The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

‘You’re my family,’ I said. My voice had gone wobbly. ‘You and Luke. I know things have been … difficult. But he’s getting stronger. So are you. You said you would marry me, remember.’

  The odd thing is, she agreed to it, because she had promised, because of Luke. She would marry me, as a pledge to the child, but no longer live with me or love me. ‘I’m tired of men, as a matter of fact. They’re okay as friends, but I’ll live alone. Or else with Sylvie and her child. That would be company for Luke. Don’t cry,’ she said, seeing my stricken face. ‘Get a grip on yourself. You’re a father. And you’ll always be special,’ she added, more kindly. ‘It’s just … I trusted you too much. I think that women should be independent.’

  And so we got married; a kind of divorce.

  And much of it’s still a mystery to me. How can I explain it to these crazy kids, who live for food, and fire, and sex? How love was so important to us. How tiny shades of wants and wishes made us fight, and sob, and part. How humans had everything, and valued nothing.

  5

  Cold, cold, battering cold, cold that howls and bites and burns, cold we shrink from like an enemy, as darkness comes, as the sun slips away. We huddle together round the fire like friends, but can anyone be friends with the wild children? They let me creep close, they tolerate me, because they want the things I have – my expertise with the machines, my stories. They think I am as old as god …

  They have no family, no history.

  In the middle of the night, the cold is like stone, black and solid and hard as death, and as the dawn comes it sharpens to pain, as light creeps back with the morning wind. (I loved it, once, that little wind. In the Tropical Time, it came like grace. Now it’s the wind that takes the dying. Comes like a blade to finish them off.)

  And then the sun. See, it’s rising. Our friend the sun, my only friend. The line of white along the horizon, the light reflected off the back of the ice … It will redden soon, then the sun will appear, and this frozen ball will roll towards it, the sun will climb over the smoking towers (that stain of foul greasy smoke from the chimneys, hinting at a long night’s killing and eating), piercing the mesh of the perimeter fence, till the heat begins to melt the grey grass, and a dull soaked greenness spreads in patches, and the torn airport fence begins to drip, glitter and weep as the frost dissolves, and the broken windowpanes catch fire, great burning lakes for a few brief moments, and the human mound starts to shuffle and groan, what looked like a pyre of blackened bodies begins to colour and shift and dissolve into hundreds of moaning, stretching creatures, and my own blood creeps back, slowly, painfully, my aching limbs unclench and stir.

  By night I sleep like a nervous cat, waking whenever a shadow moves. That’s when it will happen, one icy night when the dark makes me indistinguishable from any other skinful of meat and grease that would make the fires blaze up for a minute, keep a few starving kids alive.

  … One night after the lights have gone out. One night when Kit isn’t there to protect me. He does protect me, in a way, though he might be rough with me if I’d let him. He is my friend, I suppose, in a way.

  His foot prods me in the small of the back. ‘Get up, Gramp,’ he giggles. ‘Here –’ He hands me a can of hot water. The edge is raw metal. I drink with care. I don’t look at him until I’ve finished. It’s difficult to unlock my neck, to make the effort of looking up. His skin is a windreddened dirty brown, and the one empty eyesocket puckers like an arsehole, but he smiles cheerily, through yellow teeth.

  ‘Writing,’ he says, impatiently. ‘Finish?’

  I gesture feebly at my notebook. ‘Just started.’

  He points to the book, then his eyes, then back, then pulls a face of animal displeasure. ‘Reddit,’ he mouths. ‘Yerrch.’

  ‘I know, all right, but it gets –’

  ‘Nope.’ He mimes tearing my book apart. One of the pages does tear, slightly.

  ‘I’m going to write about the Doves, right. The Doves, get me? You like the Doves.’

  ‘Dying,’ he says, and crouches down beside me and stares at the floor. ‘The Doves, dying.’ Kit is actually crying.

  ‘No no,’ I say, encouragingly. ‘They just miss me. Their Uncle Solly. I’ve been too busy –’ His foot again, propelling me in the direction of the hangar where the Doves are kept.

  ‘You go today,’ I say, firmly. ‘I go tomorrow. Today, I write.’

