The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  But Sarah began to have dreams, and delusions. She dreamed she had children who sprouted wings, poor thin things with stunted bodies, and as she tried to take them out in the sun she found they were kept alive by tubes, and when she tried to free them, they died. This dream returned night after night.

  She saw women in the hospital carparks with older children she suspected had been techfix births. They were left in the car looking limp and pale, as if they’d been kept too long in the dark. ‘Look at that boy,’ she would hiss to me, as we passed a Mercedes with gleaming paintwork and a dim blonde head in the back behind glass. ‘He didn’t look normal to me.’

  ‘You couldn’t see him properly.’

  ‘I did see. You’re afraid to see them.’

  And yet we never consciously believed our own baby would be less than perfect. Successful people had successful babies, even if they needed Dr Zeuss to help them.

  It was a good time for us, despite the terrible stresses, because we were focused on the same thing. Sarah took a sixmonth vacation from TV, and I gave up the Learning Centre and concentrated on the nanotechnics, where I could put in the hours whenever I wanted, since the labs were open around the clock in an effort to keep up with the Africans.

  I would sit there, sometimes, halfasleep, looking through the electron microscope at tiny machines performing tiny tasks, their incredible completeness, the way they could selfreplicate and grow, and it satisfied me at some deep level, made me feel life was still all right, that men were still in command of things, masters of a friendly universe.

  Well, not entirely in command, perhaps, because the best machines evolved and mutated. One day they would matter, those mute mutations. But then I was proud to help them along. I, Saul, was one of the chosen.

  ‘I feel sick,’ said Sarah, one steamy morning when we felt too hot to pull our clothes on. We had got up at fourthirty to get to the Batteries.

  ‘Could be good news,’ I said, pausing with my purple singlet over my head. ‘You never feel sick.’

  ‘I have a bit, lately … it’s the heat, that’s all. You know it is. So much for the icesheets. I think it’s been hotter than ever this year.’

  ‘It wouldn’t get cooler all at once,’ I said, emerging from the neck-hole, smiling. ‘I bet you’re pregnant. Yes. Must be.’

  We held hands even more tightly than usual as we sat and waited for Dr Zeuss.

  If a skull could smile, Dr Zeuss smiled. Indeed, he beamed. He gripped our hands. ‘I am happy to say we are successful,’ he said. ‘Ms Trelawney, we have a twin pregnancy. If you’d like to see the images, we have them on the scanner.’

  We heard no more. We were in each other’s arms, kissing each other, laughing and weeping. Dr Zeuss gave us a moment before he cleared his throat. ‘Ahem. If you’re ready.’

  A silver moonscape appeared on the screen like the ones we had often seen before, empty. He was having a little trouble focusing. The nurse came up and touched my arm. ‘Sir, we’d like you to sign a consent form for us to use these pictures in our advertising –’

  ‘In our educational package, yes,’ Dr Zeuss interrupted, waving her away, ‘but not just now, Marietta, please. Conception is a very meaningful moment.’

  We soared over craters and silver seas and dark patches where nothing lived. Then suddenly the picture steadied. ‘There you are,’ Dr Zeuss sighed, content. ‘There we are. A fine twin pregnancy. Three weeks postimplantation, I’d say.’

  They were two dim swimmers, curled together in the waves. They were moving, languorously, floating towards earth, but it suddenly struck me, they were here already, they weren’t up there where Dr Zeuss pretended, two virtual ghosts on the clinic’s screen, they were my twin babies, they were growing in Sarah, and I fell to my knees and kissed her stomach, and felt her warm tears wet my hair.

  ‘Do you want to know the sex of the foetuses?’ Dr Zeuss enquired, slightly impatient.

  ‘It’s a boy and a girl, I know already,’ said Sarah, laughing up at his long thin face.

  We enjoyed her pregnancy so much. There was no shadow for the first four months. Sarah relaxed, and slept like a child; we curled like spoons, my hands on her belly. One morning, though, she began to bleed.

