Call of the White (24 page)

‘No, I've been leaving the blister intact to protect the skin underneath,' she replied.

I was horrified. Leaving the blister in place would have been unnecessarily painful. ‘Are you taking painkillers?'

‘No, I'm not used to taking drugs so I don't want to take anything unless I absolutely have to.'

I encouraged her to drain the blister and take some paracetamol to make skiing less painful but she was steadfast in her objection. I could see that the conversation was making her emotional. ‘If I had known I was coming here, I would never have gone to Namibia,' she admitted sadly. ‘It just seemed like too good an opportunity to miss.'

Helen was paying the price for taking on two such serious expeditions back to back. It wasn't just the physical impact of Namibia that she had underestimated; it was clear that there was a mental and emotional price to pay as well. It gradually became obvious that Helen wasn't herself. Normally happy and positive, the laughter seemed a little strained and she became very negative about the smallest of details. I could see that the expedition was already harder, mentally and physically, than she had prepared for and I was worried for her. One evening I made a point of finding a private moment to ask her how she was finding it. ‘To be honest, Felicity, I'm eighteen years older than some members of this team, and today I felt it.' I gave her a hug of encouragement. ‘I'm just worried that I'm not giving you the support you expected,' she continued. It was true that I was surprised at how difficult Helen was finding the expedition but I tutted at her concern. ‘Don't be ridiculous. It's our turn to support you. You just need to concentrate on maintaining those feet and getting to the South Pole.'

Helen wasn't the only surprise of the expedition. Kylie, normally incredibly self-sufficient and organised, was revealing herself to be a magnet for accidental disaster. She was full of energy and never deliberately careless but things just seemed to get broken around her. She was in charge of the stoves in her tent and within the first week she had managed to burn her sleeping mat, the tent, a thermos flask, a water bottle and even the leg of her own trousers – while she was wearing them. Each day she listed her latest stream of disasters and I couldn't help laughing in pure exasperation. She may have been terrible with equipment but she was a master with people. If I ever fell short on the pastoral side of things I knew that Kylie would be filling the gap, ever ready with a comforting hug and a cheering view of the situation.

Kylie always brought good humour with her but it was Steph who supplied the fun and was the vitality of our team. Her direct observations about the surrealism of our day-to-day life on the ice kept us laughing but as fond as I was of Steph, she was often the cause of intense frustration. Her natural state was one of disorganisation and constant crisis. She'd worked hard to implement some self-discipline and although I recognised her effort I still found myself having occasionally to be quite hard on her, particularly when her belongings began spreading too far out of her corner of the tent, or when she spent too long getting into her sleeping bag at night, procrastinating for hours as she pointlessly fossicked long after everyone else was asleep. Steph's habitual disarray was highlighted by the contrast with Era's unfailingly neat habits. Era took her responsibilities within the tent very seriously and was often the one to scold us if we fell below her high standards of personal administration.

In retrospect the early days of the expedition seemed to have passed in a flash and yet at the time we noted the passing of every moment of the day in exhaustive detail. It was as if we had entered a cosmological hall of mirrors where instead of our reflected images being affected, it was the seconds and minutes of our days that were distorted. Time appeared able to stretch to fill an aeon or contract to last no longer than a click of the fingers. We began talking about 90 minute legs rather than hours as if this was a new unit of time (‘Lets stop in two legs' time…'; ‘It will take us four legs to get there…') and in days since departure rather than referring to dates or days of the week (‘We'll get there on Day 15…'; ‘It happened on Day 3…'). It felt like we had truly stepped outside normal existence. The landscape supported this conclusion. The relentless emptiness was absolute, as if the whole of creation had been wiped clean and we were, quite literally, walking across the great white drawing board of the gods as it waited to be filled with their new handiwork.

