The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  Luke, my son. We would travel together. Ask the ancestors to take us in.

  There was a kind of moral dilemma, which it took me two minutes to dismiss. Should I ask Sarah if she’d let Luke go? Should I give her a chance to be reasonable?

  No. She had never been reasonable.

  Besides, Wicca World were under huge pressure, the elections were coming in the next few weeks and they were almost certainly going to lose to the Manguard coalition of male liberationists. Sarah had too much on her plate to listen.

  Moreover, trouble was expected after the elections. Wicca World were coming under scrutiny for their use of the money they had collected, the fund they called ‘People Against the Ice’ – PAY, as the newstexts instantly renamed it – which had brought in billions, at least in the early days, before male critics began to suggest they were using the money to promote the party. It seemed likely things would get nasty. Even more reason to get Luke out.

  My reasons were good, my logic impeccable. And yet, I took a son from his mother, without any warning. I can’t deny that.

  Who could I trust? I’d stayed away from the club since the incident when I knocked Richard’s tooth out. Paul had rung a few times to see how I was, but I sat alone with the answerphone on.

  Now I needed friends. Paul was a friend, and more important, he had hundreds of friends, he was very well liked – well loved, I should say, by most of the regulars at the club. I don’t think they had much feeling for me. I was always a bit of an outsider. But on the other hand, I was a man, and a man mistreated by women, at that, and nearly all of them detested women, and especially Wicca World, the archenemy, the witches’ coven, the ‘Cunts’ Coven’ as the lads called it, snickering with hatred, spitting at the screen … It wasn’t my scene, but I needed them.

  Paul was happy – too happy – to get my call and be asked to the house, after all this time. He came that same evening, smelling of Le Musc. (I know because I asked him; it was overwhelming.) He was rather shy with me at first, but after some weed he began to relax. He told me they missed me at the Scientists. ‘No one much liked Richard, anyway, she was always being bitchy about people’ I had never got used to that knowing way gays had of referring to each other as ‘she’. ‘You were like a man possessed, you know, it took a dozen men to pull you off him … Where did you get so strong? I’d never have guessed, you seem so gentle.’

  I suppose I realised he wanted me, I suppose I took advantage of him – But I didn’t know what was going to happen. How could anyone have foreseen what happened?

  I outlined the situation to Paul. I showed him my favourite pictures of Luke. When I talked about Sarah, a frisson of distaste curdled Paul’s sensitive, handsome mouth. He said he thought Luke was ‘beautiful’. Then I played him one of the two recordings of Luke’s voice which had escaped Sarah’s furious search. He was singing Mendelssohn, by an irony. We sat and listened to it in silence, that slender thread of filigree wire, singing, it seemed, of some other world where no one would be unhappy or lonely: Oh, for the wings, for the wings, of a dove … Far away would I roam, far away, far away … In the wilderness build me a nest, and remain there for ever at rest … His eyes filled with tears. I knew Paul was with me.

  The beginning of the plan seemed lighthearted, exciting. Paul had recruited Riswan and Ian and another man, Timmy, whom I hardly knew but am sure must have been a lover of his. Timmy was a specialist in unarmed combat, tall and lean with narrow, sculpted muscles and a wellshaped, blueshadowed naked head which he displayed even when out of doors, unlike most of the boys who by now were adopting little nuskin caps in the face of the cold. Timmy had mixed feelings about me, I think, but his desire to impress Paul must have prevailed over his jealousy. Riswan had known me for over a decade, and understood the situation with Sarah. Ian was friends with all of us.

  There wasn’t going to be any violence. I was meant to come up with an immensely cunning scheme, though as yet the details weren’t quite clear. The guns in my mind were just a kind of backup, in case the women tried anything silly. I knew they would be needed later, when Wicca might come after us, and then as protection for Luke and me on the long drive across Euro. You couldn’t fly to Africa without a visa, so my plan was to drive down through France and Spain and make a seacrossing to Africa …

  I meant the guns to come in much later, so why did I show them to the guys, the very first time that we all got together?

