The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  She suddenly stopped frowning and touched my arm. As the entrance slid open, to great whoops and cheers, I watched her pupils expand and darken. ‘Why should you?’ she said. ‘I mean – you’ve only just met me. I mean, you were risking your life for me.’

  I thought about that in the split second that was left. I couldn’t say ‘Because I’m in love with you,’ for fear she would think me completely mad.

  The thing I did say seemed simple, obvious, though normally I would never have said it. ‘Because I’m a man,’ I told her. ‘Because I’m a man, and you’re a woman.’

  3

  That was the way it began with us. An absolute feeling of rightness together. My colouring, my size, my sex. They all felt right as never before. They married her smallness, softness, toughness. She reminded me a little of my mother, slight but enduring, loving, fierce, good with her hands, helpful, maternal. She was – womanly, that was the only word, old-fashioned though I knew it was. So I could be manly, as I wished to be.

  ‘You beautiful man,’ she said, when she first saw me naked, not long after. No woman had ever said that to me.

  ‘But I’m so – hairy,’ I said, humbly. I did feel humble. She was too good for me. Seeing her like this, it was obvious. Her small sweet breasts. Her delicacy. I was halfashamed of my hairiness. The pressures against it were overwhelming; ninetyninepercent of men were smooth and neat, displaying their gleaming narrow bodies in clubs, corrugated chests that shone like oil and only the faintest grey fuzz on their scalps. I was an ape by comparison, a pelt of blackness from chest to groin.

  ‘Esau was an hairy man,’ she whispered, gently running her fingertips through my chest hair, going down, lower, lower, bliss, till she reached the place where I was hard and hairless, and she bent her head and kissed me there, then looked up and smiled – ‘See, you’re smooth as well.’

  Such happiness. Such a time of peace.

  Only one thing was less than perfect, and I put that down to my stubbornness, a streak of pride and resentment that had sometimes got me into trouble at school. She was wild about me, everything about me, as she assured me earnestly, running her hands over my lips, my nose, telling me I was the first beek she had slept with. (How very dated that slang seems now!) She seemed to think about that more than I did. It must have made me more romantic, my mixed race background, my unusual looks. She wanted me to read the essays she had written for the Ethnicities part of her diploma, and I tried, I tried, but it was very solemn, and the language incomprehensible.

  She ordered what seemed like dozens of films about black history, and urged me to watch them. The Black Diaspora, The Black Experience, Caliban in London, African Journey … She saw at least half before she got bored, but I made excuses not to watch them with her, I didn’t want her telling me stuff, teaching me stuff, about my past, I wanted her to love me for myself, I didn’t want to be part of black history, I needed to be myself, her man. ‘I’ll use them later,’ I said, meaning never. And she sulked a bit, but then she gave up. We made love so much, there was no time to quarrel.

  Never, never …

  Never say never.

  For a while we were everything to each other, Sarah and I in a box of a room. (Property, of course, was insanely expensive since the government had stopped all further building to protect the last socalled green spaces. But the illicit shanty town still grew, though every day police tore it down. And in the centre of London flybuilders slipped buildings into every tiny gap and garden.) We were grateful for our sweaty box, though it was on the third floor and had no aircon, no voice response, no autoservice. It was primitive, but so were we.

  We made love on the floor, which was cooler than the sleepmat, and in the showerroom, and in the kitchen. We slept intertwined, in a slipknot of sweat. That amazing heat of that first summer.

  It was always with us, like a third person. If we hadn’t been so madly in love with each other, hungry for each moist salty centimetre of skin, we couldn’t have borne to share that space. The middleaged, the slows, the bits, rarely seemed to touch each other. By June or July, handshakes had shrunk to a tentative tap inside the wrist.

  But to us that summer was like a mother, holding us clasped together in the heat. Deep down we were very different people, but for months of bliss we lived like twins. I made iced coffee; she made iced coffee. I showered; she showered. We made love again.

  The first time we did it, she said, insanely, ‘Come on, Saul. Let’s make a baby. I know I’ll get pregnant. I just feel it.’