  To my surprise, he goes off, hangdog. I didn’t expect that to be so easy. Normally I don’t write by day, but the last two days I have found a hiding place and written as if it would save my life, though I don’t suppose anything can save me. I mean to finish my story, though.

  I jog away, stiffly, trying to look young, trying to look tough and in command. I defecate in one of the pits. Hard and mingy, not satisfying. It’s the diet. Unless the boys have robbed a convoy there’s no fruit or veg except potatoes, which these kids can just about manage to grow, but most of them are rotten by this time of year and they come out of the fire either burnt or half raw. At least the cold stops the pits stinking. On the rare warm days, in the old midsummer, the air is suddenly black with flies. Not all the wild boys use the pits, but it’s a crime if you’re caught fouling, punishable with beating, and occasionally death, because some of the beaters don’t know when to stop.

  The Doves are supposed to be my daytime job, but for a few days I’m going to neglect them. Kit will cover for me, with some of the boys. They always like to play with the Doves, though play is becoming less satisfying as more of the Doves become … moribund.

  (Such a comic word, round as a plum. Not one of these boys would recognise it. I long for someone who knows what words mean. My mother loved them; my father too. In the new Days, people don’t risk words. If you open your mouth, the ice blows in, hurting the teeth no dentists care for. Drying your throat. Piercing your soul. Filling your heart with loneliness. Best keep the old words close to your chest … They don’t hurt me if I write them down.)

  I jog purposefully over to the derelict shell that was once one of the multistorey carparks. Till a few months ago it was full of wild children shooting down the slopes on homemade skates and skateboards, but too many were killed, or it grew too cold. The winds that howled through became too much to bear, and now the skaters have moved elsewhere. There’s a tiny cupboard here, two metres square, smelling of damp, by an empty liftshaft. There is light to see by if I leave the door ajar, but it would be too dangerous to do that. I’m safe in the open, where many people know me, but no one’s safe if they’re caught alone. I close the door firmly and take out my candle, my treasured grey stump of life and light. Not much of it left, so I’ll have to hurry.

  I never stopped loving that bloody woman, however angry I felt with her. Of course I was angry; she was insane. How could we get married and live apart? Shouldn’t a woman want to live with her man? She lived with a woman, and had a male lover.

  I complained to anyone who’d listen. But people didn’t understand. It seemed I’d been living in a timewarp.

  I tried to take in what was going on. Behind my back, the world had been changing. Once I started looking, it was everywhere. Segging had spread into so much of life. Young women were beginning to live with women; men were trying to live with men. Colonies of men took apartment blocks together. Those with swimming pools were especially popular. For many the choice was homosexual, but others just liked the camaraderie, which made them less lonely than before. This way of living could get competitive, vying with peers for sex or friendship or leadership within the group, so some of those early experiments failed and the men went back to live with their parents. The older generation thought the world had gone mad. Perhaps it had, perhaps it had.

  The women lived together for different reasons. Some of them drew up the battlelines around the scarce, precious children. Four or five women would look after one child. Those rare, petted, unhealthy children … Again this could get competititive, but the childless ones found a kind of fulfilment. Not
that all women were domestically inclined. The gangs of girls who roamed the towers were said to be more violent than the men. Some teenage girls found inspiration in older women’s groups which mimicked the men’s. Their ‘sheroes’ were hard, fighting fit: musclebuilders, shaved bulldykes who rode big motorbikes and had big arms. Men looked, and giggled, and looked again, and invented new subgenres of sex magazines in which such women were humiliated, or humiliated us, according to taste. But secretly we were afraid. I was afraid. Was this the future?

  It reminded me of life in the Gendersense programmes that Sarah had fronted on the screens, which had always struck me as too weird to be true. I must unconsciously still have thought the norm was a home like Samuel and Milly’s, or mine and Sarah’s, as it once was.

  I had known a lot of vaguely sympathetic couples who were trying for babies when Sarah and I were, clinging together like drowning people. Now, in my loneliness, I contacted them. But the ‘friends’ we had made in Dr Zeuss’s waiting-room – to be precise, that Sarah had made – had mostly split up since they’d been through the Batteries, whether the treatment were successful or not. Or else, to my surprise, they had never lived together. Some of them barely remembered each other …

  They had all moved on, but I had not.

