The Ice: A gripping thriller for our times from the Bailey’s shortlisted author of The Bees. Laline Paull
excused himself.
He pulled on waterproofs and went back down to the beach. The Dauphin rested at one end, facing down the fjord in readiness for their return. At the other, Danny Long had pulled one of the smallest Zodiacs from the boathouse, alongside the single kayak Sean had requested. This was his manager’s mute comment on the safety infraction of Sean’s stated intention to go out alone. A breeze glittered the water of the fjord – and carried the faint beat of rock music. He looked around. It came from the building beside the boathouse.
Sean looked at Danny Long in question, then walked towards it. His manager came with him.
‘I’ll tell them to keep it down, sir. But now might be a good time for them to meet you, if you’re happy with that?’ He hurried alongside as Sean pushed through the vestibule doors.
Twenty men jumped to attention off their bunks, their eyes down. Sean stared in surprise. No one said anything. He had never seen any of them before, and did not remember there being so many of them on his last trip. But everything about that visit was confused. He would check when he got back.
‘The new detail, Mr Cawson – they’ve only been in a week, but they’re all good.’ Danny Long’s voice changed as he addressed the men. ‘This is your CEO, Mr Cawson.’
The men looked at Sean and saluted. They wore dark clothing and looked very fit.
‘At ease.’ Sean had no military training, but apparently it worked because the men sat back down and resumed looking at their screens, or lying on their bunks. Danny Long seemed to be waiting for him to say something.
‘Good,’ he said, to cover his surprise. He went out into the open air. A retreat was in place he knew nothing about and a new detail of men – he had forgotten that part of the arrangement – were gathered in that dark cavernous room.
‘All good, sir.’ Danny Long was watching him.
‘Right then.’ Sean took out his own binoculars and stood back to back with his manager, sweeping the rocks and peaks of the bay with hi-mag scrutiny. He could not – would not – ask Danny Long questions that would reveal his ignorance and completely undermine the authority he was there to resume.
The manager’s radio crackled. From the upper lookout in the Lodge, his second in command Terry Bjornsen was also scanning for bears. All clear.
‘Waiting,’ Long said into his collar, as he completed his own slow survey. He raised his arm to the Lodge. ‘All clear below.’
Sean lowered his kayak into the water, climbed down the steel ladder and slid into the seat. He took the paddle from Long, coiled the red tethering rope into the cockpit and pushed off with a long slow glide. There was no wind. Midgardfjorden was a black mirror, the only movement was the undulating wake behind Sean’s kayak, and the slow rise and fall of his paddle, hissing softly as it cut the water.
He skimmed out towards the centre, the rising shimmer of light around him showing that the sky was drying as the sun burned through. His consciousness fused with the subtle motion of the kayak and the long ripples of sunlight. He kept his eye on the jutting inner point of the M. He knew the current that circled the inlets and made a little area of turbulence close to the shore that could capsize the unwary – but here it was now, all the way out in the centre.
Dipping his blade, he felt the pull from the water, the tug all the way up into his arm, as if it had caught on something. The current swirled like a water snake but Sean had good upper body strength and kept his head. He judged its velocity and angle, then twisted his paddle blade into its force. He felt the energy from deep in the water travel up his paddle, his hand, his arm, into his shoulder, neck, and face. He held the strain – and the hook of the current released him in the right direction. Only five or six seconds – but long enough to go in if he’d panicked. But he hadn’t – and in that instant of instinctive reaction, in that correct response, his feeling of power came flooding back – and he was embracing that beautiful and terrifying lover once again: the Arctic.
His heart pounding with joy, he glanced back. Danny Long stood on the jetty, a tiny figure beneath the rearing mountain, his rifle above his shoulder like a tribesman’s spear. Sean rounded the point and moved out of sight.
From the air the glacier was one thing, but approached in humility by kayak, she revealed another nature. Sean lifted his paddle and slowed, poised in the water. The towering blue and white face of the ice filled his vision, the Arctic silence his ears and mind. Sometimes it was so intense it almost formed into a sound; sometimes he had heard the bumping and scraping of the pack ice form abstract fragments like music.
The silence gathered around him so that he could almost hear the squeeze and suck of his heart in his chest. He felt his sweat blot his base layer, and the bracing of his tendons far away inside the kayak shell. Below him the dark depth of the water; above, a thread of breeze that dried the molecules of sweat. His vision filled with the deep blue strata of the most ancient compressed ice, forty thousand years old.
When Sean was eleven and in the care home while his mother was recovering from yet another attempt, he saw a huge oil painting of icebergs on one of the off-limits staff landings. It was so beautiful he started using this longer route, despite the punishment when he was caught, just to gaze at the space and the colours of this pristine frozen world. While he stood before it, he forgot his distress, and threw his consciousness into the ice.
There was a mast from a shipwreck in the foreground, and he imagined himself the sole survivor. Everyone else was dead but he must find a way to keep going. As he gazed at it one day it came to him like a truth – his father was on that ship, or one like it – he had gone exploring and been shipwrecked, that was why he’d never known him, why his mother wanted to die. The ice had taken his family and he must go there to get them back.
The iceberg painting grew in his imagination, even when his mother returned from the hospital and reclaimed him to the ugly council house where she struggled on in depression and drinking. Sean fixated on his lost explorer father, and everything to do with the Arctic, and he had bolstered his fantasy with such authentic details, backed up with angry fists for doubters, that it became fact.
His fighting was a problem until a social worker intervened. Sean was in danger of serious delinquency but clearly bright, and the social worker goaded him into agreeing to sit the scholarship exam for The Abbott’s School.
This was the grand, grey-stone public school where Sean had often joined the townie gang in attacking boys who wore the strange uniform – but now he was to be one of them. He’d listened outside the door after his interview – ‘Oh, the poor boy, think of what he’s gone through, yes, yes let’s extend a helping hand.’
So Sean Cawson received the academic scholarship and the sports bursary and the charity award that topped up the rest and meant he could go for free. By the age of fifteen, he had become a chameleon at Abbott’s, sloughing off the misfits who would have been his natural friends and gravitating instead to the leaders of the pack, in sport and academic excellence. There he worked out the answer to the question he’d always pondered, about fairness and beauty and ugliness and justice. It was wealth.
Sean blinked. Not eleven in the care home, not in the dorm at Abbott’s. In the kayak, frozen. The current had taken him closer to the ice face – how long had he been zoned out, thinking of the past? A few seconds – a couple of minutes? The temperature had dropped and the light was that milky veil that can suddenly appear in Arctic air like a spell, blanking out contours, hiding crevasses, wiping out direction.
His heart slammed. In the few seconds he had mentally drifted, the current had taken him directly in front of the mouth of the cave into the glacier from which Tom’s body emerged. It was deep; the ice was the darkest blue he had ever seen, and as he paddled backwards, he could hear the echo of his blade striking the water. His ears blocked as if he were airborne and his mouth was dry. The new cave was the source of the pull in the water, it had changed the current pattern of the fjord.
He felt a terrible urge to go in, but he knew that was crazy, like standing on a high cliff