Three Moments of an Explosion

  “You’re like a fat bear!” she might shout at Ian as he picked his careful way behind me. He was not fat at all but she called everyone fat. She would make lumbering motions at him and Robbie and I would laugh and I would try to speed up, to come down and stand with her while Ian descended without looking at us.

  It was the steepest slope we could find in our area, one that took real effort to get up and down. We felt like we were mimicking, honoring, what the explorers above us were doing. We would watch the trains that rushed below. I know I wasn’t the only one, looking down, who imagined looking down from a lip of ice, at London.

  Ian and I were most into the bergs, so he wanted to hang out with me. That was complicated. I wanted the company of someone who read all the magazines and knew as much as I did, or almost, but I was also infuriated by his owl-eyed camaraderie. Sal used to look at me scornfully when he and I talked. There was always a wet spot on his cuff where he chewed.

  Sometimes I’d go to his house. If I had some cool cards in my pack of Iceberg Updates, we’d compare collections, maybe swap a few.

  Lund came down in the forecourt of a supermarket. The police got there as fast as they could, but of course locals uploaded their pictures of her body and of course we found them, and showed them to each other with a complex of emotions I cannot put into words.

  I still have the image somewhere. The hollow feeling in my stomach was never mere ghoulishness. I got to know the faces of all the onlookers in that picture as well as I did the strange configuration of Lund’s body. I think I was horrified, I think I did care.

  I wanted to have saved her, and if none of my friends were watching, I would reach through the wire fence when trains went past, stretch out my hand into their gust and imagine that I did.

  There were days of rain and we wondered if the water would erode the icebergs, bring them down in a cascade of slush. But the second wave of survey teams trudging on their surfaces reported that even the worst downpour only melted them for a centimeter or so. They would quickly freeze back into their pre-rain shapes. While the scientists investigated, a small, powerful cross-party group of MPs demanded that the government blow up the icebergs with incendiaries.

  It was during these wet days that some commentators first suggested a connection between the appearance of the icebergs and the growth of coral across the facades of Brussels. It had been three years since the brain coral, pillar coral, and prongs of staghorn coral had first started to appear. Every week contractors removed the thick outcroppings and worm-waving extrusions on the European Parliament and its surrounds. They still do, cracking and scraping the bony stuff off and scrubbing down the surfaces. Every week it returns, leaving the buildings a fishless reef.

  While that link was mooted, survey teams clambered the slopes of Masses 1 and 4. They ascended the geometric pinnacles carefully, planting anchors and trudging up with spiked boots. They found nothing but more wind, and they came down again.

  Flights resumed in the rest of the country. Heathrow and Gatwick and City stayed out of action but Stansted reopened. The BBC announced that it had commissioned a drama series set among investigators on Mass 2.

  Sometimes when I met up with Ian, just the two of us, we’d shadow one or other of the masses. My favorite was 5. I called it the Ice Skull, claiming it looked like one. He liked 2, the smallest and lowest and most stalactite-bearded, which circulated mostly around our neck of the woods. We liked it when the bergs went over brownfield sites and wasteland: we would walk underneath them and kick old brick bits and garbage out of the way, looking for secrets in the ice’s shadows.

  We collected images, information, stories. It was these days that opened up the city to me, sent me down to New Cross, over to Silvertown, south and east and areas I’d never been before, wherever the icebergs went.

  In Stepney a newsagent was taking every other publication out of his shop window and filling it with, of all things, copies of New Scientist. “I tell them,” he kept shouting to someone inside. “I keep telling them.” He waved a magazine at me jovially. “Look,” he said.

  On the cover were photographs from a southern mission years before I was born, icebergs rising from the water. Next to each of those images was one of a mass over London. The frozen slopes and slices and cracks were the same. The crags overhead were close to identical to those that had once floated in the Antarctic.

  “Look, they melt!” he said. “First they melt and now, look, they come back.”

  Sometimes the gusts of cold below the ice were particularly bad, became brutal mini-winters, freezing the air into little storms. It had been a while since London had had proper cold, even in December and January. The local fashion for berg-coats started then, a vogue for the lightweight, all-year warm clothes most of us still carry, that you can slip on and off if ice crosses your path above.

