White Heat (11 page)

    'Taylor
said you were a bear hunter.' Bill Fairfax spoke in precise, clipped English.
Sammy hadn't said where he was from, but Edie guessed England. Elizabetland,
the locals called it.

    She
said: 'Once. Not in a long, long while.'

    'Ah well.'
He sounded disappointed.

    An
awkward moment followed as they tried not to watch Taylor out on the strip,
kicking gravel over the mess he'd made.

    'But
you're quite the landswoman, I hear,' Bill Fairfax continued, returning to the
subject of bear hunting.

    Edie
wondered for a moment if he was expressing a lack of confidence in her, then
realized that it was just the opposite. Even though she was herself half
qalunaat,
she quite often found it was hard to read southerners.

    'That
hunting trip sounded
terrible
,' Fairfax went on.

    Edie
felt a lurch. Surely Taylor hadn't been stupid enough to have confided in
Fairfax about the Wagner affair?

    'Just
bad luck,' she said, hedging.

    'You're
too modest. Taylor told me all about it, throwing up that snowhouse. Nasty
blizzard you two got caught up in.'

    'Oh,
that.' Edie felt herself relax. She guessed Taylor was lying for the same
reason that she would go along with his lies: they both needed the work. Maybe
he wasn't so stupid after all.

     After
she'd settled the two men in the hotel, Edie went across to the clinic to let
Joe know she'd arranged a briefing meeting at the mayor's office and was met at
the door by Robert Patma. Joe was busy talking to Minnie Toluuq, Robert explained,
but he'd be free very shortly.

    In
the three years Robert Patma had been in the community, Edie had found herself
growing increasingly fond of him. Like most
qalunaat,
he'd come up on a
two-year contract, but, unlike almost all, he'd stayed. He was a hardy,
uncomplaining type and although on the surface very cynical about his reasons
for remaining in Autisaq - citing northern hardship money and long leave
entitlements as chief among them - he'd often gone above and beyond what was
called for under the terms of his contract. For example, he hadn't been under
any obligation to allow Joe to volunteer at the nursing station but he'd showed
a great deal of generosity and commitment to him and over the months the two
men had become good friends. Joe often went round to Robert's apartment after
work and the two would listen to music together and eat the curries the nurse
liked to cook.

    She
made a point of following him into the kitchen where he was making tea and
asking after his father.

    'He's
OK,' he said. 'Sugar?'

    'Sure,'
she said. She watched Robert drop a single cube into the mug. 'I'm sorry your
mother didn't make it.'

    He
blinked. 'I don't really like to talk about it much.'

    She
reached for some more sugar, but he pushed the mug towards her as it was.

    'You
want to watch that,' he said. 'Diabetes. Arctic epidemic.'

    'Another
one.'

    Robert
smiled bleakly.

    Just
then Joe emerged from the consultation room at the back. He and Robert had a brief
discussion about various things that needed doing then Joe put on his coat and
boots and he and Edie walked down the ice road towards the mayor's office.

    Edie
said: 'Sweetheart, if you don't want to take this Andy Taylor fellow, you don't
have to. You know that, don't you? You don't have to do anything just because
your father says.'

    He
looked at her with affection and shrugged. 'It'll be different when I'm
qualified.'

    'You'll
stay here in Autisaq, right?'

    He
shook his head. 'Yellowknife, Iqaluit maybe, somewhere bigger.' Then, tapping
her on the nose, he said, 'You'll come too, Kigga?'

    'Sure,'
she said. 'Sure I will.' She meant it.

    The
heat in the mayor's office was stifling. Fairfax had complained about the cold,
so Sammy had turned up the furnace. Edie glanced at the thermostat. Sixteen
degrees. A hot house. Taylor was sitting in his Polartec, wiping away the sweat
around his collar, looking ill at ease. Fairfax spread out in a chair beside
him, giving off an air of entitlement.

    After
the success of the first TV documentary, Fairfax had been approached by the TV
company about another idea, a search for the body of his ancestor.

    'I
guess you know the rumours?'

    Sammy,
Joe and Edie nodded. Everyone knew the rumours. When Sir James's final
expedition got into trouble, some Inuit had passed by the camp and seen what
they took to be human meat hung out to dry. As the story was passed on to
various white traders who came into and out of the area it was embroidered and
elaborated upon. By the time it reached London it had become quite a scandal,
casting a shadow over the explorer's reputation. It was on account of this that
Sir James's backers had refused to send out a rescue party to try to locate the
explorer and his crew. Probably it would have made no difference anyway.
Fairfax's ship, the
Courageous,
was found drifting and abandoned by an
American whaler just north of Cumberland Sound. None of the bodies had ever
been recovered.

    As
Bill went on, Joe caught Edie's eye, looking for some kind of steer. He often
thought of her as a bridge between his world and that other, unknowable place
to the south. She signalled back with a reassuring smile; they'd talk it over
later. She'd read enough about the old white explorers to know that the
prospect of cannibalism hung over them like some malevolent spectre. To the
Inuit, eating human flesh was merely the survival tool of last resort. The most
dishonourable thing an Inuk man with a family could do was to take the easy way
out, to give up the struggle to provide for his loved ones, lie down and die.
That way he condemned his present and future family and brought shame on his
ancestors. In the
qalunaat
world, the opposite was true. Dishonour had
become attached to Sir James Fairfax's name precisely because he'd done
everything he could, right down to eating his own kind, in order to survive.

