The Ice People
Page 8
Whereas Sarah was never predictable.
I began to go to the Scientists more often. It was one good way of devouring time. If I dropped in after work, and took a few buzzers, I could laugh and dance with the lads till ten. And I was no longer embarrassed about dancing. Sarah used to tease me for the way I danced, but at the Scientists, we just did our own thing, flailing, hopping or slinkily erotic, and no one minded, no one mocked. (Men don’t like to be mocked by women. Bite your tongues, you sour sisters.) Then when the drugs began to fade I would slip into the saddle of one of the computers and ride away into the shimmering screen.
Once or twice I let a sweet young lad called Paul give me relief in the massage room, though it didn’t take away the loneliness. I admit I enjoyed it. It was very exciting. He was tall and slender with beestung lips and a mischievous, appealing smile, rather feminine as well as boyish. His hands were marvellous; he understood men. It made me feel that I still had a body. And everyone seemed to be doing it, in those days.
But another part of me felt dismayed. Did I really believe we were all bisexual? The people who said so all seemed to be gay.
The flat got dirtier, felt darker … thankgod it was a little cooler, at least. Our overheated planet was at last cooling down, with everyone queuing up to claim the credit, virtuous big business, responsible governments. All complete nonsense, but I welcomed the cooling. I started to leave food out of the fridge in a way I would never have done when it was hotter. It still grew blue mould; I tried not to see it. I fed the cats, resentfully (they were getting old; if I neglected them they’d die, and how would I cope with that, without Sarah?) but I never bothered to clean their bowls. The spoons were dark with crusted meat. I ate out every night, and came back to sleep uncomfortably on the screenroom sofa, going nowhere else except the lavatory. I kept the doors of the kitchen and the bedroom closed.
Weekends were the worst, long and empty. The club didn’t open till six pm. On Saturdays I usually got up late and cleared out of the flat as soon as I could, putting in laps on the walking track where I had become a regular – of course no one walked outside in the cities. I needed the exercise badly. All day I was hunched over microscopes or screens, earning good money by wrecking my spine. I needed to walk or fight or run, I was a big man with a big man’s body … And I wasn’t having sex, that was the nub of it. I needed it. Men do need sex. Wanking is nothing compared to sex. It’s like packed lunch compared to hot dinners.
That Saturday I got up late as usual, and switched the screen on while I got dressed. I’d never cared much about the news, but now I liked anything that made me forget, like appalling disasters to total strangers.
But that morning’s news stopped me in my tracks.
After decades, nearly a century of trying, human beings had succeeded in making ‘mobots’, cute little domestic animats. Robots available ‘to every home’. Robot cleaners. ‘Robot friends’. They cleaned, cleared rubbish, walked, talked. The report was long and very exciting, till pundits arrived to pose and drone, at which point I lost interest and began to pull on my skintight orange tracksuit. (I had bought it from the shop at the club. Encouraged by Paul, I must admit. Now it seemed a brighter orange than before, and showed my genitals embarrassingly clearly, but I told myself it was okay, lots of other men wore ‘skins’ like that.) I walked to the door, ready to go out, swigging a cup of strong black coffee that I meant to put down on the ledge by the door –
Suddenly the key turned in the lock, the door swung open, it was Luke, it was her! I spilled my coffee down the front of my suit.
At once I felt naked in my lurid lycra, but Sarah hardly looked at me. Her eyes were red, as if she had been crying, and Luke looked older, pale and tense, though he jumped up at me as if I were a whale, as if we could swim away together … A scarf of spilled coffee grew cold on my chest, but he didn’t care – children never do, it’s only their mothers who make problems and fusses. He ran off to the loo, she went after him, and I stood in the window, my heart thumping.
‘Daddy!’ Luke yelled in his high reedy voice, dragging me out of my brown study, ‘Mummy says why is the flat so dirty?’ But neither of us listened to my answer, as I hugged and wrestled with his beloved skinny body that still felt as if I could break it in two, if I forgot, and stopped pulling my punches.
I wanted to say how horribly I’d missed him, but instead for some reason I told him the news. ‘I just saw something on the screens about some wonderful robots,’ I told him, brightly. ‘They do all the housework.’