  Some devil made me go to the cupboard, unlock the door and drag out the bag, heavy and cold, smelling of oil and sour metal. I wanted to impress them, show them I was serious, not just a wild man with a crackbrained plan. Not just another crazy lonely man.

  They were sitting round the table in the dining-room, smoking green and drinking beer, a little subdued by the new surroundings. It took all my strength to get the bag on to the table. It landed with a thud, and I didn’t say a word. They stared as I unzipped it. We peered inside. They saw the pistols first. There were whistles, and gasps, and a lot of swearing.

  I didn’t understand it until that day, but guns were made for men to play with. They’re the ultimate machine, the perfect toy, and all the guys wanted to handle them. I was first, picking up the .357 Magnum. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as my hands closed around the wooden grips of the handle. We were all crowding round and reading out Samuel’s labels, the ink slightly faded, sellotaped on. I bet he loved the words as well as the guns – ‘Heckler and Koch’, ‘Browning’, ‘Beretta’ … I got my own love of words from both parents. Dad used to read the Bible to me. Thou shalt not kill, pausing between phrases, his dark eyes looking up at me.

  The big guns in their pillowcases came out last. There was a ‘Chinese Kalashnikov AKM’ (I’d thought Kalashnikovs were Russian), which had an ammunition clip that curved like a banana. There was a sawnoff doublebarrelled shotgun, ‘Made in Spain’, and an antique ‘US M1 Carbine 3006’, whatever that was, ancient, its wood deeply pitted and scored. (It looked used. How many people had it killed?) There was a ‘Tikka Finnish Hunting Rifle’, and one or two others I don’t remember. At the very bottom was the pièce de résistance, a brutal great matt black ‘Special Purpose Automatic Shotgun: 15 Shot: Pump Action: Made in Italy’. We looked at that shocked. It was such a bloody monster. It was a few seconds before Timmy hauled it out. Then I took it from him. It was mine; mine. It had a hefty pistol grip, and a chunky foldedover swag of grey metal that I worked out must be a shoulder stock. I hefted and swung it; this was the business. I was utterly absorbed. I forgot the others.

  Then Riswan brought me back to earth by asking if we were going to take them with us. ‘Well, maybe just for backup,’ I said, unsure.

  ‘You mean, carry them,’ he said.

  ‘Well … I suppose so.’

  There was a silence, while we imagined ourselves, five big men carrying loaded guns. It was thrilling. We had seen it in so many old films. It was what men did, in the age of heroes.

  ‘No point taking them if we don’t know how to use them,’ said Timmy, calmly. ‘We might have to use them.’

  No one commented, but each of us ran our hands more boldly down the guns’ cold noses, and soon we were chattering loudly as we started to work out, in theory, how to load them, opening chambers, sliding levers, clicking triggers … But I wouldn’t let them use the ammunition in the house. I had a feeling this was getting out of hand, but my life was out of hand, and I was going with it.

  ‘Be careful of Dora,’ I said, stupidly. She had just bumped into my leg, quite hard, almost as if to remind me she was there. She had been wobbling about in the corner of the room, for once being ignored by everyone, which made her solitary speech and laughter seem slightly vacant, even pathetic.

  We drove out of the city the next weekend, five men in one car on a brightish afternoon, looking like five gays off for a Greek party. Or like criminals from the twentiethcentury, when only male criminals drove four or five to a car, so my father had told me, expressing distaste at
the new fashion for men driving round together.

  Not possible, but we were criminals – when all my life I had been so straight! We were laughing a lot, and drinking beer, and we had the green bag full of death in the back, and we drove deep into the country and found ourselves a wood to muffle the noise. It was the first time I had really noticed what the cold was doing to our woodlands. Some of the trees were brown and dead, others becoming bare in patches. It looked as if something were eating them. I thought, the cold is beginning to bite.

  We stretched out a tartan rug on the ground – the remains of a snowfall had frozen hard – got out the guns and spread out the ammo. Then slowly, carefully, we matched them up. Smaller bullets for the revolvers, fine long cartridges for the shotguns. The metal felt cold as ice to the touch, and stuck to our skin. It was almost erotic. Painstakingly, rigid with excitement, we loaded up, growing slowly less clumsy. The enjoyment felt private and intense: the deep delight of perfect machines, of oiled parts clicking in, of something that works – the pleasure a woman could never understand.

