The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  But then it seemed she didn’t hate me. Her nails were digging into my back, hurting me but pulling me closer, she was pushing her head up under my chin, butting at me, nuzzling me, clawing the muscles of my arms yet pressing herself fiercely against me. I was confused, then less confused, for this was the thing I had dreamed of happening, happening now, in the cold, in the moonlight. But I smelled myself, ‘I’m dirty,’ I choked, ‘Briony, let me go and wash,’ then, gabbling, for she was younger than me, I wasn’t a bad man, nor irresponsible, ‘I am okay, I haven’t had sex for over two years, and I take my hiv boosters regularly,’ but she was pummelling my chest, pulling my shirt off, plucking at my trousers, oh, oh please, easing down my pants, and my penis rose like a seal into her hand, quite separate from me, happy, hungry, my penis was in Briony’s hand, and she ringed it, rubbed it, silent, greedy, and then she led me through to the salon where the moonlight poured through the open shutters and perched herself on the edge of the table, that massive, funereal French table, and without some wretched calculation about ovulation to kill all pleasure, opened her legs, and pulled me inside her, silently, hungrily, I was inside her, without a condom, gloriously naked, the first woman other than Sarah in fifteen thirsty years of marriage, and it was so warm, so wet, so tight – I came with a little cry like a baby after thirty seconds at the most, and then it was ‘Sorry, Briony, sorry. Thank you, Briony. That was so …’ I felt shattered, and tender, and slightly ashamed, and also fucking wonderful. Fucking wonderful. My blood zinging.

  Then she tugged down my hairy head, I always liked women to touch my head, to stroke my hair, to knead my scalp, as Sarah did, years ago, when she loved me – and Briony nudged my face to her lips, the hot small knot of her clitoris, salty, slippery with my sperm, and I worked with my tongue until she came, in a long diminuendo of dove-calls, her hips twitching helplessly against the hard table.

  And then she cried, but with release from tension, and I groped my way through and found her a blanket and wrapped her in it, and told her again how sorry I was if I’d frightened her that evening. She said nothing (I’ve learned that slowly – it’s never enough just to say you’re sorry), and both of us wished we could drink a cup of coffee without having to gather wood for a fire … So many things we once took for granted.

  Bless you, Briony. Forever bless you, though I’m sure you acted half out of fear, to placate the brute, to tame the monster. It was something – natural, instinctual. We were all going back into the dark again. The return of the secret life of the caveman.

  And yet she slept in her separate room, and next morning, which was sunny, she had gone back to being normal, friendly, asexual, although I gave her longing looks that I hoped my sulky son wouldn’t notice.

  I thought he was sulking. In fact he was sad. Because Luke was quiet and wouldn’t look me in the eyes, I thought he was still angry about my fit of temper. But it was his voice he was thinking about … It’s never about you, with teenagers.

  I had woken full of energy, and gone to find fuel. I managed to buy proper French bread from an old man in the village three kilometres away. He was a handsome, vigorous old chap with a huge drooping growth on one of his eyelids, the kind of thing we were getting used to now doctors were just for the megarich. According to him, only the young had left the village. ‘The grandparents stayed. We love our village. Life goes on as normal here. Except it’s … quieter. And colder.’ I bought pastries, too, for an inflated price, but they were light as an eggshell, and fluffed with fresh cream, and I wanted Luke and Briony to like me. He told me where to go to buy fuel. It wasn’t so easy to find in the north, where the unseasonal cold had spoiled the cannabis harvest, but the family to whom he directed me were growing in bulk, hydroponically. I asked them for three or four cans of methanol, then found to my embarrassment I’d left most of my money in the jacket I had taken off the previous night. They looked at me with the blank fear and hatred they must have got used to feeling for cheats. I was weak, for some reason, I didn’t argue, perhaps because the old man had been charming, perhaps because Briony and I had made love, I just paid for the topup of my tank and left, instead of shooting them and keeping the fuel.

  When I got back, I found Briony was up, and washing a duvet she’d found in a cupboard. ‘We don’t want to drag that thing along,’ I told her, but ‘It’s natural goosedown, worth a fortune, and light as a feather,’ she told me, happily, bundling it out into the drying wind. ‘Might be useful in the Pyrenees. In any case, it’s too good to leave behind –’ She’d turned back into a chaste, respectable housewife, but I watched her hips as she disappeared.

