say, “Hey, guys, these are my parents.”
We stooped down to his level and made a fuss over him. A handful of baby down came off and floated away on the breeze.
After a while, Terry pulled me up and put her arms around me. I held her close for as long as I could, feelings bubbling up inside me.
She let out a long sigh. “This is so difficult. I . . . Oh God, I really wish you could stay.”
Nice.
“You needn’t call me God, though,” I said.
She aimed a playful kick at my shin. What I should have said was “I really wish I could stay, too,” but it seemed a bit late for that now. So I drew a heart in the snow instead and put a T and P inside it. It was a goodish save. Terry seemed to like it anyway.
Pip was intrigued and bent his head down to look at my design.
“I know you think the P is you, but it’s actually me, mate,” I told him. He wasn’t impressed. He promptly walked all over the heart, blurring its outline and the letters inside it. Vandal.
“What are we going to do?” Terry said. I knew she meant our relationship. It was a good question.
“Enjoy these five days together, at any rate,” I suggested. “Enjoy every moment we can snatch alone together. Snatch as many as we can.”
It’s going to be one hell of a five days, with an ill grandmother and a penguin chick to care for and a cabin full of scientists with no room to maneuver at all, let alone indulge our newfound passion.
I took my gloves off and stroked her hair back from her face. Her cheeks were cool and soft. Her eyes looked a bit moist.
I had to ask. Man, I just had to. “Sure you don’t want to come back to England with me?”
The crowd of penguins faded into the background, their noise hushed for a moment. They all seemed to be waiting with me for her answer.
I felt it then: that sinking feeling. You know the one. Like when Tesco is doing a three-for-one offer on beer and you buy eight crates, only to discover, when it goes through checkout, that you’ve misread the sign. It wasn’t beer that was three-for-one, it was the mini packets of peanuts.
I knew I shouldn’t have asked. I should have guessed she’d never put me above the penguins.
“No, Patrick. Sorry. It’s . . . no, I just can’t. Not now we know the project has a future. I just have to be a part of that. It’s everything to me.”
All this was doing my head in. I somehow had to disentangle myself from Terry. I glanced at my watch.
“Hell, I’ve been out for hours. It’s high time I checked on Granny.”
I zoomed back, super speedy through the snow.