Three Moments of an Explosion (2 page)

After the fall of that first pillar people got nervous. There were instructions to stay indoors, as though it would be better to be crushed by a ruined house than by the ice itself. In fact the bergs were very solid. In the first week of their existence, only three slabs of any size came down, causing damage but no fatalities.

They weren’t the only chunks to break off: they were the only ones to fall.

I was at Brent Cross Shopping Center with my mum and dad and my sister the first time I saw one of the icebergs break. It was a few days after their appearance and we were shopping for a football kit I needed. We were in the car-park and I was looking at Mass 4, I think it was, hovering miles away above Ealing. My dad told me to hurry up, and as he turned we heard a cracking. A chunk of ice the size of a building broke off the northern edge of the berg.

I gasped and my dad let out a horrified noise as the block toppled sideways, spinning—and then stopped. It didn’t fall—it drifted away horizontally. It bobbed, spinning, leaving a little wake of suspended ice. We looked at each other.

The breakaway drifted back, and coagulated again with the main mass, a day and a half later.

It was two days post-manifestation that the first official government survey team made icefall. Scientists, professional explorers, a few international observers, an escort of Royal Marine commandos. In the press release, they all wore cutting-edge arctic gear and determined expressions.

They went for Mass 3. It had a horizontal plateau breaking up the slopes of its topside, onto which a helicopter could lower them. By now, all the icebergs had been given their own names, usually based on their silhouettes. The
London Evening Standard
declared this the “ascent of the Saucepan.” They live-streamed the delivery online, soldiers in thermal clothes lowered on swaying cables onto the pristine blowing surface of the ice, to make base camp almost a mile over Battersea.

Over the next five days we all followed the team’s terse dispatches, their tweets and photographs, footage from their cameras, as Mass 3 itself described a wobbling circuit above the city. People leaned shivering out of their offices to look as it overflew. “The Saucepan” was escorted by military helicopters. If you were at a high point in the city looking out at the icebergs, you could see Mass 3 was surrounded with the specks of aircraft.

We read the reports of the team struggling up sides of ice, stared at the images they beamed down. Of course we were all caught up in the drama, and no one would deny how brave they were. Now, though, a few years on, so it’s not like pissing in church any more to pass comment, it’s fair to say that those dispatches were mostly the sort of thing you’d expect from any arctic adventure. Freezing winds, terrible ice, so on.

I suppose I’m saying that Mass 3, like all of them, is exactly what it looks like: an iceberg. No more, no less. Cold, austere, barren. Awesome, of course, because since when were icebergs not? But, and bear with me with this, except for the fact that it’s levitating above London, it seems no more nor less awesome than its cousins in the sea.

There were, though, two exceptional images from that expedition. The first is the iconic shot of the team crossing an ice bridge between two forbidding white crags, with the slates and aerials of Wandsworth far below. The second is the selfie of Dr. Joanna Lund, taken close to the iceberg’s summit.

Dr. Lund looks unhappily at the camera. She’s slight, with squinting eyes circled in dark, her hat pulled down hard over her ears. Behind her is the pinnacle. You can just see the rest of the team at its base, looking up at the white blocks. There’s the usual hard beauty of such landscapes. The city is not visible. The ice could be any ice. But there’s a flat quality to the light and something in Lund’s expression that makes the picture profoundly unsettling.

In the debriefing after the team’s extraction, the government was keen to stress that they had, of course, considered the possibility that the icebergs might collide. If that was true, any protocols they had in place utterly failed.

On the morning of 17 June, the very day that last photo of Lund was released—while, we were told, the team were attempting an ascent of that troublesome ice—Mass 6, nicknamed Big Bear, began rolling with unusual speed across the skies, north away from Croydon.

At first this caused no particular alarm. But as the hours passed and Mass 6 accelerated, and as Mass 3’s own sedate trajectory altered, it became obvious that the two were on a collision course.

The helmetcam of Lund captures the catastrophe. The crew are bracing behind frozen slabs. Swinging into view below them with the yawing of Mass 3 are the tower blocks of Peckham. And looming abruptly out of the south comes a cliff of ice. Mass 6 moves fast.

