The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  In our Days, life wasn’t easy for men. It was softer – but it wasn’t easy.

  I’d never intended to bring Briony – a woman, for godsake! One of the enemy!

  – But she wasn’t, really. Nothing was predictable. In those months, everything was turned upside down. My behaviour to her had been appalling. I’d lied to her, manhandled her, sheltered behind her like a coward. I ‘took her hostage’, in the Wicca’s phrase, as though I were always taking people hostage, that clean little phrase for a demented cockup, so she started on the screens as a heroine, ‘YOUNG WOMAN SNATCHED AS SHE TRIES TO SAVE BABIES’. But soon it changed. The police ‘had suspicions’, there were ‘questions to be answered’, ‘discrepancies’, and before very long they had all decided that Briony was part of the conspiracy, and she had a price on her head as well, for Wicca offered hundreds of billions for our capture.

  I had done all this to Briony, who had merely been kind, worried, decent. I expected her to fear and hate me. On that first awful day I had sat in the back of the car with my Magnum jammed up against her ear while Ian roared out of London in a frenzy and Luke sobbed and wheezed on the seat beside us, but she’d suddenly said, some five hours later, as we drove down a rutted lane through a wood to a safe house Paul had arranged, ‘Could you take that thing away from my head please? It might go off by accident. Look, I was fed up with Wicca as well.’ And at first I took no notice of her, though Luke said ‘Briony’s my friend,’ but as days went on and her image on the screens changed from saintly virgin to demonic witch, I saw she had as much to lose as me if we were captured, and relaxed.

  I thought about letting her go – I thought about dumping her, to be honest. Three might travel lighter than four, but when I suggested it she said, ‘If I get caught, you know they’ll kill me. You have to take me with you across to Euro.’

  She had a heavy fringe, like a Palomino pony, and her pale blue eyes glittered underneath. I thought that she was going to cry. I’m not very good when women cry. ‘How do you know I’m heading for Euro?’

  ‘I’m not stupid. Take me with you.’

  And so I did. She was young, calm, kind, and she liked Luke, and she was beautiful, which wasn’t important, but cheered things up, and I soon needed cheering up very badly, for it seemed we would never get out of the country.

  I hadn’t meant to bring Dora, either. She was suffering a little as we kept on the move, unable to stop anywhere long enough for her to have a good slow twelvehour refuel, which all Doves needed as they got older. Nor was she ‘happy’ travelling in the boot; Doves’ mobility and bodytone wane with disuse, all around me now they are failing, waning –

  Doves have no concept of the future, although some of them have a time delay. If that isn’t in use, they exist in the present, commands, perceptual apparatus, the lot. We were sitting round the table in a safe house near Bournemouth, I’d been drinking I suppose, and feeling expansive, and foolishly I started to explain to Dora, and perhaps to our hosts, who were Dovelovers, that once we’d got to Euro she could travel with us, look out of the window, play with Luke, see mountains, lakes, everything … But she looked at me with her big soft eyes, a little duller than usual from being switched off, and said, ‘This is not a correct message. I see a table, I don’t see lakes. I see a red bottle, I don’t see a mountain.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘or maybe next week. I shall show you and Lukey the lakes, and the mountains.’

  ‘I don’t see lakes, I don’t see mountains,’ she said, and it touched me with foreboding, as if she must be right, as if she were a prophet. But of course she was just a preprogrammed machine.

  We were hunted everywhere. I couldn’t fix a crossing, all Manguard’s contacts couldn’t fix a safe boat, no one would risk it, all the ports were watched, or they asked for impossible amounts of money. ‘Lie low,’ was the advice. ‘They’ll get tired of watching,’ but I knew that Sarah would never get tired of it, I knew she’d stick at nothing to get Luke back.

  (Sarah. I couldn’t think of her. She’d become a black hole, a ghastly vortex of blame and guilt. Guilt would only slow me up, and I had to be light, fast, hard – I gave curt, repressive answers when Luke asked me about his mother. I was his father. I too had suffered.)

