The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  ‘Luke,’ I said, trying to sound calm, ‘you can swim, can’t you? You have been taught?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Did you think I could?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I just – wondered.’

  ‘We shan’t sink, shall we? We’re not going to drown?’

  ‘Of course not.’ I cursed myself for worrying him.

  And now we could feel the swell again, even through our speed, even through the engine, like a gentle nudging from a giant beast that was just beginning to get moving, a fluid, easy, enormous something that balanced our littleness on its shoulder, too vast to notice we were there, beginning to stretch out into a lazy gallop, sliding us slowly across its muscles, breathing a great wind into our faces, backs of our necks, ankles, wrists, finding each little nakedness, for the wind had become a steady gale, and we were all at once so small, and the danger wasn’t from the copters, the danger wasn’t from the coastguards, the danger was an absolute dizziness, the danger was of falling through the world, the danger was of bringing my beloved son into the middle of the ocean, and he could not swim, and I was the father, and could not protect him ...

  Had not taught him, or thought about him.

  ‘Briony,’ I called. They were huddled together at the forward end of the cockpit, their two black shapes like a mother and child, high in the sky, then plunging, plunging, then up again, and someone was shouting – I think it was Luke – with excitement, not terror, but Briony had her arm round him – I couldn’t help wishing that it were Sarah: if we had to die, we should all be together – I saw Briony’s profile briefly outlined, against the glow that still hung along the skyline, a bar of gold below the indigo, and the sea had turned black, silky, oily, and now it was trying a new little trick, rolling us lightly from side to side even as it pitched us from head to foot, while the whole damn ship, as it pitched and tossed, was rising and falling like a heavy yoyo, and before her face sank into the blind darkness, I saw her small nose, her high forehead, she wasn’t as tough, as hard as Sarah – ‘Maybe you and Luke should go below.’

  ‘Lukey, go in the cabin,’ she said. ‘Lukey!’ She gave him a little push. And then, as he scrambled noisily through, she called to me, ‘I can’t go below. I’m going – going to be –’

  And then she was sick, with a profound, tearing, retching movement that brought her suddenly to her knees, clutching the side, again, and again, as we surged up and down like a horse at a fair, a merrygoround going round for ever. I couldn’t leave the helm to go to her. We had only been out at sea for an hour. Could she stand another four hours of this?

  I missed the lights of shore very badly. I should have felt great, for we hadn’t been followed, we hadn’t been sunk, we had made our escape, we were free of Wicca, and of Manguard too, of the endless men with their shiny heads and sweat and perfume and corded muscles, and free of my silly, homophobic anxiety for Luke, aged thirteen, and beautiful – instead I felt cold and lost and empty, for ahead there were miles of howling darkness.

  In those days, none of us were used to it, because, in London, it was never dark.

  I had a brainwave. ‘Luke, switch Dora on.’

  ‘What for?’ He never wanted to.

  ‘Because she’ll give you some light. And warmth. We’re safe from the copters now. Go on.’

  It was good to see her familiar eyes at the foot of the companionway ladder, glowing orange in the night, and to feel her squat friendly presence again. ‘Why don’t you curl up next to Dora and try to get some sleep?’ I shouted to the back of Luke’s blonde head, illuminated in the cabin before me.

  ‘I’m worried about Briony.’

  ‘She’s all right … she’ll be down in a minute.’

  ‘She’s claustrophobic,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ He didn’t usually use words like that.

  ‘You know. She doesn’t like being shut in. She can have one of my jumpers if she likes.’

  He suddenly sounded so grownup. I realised that he was not a child, not just someone I had to look after. And he wasn’t scared. I could hear that too.

