The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  ‘What’s happening?’ Luke was out of the car, rubbing his eyes, pulling on his trousers.

  ‘Some mangy wolves. I saw them off.’

  ‘Wolves?’ he said. ‘Like in the books?’

  And before I could stop him he had darted outside.

  The next thing I remember we were both outside. Away from the fire the cold made my eyes water, Luke was trapped by a ragged ring of animals, eight or nine, maybe more, dark weaving bodies, all snarling and growling and running at him, shearing off to the side at the last moment, but getting bolder, corning closer, he was dancing about and shouting at them, but he’d suddenly had enough, I could see, he was yelling for me, ‘Dad, Dad!’ and in a great slithering rush on the snow I came running into the middle of them, kicking out with my feet in their heavy boots and shouting like a man possessed, glad of my roar, my deep male voice, and I heard a sickening crunch and click as I got one of them square in the jaw, and when it screamed and yelped with pain I kicked it again, in its scrawny ribs, then turned and booted another wolf’s side, shouting out every vile threat I could think of –

  And Luke, who I thought had run to safety, came storming from the chapel with a flaming branch, brandishing it above his head like a knight of old with a blazing cross. He went straight for them, and I ran with him, we ran at the wolf pack, side by side, yelling curses I didn’t know he knew, and after an unsteadying few seconds when they came on towards us unafraid they hesitated, broke like a wave and were suddenly fleeing, whining in panic, nothing but a bunch of beaten dogs. We found one halfdead on the snow in the morning.

  We did it together. Father and son.

  (Did it really happen, or was it a dream? I don’t remember much cold, or fear. I don’t remember how the wound healed. I have a vivid memory of my son hugging me, but I can’t remember the time or place.)

  I think I was ill for a week or so, and then my memory clears again.

  Without Briony, we two became closer. I should say ‘we three’, for Dora was important. She gave us something to talk about; something to look after together. From the time when Luke had given her his voice he’d begun to spend more time with her, having the ‘conversations’ with her that still seemed novel and amusing to him, playing chess with her and sometimes, when we rested, stroking her and making her chuckle.

  (I say ‘her’, but I often got confused, in a way that rarely happened when Briony was there. I thought of the two of them as ‘the boys’, and of our little gang as three males together, and I started to call Dora by her androgynous nickname of ‘Dodo’ more and more.)

  Our whole way of being seemed to change. We were rougher, less tidy, less organised, louder. We packed up our plates without washing them. We knocked around together. We were three men.

  Spain was more orderly than France. Life seemed to struggle on in the villages, though the cities, people said, were full of crooks and murderers. They looked at us strangely as they said these things, afraid that we were bad people too. They seemed more suspicious near Madrid, where a Moroccan mafia had taken over – the central government had fled.

  I was no longer sure if we were good people. The boundaries of things had begun to blur. In the misty, snowy forests of the Picos de Europa we survived some hairraising encounters with desperate travellers wanting to steal our food or fuel. (Perhaps that wasn’t always what they wanted, but they flagged us down or followed us. How were we to know what their intentions were?) I told my son we could take no chances. I shot at their tyres or smashed their windscreens. If they were driving too fast, they crashed off the road. We didn’t hang around to see what happened. But I told myself I wasn’t a brigand, I hadn’t attacked anyone without cause.

  Even that didn’t last. We were leaving the foothills and cruising down towards the rolling plains. We were moving fast, fast enough finally to feel we were outstripping the march of the ice. There was something on the air we had almost forgotten; a greenness, a sweetness, a faint blush of warmth. And then we rounded a hairpin bend and were overwhelmed by the first flowering almond, a cloud of pale pink, then another, and another … and the dense wondrous smell of warming earth. We could drive at last with our windows wide open, feeling infinitely cheered by the scent of spring, by the sea of brilliant sun and blossom, blowing almond, foaming cherry. I was actually singing, though Luke wouldn’t join in, when we had a puncture near Villavelayo. The car began to grind and bump as we ran over what felt like cobbles. It was merely an ordinarily bad road, in fact, but the tyre was completely flat, and when I tried to change it the spare was duff. The first car that passed us, as we sweated in the heat, was a shabby old VW, heavily loaded. They must have been refugees like us, with bags and bundles tied on top, and I looked inside and saw three or four children, watching us with pale, curious faces, and I let them go, I couldn’t do it. But the next car, ten minutes later, held two men – a father and son, Luke found out later – and I held them up without compunction. I flagged them down; I waved the gun, then stole their tyre and swapped it for mine. Luke kept them at gunpoint while I worked, and he chatted to them in his effortless Spanish. They didn’t seem to bear a grudge once they realised we weren’t going to kill them. Luke got quite friendly with them. I felt excluded. I was the old man everyone hated.