  Those days were hectic, comfortless, shot through with jolts of adrenalin when we had to leave one hiding place for another, never sure how welcome we would be, for most of our hosts were as afraid as we were …

  Once Wicca nearly caught us, by accident, I think. We were hiding on a wind farm near Bideford in Devon and something woke me in the middle of the night. I crawled past the sleeping body of my son to look out of the window of the outhouse where they’d put us and I saw under the moonlight fifty, a hundred strange figures shrouded in dark capes or blankets passing through the tall silver forest of propellers, seeming to look neither to right nor left, never pausing for a moment, unstoppable. They looked like a company of Amazons, and the great still propellers were a field of spears, stuck into the ground to show their power. They never stopped. They strode over us, or through us, but I shivered as I watched them fade into the distance.

  (Perhaps I imagined them; or dreamed them. Perhaps my whole life was lived in terror of women. I think that was true of all of us men. We felt they had everything and we had nothing.)

  Then our fortunes changed. The elections came, and our little crew was almost forgotten by the screens. There was a storm of accusations of ballot rigging, falsified votes, intimidation. Ballotboxes – those weird, anachronistic gadgets which required us to go and vote in person, always wooing out a few strange waxen figures who had obviously not been Outside for years, hooded, dazzled, in gloves and dark glasses – were snatched from polling stations, dumped or burned. There were four or five recounts at most stations, although the poll was only fourteen-percent, a pathetic fraction of what it once was, when elections were real, in the twentiethcentury. Everywhere defeated Wicca candidates furiously demanded more recounts, and great batches of votes suddenly emerged from nowhere. The election ended in virtual deadlock, with neither side conceding defeat, though most people seemed convinced Manguard had won.

  And then there was chaos. There was still a National Army, which had soldiers of both genders, all nominally loyal to the Speakers. But over Wicca’s four years of power, there had been more and more reports of men defecting, whole units joining security firms that were really more like private armies, many of them linked closely to Manguard. And the local police forces were also breaking up as the men and women went different ways. Manguard took over some of the ports, but the coastguards, for some reason, were loyal to Wicca – I imagined brawny women in roaring boats. The screens were completely polarised: Wicca still dominated Nationscreen, Manguard had good links with Euroscreen.

  The country teetered on a knifeedge for days as the two sides wrangled tensely for power, while behind the scenes they marshalled their forces. I heard shooting several times in the distance. No one really knew what was happening. We seethed with rumour as we tried to sift the thousand different stories on the net, and we kept our heads down, though we sensed we were becoming a minor distraction from the bigger story of peace or war.

  And all the time it was getting colder. This was long after the collapse of the Eurotunnel, twenty years after the great disaster under the Channel when the Euroscept bomb destroyed a crowded train and fractured the walls, which held for a few hours, then cracked catastrophically in a few seconds, so the blazing inferno we were watching on the screens was suddenly doused as the sea flooded in – thousands of tons of black sand and mud, and the screaming died, and the screens went blank … And hundreds of bodies were never recovered, and the Speakers couldn’t raise the money to repair it, and anyway people were afraid to use it, and so it was broken, our link to Euro.

  By ferry from a friendly port would have been the obvious way to get across, since flying was out of the question, but the ferry company had just suspended service, announcing it a we
ek after I kidnapped Luke, because the ice floes were heading down from the north in increasing numbers, growing bigger all the time. Though there’d been no trouble in the Channel as yet, the company was reinforcing all its hulls to avoid a repeat of the Scottish disaster when so many hopeful Swedes were drowned.

  And so we decided on a small boat, with a gathering sense of excitement on my part. The chaos meant they were available again for the kind of money we could just afford. To be off on the sea in a boat with my son – wasn’t this the life I had been longing for? The kind of action I had somehow been missing?

  I had to pay the bugger two million ecus, although the boat had come through ‘friends’, through a Manguard member, Riswan’s second cousin. It was nearly a quarter of the sum I’d brought with us – it would have bought me a bloody castle in Scotland, now everyone was flooding south, as I told him, but Kishan insisted the price was cheap. Perhaps it was. The boat would be a writeoff, for he was too cautious to come with us and sail it back across the Channel.

