Dedication

DEDICATION

For Martin

‘Beyond this point, there be dragons . . .’

The advice on the extremities

of ancient maps, signalling the

end of the known world.

They put me into a small, white, still room and that was wrong. One day Rick came and took me outside into air that was vivid with smell and colour and noise. I told him where I had to go. He drove me away with a honk of the horn and at a service station on the rim of the city we stopped and swapped places and I drove on. I turned up the music and wound down the window and held out my hand, butting the breeze. I drove deep into the nights until we came to the desert.

I’m here because Antarctica has given me a taste for deserts. The meanest motherfucking desert of them all has given me an addiction for wide lands and tall skies and air that hums. It’s a furious need; it’s under my skin and it isn’t going to let me go. I lie in my swag in this other desert, sharply awake. The wind has blown all night, blowing away sleep. I’m writing about Antarctica, by torchlight, on my belly. Just like I used to lie on my belly on the ice.

Heat comes ahead of the day. I flick off my torch, flip onto my back and listen to the Central Australian sky.

There’s a hum of stillness. It’s as though there’s a bowl over my head. There’s the last star, the first bird and flies, before six.

I flick them away. Then in thickening heat ants begin a speedy traverse of my skin. I feel like Gulliver. My hand slaps and sweeps at my thighs and hipbones and wrists and I stand up quickly from my swag and the Antarctica pages scatter. It’s almost day.

Rick’s made a fire. Burning sticks crack strongly into the stillness. He hands me a tin mug of milky tea. The liquid’s lifted the soft red dust from the cup’s sides, lifted it like cinnamon to the surface.

I tell Rick I didn’t sleep and he says Antarctica again and I say yeah. He worries the fire with a stick.

There’s a high gathering of clouds. There’s the smell of wet on the wind. A storm rumbles in the wings of the sky; it’s as though a huge table is being dragged across the floor of heaven.

In a controlled rush we clear things away. I scrub our tin plates with water and desert sand. When I’m nearly through, I look up and stop.

The sky hangs. The birds have hushed. There’s a blanket of stillness, as if the whole world is poised, waiting for the storm. The strange yellow light ahead of the rain brings out vividly the colours around us—the ochres, the browns, the bleached greens. I think of the strict Antarctic palette of white and blue and grey and black. Bellies of pink arc above us as Major Mitchells swoop by in a sudden evacuation. The smell of eucalyptus is flint sharp in the air. I look across at Rick. He’s kicking sand over the grey remains of the fire. I think of snow being kicked over the carcass of a day-old seal.

Antarctica is seared like acid on my mind.

I can never go back. I don’t reckon it’s meant for humans. I tell this to Rick. He says nothing. I know he thinks I’m here because I’m running away, as far away as I can get.

The first fat splats of rain come. One hits me like a nail. The earth opens up as if it’s breathing. We run. I take down my towel from the dead branch of the tree and snag a splinter in my finger. I can’t get it out. We run to the cabin of the four wheel drive and slam the heavy doors. Rick takes my hand in his and opens it flat and my palm is a road map of ochre lines. He tells me to hold still and with his two dirty blunt thumbnails he squeezes and stops and squeezes again and gently, the sliver pops up and out. I’m still and quiet because I’m crying. Because of Antarctica. Because of something I’d forgotten.

A blowy howly mongrel of a day and there was the grit from the wind and a shard of something in my eye, the sudden sharp pain of it and the scream, I can’t see! and he was at me swiftly and peering and holding my head braced tight between his big bear hands and yelling, Hold still! and he was licking my eyeball while I was kicking and squealing like a pony, he was licking and licking until the speck was gone and I came up blinking and smiling and still.

I can catalogue Antarctica by touch.

The touch of air sucked dry on my cheek, the fur of a day-old seal pup, the touch of an iceberg, a blizzard, a lover, the touch of sweat at minus twenty-three, of a camera stuck to the skin on my face, of cold like glass cutting into my skin, of a snowflake, of a dead man, of a doctor’s fingers on my inner thigh, of a tongue on my eye.

One: Galloping Days

ONE

GALLOPING DAYS

It begins with touch, in Sydney.

A finger’s up my bum. The finger’s male. It’s brisk in a sheath of powdered white latex that seems as thin as skin. I’m naked from the waist down, on my side on a government surgical bed. The mattress is meanly thin. My body’s curled foetally, bunched like a fist to the wall.

