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

7

London, four years earlier

Sean had found out about the Midgard sale, put together the proposal and finance, and fought to stay in negotiations. He was at the decisive final round of talks when it looked like Tom’s puritanical ego would destroy the whole venture.

‘I don’t want to do this.’ Tom hadn’t even waited for the meeting to officially start. The Pedersen family agent, Mogens Hadbold, their lawyer and their accountant, stared at Sean in confusion.

‘Wait.’ Sean felt like he was in a bad dream. ‘Tom, what is this?’ They were in a penthouse suite at Claridge’s, and Tom was holding up Sean’s bid proposal in its embossed leather cover.

‘I do not want the Pedersen family to sell their property,’ he said, ‘because it’s in such an environmentally sensitive location. The Arctic ecosystem is already massively stressed by warming seas. There is no more summer ice. Politicians pay lip-service to bringing the temperature down while quietly drawing dividends from their fossil fuel investments. We’ve got government ministers on the boards of oil companies. I don’t want that either, but that’s reality.’

Sean consciously relaxed his hands so they did not make fists. What an absolute fucker, telling him one thing and waiting until now—

‘But,’ Tom continued, ‘we’re here because someone is going to be chosen as the new owner. Someone is going to become responsible for that corner of the Arctic, at a most critical moment for its safety. I’m here to tell you that, if this sale is going to happen, I stand with this man to buy it. We’re here because the numbers are right.’

‘Certainly in the correct area,’ confirmed the family agent. ‘But above a particular threshold that Mr Cawson has passed, the family are even more concerned to select the correct buyer.’

‘I led Greenpeace for two years,’ Tom said. ‘I’ve been involved in environmental issues my whole life and I will continue to be. I’ve known Sean since we were at college together. I’ve learned a lot from him, and as I’m now in this room, I hope it’s become a two-way street. I used to turn my nose up at people whose main interest was money, because they didn’t seem to care how they made it. Now I’m less naïve. The only way the world will change for the better is if it is precisely those people who start thinking differently about profit.’ He looked at each of them in turn.

‘Last year’s coup in the Maldives cost every hotel group there untold sums as well as several lives. Many people saw it coming, the hotels were warned, they absolutely knew what was going on, but profit blinded them. Climate change means the poorest people suffer first – people who don’t buy organic or vote for liberal democracy. The Maldives is happening all over the world, in every poor country where the sea level is rising and the land is flooding.’

‘Mr Harding,’ Mogens Hadbold smiled patiently, ‘we all care—’

‘Caring is meaningless without action. We must stop the economic apartheid that is killing this planet.’

‘Tom, for pity’s sake!’ Sean was on his feet too. It was appalling, Tom was like a mad man, he hadn’t seen him like this before.

‘Sit down, Sean. You wanted me here, you wanted me on board, so let me continue. I’m nearly finished. Look at the world – a great big band of drought or flood that just happens to coincide with mineral resources, with political instability and then with foreign intervention by the very powers that benefit from the extractive rights. Powers that do not give a shit about the cost, human or natural, of that resource exploitation. What we’re looking at is a global environmental sacrifice zone – and the Arctic is just the latest part of it.’

Sean sat there, his face burning. Tom’s ego was out of control. How could he not have seen it? What was he doing now, with the mineral water? Holding it up to the big mirror on the mantelpiece. He looked mad, speaking to the flowers.

‘Bottled at source in the Alps. Where the shrinking snowline means only the highest resorts still exist, and their prices make even the rich feel poor. And if they’re starting to think about climate change, you know we’re in the last-chance saloon.’ He turned and came back to them. ‘When that chunk of Venice collapsed into the lagoon, the dead included guests at the Cipriani, as well as refugees.’

He drank again.

‘So if you’re not worried, you’re not paying attention. And if you are, then it is your moral and civic and patriotic duty to either keep your property and be vigilant stewards of the Arctic, or, ensure that you only sell to a buyer who will use it to be a vigilant pain in the arse to any and everyone who is trying to make a killing up there. I don’t know, you might be those people yourselves. I don’t know you, but I do know this man.’ He pointed to Sean.

‘Arctic obsession started our friendship. We’ve gone our separate ways, but that’s still our bond. He might have become a capitalist pig – but he’ll never do anything to destroy the Arctic, in any way. I know that. He’s clever or crazy enough to invite me to be a board member, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that people hear you better if you’re in the room, not yelling through a loudhailer from the street. That’s why I’m in with Sean: he knows the very people I want to reach, the brokers between governments and mining companies, the shipping people, the people who make things happen, or make things disappear. I’ll be in the room with them on this.’