  Dr Zeuss always shunted his pregnancy successes across to the care of their own doctors, so Dr Wang had to deal with us when we drove to the Medicentre in distress.

  ‘Have I lost them both?’ Sarah begged, desperate.

  He scanned her, carefully. It took a long time. He remained calm as we demanded information. After an age Dr Wang straightened up and turned towards us, looking sad.

  ‘You have lost one twin, I’m sorry to tell you. But one looks perfectly healthy and strong.’

  ‘Is it the girl?’ Sarah asked, and her voice held hope. I knew that she meant ‘Did the girl survive?’ I think I was hurt. I know I was. Didn’t she want a boy like me?

  Dr Wang had misunderstood her question. ‘It’s the girl who has died, yes, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sarah, a cry of pure pain.

  ‘Darling,’ I said. ‘Sorry, sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay … But I did want a daughter.’

  Yet neither of us could stay sad for long. We were expecting a baby, and that was a miracle, and nothing was going to spoil it for us.

  ‘Robin,’ said Sarah. ‘Like Robin Hood.’

  ‘I prefer Joe, or Sam,’ I said. ‘Less … androgynous. A real boy’s name.’

  We imagined him, against all reason, brown and bonny and merry as Moses, singing in his basket under clear blue sky. We ignored it when a thick package arrived from Dr Zeuss’s Fertility Clinic pointing out, ‘as a routine precaution’, some of the postnatal complications that had been found to occur ‘slightly more frequently’ with techfix conceptions. There were pages of detail, most of it hairraising.

  ‘This is obscene,’ said Sarah, furious. ‘That horrid old death’shead wants to frighten us. If there were all these problems, why didn’t he mention them when he was monitoring us every day?’

  ‘Because it could have frightened us off?’ I guessed. ‘Before we had given him all our money? No, it’s okay, I’m not serious. It’s probably some legal wrinkle. In case you sue. But you’re fit as a fiddle.’

  The two of us knew better than the doctors. We heard the loud rhythm of hope in our hearts, the rhythm we heard when she took my hand and held it patiently over her belly till I felt the child kicking, quick and strong.

  In her last months there was such tenderness between us. I watched her moving, heavy, slow, her words dreamy and disconnected, drunk with the hormones protecting our baby, and I waited on her hand and foot, not allowing her to carry so much as a coffee cup, rubbing her back, massaging her feet, fanning her with a peacockfeather fan as she lay there at midnight sleepless and sweating, getting up in the early hours to bring her iced drinks, and again in the morning to bring her breakfast.

  (Did you forget that, later, Sarah? I rose to the occasion then, at least. And I never lost my temper, did I?)

  ‘Luke,’ she said one morning. ‘I like that name. You wanted something short. It’s – I don’t know. The name of a good person, somehow. I’d like our child to be a good person.’

  ‘Save the world,’ I mused, half-asleep.

  ‘Might not need saving, if it cools down. I think about coolness with such longing. I think about evenings on Coll, you know. Walking barefoot on the cool white sands. We kids used to run into the sea. It was so cold we couldn’t stop screaming …’ She was talking in her new, softer voice.

  ‘I do like Luke … cool … lukewarm … I’d love to go to Coll with you.’

  ‘I wish I could walk around naked all day. It’s inhuman, putting clothes on this great sweaty bump.’

  Once I sponged her all over with water from the fridge, gently, firmly, telling her I loved her, reminding her that very soon there would be three of us for ever and ever.

  She went into labour two weeks prematurely as the early mor
ning breeze breathed in through the window. We lay there, electric with excitement and hope, watching the sky begin to whiten, kidding each other, laughing and panicking, timing the contractions as we had been told. Her bag was packed. We drove in at sunrise, swooping like a copter between the tall towers that fringed the flyover like great black trees. The windows were jewels, red as blood. I felt sleepless, drunk, a demented god watching the creation of the world. I had brought a bag of luxuries, champagne, music, teabags, massage oil, baby clothes …

  Around eleven am things began to go wrong. The baby’s heartbeat was not strong. The doctors needed consent to act ‘if it becomes important to remove the baby’. Which meant a caesarean. I refused. We’d agreed to have the baby naturally.

