Degrees of separation, p.1
Degrees of Separation, page 1
About the author
As well as being a fiction writer, Laurence Fearnley is a curator and has written about many contemporary New Zealand craft artists. Fearnley holds an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University and has previously published short stories in Sport and several anthologies.
Her second novel, Room, was shortlisted for the fiction award of the 2001 Montana Book Awards.
In 2004, Fearnley was part of the New Zealand Artists and Writers to Antarctica Programme. She currently lives in Dunedin with her husband and son.
DEGREES OF SEPARATION
Laurence Fearnley
For Aaron, Becky and Neil
PROLOGUE
It is midsummer and snow falls, extracting colour from the landscape. The sky bleaches, becomes a shade of dull white; yet the ground is still, in many places, the colour of charcoal. In the hollows, where the snow has settled, the impression is of a brass rubbing: marks made by white chalk passing over a sheet of black paper. The scientist’s tracks from the previous day have disappeared. He stands still, looking about him as if suddenly unsure of where he is. He has picked his way through this landscape so often, and yet now, without the thin, broken trail of trodden ground to guide him, he is momentarily disorientated. Ice forms on his face, creating a mask which, for the present, feels warm, shielding him from the cold. But, as he stands surveying his surroundings, his eyelashes begin to catch; weighted with ice they stick together, then tear apart as he squints against the light. His gaze finally falls on a pair of skuas that have dragged a penguin chick to the edge of the frozen lake, where they begin steadily, methodically, to rip it to shreds.
The skuas work together, one bird holding the fluffy brown chick’s flipper as the other tugs at its breast. From time to time they pause and glance around, watchful, keeping track of the other skuas that hover nearby. Only when another bird comes too close do they cry out. For the most part they remain quiet, intent on feeding and on attracting as little attention to themselves as possible. In less than an hour the chick will be nothing more than a bloody red ribcage and a pair of pink legs still attached by the pelvic frame. In time its legs will fade to a pale yellow, the colour of parchment, but for now they rest on the ground like rose petal decorations on a wedding cake.
The scientist shuffles, adjusting his weight, and a rivulet of shingle falls away from his feet, sending a thin stream of stones across the ice-covered lake. He is aware of another man approaching: his colleague, a man in his thirties who walks slowly, his head bowed, eyes focused on the ground as he passes through the colony, pausing every now and then to write in his notebook. After several minutes he is within a few feet of the scientist and he stops and looks around, considerate, perhaps, of the older man’s privacy, or maybe in deference to his seniority.
The older man watches as his colleague fumbles in his pocket, bringing out a plastic bag of brightly coloured jellybeans. The newcomer offers the bag to him, saying, as he does so, ‘Watch your teeth – they’re frozen.’ Although he declines the offer, the scientist’s eyes remain fixed on the sweets; he is attracted by their garishness. The younger man speaks again. ‘I’m off to my bed. It’s late. I’m knackered.’
Nodding, the older man looks at his watch and turns to where the sun sits in the sky, a pale glow obscured by broken cloud, barely strong enough to silver the passage being made by the ice-breaker through the sea ice several kilometres from where they stand. It’s almost two in the morning; the conservators have long since retired to their beds and will not leave their tents again until eight, just as he returns from his all-night bird watch. Mumbling ‘Goodnight’ to his colleague, he watches the young man’s progress as he sidles around the lake, pausing to light a cigarette as he passes in front of Shackleton’s hut, his dry cough cutting through the noise of the penguin colony, which is always, day and night, in the background.
He notices that the skuas have abandoned the carcass. Other birds have moved in but there is little left of the chick for them. Its blood is trampled into the snow, a spreading stain that briefly captures the attention of a group of six adult Adélie penguins. They hesitate and crane their necks at the scene in front of them before hurrying by, heads bowed. As they near the scientist they pause once more, then charge past, feet thudding as they skitter towards the edge of the colony and the trail that leads down the steep cliffs to the edge of the sea.
