Beneath the Ice (5 page)

Bear sat in the changing room downstairs, her hands pressed against her forehead. A towel was draped over her naked back; each rib was visible along the line of her spine. Her lithe shoulders were pulled forward, revealing an old burn mark that ran in a neat rectangular scar across the width of her back. She was motionless except for the slow clenching and unclenching of her toes as she splayed each one on the cold marble floor.

Three work folders lay on the bench next to her, each filled with the preliminary notes for a new mining investigation. She was supposed to have reviewed them all and chosen her next assignment, but in the last three weeks she hadn’t got past breaking the security seals. She just couldn’t concentrate; the words seemed to blur on the page.

Time was running out. There was only so long her manager could cover for her. Her job was to uncover the truth behind major mining incidents happening around the globe, and Head Office only cared about one thing – productivity. If she didn’t pull herself together soon and get to work on one of the assignments, it didn’t matter how good her track record was, she would be out on the streets.

Bear looked up. In the far corner of the room was an older woman, possibly sixty but with the slight tug of plastic surgery at the corners of her eyes. She had her face pressed against a mirror and was trying to make the best of the light, while her right hand expertly pencilled in the sharp acute of her eyebrows. She glanced up, catching Bear’s reflection in the mirror. What would have been a smile of greeting quickly hardened into one of loosely disguised contempt. Her nose wrinkled as if catching an unpleasant smell before she abruptly turned back to her own reflection.

Bear stared at her in disbelief. After all the years of coming to the Legionnaires Club, she still caught the same glances, the same mutterings of disapproval. It was always the same – a black woman in the club! How perfectly scandalous! She would see the searching look in their eyes and sense the air of anticipation, as if they half expected her to burst into some kind of tribal dance.

Shutting her eyes, Bear cursed herself for letting it get to her. Who gave a shit what these people thought? She came to the club because of Edith, and Edith came because her father was one of the richest men in France. She had insisted Bear should join. It was that simple. She couldn’t expect these people to relate to her. They had barely been outside the city walls, let alone grown up in a place like the Congo.

The Congo. Bear’s lips moved silently, mouthing the words as if saying them for the first time. How would anyone here be able to understand what it had been like to grow up in such a place? The Congo questioned every moral certitude. It contradicted every absolute held so dearly by the West. Out there, life functioned on a totally different level, one where only the strong survived.

But it was an upbringing that had served Bear well later in life. Her mining assignments invariably led her to some of the most war-torn hellholes on the planet; from Sierra Leone to Nigeria, East Timor to the Sudan. In those kind of countries the situation was always fluid, always treacherous, and growing up in the Congo had habituated her to levels of danger that most people would have found terrifying. As a child, she had witnessed unimaginable horrors – no more so than when the Rwandese refugees had flooded across the border during the great genocide – so why did she always let something as petty as the racism of the club get to her? These people here would never change. They would never understand. ‘Bear?’

She looked up to see Edith’s smiling face, taking in the neat row of white teeth and heavy coating of lip-gloss.

‘Eddy? Comment ça va?’

Edith’s eyebrow rose as if she had been dying for someone to ask her that question all morning. Disposing of her Chanel handbag with a quick flick of the wrist, she edged herself on to the bench next to Bear, squashing the work folders beneath her short skirt. Normally Bear would have objected, but she knew enough of Edith’s unstoppable enthusiasm to comment.

‘I have
got
to tell you what happened last night,’ her friend began, eyes widening at the prospect. ‘Henri and I were having a dinner party. You know, the usual banker mates of his and my cheeks were aching from smiling so goddamn much.’

Tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, she leant forward. ‘Well, I went upstairs to check on little Frédéric as he was sleeping in our bed. A few minutes later, Henri comes up and we ended up talking in Frédéric’s bathroom down the corridor. We were mouthing off about how boring everyone was, how fat his boss’s wife is . . . you know, basically giving the whole room a good slagging off.’

Edith moved a fraction closer, her voice dropping conspiratorially. ‘Then Henri starts getting horny, right? So we shut the door and do it right there on the bathroom floor.’