  I had never seen real snow before, proper deep snow. One afternoon outside a shopping center by Dollis Hill, near a patch of dead trees, Ian and I found a pile of it bigger than either of us. It looked a bit wrong to me. Afterwards, I realized that it had been too angular to be a drift. It was a rare instance when a sizable chunk of iceberg matter had fallen straight down.

  We messed around with it a bit but I was late and I left Ian there. When I got home he’d messaged me with a picture of a dirty, melting mound of slush. He’d kicked his way right into it. In the middle was a battered padded tube, a bit bigger than the core of a toilet roll. It was sealed and wrapped in black plastic.

  THERE WAS STUFF IN THE MIDDLE OF IT FROM UP THERE, he had written.

  SNOW LANDED ON RUBBISH FOOL, I wrote back.

  Meanwhile, an unauthorized expedition uploaded footage onto the internet.

  The man staring into the camera wears a woolly hat and a bandana over his mouth. Behind and way below him is a vista of night lights, of London in the dark. A microphone is clipped to his collar and his voice is clear despite the rushing wind.

  “Right,” he says. “So, this is, like, the fourth fucking time we’ve been up the Shard.” Links to videos of the three previous expeditions on that huge building briefly appear. “But, you know, kudos on the ‘increased security,’ Mayor.” There are sarcastic cheers out of shot.

  The camera turns to show other figures clustered by the aerial tower of London’s tallest building. The climbers wear a cobbled-together variety of colors and styles. They hoot and wave. The shot zooms down on the south London streets where you can just see pedestrians.

  “Anyway,” the first man says. “You’ve seen me before. I’m Infiltrex. Or—” He pulls the bandana from his mouth to show a surprisingly soft face. He looks like a cool older brother, the kind who might buy beer for you. “OK, so I’m Ryan,” he says. “I think this time man’s going to go uncovered. It’s time for the big one.”

  The camera pans up. Filling the night sky overhead, astonishingly close, is a jagged field of ice. It looms, and it’s approaching. It’s so low that the longest extrusions dangling from its underside reach down below the level of the Shard’s tower point. On which, the camera briefly shows, two explorers wait.

  “Come on, quick,” says Ryan, out of shot, “we ain’t got much time.” An icicled ceiling closes over them, invoking ecstatic claustrophobia.

  “We’ve been watching and waiting. This is the lowest of the lot. This is the one that’s going to fuck up your architect’s plans. And it’s lower now than it’s ever been and if we’ve got this right …”

  It’s never been quite clear what equipment the crew used: the camera doesn’t show it, though there’s been speculation about “grapple guns.” What we know is that there’s a sound of percussion, and shouting, and the footage cuts to that from a helmetcam, and for less than two seconds you can see someone dangling from high-tensile cable. With that literal cliff-hanger, the video pauses for several seconds, entirely dark. To open again on Ryan’s face, filling the frame.

  “Here we are,” he says. He’s holding the camera himself. It’s dayli
ght. He lets us see that behind him is an edge of ice, then air and cloud, then, almost a mile below, that London crawls.

  The fashion for urban exploration had been declining. There had been a glut of handsomely photographed excursions into deserted hospitals and neglected storm drains. The ascent of Mass 5 was a new scale of feat for these infiltrators, and it rekindled the fascination. “Yeah, we know what they’re doing,” said some pixelated informant to the BBC, in a disguised voice, “but no clue how they got up there.”

  “Look, Battersea,” says Ryan breathlessly, waving down at the roofless chimneys, bracing himself to climb a crevice below a companion’s kicking boots. “London Eye. Is that Fuckingham Palace?”

  There’s a long climbing montage, as deliberate as anything in Rocky. When Ryan reappears, he has more stubble. He is not so boisterous. Breathing gear bobs around his neck.