‘You’re kidding,’ he said, and laughed exultantly.
‘No, really,’ I said. ‘I think they were called ‘‘Doves’’. Shall we buy one for Mummy?’
‘What’s that?’ sniffed Sarah, sweeping in at top speed with a bottle of bleach. ‘What are you going to buy for me? You forgot to remind me about your birthday.’ (She must have felt guilty for forgetting my birthday.) ‘This place is unbelievable. I don’t see how anyone can live like this.’
‘Well, you don’t live here any more. Do you?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ she said, uncertain, which told me that something might have gone wrong.
‘Mum said we were going to live with ladies,’ Luke said.
‘Shut up,’ said Sarah fiercely. ‘Go and unpack.’
‘Shut up is rude.’ Happily selfrighteous, Luke hugged me tightly. ‘But she’s quarrelled with the ladies,’ he finished.
‘You’re welcome to sleep here, of course,’ I said. A tiny blip of happiness formed itself somewhere. I decided not to press home my advantage. ‘Will you be staying long?’ I called after her, as she started to bash things about in the bathroom.
‘I live here, don’t I? We never moved out. But this, it’s disgusting, it’s worse than I’ve ever … ’ Her voice was muffled by the sound of something falling. I realised the curtainrail had fallen on her head. I had meant to mend it; I’d been too depressed. But then, it was Sarah who had depressed me. I decided not to apologise.
She reappeared like an angry queen bee, the blue flowered curtains draped round her neck. ‘Why are you sleeping on the sofa?’ she said. ‘Have you turned back into a student again? You have no idea how odd it looks. And by the way, what on earth are you wearing?’
(From the hall, Luke put in ‘Daddy’s dressing up.’)
People with showercurtains round their neck should not throw stones, but nothing stopped her. ‘You look pretty silly yourself,’ I jeered. She looked at me with an attempt at scorn. I so much didn’t want us to quarrel. ‘Sarah, let’s not have an argument. It’s great to see you. I hope you’ll stay.’ She paused in her rampage; her expression softened, and I pressed on. ‘I do miss you. I have missed you. And Luke. Badly.’ Perhaps I should have left it at that, but she’d made me suffer, I’d pined, without them, I was her husband, I had been wronged – ‘He needs his father. Boys need their fathers.’
‘Rubbish,’ she said. ‘It’s been disproved.’
(Did I look like a father, in my orange lycra?) ‘Disproved by what?’
‘Studies.’
‘What studies?’
‘I’m not going to argue with you, Saul. You’repickingafightbecausetheflatisdisgustingandyoufeelguiltybutwon’tadmitit.’ She said that last sentence in less than half a second.
The nerve of the woman! The outright nerve! ‘This is nothing to do with the flat,’ I said mildly. ‘I didn’t mind it the way it was, but if you don’t agree, just clean it.’ I had never tried this tack before. It made me feel calm and surprisingly powerful.
By now she was armed with a forest of brushes. ‘I can’t be expected –’ she shrieked, automatically, peering at me over the head of a broom, when her voice failed, simply trailed away, as she looked at something just over my shoulder, and I turned, rather stiffly and painfully because the sofa had twisted my neck, to see.
Luke.
Standing in the window, the curtains open, the window open. We were four floors above the ground.
Then everything went into slow motion, as we tried very hard to do the right thing. Sarah put down her brushes, one by one. ‘Darling –’ we said gently, with almost one voice. We bore down on him, excruciatingly slowly, afraid to upset or startle him.
‘We’re not having a row. See?’ said Sarah, putting a shaking hand on my arm.
‘Of course we’re not,’ I corroborated.
‘You were,’ said Luke, and he suddenly crouched down, so quickly that we both gasped with fear, but he had just gone into a foetal position, shivering and staring at us silently. I moved another metre, then grabbed him in my arms (surely he shouldn’t be so light, at seven?), while Sarah banged the window shut with desperate force, and said, ‘Sorry, Sorry.’
