The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  ‘When?’ I asked, ‘when will you be ready? I’d like to try now.’ She wouldn’t answer.

  She looked different these days from when I first met her. More beautiful perhaps, cooler, more refined, the softness leaving her mouth and cheeks, her jaw more pronounced, her nose more sculptured. She hardly had time to teach any more, but she kept a loose attachment to give her credibility. She wore crisp white trousersuits and structured dresses that bared the long neck under her groomed red hair. She was known as a beauty, now, on the screens, though she avoided gossip and photographs, and particularly frowned on any mention of me, or snatched papshots of the two of us together.

  ‘You’re not ashamed of me, are you?’ I asked her that evening. She was looking like a model, lean and contained, in a pale yellow suit with combat trousers.

  ‘No – of course not. How could I be? But perhaps you could sometimes wear a shirt. I mean, we’re not nineteen any more.’

  ‘That’s why I think we should try for a baby.’

  She looked thwarted, as though I were being obtuse, but surely she was being obtuse? ‘I’d just like to earn enough for us to have a house. Move out of the city. Then the child could have a garden.’

  ‘You mean, stay in England?’ I was dismayed.

  ‘Don’t take me so literally,’ she snapped. ‘I just think we should be practical. You’re a dreamer, Saul. I have to plan for us both.’

  ‘I thought we’d already made plans,’ I said. ‘Travel, remember. Children. Freedom. I could earn good money with my research.’

  ‘Well, they don’t give a crash about gender in Ghana,’ she flared at me. ‘Have you thought about that? Do you ever think? I couldn’t do my work in Ghana. I couldn’t earn any money in Ghana.’

  ‘Look, I gave up Ghana, you know I did. But I could support you. I could,’ I begged. ‘It’s what we used to talk about. You could be a mother, I could be the man … I’d really like to look after you.’

  To my surprise, she began to cry. ‘It sounds beautiful, when you say that. I don’t know why I’m crying, I must be going soft … Of course I want a baby, more than anything.’

  ‘Then why don’t we try? Let’s try right away!’

  Her precise new face was blurred with tears. She stared up at me from her seat in the window. She had tugged her tailored hair out of shape; it looked softer, more human, fraying at the edges. ‘I’m afraid, I think,’ she said, slowly. ‘I don’t want to fail, like everyone else.’

  And then I was a man, and she was a woman. ‘I’ll make you pregnant. Of course I will. Just let me finish looking at this data … I’m tying up loose ends on that hoax last year.’

  ‘Not the Antarctic thing? I thought that was all forgotten?’

  ‘This woman is testing her ice thicknesses again. It has to be done at the same time each year.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ve got things to do. We’ll meet at bedtime and – have a go.’

  Not very romantic, but I didn’t care. My heart was singing. Now life would begin. I flicked on my screen and stared at it through a brilliant film of happiness, scanning automatically across the sites till I came to Professor Raven’s homepage.

  The data was back, I registered at once. Good, so now this thing would be buried. The Globecorps would have to try another tack. The future would be hot; hotter; hottest … I hope our baby won’t be hairy, I thought, particularly if she’s a girl … Yet something on the screen was demanding attention, pulling me down from my place on the ceiling.

  Improbably, it had happened again. Raven’s second set of data showed the icesheets still thickening. The results this time were more dramatic, an increased rate of change upon the year before. The report was concise, but Professor Raven had added a footnote. ‘I am of course aware that these results will be scanned by screens all over the world and made use of for various ends by the Globecorps. I am not responsible for their interpretations or misinterpretations, but I can vouch for the data’s accuracy. Sceptics might care to crossrefer to Achtheim, Dr Gisele, Alpine Glacial Movement, and Geronimo, Professor Jean, A Puzzle for the Icebreakers.’

  When I finally lay naked with Sarah in my arms, more excited perhaps than I had ever been since the first time I lay with her, my love was shivering with nervousness, and as I stroked her arms and breasts and felt the small goosebumps begin to subside I thought about cold, and the sheets of ice, the vast fields of ice where the sun never set, and how strange and beautiful it would be if the great bluewhitenesses were creeping back. The children came running over the ice, shrieking with laughter, clutching each other, sliding down to the frozen ocean. Were they coming nearer? I still couldn’t see. The light on their faces was intense, blinding.