  It took me some while to take this all in. I confided in Riswan, my friend at work. ‘Sarah has left me. And taken the baby. I only see him a few times a week.’

  ‘What do you mean, she’s left you?’ Riswan’s big dark eyes were opaque and puzzled.

  ‘For good. She only comes back to visit.’

  ‘You mean, you were living in the same flat?’

  ‘Of course. We’ve been together for over ten years.’

  ‘You should be glad, my friend, to be free of the woman! Women and babies make a mess everywhere –’

  ‘Well, she did do most of the cleaning –’

  ‘Men should stick with their own kind, actually. No trouble that way. No shouting, no crying. Tell this woman not to visit.’

  He was the third person to react this way. I couldn’t deny there’d been some shouting and crying. ‘But I love my son,’ I said, puzzled, and saw the envy in Riswan’s eyes.

  ‘You’re lucky to have a son. But it’s women’s business, looking after children.’ And then he began to complain incoherently how now there were more and more male nannies, which once again had passed me by. ‘They call them ‘‘mannies’’, instead of nannies. Mannies, I ask you! It’s … humiliating. One of my best friends is training to be one!’

  ‘It was Sarah who kept me abreast of things … I love my wife.’

  ‘You mean, you got married? In the twentyfirst century?’

  ‘Well – yes.’

  There was evidently little point talking to Riswan.

  All the same, he was a loyal friend who had covered for me after the baby was born. And any friend now seemed valuable. When Riswan suggested I go along to his club, the Scientists, I agreed. ‘But not just yet, Riswan. I still have a few things to sort out with Sarah.’

  In fact, my despair had been premature. Her arrangement with Sylvie was not a success, despite their ‘shared aims’ and ‘deep mutual understanding’ and ‘desire to support each other as mothers’ (to quote from a thinly disguised account of her life that Sarah had so smilingly delivered on her new programme, Modern Living, as if it had happened to three other people, as if nobody real had been hurt, abandoned).

  Sylvie had wanted to have sex with her. That was the long and short of it. (Whereas Sarah, I suppose, preferred sex with her doctor.) In theory Sylvie respected Sarah’s refusal, but in practice she sulked a lot and left the washingup and sat at the kitchen table weeping, while her son beat Luke up in front of his mother in an eager, professional way.

  I’d learned my lesson. I listened to Sarah. It took a long time, with a lot of repetitions. Women do tend to repeat themselves, but of course a man must never say that. Her doctor, it turned out, had been ‘a control freak’. Well, naughty old him! But I held my tongue. I was kind and thoughtful, and suppressed my glee. I told Sarah she could always come back. In effect, as it happened, she already was back, nearly every evening when she wasn’t working, and when she was, she left Luke for the night. A new, muddled happiness descended on us.

  Luke hardly slept and was often ill, but he was a startlingly clever, fairylike child, laughing and crying at things we couldn’t see, beating his head on the walls, sometimes, his blue eyes suddenly filling with tears, running to either of us equally. Light as a mayfly, up into our arms. He had Sarah’s eyes, her mother’s blonde hair, my dense curls, Samuel’s long limbs, and his lips were full, my lips, our lips … I sometimes found myself hunting ghosts, searching Luke’s face as I had once searched my own, that long ago day, in the bathroom mirror, hunting the hidden lines of Ghana. But he was thin and pale as a child of glass, and his eyes were weak and slightly unfocused. His heart had a defective chamber, which the doctors had promised could be repaired later, and his asthma, alas, was more severe than most children’s. And he had allergies, because of all the drugs. But considering everything, he was pretty healthy.

  ‘It’s so wonderful to have you back,’ I said, lying beside Sarah, hardly believing it, stroking her beautiful chestnut mane, short and thick now as a glossy pony’s, pulling its tendrils across her jawline, stroking the long moist curve of her neck, then down to her belly, still soft from the baby, and lower to her tangle of dark red hair, warm and wet where we had just made love, though we’d used contraception, at her insistence. ‘My wife,’ I tried; I hardly ever said it. ‘My darling wife. I knew you’d come back. I think you just went mad with grief. Those bloody doctors, and Luke being so ill.’