  “OK then,” he says. You can see the ice blocks that distinguish the mass’s peak. “You getting me? We have a bit of a theory, so to say. You seen the soldiers marching up and marching down again, right? But there’s more than one way to climb things. OK so Jo’s quicker’n the rest of us, she’s gone on ahead, and …”

  Two hundred meters above him, a figure in a red jacket hauls herself up. She’s just below the top of the steep ice pile.

  “Keep on her, man,” Ryan says. “We’re up in a minute. Right behind you, Jo!”

  The woman looks both too close to and too far from us. She swings an ax. The footage is unstable. She climbs another few steps, around a cold crag, the camera veers for an instant, returns, and she is gone. She is nowhere.

  “Jo? Jo? Jo?”

  Ryan’s eyes are wide.

  “She’s fucking up, man! I told you.”

  I stared at the screen.

  “You got to take the right direction,” Ryan says to the cameraperson. “Shall we? After you, bruv.”

  I texted Ian, again and again. WHAT YOU DO WITH THAT THING YOU FOUND? I said. IN THE SNOW. I texted him this because dangling from Ryan’s rucksack was a distinctive tubular pack exactly like the one that Ian had kicked out of the ice.

  Ryan climbs the ice blocks. You can hear him wheezing. You can see the undersides of his companion’s boots. Then he looks up and he’s alone, surrounded by clouds. Then the footage ends.

  I got hold of Ian eventually. “I left it there,” he said. “It was disgusting! It was all covered in dirt and it was in the rubbish!”

  I made him come back to Dollis Hill and show me exactly where he’d found it. He made a lot of noises about how I was being stupid but he was scared of me so he came.

  There was no ice overhead. Every pile of rubbish we passed he paused and ostentatiously investigated.

  I was looking at the signs on a newsagent’s notice board, as if they might help. A young woman was saying to her baby, “Oh please stop, just please stop.” In the distance, from the east, came a big thundering sound. It was ice shifting, one of the bergs changing. We knew how to tell that from the noise of a storm now.

  “You’re so stupid,” I said.

  “You said,” he said. “You said it was nothing.”

  “Shut up. Leaving it, you’re so stupid.”

  He said nothing. Pigeons wheeled. I looked slowly down and caught Ian’s eye. We stared at each other for a minute and I saw something in his expression and I stepped toward him and he ran abruptly in the direction of the Tube station. I didn’t even feel surprised. I went after him, shouting almost dutifully, but he was way ahead of me and he got into the underground before I got near.

  Ian stayed off school for days. He shut down his social media accounts. When I went to his house his mum opened the door and stared at me with new dislike. “He isn’t coming out,” she said, before I could speak. She closed the door and said through it, “Don’t come back or I’ll tell your dad.”

  Who did I have to talk to about what was happening?

  Someone found another padded tube and sold it to the Daily Mirror. A young woman handed one to Channel 4 News. “We should stress that there’s no way to confirm this is indeed what the contents claim,” the newsreader said.

  It was reinforced cardboard, water-sealed in black plastic, wrapped in dense bubble-pack.

  “It was sitting there in the middle of a pile of snow,” said the woman on the TV. “Something about it didn’t look right.”

  They showed the note it contained. It was handwritten in big script. Message 4, it read.

  This is Ryan. Were climbing by the brow. We had to leave John or Duro we call him.

  He found old spikes and rope. Like there was another camp before. He said there was something in the ice shaft like something dark like an old animal froze in there bare years ago but we never saw it there was all cracking and stuff falling and when we reached him we couldnt see it. He stayed there just whispering.

  If we look down we see you but refracted. Hope these dont hit no one. Well pack them in snow to be safe. There are birds or “birds” up here.

  We have pictures in our cameras we cant drop. Ice here looks different.

  Hello from here.

  It used to say “Hello from the redoubt.” Someone had crossed out the word “redoubt” and, in a different hand, tried “ghostberg.” Someone had crossed that out too.

  In the underneaths you couldn’t tell whether London was cold because of the icebergs, or if it was just cold again, really cold for the first time in a long time. On the 25 December, Mass 6 went low over the Serpentine Lido, while the Swimming Club were doing their traditional Christmas Day plunge. The downdraft flash-froze the water and a sixty-two-year-old man died. “He was doing what he loved,” the club secretary told the news.