  ‘The ice is growing,’ I whispered to Sarah. ‘It wasn’t a mistake. The ice is thickening. Our little boy might even see snow.’

  ‘Our little boy!’ She kissed me, tenderly. ‘No, you’re deluded. We’ll have a girl.’

  ‘Twins,’ I said, as I pushed inside her. ‘A boy and a girl. Snowbabies.’

  4

  And so we began on our epic of conception. The details blur, but it took ten years. Ten years of learning to eat my words.

  It was as if we shared two different lives, one all success, the other slow failure.

  In our waking life, we pursued our careers, began to make money, moved from the room to a threebed flat, then a fourbed flat in a better part of London, less fun but safer, a flat where we could finally have a study each, if we managed with only one guest bedroom.

  Sarah, after all, had no family to speak of. Her father was untraceable, and she wasn’t on speaking terms with her mother, who was on her fourth marriage, to a twentyyearold skater. Perhaps that’s why she clung to me. It’s certainly why she adored my parents. The guest bedroom was for Samuel and Milly to come and marvel at their son’s success.

  And I was successful, though I felt a little trapped. I divided my time between working on a consultancy basis for the Learning Centre where I first met Sarah, and researching applications of nanotechnology for one of the two big Nanocorps. I felt proud of what we were doing, designing minute immune machines, ‘like minisubmarines’, I told Sarah, which could travel through the blood and identify and destroy an enormous range of viruses and bacteria. My friend Riswan was the medical star; my part was the protein engineering. True, it turned out later that many of the agents we’d targeted for destruction had benign effects that we hadn’t understood, so the application was never used, but those were the early, heroic days.

  I earned a lot, but Sarah earned more. Sometimes it seemed she never stopped working. And she made the flat beautiful; it mattered to her. She would come home exhausted from performing, then work for two hours cleaning and dusting till the flat was immaculate. At first I used to try to stop her, but that made her crosser than cleaning did.

  ‘Someone has to do it,’ she would say.

  ‘Sure. The cleaner. That’s why we have one.’

  ‘But she can’t make it look like a proper home. She doesn’t love it, like I do. It’s … our nest.’

  But she wasn’t laying eggs. My mind went blank. ‘All the same, you’re exhausted. Stop.’

  ‘I want it to look nice.’

  ‘What can I do to convince you?’

  ‘You can’t convince me. I suppose you could help me.’

  ‘Okay then.’ I probably sounded reluctant. I’d had a tough day at the office; I wanted to sit and chill onscreen. ‘I mean, if I must, but you worry too much. The flat looks perfectly all right to me.’

  ‘You won’t help me,’ she remarked, tightlipped. ‘You make me feel bad about asking you to help. So don’t pretend to be all concerned.’

  She wasn’t logical, because she was tired, always hyperactive, living on her nerves. She found it hard to say ‘No’ to things. Each invitation to write an article, appear on the screens or speak at a conference might be her last, so she never refused. She put her work before everything – she was alw
ays exhausted. Perhaps that was why … Stress can make human beings infertile.

  (But was I so different? No, just less successful.)

  When my parents came, they were amazed and frightened. The way Sarah’s phone never stopped ringing, the gourmet food at every meal (when most people in England lived on pills and Fibamix), the huge china bowls that Sarah kept filled with expensive real flowers in the diner and the screenroom, the way we darted around, without a second thought, in taxis and, slightly less often, minicopters (my mother had only taken two taxis in her life, and neither of my parents had flown in a minicopter until we hired one to take us all to a West End lloydwebber, then supper at the Ritz), the way we worked into the early hours, and lived symbiotically with our machines, which responded to our voices, of course, opening doors, cooling, heating, dealing with rubbish, ordering food. It was a different world from Samuel and Milly’s.

