Sightlines Read online

  On the bridge, a warm competent calm prevails. No one shouts there, certainly not the officers. Wide windows give panoramic views beyond the ship’s mast and white prow of the fjord ahead, as the ship sails steadily on. It’s a long fjord—the longest in the world—and we will keep sailing till nightfall. From here the icebergs ahead look like a jumbled barrier, as if there were no way through, but the radar shows otherwise. I like to look at the radar screen, and I like to watch the ship’s captain and officers as they consult it.

  The screen is the size of a small TV, and has shields around it the better to shut out any reflection or glare. On a black background, the fjord walls show as two green glowing lines, straight as the kerbs of a road; the icebergs are a rash of green dots between them. The officers move calmly between window and radar, radar and window, studying now one, now the other, checking one against the other, determining a course. In an alcove behind the bridge, screened at night by curtains, is the desk where the charts lie, with compasses and pencils, under an angle-poise lamp; a digital readout gives the ship’s latitudes and longitude, as transmitted by satellite. It’s quiet on the bridge, like a public library, but for the constant faint reassuring drone of the heating or ventilation.

  But it’s no good being indoors. Once warm again you have to be out—but the instant you put your shoulder to the seadoor, and lift your foot over the high step, so you are again under the lifeboats on their derricks, the wind claims you, you’ve to walk head down onto the bow, where the wall offers some little protection. Polly has been in for a coffee, but she, too, is back out again. She has been to these latitudes many times, but she’s still keen, though, still interested. She is standing on a little metal step set into the bow.

  ‘Like a harpoonist!’ she calls.

  ‘What’s to harpoon? Any narwhal?’ We’d love to see narwhal.

  ‘No narwhal!’ she replies, giving her little laugh.

  We see few animals. There have been little ringed seals hauled out on small icefloes. They have happy-go-lucky expressions, despite their austere world, and they dive as the ship nears. And earlier—the Finnish birder was hopping across the icy deck in excitement—two white gyrfalcons appeared right overhead, attacking one of the young kittiwakes which have been the ship’s constant companions. The falcons were working together. One (you could see the sandy bars of its undersides) tried driving the gull up from below, as the other descended toward her—there was a twist and turn of wings and a lot of shouted support—but the desperate gull was the more agile, and she managed to jink away into a lead of clear air, then fly up against the blue sky until she vanished, whereupon the falcons vanished, too. We look for birds and animals all the time, amongst the lifeless ice. I like the way the birds use the icebergs, how they perch on them, quite at ease, hitching a slow ride downstream. Glaucous gulls, a raven or two, another upright white gyrfalcon.

  Another iceberg, and another. Some people say you can smell icebergs, that they smell like cucumbers. You can smell icebergs and hear your own nervous system. I don’t know. Although they pass slowly and very close, I smell nothing but colossal, witless indifference.

  * * *

  Eventually, in the early evening, in a bay safe from icebergs, the anchor goes rattling down. Tufts and bows of white ice drift around the ship. The fjord is wider here, less relentlessly spectacular; there is a different geology. Instead of jagged basalt mountains, we look out on smooth hills of ice-worn rock, with patches of snow.

  The wind has dropped, the water is tranquil enough to hold the hills’ reflections. Soon it will be dark, but in the last of the daylight we watch—the photographers are all out on deck, their lenses trained—a family of seven stolid musk oxen as they trundle slowly over the hillside. The animals are much the same rusty colour as the vegetation they graze. With downward-curved horns framing their droopy faces, the males look like they’re unhappily in drag. They all have a dusting of whitish guard hairs on their shoulders, like frost.

  We eat and, as night falls, the waters of our anchorage change. I’m leaning over the side, puzzling about the sea 25 feet below. It’s become a sluggish eerie green, and suddenly it reminds me of a horrible rubber sheet my mother used to produce, to complete our humiliation, if my sister or brother or I had a phase of bed-wetting. I haven’t thought about that sheet for forty years, but here it is: deep in a fjord in east Greenland at nightfall, at 71 degrees of latitude, undulating around the ship: saltwater, slowly beginning to freeze.