  I burned the broken table to make a fire and boiled some water for coffee and to cook the duck eggs we’d plundered yesterday. We had a tasty breakfast, with that and the baguettes, though in a perfect world there would have been French butter, unsalted, creamy, delectable –

  But no, the old world had not been perfect. We were finding new skills, new strengths, new closeness.

  ‘I ought to record myself,’ Luke suddenly said, as he sat eating his choux at the end of breakfast, while Briony was stretching more damp washing on some overgrown rose bushes in the sun. His voice sounded perfectly normal again, that high clear treble I had always been used to – I’d halfexpected that last night’s row might have cracked it forever, with the strain. But it had to signal the beginning of something. ‘Mum’s got all the recordings, hasn’t she?’

  ‘Well – I’ve got two. Years out of date.’

  ‘I’ve got to get to some recording equipment. I don’t mind my voice going, but it’s sort of weird … Juno made me feel as if I were my voice.’

  ‘Juno was a psychopath,’ I said. ‘I don’t see how we get to recording equipment. I suppose there are still places in the big cities …’

  ‘We have got recording equipment,’ said Briony, pausing like a dancer, both hands uplifted, speaking above the snap of the sheet in the wind. ‘Of course we have. We’ve got Dora, haven’t we?’

  ‘I’m not giving Dora my voice,’ Luke mumbled. And yet, they’d been getting on better of late. Luke had been less standoffish and suspicious, more interested to find out what she could do, and Dora had stopped automatically malfunctioning whenever she recognised his voice.

  He thought about it, and then he said, ‘Is the RV good quality?’

  ‘Perfect,’ I said. ‘With this model, and everything later … It was a bit dodgy with the early Doves.’

  ‘Great,’ he said, and swallowing his bun, he ran inside to try it out.

  Perhaps that was the point, when Luke started singing. Distant stars must have paused and listened. Sometimes, mygod – my God exists. As blessing, not as half a curse.

  Sometimes I think of the earth from the air – how the blues and browns the first astronauts saw have slowly gone under the spreading silver, reflecting the sunlight back out into space, now an icebright ball with a bluebrown girdle, a narrowing band of grass and trees, a shrinking stretch of unfrozen water …

  Is it that God grew tired of us? Perhaps he wanted his world again, shining, perfect, unpolluted. If humans survive, we’ll be as grass, quiet and slow like moss or grass, lowgrowing things, less arrogant. Flesh is grass, now so many have died. Already our numbers have crashed by threequarters, and that’s a conservative estimate, since no species likes to believe it’s dying …

  The ice comes on, a shining wall, carrying all our follies away, untrodden light, unbroken sky.

  Sometimes it’s there I see God’s face. Blank, encompassing, infinitely bright.

  If there’s a God, he was happy with us that morning in Anjou when Luke started singing. The wind had dropped to an eerie stillness, as if the elements understood, and the clear cold April sunlight sparkled, and the only sound was a little stream, perhaps four hundred metres away, and Luke’s glorious voice, yearning, soaring, flying upwards and gliding down like something too quicksilver to be human, the spirit of air, the spirit of water, for some of his singing was
shot through with pain, some of it our pain, I’m afraid, and also his own, for what he had lost, and what he was now about to lose – and perhaps for what he had never had, a quietly loving mother and father.

  That morning we were blessed, those of us who heard him, singing all his favourites, Schumann and Gershwin, a Debussy setting of a medieval song that made me think of Sarah – Dieu, qu’il la fait bon regarder, la gracieuse bonne et belle! … Qui se pourroit d’elle lasser? Toujours sa beauté renouvelle – I never did tire of looking at her, for me her beauty was always new. And then ‘Trois Oiseaux du Paradis’ –

  Luke sang in the sunlight, he sang next to Dora but he sang outwards, to the spring morning, he sang a radiant, sorrowful paean of praise to the godgiven talent that would soon leave him. Briony and I were anxious at first, lest what happened the day before should happen again, but sound poured from his throat in a silver ribbon and soon we relaxed and forgot and listened and time didn’t matter, or work, or worry, for his gift was entire, threedimensional, and it drew us in, we melted, yielded, and even the cats and the birds were silent, and the trees were still for Orpheus. Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis, Ont passé par ici, Le premier était plus bleu que ciel … Le second était couleur de neige, Le troisième rouge vermeil … What was the gift the red bird brought? Un joli coeur tout cramoisi … It brought a beautiful crimson heart, but death, in this garden, was far away.

