shameful abuse that she will never be able to prove?
The terrain grows steeper and her footsteps noisier as each step sends loose shale scurrying down the slope. Once, she looks back and sees a torch beam near the water’s edge, a long way below. The voice she hears next, though, is as clear as if someone walked beside her.
He’s not dead then?
Felicity stops walking and remembers. There was a shot, a sound so loud that even the chaos of the wind seemed to die down in shock. She remembers the building shaking, parts of it falling, she remembers turning and running. Did he shoot her? Shoot her and miss?
No. She looks down and sees her own right hand raised, clutching the torch, as though holding a gun, and she remembers seeing the gun in her own hand. She remembers firing and dropping it in horror at what seemed exactly the same moment. She remembers Freddie crying out and then falling. She shot him.
How is that possible? She doesn’t own a gun. She has never even fired a gun.
Felicity’s chest tightens and suddenly her head is full of voices, each of them clamouring to be heard. They tell her to flee up the glacier, to turn around and head for Grytviken, that she is a killer, that she is useless, that she’s always been useless, that she deserves everything she gets and more. So much is being shouted at her, each voice contradicting the last.
She starts to run and realises she is heading the wrong way, back down to Husvik. Stopping again, she struggles to get her breath. She has a vision of her skull bones, pulsating outwards, being stretched to the point where they might shatter, because the contents of her head has become a virulent, violent mob.
Bewildered, fighting back sobs, she sets off again, up this time, pushing her body to climb higher, move faster. If she slows down for even a moment, she’ll have to ask herself what the hell is happening. She pushes on, as the great towers and peaks of the glacier emerge from the darkness and she closes her ears to the rancour in her head. She’s reached the snowline when a single voice sings up, louder and clearer than the others.
He’ll come after us, you know that, don’t you? He’ll never give up.
Felicity stops walking. She knows that voice. She’s heard it before.
‘Who are you?’ She speaks quietly, knowing her voice doesn’t need to carry. The conversation she is having is entirely in her own head. The voices have always been her own. A gust of icy wind blows down from the glacier, lifting her hair and cooling her hot scalp. She has a sense of having reached a fork in the road. The noise in her head abates a little, and with the settling quiet comes a sense of – more.
She is bigger than she knows. She is more.
‘Who are you?’ she repeats and this time she wants the answer.
I’m Bamber, says one of her other selves. Hello, Felicity.
Felicity takes courage and says, ‘Are you me?’
Oh no. The denial is instant and immediate. A second later the tone becomes more considered. But you might say so.
The voice is her, but not her? It makes no sense. What the hell is happening to her? ‘Stop it,’ Felicity says. ‘Go away.’
She sets off again, faster, but this time, she isn’t entirely sure who she is running from.
70
Joe
‘Christ, does nobody in this place sleep?’
It is nearly one o’clock in the morning when Jack enters the common room of the Bird Island research station, where Ralph and Joe have been sharing the last few inches of a bottle of scotch. The station can sleep ten, mainly in two dorm rooms, and they’ve all been provided with beds. Neither Joe nor Ralph have been to bed yet.
‘My mother,’ Joe replies, ‘went out like a light at ten.’
‘Seasickness does that to you.’ Ralph tops up both their drinks. ‘She ate well though. Glasses in the cupboard, Jack.’
Earlier, they’d had a surprisingly good dinner of reindeer steak with a salad of dandelion leaves and tussock roots. Jan had even baked her own bread. The station is warm, given the storm blowing outside, and Joe is surprised at how comfortable he’s been made. He still doesn’t feel like sleeping though.
‘Takes a lot to put Mum off her food,’ he says.
‘So, is there a dad in the picture?’ Ralph asks.
Jack is hiding a smile as he joins them.
‘They divorced when I was