The Ice is Singing

by Jane Rogers

  I fed them. I was a milk machine. He said, ‘Loss of appetite is a symptom’, but I was not ill. I can choose to be bad, not mad. I was ravenous. I ate dry sliced bread from the packet, I ate chocolate biscuits, I made the girls bring me cheese and apples and ryebread. I ate tuna fish out of the tin with my fingers, I drank yoghurt from the pot while they fed. Making milk, like a giant cow gone mad and trying to stuff the world down its gullet to make it into milk.

  If I can’t do anything else, I can do that. At least, I can feed them.

  9 p.m.

  I went for a walk. There was a bitter wind, the sky is leaden, it will snow again tonight. Everything is at zero point, locked into this eternal winter. Beneath the snow and ice you sense the final death of plants, the last resistance they held in reserve for the spring has been clinched out of them by the cold. Only freezing holds the world up; if the ice ever melts it will all fall down and lie, sodden and limp, on the ground. I am full of ice.

  There is no point in writing this. What is there to be found, in the dregs of the last eight months? I had the twins. I made a mistake. Which was simply the latest in a long line stretching back to Ruth’s birth, maybe before. The right thing for the wrong reason. The wrong thing for the right reason. What does it matter, finally? It’s ordinary.

  I’ll tell another story. Other people’s stories are better. They have shape. I’m sick of this endless going on from day to day. I’ll write a life whose shape is tight and firm, drawn on the page like a pattern. A woman who stole a baby. Her story; her reasons, the subterranean links under years, between one thought, one chance event, and a growth in the imagination which will materilize half a lifetime later. The story is circular, satisfying . . .

  You’re playing, Marion. Hiding, bluffing. I don’t know what you’re up to. Your list isn’t finished.

  Thurs. 27

  It’s morning; the sun has just come up into a clear blue sky, and is catching the snow with pink splashes of light. Everything is frozen still, and unreally beautiful in the late dawn light. What was pointless and hopeless last night is maybe still so, but I said I would tidy up, and the list isn’t done. Jackie’s not on the list yet.

  * * *

  Jackie. When she came back she said, ‘You’re in a mess, Marion. Why didn’t you write? Why didn’t you let me know?’

  I said, ‘I’m all right Jackie, leave me alone.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m busy. I’ve got to put the washing on.’

  ‘I’m taking you out. Helen can babysit.’

  ‘I don’t want to come out. I’m all right. Go away.’

  Jackie was my friend. Jackie was in the ward sixteen years ago when they brought me up after having Ruth. Her Helen was one day old. Like two excited dogs we yapped and nipped and chased each other across that first year of their lives, from crisis to crisis, from exhilarated discovery to latest breakthrough, from commiserations to confessions. When she went back to work I was sorry for her. But she was sorry for me that I didn’t. After a while we were both sorry for ourselves as well, when we realized neither of us could have everything.

  I was really, complacently sorry for her when I was huge with the twins and she came round to tell me about Hong Kong.

  ‘It’s only six months,’ she kept saying. ‘It’s a fantastic opportunity. And Helen’s coming out for a holiday when she’s finished her O levels.’

  I tried to imagine working in Hong Kong for six months, and being parted from the girls for however long it was before they came to join me ‘for a holiday’. I was glad I couldn’t imagine it. I promised to ask Helen round a lot, and write. I did neither.

  My friend Jackie. Nights in the kitchen, late, when we’ve been sitting talking and talking ourselves out, unravelling all the events and thoughts and half-thoughts and theories, holding our lives up to each other for verification, making each other real. It was too late by January. She brought back Christmas presents for the twins, little Chinese silken suits, emerald green and peacock blue. ‘The blue’s for the girl,’ she told me. She was expansive and happy, she’d been promoted, she said I ought to see a doctor.

  So I told her I had, and I had tablets, thank you, and I didn’t want her fucking help any more than I wanted anyone else’s.

  * * *

  Karate nights. Why do I remember them? Ruth started karate when she was thirteen, so Vi must have been eleven. We used to go and meet her, at nine when it finished. In the autumn we walked, I was glad to be outside after the artificial light and heat of the library. Vi was full of the comp., all those new people; she rattled on to me about teachers and school and I half-listened while I scuffed my feet amongst the fallen leaves and remembered new autumn terms myself, new shoes, frosty mornings, conkers. Vi would talk about anything, she never stopped. I think she liked to have me to herself.

