The Nature of Ice by Robyn Mundy Read Free Book Online Page A

impressionist painter, drawing on brushstroke and colour to create light and shade, to reveal a deeper truth.
    Sensate truth , Marcus termed Hurley’s art, and framed Freya’s face with his gaze.
    At the end of her final semester at the photography college, Marcus had encouraged her to stay in Melbourne and urged her to take her portfolio to a dozen contacts on a list he’d prepared, convinced she had the talent to strike out on her own. Of course she accepted his invitation to celebrate her first paid assignment. To new beginnings , he had toasted.
    â€˜WE BEGAN HERE.’ THE FIELD training officer traces on the map the route Freya had taken. ‘And we were looking sweet all the way up here. Waypoint 228,’ Simon taps the map, ‘is where we started going walkabout.’ The GPS, the size of a mobile phone and every bit as intrusive, is passed around the field training circle for all to acknowledge Freya’s unplanned 5.2-kilometre detour. Latitude, longitude, minutes, seconds; dozens of satellites map the globe with frightening acuity, ten of their stealthy eyes fixed upon the ice edge where the training group confers.
    â€˜If you have access to a GPS,’ asks Travis, beside her, ‘why would you bother with a compass?’
    Freya silently agrees.
    â€˜Chances are, you won’t use anything but a GPS over summer. They’re all well and good until your batteries run flat, or your LCD gives out with the cold.’ Simon rests the map on the seat of his quad bike. He takes Freya’s compass and demonstrates again how to adjust for magnetic deviation. ‘Remember, folks,’ he draws a pocket-sized book from his jacket and waves it like a spruiker touting programs at a fair, ‘Simon says. Whatever you need to know, the information is all here in your field manuals.’
    The four trainees, Freya now at the rear, follow Simon Says in a single line back through iceberg alley, weaving between the same towering bergs, meandering past the same field of waist-high snow, avoiding the same crests of ice that Freya led them safely by when outward bound. She can’t help dwelling on her ineptitude. What if other people’s safety depended on her navigation? A girl in need of rescue , Marcus began calling her years ago, on the night she took a wrong turn while showing him her city, and hurtled down an alleyway to a dead end. He was as certain of his feelings then as he was of his sense of direction. After she moved from Melbourne back to Perth he had appeared unannounced on the doorstep of her unit, the fragrance of the bedraggled posy in his hand engulfing, as was her image of him smuggling hand-picked sprigs of daphne across the continent.
    No unlit street signs to blame out here: just her own shoddy compass work, though no one is insensitive enough to say so. Simon and the training group are kind, encouraging, which only adds to Freya’s sting of failure. All day her focus has been pulled and pushed by all this wonder, her mind raking through ideas on how to photograph the ice—dismissing the notion of black and white amid all this colour and texture, the quality of light, the incomprehensible magnitude of the place. Did she take a compass bearing as often as she ought? Did she add or subtract for magnetic deviation? Travis joked that she’d lured them astray on purpose. Everyone agreed that the path she blazed out to the ocean added a brilliant photo opportunity to an already outstanding day of navigational training—the water sparkling, the ice edge alive with the hubbub of penguins.
    Freya has her work cut out keeping pace with the bikes ahead, her oversized helmet requiring constant attention to stop it sliding forward. This irrational dislike she has for enclosure—what kind of person knowingly chooses a helmet several sizes too large? She releases her grip on the handlebar and pushes at the headgear. She has less than a second to feel her body