I run into Brooke on the staircase on my way to breakfast.
'Good morning,' I say.
'Great morning,' she replies, and I laugh.
Brooke looks at me quizzically. 'You look different.'
'In what way?' I ask.
'Like you've got your sea legs back.'
My smile pinches my cheeks. 'Yeah. I guess I have.'
She pats me on the back. 'Come on,' she says. 'I'm hungry.' Two of the artists I exhibited at WOMXN in London, Holly and Vivienne, are on the expedition. We find them at the breakfast bar and I introduce them both to Brooke. Then we all join Joan at a table.
Over breakfast, we talk about where Holly and Vivienne have been since the show. Holly has been in New York, Vivienne in Paris.
'I never thanked you properly,' says Vivienne. 'After the show, people started to take my work a lot more seriously.'
I feel myself swelling with pride. 'So they should,' I say.
'I still struggle to get people to take my work seriously,' Brooke says, laughing. 'Especially men. Especially men I'm dating.'
'Ha!' says Joan. 'I know the feeling.'
'They're probably intimidated,' Holly tells her.
'With me it's the opposite,' says Brooke. 'They all try to make me smaller. One guy I went out with referred to my DPhil at Oxford as my "little project". Another used to say I worked with "ice and stuff".'
Holly says, 'My last boyfriend asked when I was going to get a real job!'
And we all crack up.
'Well,' says Brooke, 'I realised down here, standing at the foot of a glacier bigger than they could ever imagine, that I'm a fucking superstar.'
'Hear, hear!' says Joan, raising her glass of orange juice.
'And you know what?' says Brooke. 'I fucking love my life. I don't need to be with someone unless they add to it.' Her smile is wider than the sky. 'I'm not afraid of the risk of being woman.'
And to that, we all clink glasses.
Later, those of us not affected by seasickness gather in the main cabin for games of cards. We play Shithead and I laugh until my sides are sore. But it feels good, this ache. Because it's born out of something unashamedly honest. And I don't care that I suck at this game, because I feel like I've won, either way.
***
At lunch, Salma announces that we're halfway to Antarctica, but adds that a growing swell is likely to slow us down.
'The Southern Ocean,' she says, 'is a great place to learn patience.'
***
When we wake on our third day, the swells that peaked overnight are slowly dying. The boat is steadying. Salma gathers everyone in the main cabin for the morning's announcements. She tells us we're nearing the peninsula and says there'll be a prize for the first person to spot an iceberg.
'Congratulations, everyone, for surviving the Drake Passage!' she says and we all cheer loudly.
At breakfast, I learn that one of the chefs, Alex, is Australian and has a tub of Vegemite in the kitchen. I spread it over my toast for the first time in years, grinning like a child.
Brooke finds me making a coffee. 'It's safe to go outside,' she says. 'The swell's dropped off enough.'
'Should we eat brekkie on deck?'
'You read my mind.'
I fold my toast up in a napkin and take my coffee back to my room, where I rug up. I haven't been outside since we entered the Drake Passage, and now that we're much further south the air is shocking. It's a cold that completely consumes. Like falling in love. Total and unapologetic.
Brooke meets me on deck, and we walk together up to the bow.
'Hey!' someone calls out.
We look up to the bridge to see a woman in uniform waving.
'Who's that?' I ask Brooke.
'That's our captain, Georgia—she's a weapon,' Brooke says, and I laugh.
A moment later, an albatross appears above the starboard deck. I tap Brooke on the shoulder, 'Look! Look!'
'Beautiful, isn't she?' Brooke says as the bird soars across the bow of the boat in front of us, wings stretched out wide, a smooth shadow flying over the deck. 'She's young,' Brooke says. 'She'll grow to be twice that size.'
'Incredible,' I whisper, thinking of Mac. And then. Of Maggie and Coco. Of another sea in another time. Flashing before me. Flooding back. A memory so palpable, I feel I could reach out and touch them. Hold their hands.
I think of Robynne. Home, here, in Antarctica. And I can hear myself asking Mac, all those years ago, on the Sea Rose, 'Do you ever wonder what the point was?'
'The point,' he'd told me, 'was that she lived.'
Brooke grabs my arm, and I'm drawn back into the present. 'Oli!' she says. 'Look! Over there!'
Looking in the direction in which she is pointing, I see it. Our first iceberg. A bold white block on the horizon. We run into the main cabin to let the others know.
Salma is by the stairs.
'Iceberg!' I shout. 'Iceberg!'
Brooke laughs. 'Don't shout that! Haven't you seen Titanic?'
***
Our first landing is at Half Moon Island, a crescent-shaped sliver of rock. Before we disembark the ship, we have to vacuum all our clothing to remove any trace of flora from South America, and wash our expedition boots in a quarantined room. I'm wearing so many layers, I seem to waddle, not walk. 'Like a penguin,' says Brooke.
We climb down off the stern deck into inflatable boats called zodiacs. In my boat are Salma, Brooke, Vivienne, Holly, Joan and Alice, a sculptor and textiles artist from Australia. She has a head of thick red hair that makes me think I'm among Vikings. Fearless women, braving the sea at the end of the earth.
When we land on the beach, Brooke points out an old wooden boat, shipwrecked at the end of the island.
I imagine the men who landed here more than a hundred years ago.
Ghosts climbing out of the boat. Footsteps on the moon, this cragged half.
Brooke helps me out of the boat. Waves lapping at the shore, like gentle kisses in the middle of the night. Smooth pebbles, rounded and softened by this intimacy.
'A real penguin!' Brooke says, pointing to a cluster of penguins up on the ridge above the beach. 'They're chinstrap penguins. Look at their faces —it's like they're wearing hats with little straps around their chins.'