  * * *

  Now it’s after midnight, and dark. We have been to bed, lain in the dark in our cabins, but are up again, jackets and jerseys thrown over our pyjamas, boots, hats and gloves, and are again standing on the ship’s foredeck, eight or ten of us, in twos or alone. Some lean on the rail, some stand in the middle of the deck. There is no electric light; the crew must have switched them off, so there is ship’s equipment to negotiate in the darkness, winches and a mast. Although there is no wind now, it’s deeply cold and we move with care, because the metal deck underfoot is glazed with ice. If we speak at all, it’s in whispers.

  The land is featureless now, and the water black, but the heavens are vivacious. We are standing with heads tilted back, marvelling.

  Luminous green, teal green, the aurora borealis glows almost directly overhead. It intensifies against the starry night like breath on a mirror, and it moves. Across the whole sky from east to west, the green lights shift and alter. Now it’s an emerald veil, now with a surge it remakes itself into a swizzle which reaches toward some far-away place in the east. We’re like an audience—some gaze directly, others have again raised long-lensed cameras—standing in the deep cold, looking up, keeping silence, but it’s not a show, it’s more like watching fluidity of mind; an intellectualism, after the passivity of icebergs. Not the performance of a finished work but a redrafting and recalculating. In fact, because the aurora’s green is exactly the same glowing green as the ship’s radar screen, as the readout which gives the latitude and longitude, the aurora looks less like a natural phenomenon, more like a feat of technology.

  Some people say you can hear the northern lights, that they whoosh or whistle. Silence, icebergs, musk oxen, and now the aurora borealis—the phenomena of the Arctic. This is why we’ve come here. This is why we are out on the freezing deck at midnight. The lights alter again. Low voices, the rapid clickering of cameras.

  Polly comes up beside me and pokes me as best she can through all the layers of clothes. With head tilted back she whispers, ‘They are changing without moving’, which is true, and I fall to wondering if there are other ways of changing without moving. Growing older perhaps, as we are. Reforming one’s attitudes, maybe.

  Bright teal green. Once upon a time, whaling ships had come to these latitudes, with orders to return heavy with oil and baleen. Now the aurora alters into long trailing verticals, and it makes me think of baleen. Sifting. Sifting what? Stars, souls, particles. You could fancy the northern night were a great whale whose jaws our ship were entering.

  We stand side by side watching, as the green lights close themselves in, then instantly flare out again like a concertina, like people can do who’re really skilled at shuffling cards. It’s a movement which ought to whoosh, but there is deep silence. There’s something in the lights I recognise—a restlessness, a dissatisfaction with their own arrangements.

  But: ‘Where is everyone else?’ I whisper. Aside from those few on the deck, the shapes of a few more people can be seen looking out from the windows of the bridge. The bridge, warm and reassuring with its competent officers and glowing green instruments. Where is everyone? My cabin mate clamps her arms to the sides of her goose-down jacket, stands rigid, and whispers in reply, ‘Perhaps they are asleep.’ She smiles as though she’d looked into the human condition some time ago, but has since moved on.

  Or perhaps it is the cold. The cold is no joke. Stealthy, penetrating, already prospecting our bones. Perhaps they decided against heeding the impassioned calls o
n the PA to come and see the northern lights in all their spectacle, because of the cold. Perhaps they lie, as Polly suggests, like alabaster knights on a tomb, down in their cabins, changing without moving. Once more the lights alter and breathe. Someone gasps, then laughs softly and the cameras click.

  Where, also, are the animals? The musk oxen and seals and gyrfalcons, and the kittiwake which escaped with its life—what do they do in the night, under the stars and the aurora? I like the aurora; there is something both elegant and driven in this green restlessness.