    Sir
James's last known diary had recently surfaced among the effects of Bill's
great-aunt, he continued. The explorer had been a punctilious diarist, keeping
meticulous notes of weather conditions, navigational decisions as well as lists
of supplies and a day-to-day account of happenings among the crew. His diaries
from his first two Arctic expeditions, in 1840 and 1843, had long been part of
the collection at the Scott Polar Institute at Cambridge University. It was
always assumed that the diary of the penultimate voyage of 1847 was somewhere
among the family papers, but it hadn't turned up until Bill himself had
discovered it in an old port box filled with bits and pieces which his
great-aunt had left him in her will. Bill doubted that his great-aunt had known
the contents of the box; she'd left him several dozen, and most had contained
nothing more interesting than old copies of accounts. But this was quite a
prize. The diary was of particular interest because it contained a detailed
plan of Sir James's proposed next voyage, the one during which, as it turned
out, he and his crew disappeared.

    Bill
Fairfax hesitated. The newly recovered diary revealed that Sir James had
planned to stay at Craig Island during the migration of beluga whale which
passed close by during September on their way south. He hoped to kill enough
whale to provide meat through the winter months, and had scouted out suitable
campsites on a previous expedition, one of which was near the present-day
Uimmatisatsaq, the other on the east of the island at Fritjof Fiord. Bill
Fairfax spread his maps on the table, pointing out the two spots for Edie and
Joe to examine.

    No
one knew what went wrong, he said, whether the beluga travelled by another
route that autumn or the crew were struck down by disease but Bill Fairfax had
a hunch that his ancestor made it to Fritjof. In any case, if he could find Sir
James's body, he was convinced that recent advances in forensic testing would
reveal the real cause of his death to have been scurvy or vitaminosis and not
the starvation that might have led him to resort to the unspeakable.

    The
room fell silent for a moment, then Edie spoke up:

    'Even
with all these maps and the diary, unless there are some pretty big grave
markers, you may as well be trying to find a snowflake trapped inside an
iceberg. It would make your job easier to come back in the summer, when the ground
is partly exposed.'

    Fairfax
coughed. 'It's a little awkward,' he said. 'But I'm under some pressure to sell
the diary and when I do, the information will become public. We're hoping to
get enough material together to interest the TV people. Then we'll come up
again with a film crew in the summer, you see.'

    So
it's about money and ego, Edie thought. Not that she cared. This wouldn't be
the first ego trip she'd guided - she thought back to the French property
tycoon who'd been determined to prove that the Gauls discovered Baffin a
thousand years before the Vikings and the American movie star who'd wanted to
live in a snowhouse to explore 'ice in the soul' - and she was pretty sure it
wouldn't be the last.

    She
said: 'So long as you understand the likelihood is we won't find anything.'

    Bill,
leaning over to shake her hand: 'Perfectly understood.'

    Much
later that evening, after she'd finished checking her snowbie and packed for
the morning, Edie finally sat down to watch
The General.
Of all the
great comic movies of the silent screen, this was her favourite. There was
something life-affirming in Buster Keaton's daring, the way he cheerfully
launched himself off skyscrapers, dodged oncoming trains and ran into the path
of runaway horses, brushing death off over and over again as though it had no
more power over him than a light spring shower. Edie found that however many
times she watched it, her pleasurable anticipation of the scenes ahead never
dimmed.

    Time
bypassed her altogether, so she had no idea how long she had been watching when
there was a knock on the door. She knew at once that it must be one or other of
the
qalunaat
— Inuit considered knocking an insult, an acknowledgement
that the visit might not be wholly welcome — and shouted for whoever it was to
come right in. An instant later, Andy Taylor's face appeared around the snow
porch door, smelling of whisky, a can of Budweiser in his hand.

    'A
word?'

    'Sure,'
she said, keeping her eye on the screen, hoping that he'd pick up the message.
'Come in.'

    He
stood before her, lank and anxious-seeming, a diamond stud twinkling in his
right ear. He'd come to make his peace and wasn't sure how he'd be received.

    'You
probably didn't expect to see me.'

    'No,'
she said. She felt a little disgusted by him.

    'What
are you after?' she asked.

    He
took a long gulp of his beer and put the can down on the table. He seemed a
little unsteady on his feet.

    'Like
the man said, a documentary.'

    'Musk-ox
shit.'

    'Fact
is, I'm broke.' He shrugged his shoulders apologetically. 'Wagner's widow, that
bitch, she refused to pay me.' Edie noticed that his fingernails were bitten to
the nub. He seemed keyed, like a hunted thing. 'You think I'm a whore, I get
it, but there's no high ground here, lady Look at you, playing at being an
authentic Eskimo. You and me, we're both in the same game.'

    'Maybe,'
Edie said. 'I don't care what your motivation is, but you behave with Joe out
on the land the way you behaved with me a few weeks back, and you can be sure
your career, or whatever it is you're doing here, is over.'

    'Three
days,' he said, 'then I'm out of your hair.'

    She
got to her feet and went to the door.

    'See
you in the morning.'

    He
took the hint, smiled as he passed her and went into the porch to put on his
snow boots.

    When
he'd gone, she picked up the can of Budweiser and shook it. The base of the can
felt heavy and its contents swooshed softly, a sweet, hoppy swoosh. She went to
the kitchen and poured the remains down the sink. At that moment she heard the
door swing open and Joe came in. She hastily threw the empty can in the trash
and covered it over before he could see it.