Dead Water (13 page)

At 6.30 p.m. a car pulls up outside the house and sounds its horn. Roopa goes to the window. She cannot see the driver. Is he young? Is he pretty? Is he kind? There is no reason for her to suppose that this is Hardik’s lover. He could as easily be just a driver. She will never know and there is no point asking Hardik. She knows what he would say. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

Hardik comes to say goodbye. The sun is low in the sky. The room is full of saffron-yellow light.

‘Yash wants to get rid of us,’ she says. ‘He wants to drive us out of town. This –’ She sees her mother’s furniture again, what’s left of it, strewn about the hall, and swallows, fighting tears.

‘Roopa, that’s nothing to me.’

She cannot tell whether he is being kind or cruel.

Outside, the driver hits his horn again. Hardik takes her hand. He wants, in these final moments, to be gentle. ‘You have your family. You have Thane. Go home.’

When he is gone, Roopa tidies the house. Her weeping has numbed her. The piece of her that is capable of powerful feeling is missing suddenly: perhaps Hardik took it away with him. She will rescue what she can of her mother’s furniture. Her kid brother Ijay can drive it back to Thane. A heavy bureau that used to stand in her father’s study. An ornate sandalwood box, big as a table, that a distant auntie brought home from Malawi. All but one of the wicker-bottom chairs has been staved in. As a child she used to drape sheets over these chairs, making a cave for herself. Her father crawled around it on his hands and knees, roaring like a lion.

She tires. She will finish this another day. For now, she will pick up a handful of personal things to take back to Arun and Nidra’s house. A book or two and some make-up. The make-up she wants has been trodden into the linoleum, and she can’t find her books anywhere. Were they taken in the raid?

Roopa remembers her report. A hollowness opens inside her.
Her report
. Her half-finished investigations into the Yadav family. She goes into the bedroom, gets down on her hands and knees and reaches under her bed. The blue suitcase isn’t there. She finds it by the window. Its locks have been forced open. It is empty. She casts around for stray papers but this is pure avoidance. Yash Yadav’s men have confiscated her report.

She imagines it landing on Yash’s desk. Yash reading it: a dossier compiled by his pregnant ex-lover. Notes on his business dealings. Unsubstantiated accusations of impropriety, extortion and fraud. She imagines Yash, with the resources of a state-wide counter-terrorist apparatus at his fingertips, finding out who she is, where she comes from, who she works for.

It is getting dark now. She fumbles her phone out of her bag. She calls the Anti-Corruption Bureau’s head office in Worli. She thumbs through half-familiar options, pausing a second to jiggle the bedroom light switch. The electricity is off.

Kala’s extension: ‘Superintendent’s office.’ It is not Kala’s voice, nor anyone’s she knows. ‘Kala Subadrah? I’m sorry, she no longer works in this department.’

Panic streams through Roopa’s softened and expanded body: it flutters in her throat, delivers a ghost-kick to her diaphragm, commands her to pee – the body as slapstick. She says, ‘I have information relevant to the Yadav case file, Maharashtra Port Authority One through Three, Y-A-D-A-V.’

The line goes dead a moment, then clatters back to life: ‘I will transfer you.’ The dialling tone is replaced almost immediately with an out-ofoffice message. Roopa listens with growing incredulity: she’s been put through to the archive.

If Kala is gone and the case on Yadav is abandoned, then how is she to return to Worli and the ACB? How is she going to get home? She thumbs the red button to kill the call, then scrolls through the names on her phone. She will find an old colleague to talk to. Someone to tell her that this is all a mistake.

Headlights sweep the darkening room. An expensive Hyundai saloon draws up behind another, virtually identical car, parked opposite the house. Now the car in front starts its engine. Its sidelights come on. It pulls away, leaving the newcomer in its place. Roopa moves away from the window. She imagines Yash Yadav, her report in his hands. She knows how he thinks. She heads for the door. A shadow appears behind the glass.

She hesitates. ‘Hardik?’

The pane shatters. A gloved hand reaches round for the catch.

She runs into the bedroom.

The door bangs open.

There are footsteps in the hall. And here they are. Hoods, cricket bats, trowels and wrenches. Their smell fills the room: ash, wet clay and burning tyres. A country smell. A brick-kiln smell. They rush into the room and fall upon her.