  I was naked and stiff in the candle flame (which was strictly illegal because of the fire risk). My sweat ran down like melted wax, but a cold little voice from somewhere else hissed in my ear, escaped my lips.

  ‘But if we want to travel, Sarah,’ I said. ‘You thought, in a year … once you’re established in the job. We talked about going to the ends of the earth …’ I felt as if our dream might slip away, but perhaps I was looking in the wrong direction. ‘But never mind,’ I added, hastily. I would have done anything she wanted.

  I was too late. Her fluid mouth, which had been like an anemone, red and inflamed and fully open, instantly hardened. ‘Of course you’re right. I’ll fix myself up.’

  Regret hit me like the back of a spade. I knew I should have trusted her instincts, and we would have made a baby at once, a bouncing, beautiful, healthy baby.

  Then she came back towards me, with her copperred hair running in heavy streams across the apples of her breasts, her eyes cast down, her eyes on my penis, and her fingers touched my neck, and I groaned, and forgot.

  ‘There’ll be other times,’ I said, when we’d finished, and lay entwined in the airless night. All the windows were open, but the breeze never came. Below in the street, car doors slammed, sirens wailed in the distance, a drunk was singing a sentimental song about tomorrow, a can clattered and crumpled underneath a car wheel, a couple continued a distant row – but the sound of her breathing, loud and real in the foreground, turned the sadness of the city into perfect contentment. Or almost perfect.

  ‘Are you awake, Sarah? There’ll be millions of times –’

  ‘What?’ she asked me, sleepy, happy. ‘What are you worrying about, Saul?’

  ‘We’ll have lots of babies, like you said.’

  ‘Oh that. Thankgod you were sensible.’ She yawned, turned over and fell asleep.

  At first we seemed to want the same things. This life in a high poky room in London was temporary, we agreed. We dreamed of making for the last open spaces. Our private mantra was ‘the ends of the earth’. We imagined raising a family by the sea, with forests, fields, clean bright water. The children were running, shouting, towards us.

  But two years went by and they had run no closer. Sarah was getting more involved in her job even as she began to find its premises ‘simplistic’, as I heard her tell a colleague in the lift. She was one of the most vocal of the first group of Role Support Workers to be appointed, and because she talked well, and looked good on the screen, she began to be looked on as a spokesperson.

  She talked about it to smug presenters. How the children resisted her, how they jeered. The tactics she used to make them take her seriously. How the boys reacted better if she presented herself in a more androgynous way; otherwise they tended to fall in love with her, though of course she didn’t put it like that. (I burned with jealousy when she told me about these great lustful adolescents, staring at her.) On the whole, though, the boys were more receptive to her message. They saw great advantages in the old roles, in having women to love and support them. The girls, on the other hand, were not all that excited about developing their nurturing sides.

  She came home very thoughtful after one discussion. She described it to me as she made supper. ‘I want to look after kids,’ one girl had said, a big, loud creature who spoke her mind. ‘I worry in case I never have them. But why should I want to look after a man? They’re not babies. And most of them are hopeless. That’s what Mum says, anyway.’
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br />   ‘We only want them for one thing, eh girls?’ her friend had shouted, ‘and they’re not much good at that, either,’ and all the girls shrieked with crude laughter, while the boys sat sullen, their faces burning. ‘Slags,’ one shouted. ‘Lesbians.’

  The girls were often hostile to Sarah, too. ‘It’s because you’re so beautiful,’ I suggested. ‘They’re jealous’. But ‘Women are more complex than you think,’ she replied. ‘They don’t know how to relate to me, that’s all. I’m not like their mothers or their sisters. I’m telling them things they don’t want to hear. But they’re halfafraid I’m on to something.’

  ‘Well, you’re the right person to be teaching them,’ I said. ‘You do love a man. And live with one happily.’

  There was a little pause before she said, ‘Yes,’ and when I glanced across at her, curious, she left the washingup and came and sat on my lap, looking over my shoulder at the square of night sky.