Doctor Pat Pisano says he’s feeling for bowel cancer. I didn’t think I was in the risk category. A loud blush is gatecrashing my face and Doctor Pat Pisano can see it. I went to primary school with him. It’s one of those excruciating coincidences. I haven’t seen him for fifteen years. He asks me if I’m married yet and I tell him I’m not. All he had to do was look at my left hand. I look at his. He tells me I’m the only person going on the voyage who doesn’t have to be examined by the government psychiatrist and he says little do they know, with a high giggle. I never liked him at school.

His fingers and the fingers of eleven other medical practitioners are thorough as they roam my body, searching for abnormalities that will prevent me from going to Antarctica. Specimens have to be fit and I’m not sure I’m going to pass. The fingers are thorough and gentle and firm as they attach electrodes to my arms and legs and chest to measure my heart rate, guide my torso in front of the x-ray machine, probe my wide-open mouth, take my urine in warm plastic cups, pinch skin.

I pass the medical. There’s one query in the doctor’s report faxed to my work. SLIGHT BUILD, QUESTION MARK.

‘Does this mean you’re going to freeze quicker?’ says Lyn, the chief of staff, as she hands over the report.

4.03 a.m. A new day at work. The desk’s bare, the streets are lean. The newsroom’s stilled, waiting for the onslaught.

The police scanner coughs, scratches. I lean forward to listen. Domestic. Tic tic. Stabbing. Tic tic. MVA. Torana into pole. One to Westmead, serious. One minor, treated at scene. Yeah yeah I’ll pick up a Maccers on the way, two filet-os and a pinkshake yeah yeah. Some dude singing ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ and ‘Not in the Mood’. Ah cops. Tic tic. Nothing doing. Tic tic.

The city’s smug, asleep.

10 a.m. The airwaves are crowded. Domestic MVA stabbing assault domestic domestic. L-plater, failed to stop, old lady run over. Driver distress. A zip-up bag at a Blacktown bus stand dripping blood. Unconfirmed, can’t be found. A woman threatening suicide on a city-bound bus. A brawl at a mall.

‘Lyn,’ I say, ‘it’s dead. Any stories?’

She slaps a press release on my desk. Global warming. An international conference.

‘Good practice, my love,’ she says. ‘And by the way, how many cocks did you have to suck to get this little gig in the ice anyway?’

I smack my lips and grin. ‘Too bloody many.’

None. The newsroom was offered an Antarctic trip by the Australian government and I put up my hand and was chosen. One journo a year, on average, gets to go. It’s good PR for the government, it helps in publicising and demystifying the nation’s presence on the ice. The newsroom jumped at the offer and so did I. The voyage gets me off the police round which I suspect I’m too good at because I’ve been stuck with it for too long. And it gets me off the morning shift.

I ring the number on the press release. The talent’s good. She says last summer the hole over Antarctica was the size of Europe. Good grab. She says each year the hole’s getting bigger. Great stuff. When the tape’s turned off at the end of it I tell her I’m just about to go down there. She’s the first woman I’ve spoken to who’s been. I ask her what it’s like. She says for a start there aren’t many women. She says that on the Antarctic stations everything I do will be watched, from talking with a man to drinking at the bar to eating in the mess. She says a woman’s attention is sought persistently.

I tell her I think I’m going to like that a lot and she says, suddenly fierce, that after a while the attention’s utterly exhausting and she wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

‘And if it gets to the stage of actually working out a way of sleeping with someone, well, you have to be incredibly discreet. Most people haven’t been touched for a very long time and they don’t want to see the people who are getting it, flouting it.’

She’s warning me. She wishes me a crisp good luck and hangs up.

Midday. Knock-off time. Lyn yells goodbye and asks what’s the ratio of men to women, down at that place I’m going to. I tell her there are very few women and a lot of beards and that touching is taboo.

‘Well that’ll be a challenge then.’ We laugh. ‘Hooroo.’

My body’s too tired to do the twenty minute walk to my flat. I get the train home to dinner and bed.

A man called Jim rings in the thick of work. I’m trying to catch something on the scanner about a babysitter and the baby’s stopped breathing but there’s an ease, a sureness in his stranger’s voice that stops me still. It’s as if he knows me.

‘Hey Fin, I heard you’re coming to the ice with us. I’m ringing to fill you in on a couple of things. I’ve been nominated by some of the blokes.’