  At first I was dismayed that he wouldn’t take us, but very soon a sneaking excitement, a sense of wild exhilaration, took over. I would sail the boat. Of course, of course.

  I had sailed quite often, with my mother’s brother, when we stayed by the sea with Milly’s family. My mother had always got cross and worried and nearly succeeded in spoiling it all. I loved it, though. The nautical language, the sense of freedom, the light on the sea, the chance to do something without the women – and my uncle said I was a good sailor. But I hadn’t sailed for over thirty years.

  Still, anyone could sail a boat. I’d seen endless images of men sailing boats. My boyhood hero, the actor Guy Ball, had sailed a small boat across the Atlantic in Sea Man, the film to end all films. I was ten, a very impressionable age.

  I had to take Briony along, and Dora, which maybe made everything a bit less romantic …

  Yet more old-fashioned, in a pleasant way. Myself, my son, the wife, the dog. Sailing off together on a Great Adventure. Daddy could do it. Daddy would.

  If anyone had watched us setting out, from a Dorset cove near Lulworth, at sunset, they would have seen something from a twentiethcentury picturebook, Briony’s blonde head bronzed by the sunlight, Luke’s loose curls, Daddy at the helm, Luke with the faithful pet at his side, Dora the Dog, tethered, sleeping, Mummy bending over the picnic things (in fact, she was checking we had the guns), homewardbound as the sun went down, tacking slowly across the V’s of red surf as Daddy got used to harnessing the breeze, and out through the black rocks that guarded the bay, sailing out silently as far as we could before we took the risk of starting the engine.

  It began like something fun, romantic, and Luke was grinning with excitement at the bow, leaning back against the pulpit in the last of the sunshine, the red light glazing his face with healthy colour, wrapped up (on my advice) in layers of sweaters that made him complain of being too hot. I was giving him and Briony firm, calm instructions about hauling and sweating up the sails, and all of us were doing awfully well … But that was at first, before the wind got up, while we were still near the dark shape of the shore, with the ghost nets of light from the little resorts growing brighter point by point as we watched and, Briony and Luke competing to count them.

  (Only I knew Briony was afraid. We had had a conversation the night before. She’d been at pains to tell me how tough she was, which I took with a hefty pinch of salt, since she had been crying, one second earlier. ‘You won’t regret taking me,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s just that I get horribly seasick. And I can only swim ten lengths –’ She looked adorable when she cried, her cheeks flushing, her full lips trembling, and I comforted her, till she got very assertive, and pretended she had once been in the Army. But I poured her a whisky, and calmed her down. I felt that somehow we had got closer, and I liked the new feeling of responsibility. It made me feel tender, and – yes, tender.)

  Now no one would have guessed she had a problem. Briony was chattering away to Luke, and Dora was perched by my son’s knee, and the sky overhead was a picture of heaven, great lakes of wet crimson with gulls flung across it. Sarah would have loved it; I missed Sarah, how very sharply I missed her, suddenly, but that was in another country, and I was here, in the gathering dark. I was Daddy now. I had to protect them.

  ‘Luke, take Dora below,’ I said. She was sleeping, but the wind had strengthened a few knots, veering now from south to southwest, and I thought she might slip from her seat in the cockpit. Definitely time to start the engine.

  It was an old-fashioned boat, almost a hundred years old, though Kishan insisted he had cared for it ‘like my own child’ – but he had no child. The engine was an ancient twostroke inboard that you started with an enormous castiron flywheel. I gave Briony temporary charge of the helm (I thought it would give her confidence, though she was already looking faintly green) while I followed his written instructions precisely. First I worked out what everything was. I attached the starting handle, opened the seacock, turned on the fuel, then swung the handle vigorously. And nothing happened. Nothing at all. We thudded into the shortening waves.

