Night one thousand five hundred and ninety-nine.
I write the night count out in words, the way the Register likes it, in the box at the top of the form, and behind me the kettle starts to tick on the range. Ten past five. The pad is pale green, fifty forms to a pad with a carbon behind each, and I have filled twenty-six pads and most of a twenty-seventh. The used ones are in a shoebox under the stairs. Nobody has ever asked for a carbon back.
Bed. I copy it off yesterday’s carbon: 77.8 south, 166.7 east, twelve metres. Same bed, same back room, same twelve metres above the sea the house stood at in 1960, when I was born in the front room of it. The first spring I wrote as before in that box to save my wrist, and a lassie from the Register came up Slag Row on a bicycle to tell me that as before was not a position. She was very kind about it. She wrote the numbers in for me with her own pencil while I stood on the step, so I would see how it was done.
Duration. Thirty-one minutes. That is what the cap said the one night they put a cap on me, and it is what I have written since. The Register would like a fresh figure now and then. The Register can come and sit up with me.
Window. Changed, unchanged. Tick one.
Under the boxes, in small italic, the form says: Please describe what you saw. Please do not describe how it made you feel. I have never once been tempted.
My pen is over unchanged, where it has been every morning since the March of 2027, and it doesn’t come down.
I put the window back together the way it was at half past four. You don’t choose it. That is the first thing any dreamer tells you and the only thing they all agree on: you can’t move in it and you can’t turn from it, you get the one view from the one place, and mine is a ledge at the south end of a long sunk hall with the floor running away from me in stone the colour of a wet slate roof, though it is not slate and not quite stone, and the light is blue and comes from nowhere and lies the same on everything, so that nothing in that hall has ever thrown a shadow, not the floor, not the far wall, not the pillars down the left-hand side.
I count them. I count them every morning like a woman checking her change. One, at the near end, broad as the cab of a hauler. Two. Three. They get smaller the way a row of anything gets smaller, until the last of them, at the far end, is no thicker from my ledge than a pencil held out at arm’s length.
Seventeen pillars. Seventeen.
And down the seventeenth, from where it goes up into the dark of the roof to where it meets the floor, there is a line of light.
It is thin. From where I am it’s a hair. It’s bluer than the rest of the hall, a harder blue, the way the blue in a crack is harder than the ice around it. When I was a tent hand at Halberd we held the brittle cores up to the lamp to find the breaks before the breaks found us, and the worst of them never showed until you turned the core a quarter and the light caught and ran the whole length of it at once. That’s the nearest I’ve got. It isn’t near.
It’s plumb, too. Forty-four years of watching an inclinometer, and I’d put that line inside half a degree of true. I’ve never been able to say that about anything else in the hall. The hall has never looked quite square to me, and I’ve never been able to say why, and I stopped trying in the first winter.
The Register says there are things in the city that move, slow works it calls engines, some turning once a day and some once a year. None of them is in my window. Four years and four months and some days, and nothing in my view has so much as settled. At the Flensing Quay bar they used to say I’d got the waiting room.
I go back through the pad first. Yesterday’s carbon says unchanged, in my hand, ticked hard. So does the one before, and the one before that, and I turn back a whole week of them, which I’ve never done, as if I’d find one where I’d been careless. I haven’t been careless. I’ve been careless about plenty in seventy years, but not on this form.
I tick changed.
The pen goes through the form and the carbon both and leaves its mark pressed into the next sheet, so there’s a wee tick waiting on tomorrow’s before I’ve had tomorrow.
Describe. I write: Line of light, 17th pillar (far end, left). Full height, roof to floor. Brighter than the hall. Straight. I read it over. It’s what I saw. Sketch is the last box. I’m not one of the ones that draw. There are folk on the Coast who send the Register a picture every morning with the shading done, and the Register pins the best of them up in the net loft on the Flensing Quay where the tourists can admire them. I lay the edge of the pad down the middle of the box for a rule and draw one line.
The kettle has been rattling its lid at me for a while. I get up and pour, and I’ve poured the water into the pot before I’ve put the tea in it, and I stand there with a pot of hot water. I put the tea in.