He laid down the bid proposal on the table. ‘How can people say what they really think at places like Davos? It’s about being seen to do good, and someone with a vested interest in the outcome is always playing the host. Sean’s plan takes that layer away. A luxurious private retreat in Arctic grandeur – who doesn’t want to go there?’

Sean had to admire him. He was such a showman. No – that wasn’t fair. Protecting the environment was Tom’s life’s work, he had the broken bones, scars and jail time to show for it – as well as the adulation of thousands of people. He’d put all his money into it too, though his family had tried to stop him; Sean remembered hearing that.

‘Enough with the bleeding-heart liberals crying over the polar bears. I want the greediest, ugliest-thinking, most short-sighted, ego-crazed politicians and plutocrats we can find to stay in the place Sean will build on the shore of Midgardfjorden. There’s a reason men have risked their lives again and again for the Arctic; it shows you your soul, even if you think you don’t have one.

‘I’m naïve: I still believe you can reach people through their hearts. But I’m battle-scarred: profit speaks louder. Sean’s plan combines both those things. So that’s why I say that my first position is still no more development in the Arctic. But as it is happening, from all sides, as the summer ice has gone – twenty years ahead of government projections, and as it is a free-for-all, no matter what people say, then let us be there, let us try to guide development to do the minimum harm, and protect the life of this fragile, sublime, vulnerable environment. You can only lose it once.’

Tom walked round behind Sean and put his hands on his shoulders. ‘I know my friend and I trust him.’ He took his seat again.

No one spoke for a long moment. The atmosphere had shifted. The lawyer and the accountant were staring at Tom with that star-struck look Sean had seen on people’s faces before. Mogens Hadbold’s laptop pinged, two, three, four times, breaking the spell. Hadbold looked across to the mantelpiece and waved. Only then did Sean spot the tiny camera in the flower arrangement.

‘Yes,’ said Mogens Hadbold. ‘I’m sorry that I did not tell you the meeting was streaming live. They wanted to be present, but discreetly.’

He turned his laptop to face Sean and Tom, and the quartered screen showed different Pedersens on Skype.

‘That was very impressive,’ a female voice said, out of the screen. ‘We will let you know. Tak, Mogens.’

He replied in a rapid burst of Norwegian, and closed the laptop.

‘Mr Harding is something of a hero to the younger generation, you know this. They are the ones making all the big noise about the right buyer. The older ones – well, you know how we are as we get old. We like security. And money! But the young have the power.’ He stood up, as did the lawyer and accountant. ‘Thank you very much for returning.’ The meeting was over. Sean stood too.

‘You don’t want to ask me anything?’ He looked from one to the other. Mogens Hadbold shook his head. ‘We have looked into your partners, Miss Martine Delaroche and Miss Radiance Young. We are satisfied of your financial commitment. And of course we know Mr Harding’s environmental work. And you know Midgardfjorden, so there is no more to say on that. Everyone is clear what is on the table.’

They were both silent in the lift going down. Only when they were out on the street did Sean explode.

‘You knew there was a camera!’

‘Yep. Want a drink?’ Tom grinned. ‘I’m gasping.’

They went into the first place that smelled of beer. It was the middle of the afternoon, a strange time to be in a pub, but everything was strange. Sean had taken Tom to the presentation as his mascot; Tom had taken control. Sean had said almost nothing. Tom put his arm round his shoulder.

‘I wasn’t so bad, was I?’

‘You were an utter, utter bastard. They loved you.’

‘Didn’t overdo it?’

‘You chewed the furniture – I wanted to throttle you.’

‘You’re very welcome.’ Tom ordered two pints without asking what Sean wanted. Sean wasn’t a pubbish sort any more, certainly not any old boozer on a midweek afternoon. Not that he was in any state to do business – he was fizzing with energy and outrage at Tom’s hijacking of his event.

‘You are the most egotistical fucker I have ever met, Tom, you know that?’

‘If I’d gone in there all mealy-mouthed, you’d be dead in the water.’ Their pints came. They clinked.

‘Bastard.’

‘Bastard.’

They drank hard and talked lightly of current affairs, excluding the one with Martine. Tom thanked Sean for the picture. They discussed the latest closure of the Suez Canal, the skinhead revival, and remembered a mutual friend from college, recently killed reporting from Ukraine.

‘We underestimated him,’ Tom agreed. ‘A hero in our midst.’

‘Like you,’ Sean said. ‘You’re a hero. I mean it. Your life counts.’

Tom drained his pint. ‘Sean, so does yours. You can move mountains. You’ve pulled yourself up by your bootstraps.’

Sean felt a glow that was more than the beer, and the afternoon sun coming in through the sand-etched windows. Putting the world to rights with Tom, boozing an afternoon away. What a rare pleasure. He was about to tell him that; he might even have been about to tell him how much he’d missed him, after ordering another pair of pints, when the door opened and a beautiful girl walked in.