Everyone in London heard the impact.

Considering the scale of the things, it wasn’t much more than a glancing blow. The two ground together horribly, breaking off great chunks that spun into the sky. Mass 6 lurched to the east. Mass 3 pitched.

Lund staggered as her nook tilted. Her brace held, the steel cord did not snap, but the ice in which it was tethered crumbled. In seconds she slid down angles it had taken her hours to ascend. We saw the footage from her point of view. She careered down a chasm that now sloped hard and became a funnel.

I watched the file many times, though my parents told me not to. I’d slow it down, feeling sick and adrenalized as Lund descended. She’d been issued no parachute. I’d loop back to the start again and again, every time the ice released her into the air.

Mercifully, the camera gave out before she hit the ground.

We played games of London Iceberg. Robbie’s great-aunt was in sheltered housing up toward Wembley, and we’d meet him there because at the back of the complex was a slope of rubbishy grass down toward the railway lines, that we could access by climbing a low fence near a neighboring garden.

Robbie’s great-aunt would give us biscuits and ask us what we were all up to. Her house was untidy and full of papers and books. She was small and smiley and, I now think, shrewd and amused by us, though her attention always seemed elsewhere, as if she was listening for something. Robbie was kind to her. It was strange to see him so gentle, Robbie with his boxer’s face and megaphone voice. He’d been in a body cast as a small child, and had been making up for it since. He called his great-aunt Nantie and we never knew her real name.

“Those things,” she said once, interrupting our awkward chat while we sat politely in her living room, standing up suddenly apropos of nothing and opening her front door so we could see that one of the bergs was indeed approaching. When she sat back down she said, “Life in a polynia, eh?” She smiled, watching our reaction to the word.

“That’s a lake with ice all round it,” Ian said. I blinked at him, angry that he knew that. He wouldn’t look at me. Nantie laughed.

I looked it up myself when I got home. He was right. I scrolled through images of ice-holes and belugas.

We’d do our best to talk politely with Nantie as long as we could. When we ran out of anything to say we would go outside and wait until Robbie could get away too and then we would all run, slip through the barrier and slide down a scree of trash to a wire fence, only a few feet above the train lines themselves.

Sal was usually the first down. She would wait for us by the wire, finger-snarling her long hair into knots, and whistling impatiently through her teeth.

“You’re like a fat bear!” she might shout at Ian as he picked his careful way behind me. He was not fat at all but she called everyone fat. She would make lumbering motions at him and Robbie and I would laugh and I would try to speed up, to come down and stand with her while Ian descended without looking at us.

It was the steepest slope we could find in our area, one that took real effort to get up and down. We felt like we were mimicking, honoring, what the explorers above us were doing. We would watch the trains that rushed below. I know I wasn’t the only one, looking down, who imagined looking down from a lip of ice, at London.

Ian and I were most into the bergs, so he wanted to hang out with me. That was complicated. I wanted the company of someone who read all the magazines and knew as much as I did, or almost, but I was also infuriated by his owl-eyed camaraderie. Sal used to look at me scornfully when he and I talked. There was always a wet spot on his cuff where he chewed.

Sometimes I’d go to his house. If I had some cool cards in my pack of Iceberg Updates, we’d compare collections, maybe swap a few.

Lund came down in the forecourt of a supermarket. The police got there as fast as they could, but of course locals uploaded their pictures of her body and of course we found them, and showed them to each other with a complex of emotions I cannot put into words.

I still have the image somewhere. The hollow feeling in my stomach was never mere ghoulishness. I got to know the faces of all the onlookers in that picture as well as I did the strange configuration of Lund’s body. I think I was horrified, I think I did care.

I wanted to have saved her, and if none of my friends were watching, I would reach through the wire fence when trains went past, stretch out my hand into their gust and imagine that I did.

