Free The Lightkeeper's Wife by Karen Viggers Page A

time.
    Bazza is watching me.
    ‘I don’t think I can go,’ I say. ‘I’ve got too much work on.’
    ‘You should go. It’ll only be for an hour or so. And they need support for these things. They’re always asking the bios to give talks about their work and then nobody goes.’
    ‘What about you? Are you going?’
    Bazza winks at me. ‘I go home early that day. It’s card night. But if it was a Thursday . . .’
    ‘You’re full of it, Bazza.’
    ‘Yeah, mate. But Emma’s a nice girl. She’ll give a good talk.’
    I put the flyer down and pick up my pie. ‘I’ll see how I’m going at work. Now, about this truck . . .’
    Bazza looks at me and shakes his head.
    On my return to the car Jess greets me joyously. Bazza made me take one of the flyers for the seminar and I toss it on the dashboard. I rub Jess about the ears. ‘How you going, girl?’
    She tries to scramble onto my lap and I indulge her in a crowded hug for a moment before pushing her back down to the floor. She’s all doggie smiles and wiggly body. I wish humans could show their pleasure as transparently as dogs. We’re all so self-contained.
    ‘We’ve got work to do,’ I remind her. ‘Then we can go for a walk after dinner.’
    Walk and dinner , two words that she knows. She pants happily up at me from the floor on the passenger side.
    On the drive back to the garage, the flyer slips from the dashboard onto Jess’s head and then to the floor. I scoop it up and put it on the seat. I wonder what this Emma Sutton is like. The young female scientists are generally the most temporary of all the staff. They have a few seasons in them before their lives are screwed up by a series of ice-based relationships that usually fail to survive back in the real world. Then they leave for other pursuits and to sort out their lives.
    But it’s not always as simple as that. I only had one season south and I’m still not sorted out. Bazza thinks I should be over it. But I’m not. It’ll haunt me all my life.

6
    There’s something about Antarctica that locks you in for life. Maybe it’s the landscape; so wild and bare and sparse. Or maybe it’s seeing so much white. Or the relationships, all so intense. Whatever it is, somehow, in all that vast space and luminous light, you become transformed. You discover a new self. An ability to melt into distance. An uplifting sensation of freedom. At the same time, eternal yearning is born. You want to return. To reunite with the self you uncovered down there, a self unchecked by normal boundaries. When you go back to your old world, along with the other injuries Antarctica has inflicted, raw longing rules you. Your soul is in bondage. The healing takes years.
    As my wife pointed out later, Antarctica is not something you can share with people who haven’t been there. You can’t show them how light shimmers over ice or glints from the angled faces of icebergs. When you talk about Antarctica after you return, you see the reflection of your craziness in people’s faces. It’s like grieving a death; those whose lives haven’t been touched can’t understand. So your isolation thickens. You wonder how you can feel more alone in a city of sixty thousand than in a field hut twenty kilometres from base.
    For just over a year, Antarctica was my reality. I went, and I came back. My old life tried to reimpose itself, but parts of the puzzle were missing. They were lost in light and space. Captured by wind. Trapped in a blizzard. That’s the cost.
    Antarctica keeps part of you forever. You can never bring your whole self back again.
    My wife Debbie found the ad on the Antarctic Division website for a diesel mechanic to overwinter at Davis Station; which would mean two summers and a winter away from home. We’d been married a year and bought a house. It was nothing fancy, and the mortgage wasn’t huge, but neither of us had impressive incomes, so the loan was a financial constraint. I wasn’t much of a spender, but