Robert Garnham

 

 

It’s bloody cold in the Antarctic at the best of times, so I don’t even know why we needed a refrigerator. The only things we kept in it were yoghurt and penguin urine, both of which had to be kept at a certain maintained temperature, but this could very well have been achieved by leaving them out on the work surface, that’s how cold it was. I suspect it was only on the third week of the expedition that I began to have my suspicions that the refrigerator was actually my old friend Pat.

‘Come to keep me company, eh?’ I’d say, every time I went to the kitchen of the research station living quarters.

I’d pat the side of the fridge.

‘Don’t drink the lemonade, Steve’, Sandra said, for the umpteenth time.

I hadn’t seen her standing there.

 

 

I’d go to bed each night in my quarters, wrapped up against the cold, feeling kind of comforted to know that Pat was there. The refrigerator made a prolonged humming sound, and the light inside of it wasn’t very bright, and every now and then it would emit a weird farting sound. It was definitely Pat.

‘Alright, Steve?’, I wanted it to say to me. But it kept obstinately quiet. Pat was a man of few words at the best of times.

 

 

Oh, the hours we would spend out on the ice. The thrill of seeing a penguin wears off after the first half hour. Secretive bastards, they shuffle along and one day Sandra got pecked real bad.

‘Bloody thing!’

‘Hey’, I’d say to her, just to take her mind off the penguin peck. ‘If we walked inside a giant refrigerator right now, do you think it would actually feel warmer?’

‘Jeez, that thing gave me a nasty nip’.

 

 

Back in the safety of our primary coloured research station, its tin sides contrasted against the pure white snow like some kind of 1980s synth pop album cover, I lingered in the kitchen for a bit.

‘Pat?’, I whispered, ‘is that you?”

The refrigerator hummed in a contented sort of way.

‘Remember that time we played badminton at the leisure centre? Remember that? And the man on the court next to us collapsed and died . . . ‘

And we’d had to forfeit our game, not that we ever took it too seriously. I’d rolled up my towel and put it under the poor man’s head while they were pumping away on his chest. Ten minutes later I had a shower and . . Oh no . . Where’s my towel?

‘Remember how we were given a free game by the leisure centre the next week? And they put us on the same court where the chap had died. And you came over all superstitious?’

‘Who are you talking to?’, Sandra asked.

‘No-one.’

‘There’s just you, me, and the fridge . . . ‘

‘How’s your hand?’

‘Throbbing like a bastard.’

 

 

That night I looked out from the window of my quarters at the long shadows thrown by the penguins in the setting sun. I watched as they shuffled back and forth and I thought, has there ever been a more gormless creature? And then I remembered my Aunt Cindy.

I went along the corridor to the kitchen and I said hi to Pat.

‘Remember that story Aunt Cindy used to tell? I don’t know what medication she was on . . . Went to the zoo with her neighbour and her neighbour’s kid. And they had a picnic. And the kid walks off and then comes back all wet. He’s been in the pond. And the neighbour says, that’s it, you’ve ruined our day out, so they all go home, and when they arrive home they open up the kids backpack and he’s got a penguin in it. A real live penguin. So she phones the zoo, ha ha, and they say, keep it in the bath, we’ll be round in half an hour.’

The refrigerator hummed in agreement, possibly laughter.

 

 

The next day we went out on snowmobiles, me and Sandra. We were well protected against the biting cold. We took photos of a crevice in the ice where two of the glacial ice shelves meet.

‘We’ve taken a shelfie!’ I said.

‘What?’, she yelled, above the biting, whistling wind.

‘Shelfie!’

There’s a severe storm coming in, we can both feel it.

‘If this ice shelf drifts apart’, she yelled, ‘we’ll have to be rescued by a naval vessel’.

‘What’s that? A ship dedicated to belly buttons?’

‘I’m worried about you’, she said.

‘What?’

‘I said, I’m worried about you!’

 

 

The research station awaited us. There’s something comforting about it’s primary colours. Penguins frolicked beneath its spindly legs.

‘We may have to move’, Sandra told the assembled scientists. ‘If the wind changes direction, we could be cast adrift on the open sea. This whole ice shelf, it’s the size of Yorkshire, but it could just drift off at any time. We’d have to abandon the research station completely’.

‘That’s a sensible course of action’, Professor Carver said.

‘But what about the fridge?’, I asked.

And they all looked at me.

 

 

That night, having tired of watching the penguins, I went to the kitchen to find a man sent by the research company, testing all of the electrical appliances for faults.

‘Portable Appliance testing’, he explained.

I kind of lingered while he worked. I leaned on the work surface and stared out the window at the white landscape. There wasn’t really much to say.

 

 

 

 

ROBERT GARNHAM has been performing comedy poetry around the UK for ten years at various fringes and festivals, and has had two collections published by Burning Eye. He has made a few short TV adverts for a certain bank, and a joke from one of his shows was listed as one of the funniest of the Edinburgh Fringe. He was recently an answer on the TV quiz show Pointless. Lately he has been writing short stories for magazines and a humorous column in the Herald Express newspaper.