Bear looked skywards, perpetually amazed by how willing Edith was to share the intimate details of her marriage. ‘And why are you telling me this?’

Edith grabbed on to Bear’s shoulder in readiness to deliver the punchline.

‘Because the fucking baby monitor was on!’ Raising her hand to her mouth in delighted horror, Edith began to shake her head. ‘Everybody heard everything. I mean,
everything
. We dusted ourselves off and trotted downstairs like nothing had happened, only to find the dining room empty.
Putain de merde!
There was only the little flashing light of the baby monitor!’

Edith’s finger bounced up and down as she mimicked the flashing light, before she looked up and cackled with laughter. Bear returned her gaze, trying to suppress her own smile. No matter how down she was, somehow Edith always seemed to make her see the lighter side of life.

‘They were dull anyway,’ Edith continued, smoothing down her skirt as she got to her feet. ‘Does kind of scupper Henri’s chances of promotion for a while though.’

They both fell silent as the older woman in the far corner of the room made an affected display of clearing her throat. She had already packed away her eyeliner. Marching past them towards the exit, she breathed the words, ‘
Petite salope
,’ before sweeping out of the room.
Little slut.

Edith’s mouth fell open in shock. A moment passed in stunned silence before she gathered herself and leant forward so that she could call through the closing door: ‘Shut it, you old hag!’

As the door finally eased shut, Edith flashed another smile at her friend. ‘Don’t worry, I know her. She plays tennis with my dad.
Complete
bitch.’

Edith then moved to the locker opposite and let her eyes settle on Bear. After a brief silence the frivolity seemed to ebb away, to be replaced by genuine concern.

‘Nice to see you laugh, Madame Beatrice. Haven’t seen it in a while.’

Bear shrugged.

‘You know, you haven’t phoned me in nearly three weeks,’ Edith continued. ‘Normally, I strike a friend out of my address book for that kind of behaviour.’

Bear raised her hands in self-defence. ‘Sorry, Eddy, let’s just say it hasn’t been the best month.’

‘Still thinking about Luca?’

At the mere mention of his name, the last of Bear’s energy seemed to drain away. She turned her gaze to her feet, letting her vision blur.

‘What the hell happened between you two?’ Edith asked.

‘Can we not talk about this?’ Bear asked, not bothering to look up. It was as if each hour of insomnia was compressed into this one moment, making her feel utterly exhausted. Six weeks had passed. Six weeks, and still she felt raw. Bear slowly shook her head. Everything felt wrong. It was like she was on a path in life that she had never meant to take.

‘Come on, Bear, you’ve got to talk to someone.’

‘Yeah? Why?’

There was a long pause while Bear slowly closed her eyes. She could picture Luca at their flat in Paris, with his tousled blond hair and pale blue eyes. It was his eyes that she had fallen in love with, right from the start. They had always been so full of untapped energy. The way he used to look at her had been so uncompromising; as if life existed purely for them both.

But that was just it, it didn’t. Bear had a son called Nathan, who was six years old and living in Cape Town with her ex-husband, Jamie. No matter how much she tried to rationalise her decision to live in Paris with Luca, it didn’t ease the terrible sense of loss she felt. She could hear herself justifying it all, telling anyone who would listen that seeing Nathan once a month was an acceptable compromise for a short period while she focused on her relationship with Luca and her career. But even as the words left her mouth, she could feel the burning in her heart. Had she not been a mother, she could never have believed that the longing for your own child could cause physical pain.

And the worst part was, it wasn’t even Luca’s fault. He had only asked her to wait six months, just to get used to the idea of them as a couple before introducing her son into the same house. But with every reasonable call to wait, all Bear heard was ‘no’, and with it the desperate sense of separation from her child grew. On the last two occasions, her ex-husband had taken Nathan to his grandparents on exactly the dates she had flown to Cape Town to see him, just to spite her, and now there was only the gaping hole in her heart; from losing Nathan, from losing Luca, from life’s relentless onslaught.

Resting her head against an oak-panelled locker, Bear stared across at her friend. A single tear welled up in the corner of one eye before running down the line of her nose. She sniffed, hating the feeling of being so exposed.

