The Ice is Singing

by Jane Rogers

  At weekends he took her out, planning outings to zoos and parks to delight her. When old ladies commented on how pretty and clever she was he glowed with pleasure. People were always remarking on her beautiful hair, which grew longer and more fly-away, without ever changing its silver-blonde colour. He called her Silver Top, Duck’s Fluff, Dandelion Clock.

  As if he had been turned on a giant wheel, he entered again into a terrible state of anxiety about Elizabeth’s care of Amanda. Elizabeth might let her run out on to the road. She might fall downstairs. He could see her hurt, maimed, unconscious on a hospital bed; she was only safe when she was with him. And when the child fell asleep, exhausted, at 8.30 or 9 p.m., he resented all the waking daytime hours of her Elizabeth had enjoyed.

  He considered leaving his job. If he gave up work . . . It would only be for three years anyway. Amanda could start school at four and a half. It wasn’t long – and he could sell the car, and do odd pieces of carpentry at home, at nights. He had savings. Maybe he could persuade Elizabeth to wait for her money from the mortgage, till Amanda was five. The new man was well off, to judge by the size of his house.

  He realized that Amanda greeted Elizabeth with enthusiasm when he took her back in the mornings. She did like her mother. Would it harm her to lose contact? From the opulence of his imagined full days and nights with her, he considered letting her go to Elizabeth for the odd weekend.

  He gave six weeks’ notice at work before he’d even spoken to Elizabeth. He didn’t want the confrontation. But he was also quite sure that he would get what he wanted. If Elizabeth refused, he would go to court and get proper custody. He was the injured party in the whole affair – and had clearly established more rights to Mandy through his continued care of her. There was no way he could lose.

  He finally told Elizabeth one morning as he dropped Amanda off, that he’d like to talk to her that evening. At 6 p.m. she ushered him into an untidy, expensively furnished lounge. As she turned to open the door in front of him he realized, with a jolt, that she was pregnant again.

  So much the better. She’d have no need to fight for Amanda now – she’d have a new baby all to herself. It hadn’t taken them long, had it. It hadn’t taken them three bloody years.

  She sat down and asked him, quite formally, to sit. He tried not to look at her. He was just starting to speak when the door opened and a man’s blond head peered round and said, ‘Sorry!’ before withdrawing.

  David started again. ‘I’ve come to see you about Amanda.’

  She nodded distantly. He imagined the shape of her belly under her smock, and his hands remembered the feel of her skin, stretched tight and silky-smooth. It was impossible that he should be speaking to her like this – in another man’s house. He had to close his eyes to steady himself and tell himself with all his concentration, ‘She is a bitch and I don’t care about her. She is nothing to me.’ His hands, clenched on the arms of the chair, were sweating horribly. He wondered where Amanda was. It would be easier if he could see her.

  ‘I’m stopping work. Given in my notice. I want to – you to – I want you to let me have Amanda. I’ll look after her in the days too. You can see her – but I want her. It’s only fair. You can see that.’ Blurted out, not like any of the speeches he had planned. He was burning up. What was it? He didn’t even know what it was that was sending waves of hot panic beating through his flesh.

  Elizabeth seemed composed. She spoke in a low voice. ‘Look, I’ve got something to tell you, David, and I should have told you before. I’ve been putting it off because I didn’t want to upset you. But there’s nothing else I can do, I’m afraid. I didn’t –’ She faltered, and he suddenly realized that far from being composed she too was terrified, on the edge of tears. Her voice dropped even lower and he had to crouch forward to hear her. ‘When I moved in with Mark he guessed something which I’d never thought of. He hadn’t really seen her before, you see. But when he saw Amanda – properly – he guessed.’ She came to a complete stop. David was paralysed. The ‘WHAT?’ of rage inside him could not come out, and lodged in his throat like a brick. At last she went on.

  ‘It’s the hair, you see. It’s so unusual. It would have been such a coincidence. And yours and mine both brown . . .’

  Noise. Of roaring. Inside a furnace roaring up with a huge burning lion maw to swallow into red heat.

  As it subsided she’d been talking on ‘ . . . because I didn’t, honestly, it never entered my head; he said, well, you can prove it. So he took her to the doctor’s and had a blood test.’

