Free Hemispheres by Stephen Baker Page B

breathing.
     Emptied my conscious brain until the night country moved through me, the clay lands of the Vale of York, wide fields and ancient
     woodland, flat country and hill country, sleeping villages and dreaming farms. Hawthorn hedges knitting the land like sutures.
     A flock of sheep ghostly in the damp night. One or two of them coughing in their sleep, facing the east where the light was
     already beginning to mass. Wood beetles deep insidedecaying trees, chewing at the timber, drumming with their hind legs. Birds roosting everywhere like fruit, half asleep and
     half awake, ever watchful for the death which comes in the night. Men and women and children asleep behind the blank windows
     of houses, in each other’s arms, back to back like bookends, or alone. After sex, after arguments, after beatings, after bedtime
     stories, after full or empty lives, but mostly half full or half empty. And the sleepless were reading, masturbating, or just
     worrying, turning over and over to find a comfortable position, in the small cold hours of the night when dawn seemed an impossible
     solution.

6 . Wandering Albatross
(Diomedia exulans)
    You should try your colleagues’ solution. Sarah laughs, gest uring with her golden head towards the far Nissen hut. It might
     help with the insomnia.
    A solution of forty per cent ethanol in water? I throw back. Don’t touch nothing stronger than beer, me. Not for fifteen years.
    She looks quizzical.
    It didn’t agree with me, I say. Or rather, I didn’t agree with it.
    Our voices are stretched out like a flysheet over the constant noise. Imagine ten thousand claw hammers squeaking ten thousand
     nails out of ten thousand gobby bits of timber. Imagine all the demons in hell gabbling and cackling and speaking in tongues.
     Imagine it, but even then you won’t come close.
    Bird Island, South Georgia, is the biggest breeding colony I’ve ever seen, a sprawling shanty town of nesting seabirds. Gannets
     and skuas and five kinds of albatross, all camped on these untidy mounds of nest with scarcely enough room to turn round,
     reaching to jab with thuggish bills at anything that encroaches. They squawk incessantly, to maintain territory, to greet
     and threaten incomers and mates and chicks and parents. They gabble and bicker like biddies over the back fence. They squabble
     and fight like radge kids. They yelp and howl it seems for the sheer outrageous joy of the sound. I am here, they say, in
     a million clattering tongues. What are you going to do about it?
    The nest mounds sprawl over every available surface, pebble beachand black rock and grassy slopes, streaked with guano and rotting seaweed. And the stench of the colonies comes as loud as
     the noise, a reek of ammonia that puckers the eyes and stings the inside spaces of the nose.
    Away to the north stretches the open ocean, grey and restless with the white caps bristling across it like neurons firing
     in the lonely spaces of the brain. The boat sits at anchor in the shelter of the point, and we’ve pulled the inflatables up
     the steeply raked pebble beach towards the small complex of Nissen huts that’s become our temporary home. To the south, behind
     us, rear the ranges of South Georgia, a long black fossil like the spine of a sea beast. Ice and snow on the peaks, white
     as the sun. Black rock matt and impenetrable, absorbing light, absorbing heat. The improbable green of tundra grasses on the
     lower slopes, spikes and globes rippling in the constant wind, each inflorescence a tiny world. White, black, green. And the
     incongruous scarlet and blue of our anoraks, as we stand above the colony and look back through the whirling melee of seabirds
     towards the huts at the head of the bay.
    Sarah was sanguine when we turned up out of the storm, five castaways in a limping boat. Pointed a shotgun at us, told us
     that she was quite ready to radio the marines at Grytviken if we put a foot out of line, and then showed us the spare