  Those evenings were a chore in theory, having to go out at eight-thirty broke up the evening to nothing. When the nights got darker and wetter we’d go in the car and quite often stop at the Italian café for a cappuccino and apricot tart, or a water ice. It became a ritual, he smiled at us in recognition when we arrived. Ruth was nearly always in a good mood, flushed with exercise and self-confidence, explaining movements to Vi. The coffee was frothy, with grated chocolate on top; Vi scooped if off delicately with a spoon, and licked it like a lollipop. I don’t know what we talked about – but we were always talking, always buzzing. They stand out clear, the karate evenings.

  * * *

  Vi. Vi is soft-hearted. Vi comes into my room when she gets back from school, she looks at the twins and seems to like them. I watch her pick one up and sit on the bed, holding it, touching its small claw-fingers with her free hand, smiling patiently until the slow-focusing eyes can capture her. Then the baby smiles at Vi and Vi laughs at the baby. I get off the bed irritably, gather up mugs. Without looking up she says mildly,

  ‘I’ve put the kettle on, Mum.’ I go into the kitchen to watch it.

  She has a little girl’s face still; little girl’s shoulder-length straight hair, which she sometimes plaits; little girl’s wide-open eyes and slightly upturned nose. She’s taller than Ruth already, lean and rounded and growing. I used to look at her and think, like I did when she was a toddler, ‘What a lovely body.’ And I thought – not that I created it single-handed – but that its perfection was through me, of me. The beauty and firmness of her limbs – a share of it – was mine to delight in.

  Vi pushes me. If I look up from the bed or the baby I’m holding I notice she’s come in, she’s walking round my room picking up tissues and cotton wool and dropping them into a plastic bag, then she takes out the nappies. She comes back with a tray and loads up the cups and yoghurt pots and banana peels. I don’t meet her eye. Then she says,

  ‘Do you need any shopping?’ I don’t reply.

  ‘Mum? It’s a nice day. Shall we put them in the pram and take them out?’

  ‘They’re quiet now, Vi. If they wake up.’ When they woke up I fed them and changed them and by then it was one and a half hours later and Vi had gone out.

  ‘Mum? Don’t get mad – can I make a suggestion? Look, I was talking to Dad and he’s really upset – he is, honestly – and he asked me what he could do so I suggested –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, why don’t we get a cleaning lady for a bit and he could pay her, and then you wouldn’t have to worry about that and you could just concentrate on the twins and getting better and –’

  I was just looking at her. I watched her falter into silence, and then pick up again in anger.

  ‘Look, I know you think me and Ruth should do it all but it’s not working, Mum. We’ve been doing it for weeks. We’re at school, we’ve got work to do, you can’t expect us to run the house, get the food, cook and clear up and everything – it just doesn’t work. It puts everyone under pressure – you make us feel guilty as soon as we come in the door – it’s horrible coming into this house, and you act as if it’s our fault they’re
here and you’re ill, as if we’ve got to pay you back or something –’ She burst into tears. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t care what they did. Let him pay for a cleaner if they want one.

  When the cleaner came I shut my bedroom door. She knocked on it but I didn’t answer. But I couldn’t sleep because of the roar of the vacuum cleaner, and the idiotic babble of daytime TV that she kept on while she worked. When it went quiet I crept out to the kitchen to find a drink and she was sitting at the kitchen table as if she owned it, reading a magazine and eating sandwiches. I went back to bed and she brought me lunch on a tray, then she looked at them and said how sweet they were. I wanted to leave it but I was starving.

  * * *

  Ruth. Ruth didn’t come and sit on the bed. I didn’t know if she was in or out. Sometimes Vi said, ‘Ruth’s gone to Gareth’s’, or ‘Ruth’s gone to Annie’s’, sometimes not. Sometimes when I asked where she was tonight Vi said, ‘Up in her room’, in amazement, as if I must be mad.

