The Lightkeeper's Wife - By Karen Viggers Page 0,73
wings. It’s hot and searing like white light over ice. It’s like finding myself again after a decade, and not knowing who I am.
17
The first time I saw an aurora I was awestruck. We were four or five days south of Hobart on the Southern Ocean and I had been asleep in my cabin when someone came clattering down the corridor, banging on doors. ‘Hey, everybody. Get up. There’s an aurora outside. The southern lights. Come on. It’s incredible.’
My cabin mate flicked on the lights and we started donning layers: thermals, woollen shirts, fleece trousers, jackets, freezer suits, gloves, hats. Out in the corridor there was a buzz of activity and a flow of bodies heading for the bridge. I joined the trail of people clomping up the stairs and out onto the helideck. We then filed up again to a deck above the bridge where a group was milling quietly in the dark beside the warmth of the heating vent.
‘There’s a lull,’ a girl said. ‘But it’ll come again.’
We waited in the shadows, tense with anticipation, willing the aurora to reappear across the black sky. Ahead, the spotlights from the ship glowed on the water, piercing the dark. I wondered if we’d really see anything as elusive and ethereal as an aurora with all this extraneous light.
And then, there it was, an awakening in a high corner of the sky. A flicker, then a soft rippling sheet of pale yellow light that rose and fell on itself like a veil of smoke. It shimmered, surged and swelled, reaching and twisting, before subsiding as suddenly as it had appeared.
Stunned, we waited.
Another part of the sky lit up, ghostly fingers of fluctuating light that flickered and swirled before dancing right across the heavens in a thin trail. Wavering in curtains, rising and falling, spreading, glimmering, folding, pulsing, flaring and receding. Quivering up and down. Dropping off again.
I realised I’d been holding my breath. How could there be such beauty as this?
‘This is nothing,’ an old-timer grunted. ‘You haven’t seen an aurora till you’ve seen them midwinter. They’re stronger. More colourful. And they last for hours.’
Nobody listened to him. People who go south too often get jaded, and then even the extraordinary can become mundane. While he returned to his warm bed, the rest of us maintained our vigil on the bridge, creeping closer to the warmth of the heating vent as the cold pressed in. We were bonded in reverent silence, waiting for the heavens to light up again.
Lying awake beside Emma this morning reminds me of seeing that first aurora. Naked beneath her sheets, I’m achingly aware, alive with feelings of discovery and disbelief. Beside me, she is warm and incredibly relaxed, her arms and legs skewed and her head thrown back on the pillow. The fingers of one hand are tangled loosely in mine. Even in sleep, she seems confidently in possession of herself, so unalarmed by the enormity of the world.
It’s pleasant to lie here watching her in the dim light. Her face is slack and her mouth partly open. My eyes trace the strong line of her nose, the high curve of her cheeks, the hint of white teeth. Her lips are full and soft and I recall the sensation of them moving eagerly beneath mine, biting at me last night in passion. Her eyelids are open a little too. I want to shut them to protect her eyes, yet I’m afraid to reach out across the short space between us in case I disturb her, for then my peaceful observation of her would end. You can’t study someone as closely as this when they’re awake. It’d be a violation of privacy.
I’m still unsure how we came to this last night—whether it was the beer, or the talk of Antarctica. Now that I’m sober, it’s not regret that I feel, but an uncomfortable fragility, as if my skin is cracking open and I’m morphing into something else. As I bask in the warmth of Emma’s body, I can feel something within me gaining a momentum that will soon be too big for me to stop.
I decide I must leave. Gently, I disentangle my hand from Emma’s fingers, but her eyes open fully and engage me. She is momentarily languid and then her hand snaps onto my arm, pinning it.
‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘You’re not going.’ Her eyes are intense. ‘Don’t run. I’m not scary.’