  * * *

  Once, I asked my friend John—half in jest—why we are so driven. By day John counsels drug addicts; by night he is a poet. He wrote back, half in jest: ‘You know, my job isn’t to provide answers, only more questions. Like: why are we not more driven? Consider: the atoms of you have been fizzing about for a bit less than five billion years, and for forty-odd of those years, they’ve been pretty well as self-aware as you. But soon enough they’ll go fizzing off again into the grasses and whatever, and they’ll never, ever know themselves as the sum of you again. That’s it. And you ask me why we’re driven? Why aren’t more folk driven? Whatever are they thinking about?’

  I have no idea what folk are thinking about. Right now, I’m thinking if we could taste the green aurora, it would fizz on the tongue and taste like crème de menthe. Right now, Polly and I are playing at finding the Pole Star, by means of the Great Bear. Just for fun, we won’t have to navigate ourselves home like the old whalers by stars and sextants, or indeed by raven. We find the Pole Star and, with mock solemnity, salute it. It would show us the road north. There is always farther north. We see two shooting stars, and a satellite journeying on.

  Now we are shrill with cold. Once again the flickering and pulsing of our own minds, our own mutability, tell us that’s enough. Enough silence this morning, enough aurora now, thank you. Enough natural wonder, enthralling, mysterious and wild—we too are going to retire indoors.

  * * *

  Wakeful, Polly and I talk quietly in the dark. Curtains screen our bunks, so Polly is just a voice, a lilt and sad laugh. She’s telling me that, some years ago, when she was about the age I am now, she suddenly fell ill. As a consequence, she suffered a calling into question, an inner rearrangement which was frightening, but liberating. As she speaks, I picture these events as happening in restless green, like the aurora borealis, in the dark of the mind, as revealing of the hidden as the radar screen. Or maybe it’s like colliding with an iceberg, just as one is cruising along, in the middle of one’s life. These things happen. You can look down and down into a beguiling blue and not know where you are. Polly still works the land, as she did before these events, growing food in good rich soil. She calls herself ‘a peasant’. However, every year since that reassessment, she says, she has saved to make a journey such as this to the Arctic north, where there are no fruits and crops, only tundra and rock and ice.

  ‘What brings you?’ I ask.

  ‘The birds bring me!’ she laughs, and her accent makes it sound as though she travels in a chariot drawn by geese.

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve missed the geese . . .’ I say, and again comes that little laugh, out of the dark.

  ‘But now they are in my fields!’

  ‘And you?’ she asks.

  ‘Nothing like that,’ I say, meaning, ‘I have not been ill, not yet, or suffered a sudden calamity.’

  ‘What brings me? I don’t rightly know. But for thirty years I’ve been sitting on clifftops, looking at horizons. From Orkney, Shetland, St Kilda . . . ?’

  ‘I know these places. And you wanted to know what was beyond?’

  ‘No. Actually, I never did. Not until very recently. Suddenly I wanted to change my map. Something had played itself out. Something was changing.’

  * * *

  The northern lights may or may not make sound, but I believe they kept us awake. All that energy. In the morning, over breakfast, some people agree, but others scoff at this idea: they are eighty miles up—how can they keep you awake? They are just charged particles, trapped in the earth’s magnetic field. True, but aren’t we all?

  We are tourists, on this trip, anyhow. Maybe also in the larger sense, John’s sense. Here today, fizzing away into the grasses and silence tomorrow.

  I’m not necessarily comfortable with having a place, a vast new landscape, mediated by guides, but it’s how it is. I wouldn’t last five minutes alone here, in the cold and the ice.

  Among the passengers are doctors, dentists and engineers: people, it would seem, of professional certainty. People like myself—and Polly, I suspect—who don’t quite know what we are. Who know only that we live short lives, that we float on the surface of a powerful silence, on the surface of a mile-deep fjord, with icebergs, that we’re driven by some sort of life force, flickering and green.

  I float on the surface of knowledge, too. Of climate science, for example. The icecap is two miles deep. In 2003, a team who’d spent seven years drilling through the Greenland ice to fetch up core samples at last hit bedrock. The ice at bottom of the core is 20,000 years old. They were bringing the deep past out of its silence, waking it up to ask it about change. There are people who crawl about on glaciers, measuring speeds and surges, and the calving of icebergs. Together they bring worrisome news from the farthest remotes. I sail on the surface of understanding, a flicker here, a silence there.

