Ian McEwan - Solar

As best he could, he looked about him. The nearest houses were four hundred metres away, and showed great blank walls with one or two miniature windows – bathroom windows surely. Oh to be there, in a heated tiled room, barefoot in his pyjamas, taking a leisurely piss before crawling back under the duvet for one extra hour. But he could go right here, in the ditch, turn his back to the wind, remove his gloves, grapple bare-fingered with the frozen chunky zip of his one-piece snowmobile suit, grope under his jacket to reach the shoulder buckles of his salopettes and somehow push them down, burrow past sweater, shirt, long silk under-shirt, long johns, underpants, to gain at last the moment of the release he dared not think about. No, it was too difficult, it would have to wait, and besides, he felt better as soon as he was sitting down in the saddle of his snowmobile.

It was an underpowered motorbike on skids and easy enough to drive. One twist of the throttle on the right handlebar and the thing slid forward with the shriek of an overworked engine and a puff of stinking black exhaust. Within seconds he was bouncing across the plain, following through the sight holes of his goggles the tracks left by the rest of the group, which were mercifully side-lit by the rising sun. The wind, suddenly a sixty-mile-an-hour gale, cut through his layers, his nostril hairs stiffened into steel pins, his teeth, all his teeth, ached, his face felt peeled raw. By a miracle of osmosis, every breath he exhaled found its way inside his goggles and froze, and within ten minutes he could see nothing at all but blurry crystals and had to stop. Jan pulled alongside. Surprisingly, he was sympathetic.

‘This you do.’

He raised a flap of flimsy tin casing and wedged the goggles over the engine. They were on a tongue of land, some three hundred metres wide, that ran between two lakes, or perhaps it was a bay, perhaps the sea was close by. Beard was too cold to ask. The endless snow was orange in the morning sunlight, their track ahead led straight towards a low mountain range many miles off, and hovering over it, or behind it, was a long tube of black cloud. He would have stepped away to relieve himself while they waited, but now the wind was even harsher, and perhaps his need was not really so pressing. It was incredible, he thought, no, it was criminal, that the citizens of Spitsbergen should think it reasonable to go about in this climate on a kind of motorbike, when some kind of humanely enclosed vehicle with a heater, a proper windscreen, a seat with a backrest – a car! – might save a life or two. His moment of indignation briefly diverted him and it was only when he was back in the saddle, wearing his deiced goggles, and driving once more into a roar of fiery air, that he realised he had arrived at a point when he must make an immediate choice: stop and piss now, or allow his bladder to rupture, which would cause him to die of an internal infection, or drench himself and freeze to death. But he kept going. He guessed there remained a hundred kilometres to cover, he was doing forty kilometres an hour. Two and a half hours. Clearly impossible.

But still he did not stop. He distracted himself by attempting to recall the last occasion he had urinated. Surely it was at Longyearbyen airport, while he waited for his luggage, late at night, the day before yesterday. Thirty-five hours without a piss. Had he simply forgotten? Was he really that busy?

The moment he understood that it was the cold that had confused him and made him add the extra day, he stopped, and in his eagerness half fell off the snowmobile onto the track. He heard Jan’s machine bump into the rear of his, but he did not look back as he hurried away. It was a different kind of terrain they were on now. Their route made a shallow S through a gully enclosed on each side by thirty-foot walls of rock and ice. A vestigial sense of propriety drew him to the base of one wall, as though to a urinal, where he stood doubled up, with his back to the wind, and used his teeth to pull off the outer glove on his right hand. He heard Jan call out to him, but could not bear to be spoken to now. Biting at the end of each finger in turn, he worked the glove lining off. Immediately, his hand became numb and slow. It took him more than two minutes to unfasten the zip of his snowmobile suit, and then he found that he needed two hands to get through his jacket to the shoulder releases of his salopettes, so he pulled off the gloves on his left hand with his slow-moving right. Once more, his goggles were misting up and freezing over. But he had to admire his own calm, as he delved and tugged through the layers, as his precious body warmth bled out into the vicious cold and the wind whipped round his back, into the cliff and onto his face. Only in the final seconds, when his clumsy pink hand, as cold as a stranger’s, reached into his underpants, did he think he might lose control. But at last, with a joyous shout that was lost to the gale, he directed his stream against the ice wall.

His mistake was to wait a few seconds at the end, as men of his age tended to do, mindful that there might be more. He should have turned his head to hear what Jan had shouted. Or perhaps he could only have avoided the inevitable if he had accepted one of the other invitations, to the Seychelles or Johannesburg or San Diego, or if, as he thought later with some bitterness, climate change, radical warming above the Arctic Circle, was actually taking place and was not a figment of the activist imagination. For when his business was done he discovered that his penis had attached itself to the zip of his snowmobile suit, had frozen in hard along its length, the way only living flesh can do on sub-zero metal. He wasted precious seconds, gazing at his situation in shock. When at last he pulled tentatively, he experienced intense pain. And he was already in pain from the cold.

He remained standing with his legs apart, facing the rock wall. He did not dare do as one might with a sticking plaster, and rip himself away in one stroke. He had read of an American hiking alone in the wilderness who got his arm trapped behind a rock and sawed through his own elbow with a penknife. Beard was not that kind of dedicated person, and after all, an elbow, a forearm, a hand were one of a pair and, to an extent, disposable. As the polar wind raged against the cliff-face and rebounded against his shivering form, he watched in horror as his penis shrank even smaller, and curled tighter against the zip. And not only was it shrinking before his eyes, but it was turning white. Not the white of a blank page, but the sparkling silver of a Christmas bauble.

He was close to panicking, but could not bring himself to call for help. It was additionally difficult not to panic with his head smothered by carpet underlay and a thick helmet and goggles with diminishing visibility. For want of anything else to do, he covered himself with a cupped hand, a hand like a block of ice. He was beginning to feel sluggish, even sleepy, the way people are supposed to be in extreme cold, and his thoughts lurched in slow motion. He saw Jock Braby on TV proclaim an obituary through a forgiving smile. He went to see global warming for himself. Nonsense, of course he would survive. But this was it, a life without a penis. How his ex-wives, especially Patrice, would enjoy themselves. But he would tell no one. He would live quietly with his secret. He would live in a monastery, do good works, visit the poor. As he stood dithering, he wondered for the first time in his adult life whether there might be purposeful design in human lives, and entities like Greek gods, imposing ironies, extracting revenge, imposing their rough justice.

But the rationalist in Michael Beard died hard. There was a problem, and he should attempt to solve it. He was reaching lugubriously into the inside pocket of his jacket. In his post-doc years he had worked for a while in low-temperature physics, but even as a schoolboy, as Fatso Beard, bad at games, a swot at science, he knew the basics. Pure ethanol froze at minus one hundred and fourteen degrees, everyone knew that. Brandy at eighty per cent proof would be forty per cent ethanol by volume, giving a freezing point of… minus forty-five point six. At last, the hip flask was in his hand, the top came off after only a brief struggle, and generously he poured his libation and within seconds he was free.