There were days of rain and we wondered if the water would erode the icebergs, bring them down in a cascade of slush. But the second wave of survey teams trudging on their surfaces reported that even the worst downpour only melted them for a centimeter or so. They would quickly freeze back into their pre-rain shapes. While the scientists investigated, a small, powerful cross-party group of MPs demanded that the government blow up the icebergs with incendiaries.

It was during these wet days that some commentators first suggested a connection between the appearance of the icebergs and the growth of coral across the facades of Brussels. It had been three years since the brain coral, pillar coral, and prongs of staghorn coral had first started to appear. Every week contractors removed the thick outcroppings and worm-waving extrusions on the European Parliament and its surrounds. They still do, cracking and scraping the bony stuff off and scrubbing down the surfaces. Every week it returns, leaving the buildings a fishless reef.

While that link was mooted, survey teams clambered the slopes of Masses 1 and 4. They ascended the geometric pinnacles carefully, planting anchors and trudging up with spiked boots. They found nothing but more wind, and they came down again.

Flights resumed in the rest of the country. Heathrow and Gatwick and City stayed out of action but Stansted reopened. The BBC announced that it had commissioned a drama series set among investigators on Mass 2.

Sometimes when I met up with Ian, just the two of us, we’d shadow one or other of the masses. My favorite was 5. I called it the Ice Skull, claiming it looked like one. He liked 2, the smallest and lowest and most stalactite-bearded, which circulated mostly around our neck of the woods. We liked it when the bergs went over brownfield sites and wasteland: we would walk underneath them and kick old brick bits and garbage out of the way, looking for secrets in the ice’s shadows.

We collected images, information, stories. It was these days that opened up the city to me, sent me down to New Cross, over to Silvertown, south and east and areas I’d never been before, wherever the icebergs went.

In Stepney a newsagent was taking every other publication out of his shop window and filling it with, of all things, copies of
New Scientist
. “I tell them,” he kept shouting to someone inside. “I keep telling them.” He waved a magazine at me jovially. “Look,” he said.

On the cover were photographs from a southern mission years before I was born, icebergs rising from the water. Next to each of those images was one of a mass over London. The frozen slopes and slices and cracks were the same. The crags overhead were close to identical to those that had once floated in the Antarctic.

“Look, they melt!” he said. “First they melt and now, look, they come back.”

Sometimes the gusts of cold below the ice were particularly bad, became brutal mini-winters, freezing the air into little storms. It had been a while since London had had proper cold, even in December and January. The local fashion for berg-coats started then, a vogue for the lightweight, all-year warm clothes most of us still carry, that you can slip on and off if ice crosses your path above.

I had never seen real snow before, proper deep snow. One afternoon outside a shopping center by Dollis Hill, near a patch of dead trees, Ian and I found a pile of it bigger than either of us. It looked a bit wrong to me. Afterwards, I realized that it had been too angular to be a drift. It was a rare instance when a sizable chunk of iceberg matter had fallen straight down.

We messed around with it a bit but I was late and I left Ian there. When I got home he’d messaged me with a picture of a dirty, melting mound of slush. He’d kicked his way right into it. In the middle was a battered padded tube, a bit bigger than the core of a toilet roll. It was sealed and wrapped in black plastic.

THERE WAS STUFF IN THE MIDDLE OF IT FROM UP THERE,
he had written.

SNOW LANDED ON RUBBISH FOOL,
I wrote back.

Meanwhile, an unauthorized expedition uploaded footage onto the internet.

The man staring into the camera wears a woolly hat and a bandana over his mouth. Behind and way below him is a vista of night lights, of London in the dark. A microphone is clipped to his collar and his voice is clear despite the rushing wind.

“Right,” he says. “So, this is, like, the fourth fucking time we’ve been up the Shard.” Links to videos of the three previous expeditions on that huge building briefly appear. “But, you know, kudos on the ‘increased security,’ Mayor.” There are sarcastic cheers out of shot.

The camera turns to show other figures clustered by the aerial tower of London’s tallest building. The climbers wear a cobbled-together variety of colors and styles. They hoot and wave. The shot zooms down on the south London streets where you can just see pedestrians.