Laline Paull - The Ice - A gripping thriller for our times from the Bailey’s shortlisted author of The Bees

When Sean was eleven and in the care home while his mother was recovering from yet another attempt, he saw a huge oil painting of icebergs on one of the off-limits staff landings. It was so beautiful he started using this longer route, despite the punishment when he was caught, just to gaze at the space and the colours of this pristine frozen world. While he stood before it, he forgot his distress, and threw his consciousness into the ice.

There was a mast from a shipwreck in the foreground, and he imagined himself the sole survivor. Everyone else was dead but he must find a way to keep going. As he gazed at it one day it came to him like a truth – his father was on that ship, or one like it – he had gone exploring and been shipwrecked, that was why he’d never known him, why his mother wanted to die. The ice had taken his family and he must go there to get them back.

The iceberg painting grew in his imagination, even when his mother returned from the hospital and reclaimed him to the ugly council house where she struggled on in depression and drinking. Sean fixated on his lost explorer father, and everything to do with the Arctic, and he had bolstered his fantasy with such authentic details, backed up with angry fists for doubters, that it became fact.

His fighting was a problem until a social worker intervened. Sean was in danger of serious delinquency but clearly bright, and the social worker goaded him into agreeing to sit the scholarship exam for The Abbott’s School.

This was the grand, grey-stone public school where Sean had often joined the townie gang in attacking boys who wore the strange uniform – but now he was to be one of them. He’d listened outside the door after his interview – ‘Oh, the poor boy, think of what he’s gone through, yes, yes let’s extend a helping hand.’

So Sean Cawson received the academic scholarship and the sports bursary and the charity award that topped up the rest and meant he could go for free. By the age of fifteen, he had become a chameleon at Abbott’s, sloughing off the misfits who would have been his natural friends and gravitating instead to the leaders of the pack, in sport and academic excellence. There he worked out the answer to the question he’d always pondered, about fairness and beauty and ugliness and justice. It was wealth.

Sean blinked. Not eleven in the care home, not in the dorm at Abbott’s. In the kayak, frozen. The current had taken him closer to the ice face – how long had he been zoned out, thinking of the past? A few seconds – a couple of minutes? The temperature had dropped and the light was that milky veil that can suddenly appear in Arctic air like a spell, blanking out contours, hiding crevasses, wiping out direction.

His heart slammed. In the few seconds he had mentally drifted, the current had taken him directly in front of the mouth of the cave into the glacier from which Tom’s body emerged. It was deep; the ice was the darkest blue he had ever seen, and as he paddled backwards, he could hear the echo of his blade striking the water. His ears blocked as if he were airborne and his mouth was dry. The new cave was the source of the pull in the water, it had changed the current pattern of the fjord.

He felt a terrible urge to go in, but he knew that was crazy, like standing on a high cliff and thinking of jumping. Of course he would not do it. He braced his feet and bladed back, admiring the cobalt twists in the ice, the darkest sapphire catching flashes from the water. There was nothing more beautiful than Arctic ice.

Something touched him. Not physically – but he felt it in the prickling of his scalp – something was there, around him or under him. He stared into the cave but saw nothing; he looked down and the water was grey-green translucent. Then he looked up.

Standing on the lip of the glacier, staring down from directly above him, was an enormous male polar bear. It was close enough for Sean to see the duelling scar that twisted his black lip, giving the impression of a cynical smile. It must have stalked him while he was years away, and now they had come together.

Sean dug his paddle to move away from the cave but caught another current that pushed him closer to the ice face. The bear watched with interest and slowly walked along the edge above him, keeping pace.

Sean knew not to take his eyes from it. He felt it most distinctly – the bear was pondering leaping in now, or waiting a little longer. If he came closer, if he lost control and capsized, it would take the chance and jump. Bears had been known to go for kayakers before, but always from the shore.

This glacier was high – but the bear was enormous and highly intelligent; it knew the currents – it was standing waiting for him. When he met its gaze, he felt it willing him to panic and make a mistake. He stared back with equal force and ignored the jolt of fear down both legs.

The current was a muscle of water writhing around his paddle, tugging it under the kayak. The light glittered and the mountains reared up black and strobing around him, locking him in. The bear lowered its head, looking for where to jump. He wanted a knife – why had he not brought a knife with him? He might have done something with a knife …

As the bear gathered itself, a sharp growl bounced against the granite walls of the fjord, and it looked up in irritation. The vibration of the Zodiac engine came through the water. Sean did not take his eyes away – the bear would still strike, even now. Man and animal felt each other’s stare. Advantage animal – but man was lucky. The bear turned and loped away up the glacier and out of sight.

Danny Long slowed the Zodiac as he approached, his rifle on his back. Benoit, Jiaq, and two young blonde women were his passengers, all wearing bright orange survival suits and busy photographing the scenery. They had not seen it.

‘Excuse me, sir: the guests wished to come out.’

Sean reached down into himself for human speech again.

‘Of course.’

Long carefully circled the Zodiac around behind Sean, giving him the benefit of the wake to help him out of the current. ‘How is it, in the kayak?’

‘Great,’ Sean said over his shoulder. ‘But no one else out alone. The current.’ He scanned the slopes. The bear had vanished and he was glad.

‘Yes, sir. It’s changed, I noticed as well.’

Sean left Kingsmith’s guests exclaiming over the colour of the glacier and paddled back. Only as he boarded the plane that evening did he realise he had not thought about Tom for a moment out there. He had gone to see where he’d died, and mourn, but instead the confrontation with the bear had made him feel truly alive, and even joyful. Sitting on the plane coming back, he missed Tom with a fierce longing for that friendship, and for everything else he had lost.

This snowless ice-plain is like a life without love – nothing to soften it. The marks of all the battles and pressures of the ice stand forth just as when they were made, rugged and difficult to move among. Love is life’s snow. It falls deepest and softest into the gashes left by the fight – whiter and purer than snow itself. What is life without love? It is like this ice – a cold, bare, rugged mass, the wind driving it and rending it and then forcing it together again, nothing to cover open rifts, nothing to break the violence of the collisions, nothing to round away the sharp corners of the broken floes – nothing, nothing but bare, rugged drift-ice.

Friday, 15 December 1893

Farthest North: The Norwegian Polar Expedition 1893–1896 (1897)

Fridtjof Nansen