Three Moments of an Explosion (3 page)

“Anyway,” the first man says. “You’ve seen me before. I’m Infiltrex. Or—” He pulls the bandana from his mouth to show a surprisingly soft face. He looks like a cool older brother, the kind who might buy beer for you. “OK, so I’m Ryan,” he says. “I think this time man’s going to go uncovered. It’s time for the big one.”

The camera pans up. Filling the night sky overhead, astonishingly close, is a jagged field of ice. It looms, and it’s approaching. It’s so low that the longest extrusions dangling from its underside reach down below the level of the Shard’s tower point. On which, the camera briefly shows, two explorers wait.

“Come on, quick,” says Ryan, out of shot, “we ain’t got much time.” An icicled ceiling closes over them, invoking ecstatic claustrophobia.

“We’ve been watching and waiting. This is the lowest of the lot. This is the one that’s going to fuck up your architect’s plans. And it’s lower now than it’s ever been and if we’ve got this right …”

It’s never been quite clear what equipment the crew used: the camera doesn’t show it, though there’s been speculation about “grapple guns.” What we know is that there’s a sound of percussion, and shouting, and the footage cuts to that from a helmetcam, and for less than two seconds you can see someone dangling from high-tensile cable. With that literal cliff-hanger, the video pauses for several seconds, entirely dark. To open again on Ryan’s face, filling the frame.

“Here we are,” he says. He’s holding the camera himself. It’s daylight. He lets us see that behind him is an edge of ice, then air and cloud, then, almost a mile below, that London crawls.

The fashion for urban exploration had been declining. There had been a glut of handsomely photographed excursions into deserted hospitals and neglected storm drains. The ascent of Mass 5 was a new scale of feat for these infiltrators, and it rekindled the fascination. “Yeah, we know what they’re doing,” said some pixelated informant to the BBC, in a disguised voice, “but no clue how they got up there.”

“Look, Battersea,” says Ryan breathlessly, waving down at the roofless chimneys, bracing himself to climb a crevice below a companion’s kicking boots. “London Eye. Is that Fuckingham Palace?”

There’s a long climbing montage, as deliberate as anything in
Rocky
. When Ryan reappears, he has more stubble. He is not so boisterous. Breathing gear bobs around his neck.

“OK then,” he says. You can see the ice blocks that distinguish the mass’s peak. “You getting me? We have a bit of a theory, so to say. You seen the soldiers marching up and marching down again, right? But there’s more than one way to climb things. OK so Jo’s quicker’n the rest of us, she’s gone on ahead, and …”

Two hundred meters above him, a figure in a red jacket hauls herself up. She’s just below the top of the steep ice pile.

“Keep on her, man,” Ryan says. “We’re up in a minute. Right behind you, Jo!”

The woman looks both too close to and too far from us. She swings an ax. The footage is unstable. She climbs another few steps, around a cold crag, the camera veers for an instant, returns, and she is gone. She is nowhere.

“Jo? Jo? Jo?”

Ryan’s eyes are wide.

“She’s fucking
up,
man! I told you.”

I stared at the screen.

“You got to take the right direction,” Ryan says to the cameraperson. “Shall we? After you, bruv.”

I texted Ian, again and again.
WHAT YOU DO WITH THAT THING YOU FOUND?
I said.
IN
THE SNOW.
I texted him this because dangling from Ryan’s rucksack was a distinctive tubular pack exactly like the one that Ian had kicked out of the ice.

Ryan climbs the ice blocks. You can hear him wheezing. You can see the undersides of his companion’s boots. Then he looks up and he’s alone, surrounded by clouds. Then the footage ends.

I got hold of Ian eventually. “I left it there,” he said. “It was disgusting! It was all covered in dirt and it was in the rubbish!”

I made him come back to Dollis Hill and show me exactly where he’d found it. He made a lot of noises about how I was being stupid but he was scared of me so he came.

There was no ice overhead. Every pile of rubbish we passed he paused and ostentatiously investigated.