  She came to the bedroom door sometimes to offer a cup of tea or food. She never even looked at the twins, it was as if she was pretending they didn’t exist. I wanted to shake her. But I couldn’t even have grabbed hold of her. She never came quite that near. She kept away from me, she was disappearing, her face was hidden. I wanted to catch her, or shout, ‘Come here!’ but I was afraid of what they would think. Or of breaking something, by shouting that – breaking something tenuous and fragile, so that she would slip out of sight behind the doorpost, out of the other room, out of the house, like a helium balloon when the string breaks.

  * * *

  The day Vi came to tell me. I hadn’t noticed, but Ruth had already gone. It’s like a faulty television, the pictures are all reduced to varying shades of grey, with lines of marching dots across them, and a faint angry crackle overlying the sound. The pictures stop and start again in a different place.

  It’s like slow motion. Everything goes slow. I sit on the bed and remember what I’m looking for. Clean bra. I look around the floor. I must get rid of those nappies. I think I can see a bra under the blue cot. But it’s dirty. The boy wakes up, I put him over my shoulder. I sit down again. I’ve forgotten what I’m looking for. He needs changing. What did I do with the cotton wool? Vi comes in. She stands looking at me for a bit.

  ‘Aren’t you at school?’

  ‘It’s Saturday. Shall I open the window?’ I can see the cotton wool on the windowsill so I go and fetch it. It’s raining outside.

  ‘No. It’s cold.’

  ‘Are you putting him to bed, Mum?’

  ‘I’m changing him.’

  ‘Shall I?’

  ‘No. It’s all right.’ She sits on the bed and watches me, I can’t find the Vaseline. She is watching my every move. ‘Why don’t you make us a cup of tea?’

  ‘OK,’ she says. ‘D’you want to come and have it in the kitchen? I bought a cake.’ She goes out, which is a relief. I sit down again. When I hear the kettle whistling I remember she’s making tea so I change the boy on the bed. The sheet’s dirty anyway. The changing mat must be in the bathroom. I put him back and put his thumb in his mouth. He won’t sleep.

  She is cutting me a slice of chocolate cake, the tea is steaming. I start to eat the cake quickly, it sharpens me up. I sit down and look at her. What’s going on?

  ‘Ruth and me have been talking, Mum.’ She pours tea. ‘We think it’s very hard work for you, with the twins, even though you’re a lot better now.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘We’ve been thinking it might be better – it might make it a bit easier on you – if we went and stayed with Dad for a bit.’

  ‘With Gareth? In the flat?’

  ‘Well, no – you see, what he’s doing – well actually, he’s buying a house. He’s buying a house in Stoke Newington – we’ve been to see it. It’s pretty tatty but it’ll be great when it’s done up, and he said he’d like us to help decorate anyway.’

  ‘A big house? He’s bought a big house?’

  ‘I think he’s buying it with Linda. I think she’s buying half.’ Vi gets up and boils more water and fusses with the teapot. I finish my cake. It is quiet.

  ‘Mum – I’m not . . .’ She doesn’t finish.

  ‘You and Ruth want to live there?’

  ‘Not live – just, you know, for a bit. Look, it makes a lot of sense; you’ve got your hands full and hardly get any sleep and aren’t well anyway, so it’s no good for you having to worry about where we are at teatime and what’s going on. And he nearly always ends up giving us lifts home which is a bit rough on him because he’s got to bring us back here then go all the way back there, I mean, it’s a waste of petrol really. And it’s not – well, more peace and quiet would probably be better for you, and I think – in the long run –’

  Silence.

  ‘It will be better in the long run, Mum, because it’s quite hard for me and especially for Ruth with her exams, living here because it’s so tense and you feel – well, we feel, it makes us feel guilty but there’s nothing we can do. So that’ll probably be a relief to you too, won’t it? If we’re not here feeling like that. It means we’ll come and see you because we want to, instead of having to. And we won’t be a responsibility to you. He can worry about how late we stay up, and all that.’ Vi pretends to laugh.

  One of them starts to cry. I go automatically to pick it up. She follows me.

  ‘It will work out better in lots of ways, for now. Dad was saying it might be nice for you if Aunt Sarah came and stayed for a bit, it might make a break – she could have my room. And we get on with Linda OK, I mean she won’t interfere with us – it’ll be good for us really, like we’re learning gradually to get more independent.’

