The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  I must watch my back. Good job I’m in trim.

  Days draw down to the final battle.

  12

  The divorce dragged on. My letters weren’t answered, the letters and cards I sent to Luke. I tried not to go into his room. The jumble of toys and tools on his table, the map of the world, the photographs … One of them was of the three of us, Luke in a red baseball cap, swinging from our shoulders, one arm round each of us, kicking up his feet in baseball boots, and he looked surprisingly sturdy, boyish, not the delicate, gentle boy he was, and Sarah and I both looked happy and proud, our eyes meeting over his head. It was in her second period of longish hair, before she adapted the Wicca crewcut. Her red hair swung in a bob in the sun … I tried not to look at that photo too often. It was interesting, though, that Luke had liked it and chosen to stick it in pride of place, a photo of a regular, boyish boy. That comforted me, when I thought of the witches.

  It was silly, but I brooded about his football. I was never one of those sportsmad fathers, pushing their kids to be great jocks, but when he was at home we used to practise every Sunday, and he had a marvellous eye for the ball. Now he couldn’t even watch it onscreen. Wicca weren’t keen on anything with balls.

  I believed that Luke was still in London, still in whatever lay behind the narrow red frontage of Wicca World’s headquarters. It was a tall, slightly grimy nineteenthcentury building with complicated swags of brickred sandstone, rising on the north of the Marylebone Road to a series of sunlit mansard windows. I always imagined a flash of Luke’s face, high up in the attics, when I drove past, which I did too often, a hundred times maybe, and always that stupid lift of the heart as I saw the bright windows like living eyes, surely one day he would look out and see me … Always the blank depression and loss as the traffic swept onwards, time carried me past, and he was inside, changing, growing.

  Unbelievably, his birthday came round again. I hadn’t seen him for nearly a year. I rang every week, but never again got the soft country tones of Briony Barnes. He would be thirteen. His voice might be breaking … I hoped his mother understood something, anything at all, about adolescent boys. I hoped Wicca didn’t hate them too much. I was smoking like a chimney. I lost weight.

  On his actual birthday I rang nine times. It was bitterly cold; it had rained, then frozen. Lucky for them that the traffic swept past in a single snake at two hundred kilometres per hour, lucky that I could only fantasise about crashing my car through their front door with a splintering of wood and screaming women. I drove past mouthing ‘Happy birthday, Luke’, but I couldn’t brake, the road was black glass – I went to bed frantic with rage and frustration.

  The creaking ice crawled on towards us. Wicca World decided to evacuate the Hebrides after the supply ships couldn’t get through for three months. Great bulwarks of ice crashed straight through the hull of a cruiser bringing wouldbe immigrants from Sweden, sinking it rapidly, with all hands lost, though a fisherman too far away to help described seeing three tall pale figures being carried away on the blue ice floe, floating back north, waving frantically. There had been reports from Hebrideans that some elderly islanders were freezing to death, while others were bringing their cattle or horses into the house and sleeping with them in a desperate attempt to keep warm. However, Wicca World’s directive to evacuate was ignored by all but a few young people who were working on the islands on a temporary basis, and they left gratefully enough, spared the trouble of paying their passage. Wicca World got maximum publicity for this, as evidence of their ‘Dynamic Caring’, the slogan on whose back they hoped they were going to win the next election.

  But they couldn’t keep up with a tenth of what was happening. Lochs on the mainland began to freeze over, rivers stopped flowing, food crops failed, orchards whitened and weakened with frost, cars wouldn’t start, there were endless power cuts from grids that couldn’t cope with the surge in demand, deliverymen died in exposed country places, and there was a spate of suffocations in cities among people who had overinsulated their houses.

  Yet the pace of change stayed fairly constant. It was getting colder at a rate of one or two degrees a year, but there were still occasional days of brilliant sunshine and balmy warmth, days when we could take our coats off and stand in our shirtsleeves and stare at blue sky. Because certain preparations for the ice were in hand, farmers receiving huge Euro subsidies to switch their crops to frostresistant kinds, computers built to withstand low temperatures, gardeners showing new kinds of plants on the screens – we started to see this as the new pattern, and our basic optimism resurfaced.