I was looking at the signs on a newsagent’s notice board, as if they might help. A young woman was saying to her baby, “Oh please stop, just
please
stop.” In the distance, from the east, came a big thundering sound. It was ice shifting, one of the bergs changing. We knew how to tell that from the noise of a storm now.

“You’re so stupid,” I said.

“You
said,
” he said. “You said it was nothing.”

“Shut up. Leaving it, you’re so stupid.”

He said nothing. Pigeons wheeled. I looked slowly down and caught Ian’s eye. We stared at each other for a minute and I saw something in his expression and I stepped toward him and he ran abruptly in the direction of the Tube station. I didn’t even feel surprised. I went after him, shouting almost dutifully, but he was way ahead of me and he got into the underground before I got near.

Ian stayed off school for days. He shut down his social media accounts. When I went to his house his mum opened the door and stared at me with new dislike. “He isn’t coming out,” she said, before I could speak. She closed the door and said through it, “Don’t come back or I’ll tell your dad.”

Who did I have to talk to about what was happening?

Someone found another padded tube and sold it to the
Daily Mirror
. A young woman handed one to Channel 4 News. “We should stress that there’s no way to confirm this is indeed what the contents claim,” the newsreader said.

It was reinforced cardboard, water-sealed in black plastic, wrapped in dense bubble-pack.

“It was sitting there in the middle of a pile of snow,” said the woman on the TV. “Something about it didn’t look right.”

They showed the note it contained. It was handwritten in big script.
Message 4,
it read.

This is Ryan. Were climbing by the brow. We had to leave John or Duro we call him.

He found old spikes and rope. Like there was another camp before. He said there was something in the ice shaft like something dark like an old animal froze in there bare years ago but we never saw it there was all cracking and stuff falling and when we reached him we couldnt see it. He stayed there just whispering.

If we look down we see you but refracted. Hope these dont hit no one. Well pack them in snow to be safe. There are birds or “birds” up here.

We have pictures in our cameras we cant drop. Ice here looks different.

Hello from here.

It used to say “Hello from the redoubt.” Someone had crossed out the word “redoubt” and, in a different hand, tried “ghostberg.” Someone had crossed that out too.

In the underneaths you couldn’t tell whether London was cold because of the icebergs, or if it was just cold again, really cold for the first time in a long time. On the 25 December, Mass 6 went low over the Serpentine Lido, while the Swimming Club were doing their traditional Christmas Day plunge. The downdraft flash-froze the water and a sixty-two-year-old man died. “He was doing what he loved,” the club secretary told the news.

Gunships buzzed the berg. People massed on Parliament Hill again, to watch soldiers drop onto the lower slopes. It was like an invasion.

My dad took me to watch from the viewing platform at the top of Centre Point. It was nice of him—he wasn’t that interested himself. Honestly, I’d rather have been outside, in the streets, right underneath, but I was touched. The building authorities had set up some high-powered telescope so you could take it in turns to stare through the glass at tiny figures crawling up the mountain’s side.

We heard they found the remains of Ryan’s camp, but that the explorers themselves were gone. The soldiers went deep into cracks and caves—they released some beautiful shots from inside—but they found nothing.

Robbie’s great-aunt died.

“That’s why he ain’t been around,” Sal said. I hadn’t noticed. “His family went away after. You know what happened?”

One night Mass 7 had sat for several hours above north London with the sheltered complex squarely below it, so the residents had turned up their heat and huddled in bed early. The next morning, when the iceberg had moved on and the sun had started to melt the frost on the grass, they found Nantie sitting on a bench in the shared gardens under a glaze of ice.

“She had like a scream of agony on her face,” Sal said.

I told my mother Sal had said that and she was furious.

“That’s absolute rubbish,” she said. “You know I know Robbie’s mum. Her aunt was very very peaceful. She must have just had a little snooze in the garden and just not woken up. I hope when it’s my time I get something like that.”

The front door had been open, she told me. I remembered how Nantie had got up suddenly to open it, that time, as if she had known an iceberg was coming.