  ‘You’re a good kid,’ I yelled. ‘Keep that lifejacket on. I know it’s uncomfortable, but keep it on.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry,’ he replied. ‘I’ll come and help you sail the ship,’ but as he said it, I lost concentration and let the wind take control away from me, pushing the bow round as we hung on the top of yet another wall of water. Sideways, sideways, we were slipping sideways … what did Uncle call it? Something deadly, broaching, mygod, we were definitely broaching … Clutching the tiller with one desperate hand I grabbed for Briony with the other. She was vomiting in that strange attitude of prayer, ‘Hang on!’ I yelled to Luke, ‘Hang on!’ There was a sickening sense of time stopping as we plunged down, down, we would never come up, down, down, I started praying please no further, and then in an instant the whole cockpit was filling with water, we were going under, oh, pleasegod, I’d forgotten the washboards, if the cabin filled –

  All of a sudden we were shooting up like a flea on the back of an enormous dolphin, then slowing towards that horrible pause, that queasy second or two of stillness – but somehow, before we plunged again, I managed to wrestle her round head to wind, and the danger was over, for the moment.

  I looked for Luke, and was instantly afraid. He was face down on the floor of the cabin, twitching – he had had convulsions when he was a child – then I realised he was actually laughing with pleasure, and Briony was shaking herself like a dog, trying to get the water out of her clothes, till she slipped on the wet floor and fell over.

  And then I started to smile myself.

  Then Luke came staggering through into the cockpit, and put one arm out to help guide the tiller. His hand touched mine, hesitated, stayed. Shoulder to shoulder, we faced the waves, bracing ourselves for the next rollercoaster. His shoulder was not a lot lower than mine.

  I know I felt better with him there.

  Somewhere over our heads, to our left, then our right, then sweeping above us in a sickening arc as I tried to peer out and see what was happening, the moon had come up, and was streaking the waves with wild cracked filaments of silver. We slapped the water, we spun like a top, we were skimmed like a stone, we were flung and pounded, and I let Luke hold the tiller with me, I felt the surprising strength in his arms, and I tried to explain, as the storm roared on, how the tiller was connected to the rudder, how the rudder deflected the power of the water, how important it was to keep the head of the boat pointing into the oncoming walls of water – but I’d left it too late, he could not hear, the black O of his mouth saying ‘What? What?’

  I gave him more chocolate. My child, my son. I crammed black chocolate into his dark craw.

  For three or four hours, or what might have been days, we battered on through the bruising cold. My lips were splitting with salt and tiredness, my hands were raw and stiff from clutching the tiller, my arms were almost wrenched out of their sockets, my neck ached horribly from peering forward. I heard my bones start to crack like chalk, breaking, crumbling like cuttlefish corpses …

  I must have fallen asleep at the tiller. Luke was suddenly tugging at one of my arms, then beating my side like a faithful horse, and I registered that he trusted me before I heard what he was yelling, ‘The sun’s coming up. Dad, it’s the sun!’

  Luke must have taken the helm for me. I pulled myself up. My legs complained, my arms were shaking, I was soft as a baby –

  Now I am hard and dry as leather. Now I no longer yield to pain.

  But the boy was right. As I heaved myself up above the level of the window of the cockpit, I saw a faint glimmer over to our left.

  ‘And I counted ten seconds between the last two waves,’ he said, as we began to plummet again. Sure enough, we didn’t dive so far, and halfasecond or two later we were on our way up, and I hugged him, he hugged me, we rose into the air, we hung there, together, a boy and his father, and in the last moment before dipping again I
could see the pink and yellow line of sky above the water and a thin edge of white coming slowly closer, ‘It’s France. It is. It’s France. We made it.’

  ‘France!’ he yelled over the wind, ecstatic, jumping up and down, hugging himself, ‘I’ll go and tell Briony! Dad, you did it!’ And he briefly, fiercely headbutted me, dug his forehead excitedly into my side.

  ‘We did it together, Luke,’ I said. He looked up and grinned, a big boyish grin that I couldn’t remember him having before, and staggered away to wake Briony.

  He was back in a second, pulling at my jacket. ‘She’s not dead, Dad, is she?’ he yelled at the wind.

  ‘I’ll go and see, but you’ll have to take the helm,’ I said. For a moment, both of us hesitated. The swell had quietened, though the sea was still lively, shaking and worrying us like a dog, but he was thirteen, and if he felt he could do it – ‘I can do it, Dad,’ he said, and I went.