  As we drove on at last, I reproached him. ‘You shouldn’t have chatted to them, you know. It made it hard for me to steal their things.’

  ‘You taught me not to steal,’ he said, tightlipped. ‘Besides, that boy was around my age.’

  ‘He was a teenager,’ I protested, and looked to my left, and saw my son, himself a great big teenager, a youth at the beginning of summer.

  We stayed two nights in the village of El Piñon, on the Rio Cega. We saw no men in this little village; it seemed to be run by sturdy widows, who waved at us as we drove through. One woman stood with her curvaceous daughter, who had a marmalade cat in her arms, pointing and laughing at our painted car. Luke said, ‘They look friendly, can’t we stay?’ I wanted to get to Avila, a medieval town I remembered fondly, but I think he was tired of the endless travelling, or else he was tired of my company, and so I let him have his way. Maybe segging was in Spain, as well, but the women seemed keen to use Luke’s muscles. They asked him to help with their potato harvest, and to my irritation he agreed. The nubile daughter worked alongside him. In the evening he was in wild high spirits, the first time he’d laughed since Briony died. They let us sleep in a frigid little outhouse, laying our sleepingbags in straw.

  On the second night, I said we had to move on. He didn’t see why we had to go. I kept him awake with my explanation. I spoke with more passion than ever before, I at last found words to explain my dream, why I’d set my heart on Africa … The new, fertile, temperate Africa, where Luke would be safe and have a future, where perhaps our line would go on forever, back in the land from which we came, our genes rejoining the old dark river. It was my dream, a father’s dream …

  Sons, of course, have different dreams. By the time I finished, Luke was asleep, snoring gently into the straw.

  *

  He admired me less, grew more rebellious. On the road next day, the argument continued.

  ‘We’ve got to get a move on,’ I said, placatingly. ‘With the roads so bad, and the car so slow, you can see for yourself, it’s nearly summer. They’ll close the frontier. We’ll have wasted our time.’

  He said nothing, as usual, just stared straight ahead. ‘I miss her, you know,’ he said at last, quietly.

  ‘I miss Briony too, of course … But she wanted us to get there. She was dead set on it –’

  ‘I mean my mother,’ he said, dryly, suddenly sounding alarmingly adult.

  ‘Oh. Yes. Sorry,’ We drove on for a few minutes in silence. ‘But you couldn’t go back,’ I had to say. ‘You could never go back to that Wicca nursery. You don’t regret it, do you? I mean … I did right?’

  He stared out of the window at the field of flowers. I could smell the perfume faintly through th
e window. Dark Spanish lavender, heady, balsamy. I saw he wasn’t going to answer, and all my pentup frustration burst out. ‘They were turning you into a bloody woman! That was what your mother was doing to you!’

  He flinched – when I shouted, people listened – but then he said, with studied indifference, ‘I just said, I miss my mother, that’s all.’

  ‘But are you glad we took you away?’ I think I might have hit him, if I hadn’t been driving, and I jerked the wheel violently to the left to stop us hitting a mangy black and white dog I hadn’t noticed, then hauled it with equal violence back again, and I’m afraid I also accelerated. Would no one ever see that I was a good man, trying to do my best for everyone?

  The combination of the jerk and the shout had an unpredictable effect on Dodo, who was switched on by the jerk, and decided to answer, in her normal honeyed, encouraging voice. ‘Of course I’m happy we’re going out. I like it when you take me out.’

