A Hundred Words for Snow (NHB Modern Plays) by Tatty Hennessy

Author:Tatty Hennessy [Hennessy, Tatty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788501392
Publisher: Nick Hern Books

So it’s way too hard to trek to the Pole; we don’t really have the right gear and it takes ages and we’re probably not really fit enough to be honest. But there’s a woman who does helicopter tours. She says conditions aren’t great so we can’t land on the ice but we can fly overhead.

MUM. What do you think, Rory?

RORY. Perfect.

It’s a beautiful bright clear day in Longyearbyen when we take off from the airfield. Mum looks a bit nervous. She doesn’t like flying. I tell her –

RORY. You know the first man who ever flew over the North Pole was called Richard Byrd?

And she laughs cos it’s funny but it is also true.

I’ve never been in a helicopter before but it’s ace. It’s so loud my heart rattles in my ribs, like I can feel the sound in me. We get these headphones so we can hear the pilot talking through her microphone but we can’t hear each other. Mum’s holding Dad on her lap, like clutching him. I wonder what she’s thinking. She stares down at him all through take-off and I really want to talk to her, to tell her I know it’s scary but she should look out the window cos she won’t want to miss it, but she’d never hear me so instead I lean forward and touch her knee gently and point.

She looks out and her mouth opens.

Cos it’s pretty amazing.

Nothing. Amazing nothing. Nothing people died finding. Nothing full of bleached bones and tiny creatures and singing ice. I look at her looking at it and I’m glad she’s seen it. I’m glad I’m not going to be the only one of us who’s seen it. Like, for both of us now, wherever we are we’ll always have been here.

Underneath us the patches of ocean get smaller and smaller until it’s nothing at all but ice. We’re getting closer and closer to the very top of everything, to where my shitty little compass in the woods used to point to, to north. Dad always said if you can find north, you can find your way home.

It gets windier the further we go and it’s proper loud, the blades and the wind roaring in my ears.

PILOT. We’re almost there. Up ahead.

The pilot crackles in my ears.

Mum and I lock eyes. We didn’t talk about this bit, before. What we were going to do. I never thought about it, either. I didn’t know what I would do when it came to it. But now it seems clearer than anything, and I know what she’s going to do before she does it.

Because it’s a shame to come all this way and not make the last few feet.

And he would’ve hated that urn.

PILOT. Okay. There she is.

I look out. Up ahead, there’s a red-and-white striped pole stuck into the ice. It’s so unremarkable, one patch of ice among thousands. But it’s there. This is it, Dad. We made it. But you have to do the last bit on your own.

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