  ‘It’s very nice, Saul,’ my mother hissed the first time they came to Melville Road, as soon as Sarah had vanished to the kitchen. Mum liked our cats. Two fluffy white Persians. Not practical, really, with the heat. They were neutered males; we couldn’t have coped with kittens. They sat and flicked their thick feathery tails as they watched the flies outside the window. ‘We couldn’t have cats, with your father’s birds … You’ve done so well. The flat. Sarah. Your dad and I – we never quite managed …’ She trailed away, not wanting to say more. ‘But you, the kids. It’s what we wanted for you.’

  So we were doing something right. My parents loved us, our employers loved us; our friends came round and were hard to dislodge after Sarah’s brilliant salads and my chilled wine; minicopters and cleaners enjoyed our tips; the Liblabs courted our donations, especially in election years, and sent us invitations to celebrity events … In this life we were flying high.

  But we had another life that was a secret minefield of rings on calendars, hopes and fears. ‘We’ll do it,’ I told her, finding her in tears after another period turned up to disappoint her.

  ‘We have to have help.’

  ‘No, you have to have faith.’

  So when did I start to accept there was a problem? I found it harder to face up to than Sarah. Harder, perhaps, for a man to admit he can’t do the thing his body should do. As if that function defines a man.

  I blamed myself. I had been so certain I could give Sarah what she wanted.

  And more than a family was hanging on this. Sarah had promised to marry me, once, long ago, in our first few months together. Marrying was rare in the Tropical Time (though it came back later, with the Troubles and the Ice.) In the twenties and thirties, only godlovers got married, plus a few old slows afraid of the future.

  But I loved Sarah, and feared to lose her. And I wanted to have what my parents had had. It probably all looked different to Sarah, whose parents split up before she was eight. She was flattered to be asked; it was ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘romantic’. Or so she said, but words are easy. Perhaps it simply went well with the self she had invented to go with her job as Role Support Officer, the false new self she so quickly tired of –

  I mustn’t get bitter. What good does it do?

  As Sarah grew more successful and selfconfident, she didn’t see the point of marrying.

  ‘It’s a vow, that’s all,’ I tried to explain. ‘Who cares whether other people do it? We’re not like other people, are we?’

  ‘No,’ said Sarah. ‘I suppose we’re not. But it’s a bit awkward, all the same … The paps will come and photograph us, and afterwards they’ll never leave us alone.’

  ‘So it’s your immense fame, is it, getting in the way?’

  I had to tease her, sometimes, or die, and Sarah usually saw the joke. Not this time, though.

  ‘It’s political,’ she said, in that overemphatic, selfrighteous voice she used when I was being thick. ‘You never see the political angle.’

  ‘I thought marriage was personal, actually. It’s about you and me, and – love and children …’

  ‘Well, of course I’ll marry you if – I mean, I’ll marry you when we have children.’

  So that was settled. A compromise that neither of us was quite happy with, but I held it before me like a baton through the tenyear marathon we ran to conception.

  Two years in, I agreed to have tests. Sarah was the realist. I didn’t want to do it – to join the thousands of anxious couples who flocked to the Batteries every day.

  ‘I didn’t mention the Batteries,’ Sarah protested. ‘I hate that name, in any case … The fertility clinics do their best for people.’

  ‘Eggboxes then.’

  ‘That’s stupid too. We just have to ask our own doctor for a few little tests to see what’s happening.’

  It turned out she was already wellinformed. She had discussed it all with her friend Sylvie, who’d had a successful techfix conception. I was very upset she had discussed it. I didn’t like Sylvie, a thin intense woman with too much makeup and strawlike hair. Her threeyearold son was out of control, and she talked on the telephone to Sarah for hours. To me she always looked slightly dirty.

  But then I was ignorant, truculent, proud, and wanted no one to know our problems.

  I grew humbler later. God, I did. I have tried to forget the humiliations.

  I gave them my sperm to be examined.

  I felt I was giving them my dreams.

  Of course, as the doctor told us, in his lying, caring, professional voice, no tests were onehundredpercent conclusive, and there were many things medicine still didn’t know …

  I was angry, and hurt. Sarah claimed I exploded. ‘Oh, you don’t know it all, then?’ I sneered at him. I tore his form in two, then in four. ‘Do you think that’s a surprise to anyone? Science knows fuck all about making babies –’

  ‘He’s upset,’ said Sarah, preemptively. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Um – I can never remember your name. Sorry.’

