When the Night Comes (14 page)

MS
Nella Dan

VOYAGE 2, 1986/1987 SEASON

27th December 1986

POSITION:
63° 26.000' S, 120° 5.000' E

CAPTAIN'S NOTE:
Vessel surrounded by ice. Japanese icebreaker
Shirase Maru
arrived after breakfast. They will attempt to tow us to a clear lead.

They gave us a bag of apples. They broke us out of the ice.

I waved good-bye to them on their huge ship, the
Shirase Maru
. They even had a tennis court on the aft deck.
A tennis court
.

I bite into an apple—cold, crisp—and the sound of my teeth sinking through the skin makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. My mouth fills with the sweet liquid—so familiar. I chew and chew, my eyes closed.

Just an apple—an apple.

But I have never tasted anything so necessary to me.

Apples, always there on the trees and in the cupboard. Apple in so much of the food I love. I won't forget this now.

Seven weeks without one, and out of everything missing, out of everything gone, this is what I've missed, what I thought about, the most.

The cold, crisp taste of an apple. My teeth sinking through the skin.

MS
Nella Dan

VOYAGE 2, 1986/1987 SEASON

8th January 1987

POSITION:
45° 8.000' S, 142° 33.000' E

CAPTAIN'S NOTE:
We continue on schedule for our arrival in Hobart at 09:00 tomorrow.

His cabin door remains open.

I pass it six times a day, maybe more, but I never look in. I look ahead—eyes straight ahead. I pass by quickly. But tonight, I stop at his door. I don't know why. I don't know, but I stand there. I look inside.

My eyes grow accustomed to the light and outlines become solid. Soren's system of mess. His clothes, his boots, his books and magazines all over the floor. His bed unmade, the duvet hanging off the side.

He always said that he didn't need to clean up because he knew where everything was and if he moved things, he wouldn't be able to find anything. On the way from Denmark, somewhere near the equator on the Indian Ocean, Klaus told him to clean up his
stinking
cabin. We had only been gone for about three weeks. But Soren said that it wasn't a mess. He said it was a system.

“I know where everything is. If I need a pen I know exactly where one will be.” And he picked up a pair of trousers that were in a ball on the floor and there, underneath, was a pen.

“See!” he said.

Klaus shook his head and told him to clean up, but he was smiling, maybe even laughing about the pen. It was impossible to stay mad at Soren.

I step inside. I sit on his bunk.

His survival bag is by my feet, open with some of the contents spilling out. It makes me smile because it should be in the cupboard, tightly closed—
In Case of an Emergency
. We have to take it with us to drills, when we stand outside on the helideck, freezing, smoking cigarettes and waiting for our names to be called so we can go back inside.

Opposite me, on the built-in desk, secured by towels rolled up and jammed in on either side, is the CD player he bought in Hobart. Black and shiny and new—
AKAI
written in silver.

“You have to come and listen! Listen to the quality!” Soren would say.

We'd squeeze in. He'd put on “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits and we would stand and listen.

“Doesn't it sound amazing? So much better than tapes!”

With the constant grind of the engines and the ocean smacking the hull, we could not really hear the difference. We were just being polite, I guess, or just happy to listen to music together. Happy to be crammed in a cabin that wasn't our own. A change of scenery from the Frozen Inn or from our own tiny cabins. A different song. A different space. Something new.

But Soren only had two CDs.
The Wall
and
Brothers in Arms
.

I lean over and press the power button. There is a bass sound that I feel in my chest and the red light comes on. Then a song starts up, loud and getting louder. I grab the headphones that are on the floor and plug them in. I pull them over my ears. I close down the outside world.

I listen. I lie back on Soren's bunk and close my eyes. It's so loud, it almost hurts, but I don't want to turn it down.

Blasts of full color, details bright and bursting. A whole orchestra, a choir, a band, all there in the headphones—all there in my head. Inside of me—sounds I have heard but never felt, and I am lost, floating high on this giant wave. The words reaching into me. The words. Pink Floyd—“Comfortably Numb.”

“It's the new thing,” he said. “The sound. The real business!”

I looked at the stereo.

“It's so much money,” I said.

Soren gave me that look. “What the hell are you saving for anyway?”

I shrugged. My house was old, needed a lot of fixing, but that's not what I said. I told him that maybe I'd like to stay here for a while. Stay for a bit.

“Travel?” he said.

I shrugged again. “Maybe just stay here.”

Soren rolled his eyes then. I knew what he was thinking. There was a whole world of women out there and I hardly knew this woman, this place. It was too soon.

“I just have this good feeling,” I said, but he wasn't really listening. He was staring at the black shiny stereo that had this new sound inside of it.

We carried it out of the shop and all the way down to the wharf. He told me I could have his old stereo.

“It's better than your piece of shit,” he said.

I told him to give his to Erik and Jonas. They didn't have anything in their cabin. Anyway, I liked my old tape player. It never chewed up my tapes and it was good enough. It would do.

“Okay,” he said. “You can stay in the past while the rest of us move into the future.”

I told him that he didn't have any CD things to put in this new machine. He laughed at that. But when we got to his cabin he was serious. He looked at me.

“Maybe you should take a chance,” he said. “I guess sometimes you just have to say, fuck it! Life is short. I guess you could stay here for a bit—see how it goes.”

The last half of the song is just the thick bass, the lead guitar pulling the melody right out, lifting it up onto another level—the melody soaring to the horizon.

I let go of my body, of the ship, of this earth.

I can see for all of time.

“You were right, Soren,” I say. “It's the real business.”

B
o and the crew threw snowballs at us when
Nella
came home. She had been stuck in ice for seven weeks. There was cheering and people were hugging and kissing. Some people were crying.

Everyone on board had missed Christmas. New Year's. January.

There was a news crew there. They filmed the snowballs, the celebration, and it was on the ABC news that night. The reporter said it was the longest besetment of modern times.

Bo saved one snowball for us. He put it in my brother's hand.

“Ice, all the way from Antarctica,” he said.

My brother told him about the day it snowed and how we got the day off school and made snowballs in the street and had a toboggan made from a tray, but it busted halfway down the hill.

Bo smiled, but on the way home in the car he stared out the window and was quiet. Mum told us that he had lost his friend while they were away, that he had fallen down and hit his head very hard. He was a man who'd worked in the galley called Soren.

I remembered him. He was the man who lifted my brother up and gave him the box of chewing gum. I wanted to ask if they buried him in the ice, if they left him behind, but I didn't ask. I looked across at my brother. He had his eyes fixed on the snowball in his hand.

“Did you run out of food?” he said.

Bo didn't answer for a while; then, when he did, his voice was quiet. Far away.

“We had enough food. We can last for a very long time. But we ran out of beer. And we ran out of apples. I missed them.”

My brother looked at me. He whispered, “I wouldn't miss apples.”

Bo turned around in his seat.

“You would miss them if you didn't have them for so long. You would miss them,” he said.

My brother made his eyes wide, like he hadn't meant to say that, like it was something only meant for me. He went back to watching the snowball. It was shiny and had started to melt on the surface, but it was packed so tight and still so cold that it was not dripping yet. My brother had his sweater pulled down between it and his skin but his hand must have been getting very cold.

“If I put this in the freezer, do you think it will last?” he asked.

“Yes,” Bo said. “Yes. We will put it in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer. It will last.”