  Yes, I suppose we became slightly complacent, if a state of controlled panic can ever be complacent.

  And then the Indonesian volcano exploded, the one which had been sputtering for over fifty years but had last blown its top in the sixteenthcentury. It threw thousands of tons of volcanic rock and mud and ash up into the air. The world took little notice at first, because everyone had so many worries of their own, so Sumatra got very little international aid, though half its population stifled or starved.

  But the world was shortsighted to ignore the eruption as of purely local interest. They soon found they had to be interested – they soon found out they had to be afraid. Because darkness crept across the globe from the thousands of tons of dust and mud. Sumatra rained in millions of pieces upon all the countries who’d refused to help it. There was no spring at all that year in Britain. The temperatures dropped, then dropped again, and the constant grey light was a weight upon the spirit, dull grey light and sharp grey cold. Juno looked tired, grey and tired, and the polls were running more heavily against them. The words of the Speakers seemed thick and slow, as if the cold had reached their brains. Biologists began to talk about extinctions.

  The Hebridean islanders were sticking to their homes, but elsewhere in the world people felt less rooted. A great movement of human beings began, from north to south, from the poles to the equator, slowly at first, like the first leaves falling, then more and more, like an autumn storm, like the sky darkening into winter, and the noise was of thousands of running feet, panicking voices, massed birds wheeling –

  I sat in our flat like a man of stone and felt the world turning faster and faster. It was true, yes, it was definitely happening, but all of it seemed remote, unreal, I watched them on the screen, great swirls of black ants, crowding the airports, overloading the boats … They were real people, though they looked like insects, but I wasn’t one of them. I was a ghost.

  I sat with Dora and watched the screens, and sometimes I stroked her and ruffled her feathers, and sometimes I think I may have been crying, and if her sensors picked it up she would turn towards me, or not quite towards me, for some of their controls were one or two-percent off true, and whisper sweetly to my left shoulder, ‘What’s the matter, Saul? I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do for you?’ But Dora had done all the things she could do.

  Perhaps I was what they call depressed. It had never happened to me before, despite Sarah’s glib label of ‘manic depressive’. It reminded me of something about my dad, that he might have been depressed as well, that sometimes he could not talk to us, that he went out to the pigeons and stayed for hours, just sat and watched them, pecking at the dark. And my mother often said, after the painful day when she told me he was halfGhanaian, ‘He’s thinking about his father, Saul.’ By which I understood her to mean ‘about Africa’, about being black, that whole lost side of himself, for I never remember him having black friends, nor seeing black family, except one sister, and she was married to a white man … Perhaps because of his job with the police, who had twentiethcentury prejudices about race, he had simply left that part of himself behind, and I think it sometimes came looking for him, like everything we try too hard to lose.

  I know my father was on my mind as I sat and listened with half my mind to an item about Africa on the screens. When I heard ‘Ghana’ I started listening properly. The pictures they were showing reminded me of somethin
g. People fighting to get past a barrier, uniformed soldiers holding them back. The soldiers were black, the people were white. The white people looked desperate, the soldiers bored. Bored and amused and slightly contemptuous. What did it remind me of? Something from the past that upset and disturbed me –

  Then I remembered. When I was little, the scenes on the screen that had scared me to death, showing hordes of black people pouring into Britain, coming to take away all we had, with the brave white soldiers holding them back. Only this time, it was all happening in reverse, the negative image of the longforgotten photo. This time the desperate people were white. This time the people with the power were black.

  And a long-lost part of me started to laugh: it was my turn now. Our turn now! Black man’s turn! – Yet I wasn’t a black man.

  The report made it clear it had been happening for months, maybe as much as a year. In my strange, suspended state I had taken nothing in.

  Each African country was doing things differently, though all were overwhelmed with requests for asylum. Ghana was intending to close its borders ‘within six months’ to those ‘special cases’ allowed to immigrate because they had Ghanaian blood. The Cameroons, by contrast, had set no time limit. Sierra Leone would accept no one with any admixture of European blood.