  Timmy was first to feel sure he’d got it right. I don’t know what he aimed at, but he didn’t hit it, and the noise was like the end of the world. We all reeled around, shocked and deafened. Paul, thankgod, produced from his bag a fat roll of cotton waste for earplugs.

  So we all loaded up, and aimed at the trees, then we aimed at beer cans balanced on trees, and I heard Timmy yelling as he pulled the trigger, ‘Die, you witches’, which made us laugh, great clouds of frozen steam against the firtrees. Soon we were all joining in the fun, yelling ‘Here’s one for Juno!’ and ‘Bang bang, bitches!’ There was a kick like a mule after every shot, but after a while I seemed to master it, and it was such pure and mindless pleasure, blasting chunks of bedraggled green from the trees, blowing tins to smithereens … And we were remarkably successful, considering that this was a first for us all. Most of the cans got holes in them before we decided to hang on to our ammo. We were sweating and redfaced, but I think we felt great.

  Then a cat shot yowling and screeching from the bushes, fat and grey and terrified, and that made us laugh even harder, and I had to stop Timmy shooting it. It was a boys’ prank, nothing more than that.

  (Though it made me think of my poor sad cat, Snowball, who sat alone at the flat and got fatter and fatter till his heart gave out.)

  My plan. Though it wasn’t much of a plan. Paul and I went off to do a reconnoitre, in dark glasses and the kind of clothes that no Insiders would ever be seen in, layers of rags Paul wore for painting, and two woolly hats Paul had bought from an Outsider – he told me I looked good in mine. We were the same size, though I was brawnier. No one would have looked at us twice, dressed like that. Insiders rarely looked at Outsiders, for fear the Outsiders would ask them for money. We hung around that part of the Marylebone Road, and tried to get an idea of how things were run. We were there for days, shivering, waiting, perched on uncomfortable steps and walls, staring at the fortress of Victorian brick. I envied the pigeons on the window-ledges. Paul patted my arm as I gazed at the glass.

  My clothes smelled of him – it felt oddly intimate. We’d never talked at such length before, and I confess I found Paul slightly boring, though it seems unkind to say so now. (He talked a lot about his life; he was an only son. They had wanted him to marry; he had not been forgiven. His violent father had rejected him … My eyes grew fixed and glazed as he talked. It was my only son that I cared about, my beloved Luke in the hands of hags.)

  Wicca’s leaders, of course, were no longer based here ever since they became the elected Speakers, or we wouldn’t have had a chance in hell of getting past the security squads. They’d been doubled, according to the screens, since Wicca had ‘lost ground in the polls’. In other words, now everybody wanted to kill them. But the children were still here, some of them at least. On our first morning, around nine am, two minibuses drove up in convoy and twenty or thirty young children got out and were escorted by female guards into the building. Too young to be Luke, though I scanned them, desperate. The guards were big women carrying stunguns, dressed in greatcoats of violent green. They looked harassed, and moved the children in quickly; the doors closed behind them in a matter of seconds. They were massive doors, which made the people look small. It was like a military operation. The kids were subdued and obedient.

  I began to understand this was going to be tough.

  As I was thinking that, the doors reopened and a woman with short blonde hair ran out and up to the first minibus, which was just leaving. She banged on the window till the driver stopped. Her body language was grim, urgent, and she dived inside the bus, stony-faced. Was it a bomb scare? we wondered, tensing ourselves. But she emerged again two seconds later, triumphantly waving a large brown rabbit with a floppy pink bow and impossibly long ears. The minibus tooted its horn and left, and she slipped inside the tall front doors, but not before I realised, with a spurt of hope, that it was Briony, with a new short haircut, she hadn’t left Wicca World after all. Kindhearted Briony, my almost ally.

