Chapter Eight
Allie
We’re at sea now, Milo, me and the rest of the team, on our way to Cote Rock.
Lars, my favourite of the boat captains at the station, is taking us there, and for half an hour, I’ve been sitting with him at the controls, watching him gaze easily across the water like it isn’t the jagged, unpredictable Arctic circle he’s navigating, and instead, a swan-shaped pedal boat on a still lake at a theme park.
He vapes. It smells of sweet shop cola bottles.
‘Another day . . .’ He smiles through a bushy, iron-filings beard, rough, weather-beaten hands on the wheel of the boat. ‘And what’s the news with the young squirts we’ve got today?’
‘Squirts,’ I laugh.
‘Saying what I see.’
I like Lars. There’s something grounding about him.
He’s worked here at the station for as long as I have been here.
He’s a boat captain – used to ferry rich people around the Arctic on cruises, then took early retirement at sixty, missed it, and came here – and he is one of those people who’s just ‘happy with his lot’.
He’s stoic and hardy. There’s something cowboy-ish about him too.
But he’s also the first person to weep when an animal is injured. His soul, he says, lives here.
‘They’re here to film a documentary,’ I tell him. ‘For YouTube. But in partnership with our funding organisation.’
‘So TV stars?’ he asks, unimpressed. His voice is deep, with a thick Norwegian twang.
‘Sort of,’ I reply. ‘One’s a big YouTuber, one’s . . . an actor.’
He reverse nods, a jut of his hairy chin. ‘The one with the hair looks familiar,’ he mulls. ‘Thought it might be another Star Wars moment.’
I laugh. Lars is referring to when one of the Star Wars movies was filmed by another research station on Skellig Michael and there were so many puffins there that they couldn’t edit them out so they just CGI’d new little creatures in.
Something about it amused us all. Puffins: inadvertent film extras.
‘No Star Wars problems this time. It’s to raise awareness, et cetera . . .’
‘Right, right,’ he says. ‘And they’re good guys?’
‘The squirts? They’re OK. I don’t really know. Pass.’
He laughs out of the side of his mouth. Lars wears a gilet and a short sleeved T-shirt around the clock, which is unheard of out here, sailing through glaciers, trudging across ice. But Lars doesn’t feel the cold. A girlfriend once took him to Rhodes. ‘The heat’s like being skinned alive,’ he said.
‘Eh, it’ll be OK,’ he says. ‘Plus, if it bags you guys some cash, win-win . . . correct?’
And he’s right. That’s what I must keep coming back to.
It’s for something more important than me.
I watch the mainland now, getting more and more speck-like in the distance, the path leading to it spiked with glaciers, like dinosaur teeth.
A solid one degree centigrade. This is not about me. This is not about Milo.
It feels like it, though, sitting here, a tangle of feelings weighing down my skull.
A child’s mismatched mud pie of them. I keep thinking about his father.
I keep replaying, over and over, those warm, sympathetic eyes that held mine tightly when I told him why I came here; the way his hand reached towards me, the tip of the head.
For a moment, he was just . . . Milo as I knew him.
Milo who would never do anything to hurt me.
Milo who would’ve never betrayed me in any way – gosh, what am I saying?
That it wasn’t him? No. He laughed on TV. He posted memes.
We chug along, ice water like sharpening knifes against the boat, and I turn to look over my shoulder.
I keep doing that. Like I keep looking to check it’s true, because what a ridiculous situation we’re in.
But much is the same. Polly chats to Iris on a bench on the wooden deck.
Jameson films. Milo observes, arms folded, with that smile.
He really is striking. In that way movie stars often are.
It’s quite distracting. He’s unusual looking.
Full lips, a mouth that slants when he smiles, sleepy, cognac-brown eyes that absolutely are not contacts.
I wish I’d never bloody said that; he liked that I said that.
His ego, stroked. His hair is pushed hastily to one side in a floppy, messy quiff, and it’s hardly attractive being out here in thick giant coats and hats and boots that are more armour more than shoes, but somehow, Milo manages it. Even in that silly neon-orange jacket.
Shit. He’s seen me looking. I swoop back around.
I must remember why I’m here; stay grounded.
My puffin colony. My auks. The spring hope of new eggs.
It’ll be better once we moor up, organise camp, start the real work.
At least, that’s what I’m counting on. We have a lot to do in a short space of time, and while Milo and I might be partners, Cote Rock is about working as a team.
‘Allie? Uh, Polly?’
I glance over to Captain Lars. ‘Yes?’
‘Looking at where you guys want to camp, it isn’t very wind sheltered.’ His eyes squint to the tail of the islet of Cote Rock, tapering off into the water in the distance. ‘The wind isn’t set to be too bad, but I think it’s better to be totally away from it. Start as we mean to go on, yeah?’
And now everyone is looking at me. Polly, Iris, Jameson and Milo.
They’re looking at me in that way people look at authority figures.
This is why I have to keep this together.
Polly is our supervisor, but this is my expedition.
Letting anything get in the way is negligent.
I need to throw my mud pie of feelings over the edge of this boat, let it slowly disintegrate deep, deep beneath, with the cod.
‘Where do you suggest?’ I ask.
‘Just around the other side on the beach. It’s sheltered by a hill. I think this would be better. The only thing is, we will have to dinghy our way over.’ Lars gives a wonky smile. ‘My boat won’t be able to go right to shore. Too rocky. We’ll have to do a couple of relays for the equipment.’
‘Oh.’
Polly approaches, hands on hips. ‘That’ll be OK,’ she says cheerily. ‘Is that OK with everyone?’
There’s a chorus of sures and nods. Milo, who leans casually against the side of the boat, looks over his shoulder at me a moment longer than everyone else.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘We can all put Jameson’s newfound muscle to good use, right?’ Milo laughs, and Jameson slaps his back, says, ‘Erm, haven’t you just stopped some insane training regime, Mildred? After you, babygirl. Please.’
Everyone laughs. And I find a smile, despite myself, forcing its way onto my face too.
I turn back around to the mountains. They stare back at me like stoic, immovable father figures. ‘Sod all to do with us,’ they silently say, as I hear Polly call, ‘We’ll stick to our pairs, OK? Two people to a dinghy.’