  The cabin was sloshing with icy water. The morning sun had just cleared the window, and glittered in a thousand pieces through the glass, on the frill of Dora’s feathers, a seraphic azure, on her great soaked feet like plates of black meat, and Briony was slumped against her –

  Her matted blonde hair, her wan white face, the greyblue shadows under her eyes, the bloodless, beautiful curve of her mouth. I knew nothing about her, but she had come with us, had risked her life on the sea with us. She had cared for Luke. She was – what was I thinking?

  ‘Briony,’ I said. ‘Wake up. We’ve made it.’

  Her xylon jacket was dark with vomit. One of her gloves had fallen off, or she’d pulled it off to look at her watch. I looked at her watch – it was fivetosix – and one eye opened, puzzled, startled, wide and frightened, pale blue as the sky. ‘Where am I?’ she said.

  ‘Nearly in France.’

  She put up her hand to touch my face. I saw her do it, but I couldn’t feel it; my face was like a block of ice. We had never touched since the day of the kidnap when I’d mauled her around like an enemy. I watched the slow movement of her white hand. It was amazing, wonderful. ‘Thankgod,’ she said. ‘I thought we would die.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘that you were frightened.’

  ‘Is Luke all right?’

  ‘He’s steering the boat.’

  She smiled. The blood came back to her face.

  ‘He’ll like that,’ she said. She tried to sit up, but the boat lurched and she collapsed again. I took her hand and pulled her up.

  ‘Hadn’t we better switch Dora off?’ she asked. ‘She’s been on all night, and we can’t refuel her.’

  I bent to do it, but touched the wrong panel, and got ‘Voice’ instead, which we often turned off, because her giggles didn’t help when our nerves were bad. ‘I have a water malfunction,’ she announced, in her little voice, which sounded slightly smug, slightly too sure of herself, perhaps. ‘I have a water malfunction.’

  ‘You’re wet,’ I told her, and switched her off.

  ‘There’s France,’ I told Briony, pointing to the band of whitening sand a mile or so away. ‘I’d better go and help Luke bring her in.’

  ‘Do you think ships are female?’ she said, eyes sharpening.

  ‘No … Yes. What does it matter?’ I gave up explaining, justifying. ‘Luke wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. I’m – very grateful,’ I said, quite humbly.

  I felt that I loved her, deeply, adoringly, I wanted to take her in my arms, I wanted to shout and dance and drink, I wanted to kneel down and worship the morning –

  Instead I went back and took the tiller from my son, and he sang as he guided me through the shining rocks to the deserted beach where we ran aground.

  It seemed to me, as we rested on the sand – halfprotected by the lip of an enormous dune, its spiky green crest sticking over us, and under its fringe, the brilliant sea, still streaked across with racing whitecaps, but blue as air underneath the foam, a holiday sea that meant no harm – it seemed to me that we were coming home, me and my son and this kind tired woman who dozed between us in our nest of blankets, and Luke chased a sandfly from her hair.

  That morning was so bright, so unforgettable. I thought, A new life, away from Sarah. Hope. Joy. Another child …? Because Briony was young, and I wasn’t old, and perhaps it was Sarah, after all, who had the problem. And since Briony was sleeping, and could express nothing beyond what the curve of a cheek seemed to say, I could dream whatever I wanted to, I could feel like a god or a happy hero relaxing after an epic battle …

  Of course, she woke up, and Luke was hungry, and all of us were cold, and we had to get moving. Reality struck me like a wet sandbag, every joint and muscle of my body ached, and we had no car until I’d bought or stolen one –

  But I had eight million ecus in my pack, I had my son, I had Briony, and a little song of triumph rang out in my brain. I had escaped, I had stolen the future, I’d left Sarah behind with those bitter old women, and now we were off to the Pyrenees, through thousands of kilometres of France, then over the mountains into Spain, across the great plains and down to the sea – the narrow strait to Africa.

  Yes. That morning was one of my life’s best moments, a riff of pure pleasure I treasure even now, when everything’s so much colder and darker.

  We were a team, too. We had done it together. Without Briony, I couldn’t have started the engine, and Luke had encouraged me, helped me steer. Even Dora had given us the light from her eyes.