  Gunships buzzed the berg. People massed on Parliament Hill again, to watch soldiers drop onto the lower slopes. It was like an invasion.

  My dad took me to watch from the viewing platform at the top of Centre Point. It was nice of him—he wasn’t that interested himself. Honestly, I’d rather have been outside, in the streets, right underneath, but I was touched. The building authorities had set up some high-powered telescope so you could take it in turns to stare through the glass at tiny figures crawling up the mountain’s side.

  We heard they found the remains of Ryan’s camp, but that the explorers themselves were gone. The soldiers went deep into cracks and caves—they released some beautiful shots from inside—but they found nothing.

  Robbie’s great-aunt died.

  “That’s why he ain’t been around,” Sal said. I hadn’t noticed. “His family went away after. You know what happened?”

  One night Mass 7 had sat for several hours above north London with the sheltered complex squarely below it, so the residents had turned up their heat and huddled in bed early. The next morning, when the iceberg had moved on and the sun had started to melt the frost on the grass, they found Nantie sitting on a bench in the shared gardens under a glaze of ice.

  “She had like a scream of agony on her face,” Sal said.

  I told my mother Sal had said that and she was furious.

  “That’s absolute rubbish,” she said. “You know I know Robbie’s mum. Her aunt was very very peaceful. She must have just had a little snooze in the garden and just not woken up. I hope when it’s my time I get something like that.”

  The front door had been open, she told me. I remembered how Nantie had got up suddenly to open it, that time, as if she had known an iceberg was coming.

  Ian still wasn’t at school. His parents must have got in trouble for that. I went back to his house. I texted ITS ME O COME ON IM OUTSIDE MAN. After a minute he opened the door. When I entered his mother looked at me suspiciously but did not kick me out.

  “Come on then,” he said.

  We sat in his room and from behind some books on his shelf he pulled out the thick and battered cardboard tube.

  He watched me stare at it. “No one’s seen this,” he said. “My mum ain’t even seen this.” He took the lid off its end and removed a l
etter. We unrolled it on the bed.

  Message 1. Dear London. I recognized the script from the news. What’s the first thing we learn about icebergs? That we only see the tip. 9⁄10ths of every one is out of sight.

  You have to know how to climb right. Then you can get up and look down. We can see you.

  From here we can see all of all these bergs too.

  Whats the point seeing up here if no one knows?

  Were going to keep climbing. Wish us luck. Heres a present we scraped up.

  “What present?” I said. “What’s scraped?”

  “Wait,” Ian said, and went down the stairs. He returned with a small plastic tub. It was full of ice.

  “There was like a thermos in there,” he said. His eyes were wide behind his glasses. “Like for tea? It was stuck in the tube. It was a bit cracked but when I opened it, it was all full of ice. And it was starting to melt but I scooped it out and put it in this and put it in the freezer.”

  The ice was a single mass of angles and shapes. I could see it had partially melted and refrozen from smaller pieces.

  “What if your mum or dad finds it?” I said.

  “I’ve shown them already. I said it was an experiment. They don’t care.” We eyed each other.

  In the kitchen Ian filled a bowl with hot water and took the lid off the Tupperware and put it inside. The box floated, bumping against the sides.

  I tried not to show anything. I’m sure Ian felt the same breathless edginess I did. The ice started to melt immediately. It cracked and pinged.

  There was another noise, a hiss as if someone had half-opened the top of a fizzy drink. It was air, frozen into the ice for however many years—thousands? millions?—being released. Now I know that’s called the seltzer effect: you can hear it on arctic survey ships, from the few shards of ice that still bob about, when they hit warmer currents. We listened to the hiss of old air from some bit of sky.

  I put my arms around that bowl and pulled it close, stuck my head over it like I was sick and inhaling menthol fumes. I breathed in.

  I could smell nothingness. I felt light-headed, but that might have been because I was breathing so deep. I imagined that I could feel little boluses of cold air go down into my lungs.