Hugo’s eyes widened with shock. Or mock-shock. It was hard to tell the difference with him.
‘Thespotter?’
‘Yes?’
Nora desperately wanted to know what the spotter actually did, but couldn’t ask.
‘Well, bonne chance,’ said Hugo, with a testing gaze.
‘Merci,’ said Nora, staring out at the crisp Arctic light and a landscape she had only ever seen in magazines. ‘I’m ready for a challenge.’
Walking in Circles
An hour later and Nora was on an expanse of snow-covered rock. More of a skerry than an island. A place so small and uninhabitable it had no name, though a larger island – ominously titled Bear Island–was visible across the ice-cold water. She stood next to a boat. Not theLance, the large boat she’d had breakfast on – that was moored safely out at sea – but the small motor-dinghy that had been dragged up out of the water almost single-handedly by a big boulder of a man called Rune, who, despite his Scandinavian name, spoke in languid west-coast American.
At her feet was a fluorescent yellow rucksack. And lying on the ground was the Winchester rifle that had been leaning against the wall in the cabin. This washergun. In this life, she owned a firearm. Next to the gun was a saucepan with a ladle inside it. In her hands was another, less deadly, gun – a signal pistol ready to fire a flare.
She had discovered what kind of ‘spotting’ she was doing. While nine of the scientists conducted a climate-tracking fieldwork on this tiny island, she was the lookout for polar bears. Apparently this was a very real prospect. And if she saw one, the very first thing she had to do was fire the flare. This would serve the dual purpose of a) frightening the bear away and b) warning the others.
It was not foolproof. Humans were tasty protein sources and the bears were not known for their fear, especially in recent years as the loss of habitat and food sources had made them ever more vulnerable and forced them to be more reckless.
‘Soon as you’ve fired the flare,’ said the eldest of the group, a beardless, sharp-featured man called Peter who was the field leader, and who spoke in a state of permanent fortissimo, ‘bang the pan with the ladle. Bang it like mad and scream. They have sensitive hearing. They’re like cats. Nine times out of ten, the noise scares them off.’
‘And the other time out of ten?’
He nodded down at the rifle. ‘You kill it. Before it kills you.’
Nora wasn’t the only one with a gun. They all had guns. They were armed scientists. Anyway, Peter laughed and Ingrid patted her back.
‘I truly hope,’ said Ingrid, laughing raspily, ‘you don’t get eaten. I would miss you. So long as you aren’t menstruating, you should be okay.’
‘Jesus. What?’
‘They can smell the blood from a mile away.’
Another person – someone who was so thoroughly wrapped up it was impossible to tell who they were even if she had known them – wished her ‘good luck’ in a muffled far-away voice.
‘We’ll be back in five hours ...’ Peter told her. He laughed again, and Nora hoped that meant it was a joke. ‘Walk in circles to keep warm.’
And then they left her, walking off over the rocky ground and disappearing into the fog.
For an hour, nothing happened. Nora walked in circles. She hopped from left foot to right foot. The fog thinned a little and she stared out at the landscape. She wondered why she was not back in the library. After all, this was definitely a bitshit. There were surely lives where she was sitting beside a swimming pool in the sunshine right now. Lives where she was playing music, or lying in a warm lavender-scented bath, or having incredible third-date sex, or reading on a beach in Mexico, or eating in a Michelin-starred restaurant, or strolling the streets of Paris, or getting lost in Rome, or tranquilly gazing at a temple near Kyoto, or feeling the warm cocoon of a happy relationship.
In most lives, she would have at least been physicallycomfortable. And yet, she was feeling something new here. Or something old that she had long buried. The glacial landscape reminded her that she was, first and foremost, a human living on a planet. Almost everything she had done in her life, she realised – almost everything she had bought and worked for and consumed – had taken her further away from understanding that she and all humans were really just one of nine million species.
‘If one advances confidently,’ Thoreau had written inWalden,‘in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’ He’d also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone. ‘I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.’
And Nora felt similarly, in that moment. Although she had only been left alone for an hour at this point, she had never experienced this level of solitude before, amid such unpopulated nature.
She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true solitude. The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.
She remembered a conversation she’d had with Ash. Tall and slightly awkward and cute and forever in need of a new songbook for his guitar.
The chat hadn’t been in the shop but in the hospital, when her mother was ill. Shortly after discovering she had ovarian cancer, she had needed surgery. Nora had taken her mum to see all the consultants at Bedford General Hospital, and she had held her mum’s hand more in those few weeks than in all the rest of their relationship put together.
While her mum was undergoing surgery, Nora had waited in the hospital canteen. And Ash – in his scrubs, and recognising her as the person he’d chatted to on many occasions in String Theory – saw she looked worried and popped in to say hi.
He worked at the hospital as a general surgeon, and she’d ended up asking him lots of questions about the sort of stuff he did (on that particular day he’d removed an appendix and a bile duct). She also asked about normal post-surgery recovery time and procedure times, and he had been very reassuring. They’d ended up talking for a very long time about all sorts of things, which he seemed to sense she’d been in need of. He’d said something about not over-googling health symptoms. And that had led to them talking about social media – he believed that the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became.