  Until something on the grass flicked, moved, and a grey fluffy cat that was asleep on the bank sat up, acutely interested, and I heard a strange little mournful croak, Ah, je sens mon coeur qui froidit, and a frog went leaping across the lawn and the cat shot after it, pounced, missed, and the frog zigzagged away on elastic. Of course, it was spring; frogs’ mating time.

  ‘That was wonderful, Luke,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’ When Briony passed close by me with the washing, dry and clean and serenely folded, I saw she was crying, but she didn’t look unhappy.

  Within halfanhour, we were back on the road, and from that day onwards Luke and Dora were friends.

  15

  Sometimes my wild boys remind me of Luke, Luke as he looked many years ago. Mostly it’s an angle of their body. When the fire’s blazed up and they’re stuffed with flesh and they suddenly get a meat sweat on them and strip off their layers and stand there naked, crowing and whooping, in the red of the fire. Their narrow bodies look curiously innocent, even when they’ve got their cocks in their hands …

  The escape of the children, all over the world, was the strangest thing about the coming of the ice.

  It began in England before we left, though none of us saw what was going on. We’d seen a few pictures of them on the screen, taken from a distance, for they fled the cameras. We thought it was nothing, a fiveminute wonder, we hoped they were Wanderers who happened to be young … The escaping Doves took up all our attention. And yet there were probably ten times as many children. We were too afraid to take it in.

  The wild boys and girls. The breakaways. Some of them the children of Outsiders and Wanderers who didn’t know who their parents were, but many more of them Insider children whose parents couldn’t admit they were gone.

  These children didn’t want to live in houses, or ‘nests’ or ‘communes’ or ‘cocoons’. They didn’t want Role Support or Wicca Wisdom or any of the crutches we deemed essential. They didn’t want to be smothered by their mothers. They didn’t want to be kept Inside. They were working life out for themselves again, running wild; living wild … Sometimes they adopted a stray oldtimer to help them do things they couldn’t do.

  That was how Chef and I were adopted by Kit and Fink and Porker and Jojo, and the hundred or so kids who run with us. (Chef hasn’t cooked for the last two days. Kit says he’s sick. Fink says he’s ‘skivey’, their word for slacking, a dangerous word. I should go to see him, but I’m too busy.)

  There was an unauthorised fire on the western side of the airport this afternoon, and although the Chiefboys tried to put it out they got bored around suppertime and left it to burn. So I’m making use of it, writing by the embers. Most of the others are creatures of habit; they’ve gone to sleep in the usual heap by the fire we always light for supper, nearly a mile away in front of Departures. A few of them run past, and peer over my shoulder …

  I tell them to wait. They will get it all. When I’m finished, I’ll tell them the whole damn story, though what they hear won’t be like this, the truths of my heart, the truths of my life, my long strange life in the twentyfirstcentury.

  They’d find it – stupid. Incomprehensible. Pointless quarrels, unnecessary problems. Simple is best, for the wild boys. Death excites them, and love and adventure. Love they can understand again, in their savage way, their animal fashion, love between male and female, that is, for they’re mating again, the wild boys. When they find the girls, they know what to do … They don’t seem to be breeding, though, in the city.

  The old man in the village who’d sold me the pastries asked me if we had wild children in England, and I denied it, instantly. He warned me against a marauding band of boys who ranged around their village. ‘And the others, of course. Watch out for them.’ He nudged me, black eyes meaningful, and I wondered who ‘the others’ were.

  We were twelve hours’ journey from the Pyrenees, which meant we would sleep one more night in France and try to cross the mountains by daylight, when any snowfalls would be less dangerous.