Above him now a skua circles the penguin colony, the white flash on its dark brown wings appearing almost as a tear, the same colour as the sky in which it flies. He watches as it passes overhead before striking out to sea.
As the skua disappears from view, his thoughts drift until he imagines himself airborne, flying over this land. In his mind he maps the place he has visited so often over the past forty years – the place he will soon leave for the very last time. He looks down on Ross Island and the surrounding sea, tracing a passage from the grey open water to the vast plain of white, ice-covered ocean. He reaches the tidy strip carved by the ice-breaker and follows it briefly, before overtaking the ship and continuing on his course towards the distant American base, McMurdo Station.
Below him now lie streets, power lines and buildings: a small settlement tucked between hills so black they could be slags of coal. Although the town is familiar to him, he is amazed, once more, by its ugliness. It is as if the people who built it followed a brief permitting them to select only the largest, most utilitarian buildings and, being unable to deviate from that plan, they decided – in an attempt to make the place distinctive – to select one building in every colour offered. Dull brown accommodation blocks sit within sight of ochre and green workshops; white communal areas face silver-grey hangars. Scattered around, filling in any remaining space, are hundreds of shipping containers of various hues, which lead in turn to the huge white fuel tanks that dominate the entrance to the town.
With the exception of one building – the chapel with its small bell-tower – there is nothing restful about the place, nothing homely or gentle on the eye. The scattered jumble of sheds assaults the senses. Strangest of all is the apparent lack of life in the town. Few people are walking the streets and those who do are walking briskly from one shed to another – a sudden flash of colour that is swallowed up by the building into which it disappears. By contrast, the town emits plenty of noise – the sound of music through loudspeakers, the drone of heavy machinery, the batter of helicopters preparing to take off, and the slow drawl of trucks making their way along the road, passing the oil tanks as they ferry passengers and goods to Scott Base or the airport beyond.
Still airborne, he follows a truck now, over the low pass towards the smaller settlement of Scott Base. Here the sheds are all green – the colour of frozen peas. Being smaller than the buildings of the neighbouring American base, they reflect a scale that is still human. The trucks are smaller than the giant machines that trundle, almost empty, back and forth from McMurdo. But even here, there is little to hold his attention. Below him, two figures walk out onto the sea, following a trail marked out with red flags. Occasional clusters of black flags flutter in the slight breeze, indicating areas that are dangerous. Beside one such flag, near a tide crack, lies a seal, asleep in the sun, oblivious to the boundaries set out by the human visitors.
The two figures, a man and a woman, pause and watch the seal for several minutes. He can hear their voices but from this height is unable to understand what they are saying. After a short while he sees the man hug the woman and then the woman steps back, as if amazed by the unexpectedness of the man’s gesture.
Already, however, he is flying past the figures, leaving them behind as he turns in the direction of a small wedge of land, Bratina Island, which sits, darkly, on the ice shelf, thirty kilometres to the south-west.
At first, his flight continues across the white, flattened sea, featureless but for the swathes of blue-grey shadows that sweep the ground ahead of him. After a while the ground beneath him alters: the untracked expanse acquires markings, patches of water and stone appear, gaining in frequency and size until they become lakes, surrounded by dunes of grey shingle. The island is close now, directly below him. He can see people leaving the campsite, their progress to the northern end of the island momentarily interrupted by a skua that repeatedly attacks their stooped bodies as they scurry by.
It appears that the group is trying to reach a plastic pole that has been placed in the ice a kilometre or so from where they stand. Although the distance between them and the pole is slight, they are having difficulty determining the best route. The hummocks that surround the island obscure their view and, as they walk, their passage is frequently blocked by large ponds. He watches as they walk back and forth along the edge of one such pond, looking for a place to cross. He sees the leader of the group jump and, like penguins hesitating at the shoreline, the remaining figures continue to walk to and fro for several seconds. Then without warning they leap, one after the other, and hurry to catch their guide. Suddenly he can hear laughter and, drawing closer, he hears a softly spoken voice ask, ‘So, have you found inspiration yet?’ More laughter follows and he finds himself joining in: the sound is infectious; it makes him feel young.