For the briefest instant there is only breathing and the tussle of prone bodies in the darkness and it seems as though there might be passion here. But this is something else and Roopa finds the strength at last to scream. Two men pick her up by the arms and throw her against the wall, getting the air out of her. They haul her back on to the bed and fall upon her, lying across her, pinning her down. One of them rubs himself against her.

Things are slowing down. Violence is giving way to performance. A man comes in with a thick green rubbish bag. He empties it on the floor. It is full of glass. Coloured glass. Broken glass. The shattered wastes of Firozabad and Devnagar. They pick Roopa up and pull off her clothes and sit her on the glass and while they hold her there, down in the red puddle she is making, a man kneels down in front of her, brandishing a pair of pliers. His breath is nauseating: rotten and sweet and laden with alcohol. Working from one side of her scream to the other, he crushes her teeth.

Friday, 15 June 1928

In the middle of the Barents Sea, halfway between the mainland and Spitsbergen, Bear Island forms an irregular arrowhead pointing due south towards Tromsø. There is coal here. For years, people have talked about mining it. A few spindly iron crosses along the northern coast mark the resting places of nineteenth-century Russian bureaucrats, marooned here by their own ambition or disfavour at home. Imagine them building their houses, writing diaries and prospectuses, staring at the calendar: only three months to go until the next boat! Coffee, letters, good news!

The costs of extracting coal at such a latitude, and at a location so remote – fog-bound in summer, ice-bound in winter, and lacking even a harbour – bested them. All of them, sooner or later, turned away from the sea; were drawn to face south, across flat, treeless, yellow-orange lowlands, across six hundred shallow lakes, to confront the peaks of Fugle, Hamberg, Alfred. Black whaleback mountains on sheer black pedestals. East of the group, standing 536 metres above sea level, is the highest peak on Bear Island. It is called Misery.

Their huts stand deserted now and the wind has torn the shingles from their roofs. The locomotive, hoppers and carriages of the mining operation are orange with rust. A narrow-gauge railway runs along low cliffs above the only anchorage. The wooden ties are bleached white, dry and cracked. At the end of the line the cliffs have crumbled and the tracks spill into the sea.

Eric Moyse, twenty-eight years old, whaling and fishing magnate, landowner, mayor, lollops over stones overgrown with scurvy grass, slippery with yellow moss, past splashes of purple saxifrage, to the meteorological station at Herwighamna. He has a vested interest in the weather, and in the newfangled meteorology, and twice a year, spring and autumn, his ships convey supplies and personnel to this most isolated of Norway’s weather stations. The huts, repainted every year at his expense, are the only green things on the island. The adjoining radio station is Eric’s own work.

Maintaining the weather station gives Eric some welcome distraction from the news dribbling out of Vadsø and King’s Bay. The airship
Italia
has crashed on pack ice near the Pole. The few survivors are all but unreachable. One of them, Lothar Eling, is Eric’s protégé. His climbing pupil. His friend.

It is getting late: nearly 4 a.m. The skies are clearing, but the glass tells a different story and the weathervane points obstinately south. Even as he stands recording his observations – barometric pressure, temperature, humidity – the breeze tickles him through his beard.

CLOUD COVER BROKE 4.15 A.M.

CONTRARY WINDS DOWN TO 15 MPH.

The rest of Eric’s weather report, morsed in tonic train at 1,400 metres, is mostly raw number, but the amateur weatherman in him cannot resist adding an editorial.

STRONG HEAD WIND EXPECTED FROM NORTH.

He knows full well that Tromsø’s tough-minded analysts, pupils of Professor Jakob Dunfjeld, will ignore him.

Visibility is deteriorating fast. Eric wobbles over rubble covered in moss, between tufts of grass. The weather breaks, and the rain turns the rocks to glass under his boots.

*

An hour later, in the shelter and relative warmth of the weather station, Eric Moyse listens to Stavanger.

BETWEEN BEAR ISLAND AND SPITSBERGEN EASTWARDS DEPRESSION, PRESSURE FALLING IN FRONT OF CENTRE. OVER OCEAN BETWEEN SPITSBERGEN AND JAN MEYEN N TO NW BEAUFORT 5.