He tells me our ship’s to be the first into the ice after winter, the only ship to crack its way so far south so soon into the season in mid-September. No-one else is as mad as the Aussies. He says we’ll be carrying nine tonnes of freeze-dried food on board just in case the ship gets bogged. It’s happened before. The baby’s being taken to hospital. And the babysitter.

‘A journalist, eh?’

‘Yeah, a journalist.’

‘You know, there’s a bit of a rule among us old timers. It’s called Blame the Journo. If anything goes wrong, we blame the journo. Just thought I better let you know.’

He chuckles. I swallow his chuckle in mine.

‘One last thing. Are you married? A couple of the blokes wanted me to ask. They’ve heard you on the radio.’

I tell him I’m not married. I hang up, smiling.

Sarey my mate tosses it in, walks out two minutes before the 8 a.m. flagship bulletin. She’s never going near the newsroom again. Says she’s going to get a life. Won’t even come back to fill out release forms. She wants a postcard from Antarctica. Lots of ice.

‘A JAFO, people will call you.’

Ben Linton, four days before departure. He works at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He’s been to Antarctica three times before and says he has ice in his veins and he can’t dig it out. He gives me an Antarctic briefing from a journo’s perspective. He’s bearded. His hair is ice-white. He stares at my miniskirt. At my pink jacket made out of an old chenille bedspread. It’s meant to be ironic. I can tell he doesn’t get it.

‘Here comes another bloody JAFO they’ll say, and no-one’ll tell you what it means.’

‘What is it?’

‘Just Another Fucking Observer.’

‘Oh, great.’

I look at the radio newsroom buzzing around us, the rows of computer terminals, the video monitors, the police scanners, the journalists working the phones.

‘Do they really hate us that much, Ben?’

He considers. A smile cracks his stern face into a boy’s.

‘Yeah, they do.’

Lovely. I’m the only journo on this expedition.

Ben strides away past the row of ageing subeditors, intent and turtled at their computer screens, and throws back at me, over a line of concentrating heads, ‘Everyone who goes down there comes back a different person. It changes your life.’

‘Mate, I’ll see if you recognise me at the other end,’ I yell back.

The scanner’s clogged with shit. A kid’s told his dad he saw a girl being pushed into a car at Cabramatta Station. A guy’s walked into the Albury Hotel with blood on his hands saying he’s just stabbed his boyfriend. A bomb scare at a university, on the day of exams. A Domestic. A Domestic. The airwaves crackle and die. My pen lies still. The scanner coughs. Deceased. The pen is snatched. My body leans. Man washed up near Balmoral. Elderly, naked but for underpants around his neck. Story.

Subs don’t even use it. Too many bodies lately.

‘Just a derro.’

I put my computer to sleep. My body feels thick with tiredness. The train’s late. When I get on it, there’s a white-bread sandwich squashed into the corner of the seat. I walk from the station up a back alley to my Kings Cross flat. Outside my building I sidestep a delirium of pigeons as they peck at the orange vomit in the gutter. Last week a woman in a short skirt walked up the alley ahead of me with blood in dried ribbons down the inside of her legs. It looked like river lines on a map.

I step into the quiet of my foyer, check the empty mailbox, ride the lift to the fifth floor and open the door and stride through the apartment and fling wide the protesting windows to let in the sky. And stop. My arms are folded on the sill and I lean my face outside and stare at the busy blue before me, the high buildings pushing up into it and the steady march of the aeroplanes traversing it. High above the blue is a clot of cloud and I stretch my face to it and think about those who experience versus those who observe and wonder how Antarctica could change me.

A drink’d be nice. I’ve started to drink a lot lately. By myself. In my room. I feel like I’m entering a cliche. I make myself a gin and tonic. It doesn’t hit the spot. I think about my flatmate. Our living arrangement has soured. His smell has soaked into the walls of my apartment like the cold does in winter. He’s accidentally gassed me twice with the oven and he leaves the toilet seat up and he’s in the army reserve and he says negative instead of no and out instead of goodbye. I used to think he was cute until he started sleeping with a schoolmate I invited over for coffee. I haven’t quite made up my mind to kick him out. Who else would I find? It takes a certain type to want to live in this area.

My apartment building’s called The Hopes. What joker thought that one up? I pour myself another drink.

Why do I sleep with my eyes wide open? My Magritte dream: I’m sitting at my desk by the police scanner, forehead furrowed, sunrise behind me through the window which I never see, story story, scanner ticking. And then the 3.25 alarm. Awake, rise, work. Exactly as the dream.

