The Ice: A gripping thriller for our times from the Bailey’s shortlisted author of The Bees. Laline Paull
There was nothing more beautiful than Arctic ice.
Something touched him. Not physically – but he felt it in the prickling of his scalp – something was there, around him or under him. He stared into the cave but saw nothing; he looked down and the water was grey-green translucent. Then he looked up.
Standing on the lip of the glacier, staring down from directly above him, was an enormous male polar bear. It was close enough for Sean to see the duelling scar that twisted his black lip, giving the impression of a cynical smile. It must have stalked him while he was years away, and now they had come together.
Sean dug his paddle to move away from the cave but caught another current that pushed him closer to the ice face. The bear watched with interest and slowly walked along the edge above him, keeping pace.
Sean knew not to take his eyes from it. He felt it most distinctly – the bear was pondering leaping in now, or waiting a little longer. If he came closer, if he lost control and capsized, it would take the chance and jump. Bears had been known to go for kayakers before, but always from the shore.
This glacier was high – but the bear was enormous and highly intelligent; it knew the currents – it was standing waiting for him. When he met its gaze, he felt it willing him to panic and make a mistake. He stared back with equal force and ignored the jolt of fear down both legs.
The current was a muscle of water writhing around his paddle, tugging it under the kayak. The light glittered and the mountains reared up black and strobing around him, locking him in. The bear lowered its head, looking for where to jump. He wanted a knife – why had he not brought a knife with him? He might have done something with a knife …
As the bear gathered itself, a sharp growl bounced against the granite walls of the fjord, and it looked up in irritation. The vibration of the Zodiac engine came through the water. Sean did not take his eyes away – the bear would still strike, even now. Man and animal felt each other’s stare. Advantage animal – but man was lucky. The bear turned and loped away up the glacier and out of sight.
Danny Long slowed the Zodiac as he approached, his rifle on his back. Benoit, Jiaq, and two young blonde women were his passengers, all wearing bright orange survival suits and busy photographing the scenery. They had not seen it.
‘Excuse me, sir: the guests wished to come out.’
Sean reached down into himself for human speech again.
‘Of course.’
Long carefully circled the Zodiac around behind Sean, giving him the benefit of the wake to help him out of the current. ‘How is it, in the kayak?’
‘Great,’ Sean said over his shoulder. ‘But no one else out alone. The current.’ He scanned the slopes. The bear had vanished and he was glad.
‘Yes, sir. It’s changed, I noticed as well.’
Sean left Kingsmith’s guests exclaiming over the colour of the glacier and paddled back. Only as he boarded the plane that evening did he realise he had not thought about Tom for a moment out there. He had gone to see where he’d died, and mourn, but instead the confrontation with the bear had made him feel truly alive, and even joyful. Sitting on the plane coming back, he missed Tom with a fierce longing for that friendship, and for everything else he had lost.
This snowless ice-plain is like a life without love – nothing to soften it. The marks of all the battles and pressures of the ice stand forth just as when they were made, rugged and difficult to move among. Love is life’s snow. It falls deepest and softest into the gashes left by the fight – whiter and purer than snow itself. What is life without love? It is like this ice – a cold, bare, rugged mass, the wind driving it and rending it and then forcing it together again, nothing to cover open rifts, nothing to break the violence of the collisions, nothing to round away the sharp corners of the broken floes – nothing, nothing but bare, rugged drift-ice.
Friday, 15 December 1893
Farthest North: The Norwegian Polar Expedition 1893–1896 (1897)
Fridtjof Nansen
London, four years earlier
Sean had found out about the Midgard sale, put together the proposal and finance, and fought to stay in negotiations. He was at the decisive final round of talks when it looked like Tom’s puritanical ego would destroy the whole venture.
‘I don’t want to do this.’ Tom hadn’t even waited for the meeting to officially start. The Pedersen family agent, Mogens Hadbold, their lawyer and their accountant, stared at Sean in confusion.
‘Wait.’ Sean felt like he was in a bad dream. ‘Tom, what is this?’ They were in a penthouse suite at Claridge’s, and Tom was holding up Sean’s bid proposal in its embossed leather cover.
‘I do not want the Pedersen family to sell their property,’ he said, ‘because it’s in such an environmentally sensitive location. The Arctic ecosystem is already massively stressed by warming seas. There is no more summer ice. Politicians pay lip-service to bringing the temperature down while quietly drawing dividends from their fossil fuel investments. We’ve got government ministers on the boards of oil companies. I don’t want that either, but that’s reality.’
Sean consciously relaxed his hands so they did not make fists. What an absolute fucker, telling him one thing and waiting until now—
‘But,’ Tom continued, ‘we’re here because someone is going to be chosen as the new owner. Someone is going to become responsible for that corner of the Arctic, at a most critical moment for its safety. I’m here to tell you that, if this sale is going to happen, I stand with this man to buy it. We’re here because the numbers are right.’
‘Certainly in the correct area,’ confirmed the family agent. ‘But above a particular threshold that Mr Cawson has passed, the family are even more concerned to select the correct buyer.’
‘I led Greenpeace for two years,’ Tom said. ‘I’ve been involved in environmental issues my whole life and I will continue to be. I’ve known Sean since we were at college together. I’ve learned a lot from him, and as I’m now in this room, I hope it’s become a two-way street. I used to turn my nose up at people whose main interest was money, because they didn’t seem to care how they made it. Now I’m less naïve. The only way the world will change for the better is if it is precisely those people who start thinking differently about profit.’ He looked at each of them in turn.
‘Last year’s coup in the Maldives cost every hotel group there untold sums as well as several lives. Many people saw it coming, the hotels were warned, they absolutely knew what was going on, but profit blinded them. Climate change means the poorest people suffer first – people who don’t buy organic or vote for liberal democracy. The Maldives is happening all over the world, in every poor country where the sea level is rising and the land is flooding.’
‘Mr Harding,’ Mogens Hadbold smiled patiently, ‘we all care—’
‘Caring is meaningless without action. We must stop the economic apartheid that is killing this planet.’
‘Tom, for pity’s sake!’ Sean was on his feet too. It was appalling, Tom was like a mad man, he hadn’t seen him like this before.
‘Sit down, Sean. You wanted me here, you wanted me on board, so let me continue. I’m nearly finished. Look at the world – a great big band of drought or flood that just happens to coincide with mineral resources, with political instability and then with foreign intervention by the very powers that benefit from the extractive rights. Powers that do not give a shit about the cost, human or natural, of that resource exploitation.