  A phrase recurred; the ‘ice people’. ‘We cannot take in all these ice people …’ ‘The ice people are coming here in ever greater numbers …’ ‘a growing concern that we shall be swamped …’ ‘thousands, maybe millions of ice people …’ Ice people, ice people …

  So now Europeans were ice people – perhaps we had always been ice people. (Yet I wasn’t one of them, was I? That longlost part of me snickered, jeered. Black man’s turn! Serve them right!)

  The rest of the report drifted over me, but I looked with wonder at the pictures on the screen of African scenery drenched in sunlight, a wildebeest quivering behind a thorntree, the canopy of velvety mixed greens in the forest, the bougainvillea, luscious, grape red, and a group of chattering barechested children, sitting in the dust playing music on pipes – goodgod, it was still truly hot in Africa. It might be the last place the ice would come. Indeed where the ice might never come, for previous ice ages stopped short of the equator …

  I began to think, idly, I could go there. Halfheartedly, because I’d never gone back, had never wanted it enough, till I was suddenly forty, and it seemed too late. But a buried wish began to stir. Though no one suspects it, I have black blood, I could just walk in and claim my kingdom … ‘Look, Dora,’ I said, and turned her to the screen. ‘That’s Africa. We could go there.’

  ‘Is it a tree?’ she asked hopefully, which made me laugh, because she had gone into ‘Recognition Test’ mode.

  They were showing the boys by the road again, all clustering round the piper, laughing and clapping, and I thought, they’re not so much younger than Luke, I wish that Luke could be there with them –

  Then the realisation pierced me, he could be. He had Ghanaian blood, his greatgrandfather’s blood. He was part Ghanaian, for all his blonde curls. He had a right to be there, in the sunlight. Stupid, why didn’t you think about Luke?

  I started to listen to the programme very carefully. One greatgrandparent was the minimum requirement. If you had one Ghanaian greatgrandparent, you qualified. Luke qualified, but I’d neglected him, I’d abandoned him to the clutches of the women. He could have a life, be free, survive …

  But the border would close at the end of the summer. There was not much time left. I got to my feet. Adrenalin, a white electrifying wall of it, lifted me like a tidal wave. I would do it for Luke. I was no longer depressed. I was a man, a father, not some godforsaken wimp. I could suddenly feel the strength in my body, the strength I’d been proud of when I was a boy but had almost forgotten when I was with Sarah, the muscles and tendons I had slowly rebuilt over the last six years’ sweating and grunting in the gym.

  I was pretty fit. I was going to use it.

  Moreover, I had something I had never shown Sarah, never shown Luke, never shown anyone, something that Samuel had left me long ago and I’d never worked out what to do with it, something I went to look for now, locked in a cupboard by the ventilator shaft, wrapped in a bag of stiff green canvas.

  Forbidden fruit. Completely illegal. Left me by that careful, godfearing man whose whole life was about upholding the law. ‘In case you need them. You’re my son …’ Dying, Samuel had entrusted me with the cache of shooters he had confiscated over his years as a police enforcer. Instead of turning them in, he’d kept them. So his belief in law and order had its limits. Perhaps he sensed that the sky would fall in …

  There had been a total ban on private ownership of guns in the UK since the massacres of the 2020s, though the licensed policeforces and National Army had sophisticated stunguns and other immobilisers. It was almost the only national law that was still enforced in every council district, since all the police saw it was to their advantage. Domestic manufacture of guns had ceased, and smugglers were gaoled for life or termed, so most illegal guns were twentieth-century metal things, old and heavy, but still dangerous. They were in frequent use among criminals and outlaws, despite a mandatory life sentence for using a gun while committing a crime. If anyone ever discovered my bag, I was planning to say it was a gift from my father, a set of golfing irons, as far as I knew.