  ‘I wasn’t mad,’ she said, lightly. ‘I just felt trapped. No one listened. I didn’t know how to get out of there.’

  ‘The window wasn’t a good idea,’ I said, unwisely. I felt her stiffen: I seemed to have lost my touch with humour.

  ‘This is only temporary, you know,’ she said. ‘Just till I can find somewhere for Luke and me.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said glumly. But I didn’t believe her. Melville Road was convenient for her work, and things were going pretty well between us. It felt right, the way life was meant to be, sharing our child, our food, our bed. After a few months she seemed to settle.

  There were days and nights of almost perfect bliss. She could not breastfeed, because of the long time when Luke had been too ill to be with her, so both of us shared the bottlefeeding that went on until he was nearly two. I liked to watch as Sarah fed him, the way the level of the milk slowly dropped, and as it dropped, his lids began to flicker, his blueish lids began to quiver and droop, and by the time she finished his transparent lashes were a faint fringe of silver on his sleeping cheek. I liked to hold the bottle myself, to imagine that as Luke sucked the milk my strength went into him, and my love.

  Because of his frailty, Luke slept in a cot at the foot of our bed till he was nearly three. I loved to wake up and hear him cooing to himself, and later singing nursery songs in a remarkably clear, steady voice, talking to himself, or counting his toes. Then there was the morning when he managed to climb out, to scale the bars and get on to our bed, a triumphant day because it had once seemed that his arms would always be too thin for climbing, his large heavy head too much for his neck.

  ‘Time for a room of your own,’ said Sarah, ‘My big strong boy,’ and put her head on my shoulder. And the three of us hugged, wordless, proud. She grew her hair again; it may have meant nothing.

  Luke made us laugh with his invented words, his invented friends, his bubbly farts, the way he plastered avocado on his eyebrows or used Sarah’s makeup bag as a hat. Each new word he learned entered our secret language, became a secret joke and source of pride for a precious few months, till it faded, forgotten. I took so many photographs the camera died.

  I wanted this happiness to go on forever. I tried my best; perhaps I tried too hard. I put her work before my own. I
t was Sarah who gave Luke his regular medicine, sighing, sometimes, as she ticked the chart with its long row of columns every morning. But when Luke was ill it was I who stayed home and cared for our child, fretful, whiney, speckled with fever and frighteningly hot. I stroked the eggshell dome of his forehead, and poured the medicine that cooled him down.

  Sometimes she thanked me, more often not. Perhaps I needed her to be grateful. Sometimes she seemed almost angry with me, as if the mere fact of my dogged presence excluded her, or pointed to her absence. Sometimes she swept home from the studio in the middle of the night to find me and Luke fast asleep on our double bed, with the screen still on, ‘as it has been all day, I bet it has’, though how she knew that was a mystery, the floor scattered with crumpled clothes and toys and halfeaten plates of nursery food, and she’d order me to carry Luke through to his room ‘so he can go to bed properly, for heaven’s sake’, while she set about grimly cleaning the flat.

  ‘I mean, do you have to mess everything up?’

  ‘I was looking after Luke. I mean, someone has to.’

  ‘You’re trying to say I’m not a good mother.’

  ‘You’re trying to say I’m a dirty scumbag.’

  ‘No –’ She crumpled, looked ashamed, let me put my arms around her.

  ‘Okay, then. But I’m doing my best.’

  ‘I’d like to look after him. The sodding screens …’

  I saw her resentment, sensed the danger.

  She said she didn’t want another woman in our flat, so I hired a manny, with her approval, one of the new breed of male nannies Riswan had been so sniffy about.

  Ash Vijay was a great success with us both, for I had been getting behind with my work, and now Luke was older variety was good for him. He adored our manny from the first, partly because Ash always brought with him the other child he was caring for, a little girl called Polly, slightly older than Luke. Polly couldn’t have looked more different. She was dark and rosy with shining skin, unusually sturdy, glowing, lively.