  Roaring again, blocking her out. Red coming up before the eyes darkening to black. The white speaking senseless face blotted out, then hanging like a puppet gibbering before him. The mouth went on opening and closing, the face contorting, as he watched. She was crying. She was talking. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, David. I didn’t know, I promise you. You can – if you want you can see her – Mark won’t mind – if you want to see her sometimes.’

  Without knowing how or where the strength came from he got out of the house, Elizabeth following him and crying at him all the time. At the door she caught his arm and he pushed her back, and stumbled down the steps. She shrank back into the hallway, staring at him. As he turned on to the pavement the corner of his eye was seared by a flash of white hair at the bedroom window.

  He had never seen Amanda again. Except secretly, through fences. And the schoolteacher was right. Carry on like that and he’d turn into one of those perverts, be no better than them. Frightening a little girl at the school gate, with the ugly exposure of his crippling love.

  Weds. morning

  I am telling stories. In a chipboard cupboard of a room six floors up a cement column, with hot dry air and nylon sheets. The room is so full of electricity that I have adapted to walking slowly, avoiding contacts. My hair crackles, the dry skin on my face is peeling. My lip bleeds.

  I am here, not there. There are the twins, Paul and Penny, giggling crying slavering slopping their food sucking their thumbs. Paul sobs in his sleep. Penny moans. My babies who have sucked my breasts and grown in my flesh, pieces of me, my belly my heart.

  I am sitting six floors up with a window over the motorway to hills; a five-star view in a one-star room. Snow. Total snow, not London snow. Snow on road ditch hill tree roof cloud car field. I am not –

  Not a diary not a journal. Not Marion, not a sniff or spit or print of her. In my cement tower (once doubtless white as an ivory but now yellowing grey as decayed teeth, a tower for my times, the days of ivory – like the golden age – being gone) I sit. Sit, wait, woman in a tower. Like Mariana in her moated grange. No, Rapunzel, gone bald. Stuck up a tower for good.

  No games. Here. Nylon sheets, lemon. Two blankets, off white. Nylon quilted bedspread, pink floral. Grey fleck carpet. Woodchip off-white walls. Fitted white-wood wardrobe and shelves, white washbasin, and mirror. Bedside coffee table (supporting lamp) of such generous proportions that this exercise of arm and pen is possible. I sit on the floor under the window, back against the bed, legs outstretched beneath the table. Writing on a new block of A4 ruled feint (wide).

  Me. No Penny no Paul No Ruth No Vi no Gareth. Me.

  Yes, inescapably me. Not Marion, she says. Not a stiff or– But her sniffs and spits are all over David and Amanda. She has pummelled him into shape – hasn’t she? With her hammy fists, he’s moulded and sticky as dough, paddled with the prints of her flat-edged fingers. Listen.

  ‘He began to long for a child. Not knowingly, but with a dull subconscious pang of loss.’ He didn’t know (she says). But Marion knows. Mother knows what’s wrong before you know yourself. She names the pain. She identifies it, telling herself that thus it can be remedied, later in the story. Suggesting to herself – comforting herself – deluding herself again – that things follow on, make sense, have remedies.

  Perhaps she wanted a good wallow. Nothing like someone else’s troubles. Liberally doused with ketchup, with ‘slow burning love’. Great towering p
assions, in red and black cloaks. She doesn’t feel secure unless she thinks they’re there.

  Instead of real things. Little things, that lurk and move quick and don’t make sense. They resist explanation. They won’t stand still to have metaphors hung round their necks like mayoral chains. Quick, dart, lurk. They’ve gone.

  Marion. Whatever she writes. She might as well stop now.

  Fri. 7

  Snow. More snow every day. Many roads are blocked. I thread my way along those that have been cleared; even in frost they remain wet because of the salt. The verges, heaped high with snow-plough packed snow, are ruined and blackened like a building after fire. On the other side of hedge or wall the white begins, snow clear to the next blobbed wall. There are no colours in this landscape, it is black and white, and even the black is faded – grey black, faint black: whiteness of snow overpowers all, bleaching the eye, leeching colour.

