Chilled, Laura slid her hands inside the sleeves of Zach's jumper to his elbows, the fine hairs thrumming under the friction of her palms. His skin had a timbre all its own, a timbre which neither cold nor distance could deaden.
'We've all got our voices, Max.'
With a guilty look Max spit out the ribbing of his crewneck.
'You aren't even listening to me,' Laura said. Then it struck her what Max had been humming under his breath. 'He's played that to you?' It's ours, it's private, how dare he.
'Zach thinks a lot in music. Sometimes I can't help overhearing.'
She studied him for a moment. 'Now?' she asked softly.
At first it seemed he wouldn't answer. Laura waited, her skin tingling as though warming from a near frozen state. Waited, because silence spoke in her loudest voice.
'Remember that silly rhyme I used to chant when I was little?' Max said at last. 'You know, before going to sleep?'
'How could I forget? Bad man, don't talk. Bad man, don't stalk. Got my hawk. Got my hawk. You didn't even know what it meant.'
'I never told you what it meant.'
She eyed him but a quick glance at her clock warned her that their mum was likely to appear at any moment. 'So?'
'So that's what Zach does. Plays the clarinet in his head.'
Sarcastically, 'To keep away the bad man?'
'Even smart people can be superstitious.' Max reached for his neckline again, then thought better of it. 'Laura, you don't understand how terrified he is that he's going to lose you.'
This time it was their dad at the door. A feeble grin to accompany a feeble joke. 'OK you two, bedtime. Doctor's orders.' He waved a hand at the toffee packet. 'And don't forget to brush your teeth.'
Her dad would have to do the telling.
* * *
At first Laura's mum remained solicitous, almost affectionate. There were special dishes, and special privileges-a TV brought into the bedroom, household chores suspended temporarily-and not a single overt reproach about Zach, though after a few days had passed, she began to wonder, with quite a girlish laugh, whether Owen was afraid of catching something.
'They've got enough kids as it is,' Laura snapped. 'Why don't you ask if you can adopt him?'
Her mum's brow knit and her lips stitched in a way that meant duck, but then she gathered her unravelling temper together-Laura could see the muscles under her mum's skin stretching into a forbearing smile, as though a Fulgur evaluation team had just come into the room.
In the weeks that followed, winter became oppressive, a race you knew was forfeit the instant you hit the water, a race that by everyone's reckoning, yours included, you ought to win. There's no explaining it. You're fit again. You're back in school. You're seeing Zach but still you swim through February as though the pool contained slushy, greying, slightly grainy snow, not water.
It happens to everyone, Janey claims. The better part of a race is in the mind.
Zach remained in his flat where Laura stayed the night at least once, sometimes twice a week. Her mum accepted this arrangement with distaste but no real opposition, evidently fearful of what Laura might do if permission were refused. As usual, her dad said little, but Laura noticed a certain gleam in his eyes when her mum asked about Laura's plans for the evening, a gleam which he hid by clearing the plates or examining the new Mancala board he'd bought; he had a large vintage collection, corresponded with aficionados worldwide, and had even written a book about regional varieties of the game, whose mathematical complexities he claimed rivalled any of the more popular mindsports.
At the end of the month Laura worked up her courage to attend one of Zach's meetings on her own, which was held after hours in a public library. The small room was crowded, mostly with couples who could afford babysitters for the evening and a meal afterwards in a restaurant with starched white tablecloths, serried ranks of cutlery, and a sommelier. Zach was far too coolheaded, too circumspect, to glare at her but it took every bit of her self-control not to get up and leave.
'Not tonight,' he said when she caught up with him by the water cooler. Slowly he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand while he glanced at his companions, one the medical student who had been at the first meeting she'd attended, the other the sort of twenty-something professional woman who made Laura feel scruffy and tongue-tied. Though discreet about their relationship, Zach had become more willing to hazard, occasionally, going out together in public-a visit to an art exhibit he was keen to show her, an hour at a caf? 'Notoriety has its perks,' he'd said wryly. All the more shocking, then, when the woman gave him a foxy smile and dragged the student out of earshot.