Still smiling, he turns back to Ross Island. His gaze takes in the vapour cloud that rises from Mt Erebus as he glides over tide cracks and pressure ridges, which diminish as he draws closer to the large snow-groomed strip that serves as the runway. Out of the corner of his eye he is aware of the lumbering hulk of an aeroplane preparing to l
Not yet ready to join them, he turns his back on the group and returns to the place he has not yet quit, Cape Royds. He hovers for a moment, observing his own figure standing just as he left it on the edge of the penguin colony, head tilted, gazing out towards the thin grey strip of horizon, waiting and watching for the skua to return from the sea.
SALLY
Located in the roof of the aeroplane, high above her, was a door marked Emergency Exit. Sally couldn’t take her eyes off it. Leaning back, with her head resting against the red webbing of the seat, she imagined the circumstances in which the door – which had to be at least six metres above the floor – would come into use. She glanced down the length of the plane looking for more exits, but could see none. She registered the four rows of people who filled the Starlifter: men and women dressed in either red, black, or blue and yellow. Her eyes went back to the exit. Remained there.
Sally became aware that the woman next to her had begun to fidget. She was trying to remove her jacket but because there was so little space between their two bodies she could barely move her arms, and now one of them seemed to be stuck mid-length down her sleeve. It began to flap uselessly as she attempted to break free. She reminded Sally of a bird with a broken wing trying to get airborne. The woman gave up, rested for a second, and then began again, this time pushing her arm back into the sleeve before trying to slip the coat off backwards, over her shoulders. She looked like a diver squirming out of a wetsuit. The brown paper lunch bag that had been balanced on her knee fell to the floor, landing on the boots of the woman opposite. Encumbered by so much clothing, even bending down to retrieve the bag was difficult. Polypropylene vest, shirt, polarfleece salopettes, windproof salopettes, fleece jacket, large padded jacket …
‘Shit!’ Sally could see her neighbour speak – she lip-read the word even though she was unable to hear it spoken. Her own ears, like those of most of the other passengers, were fitted with bright yellow foam earplugs.
‘Shit!’
Sally heard the voice this time, and smiled in the woman’s direction. She didn’t know her name but had sat opposite her at breakfast that morning at Scott Base. She had said hello but nothing more because the woman had been talking to her neighbour. The conversation, Sally remembered, had been about cats. About how the woman was looking forward to seeing her pets again. She was telling her friend about a game she sometimes played. She would shine a red laser pointer onto the cat’s paw or tail and watch it spin round and round as it tried to catch the light.
The woman had smiled as she spoke, adding that she found cats less complicated than people. No matter who you were, she had said, you could count on a cat for company. Her friend had nodded but replied that she preferred people. Sally had said nothing. She had listened but had felt dislocated, as if finding herself in some foreign backpackers’, among people whose language she could not understand. She had only been away from the base for ten days but now everything about the place seemed odd, every light too bright, every voice too loud and every person or piece of furniture one too many. She’d wanted to contain herself. Walking down the corridor she had noticed that her arms were folded firmly across her chest, as if she was holding herself in, protecting herself from anyone who might have passed her. It was a feeling that had remained with her throughout the day.
At eleven, when she had returned to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee, she had chosen a seat away from the other people and was sitting by herself, gazing through the window, when she heard a woman’s voice say, ‘We can’t have you sitting by yourself!’ Sally had smiled, introduced herself, and wished the stranger would go away. Instead they talked. It was the woman’s first full day in the Antarctic; she had arrived the afternoon before, later than scheduled because the plane had been delayed. Sally had nodded and felt somehow old. As if she had aged because she had already spent two weeks on the ice and was due to leave later that same day. The woman had asked her what she thought of the place and Sally had replied, ‘Fantastic.’ She had hoped her reply would discourage further conversation but the woman had agreed. ‘It is fantastic, isn’t it?’