  My eyes are suffering; they ache, and at times white masses seem to shift before them, even when I’m not driving. The world seems slippery to them, they can’t get a grip on it. Perhaps I should buy some sunglasses. My neck and shoulders ache as well. I need to take a rest from driving.

  You talk rubbish. A tube of chemicals fizzing, changing colour by the minute. Lions pace. Pigs chew. Marion drives. It’s Nature’s way, my dear – survival. Do you think you’ve made a choice? Bid for freedom, escape? Can you escape your own nature, your own substance, the sloppy porridge of cells which are your construction, flesh and bones? All they’re programmed for is to keep you alive – they don’t care how.

  1. Lion. In a cage, paces. Hormones thereby released dull its anxiety, keep it sane.

  2. Pig. (More satisfyingly, more symbolically) in a factory farm, secured in its stall with chains, chews them. Day and night, obsessively. Survives, pain of captivity blunted, high on the heroin substitute its body manufactures in response to chain-chewing. Remove its chains, it cracks up: beats it brains out against the walls.

  3. Marion. The case is less extreme. Drives. Brain pleasantly numbed from consideration of more serious matters.

  Chemicals. Programmed to survive. All you are.

  That’s enough.

  Sat. 8

  At times I can go down in an eddy – down, down, below the static-noise surface, into the quiet spaces (underwater?) where vision is peculiarly clear. One thought one image leading to the next like slippery underwater rope I’m on a trail, can’t let go in the dark clear depths for fear of total loss, but if it’s possible to pursue the thought to its end (cave diver in the liquid hollows of the earth) then I will win –

  What? No more than a journey of that length. Always at the end, finally, a rock wall, a crevice too narrow for my shoulders.

  Strange changes in my body as I travel through no-time. I seem to swell and bloat like a drowned woman. My hands and feet have puffed up so that the skin is tight. Reasonably, I argue that it’s due to hours of driving, sitting still, blood not circulating. My body remembers it as a sign of pregnancy. My aching eyes never recover from assaults of snow glare. And now my lips are dried and cracking like sun-baked mud. They too seem to have swollen; they are bursting through the old skin, which shrivels back, to be peeled absentmindedly by me as I drive. Today I peeled a section raw.

  Reasonably, reasonably. The air outside is sharp and cold. Inside my car is hot and dry, the heater like a breath from the desert. My lips are simply dry. A sensible application of Vaseline or Lypsyl three times a day would sort them out. In the mirror I see a woman I’ve never met, with tiny squinting eyes and swollen bleeding lips.

  My lips must be constantly touched. I find myself stroking the silken new skin; pressing them together and moistening the dry corners; brushing the back of my hand against them, peeling with my teeth the onion layers of old skin. I have picked foolishly at the scabs until they’ve bled again.

  I am continuously aware of my lips. I feel them move and crack. I lick them to taste the blood. I can’t rest, I can’t leave them alone to heal. Last night I lay on my back with my hands clenched beneath me, to stop them stealing up to touch and peel my gigantic lips. I imagined I might unpick myself. Picking and picking, peeling back the skin, touching and brushing the moist new flesh, laying the backs of my fingernails against it, fretting at the edges of what is (already, for God’s sake) a hole; I might unpick enough to find an end to pull – that would make the whole lot unravel.

  They’re a neat edge around a hole, lips. Like a button hole. We girls learnt button-hole stitch at junior school. Blanket stitch, the stitch for binding raw edges. Over and over goes the thread, passing the needle through each previous stitch’s loop, linking them together to make an edge.

  I circle it. Over and over (sewing or unpicking?) I painstakingly circle the hole. The world resolves itself into images and theories of lips.

  Consider Lips

  Mouth edges. The rims of darker skin that frame the hole into which go air drink food thumbs lollipops cigarettes nipples and other parts of other people’s anatomies. Out from which come breath (used air) spit (lubricant and dissolver of those anatomies and lollipops) vomit (regurgitated food and drink) and words. Which have no counterpart in any of those things that go in. Except that words name them: identify them, ask for them, and so appear to own and control them all.