I sat down with Luke on the sofa, and wrapped him in the blanket I’d been sleeping under. I held him until he stopped shaking and crying. ‘Mummy and I are so sorry,’ I said. ‘We weren’t really rowing. It was just about the cleaning. Not important. Silly old cleaning.’
‘You always row about cleaning,’ he said. ‘That’s why I don’t want to be alive any more. I’ll go somewhere else. I’ll get away. I’ll go to heaven and live with Grandpa.’
It was so absolutely shocking to hear a child say that. I hoped his mother was listening.
She was. She came and sat beside us on the floor, her crimson head upon her crimsontipped hands, but when she looked up she was white as death, whiter than Luke, if that were possible. She reached out and patted Luke’s ankle. ‘I promise not to row with Dad any more. I’m … really sorry. It’s been a bad day.’ Then she took my hand, stroking it with one finger. ‘Sorry, Saul.’
‘So I should hope.’
Luke saw my smile, and began to relax. He contrived a position where he could hug us both. ‘I like it like this,’ he announced. He was quick to appreciate a position of strength. ‘Can we have hot chocolate, Mummy? And biscuits? Can we all sleep in the same bed tonight?’
‘Yes,’ said Sarah, ‘Yes, my love,’ though she usually said ‘no’ to requests for chocolate. She got up to see to it, leaving us together.
‘Will she keep her promise?’ Luke asked in a whisper.
‘I think so. But never do that again.’ I was remembering what happened after he was born, how the doctors claimed Sarah was suicidal. Perhaps it was genetic. (Or was it me? Perhaps I drove everyone near me to suicide.)
She came in smiling with mugs on a tray and a plate of chocolate biscuits. But old habits die hard. ‘There’s only one plate. Try not to drop crumbs.’
Something occurred to Luke. ‘Daddy!’ he cried, so sharply that I slopped my drink again. Sarah noticed but managed to say nothing. ‘Tell Mummy you’re going to buy her a robot.’
‘What?’ she asked.
I told her as much as I could remember about the Doves. They were dogsized or toddlersized, like household pets. They looked vaguely like stumpy winged birds, but the TV camera hadn’t lingered long enough for me to tell. They could dust, wash floors, recycle rubbish … And the cost was pitched low enough for everyone to buy one (the Outsiders could never have afforded them, of course, but then, they had no homes to clean). No more than the cost of a cheap car. I remembered the slogan: ‘A Dove in Every Home.’
‘Giant publicity campaign, huh?’ was her first remark, made without enthusiasm.
‘Well, they did look – remarkable. I really would like to buy you one.’
‘What do you mean, buy me one? Buy us one. It would be cleaning for both of us. Cleaning is as much your work as mine.’
Feminism can be fucking pedantic, though my heart leapt up at that ‘both of us’. Still, I took her words as a ‘Yes’. ‘Mummy says ‘‘Yes’,’ I said to Luke, and he beamed hugely, showing straight white teeth. His front teeth had grown down while they were away, and his face was longer, more adult, but also more piercingly vulnerable. ‘I’m going to buy us a Dove, Lukey. Our own robot. You can play with it.’
‘Great!’ he said. ‘It can be my friend, now Polly doesn’t come round any more.’ (She didn’t come round because of Sarah, who had been dumped by Polly’s father – I’d managed to work this out for myself, but Luke was hurt and mystified.) ‘Is it really some kind of dove?’ he asked, more gravely. ‘How do we make it do what we want?’
‘It’s just its initials,’ I told him. ‘Short for ‘‘DO VEry Simple things’’. Jolly clever name, really. What’s the matter, Sarah? Aren’t you happy?’ She was discomfited, biting her nails. I couldn’t help enjoying her confusion. If she refused, she would upset her son. ‘You need never get cross about housework again.’
‘Um,’ she said. ‘I mean, that’s good. It just … doesn’t seem quite natural, to me.’
They delivered it while we were out. The guard hailed me when I came home. ‘Enormous piece of furniture for you, sir. New screen is it? Feeling wealthy?’
‘Not after buying this,’ I told him.
I took it up in the lift with me. To my surprise, I felt tremendously excited, though why is that surprising? It was exciting. For decades we had been promised this, robots to live with us as friends.