  ‘Indifference is the danger,’ she said after a while. ‘And boredom and resentment and a faint sense of guilt that the other sex exist at all. It’s as if we would be happier –’ She paused and tried again. ‘As if they would be happier if the whole of life were segged. Boys feel safe with boys, girls with girls. The downside is, the girls want children. And the boys still want the girls to love them. But they don’t, and so they try to ignore them.’

  There had been a lot of shuffling and giggling when she showed them old films about love from the Learning Centre’s midtwentieth-century collection. It was true that they tended to go silent by the end, and she could tell quite well that a lot of them enjoyed it, but they were sheepish about saying so. ‘Boring,’ they chorused, when the lights went up. And yet perhaps this part of the course was not a failure, for they always showed up in strength for the films.

  She’d begun to get on better with the girls as she started to understand their point of view. ‘They’re not just yobs,’ she told me. ‘I used to be scared of them because of their violence, the way they beat boys up outside the gates, but they’re quite thoughtful, when you listen to them. I think they have a point about housework, too.’

  ‘But you enjoy it,’ I said. ‘Partly because you’re so good at it. Your food always looks so beautiful. I mean, you turn that side of things into pure pleasure. I wish those girls could see what you do.’

  She didn’t smile, but nodded slowly. ‘It takes a lot of time, though, Saul, you know.’

  ‘Time well spent,’ I said, kissing her.

  (I was a fool. I didn’t spot the signs.)

  She let me kiss her, then pushed me away. ‘I’ve got to get on. I must finish my work.’ She was preparing one of a series of reports for the government on the success of the project, which would help them to decide on further funding. Each night she was working till the breeze began to stir, long after I had fallen asleep. I would bring her iced coffee as she bent over her screen, though she started to reject it in favour of water.

  ‘But you love iced coffee,’ I said to her, hurt. ‘And you know I like to look after you –’

  ‘Why don’t you, then?’ she cut me off. ‘I used to like iced coffee. But people change.’

  And she began to change more obviously, wearing trousers to work instead of dresses, which she said antagonised the girls, and trimming her hair ‘because it gets in the way’. In the way of what? She was going somewhere.

  Meanwhile I was online whenever I was able, to update on the latest tech data. Teaching for me had been a temporary plan; now it was time to move back into research, where there was more money, and freedom, and travel. The room seemed smaller when we were both working, two screens like two extra living things in the space, two busy, whispering, hurrying voices. Even so, it felt companionable. I was sure we were working towards the same end, the imagined future of shared freedom. A beach, sanddunes, small feet running.

  She made the food; I ate it, gratefully. She washed the clothes; I put them on. I never really noticed that she was doing more (but she could have spoken; she could have complained) until one day we had our first quarrel.

  She was standing by the window, drying her hands, preparing to sit down to work after supper. I remember there was a bright sunset. I couldn’t see her face, but the new short shape of her hair made her head sharp and black against the scarlet light.

  Something was beginning, something very important, but I didn’t understand it, nor anything else. ‘There’s some weird data here from the Antarctic,’ I said. I was reading from the net about the rate of melting of the icecaps, and the various tech fixes trying to slow it down. ‘Some of these results are coming out skewed.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They seem to show the ice is getting thicker. I wish I were out there. This woman must’ve left out some of the variables.’

  ‘What if it’s true?’ she interrupted. ‘I’m sick of this heat. I wish it were true. Imagine it. Having fires in winter like my grandmother did on the island … This cold fog used to roll in from the sea, it was like walking through clouds, it was marvellous.’ After Sarah’s violent father left, she’d been sent to stay quite often with her grandma in the Hebrides. Her memories of Coll were absurdly romantic.

  ‘Or else they’re taking samples from the wrong place,’ I continued. ‘There has to be some obvious error. Why do these people always screw up?’

  ‘Wrapping up in coats,’ Sarah went on, ‘like they did in the last century. Not every day the same in this godawful heat. And this godawful baking city.’

