Carrie Essler
The Hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk
Southern shore of the Beaufort Sea, Canada
October – Tomorrow

Carrie Essler sprinted along the concrete jetty. She halted at the end beside a mooring cleat as big as an anvil, squatted on her haunches, tried to catch her breath. The freezing air had scoured her windpipe, the hairs in her nostrils frozen, prickly and tickling. She made a fist, soft-punched the cleat. Something in its pig-iron obstinacy calmed her more than the eight miles she’d run.

She pulled herself up, sat on the cleat. A breeze blew in from the southwest, lifting the ice-dust from the frozen sea-surface into spectral eddies. She was shivering already, the sweat on her face beginning to frost. Never sweat in the Arctic, it’ll suck the life right out of you when it freezes.

A Chinook helicopter dropped from the clouds in the northeast. It banked out across the sea and then straightened on final approach. She sighed, checked her watch.

‘Typical,’ she said.

Carrie jogged back along the empty jetty that thrust out into the Beaufort Sea like some engineer’s hard-on. She ran past the offshore supply boat moored there for the winter. The deep thwock of the chopper’s twin rotors cut through the wind’s low hiss.

‘Be nice…be nice…be nice…’ she muttered over and over as she ran past warehouses and portacabin offices, then along by the corporate and dormitory buildings that lined the airport runway. She swung in through a gap by the charter helicopter hangar. Skidded to a halt on the slippery tarmac beside an Inuvialuit man in a Canadian Coast Guard parka.

‘Ma’am,’ he said.

She nodded, put her hands on her knees, panting.

‘You been out where polar bears’ll get you again.’ He wore a conciliatory smile, but his quiet voice was serious.

‘Here’s hoping, Mike,’ she replied.

He wasn’t to be put off so easily. ‘They come in off the sea. More now the pack ice stays away in the north.’ He shook his head, as if weary with the entire world and everyone in it, then stepped forwards to wave the Chinook down.

Huge whorls of dust enveloped Carrie as it landed. Red and white with the livery of the Canadian Coast Guard, its deafening engines made her duck away. ‘Be nice…’ As the rotors slowed, she saw the pilot through the cockpit window.

‘Oh, marvellous,’ she said aloud.

The Chinook’s rear ramp dropped. She walked over to stand beside it. A short, round man bumbled down the incline, way too much gold braid on the jacket beneath his overcoat. Above her head, the twin rotors came to a stop.

Carrie made a show of saluting.

‘I see you dressed for the occasion,’ Assistant Commissioner Grady said, looking her up and down, his lips thin. Carrie wore Lycra skin-tights in hippy-trippy colours that, she conceded, looked a little curious with her Arctic boots, Coast Guard fleece and ancient yellow bobble hat.

‘You showed up early, sir.’

‘Jogger now, are you?’

She breathed in hard through her nostrils, tried to quell the hatred, the anger. ‘Swimming’s out, this time of year,’ she managed.

Grady made a visible effort to smile. ‘It’s good to see you, Carrie.’ She didn’t return his smile.

‘So we’re part of your whistle-stop tour of the provinces then?’ she said.

‘I’m here to see PentOil off its drill site. That’s it.’

‘I heard. Flying out to the rig with the corporate vampires tomorrow. Very cosy, if I might say so, sir.’

‘I’m hoping you’ll join us.’

‘Not a chance, sir!’ She was thinking about the Chinook’s pilot.

Grady closed his eyes, raised his face to the heavens. His breath came steaming from his nostrils. He took a moment to look around. Carrie followed his gaze. The runway contained just a lonely Twin Otter, heavily sheeted against the weather. A few lights glinted from Tuktoyaktuk village, half a mile away. The odd window shone in the two-storey airport block beside them. Light bloomed from the control tower above the modest original airport building that predated the arrival of corporate money.

‘If the Arctic did tumbleweeds…’

‘Things closing down for the winter,’ said Grady.

‘Been a thrill a minute all summer, though, sir.’