I decided not to open it till Sarah came home, but then Luke was brought back from school by a neighbour, and he saw the big package and could not wait.
‘Please, Dad. You said I could play with it.’
‘Yes, but we said it was a present for Mummy –’
‘But Mummy said it was for you as well.’
He kept walking round it, poking it, till I used his impatience as a cover for my own. ‘If you insist. We’ll just take a peek. I’d like to see what colour it is.’
We peeled off the rustling recrap that encased it. I halfexpected it to come out moving, but when I first glimpsed a small patch of its side, it looked like grey plastic, anonymous, dead. I went on unpeeling. Luke was mad with glee. Two protuberances appeared from the base that reminded me of the feet of a dodo, leathery, crudely detailed things, quite large compared to what the body must be. One of the cats was watching us, but it ignored the robot and jumped inside the packing, waving its tail disdainfully, or perhaps the white plume was a flag of surrender.
Luke tugged at my arm. ‘Daddy, Daddy.’
‘What? I’m trying to get this stuff off.’
‘Is it a girl or a boy?’
‘God, I don’t know. What do you want it to be?’
‘I want it to be like me.’
I nodded, understandingly. ‘Okay, it’s a boy. It can be – a sort of brother.’ It still hurt me that he didn’t have a brother.
‘No,’ he said, indignant. ‘I want a girl.’
‘No, you don’t,’ I said, not entirely listening. The logic of children is often surreal. ‘Oh, look, I say …’
For the head, when I got to it, was really tremendous. Now we saw our robot whole.
It sat there, looking remarkably composed, a robust, short creature around a metre tall, a little less, perhaps, than a threeyearold child. Its head was huge, childlike or birdlike, a baby bird’s head in terms of its proportions, its most notable feature two big lidded ‘eyes’, which were currently turned down on the ground, giving a winning effect of shy good manners. It had stumpy legs and big flat feet; its arms had a softer, velvety texture. There were numerous panels, buttons, indentations, both front and back, suggesting many talents.
‘Hallo,’ I said. I didn’t mean to be facetious. I liked it at once, and wanted to greet it.
‘Dad, Dad, why isn’t it moving?’ Luke was jumping up and down on the spot. The cats were weaving around it, more confident now, tapping it gently with their paws, trying to see if it were dead.
‘I don’t know how we switch it on,’ I said.
But I soon found out; it was delight
fully simple. You pressed a little panel marked ‘Hallo’.
‘Luke, do you want to switch him on?’
‘Or her,’ he said. He thought about it. I think he was suddenly afraid. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to wait for Mummy.’
The miracle was, Sarah liked it too. It appealed to her love of novelty – it tickled her sense of humour, too, the way they had made it like a cartoon character, its cheeky roundness, its big brainy head. ‘It’s almost too sweet to be useful,’ she said. ‘Look at those lovely long xylon lashes. So cute …’
‘Luke, switch it on, now Mummy’s here.’
Very tentatively, Luke pressed the panel, then stepped away smartly, and we all waited. Nothing happened. He tried again. ‘I think you should be firmer with it,’ Sarah said.
‘You’d know, dear,’ I countered, but she didn’t hear me. She stretched out her small strong hand, and pressed, and a moment later the Dove quivered, whirred, and set off across the floor with the bandy gait of a drunken toddler, pausing minutely every now and then and whirring more loudly, as if thinking. We watched it, all three of us, as proud as parents. It worked! It walked! We stood and adored.
Then it reached a carpet, and the world went mad. There was a noise like a million electronic saws and the carpet turned into a cross between a flying terrier and a boa constrictor, writhing and hissing like a white tornado, while the Dove stood and fought it, rocking, grinding. Both cats fled yowling into the kitchen.
‘Turn it off,’ shrieked Sarah above the tumult.
I did. We looked at each other, shaken, but Luke was grinning and shaking his head.
‘It’s not broken,’ he insisted, happily. ‘It’s cleaned the floor wherever it’s stepped.’
We began to laugh.
‘It’s brilliant,’ said Sarah.