Kings Cross. 3.45 a.m. Venus Club glowing, Tender Trap thumping. Eyes at me as I walk quick along the drag, incongruous in office clothes. Fear. A cabbie’s weariness as I squelch onto the plastic over the front passenger seat.

‘Jeez, you smell fresh. Just out of a shower, huh? Just washed your hair? You smell soo beautiful. Off to work luv, at this hour?’

I tell him I’m a radio reporter.

‘A reporter? Aren’t you a good little worker. There’s a big smash along Parramatta Road for you. Looks like a double fatal. They wouldn’t let me stop and look.’

I give him a big tip, on the cab docket, at the company’s expense.

‘Jeez it’s good to smell you,’ he says as I step from the car.

The phone rings early. It’s Jim.

‘I just wanted to say hello again, fill you in a little bit more.’

It’s the voice of a plumber or a mechanic or a man with a shed. There’s a sweetness in it. I’m not used to those sort of voices in my job.

‘There’s gonna be a hundred and two people on the ship. About twenty-four crew and then the rest are expeditioners. That’s what we’re called. Pretty grand, eh? And then among the expeditioners you’ve got scientists and tradesmen—boffins and tradies. That’s the lingo.’

I ask him where JAFOs fit into the picture.

‘Jafos? Aren’t they what you roll down the aisles?’

He tells me his name in Antarctica is Stiff. I don’t believe him. He says it’s true. He won’t tell me how he got it. How could I keep a straight face when I’m calling a man Stiff? I tell him I’ll be calling him Jim. I get the feeling that people turn into something else when they’re down there, and a new name’s just the start of it.

He asks if I mind him ringing up all the time, but it’s because he always thinks of new things to tell me. I tell him I don’t mind and he says good because he likes ringing me up.

I hang up, smiling again.

Family killed on the north coast. Six bodies, the mother and her five kids, all dead, all in the station wagon. Good story—kids are good, they use kids. On a holiday from the Territory. All in the station wagon. Five kids. Story story.

What has happened to me? A mother and five kids are dead and the strongest reaction I’ve got is the sweet hit of exhilaration that my story, my voice report, is leading the midday bulletin.

Home. Approaching delirium tiredness. I lie on my bed in the hot afternoon. Sleep is sparse, cobwebbed, in thin strands. There are drills and shouts and bottle recycling trucks and sirens and footsteps and music loud around me.

The next day. Jolted out of a quiet news day stupor by a voice from the scanner. A voice taut, bottled up with something huge, a voice to be snapped.

CONSTABLES DOWN SHOT and it’s garbled and the voice can’t get it clearly out. The man in the police radio control room is infuriating in his calmness.

‘Slow down, constable . . . what are you saying . . . we can’t understand you.’

SHOT POLICE MATES DOWN DOWN AWAY TWO.

Police down! Police hit! The chill of it. And with the radio control man there’s a sudden snap and panic reaching out across the airwaves to all the police officers listening in their squad cars and at their stations and to all the journos straining at the desks in their newsrooms: ‘Can anyone understand what he’s saying?’

And gradually the young policeman’s breathing normalises, his mind unjumbles, the story unfolds as he drives to the hospital with a mate dying on the seat beside him and a mate dying on the seat behind him and it’s action stations, all systems alert.

It’s only much later, much later, leaving work and walking through the park that I crumple and start shaking and have to sit on a park bench for a very long time. I feel wound up as tight as a tin toy. I want to cry with it all but I can’t.

I’m being sent to Antarctica to capture noises. The people and the penguins and the machines and the ice and the sounds I don’t know about yet.

I pack a hotwater bottle for my tape recorder, to keep it warm in its esky. I pack coolpaks of beautiful, bubbled, marine-blue liquid that will turn into heatpaks when I soak them in hot water. They’re for my esky too. I pack lots of batteries because the cold will leech them quickly of power. I pack splicing tape and razor blades and computer disks; I pack a labyrinth of microphone leads and crisp, fresh notepads. I pack condoms. I pack three tubs of moisturiser because my old World Book tells me that Antarctica’s the driest continent on earth.

I feel like an eighteenth century explorer as I carefully fill my trunks. I run out of room. I ditch the farewell teddy bear Lyn and the newsroom’s given me. I ditch the box of condoms—they’re too presumptuous, anyway.

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!