'There's some stuff I need to discuss with them,' Zach said.
'With them? Or with her?'
'I don't want you coming to these meetings.'
Two spots of colour flamed in Laura's cheeks. 'It's you who doesn't want to sleep with me, not the other way round.'
'I'll ring you tomorrow.'
And Laura was left staring after them in a rage. Did he think that she wanted to go to art galleries when all her mates were at concerts and clubs or just watching TV with a couple of packets of crisps, some beer, and a good long uncomplicated snog?
'Think I don't know you're scared?' she hissed. 'Bloody terrified that it won't be fairytale perfect?'
She whipped out her mobile and rang Owen.
Chapter 38
'What does your name mean?' Pani asks.
'What a little pest you are!' Zach says, caught off guard.
'Names are important,' Pani insists, unabashed. 'They're part of your soul.'
'What makes you so sure I've got one?'
'If you've left it somewhere, I'll lend you a piece of mine.'
'Not the tailpiece, I hope.'
Pani ducks his head, but not before Zach catches sight of the merriment in the boy's eyes. Under other circumstances he'd have been the school daredevil, this lovely child. Zach leans forward and pantomimes a stitching movement in front of Pani's lips. 'I thought you didn't want anyone to hear us.'
At Pani's instigation the two of them have slipped away before the rest of the camp is fully awake, though they've been careful to avoid the communal room where, in a sleepy bustle, the aunties are beginning to prepare the morning meal. Weeks ago Pani and a few of the other lads excavated their own access route in a small storage annexe, the sort of enterprise that Zach remembers from his Foundation days. A narrow squeeze, this tunnel, and he refrains from suggesting that Uakuak is far too canny not to be aware of it. There's probably a great deal the old hunter doesn't reveal, particularly to his son.
Without a torch it's slow going, even though Pani swears to know every centimetre of the terrain. They struggle against a brisk headwind, which is the very reason for harpoon practice before the hunt. 'My father took his first seal when he was two years younger than me.' By the time they cross an unforgiving stretch of icy washboard sastrugi to reach the edge of a polynya, Zach promises himself ten minutes alone with Angu.
Pani delicately probes the matte surface of the water with his harpoon tip, then kneels in scrutiny. 'Ugurugizak-greasy ice.' He clears a patch not much larger than a breathing hole, lowers a weighted sealskin bladder, and passes the line to Zach. Rising and stepping back several metres, Pani readies his harpoon. As instructed, Zach waits for a self-determined interval before hauling up the target with a sharp jerk. The boy misses. They repeat the exercise. Again Pani misses, though not by much. Further attempts merely worsen Pani's aim, and he's unable to disguise his mounting frustration. After a while Zach calls a halt to walk about, clapping his hands together and stamping his feet. Despite caribou skin mitts and fur-lined parka-Uakuak insisted on outfitting Zach with as much 'proper' clothing as would fit-the cold is quick to penetrate his defences. Pani eyes him with a worried expression, the kind a much older lad might use towards a small brother with fever, a beloved dog who's just been injured.
'Are you OK?' Pani asks. 'Maybe we ought to go back.'
'A bit cold, that's all.'
Unconvinced, Pani shakes his head. 'Your face is too pale.' He'd of course know the signs of frostbite.
'Stop fussing, I'm fine. Let's give it one more try.'
Pani regards Zach a moment longer, then lays his harpoon aside and tugs at Zach's sleeve. 'Bend down,' he orders, and proceeds to blow on Zach's face till it begins to sting; on his eyes-his eyes, why hasn't he thought of that?
'Pani, do things sometimes looked blurred to you?'
'Not close up.'
'How close?'
'Arm's length, I guess.'
What kind of cruel joke is this? Program a young hunter to need glasses in a world where there's none to be had.
Pani roots in his pouch and hands Zach a piece of frozen blubber. 'Here, this will warm you.' Zach dislikes the fibrous consistency and especially the tracery of blood-the nutty flavour isn't actually unpleasant-but he chews on it as much to please Pani as to replenish his own energy while mulling the eyesight problem.
'You haven't answered me, Zach. About your name.'