The sky was as unchanging as the horizon. Although the sun moved, it described perfect circles above us so that there was no change in the colour and strength of the light throughout the day. Only the clouds gave any indication of the passage of time. The skies were so big that we could see whole fronts of cloud in their entirety and watch as they slowly advanced towards us. Flat and uniform, like thin blankets cruising through the atmosphere, the shadow of a cloud layer would fall across us as dramatically as a biblical event and as suddenly as an eclipse. Steph stood next to me at one break, munching awkwardly as she peered upwards at the clouds above us. They seemed so low that it was tempting to reach out to try to touch them. ‘I've never watched clouds forming before,' she said in wonder. I could see what she meant. The swirling mists above us seemed to coalesce in front of our eyes, forming and reforming over and over again until they drifted away in a single layer, like a blind being pulled over the sky. On the horizon the clouds had gathered into vast towers of light and shade. I watched them as we skied onwards and they appeared to grow like candy floss being spun at a fairground. Their centres were dark triangles of shadow surrounded by smudges of grey. As I continued to gaze at them absently my vision warped and wavered as if looking at a magic-eye picture. I grinned in sudden perception. What I was looking at weren't clouds gathering on the horizon but the tips of distant mountains. It was the first distinctive feature we had seen since leaving the coast ten days before. Leading at the front I turned round and pointed excitedly at the mountains to Kylie a few metres behind me. She looked up from her skis and watched my pantomime. ‘Mountains!' I shouted, even though I knew she wouldn't be able to hear me and jabbed towards the horizon again with my mitt. She followed the direction of my outstretched arm, confused, then spotted the apparitions. She nodded at me enthusiastically before turning to Reena behind her to act out a similar pantomime. Surprise and delight rippled down the line, even though there was not so much as a pause in the rhythm of our skiing. I conjured the map of our route into my head and realised that these ghostly mountains to our south must be the Pensacolas, some 100 kilometres away.

That evening in the tent I pored over the laminated map we carried with us. Era had conscientiously marked the location of each of our camps with a small cross in neat black pen. There were now ten crosses forming a slightly wonky line from our starting point on the coast, stretching out boldly across the white expanses of the map. Our advance looked impressive until I folded out the map to show our entire route to the South Pole. In contrast to the ground yet to cover, we had barely taken our first steps. ‘In four days' time we will reach the eighty-fifth degree of latitude,' predicted Era confidently. Era had been a mathematics teacher and she loved any kind of mathematical problem or puzzle. Each evening, after carefully plotting our position on the map, she would cover our tiny communal notebook in her calculations of mileage covered and distances to go.

We were now skiing six 90-minute legs in a day and had increased our daily mileage from just over 8 nautical miles to nearly 14 nautical miles. I was pleased with our pace: we had built up gradually and the team looked really strong. However, Helen was still anxious. ‘We've just got to keep plodding, we don't want to go too fast,' she said. I didn't think we were in any danger of going too fast and suspected it was her feet, not the pace, that were the real problem. The nails on her big toes, which had been damaged in Namibia, were coming loose and moving around painfully as she skied. ‘They throb at night and keep me awake,' she admitted as we
sat together in the tent surveying the damaged skin.

‘Take some painkillers, Helen – at least overnight so that you can get some decent sleep,' I cajoled. Eventually she was persuaded to take some paracetamol and ibuprofen.

Her tent-mates were also nursing their feet. Reena, who had been using Kylie's skis, had developed a pain in her left ankle. They were both now convinced that there was something wrong with the ski and neither wanted to use it. This was a problem as walking was still not a viable option in the soft snow and if the problem really was with the ski, passing it on to someone else would just spread the injury around. Kylie reluctantly took back her ‘evil' ski. ‘I just need to make sure that with every step my heel hits the ski right,' she decided (with more optimism than I suspect she felt). ‘At least it will be something to occupy my mind,' she added. Concentrating on every step sounded exhausting. It was clear that we needed to find another solution.