He tries again to catch radio signals sent by the survivors of Nobile’s ill-fated expedition. A farmer in Archangel picked up the camp’s SOS two weeks ago. So far, Eric has been unable to pick up their transmissions. Eric has come to the end of his time on Bear Island. He is waiting for a boat to carry him back to the mainland and his responsibilities as
nessekøng
(loosely, squire) of Svolvaer, capital of Norway’s Lofoten archipelago. Early in the evening it appears: the
Cormorant
, a fishing vessel from his own fleet. Of the four men on board, two are new to him: a Bergen-trained meteorologist and a radio engineer, come to take over the running of the weather station. Accompanying them are two men Eric recognizes. A rowboat, absurdly small, serves as the
Cormorant
’s cutter, and the couple have their backs to him as they pull the boat to shore, but there is no mistaking Tor Dalebø’s red hair, or Peder Halstad’s rounded shoulders.

Bear Island’s weather station is meant for two and built small, making it easier to heat. The five men hunker down in the living area, squeezed in as best they can. The weathermen crouch on the unmade bottom bunk, as nervous and proper as new boys entering a school dormitory.

Eric serves coffee. Already they are talking about the
Italia
. ‘Amundsen’s rescue crew is off at last.’ Dalebø says.

‘That took him a while.’

The young men look uncomfortable. Roald Amundsen is practically a saint. You cannot talk of a saint this way, as though he were just one more exhausted explorer, drumming up a little publicity for himself.

The truth is Amundsen is old and broke. Whether he saves the explorers or not, a first-hand account of the
Italia
affair, with lantern slides, should be good for a season or two on the after-dinner circuit. After that, God knows what will happen to the poor bugger. You see them often enough: veterans of the
Vega
and the
Fram
haunting quarterly meetings of the Geographical Society, ancient mariners sprung from Coleridge, stuffing their pockets with canapés when they think no one is looking.

After coffee, Eric shows the newcomers around the station. The Stevenson screen stands a minute’s walk away from the radio hut, over boulders worn clean of gravel and dirt by twice-daily visits. The screen is sheltered from the constant sun of Arctic summer by a sailcloth canopy which requires constant mending and attention. It stands two metres high, so that there is room underneath to swing an L-shaped aluminium ice detector. A spare detector, wrapped in sailcloth, lies under a prominent rock, next to a spare snow vase.

Eric warns the newcomers always to wear their winter jackets fully fastened when they open the screen, or the thermometers inside will respond to their body heat. Paint is peeling from the screen’s louvres already, though it was brushed up less than a year ago. A short distance away, on a plinth fashioned from a ship’s mast, a Robinson anemometer is furiously spinning. It has small cups and its arms turn more slowly than on most models: three and a quarter times slower than the wind. The snow gauge is in a dip to the west. ‘See?’

The newcomers’ eyes slip back and forth, hunting for purchase on the bare horizon, the yellow, puddle-pocked flatlands. They expected more.

Eric takes them into the radio hut. Now they are really up against each other: there is barely room to close the door. Here is the spare generator: a 3hp Douglas. The short-wave receiver has a range of between ten and a hundred metres. Mind the reaction-coil under the table. Eric shows them the logbooks and leaves them to make a hash of their first readings and to discover, by painful experience, how to sit at the radio table without drawing off a spark from an oscillating circuit.

In twenty minutes he will come and rescue them. Another set of readings in the morning will iron out any kinks and by then they should have mastered everything they need to know about the station. And when the chronometer strikes noon and Eric and his friends, chugging south aboard the
Cormorant
, vanish at last into the perpetual summer fog, then the newcomers will confront their most serious difficulty: not their reports, which are regular and simple to prepare, but the gaps of time that stretch, plastic and hallucinatory, between them.

The next boat is not due until the end of summer.

In the living quarters, Dalebø has made more coffee. Halstad, relieved of the obligation to behave properly around the two greenhorns, is revelling in the latest gossip. ‘They say Il Duce wants the general dead. Nobile’s a thorn in his backside, apparently. A decorated war hero who refuses to join the fascists.’ He pulls out a handkerchief and blows his nose. ‘This farce is certainly one way to go about a murder.’

Dalebø grunts: ‘Be thankful. As long as Romagna’s men are cooped up on their ship with their dicks in their hands, that’s a hundred-odd fewer clowns we’ll be expected to go fish out of the water.’ The Arctic is awash with undirected, piecemeal rescue crews. ‘If it carries on this way there’s going to be bodies littering the beaches from Murmansk to Dikson.’