  An hour later, I gave my consent. Sarah was in trouble, pale and sweating. Green fluid sputtered from her womb. More doctors began to appear from nowhere. Sarah was taken away from me to a room with an enormous amount of equipment, blinking screens, pulsing xylon. I followed. No one noticed me. She slipped away beneath the anaesthetic, and suddenly things were going very fast, I was pushed to one side by a team of athletes working semi wordlessly to keep her alive, trying to pull something long and dark from inside her …

  I stared at her face, which was tiny and lost, the mouth and chin I knew so well, the high forehead with its sheen of sweat, a lock of damp hair escaping the cap, her eyelids lifting and falling again over eyes that had no consciousness.

  ‘It’s your son,’ someone said, and placed in my arms for one brief second a slithery thing that was instantly removed again, swabbed, wrapped, rushed away.

  So Luke was born, and we hardly saw him for seven or eight weeks while the doctors worked on him. Instead of the three of us being together, Sarah and I were miles apart, for they kept her in for a blood transfusion. Then an infection that could have been fatal struck at her lowered immune system.

  She kept on begging me to take her home. I dared not do it, but she never stopped begging, and perhaps she was right, perhaps she would have got better, and once again I should have trusted her instincts, but my own instincts were dulled with fear. I think she never quite forgave me.

  ‘I’m not a doctor,’ I entreated her.

  ‘I hate hospitals. I hate doctors.’

  ‘You’re not well.’

  ‘No, I’ve got an infection, which came from this stinking hospital.’

  ‘But Luke’s poorly. He needs more surgery. Nothing major, but they say his intestine –’

  ‘Yes, but my child should be with me, not shut away in some sterile tent – I think my body would make him better.’

  ‘It’s common with techfix conceptions … so they keep saying. Sarah, darling, perhaps we should have expected this.’

  ‘But we didn’t, did we? What fools we’ve been. Why did I trust you? You promised – you promised –’ And she started to weep, she lay there for days, helplessly weeping when Luke wasn’t with her, which was most of the time, blaming, blaming, a Sarah I had never seen. Her friend Sylvie was a regular visitor, holding her hand and avoiding my eyes.

  I did do my best to protect my wife, as I watched her disappear into a druginduced haze. ‘She hates drugs,’ I told her consultants. ‘She doesn’t believe in them. And why does she need them? She’s sad the baby is ill, that’s all.’

  ‘Mr Trelawney –’

  ‘That’s not my name –’

  ‘Mr Um, your um partner is suicidal. We have no choice. We have to treat her.’

  ‘Sarah has never been suicidal.’

  ‘We found her on the window ledge the other day. She was crying, and the window was open –’

  ‘She likes fresh air –’

  ‘She was on the fourth floor. And leaning right out. That’s why we moved her downstairs, Mr Um. She denied it, and asked us not to tell you, but I think we must. There’s a child to consider … Should he survive.’

  That brought me up short. ‘Of course he’ll survive.’

  But the doctor bowed, his face inscrutable, and walked away. So nothing now could be predicted.

  It was in those weeks when I couldn’t read the papers that more news about the ice began to break. I learned about it later when I went back to work, a very different man from the proud expectant father who had surfed the net while the world was sleeping.

  Now people were starting to ask new questions. I suppose climatologists had always known that the temperate climate of recent history was only part of a short ‘interglacial’ between much longer glacial phases, but climatologists weren’t listened to much, except when hacks harassed them for shortterm predictions. On average, I discovered, there were ten to twelvethousandyear warmings between ice ages of a hundredthousand years. And way back at the end of the twentieth-century, the scientist James Lovelock had famously said, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, that ‘if it weren’t for the activities of man, the earth would be entering a new ice age.’ But Lovelock was known to be an eccentric, and no one had taken him literally. We were too busy worrying about rising sea levels and the spread of deserts in Africa. Now we began to see the larger picture. Not that anyone was thinking of a new ice age – we just saw the logic in the earth cooling down. As Lovelock had also said, the earth’s warm phases, which seemed so agreeable and natural to humans, were more like the planet having a fever.