  That brought me up short. ‘But you like the heat, don’t you?’ She turned and stared. I knew her. I loved her. My mind went back to the data again. ‘It’s curious. Her reports seem to show the icecap thickening in different places. You’re right, it would be amazing, wouldn’t it? I mean, imagine, if global warming ended.’

  But a new, unlikeable expression stiffened her face into a righteous mask. ‘I wasn’t serious, Saul. If it’s anything, it’s some kind of fraud by business interests. Trying to prove global warming’s slowed up. So they can go ahead and crash the planet.’

  ‘It’s just a few data, Sarah. Not enough for a fully fledged conspiracy theory. I don’t believe it either. We agree.’

  ‘You always think we agree about everything. And could you wipe the bloody table, for once? I’ve got a headache … Must I do everything around here?’

  I sat and gaped. That was just the beginning. She hated our room, and the heat, and the city, and living together, and wished I would die, so she could live in the country, and have a big house, and a life, and a baby, and another man who really loved her, unlike me. By the end she was yelling. Then she was sobbing. She was wildly unreasonable, then contrite.

  It didn’t mean anything, or so I thought. I made love to her, and her headache went away, and so did that first queer flurry of awareness, light as the first little flutter of snow.

  But the ice didn’t go away for long. It returned quite soon, like the nerve in my tooth, the ticking of a faulty electric current.

  As Sarah had expected, the industrial lobbies were quick to make use of the discrepant data. ‘GLOBAL WARMING A BLIP’, shouted the newstexts. ‘SCIENTISTS CLAIM POLES NOT MELTING’. This was followed by a flurry of denials from scientists and politicians all over the world, worried that this freak bunch of results would undo every hard-won environmental resolution. Then the denials were challenged by a third group of scientists known to be paid by big business. But no one believed them, no one could envisage that global warming was coming to an end. It was too damn hot, and getting hotter by the day, for the news broke in spring, and soon it was summer … No one took the odd data seriously, and the original scientist who’d published the results kept her head low while she repeated the probes.

  Twelve months later it had all been forgotten. We still hadn’t managed to escape from the city. I’d been offered several posts in exciting places; I could have gone to the Galapagos, or Lisbon; I was offered a highly paid job in Africa, helping wi
th a nationwide updating of screens in Ghana. I longed to accept the last job in particular, knowing how proud my father would have been, and knowing I’d been chosen partly for my ancestry, the gift I was so proud of and had never used. The interviewing board had an atavistic sense that my Ghanaian blood made me less likely to cheat them. (They were right. I wanted to pay my dues, and my father’s dues, and my grandfather’s.)

  But I turned them down, and I don’t blame Sarah. Perhaps that means I do blame Sarah. She told me yes, of course I must go, use my talents, live my life. ‘You’ve been dreaming of travelling for as long as I’ve known you. Go, and I’ll come out and visit you.’

  ‘Come with me,’ I said, but she wouldn’t.

  She was fronting a screen show called Gendersense, dubbed ‘Utter Nonsense’ by Conserver pundits disappointed by the way her position had changed from the early days of her Role Support work. Now she saw her mission as ‘giving a voice to the different views of men and women’, ‘exploring the options for separate development’ and ‘reflecting the range of the fertility debate’, to quote from the twopage synopsis for the series she submitted to Brainscreen at the start.

  I read it as I set the table one evening. I was heating up some Thai food for her. She had come home late, and I had made an effort. I wanted her to be pleased with me; there were generefreshed snowberries and cream for dessert. ‘Darling,’ she said. ‘I really love you.’ But I couldn’t understand this thing she had written.

  She laughed when I asked her what it all meant. ‘Nothing, really. I just have to sound – well – challenging, but not too controversial.’

  ‘Are you going to tell them what you believe?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, about men and women loving each other. And living together. Then the babies will come.’

  She nodded abstractedly. Her cheeks were full of food. ‘Mmm. But it has to sound a bit more theoretical than that. I mean, it is Brainscreen. Look – it’s not about us. Please understand, Saul, it’s just a job. We’re going to live together, and have a child – one day. I mean, I know we shall. But most people don’t live like us –’