  It’s not all to do with going in and coming out, though – don’t think of lips as just an entrance way. That would be to disregard their intrinsic beauty and agility. They are the face’s leading actor. Curving in smiles and grins, stretching in exasperation, pursing in annoyance, hollowing to a thin round O of desolate misery, downturning at the corners in set lines of anticipated and fulfilled mediocrity and boredom. And when you touch them with your fingers doesn’t your skin wonder at their smoothness and durability, their appearance and texture of inside-the-body skin, which yet survives in the dry outside? Their sex colour, the bruised pink-brown of all hole-edges. Their luscious, curving shape, which makes you want to lick them.

  As for their movements, in speech alone their flexibility is extraordinary. When Billie Whitelaw played Beckett on TV, they filmed nothing but her speaking lips. Her lips filled the screen with a life, a tension, a manipulation and concatenation of muscle movements which was riveting; awe-inspiring. The words formed by these lips were lost – meaningless, insignificant – beside the movements which formed them. Medium made mincemeat of message.

  On another surface – the surface, say, of your body – lips can mould, brush, skim, suck, infill any space or crevice. Against your lips they can breathe, tremble, press, grind, hold in open-mouthed suspension. Kiss.

  Lips move; lips touch; lips signal. Lips are on the outside for show, and on the most secret inside of your mouth. Lips frame words that lie. Lips frame a hole that wants to be filled.

  My children’s lips. My husband’s lips. Lips that have touched me.

  Babies’ lips.

  They come ready pursed, as big from top to bottom as they are from side to side. In age our mouths elongate – wider and wider in grin or grim, both of which are similar in that they are lines that know; alas, that know. A baby’s mouth knows and seeks to know nothing beyond nipple. Ejected from warm wet inside to cold dry outside, from darkness to light, from flesh-fluid suppleness to the disparate harsh angles of metal, plastic and starched white sheet, the baby wants home. Warmth. Wetness. Flesh. Insides. Its body is nothing but an aimless sack, with every nerve leading to its lips. Only its lips know how to make it survive. Its lips slot and damp like a vice over nipple. Nipple, source of warm wet nourishment, connection with mother’s insides, meeting of flesh.

  At the first closing of new-born Ruth’s jaw on my breast I shouted in pain. If she could have sucked my nipple off and wormed her way back inside through the bloody hole it left, she’d have done it. A new-born baby’s suck is a desperate thing. The mother’s breast is the life-line, the life-hole. The greedy twins sucked me raw, till my nipples swelled and cracked. Little animals chewing a
t dugs; would tear the flesh and eat it if they could, if it would help them.

  On the breast, a baby’s lips (contrary to popular belief) do not form the shape that we call suck. Sucking goes on inside, further down the baby’s maw. The lips are there for manipulation and control, making, in the course of feeding, a score of tiny adjustments of motion and position. The top lip closes over the flesh in a straight line, so that neither the pinky-brown of lip nor of areola is seen. The infant’s top lip is a flat surface; when they grow older children’s lips become fuller, but roundedness here would prevent that neat seam, one plane of flesh cleanly fitting another. The underlip is turned out, in a pout, around the underside of the nipple. When the first gush of milk stops and the baby requires more, it allows the nipple to slide very slightly out of its mouth. No longer sucking, it holds the nipple between jaws and applies with the lower lip an infinitesimal trembling motion. The upper lip remains still, a pressure point. The effect upon the nipple of being ever-so-slightly trembled from below is a tickling, turning to a tingling, turning in the mother’s body to a sense of yearning which is satisfied by the sudden release of a hidden reserve of milk shooting through the breast. The lower lip stops trembling, slides quickly over the edge of the areola, to clamp in position and allow the open gullet to fill again with gushing milk.

  Consider a child in distress. Not a baby, a child, with teeth and an appetite for crisps and gum. How is its unhappiness signalled? Eyes, yes, brimming with tears. But about the mouth? A trembling, a much-described, a clichéd wobbling of the lower lip. Baby wants more milk. Wants connection of blood-warm liquid flowing from her mother’s body into her own. Wants comfort.

  Can the trembling of a child’s lip really be cured by the application of Germolene to a grazed knee, or a mouthful of Smarties? Most adult lips have given up, forgotten how to tremble. Never again will they close on flesh as close, as real, as one-with-them, as mother’s breast. All others are substitutes. They seem to be – for a while, almost certainly are – as good, as potent to comfort and banish the dark. But they are not the real thing.