She was about twenty-five, fresh-faced, casually dressed. Without realising, Sean pulled in his belly and sat up straighter. She looked across and walked over. Her smile was lovely. Perhaps she’d been in one of his clubs, and recognised him. He prepared himself. Tom put his arm round her. They kissed.

‘I’m ready,’ he said.

‘Then hello and goodbye.’ She smiled at Sean, playful and polite.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Tom, she’s the image of Ruth.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘Is that a good thing?’ The girl looked from face to face. ‘Who is Ruth?’

‘Mutual friend,’ Tom said. ‘A brilliant woman.’

The girl’s smile lit her up. ‘Then I don’t mind at all.’

Sean gazed at her until Tom punched him lightly on the shoulder.

‘Let me know how much they hated me.’

Sean watched them disappear out onto the street, and into their shared afternoon. He found himself alone, quite drunk and acutely bereft.

The lovely girl was young enough to be Tom’s daughter, if he’d had one. This brought the image of his own sharply to Sean’s mind. Rosie, the angry sad child who could not understand how her father needed to feel like a man more than a husband. How her mother had changed into a woman who saw him as he really was, instead of the hero he wanted to be.

Sean knew he was drunk, but maybe that was the best way to tell Rosie how he felt. He wanted to say sorry, for so much. There at the bar he took out his phone. The call went straight through to her voicemail. At least it didn’t ring several times, as often happened, before going dead. That meant she knew it was him, and didn’t want to talk. This time, she was just busy. Then he called Martine, and the same thing happened.

Why did they not pick up? Sean left his pint unfinished. Only sad old men drank pints on their own in daylight. Tom had done this to him.

A bright burst of laughter seemed aimed at him and he turned. Two girls sat at a corner table, they looked away when he caught their eye – but not before flashing him a quick smile. He did not know what to do with himself; it was that awkward time when the pub was just filling up with the early after-work crowd, the low earners who couldn’t wait to get away. One minute he was enjoying a liberating freedom with Tom, drinking pints in an unfashionable pub at the hour they felt like doing it – and the next he was beached on the shores of other people’s lives – like some loser.

The girls sent arcs of laughter up through the air, they were lassoing him and drawing him over, they wanted to play. He looked in the mirror behind the bar, where he could see them angling their thighs towards him, rearranging their shiny hanks of hair.

Before he left, he spoke to the barman and bought a bottle of champagne to be sent over when he’d gone. Their faces fell as he went out, and he felt a grim satisfaction that he had not fallen for it, drunk as he was. He could have gone over and within a couple of drinks – maybe not even that – adjourned to somewhere more comfortable. A hotel. An hotel. He had learned to always use that weirdness, to demonstrate his adherence to the right set of rules. Inviting people for ‘a kitchen supper’, never ‘dinner’. Repeating ‘how do you do,’ instead of ever answering the question. In English society, nobody cared – that was something he learned too – and they would be horrified if you told them. But they always cared that you were rich.

Standing outside, Sean watched the girls receive the champagne. They were suitably over-excited and he drew back as they scanned the pub for him. What a strange thing to have done. It gave him no pleasure, he was just acting out the anxiety of waiting, of being compared and judged after the presentation. He should have just said that to Tom, but he’d been too busy struggling with the feeling of inadequacy because of how brilliant Tom had been. If they’d only had longer, and more to drink, he would have blurted it all out, they could have talked again like they used to – he could have told him about how it had gone wrong with Gail. Tom was kind, he was always kind, he would have known what to say. Instead, he’d gone off with that girl, who did look like a young Ruth. Tom had fucked things up too. Sean wasn’t the only one.

He slammed into the wall of the pub, drunker than he’d thought. When he and Tom had been drinking together, he’d been happy in a way he had forgotten, relaxing into that long-lost feeling of comradeship and solidarity. Only now did he realise he’d been looking forward to talking about their Greenland trip again, to indulging in a full-blown nostalgia fest, to drinking more, to calling Martine drunkenly to say he was having dinner – supper – with Tom, that it didn’t fucking matter what happened with the Midgard deal, at least they’d reconnected.

He peered through the pub window. To feel so disappointed was pathetic. Nostalgia was for people whose lives were over. Tom had a date, and those girls in there had been joined by two meaty-looking boyfriends. Sean watched some animated talk about the bottle and the boys jerked their necks and squared their shoulders in ritual male display for the rich sod who’d undercut them.

Aimlessly drunk, emotionally disorderly, he decided to clear his head and walk back to Devon Square through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, in the hope of seeing the cavalry.