Persistent little bugger. 'It comes from an ancient language nobody speaks any more.'
'Old like all good names. And it means?'
Zach's thoughts retreat before the barrage of questions, though it's hardly Pani's fault that the Purists are lobbying for their so-called simonym legislation-a proposal to rename all simus in accordance with strict guidelines which would make traditional forenames illegal, even as nicknames. Still hotly debated, yet more and more likely to be passed. Zach rubs a fist across his tattoo. 'Someday I'll have it removed surgically,' he told Laura. 'No, don't,' she said. 'I like it. It's part of you, you mustn't obliterate it.'
'A shaman's name, I reckon,' Pani says.
'No. It means God remembers.'
Persistent sly little bugger. One of these days somebody will knock that grin off his face if he's not careful. When Pani bends to retrieve his harpoon, Zach scoops up a handful of snow.
'You fight dirty,' Pani says a while later in surrender.
Zach turns away, memory lying in ambush behind every hummock and every pressure ridge like a council bleb with his snowball filled with shot. Removing a mitt, Zach stoops to run his fingers through the layer of windblown snow. Though Pani says nothing, Zach can feel his disapproval. Ice crystals are far more complex than described in school geography, even their names suggest a lyrical complexity: plates, stellars, columns, needles, spatial dendrites, capped columns, rimed, bullet rosettes, irregulars. This love of taxonomy-how much does it explain, how much conceal of the mystery of ice? It's staggering that no two crystals are identical when composed of nothing more than water, than a hexagonal latticework of H2O molecules nucleated under supercooling. Again Zach scrapes up some of the astonishing stuff to study before it melts, as though he could somehow magnify the flakes to reveal their exquisite fingerprints.
'Stop that!' This time Pani feels obliged to interfere. Zach wipes his hand on a sleeve and slides it back into his mitt. The air is surprisingly dry, and between them they empty the seal-flipper water pouch which Pani is carrying under his parka. Drinking is meant to help keep the skin from freezing; Zach wonders if any simus were included in the trials. Pani goes for a refill from a nearby drift-unmelted snow only increases your thirst, he warns-while Zach turns back to the polynya to pee. As a man it's wicked enough to lower his trousers at these temperatures; what must it be like for a woman! The splash of laughter, unmistakable, is disconcerting enough to spray his boots.
He swings round, hastily sorting out his unfinished business. Pani is staring out over the pack ice, and Zach can tell from his stance, a taut predatory stillness, that the boy is all attention. There's something he's trying to make out. If someone laughed, it wasn't Pani.
'What is it?' Zach calls. 'A seal?' The wind snatches away his words. Skirting a finger of the polynya to move closer, he hears a low grinding noise which brings him to a standstill-a primeval sound of rupture, he'll tell himself later, and the memory will become the septic forceps of sweat-drenched nightmare, tearing him from sleep. But now there's no time to think, and no time to take fright, no time to register the frantic movements of a figure emerging from the distant iglu, the scrambling and frenzied barking of the dogs, no time to hesitate or prognosticate or levitate while, in slowtime, the ice buckles and folds beneath his feet, folds and buckles and tears the caul of time in this thin cold place.
'Pani!' he cries, and leaps towards the boy.
And then there is only silence, and cold, and suffocating snow.
'He was born with a caul.' Slowly Zach raises his head against the snowy weight of memory, his mother's words overheard long ago, then explained and soon forgotten; frozen words, jarred loose by the quake.
The light is blue, so deep and pervasive a blue that at first he sees nothing but blue. He spits snows from his mouth, shakes his head, extracts the clumps jammed into the neckline of his parka and beginning to trickle down his back, then works himself to all fours. His own cap, oddly enough, still covers his ears though the hood has slipped back. If anything is broken, he's too numb (or concussed) to feel it. More confidently he scrambles to his feet. Above him stretch high, near-vertical walls of ice and a jagged shard of the sky. In the strange light it's difficult to guess how far he's fallen. 'Pani! Where are you? Are you OK?'
'Zach?' Pani's face appears at the edge of the crevasse and he begins to laugh with predictable resilience. 'You look like a snowman.'