  ‘It’s good news, darling. Don’t you see? After all our fears about the future, the climate may go back to what it was in the last century … Our son’ (but was he really our son, this long thin creature with tubes in his arms?) ‘won’t have to live in a desert.’

  But she stared at me as if I weren’t there, and her wide blue eyes began to water again. ‘Why are you telling me all this shit? I don’t bloody care. I don’t want this baby. Maybe it’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true, Saul, I don’t want him –’ And she looked at me, begging me to understand, but I was shocked and became selfrighteous, though I’d secretly felt the same way myself.

  ‘You have to want him. He’s our son,’ I barked. I was brutal with her because I felt guilty.

  ‘I wanted a daughter. My beautiful daughter.’ She lay and wept, and I wanted to hit her. She was the mother. It wasn’t fair.

  ‘Don’t cry. Get a grip on yourself. You’re a mother.’

  I didn’t see this was the turning point. I thought it was something temporary. Sarah would have to love me again once she and Luke came home together.

  They did come home, but things didn’t get better.

  She was too weak at first to look after the house. Luke seemed to suck up all her energy. I would come home from work and find her exhausted, with milk and avocado all over her blouse, and the floor, and the table, and the chair. Our flat had never looked like this. I got the cleaner to come more often. I did my best, but Sarah glowered at me. She lay with the infant clamped to her chest and watched old films with her friend Sylvie who always seemed to be by her bedside. If I spoke, they stared at me resentfully. ‘You never listen,’ was Sarah’s refrain, but they only spoke to me to give me instructions, to tell me to heat bottles or bring a fresh nappy. And I worked all day. It wasn’t easy.

  In any case, it was Sylvie she talked to. ‘I know,’ I would hear her cooing, ‘I know.’ Her son sometimes came along on sufferance, and sat picking Sarah’s flowers to pieces. They didn’t leave when I came home. I found myself unable to be pleasant to them. Sylvie had a patch of eczema by a stud in her ear, which was some kind of stupid lesbian symbol. If she’d been a man, I would have been jealous …

  Then Sarah did find a man who listened. He was one of the doctors who treated her depression. Most of them disappointed her. His consulting rooms were only two blocks away from Melville Road. She went three times a week, and came back pinkcheeked and invigorated. I was happy to stay at home with Luke, glad that something was doing her good …

  (I still don’t know what she wanted from me. I only know that I didn’t give it. It seems to me that men couldn’t get it right – we we
re either too brutish or too wimpy for them. But we were ourselves, we were men, for godsake. What did they think they could turn us into?)

  I was slow to resume our sex life after Luke was born. I wanted to be sensitive. I spit with derision to think of it now, but I didn’t want to hurt her where she had been hurt. If you love a woman you don’t want to hurt her.

  And then you want to smash her, rape her, kill her.

  Another man’s hands on her milky breasts. His filthy hands on her tender belly, still soft and stretched from bearing our child … Did she laugh with him? Did she come with him? That helpless little crescendo of whimpers –

  She told me, one day when Luke was nearly a year old, that she had decided to take a lover, ‘since you no longer want to sleep with me’.

  If Luke hadn’t been there, lying sleepless on the sofa, I think I might have killed her, for I still adored her.

  ‘You’ve slept with someone. You lying bitch …’

  I wanted sex at once, there and then, I wanted to drive that bastard away. I had a right, I was her child’s father …

  But she wouldn’t. ‘I don’t belong to you. I’m not your wife. I don’t have to. As a matter of fact, I think we’d get on better if one of us moved out. I’ll keep Luke, of course.’

  She would steal my child! No, I’d kill them both, her and her lying, cheating lover … but instead I picked up a little chair, a pretty thing of painted wood, blue and gold, some nursery rubbish, and smashed it hard against the wall. I remember hearing her scream insanely. I suppose I may have been holding a chairleg above my head, but seeing her terror I dropped my arm. I felt suddenly tired.