My love affairs were starting to get out of hand. My love affairs, and my drinking. There was nothing for it but to run away to the North Pole.
Johansen and I surveyed the endless icy wastes. That was our job now. All the same, we often found ourselves overwhelmed with emotion. We would sit on our snowmobiles and weep at the immense, impossible snowy beauty of it all.
“Have some coffee”, Johansen said, handing me the flask, “it has brandy in it. Like always.”
He had left behind a wife and a six-month-old baby girl to come here, to the end of the world. The money was good and they were planning, eventually, to buy a house back in Sweden.
Dr Kristina Gjenistad stalked the corridors of Ice Station B. In her native Norway she was an Olympic cross country skier, a swimmer, a runner of marathons and ultra-marathons. Ice-bound now for six months of the year, her smooth, muscular thighs still strained to escape the limitations of her tight regulation uniform and carry her, stotting like a gazelle, off across the sea-ice.
I was a little bit obsessed with Dr Kristina Gjenistad. I wanted to make love to her on an ice floe while the aurora borealis crackled and whooped over our heads. I invented excuses to go to the clinic to see her.
“My hand’s a bit sore today”, I’d say, or “I’ve hurt my ankle”, or “do you need any more medical supplies?”
Unfortunately she’d seen my kind coming a mile off all her life and would have nothing whatsoever to do with me. She recommended aspirin, hot baths, and keeping off the affected limb. I argued that these things were of little use in cases of unrequited love, but she remained unimpressed.
Polar bears were reported. We posted a twenty-four hour armed guard. First thing every morning it was my job to go out and clear the rime that had gathered on the anemometers.
Through the dark months of February and March we played cards and drank and outside the wind screamed by at one hundred and fifty miles an hour in the interminable polar night. The temptation, sometimes, to just step outside and surrender oneself to the elements was acknowledged. We watched each other for the telltale signs and waited for the spring.
There were talks on scientific subjects, animal husbandry, literature. We discussed “The Arctic as Metaphor”. The Scandinavians used their block vote and the motion was defeated.
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing here anymore,” said Johansen, as we watched the watery sun come up for the first time in three months. I took that as my cue to leave.
When I got back to England I wrote a book about my adventures and became moderately rich and famous. Your applause makes me feel better about myself, for a while.
It’s said the Inuit have no word for “memory”, but I saw nothing much to convince me either way.
By Owen Booth
Read Owen's other Shortfolio story - And then...
2 comments:
Loved this. It just works really well. Read it at 9am in the morning when I got to work and it improved my mood greatly.
Nice one. If I had to provide a point of criticism (and I feel it behoves me to do so) the end of the story felt a little rushed to me. Generally though I liked the meandering, unfocussed narrative that runs through the piece. It conveys the sense of days and weeks bleeding into each other for the main character really well. Touche sir.
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