  Luke switched her off with an impatient ‘Shut up … Look, you didn’t ask me at the time, did you?’ he said. ‘So don’t go asking me now, all right? I don’t just have to say what you want me to. I’m not Dora. I’m not a robot.’

  I made myself calm down, and drove on. I was determined to get to Avila that day, and to my joy, it was still standing, Avila, where I had come as a student, with its little colonnaded square.

  Life seemed to go on there remarkably as usual, shops still open, genuinely open, not operating behind barricades with furtive ‘Open’ notices on the shutters. The door of the church was locked, of course, but the roof was good; the stained glass had survived. When it came to the hour when decades ago the populace would have come out in their best clothes to promenade in the last of the daylight, to my astonishment, people still came, in their rusty blacks, their tight widows’ hairdos, men in jaunty hats catching the late red sun, little girls running in acidbright satin dresses which surely they had worn for ever … The only difference was that there were fewer children, but the old men drank dense yellow drinks under the pillars and the women chattered, harsh, humorous, and no one attacked us or threatened us. The little ones played skipping games on the flagstones, their shiny shoes tapping like a small light heart, and swifts came darting up into the twilight as they had done when I was young. It was summer in Avila, full golden summer.

  Tentatively, we sat down at a table. A woman came and stared at us and brought us bread and wine and olives, which seemed no more expensive than before. We sat dumb, happy, silently eating. Luke watched a girl who was playing with her little sister, her long silky hair and her small breasts bouncing. I could see people looking at my battered face; no one had noticed it in the village, as if they had grown used to violence. But Avila was a place of peace. The waitress asked me if I needed a doctor; I fobbed her off – I didn’t feel like explaining – but I let her recommend an inn, and that night Luke and I slept in beds with sheets.

  As I was slipping away, in my rough clean linen, enjoying the feel of it against washed skin, on the delicious edge of sleep, Luke suddenly spoke from the opposite corner.

  ‘Dad,’ he said. ‘This is nice. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Mmm,’ I mumbled, thick and slow.

  After a moment he said, ‘I’m glad I’m here.’ I think it was his way of saying thank you. Or sorry, perhaps, or both, it didn’t matter.

  ‘Thanks for telling me –’ I said. I meant to say more, but while part of my brain was working it out, the rest got lost in drifts of warm feathers.

  It was one of the last nights we spent together.

  19

  Driving through Spain, we drove through the seasons, from winter to summer, from the mountains to the sea, and for Luke, who had been so much confined, it was like seeing the whole world in a nutshell, from pinecovered mountains to bare red plains, from the lush green hills in the misty north to the burnt brown humps of baking Ronda, rolling down towards the glittering sea, and beyond the sea, beyond its white glaze, on the other side of the tongue of the Atlantic where the boats darted like lizards across the light – across that strait was Africa. And the boats were still sailing. The boats were still sailing.

  I thought I could see Africa.

  ‘Look, you can see it, if you screw up your eyes,’ I told him, excited, ‘Over there –’ There was the faintest line, the smallest shadow, faintly purple on the far horizon where sky met sea in a shimmer of heat.

  ‘Maybe,’ he grunted, and turned away. I thought it was too much for him, to see it in reality, the land of dreams, so I said no more, and patted his shoulder.

  It was damp with sweat. Unbelievable. There was heat again, we smiled, we expanded, we felt we had been cold for half a lifetime and never wanted to be cold again. The hills were singing with heat and crickets and thyme and marjoram and magic, and I drove faster, though the roads were narrow, I was rally driving and showing off till we nearly died on a hairpin bend. Then I sobered up. I wanted to get there. Having risked so much, I had to get Luke through.

  In the back of the car was the brown dispatch case that held our precious documents. When we left the car they nearly always came with us, but inside I kept the case wrapped in a dirty towel, obsessed with the possibility that thieves would ambush us and snatch it, thinking it held our money. Every time we stopped, I would check on it, a corner of green underneath the oilcan. And it was still there. We would be all right.