  No, not a team, a family. The members of a team are all alike, men with men, women with women. Our family was not like that. Difference was the point. We were complementary. Everyone had something different to give.

  Human beings weren’t meant to be segged. We were never intended to be solitary. The links stretched back through the generations, gifts of memory, gifts of genes. My father’s gift was concealed in my pack, sheathed in xylon, our most precious possession, the birth certificates, the documents. Samuel’s gift, of which he never knew the value, to the grandson he could not hold as a baby, so small, so skinny, so very white. (Dad said to me, after an awkward pause, ‘Congratulations, Saul. We-ell … You never would believe that this was my grandson.’)

  Now Samuel’s blood was going to save Luke’s life. Opening the gates of Africa. Giving us the key to the last warm places, the retreating deserts where fruit would grow, the great grassy plains that had once been sand, the blueing hills, the returning streams, the sapling woods of the new green Sahara.

  14

  I suppose you never know who you are until your life is over. What you are is the sum of what you do – leavened with wishes, dreams, regrets – but I never knew half of what I could do until I was prised from my shell of habit.

  I found I could sail across the Channel, which after all is a limb of the Atlantic. I could barter, in French, a boat for a car, and not do too badly on the deal. I could come across as tough, and taciturn. I could make people afraid of me. I could do without sleep, and books, and good food, and buzzers and soothers and all the rest …

  I could live at a slower speed than before, rougher and slower, because I had to. Cars in Euro were a different life-form to the speedy hydrocars we drove at home. Since half of Paris was burned to the ground in 2056, the year before our journey, by the explosion at the hydrogen plant at Boulogne-Bilancourt, there had been no fuel for hydrocars, so the old bangers had come into their own, poor people’s cars, essentially, a few still running on blackmarket petrol, more of them adapted to run on alcohol that enterprising peasants brewed from plants. Hemp plants mostly, after smoking the leaves. You soon got used to the sweet, choking smell. But the car we’d got hold of, a red battered thing which had green and yellow fins painted on the back, did forty kilometres an hour flat out – pretty average for a French Alco – and you couldn’t go flat out through unfamiliar country where most of the signposts had been burnt for firewood. Sometimes it felt as if we were crawling, covering eighty kilometres a day. I began to understand what I’d never grasped when we f
lew all over Euro in less than halfanhour, when we slid like silk over the surface of things – that the world was large, and wild, and hard.

  I could smash down the shutters of deserted houses, break in through other people’s windows. I felt nothing, looking at the scattered glass from a family photo in a brass frame. My family mattered more than them. I learned staying alive mattered more than anything, staying alive to protect my son.

  Once I broke in and found a middle-aged woman whimpering with terror in the kitchen. Her face was a slab of tearstreaked white. She stared, transfixed, as if I might kill her. I took what we needed as if she weren’t there, and left her twitching, shivering, pleading. Perhaps she was mad, and had been abandoned months ago by indifferent children. Perhaps the father had stolen her children … I forced myself to act, not think, but I’ve never forgotten the colour of her eyes, blackishgreen like an oiled mallard, and her greasy dark hair, licked to her scalp.

  I could forage for food and always find something, always enough to keep us alive, for the fleeing French never took it all with them, there were always tins of chestnut purée or vacuum packs of langue de chat biscuits or apple compôte or great wheels of cheese. We sometimes ate almost too well, in the north, on greasy pâtés or confit of duck, food that made poor Luke want to throw up, for he was used to spartan vegetarian fare, but we nagged him to eat it, and sometimes he did.

  I could wring the necks of chickens. That was a shock, how easy it was, once you caught the damn things, with their hysterical squawking and long scrabbling feet and outraged eyes, once you’d felt the pain of their steely peck on your naked hand, it was easy to kill them, to squeeze and twist their long leathery craws with their prickly unpleasant ruffs of feathers. I could pluck them, too, once Briony taught me. Her mother had owned a battery farm, and she wouldn’t eat meat for our first few weeks, but by the end of March she was eating everything.