  ‘Wang. Dr Wang –’ (I laughed, rudely) ‘we quite understand these are stressful experiences.’

  Dr Wang ‘understood’ – but no one understood. I had just been told my sperm was semifertile. My balls were no good, that was what I heard. They were big and firm, I had trusted them, I’d secretly believed the problem was Sarah’s –

  I halfexpected her to leave me.

  She didn’t, though. She comforted me, back in the privacy of home. At least, she tried to comfort me. ‘It’s normal, now, you realise. The majority of men have semifertile sperm. At least you were brave enough to get tested. Most men won’t, which is simply pathetic.’

  ‘Pathetic?’ I said. ‘You haven’t a clue. You don’t understand how much it means to men … everything, really.’

  ‘You’ve still got me. And your job. And your future. And we’ll still have a baby, somehow, sometime. Other people do. So shall we.’ She was brisk and kindly, but thought my grief excessive. She always did think me too extreme –

  Yet wasn’t that part of what she’d fallen in love with, my passionate emotions, my grandiose self? The Saul who was ready to die for her when the spacemen appeared with their huge silver vappers? She was inconsistent, like all women.

  But I knew she liked me to make her laugh. I made an effort to stay cheerful.

  ‘I just need more sex. I’m not kidding. I’m not infertile, just semifertile. Half, get it? So I need twice as much sex.’

  And then she laughed her beautiful laugh, husky, showing her small milky teeth with lower incisors sharp as cats’, and we were happy, and made love again. ‘Just one more chance and they’ll be in like Flynn.’

  One more chance, then another, then another, till nine years had gone by, and we were over thirty, and could have afforded another move to one of the smaller houses in the Northwest Enclaves where everyone aspired to live, but she refused, ‘until we have children’.

  By now it was Sarah who was utterly depressed, though she smiled for the world every week on the screens. She refused sex altogether sometimes, or else was insatiable and desperate. She read baby
magazines all night, or couldn’t bear to look at children in the street.

  I loved her too much to let this drag on. On my thirtyfirst birthday I said, ‘That’s it. We’re going to do this the techfix way. Whatever it costs, whatever it takes, we’re going to get the doctors to make us a baby.’

  It was easier once we had given in. It was like being on a moving walkway that carried us along with everyone else. But the Batteries did not have a brilliant success rate, though they boasted of ‘upwards of twentyfivepercent’. This figure meant conceptions rather than births, as old hands knew, and tipped off newcomers.

  ‘At least we’ll make new friends,’ Sarah remarked, after a long intense conversation with a woman in the loo. ‘At least we have something in common with people.’

  ‘I don’t want friends, I want a baby.’

  The men sat silent, while the women confided. I switched my phone on to text and pretended to be absorbed in reading.

  We had plenty of money, at any rate. We chose the top clinic, the bestknown doctor. Dr Zeuss had a global reputation. We put ourselves in his hands completely. We made love when he told us to; abstained when he told us to; ate and drank and slept to order.

  Instead of having two lives, we had only one. We were totally absorbed in the job in hand.

  We whizzed through the tunnels nearly every morning before five am to be injected or tested, making changes of plan at a split second’s notice if the doctors told us they needed us, if eggs could be harvested or sperm donated or any other bits of us removed and twizzled. We said ‘Yes’ to everything. We’d held out too long, and now we yielded our bodies completely, our private parts, our selves, our money.

  What Sarah had said about making new friends began to seem more sensible, for those were the only friends we could have, friends who were equally obsessed, who understood why we could never keep a date or drink coffee or wine or go to bed after nine. Our god, who ran the universe, was Dr Zeuss, and we believed in him, however much the Doctorwatch tried to expose him as a moneygrubber or a charlatan, whatever the disquieting stories onscreen about mixups of sperm or eggs or foetuses, however chilling the articles on rates of deformity in techfix births. We thought they were written by jealous hacks, too poor to afford to get help like us.