Ian still wasn’t at school. His parents must have got in trouble for that. I went back to his house. I texted
ITS ME O COME ON IM OUTSIDE MAN
. After a minute he opened the door. When I entered his mother looked at me suspiciously but did not kick me out.

“Come on then,” he said.

We sat in his room and from behind some books on his shelf he pulled out the thick and battered cardboard tube.

He watched me stare at it. “No one’s seen this,” he said. “My mum ain’t even seen this.” He took the lid off its end and removed a letter. We unrolled it on the bed.

Message 1. Dear London.
I recognized the script from the news.
What’s the first thing we learn about icebergs? That we only see the tip.
9⁄10
^ths
of every one is out of sight.

You have to know how to climb right. Then you can get up and look down. We can see you.

From here we can see all of all these bergs too.

Whats the point seeing up here if no one knows?

Were going to keep climbing. Wish us luck. Heres a present we scraped up.

“What present?” I said. “What’s scraped?”

“Wait,” Ian said, and went down the stairs. He returned with a small plastic tub. It was full of ice.

“There was like a thermos in there,” he said. His eyes were wide behind his glasses. “Like for tea? It was stuck in the tube. It was a bit cracked but when I opened it, it was all full of ice. And it was starting to melt but I scooped it out and put it in this and put it in the freezer.”

The ice was a single mass of angles and shapes. I could see it had partially melted and refrozen from smaller pieces.

“What if your mum or dad finds it?” I said.

“I’ve shown them already. I said it was an experiment. They don’t care.” We eyed each other.

In the kitchen Ian filled a bowl with hot water and took the lid off the Tupperware and put it inside. The box floated, bumping against the sides.

I tried not to show anything. I’m sure Ian felt the same breathless edginess I did. The ice started to melt immediately. It cracked and pinged.

There was another noise, a hiss as if someone had half-opened the top of a fizzy drink. It was air, frozen into the ice for however many years—thousands? millions?—being released. Now I know that’s called the seltzer effect: you can hear it on arctic survey ships, from the few shards of ice that still bob about, when they hit warmer currents. We listened to the hiss of old air from some bit of sky.

I put my arms around that bowl and pulled it close, stuck my head over it like I was sick and inhaling menthol fumes. I breathed in.

I could smell nothingness. I felt light-headed, but that might have been because I was breathing so deep. I imagined that I could feel little boluses of cold air go down into my lungs.

“Give it to me,” Ian said. I felt a spasm of that instinct for cruelty that sometimes made me a little bit giddy around him. I kept breathing and pushed him away as he tried to get closer.

The ice melted quickly. It didn’t take long. I held him back, inhaling as hard and fast as I could while he muttered and whined and pleaded, until the bubbling sound stopped.

I raised my head from above cold clear water. I looked straight at Ian and willed myself not to show guilt.

He stared at me with an awful wounded look. He took the bowl from under me and I let him. Still watching me, he put the box’s curved plastic corner awkwardly to his lips and drank the water down.

We stared at each other. “You should hand in that letter,” I said at last. “It isn’t yours. They wrote it to everyone in London.”

He just kept staring. I got up and left.

Soldiers kept going up the icebergs, and coming down again, and if any of them worked out how to get to the other bit of up, we never heard about it. If that’s even a thing. If that’s real. None of the unauthorized explorers ever came back. I stopped hanging out with Sal, and when Robbie returned he stopped hanging out with me.

By the time Ian came back to school, it was pretty easy for me to avoid him. Sometimes I might catch him staring at me across a classroom or the lunch hall. When that happened I’d sometimes say to myself in my own head something like, “I saw it first,” thinking of the snow in which the tube had been packed. If he did take that letter to the authorities they never released it.

I used to expect to bump into him. I still live in the same area, and so did he for a long time, but London kept us apart. My mum did tell me once that he’d visited Nantie’s old gardens, which she said was nice, to pay respects. I think he’s been deployed now.

I thought I’d end up working at something to do with the icebergs, but my job’s in import-export. I have to spend a fair bit of time in Europe. I’ve been through the Great Brussels Reef plenty of times. I have a little bottle-opener of the Belgian flag cut from a bit of its coral.