Ian McEwan - Solar

When he put it away, his unfortunate cock was as hard as ice, but no longer white. It was also stinging, an excruciating hot-needle pain that slowed his efforts to get dressed. After ten minutes, in one piece at last, he turned and stumbled back onto the track and found his guide waiting.

‘Sorry about that. Call of nature.’

Jan caught hold of his elbow. ‘You in bad shape, man. Look, you dropped your boots off your neck. We go both on my bike. We gonna pick up your machine later.’

He let himself be guided to Jan’s snowmobile and it was there that the calamity finally happened. As he raised a leg to hoist himself onto his place behind the guide, he felt, and even thought he heard, a terrible rending pain in his groin, a cracking and a parting, like a birth, like a glacier calving. He gave a shout, and Jan turned to steady him and settle him in place.

‘It’s one hour, is all. You’ll be OK.’

Something cold and hard had dropped from Beard’s groin and fallen down inside the leg of his longjohns and was now lodged just above his kneecap. He put his hand between his legs and there was nothing. He put his hand on his knee and the hideous object, less than two inches long, was stiff like a bone. It did not feel, or it no longer felt, like a part of himself. Jan kick-started the engine and they set off at a crazy speed, careening over ice ridges as hard as concrete, swerving round near-vertical banks like reckless adepts in a velodrome. Why was he not at home in bed? Beard cowered out of the wind behind Jan’s broad back. The burning sensation in his groin was spreading, his cock had slipped round and was nestling under the crook of his knee, and they were speeding in the wrong direction, hurtling northwards towards the Pole, deeper into the wilderness, into the frozen dark, when they should have been rushing towards a well-lit emergency room in Longyearbyen. Surely, the intense cold would work to his advantage, keeping the organ alive. But microsurgery? In Longyearbyen, population fifteen hundred? Beard thought he was about to be sick, but instead he slipped his hands through the belt at the back of Jan’s jacket and let his head drop onto his protector’s spine and fell into a doze, and it was only the sudden silencing of the snowmobile’s motor that woke him, and he saw looming above him out of the ice the dark hull of the ship where he would spend the week.

It turned out that Beard was the only scientist among a committed band of artists. The entire world and all its follies, one of which was to warm up the planet, was to their south, which seemed to be in every direction. Before dinner that night in the mess room, the convenor, Barry Pickett, a benign and wizened fellow, who had rowed across the Atlantic single-handed before he devoted his life to recording the music of nature (the rustling of leaves, the crashing of waves), addressed the gathering of the Eighty Degrees North Seminar.

‘We are a social species,’ he began, with the kind of biological flourish that Beard generally distrusted, ‘and we cannot survive without some basic rules. Up here, in these conditions, they are even more important. The first concerns the boot room.’

It was simple enough. Below the wheelhouse was a cramped, underlit changing room. All coming on board must stop there and remove and hang up their outer layers. On no account was wet, snowy or iced-up clothing to be brought into the living quarters. Prohibited items included helmets, goggles, balaclavas, gloves, boots, wet socks and snowmobile suits. Wet, snowy, icy or dry, they were to remain in the boot room. Penalty for infringement was certain death. There was forgiving laughter from the good-natured artists, pink-faced, sensible folk in chunky sweaters and work shirts. Beard, squashed in a corner with his fifth glass of Libyan vin de pays, dosed up on painkillers and in pain, constitutionally hostile to groups, feigned a smile. He did not like to be part of a group, but he did not want the group to know. There were other rules and housekeeping items, and his attention was drifting. From behind Pickett, from the galley on the other side of an oak-veneered wall, came the smell of frying meat and garlic, and the sounds of spoons against saucepans and the hectoring growl of the international chef chivvying an underling. Hard to ignore the kitchen when it was already eight twenty and there had been nothing to eat for hours. Not being able to eat when he chose was one of the freedoms Beard had left behind in the foolish south.

All day the sun had stood barely five degrees above the horizon, and at two thirty, as though giving up on a bad job, it had sunk. Beard witnessed the moment through a porthole by his bunk, where he lay in agony. He saw the flat snowy vastness of the fjord turn blue, then black. How could he have imagined that being indoors eighteen hours a day with twenty others in a cramped space was a portal to liberty? On arrival, as he passed through the mess room on his way to find his quarters, the first thing he had seen, propped in a corner, was an acoustic guitar, surely awaiting its strummer and a tyrannous sing-along. A large section of bookcase was taken up with board games, and ancient packs of cards. He might as well have checked into an old people’s home. Monopoly was surely among the games, and here was reason for further regret. Jan had helped him off the snowmobile, half carried him up the gangplank, and shown him into the boot room. Moving slowly, with grunts and moans, Beard had set about removing his outer layers, unzipping his snowmobile suit, terrified of what he was about to discover. In the deep gloom of the place it took a while to find an unoccupied station to hang his stuff on, and as he did, on hook number twenty-eight, he heard a pleasant, deep female voice behind him saying kindly,

‘This just dropped out the bottom of your trousers.’

He turned. It was Stella Polkinghorne holding out something thin and grey. It was actually in her hand, between her forefinger and thumb.

‘I think it’s your lipsalve.’

She said her name, he said his, they shook hands. She said she was deeply honoured to meet a great scientist, and he said that he was a long-time admirer of her work. It was only at this point that they released their hands. It was not exactly a beautiful face, but broad and friendly, with blonde hair straggling out from under a woollen cap. He liked the way her curious gaze met his. A broken front tooth gave her a reckless, humorous look. She said she was looking forward to getting to know him, and he said he felt the same about her, and then she hesitated, apparently not wanting to leave and unable to think of something else to say, and nor could he, distracted as he was by pain.

Then she said, ‘I’ll see you then,’ and she went through into the ship.

All afternoon he lay on his bunk in a haze of foolish schemes and regrets, examining and re-examining the damage to his skin, making plans for his immediate departure, and replaying his encounter. He could send an email urgently recalling himself to England. But he could not face the snowmobile journey back to the airport. A helicopter would have to come from Longyearbyen. How much did they cost? A thousand pounds an hour perhaps. Three hours then, worth every penny, to avoid singing ‘Ten Green Bottles’. Looking forward to getting to know him. That could mean anything. No, it meant only one thing. And what luck – he had seen from a schedule on a noticeboard that he was the only guest not sharing a cabin. But he was out of commission, possibly for weeks. He took another look. His injury resembled a scalding, he was swollen and pink, he needed to be alone, he wanted to go home, he should try and sit next to her at dinner tonight. But he would not be here. The helicopter was coming. But it would not fly at night. There were other kinds of sex they could have, or that she could have. What would be the point of that? Perhaps he was getting better. He took another peek.