He exhaled heavily. ‘I gave you a promotion.’

‘You gave me punishment detail. I’m a rescue swimmer, not some gormless border guard.’

‘You never liked Canada,’ he said, ‘even when you and Don were still together.’

‘Well, I surely am loving it now. Yes, siree. What a blast.’

‘That’s not how it was.’

‘How it was, is you packed me off to the arse-end of nowhere for screwing around on your wee Coast Guard poster boy.’

For a second he looked like he was actually going to punch her. Here we go, she thought, just try it, boss! Me lamping a senior officer’s one way out of this coal hole. But Grady only squeezed his hands tightly together.

‘Lord Almighty,’ he said, ‘then just go home!’

‘That’s it? Ship me back to Bonny Scotland where I come from? Immigrants out, rah, rah, rah?’

Grady looked at her with a kind of patronising comprehension that really did make her want to clock him one. ‘But you’re coming with us tomorrow,’ he said.

And now Carrie saw Don himself, standing at the top of the ramp, six foot three of, yes, poster-boy military zeal. As he strode down to stand beside her, his co-pilot and loadmaster following, she ran her fingers through her hair. Felt it crunch where the sweat had turned to frost. A dog’s hackles rising.

‘Donny,’ she said.

‘How are you, Carrie?’ He didn’t smile.

‘I’ll show you to your rooms.’ She marched away across the tarmac, not waiting for them to follow.

―

Pressed up against the outer wall of an airport building, Tuktoyaktuk’s only bar had once been a steel goods container. One side had been cut away and a prefab lean-to with a corrugated tin roof added. There was no sign. The owner hadn’t bothered; everyone knew what it was.

Carrie shouldered open the weather-beaten door and ducked inside, snowflakes billowing in after her. She pulled off her parka, hung it on a peg. A twin-bar electric heater glowed hopelessly on the ceiling. Caribou antlers drooped above the bar beneath dismal strip-lights. A rowdy group of rig workers waiting for a flight home drowned out the portable stereo on the counter. One of them wolf-whistled and the rest sniggered like the arse-wipe schoolboys they were. Everyone knew about her. Everyone was male. No one was going to shut up, ever. That, Assistant Commissioner Grady, was how it was.

‘Carrie Essler,’ a voice called from a nearby table in a mock Humphrey Bogart accent, ‘Arctic counter terror squad. She’s got it licked.’ He waggled his tongue to more laughter.

Carrie glared at Donny’s co-pilot. ‘Yeah, fek off, Lightsy,’ she told him quietly, her Scottish accent coming through as it tended to at such moments. ‘I’ll drive that bottle through yer face.’

Voices said, ‘Ooh,’ but Lightsy didn’t reply. He knew better.

She nodded to Jeannie, the old woman tending bar. A tall Inuvialuit man perched on a stool at the counter. He was grinning nastily at Carrie, obviously enjoying the spectacle.

‘Oh not you too, fuck’s sake,’ she said.

‘Oh yeah,’ he replied.

She sat opposite a chubby little guy with a ratty, entirely Arctic-inappropriate trilby perched on the back of his head. A half-empty bottle of bourbon and two tumblers awaited, one of them empty. She poured herself a slug and tipped it in gratitude.

Jim Ross was reading a thick, technical document. He peered over the top. ‘Who’s the wise guy?’ he said, tilting his head towards Lightsy’s table, his trilby remaining on his head as if glued there.

‘My ex-husband’s co-pilot. They came in with Grady. Flying you and your company morons out to the rig tomorrow.’

Ross mouthed a silent O. When she didn’t speak, he said, ‘Your jilted ex, plus Grady, the man who banished you up here for it. Gotta hurt.’

Carrie poured another slug, glared at the glistening rime frost in the ceiling corners.

‘Guess you don’t want to talk about it,’ said Ross.

‘Quit the oil business. Get into mind reading.’

‘Quit the Coast Guard. Get your sense of humour back.’

She raised her glass. Touché.