  I sit on the bed and give the baby my tit. Vi is standing in the doorway looking at me. ‘Yes, yes,’ I say. ‘That’ll be fine. Of course.’

  She stands and looks at me a bit longer, as if she thinks I’ll say something else. Then she goes away.

  * * *

  After they’d gone. The house is quiet, I’m on my own. Except for the twins.

  I leave the landing light on – in case of burglars? Or for the girls? I wait for them to come home.

  I know they’re not coming, but part of my head still carries on, with ‘They’re late, they’ll be tired for school. What can they be doing at this time of night?’ I nearly phone Gareth to see if he’s picking them up from somewhere, before I remember that they’re not to be my concern.

  When I go to bed I lie listening for them. But they don’t live here any more. I think I’ll ring Gareth anyway just to be told they’re safe in bed, then I’ll be able to sleep. If I know, definitely, that they are safely tucked up in bed. It’s the not knowing, not even knowing if worrying is necessary.

  I open the curtains. My room is darker than outside. Cars go by, lights shine in other houses. Are Ruth and Vi together? Are they in a car that might crash? Or walking along a street where a man is waiting, lurking in the shadows between two houses? Where are they? And if they don’t go home, will he tell me? When? Will he wait till morning? Or might he ring me to see if they’ve come here?

  They won’t come here. They’ve taken their duvets to Gareth’s. They are at Gareth and Linda’s, talking, drinking cocoa, laughing, watching a late-night film, finishing painting their new bedroom door. They are in a different life.

  When I go back to bed I can’t sleep because my feet are freezing. The twins should wake soon. They are both snuffling, their noses blocked. I get up and put on my socks.

  * * *

  Vi was wrong about me and Gareth. We didn’t pretend to be a devoted couple. It was her imagination that demanded that.

  Like mine.

  If a child can’t have what it wants it has a screaming tantrum. It doesn’t want something else, an alternative. It throws it on the floor, and screams. It would rather smash everything.

  We did live together; you can’t pretend to live in the same house. We did. He was always there at n
ight, his possessions were there, his clothes were there. We were both parents to Ruth and Vi. We talked about them, worried about them, made plans concerning them. We both took them into account. We both paid for them.

  We were husband and wife. Distantly, cynically, warily. In separate beds, and with a chilling respect for one another’s privacy. But we knew each other better than anyone else. So well that there were no rules. Ruth and Vi thought it disgusting that I got pregnant. I know they did. (Disgusting of me, of course, not of Gareth. Double standards in my liberated daughters. Ruth may even despise me for it – see it as a deliberate attempt to blackmail him?) They are both wrong.

  August. They were both away in France for a week with school, and it was hot. Gareth and I didn’t discuss it, but I assumed he would stay at Linda’s most of the time, since the girls weren’t at home. I was going to have an idle week, weeding the garden and reading some real adult novels, instead of all that teenage crap from work. I remember I bought a pile of Viragos and King Penguins, and settled in the sun on the lawn. Gareth came out into the garden on the first afternoon. I was surprised.

  ‘Aren’t you at work?’

  ‘I came to fetch a script I need for a meeting tonight. You look like you’re on holiday. This weather – can I join you?’

  I said yes, and he went to put his shorts on. He came out with a bottle of white wine and some ice. We lay in the sun and drank and talked – I don’t know, about books, the girls, work – for an hour or more. It was easy, completely easy. We knew each other so well. He leant over and stroked my leg, and we looked at each other. Yes.

  We were in a hurry, we didn’t get further than the lounge – the French windows were still open and I said, ‘What if someone comes round the back?’ and he said, ‘We’ll charge them fifty pounds for the performance’ and his skin was hot and dry and the smell of him made me tremble.

  Before he left he said, ‘Can I come back tonight?’ The house was empty, the girls were away. We didn’t have to be together. We made love in every room in the house, that week, as if we were marking out a territory. Nothing else existed. When Linda rang I reached for the phone by the side of the bed and told her I didn’t know where he was. He was inside me. It wasn’t revenge, I knew he wasn’t giving her up. It wasn’t anything except what it was. Knowing each other as we did. As we do.