  I was overtired, and overexcited, and the edges of things were playing queer tricks on my eyes. It was age, or possibly the heat haze. I asked Luke to drive, and he took over happily. Not long now, a day, two weeks, depending on what we found on the coast. Spain had once been famous for bureaucracy, but I knew we had everything they could ask for –

  They suddenly ran across the road in front of us, making Luke swerve and shout in fear, then slow down to watch them, but they were soon gone, though one gazed after us for a moment. He was brown as earth. His arms had sharp muscles. White whites to his eyes. He was laughing at us.

  ‘They must be the salvajes,’ Luke said. ‘I’ve never seen them up close before. The wild boys. There was a girl, as well. Did you see, they were throwing lemons at each other?’

  ‘Trying to kill each other, more like,’ I interrupted sourly. ‘Keep your eyes on the road. It’s steep. What did you call them?’

  ‘Salvajes … that’s what the girl in the village called them.’ He’d begun to know things I didn’t know. ‘They were having such fun,’ he said, obstinately, and I found myself thinking, has he had enough fun, as an only child, and then with the coven?

  ‘From what I hear, they’re to be avoided. Not very nice,’ I said firmly.

  ‘What’s so bad about them?’ he asked.

  I sometimes forgot he was still a child. I fell back on pious psychology. ‘It’s because they grew up without decent parents. They never lived in a family, like you did. So – anything goes, for them.’

  ‘You mean, they’re starting again? From scratch?’

  ‘Yes –’ But I didn’t like his intonation. ‘Luke. They’re not a good thing, you know.’

  ‘Didn’t say they were,’ he said crossly, and drove on in silence in the blank white heat.

  I think I had a tendency to tell him too much. I wanted to save him from my mistakes – I wanted to save him from any mistakes.

  ‘I know our family wasn’t perfect,’ I said. ‘But at least you always knew we loved you.’

  ‘Yeah yeah.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Stop going on. I just looked at them. They looked – interesting. I’m not in love with them or anything. Christ.’

  Yet all that day he seemed distracted, and I felt he might be thinking of them, those brown, lean, dirty kids, darting out in front of us so we nearly ran them over, and the arc of the missiles against the blue air … his daft idea that they were just lemons, lemons from that green lemon grove.

  (Of course they were stones. They meant pain, trouble. I was grown up, I knew the truth.)


  We slept that night in the car, all three of us, in the country just outside Malaga. Next day, I knew, was going to be crucial. I would have to bargain with one of the operators in Malaga who sold tickets for the crossing. The system was horrendously complicated, but I had done my research in advance, I was sure I had everything worked out.

  I’d been told in England by Paul’s Spanish lover, who had come from Ronda a year ago, that first you bought tickets, for an inflated price, and then you went to sort out the visas, which seemed weird, but you couldn’t get a visa without a ticket from one of a cartel of small boat operators. The cartel dealt ferociously with outsiders, though occasionally you might find a fisherman poor and desperate enough to take you across. If you took that risk, you had to sail without a visa. I preferred to buy from the cartel. According to Manuel, however, quite often, even with the right tickets, the Ghanaian agent wouldn’t grant you a visa, and there was no refund on the tickets. Still, we had a contact, the documents, five million ecus to buy the tickets and square the visa officials, if we had to. So far, luck had been on our side. I told Luke I was confident.

  That night I was terrified in the early hours, and the car was musty, frowsty, hot, recalling times I had almost forgotten. I had drunk too much wine and could not sleep. Lying with my spine uncomfortably kinked, I felt the sweat running down my body …

  Remembering being young with Sarah, far away and long ago. The long curve of her back, gleaming with moisture in the queer timeless light that came up from the street, the way her hair coiled across my pillow, smelling of some sweet musky perfume, streams of red hair, in the early days, before she cut it, cut me off … I wondered how far she had tried to pursue us. Did she ever trace us as far as France? Did she know that we had crossed the Channel? Did she try to follow us? Or had she been trapped in the civil war? From what Briony said, Sarah’s role in Wicca was precarious; Juno halfloved and halfhated her … Poor Briony. I must have bored her stiff with all my questions about my exwife. She asked me once if I was over her, and I got quite cross and said ‘Of course’, but I’d never ceased to be obsessed, never stopped wanting to understand.