Black Ice by Matt Dickinson Read Free Book Online

images: orange-breasted penguins guarding their fluffball chicks—‘You have to watch those beaks,’ her father had said, ‘give you a nasty snap’—a leopard seal, sleek and mean, barking Rottweiler teeth at a shaky lens which had moved in too close.
    And one more: her father standing with a raised flag and two fellow scientists next to a tent filled with strange machines. He held a roll of paper in his hand, a jubilant expression on his overtanned face. ‘That was the day,’ he told them proudly, always lingering over the shot for longer than he needed, ‘the day we found the underground lake.’
    His words confused Lauren. What lake? How could it be under the ice? Wouldn’t it be frozen? Lauren struggled and failed to imagine how such a bizarre thing could happen.
    Still, her father had discovered it, and that made her proud.
    Lauren ached to see Antarctica for herself, but she knew she would have to be patient. In the meantime, she did the next-best thing—seeking with that perfect logic of childhood the biggest expanse of ice she could find. That place was the ice rink at the local mall, Ambassador Ice and Bowl to be precise, located, unpromisingly, in a subterranean complex beneath a car park, approached through concrete tunnels littered with torn sweet wrappers and crushed drink cans.
    Inside was another world, a world so thrillingly cool, so refrigerated, it literally took Lauren’s breath away every time she queued to hire her skates. Then she would take to the ice, daring a touch with her hand from time to time, loving the way her skates carved elegant grooves into the surface. When she fell, she would let her cheek rest for an instant, enjoying the numb sensation it gave her flesh.
    By the time she was eleven she was at the ice rink every weekend. To onlookers she was just another kid, her dark hair a mass of ringlets, pushing herself around the rink, never trying any fancy moves or routines.
    For Lauren it wasn’t about the skating, it was about the ice. The rink was a place to let her imagination fly. In her mind the ice became the surface of some great glacier—she saw herself skating for hundreds of miles across the frozen wonderland of Antarctica.
    Years later, for her fourteenth birthday, her father fixed her up with a treat—a journey to Switzerland, where, in the Alps, she saw her first real glacier. It was the Eigergletscher, sinuous, fissured, filled with unexpected power.
    â€˜It’s beautiful,’ Lauren said with wonder as they stood looking down on the glacier. ‘Look at the colour of the ice.’ A new light filled her eyes: glaciers would be the new love affair; they were dynamic, exciting, somehow alive.
    She began to devour Antarctic literature, consuming Cherry-Garrard’s Worst Journey in the World in one weekend session. She soaked up the privations of Scott, shivered at Shackleton’s narrow escape from the pack, stacking the precious tomes side by side until she had so many South Polar editions you could almost feel the blast of chill air seeping from the bookcase.
    Some of the things she had learned about Antarctica were truly amazing: that a boiling cup of water thrown into the air will instantly freeze into a shimmering cloud of ice crystals, that winter temperatures of seventy degrees below freezing are regularly recorded.
    Antarctica, Lauren now knew, was the coldest and highest continent on the planet—an environment so obstinately hostile to human life that it might have been created in the mind of some sadistic science fiction author. In total it was covered by fourteen million square kilometres of solid ice, constituting almost ten per cent of the total land surface of the earth.
    Lauren was hooked, and now she interrogated her father on every minuscule detail of his Antarctic expedition—particularly about the lake which she had first learned about all those years before. Now her curiosity had a