  It was another week before I managed to follow Briony when she came out at the end of the day. I wasn’t used to following women. I moved very fast after she rounded a corner, but to my surprise she was waiting for me there, poised, eyes hard, one knee forward, arms raised, like someone pretending to do karate, but the pose collapsed when she recognised me and anger was replaced by worry. ‘Ohgod, I nearly killed you,’ I thought I heard her say, then decided she must have said she nearly called me. ‘Don’t follow people, it’s dangerous,’ she said.

  ‘I’d never hurt you, Briony.’

  She looked at me in a peculiar way. Her next thought was a kind one, all the same. She said ‘Luke’s okay. He’s got very tall. His mother sees him at least once a week, even though they’re so busy at the moment …’

  I registered that she said ‘they’ not ‘we’, as though she and Wicca were separate, but it was probably an accident. ‘I have to see him,’ I said, hurriedly, walking alongside her down the street.

  She stared briefly across at me with solemn blue eyes. ‘I can’t take the risk of bringing him again. They’re not very forgiving to traitors,’ she said, with a little shudder that was more than the cold. ‘I’m not in as strong a position as I was. I lost my job. Policy disagreements.’

  ‘I have to see him, or I’ll kill myself. And everyone else I can get my hands on. I’m fucking desperate. I’m not joking.’ I hadn’t decided what I would say, but the words tumbled out thick and fast.

  She looked at the ground and walked a little faster. ‘He’s still singing. His voice hasn’t broken –’

  ‘I shall come back. I’ll blast my way in. If you won’t do something, I hold you responsible. Help me, for godsake. Just let me see him. I won’t make any trouble if you let me see him.’

  ‘I can’t. You don’t understand what you’re asking –’

  ‘I’m not asking, I’m tired of asking, I’m fucking telling you, I’ll shoot myself, back there on the doorstep, where the kids will all see it. Do you think that will be good for Luke?’

  And so I bullied and lied my way in. I’m not proud of it, but it was for my son. Briony seemed amazingly attached to him (I’d started to find love in a woman surprising). She told me to come back at twooclock on Friday, and she would let me in through the service door. I must be dressed like a delivery man.

  Look, I only wanted to save my son. I couldn’t foresee … I didn’t imagine …

  The five of us met once more before the day. We considered, and rejected, perhaps too swiftly, my going in alone and bringing Luke out, depending on Briony’s good will (‘Never trust those bitches,’ said Timmy). Instead we decided to go in mobhanded as soon as she opened the door to me. So the die was cast. We drank. We were brothers. Paul looked at me with liquid eyes.

  The day dawned thinly sunny and cold. I had slept badly, but at least I had slept. I spent the morning packing the boot with thermal sleepingbags, torches, tins,
a huntingknife, some of Luke’s possessions – his camera, his microscope, his favourite crystals – but would he have grown out of them, and me? What if he’d forgotten me, or hated me? Perhaps the women would have brainwashed him. I packed the guns; of course I did. I was tempted just to take the ones we would be using, but accidents can happen, guns can get lost. Feeling reckless, and dangerous, for people were around, I hauled down the whole green bag in the lift and laid it on the floor beside the back seat. Most important of all, I packed our documents. Naturally I hadn’t got Luke’s passport, but passports wouldn’t help, the way we would be leaving. I had my copy of his birth certificate, as well as my own, and Samuel’s, and by excellent luck his father’s, my grandfather’s, carefully wrapped in tissue paper by Milly. (Place of Birth: Accra, Ghana. The keystone of our claim to freedom.) My sister and I had argued bitterly, after Mum and Dad died, over who should have their papers, and thankgod, I had won. Three generations of proof. I slipped them, carefully xylon-sheathed, into Samuel’s old brown leather dispatch case. Perhaps my father’s spirit might look after us; and my grandfather, who had believed in such things.

  I’d decided to leave Dora to Paul. His most recent Dove, Lawrence, had a voice error, so Paul had passed him on to a Learning Centre, but regretted it, and was missing him badly. I knew he would make a kind owner for Dora – I’d never met a man as kindly as Paul. But at the last moment, just before the lads came, five minutes, in fact, before they walked through the door, I realised I couldn’t give Dora up.