  * * *

  Abruptly, as though a door had slammed somewhere farther north, the weather changes. Cloud climbs low down the mountainsides and, suddenly, the following afternoon, it begins to snow and snow. Later the people of Ittoqqortoormiit—a small town of pitched roofed houses, where the sled dogs howl—will say that this year had been strange: no spring and no autumn, just bang! the brief summer, then bang! winter again. Maybe the geese had heard this change coming, under their clamour, through that appalling silence, and they’d chosen that moment to go. And the gyrfalcons. Maybe, the birders suggest, we are seeing so many gyrfalcons because they’re arriving from yet farther north. If the snow falls and then freezes, say the naturalists, the musk oxen will starve.

  We can’t see the fjord walls, only cloud. Very soon, the ship’s decks and rails and superstructure are under snow, the vessel becomes a frail, white-rigged thing, despite its metal and modernity and ice-strengthened hull. Not for the first time, as I move about the ship, I think about the nineteenth-century sailors, the whalers and explorers, the stories that come down to us, about how they got beset in the Arctic dark. When the snow lands on the water, it doesn’t melt away. Instead it coheres into soft patches, little discrete clumps, until the water all around looks like an animal’s pelt, lifting in the swell, breathing.

  Looking down at the snow-covered water, I feel a sudden strong urge to be away from here, to head south. ‘Like a goose!’ I say to Polly.

  She plucks at my old down jacket. ‘It’s because you are a goose!’

  They take the ship down the fjord by night, negotiating icebergs through dark and snow. Tricky sailing, I shouldn’t wonder, but the two officers of the watch, handsome if unsmiling, remain impassive as they work. Visibility is poor, but the aurora-green radar betrays the icebergs. The first officer leans over the radar, then moves back to the windows. I have no idea what he’s thinking. From time to time he reaches overhead to a handle in the ceiling which controls a searchlight mounted outside on the deck above. As he turns the handle, a beam of light sweeps side to side beyond the ship’s bows, picking out icebergs in the darkness ahead. As it moves through the dark, the searchlight beam glitters with falling snow.

  After a long while watching from the bridge, I go outside, pushing through the doors and entering the sudden engine noise and cold. For once, I don’t go to the front, but onto the aft-deck, where the Zodiacs are stowed under their winch. There is snow on the rails, snow underfoot. There is no sky, no stars, no aurora, only snow. The icebergs are much more sinister now. Each, in its weird majesty, slips alongside, lit white by t
he ship’s lights, only to fall behind into darkness, into the ship’s wake, reducing and reducing till it’s nothing but a gleam, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. I bear it as long as I can, then go back inside to the warm.

  PATHOLOGIES

  A FEW HOURS BEFORE my mother died, eventually of pneumonia, the disease they call ‘the old man’s friend’, in a small side-room with muted lighting in our local hospital, there was a deluge of rain. I can’t recall whether curtains or a blind screened the window, but I remember being puzzled by the sudden hissing noise, and crossing the room to peer outside, and the flat roofs, and the sheeting rain in the October night.

  The sound of the rain, and of my mother’s breathing. It was about 3 a.m. There would be no more medical interventions. Nature would be ‘allowed to take its course’.

  The days following such a death, when death is a release rather than a disaster, have a high, glassy feel, as though a note was being sung just too high to hear. It was a strange hiatus, all appointments cancelled. Between the death and funeral, the phone calls and the arrangements, between the time spent with my father and sister, and my brother’s arrival home from abroad, I went out walking on the hills behind my town. The hillsides give views of the estuary below, then the land rising again on the river’s north bank. The sky and river were beautiful, and glassy, as though they were the source of that high sung note. Nature was back in her accustomed place: outdoors, in the trees’ colours, in the tidal flux of the river; in the fieldfares arriving to the fields. I often thought about the phrase ‘letting nature take its course’, how it sounded like a gallantry, how it suggested acceptance and timeliness.