In the second tent a few metres away the issue was not injuries but hygiene. ‘Women shouldn't smell like this,' complained Steph. We had now been wearing the same clothes for at least 11 days and our last shower, back in Punta, was a distant memory. We each did our best with our daily ration of a single baby wipe, scrubbing at our face and hands first before attempting armpits and finally feet, but it made little difference. Every now and again we'd catch a whiff of ourselves and it was shocking. Thankfully, even though we were living very close together, I can honestly say that it was very rare I'd notice the stink of anyone but myself. Steph decided it was time for positive action and devised a plan for doing some laundry. We didn't have fuel to waste on melting snow to make water for washing clothes but, undaunted, she tried a dry wash. Taking her underwear outside (held in front of her at arm's length like a diseased rat) she dug a shallow pit in some powdery snow and rubbed ice into the fabric until it was damp. Adding a dash of antibacterial handwash she scrubbed at the laundry for a while before coming back inside the tent looking very pleased with herself. ‘I don't know how clean they actually are,' she admitted. ‘But at least they will feel clean.' I didn't share her enthusiasm when, later that evening, I sat up in my sleeping bag to be slapped in the face by a pair of drip-drying knickers hanging on the washing line in the middle of the tent.

The next morning we woke to a particularly cold, windy day. We all opted to wear our warm fleece-lined smocks and pulled our fur-lined hoods close around our faces to keep out the worst of the icy gusts. The mountains we had seen the day before had disappeared into the cloud-covered sky and so, heads down, we set off in our long line, watching the back of the sledge in front, occasionally looking up to scan the horizon, before resuming our fixed, downward gaze. The rhythmic motion of the skis and their sibilance as they cut through the snow lulled me into a kind of meditation. My mind wandered away from Antarctica and took me home. I thought about what Peter would be doing at that exact moment. I worked out that he would be on his way home from work and tried to remember in exact detail his route along the sea to our tiny flat near Epple Bay with its whitewashed walls and ‘sea glimpses'. I imagined him gratefully shutting our front door against the winter weather and dropping his bags in our kitchen, turning on the central heating and the radio on his way into the bathroom for a shower, then cooking a meal to eat on the sofa. At that very moment, the simple comfort of sitting with him in the warmth of our front room seemed to be the greatest gift the world could bestow.

A jolt sent me back to Antarctica. My sledge had caught on a lump of ice. I leaned forward in my harness without looking back. The sledges got caught a million times over in a single day but it was usually just a matter of pulling harder to free them. This time, there was no movement as I tugged at it. I turned around to find that my sledge had tipped over onto its side, the lip of the plastic sledge firmly wedged under a wave-shaped sastrugi. I glanced up at the team who, unaware I had stopped, were now a long way ahead. I called out to Era who was next in line. ‘Era! Stop!' Seeing there was no response I called again, pulling down my balaclava so that my mouth was clear of material. My shoulders heaved with the effort as I yelled. The team marched on oblivious, my shouts carried away on the wind blowing in the opposite direction. Part of the travelling routine we had practised was that the person navigating at the front of the line regularly looked back to make sure that the team was OK – and still there.

I watched the line for a while as it marched away from me, confident that at any moment Reena at the front of the line would look behind her. Seconds passed. Nothing. It was incredible how much ground had been covered in the few minutes since I had been stopped. The team of six individuals had now shrunk in size to become a single indistinguishable mass with numerous flailing limbs, like an oversized millipede. Sometimes the legs worked in perfect time with each other, at others it was random but all the while mitts jangled from elastic tied to harnesses or sleeves, webbing flapped from waist belts and ski poles jabbed at the ground leaving a spray of bullet holes in the snow either side of our parallel tracks. As the team continued to move further away from me, I realised no one was going to look around. I unhitched myself from my harness and, working quickly, moved around the sledge, moving the sledge bag so that I could disentangle it from the ice formation still stubbornly holding firm. It took me a number of minutes to right the sledge and reattach myself to my harness so I was shocked to look up and see that the team still hadn't noticed that they'd left someone behind. I was angry: they knew better than this. I set off at a fast pace to try to catch up.