  I had paid the bastard bloody millions for this. I tried it again, more violently. ‘Bastard!’ I shouted, ‘Start, you bastard –’ In response, the motor suddenly backfired, the carburettor spat out fuel and blue smoke and the starting handle kicked back against my shin. From the cockpit my silent crew watched me. ‘You’d better calm down,’ Briony said. What did she mean? I was perfectly calm. I ran up the companionway, grabbed the helm and lashed the tiller to keep us upright.

  ‘You bloody see if you can do any better,’ I shouted, but she took me at my word, went down and started rotating the flywheel, and I must have got the thing ready to go, because her languid turning of the starting handle made it cough into life almost straight away, and there was a wonderful, steady chatter, and then we hardly felt the swell but only the purposeful power of the boat, shooting us out across the blazing water and beyond the brightness to the dark horizon, and on to the point of no return …

  I had killed a man. I could use a gun. I was fifty years old. I refused to be frightened. And steering was easy – wasn’t it? Into the wind, straight into the wind, but the mainsail for some reason was flapping wildly, making it hard to concentrate, so I gave my crew orders to get down both sails and secure one to the boom, the other to the guardrails – I was doing okay, it was all coming back. I could hear Uncle Jim’s voice, giving me advice, and I loved the way my crew obeyed me, it wasn’t a feeling I was used to –

  But as soon as I relaxed the other worries came back. I was on the alert for copter patrols. They’d been whining ceaselessly overhead on land since the run-up to the elections, hovering and circling like the last crazed wasps, anything from two or three to a dozen, working on our terror, our sleeplessness. Now I could hear a buzzing in the distance, but the rhythmical thump of the little engine and the wind whistling through the stays and halyards made it hard to hear if it were getting any louder. I could see them maybe ten miles down the coast, their little red nightscopes darting and diving over what might have been Southampton, where Wicca still ruled, so perhaps there was a nest of them … I almost wished for a few more knots of wind, and then the copters would be grounded.

  But the coastguard patrols were a worse danger. Their fast response launches could handle any weather, and their microradar scanners were minutely accurate. The coastguards had been vapping unauthorised vessels on sight, we had been warned, to deter emigration. The coastguards, Wicca’s strongest supporters –

  I started whistling to keep up my spirits. ‘The crossing should only take five hours,’ I called. Time to give out some of my bars of chocolate. ‘We should be in France by two or three in the morning.’ Saying that made me feel a lot better, though I’d plucked the figures from the air.

  ‘Can I muck about on the sand?’ asked Luke, excited. ‘If I keep my jumpers on. And boots –’ He was always anticipating Sarah’s worries, and of course when
he was little there’d been reason to worry, but now he seemed fit enough to me. If – somehow soft, for a boy of his age.

  Then I thought, how often has he been to the sea? We’d taken him to Euro and the USA, but the British seaside was considered unhealthy. There had been too much food poisoning and dysentery and sunburn, and swimmers dying from the faeces in the sea, and nineteenth and twentiethcentury hotels collapsing … My mother and father always took us to the sea, with her brother there it was convenient, but now it was a place for the very poor, with great camps of Wanderers on the beaches in summer.

  At that moment it occurred to me. Luke had not been to a Learning Centre for four or five years, ever since Sarah started taking him to the Commune. Those were the years, between eight and thirteen, when you saw the files of shouting, laughing children gangling through the streets to the Learning Pools. All Insider children were taught to swim. But thinking back, when he was five or six, I’d suggested to Sarah that we took Luke swimming, but she worried about his asthma, and bugs in the pool, she worried that the exercise might overexcite him or hurt his voice or whatever damn thing …

  The lights of shore, faint trails of white, were shrinking, blurring slowly to nothing. The distant copters were tiny red matchheads, then a single pinhead, then they were gone. The wind was getting up, razor-sharp, steelcold, driving into my eyes, nose, mouth, making it a battle to keep my lips closed, and glancing up at the top of the bare mast I saw the windgauge rotating wildly. There was a sudden vibration from the stern and then the angry whine of the engine over-revving. I realised the whole stern of the boat was lifting bodily out of the water – the propeller was beating on thin air. We were pitching forward, headfirst, headlong, sliding down into the abyss – at the last moment, we recovered.