  We drove till nine, then at sunset turned off towards a little colony of low white villas. There were the normal security gates, wide open, and the windows of the gatehouse were smashed. We drove through cautiously, and saw a light, too bright to be candles, in the window of a villa. ‘Maybe they’ve still got power,’ said Briony, excited at the thought of light and heat.

  ‘If so, they might have inhabitants,’ I said grimly. ‘And they won’t be pleased to see us, will they?’

  We drove on up the little road between the cedars. Only that first house had a light showing, and perhaps that had been a security device. I desperately wanted a bed for the night, somewhere to recoup our strength for tomorrow, so we drove right down to the far end and wormed our way into a large stucco house which already had one shutter hanging off it, and underneath, a broken pane. It was a princely house, perhaps six or seven bedrooms, with an elegant drive and a waterless fountain. I was tired; I ripped my trousers climbing in, and I couldn’t help wishing that the lights would come on, and the heating, and the oven …

  And then, as I flicked the switch in frustration, the light flooded out; the wonderful light. ‘We’ve got light!’ I yelled, forgetting caution. ‘Maybe there’ll be heat as well.’

  It was like a firstclass hotel, to us, a place with light, water, a stove. This house had not been abandoned long; there was a bottle of whisky halfempty in the kitchen, and it still had most of its furniture, which made a nice change, something comfortable to sleep on. Rich people must have lived here once. There was a Bechstein grand piano next door, abandoned in a sea of white, and they’d left some of their pictures, oddly.

  ‘Why don’t you play something?’ I said to Luke.

  ‘I’m tired,’ he said, ‘and it won’t be in tune. Maybe I’ll try it out in the morning.’

  He didn’t want to eat; he wanted to sleep. Sometimes he still looked very frail. I fetched him the duvet that Briony had washed – dry, it was light as thistledown – and lulled by the luxury of heating and the duvet waiting like a cloud on the sofa, Luke stripped off everything and dived into bed. Adolescent boys never did like washing.

  Briony found that the cooker worked. And there were some dry stores, rice, a few herbs. ‘But have we got anything to cook? Oh Saul, did you chuck that chicken away –’ For we had been carrying a plucked chicken for nearly three days in the back of the car. Sometimes the chill was very useful; food was scarce, but it lasted longer.

  We ate like kings on real roast chicken with rice and herbs and a generous whisky. It was a large chicken. I took some to Luke, but
he was sleeping a dead, drugged sleep. We gorged ourselves, and left nothing behind but a little grey cat’scradle of bones.

  Briony and I talked deep into the night, trying to plan the next stage of our journey. I didn’t really want to drive over the mountains. There had been too many stories about travellers being ambushed in the high passes, and reports of wolves in increasing numbers, after some bloodied bodies were discovered. I began to veer towards the train.

  There were still trains running through the tunnels, but according to the screens they were often held up by desperate gangs who blocked the tracks. There were no more timetables, trains weren’t maintained, they ran through the tunnels without any lights … It was when I mentioned the absence of lights that I saw Briony shake her head.

  ‘How long shall we be in the tunnel?’ she asked.

  ‘If nothing goes wrong, just under an hour. The rolling stock is in a terrible state, the speed is nothing like it was.’

  ‘And there aren’t any lights?’ Her nostrils were dilated.

  ‘Well, no … but every so often there are arches cut through the rock to the outside, I think. Or was that the Simplon? I’m not sure.’

  She didn’t say a word. She sat there, hunched. ‘I’ll have to do it, won’t I,’ she said, a statement, not a question, a kind of giving up, a dreadful acceptance of suffering that perhaps explained her attachment to Wicca. Her father drank and her mother hit her: she’d told me that much, though she wouldn’t expand, and I wanted to hit her, too, at that moment, but only because I didn’t want her to suffer.

  ‘Briony,’ I said, ‘you’re claustrophobic. I know you are. Luke told me. Forget about the train. We’ll do it by car. It’ll be fine … it’ll be an adventure.’

  She looked up, her blue eyes puzzled, short-sighted, as if she must continue to be tormented. Then she smiled, and her eyes focused. ‘Thank you, Saul,’ she said. ‘You’re kind.’