The last time I sat at this table at this hour with something I couldn’t put a name to, it was the twenty-seventh of June 2026, and the middle of winter, and the sun hadn’t been over the Kettle since April. I woke at ten to three in the black dark with a hall in my head and no notion how I’d got out of it. I thought I’d had a stroke. My father’s mother went that way, at her sink, in the house two doors up. So I put the light on and went to the bathroom and did what the leaflet on the Infirmary wall tells you: both arms up, smile, say a sentence. I said my name and my address to the mirror. Everything went where it should. Iain had been eleven years up the hill by then and there was nobody to ask whether my mouth was straight, so I came down here and sat with the range banked and my coat on over my nightie and waited for the other side of me to go.
It didn’t. At eight the radio did the shipping and the pit shifts and nothing about anybody’s hall. It was the best part of a month before the papers had it: a hundred and eighty thousand people, all round the world, the same stone, the same light. By then I’d been back thirty times and had given up checking my mouth.
The sun’s on the sea ice in the bay now. It came up over the Kettle at the back end of October and won’t go down again until February, and the smoke from the Row lies flat across the ice in a brown line because there’s no wind to lift it. My cheekbones are cold. The range is low and the kitchen is the temperature I like it, which is about the temperature of a core tent with the flaps tied back, and I can taste it on my teeth.
Callum got it in the February of 2028, on an ordinary night, nineteen months behind me. I took mine like weather. He took his like a letter with his name on it, and went off to answer it. The Listeners call the whole business the Undersleep. The Coast has taken the word off them, and I use it like everybody does, the way you’d use a neighbour’s ladder without thinking much of the neighbour. He sailed south with the Listeners the September after, off their quay below the Charter Building, with a kitbag and a pair of my good socks. He’s at Lantern Camp. The camp answers letters once a month. You have to write one first.
Through the wall, next door’s boy starts on his chanter. He’s been at the same four bars since August, and he goes wrong every morning on the high note and stops, and starts again. This morning he gets past it. The four bars come out whole, and after them there’s nothing, because he hasn’t learned what comes next. He stops, and the wall stays quiet.
I eat a slice of bread and dripping standing at the sink, which my mother would have had something to say about.
I post my form in the Register’s box on the Flensing Quay at a quarter to eight, on my way down for the bread. That is the whole of the arrangement and it’s served me. You file the thing. You don’t take it to bed with you, or not more than you have to. I tear today’s off along the perforation and fold it in three and put it by the teapot. Then I open it out and read the box again.
Straight. I’ve written straight.
At half past seven somebody knocks three times and waits, which is how the Company knocks.
Through the net in the front room there’s a black Volvo at the kerb with the Charter’s crest on the driver’s door and chains still on the back wheels, though the Row has been clear of ice since the first week of October. The exhaust goes straight up. A man in the driver’s seat has a newspaper open on the wheel and isn’t reading it.
Ewan Strachan is on my step in a navy coat with the Company pin in the lapel and a pair of rimless glasses I’ve not seen before. One sleeve of the coat has gone white down the forearm, a fine bloom of frost, the way wool goes when it’s been leaned on something cold. The heaters in Company cars have never worked in their lives.
“Agnes,” he says.
“Ewan.”
The boy is fifty-four. In 1995 he was a Company cadet on my drill at Halberd Dome with chapped knuckles and a cough and no London in his voice at all yet, and I taught him to lay hose on a reel so it comes off again without a kink, which is most of drilling and all of the part nobody thanks you for. He had the knack by the second week. It was his second summer before I learned his grandfather had managed Coalsack No. 3, and he never once used it to get off the night shift.
“I wondered if I might have five minutes,” he says.
“You’ve had the car running for ten.”
“I was early.”
I let him in. He wipes his feet twice and stands in my kitchen until I tell him to sit, and when he sits he takes the chair Iain used to take, because it’s the one that faces the door. My form is by the teapot, open, with the Describe box uppermost. I fold it in three again and stand the teapot on it.
He puts a folder on the oilcloth. Austral Charter Company, Deep Survey Expedition, and my name typed on the first page, Mrs A. Rennie, Chief Driller, with a gap after it for a signature. The Company has always had great faith in me.
“The Assembly gave us the licence on the ninth of last month,” he says. “You’ll have seen.”
“I saw.”
“We’re going down to the terrace the radar found. Sixteen hundred and forty metres at the Pole. Hot water to the bottom, then ream it out wide enough for a cage.” He squares the folder with one finger so it sits straight to the table edge. On the dresser behind him there’s Callum at twenty on the flensing deck of the Petrel, in oilskins, laughing at whoever had the camera, and Strachan’s glance goes over it the way you’d look at a clock to see if it was right. “I want you to run the drill.”