  When Samuel died we had to burn the mattress, and I saw the bag lying under the bed. Dragging it out, it felt heavy as death. I didn’t open it till I got it home, and even then I locked myself in my study. Unzipping the bag and peering inside, I’d felt nauseous, and thrilled, and afraid. It was like looking at a secret part of my father I’d never known before. I’d seen the Speakers’ Medal he collected for shooting a maniac straight through the eye in a siege. But now I began to understand that my father must have loved the guns themselves, the weapons with their rich oily sheen. You could tell from the care with which he’d packed this bag, the layers of padding, the swaddling cloths. Down one end were the boxes of ammunition, precisely labelled coloured cardboard boxes packed inside larger ones of clear plastic. There were lubricants, swizzle rods, a set of guntools, magnificent, enigmatic, satisfying gadgets. Down the other end there were halfadozen pistols, and blunter, longer heavier things, wrapped in pillowcases, huge, menacing … I found myself sweating with desire and panic.

  On that first look into Samuel’s bag, this was as far as I could bring myself to go. I pushed them back in and closed the zip and locked it away in our security cupboard. Since then I’d been tempted to look many times, particularly when feeling low, but the sheer enormity of it always stopped me. I’d unlock the cupboard, I’d pat the bag, and something would stop me from going any farther. So much power, so much concentrated damage … Yet I knew I would never hand them in. They were so exciting, so seductive. Their lumpy, masculine shape in the darkness, their rigid bulk, their unspeakable promise.

  There was something else to all this, as well. It was a very strange gift that Samuel had given me. He’d given me life, and he’d given me death, because stockpiling guns carried a death sentence.

  There was no conscious connection between the bag in the cupboard and my learning to shoot at the Scientists. I didn’t even decide to do it. It was just one of the things that the lads all did, like pumping iron, or wanking, or dancing, like every other men’s club in the country. We didn’t have real guns, of course, just a variety of simulators, and we blasted away at virtual screens, destroying all the people who frustrated us. I found to my surprise I was good at this. I was always the top scorer at the Lonesome Corral, even if Paul occasionally beat me at Red River; I was a crack shot, I had the gene, I was my father’s son, though I’d never used a gun.

  *

  But they were waiting for me, in that cold stiff bag, and I had a little time to get to know them.

  My nights were as busy as my days. I had a new, burning interest to catch up on, ironically a bequest from Sarah. She had left the
stuff she didn’t want behind, including threequarters of her books. Remember, Sarah had passions, then dropped them (as she dropped me; as she dropped men). But when we first met, and she was crazy about me, she’d had that shortlived passion for black history, and I had been grudging, awkward, bored …

  Now, however, I went into her study, the room that had once been my darling’s study, knelt down and found them. Two crowded shelves. My orderly Sarah sorted books by subject. The Black Diaspora, The Black Experience, The Endless Crossing, Black People in Europe, The Colour of the Present, African Journey …

  The titles suddenly glowed with interest. I couldn’t wait to get inside them. Now Sarah was gone, Africa called me. It was there all along, in the flat, in my bones, but it couldn’t speak until I listened.

  And so a new inner life began. I started to see our family’s story as part of something stretching back through the centuries. Shadows and secrets when I was a child, halfheard conversations, began to make sense. And my sister, who I’d scarcely seen in two decades (she had moved to Bristol with her halfJamaican husband; the marriage hadn’t lasted, but she had three kids, conceived without problems, my mother hinted) – was the awkwardness between us to do with race? She had drunk too much after our parents’ funeral, and I’d heard her say to my father’s younger sister, who turned up at the church unexpectedly, ‘That boy does not know who he is.’ I’d known it was me they were talking about, but only later did I guess what they meant. Many different things began to sink into place.

  There were voices, statistics, numbing numbers that I lay awake trying to make real … If Africa had lost twenty million people to slavery – that’s twenty thousand thousand people … My father’s father swam out of the darkness, and an endless shimmering continent, and above it beeswarms of unknown people, my own people, being blown away. I scrolled on hungrily, trying to find them. I woke at nine to find the light still on, and the screen glared blankly from the wall, but I made myself get up and get cracking. My days were needed for practical plans.