‘I miss my boy, Eddy,’ she whispered.

‘Oh,
chérie
,’ her friend replied, reaching forward to hug her, but even as Bear let herself be embraced, she could feel her breathing grow steady again. Why was she being so emotional? Why did everything that happened make her feel like the world had just collapsed? It was the sleep deprivation. It was killing her, making her feel so damn vulnerable all the time.

Detaching herself from Edith’s arms, Bear stood up and flipped the towel over her shoulder.

‘Christ, I’m a mess,’ she muttered.

Edith stood up too. ‘Take it from someone who did a lot of breaking up in their time, you’ve got to get back in the game. It’s the only way to forget Luca.’

‘That’s the last thing . . .’ Bear protested, but Edith pulled her over to the large wall mirror and stood behind her, eyes scanning Bear’s face like an over-zealous beauty therapist. Bear stood naked but for the towel and a pair of frayed knickers, greyed from age. Her eyes were cast down, refusing even to acknowledge her own reflection.

After a moment’s scrutiny, Edith frowned. ‘I don’t know what the hell you are doing, girl, but this is the best I’ve ever seen you look.’

‘Oh, please.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘I’m sick and haven’t slept in a week,’ Bear countered, but as she started to turn away her eyes caught her reflection in the mirror and she stopped. It was the first time she had really bothered to look at herself in almost a fortnight.

‘You think it might be something else?’ Edith added, already suspecting the reason for the change, but Bear wasn’t listening. Instead, she let her eyes wander across her face and neck, taking in every detail. Edith was right. Her skin positively glowed. It was a deep, blue-black, glistening across her neck and chest from the run, but shining with vitality. Bear moved closer, flicking her tongue out to the end of her lips and running it across the sharp points of her teeth. They looked whiter, the enamel stronger somehow.

Her forehead wrinkled in confusion, the unexpected discovery counter to everything she felt inside. Stepping back a pace, she glanced down at her breasts. They seemed fuller, weightier, as if they had filled out overnight.

‘What do you mean . . . something else?’ she asked, not taking her eyes off the mirror.

‘I mean, you look pregnant,’ Edith responded, as if the observation were entirely self-evident.

Bear’s mouth opened in horror as her eyes followed the line of her body and rested on her belly. In that single moment, it suddenly became so obvious.

‘Oh, shit,’ she whispered. ‘This can’t be happening.’

VIDAR STANG BRUSHED
his fingers over his cheek. The entire lower half of his face was burnt black by the sun, blistered from his chin right up to his temples. As his fingers found a small strip of peeling skin, he gently tugged it, ripping upwards. It pulled more with it, exposing a bloody, thumb-sized patch of flesh.

Stang shut his eyes, screwing them up in annoyance. His thickset fingers were also black, this time from grime and engine oil. They poked at the open wound, dabbing it gently.

‘No,’ he said, the single word reverberating off the metal walls of the deserted Antarctic base. He paused, the bass note of his own voice surprising him. He hadn’t spoken in weeks and it was deeper than he remembered.

Piles of equipment lay all around him. Closest were hundreds of packets of dehydrated food. Then came ropes and technical climbing gear, followed by his extra down clothing. They stretched off in all directions, everything neatly stacked by name and type with shoulder-width pathways snaking in between. Order was the one constant in Stang’s life – a lesson he had learnt on the very first day he had landed in Antarctica.

He turned right down the nearest pathway, then left. His movements were fast and fluid, his body perfectly attuned to the space after so many months of living here. Within just a few seconds, he had pulled out a small aluminium panel with one side polished to serve as a mirror. Raising it to the light, he slowly tilted it from side to side to catch his reflection.

He grunted. His face looked even more haggard than he remembered. It wasn’t just the burnt skin; a short beard now curled out from his jawline, the white-blond hair patchy and unkempt, making him appear more like a vagrant than a former naval serviceman. His eyes then moved up to his cheek to assess the damage and the nub of flesh hanging from the open wound. Nothing ever healed in Antarctica. The air was so damn dry it sucked the moisture from his skin.