I open it at the page with the money, because that’s the page that’s meant to do the work. Plateau rate is in a box of its own, in Charter dollars, and by the day it’s more than Iain used to clear in a week in the sheds. I close it.
“No,” I say.
“You haven’t read it.”
“I’ve read the bit with the number.”
“You were the best deep driller the Survey ever had.”
“Aye, I was. I’m seventy. My knee came from New Holland and it’s younger than your car.”
“Your pension isn’t affected.”
“My pension isn’t affected now.”
“The arch is heated. You’d be in the warm.”
“And the rest of me would be at three thousand nine hundred and forty metres.”
He takes that without arguing. He was always good at that, on the reel. He’d let you be right and then go and do it his way at four in the morning while you were asleep.
“Can I ask you something?” he says. “Anything new in your window?”
“It’s a hall,” I say. “Halls don’t get new.”
He nods. The teapot sits where it is.
“If it’s not you,” he says, “it’ll be the Company’s new man. He’s capable. He ran three holes on the Halberd last season and brought them all in clean.”
“How deep?”
“Two hundred and ten. Two hundred and forty. One just under three hundred.”
“That’s firn and a wet summer. You could do that with a kettle and a long spoon.”
“He’s very well thought of.”
“What’s he running?”
“The new rig. Hot water. He says three days to the bottom.”
Three days to sixteen hundred and forty metres is a hole going down at better than twenty metres an hour, all the way, and between six hundred metres and a thousand that ice has been holding itself in like a fist for longer than there have been people to hold anything. You go through it slow. You go through it cold if you can. You do not pour eighty-five-degree water into it in a hurry, because it lets go: it cracks off the hole wall in plates, your water runs away into the cracks instead of coming back up the return, and you’ve a melt head on the end of a hose in a hole that’s freezing shut above it. The Survey lost a hot-water hole that way on the Halberd in 1993, and nobody on it was even hurrying. A man who has drilled three holes in firn has never heard ice do that.
“He’ll crack it at seven hundred,” I say.
“He’s aware of the brittle zone.”
“Aware.” I pour the tea, which is stewed. “I was aware of my knee for nine years.”
“We’ll take the bottom gently.”
“With hot water there’s no gently at the bottom. You don’t find the bottom. It finds you, and then your head’s in whatever’s under it.” I put the pot down. “You’d want to core the last hundred metres. Slow. You’d want to know what you were coming into before you came into it.”
“So you have thought about it.”
“I’ve thought about it for forty-four years. It’s called the job.”
He doesn’t take a cup. He doesn’t take his coat off either, and the white on the sleeve has gone to water and darkened the wool.
“You put a three-hundred-metre core within four kilometres of the Pole in 2019,” he says. “Nobody’s been closer to it with a drill than you.”
“Shallow core. The thermistor string went faulty at the bottom. I logged it.”
“I read the log.”
“Then you’ve read all there was. My plan’s in the Store with the core, if you want it. Sign it out.”
He’s a while answering that. “I might.”
“Do. There’s a typing error on page four. I never could get them to fix it.”
He smiles at that, and for a second he’s nineteen and sunburnt round his goggles and pleased with a reel that’s come off clean.
Then he says, “Is that a no? For the record.”
“It’s a no on the record and off it.” I put my cup down. “I know what’s at the bottom of your hole, Ewan. I look at it every morning for half an hour whether I want to or not. I’ve no wish to drill down and knock on the door.”
“It’s a terrace of rock under sixteen hundred metres of ice. The radar says so.”
“The radar’s never been there.”
“Neither have you.”
“No. I’ve been looking at it from the one ledge for four years. It’s more than your radar’s done.”
He looks at the folder rather than at me, and he’s quiet a while, and when he speaks again it’s quieter and more sensible still.
“The Company would rather have it done properly,” he says. “That’s all this is. I’d rather have it done properly.”
“Then don’t do it.”
He stands. He leaves the folder where it is. I tell him to take it and he says he’ll leave it in case, and I tell him there is no in case, and he leaves it anyway, squared to the edge of the table.
At the front door he stops on the step, half in and half out, so the cold comes in round him and finds my fillings. The man in the car folds his newspaper. Strachan says, loud enough for the car, “Thank you for your time, Mrs Rennie.” Then he takes the rimless glasses off and folds them, one arm and then the other, and holds them in his glove.
“The drill starts on the seventeenth,” he says. “With you or without you.”
“Without, then.”
He puts the glasses in his top pocket.
“And Lantern Camp is three kilometres downslope.”
