The Cold Pools by Chris Ward Page A

hotels were pulled down; those that could afford the high land costs were repositioned, and those that couldn’t forgotten for all time.  The entire town was gradually shifting back towards the bluff edge, the brochure said, and one day, in perhaps no more than a couple of generations, it would spill over completely.
    Karen and I had no children; we’d refused to bring them into such a world.  Several of our friends did, and while I could admit the kids were a delight I couldn’t help but wonder at the selfishness of it all.
    ‘It’s beautiful, Lewis,’ Karen said, her voice barely a whisper.
    ‘Like you are,’ I said, immediately regretting such a corny retort.
    She smiled.  ‘ Was .  I’ll let you have was .’
    We checked into our hotel half an hour later.  Karen was a little disappointed to find that our room on the third floor looked out not on to the mighty glacier but back towards the bluff edge, back towards the red sun that hung high above the Antarctic sky, swollen and sore.  Those rooms with a glacial view were beyond our price range, I assumed, but from the restaurant at least we could see the white wall that fed the town, and we ate a modestly priced meal of beef and potato pie beneath its shadow.
    After dinner we took a walk into the town, feeling the cool air and I guess I could say wintery gusts of wind wrap around our faces.  I held Karen’s hand by the finger tips, aware that the sores on her palms caused her pain.  We hadn’t made love in three months, not since the worst of the cancer began to show itself.  Intimacy was too painful for her, and in a different way it was painful for me too.  Each touch might be my last; Karen was on borrowed time: given six months a little over eight months ago.
    ‘I want to swim,’ Karen said suddenly.
    We were passing a row of cafes and wine bars.  I smiled.  ‘Wouldn’t you prefer a drink?’
    ‘Only of cold water.’
    We walked on through the town towards where the pools began on the outskirts.  The brochure had told us how some were exclusively for bathing, with big complexes thrown up around piped water fed into landscaped pools, while others were nature reserves for what birds and fish were still left.  Further on, we knew, right at the foot of the glacier, was a huge lake.  In the shadow of the ice very little could grow or live, but the waterfall that fed it was a popular sightseeing spot and where organized climbs to the top of the glacier itself began.  I didn’t like the idea of Karen slogging her way up a two hundred metre high staircase carved into the ice, but nevertheless she had insisted and we were booked on a tour for the day after tomorrow.
    I realised suddenly that we had walked right out of town.  Ahead of us, the shell of an abandoned hotel rose out of the ground beside the road, looking almost insignificant beneath the towering glacial face that rose into the air not a mile distant.  Here, the sound of water was everywhere, and the air had a remarkable chill to it that I’d never felt outside of a cold room before.
    ‘There,’ Karen said, pointing down a dirt trail that ran behind the hotel.  ‘Down there.  It leads to the lake.’
    ‘I’m not sure this is a good idea...’ I started, but Karen was already ahead of me, treading carefully through the weeds that had grown up over the trail.  An old maintenance access, I was sure, leading to the kitchens or whatever.  I wasn’t sure what Karen hoped to find, but maybe –
    ‘Look, Lewis!  Oh my God!’
    Around the back of the hotel, Karen was pointing.  Here, the lake shore came right up into the old gardens, the waters lapping around the base of an old terrace.  Karen pulled a rusty chair off a stack by the wall and sat down looking out at what had once been a sprawling garden, but had now been eaten up by the lake.
    The waters stretched away from us like a dark sheet towards the huge wall of the glacier, the ripples on its surface flickering beneath