Vivienne climbs out next, holding her camera high to save it from being splashed by a wave. 'Oh my God,' she says. 'They're adorable!'
I help the others out, then we push the zodiac off the beach so Salma can return to the ship for another group.
The sky is wide open. Clear as crystal. I remember how, at dinner,
Salma had said, 'Antarctica is the lungs of the planet.' I breathe into it.
Into the sky. Feel the entire world flowing through me.
We wander to the end of the island, where a huge cliff face juts out vertically from the earth. Rounding it, I gaze up, feel a wave of awe wash over me. The cliff face is blackened, as if charred, with tendrils of orange lichen rising up like tongues of fire. Around its base, sea lions lounge, blending in so well with the landscape that Vivienne almost walks into one. It rears its head, eyeing her. She takes a step back, saying, 'Sorry, hon. You do you …' and the rest of us burst into laughter.
Back on the pebbly beach, I notice, all along the shoreline, are strange jelly-like creatures, each dotted with a blood red spot. 'What are they?' I ask Brooke.
'They usually live in the waters around South America, but because the water is getting warmer here, they're all coming south.'
Holly asks, 'Is that a bad thing?'
'Yeah,' says Brooke, crouching down for a closer inspection. 'They eat the same plankton as the krill. Which means that, for the first time, the krill are having to compete for their food source.'
'So there'll be less krill?'
Brooke nods. 'Exactly—and everything here relies on krill.'
***
Overnight, we sail from the South Shetlands archipelago down to the Antarctic Peninsula. I wake to Salma's voice over the loudspeaker giving the weather report and mapping out the day's activities, starting with kayaking after breakfast. There's a knock at my door.
I open it to find Brooke.
'Be my kayak buddy?' she asks, grinning.
'Ha! Of course!' I say, and she high fives me.
'Now get your clothes on, quick—Georgia just said they saw orcas from the bridge.'
'Orcas!' I exclaim. 'Like killer whales?'
'Yes,' says Brooke, laughing. 'Same thing.'
I rush back into my room and start getting ready. Brooke comes in and flops down on my bed. 'Wear thermals and leggings to go under your kayak dry suit,' she says.
'Are these okay?'
She nods and I wriggle into my thermals, pull a jumper over my head, chuck on my jacket, and the two of us are out the door, running like children through the ship to the port deck. 'Over there!' squeals Brooke.
I follow her gaze to a pod of orcas, poking their heads between sheets of ice. The sky's warming into pink. And even though the sun is rising, the moon is still visible above the ice. And I remember a picture I saw in a book once, in a room where root tentacles spread in water flowerbeds. A book about whales. How I'd described this exact scene to a woman who saw my voice in strokes of red. And there's the feeling that time is catching up. Or maybe I am falling back. Back through the pages. Through paper-thin years. To her.
Brooke holds my hand, and I realise I am crying.
'You okay?'
'Yeah,' I say with a wet smile. 'I just saw an old friend.'
***
After breakfast, we anchor in a bay sheltered from the wind. Brooke and I are first into the kayaks. Lowered in, we begin to paddle. And as the sea turns to glass, we find ourselves paddling on sky, blue mountains rippling beneath us.
I look over my shoulder and say to Brooke, 'Do you ever get the feeling that this place is strangely familiar?'
'Absolutely,' she says.
'Yeah … Why is that?'
Brooke shrugs. 'I never knew my birth mum. Not until I was twenty-five and meeting her for the first time. But when I did meet her, I was in a park I'd never been to, in a state I'd never been to, meeting a woman whose name I didn't know. Yet it was strangely familiar. Like my body remembered her body.'
I turn from Brooke, look out at Antarctica stretching before us. A body. Androgynous. Blanketed by a glacier. A frozen river, flowing from the sky into the sea.
'Antarctica is like that,' she says. 'The body remembers … Like, when you look into the ice, you see where you came from. It's so distant, you don't recognise it consciously, but your body does. Your body remembers where it came from.'
A piece of ice bobs in the water beside the kayak. 'That's glacier ice,' says Brooke. 'It's clear because all the air has been squeezed out of it over millions of years. Those glaciers—' she points up ahead '—they take thousands of years to flow down mountains. The distance you or I could walk in five seconds could take a glacier fifty thousand years to travel.'
I feel the air rush out of me, feel the pause between heartbeats.
I look at my watch. It's stopped working in the cold.
Brooke smiles. 'You're on planet time now.' Then she passes me her paddle and says, 'Hold this, will you?'
She leans over and fishes out the chunk of glacier ice and puts it on her lap.
'Are we allowed to do that?' I ask.
'It's going to melt anyway,' she says. 'And besides, it will be perfect for our Baileys on ice tonight.'
'You're a genius,' I say.
Brooke grins.
The others have caught up to us now. Joan and Alice in one kayak, Vivienne and Holly in another. Behind them, more women, laughing and chatting.
'Okay, everyone,' says Cath, the kayak leader, raising her paddle into the air. 'We're all going to be quiet now and listen to the glacier.'
We lift our paddles from the water and rest them across our laps, all breathing quietly now.
In the distance, there are cracks and groans. The ice rubs, caresses, pushes, pulls. Like making love. How two bodies fold together. How I held hands once with Hugo. And there's a feeling of history happening all at once. Because when I peer over the edge of the kayak into the tide, I realise that this body of water stretches. From here it flows through oceanic pits and tropical reefs. Around capes and towering cliffs. Across deep channels and shallow bays. Up the river, winding through the earth. To Hugo. Where I imagine him, standing, right now, on the banks of the Thames, peering over the railing, into the same body of water. Our reflections rippling into each other. The faraway nearby.
'Thank you,' I whisper into the tide. 'For everything.' And I know my words, carried through this ancient sea in wide undulations, reach him. In another time, he hears me.