Sally had glanced back to the window but the woman continued. ‘It’s more than that. When you first step off the plane and see all that featureless, limitless white space around you and it’s impossible to determine any sense of scale, it’s overwhelming.’
Again Sally had glanced towards the window and this time she felt sorry. Sorry that she was so intent on protecting her memories and keeping everything to herself that she couldn’t even permit herself to talk to this woman. She held on to the silence between them, then, fearing the woman might ask her a question, enquired, ‘Why are you here?’ The question sounded ambiguous in her ears. She felt embarrassed by the bluntness of it. But the woman sensed only one meaning.
‘I’m studying marine sediments on the McMurdo Ice Shelf.’
‘Oh.’
There was another silence. A pause that was familiar. It had occurred before when Sally had spoken to scientists passing through Scott Base. It was a silence that came from not knowing what to say next. Despite her interest in everything that was going on and her desire to learn, it was as if she didn’t possess the necessary vocabulary to keep the conversation going. In any case, she’d discovered that most research projects couldn’t be turned into easy conversation. There were two options: the subject could be dropped or, alternatively, it could be developed, not so much into a conversation but into an explanation, a lecture on a subject she would only ever half grasp. Not for the first time it struck Sally that since arriving in the Antarctic she had often felt stupid.
As if sensing Sally’s hesitation, the woman had continued. ‘In fact, with luck I’ll be flying out to Bratina Island this afternoon. It’s about fifteen minutes from here – by helicopter.’
Sally interrupted. ‘I’ve just come from there.’
The woman smiled at her. ‘Really? What did you think? Incredible, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Fantastic.’
The plane was gloomy. For the first time in days Sally was struck by a lack of light. A few bulbs were positioned overhead but towards the back of the plane, beyond the passengers, where the cargo was stored, it reminded her of a cave. The overall feeling was one of being deep inside a ship. With so many bodies pressed into such a tight space she imagined a convict ship. It was hot, too. Sweat trickled down her back, an avenue of water between her shoulders.
Her neighbour was shuffling again. She was standing up, her boots carefully positioned between the feet of the two women opposite, when the upturned toes of her blue mukluks caught in a trouser leg, causing her to lose her balance. She stumbled and fell onto Sally. ‘Sorry!’ she shouted. She pushed herself up and fell again, this time onto the knee of the woman opposite. Then, regaining her balance, she stepped over the legs of two more people, Distinguished Visitors, until she was standing at the front of the plane, facing a US Air Force crew member who had been watching her. Sally watched as they talked. The man leaned down, his mouth almost pressed to the woman’s ear as he spoke. She saw her neighbour smile and the crew member gave her a rough, playful jab – a ‘Get out of here!’ shove that caused him to laugh. Then the woman removed her jacket, placed it on the end of the seat, and went into the women’s toilet.
Sally turned away and glanced across the row of bodies. The man she had spoken to while waiting at the edge of the runway was standing on his seat, reading. Only by standing on his seat with his back against the metal supports could he hope to find enough room to stretch his long legs. Here and there, other passengers took up similar positions. It was nothing out of the ordinary – she had seen the same thing on the flight down to the ice. He was wearing a red jacket with his name printed onto a Velcro strip attached to his chest: William. Like delegates at a conference, everyone at Scott Base had a name tag. And like some defiant teenager, Sally had removed hers during her first day, only to discover later, when she went to collect her coat from the row of pegs in the hallway, that she couldn’t find it. Where there had been only one or two coats, there were now over thirty, all blue – identical in almost every respect. As she’d stood looking at the jackets she had experienced a momentary panic, as if she was a child who had mislaid something an adult had instructed her to guard.
