Sun at Midnight. Rosie Thomas
as well, Rook thought. If this is what you’ve come all this way for.
He propelled her backwards and hoisted her on to his bed. Immediately she twisted her legs round his waist to hold him. Her head tipped back and her black hair fanned out on his pillow. Before he closed his eyes he saw that there was a triumphant glint in her smile.
Afterwards she nestled up against him, as light as a bird.
‘We’ll find a better place than this, Rook. I’ll start looking tomorrow. Maybe one of those neat little tin-roof houses, painted bright blue or red, like I saw on the way up in the taxi? Then, once I’ve got it fixed up, I’ll look for some work. Perhaps in one of the hotels, or in the tourist office? I’ll have a blue suit, maybe, and a name badge. That would be funny, wouldn’t it? I’ll say to the tourists, “Welcome to Ushuaia. You have a nice day.” Then I’ll come on home and cook us some dinner. We’ll have a bottle of wine, watch some TV, then go to bed. Don’t you think?’
Rook thought this scenario was about as realistic as Edith deciding that she was going to be elected president and planning what to do about the White House drapes.
The room was quiet and the silence outside was unbroken. Rook sat and listened to nothing. It was only on paydays that there was much noise around these streets at night.
Edith fell asleep, curled up around her small fists. He moved softly, putting on his coat and picking up his boots from beside the stove. At the doorway he hesitated, looked back at her and wondered if he was going to feel a flicker of affection or tenderness. Nothing came. He might have been looking at a stranger asleep on a bench at a train station, or at a picture of a woman in a magazine.
He was usually impervious to the cold, but as he let himself out of the front door and walked out into the street Rooker was shivering.
In a bar, a different place from the one he had visited earlier but the same in almost every respect, he met a man he knew.
Dave was a big, shaggy blond New Zealander who did odd jobs to fund his sailing and mountaineering habits. ‘They’re hiring down south, you know,’ he told Rooker.
The only place south of Ushuaia was the Antarctic continent.
Rook took another mouthful of his drink. ‘Yeah? McMurdo?’
McMurdo was the American polar research station down on the Ross Ice Shelf. Rooker had worked there for a brief summer season when he was in his early twenties. It had been a dull interlude. He had spent most of his time driving a shuttle bus between the gritty main street of the base and the airfield a couple of miles away. His few other memories mostly involved off-duty hours spent in a windowless bar. But it was watching the helo and fixed-wing pilots swooping away, lifting off the airfield and into the limitless white, that made him realise that he wanted to be a flyer himself.
Dave shook his head. ‘Nope. It’s a new station, some rich guy’s bought a redundant base off the Brits and he’s tooling it up to be run for, whatchacallit, in Europe? The EU?’
Rooker laughed. ‘Needs something to spend his money on, does he?’
‘I guess. Sullavan, that’s his name. I came across the site on the net when I was surfin’ this morning. Sounded kinda interesting, in a crazy way.’
It did, Rooker thought. Keep going, that was the idea. Keep going, while some place even further away still beckons.
He remembered how remote McMurdo had seemed, ringed by the ice and overlooked by the cone of Mount Erebus. In comparison, Ushuaia felt like a shimmering metropolis at the very epicentre of the world.
Dave was saying that if he hadn’t fancied heading away to Byron Bay for a summer’s surfing and sailing, he might have given it a try.
‘Is that right?’
Rooker bought him another beer and a whisky for himself. He had a long night to while away.
In the end he stayed up until the last bar closed. Dave had said goodnight and gone home hours earlier, but Rooker banged on his door until he got up and let him in to doze in an armchair. When the morning finally came he didn’t show up for work. At 10 a.m., unshaven but sourly sober, he was waiting for the locutorio to open. Ahead of him in the line was a tourist couple holding a map open against the wind, the first arrivals of the summer’s migration.
Paula, the locutorio manager, came up the concrete steps and unlocked the door. She flashed him a smile and gave him the best terminal in exchange for three pesos. Rooker logged on and began the search for Lewis Sullavan’s polar website.
It was a warm, still day. There were pools of deep shadow under the great trees and the river reflected the light like a sheet of crumpled tinfoil. Drawn by the day’s brilliance, Alice Peel had left her desk on an impulse and walked out into the University Parks. She moved slowly, letting the sun beat on the top of her head and the back of her neck. Once she stretched her arms out in front of her, absently noting the pallor of her skin. It was a weekday and it felt odd but distinctly pleasant to be wandering around in the middle of the afternoon. There were only a few other strolling or lounging figures dotted against the wide swath of grass. There was almost another month to go before the students returned and the academic year slipped into gear once more.
The scent of mown grass mingled with dust from the path. It had been a dry summer and the margins of the leaves were nibbled with brown. When she glanced up into the blue sky she saw a contrail sketched by the pinpoint of an aircraft. She wondered briefly where the plane was headed, with its cargo of passengers and their expectations. The speculation faded gently in her mind, like the vapour itself dissolving against the sky.
When the path reached the river she turned left to follow the curve of the bank. Ahead of her a footbridge and its reflection merged to make an O, the lower half blurred like a winking eye. She listened to the slow beat of her own footfalls and then to the tinny scratching of distant music. The scratching grew steadily louder and a punt rounded a bend in the river. Framed in the bridge’s O, it turned watery furrows of pewter and olive-green as it surged closer. A girl was vigorously poling. When she lifted the pole between thrusts, droplets ran down her arm and beaded the smooth wood, then struck silvery chips out of the water’s surface. The punt’s four or five passengers lolled on the cushions, laughing up at her. Their voices cut across the music.
The girl’s T-shirt rode up to reveal a tattoo on her belly. The punt was close enough for Alice to see that the design was a butterfly before she realised that the man sitting on the flat prow with his back to her was Peter. The thick hair was his, and the skull’s distinctive architecture beneath it, and the faded shirt was the one she had washed yesterday and hung out to dry on the line in the back garden. He was leaning back, supporting his weight on his splayed hands. The unexpected sight of him made her heart jump.
The punt drew level. The voices and the laughter were loud, raised over the blare of music. The girl with the pole didn’t glance at her. The long craft slid by, stirring the smell of mud and weeds mingled with boat varnish.
Peter’s head idly tilted, then he caught sight of Alice, already receding on the riverbank. He sat upright. ‘Al! Hello, Al!’
He scrambled to his feet, windmilling his arms at her. The punt rocked wildly and he danced barefoot on the slippery wood. She caught a brief glimpse of surprise like a flaw in the ready glitter of his smile.
‘Aaaaa-al,’ he shouted again. He was already into a jump, knees drawn up to his chest, the smile still seeming to hang in the air as his limbs hit the water. A plume of glittering spray shot into the air to the accompaniment of shrieks from the punt’s passengers. The girl didn’t shout. She stood looking back over her shoulder, her weight resting on one hip so that her body made a graceful curve against the willow trees on the opposite bank. The pole trailed in her hand.
Peter’s head broke the water and he struck out towards Alice.