The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  (Things had changed a lot since we sailed the boat. We knew each other better, but the strains were greater. He resisted me; rejected me. If I talked about Africa, he always fell silent, and then I was afraid it was just a delusion, my reborn pride, my belief in the future. Sometimes he reminded me of Sarah, who always made me feel like a hopeless dreamer. But I persevered. In the end, he would see it, he had to see it, as Briony did. I only wanted the best for him. All that I did, I did for him.)

  Every five minutes we had to rest. Luke talked to Briony, not me. Once or twice I felt almost jealous. He always seemed to be sitting between us. I realised yet again how close they were, how they teased each other, how he cared for her, perhaps in a way he couldn’t care for his mother, for Briony was so much gentler.

  ‘Briony,’ I said, as Luke took a piss and she smoked one of her rare cigarettes, ‘how did you ever get involved with Wicca? I mean – you’re not remotely like them.’ I know I had asked her that question before, but today for some reason she wanted to talk, or else I happen to remember her answer.

  ‘You don’t really know what they were like,’ she reminded me, with a wry smile. ‘They weren’t all like Sarah … duller, most of them.’

  ‘Sarah wasn’t dull.’

  ‘No … she isn’t an easy person, though.’ The tense she used gave me a faint shock, reminding me Sarah was still alive. ‘I admired her enormously, you know,’ she continued. ‘She was very strong. Very forceful. I think I wanted to be like her. She was like my mother, but much – nicer. At first, you know, she didn’t really hate men.’ She blushed. ‘I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but by the end they really did hate men, her and Juno particularly … Later we argued. And they didn’t trust me. I lost my job. And I couldn’t escape. If I’d tried to leave they might have killed me. And besides, there was Luke. He was … like my son … I would do anything for him. Now he’s growing up so fast he scares me.’

  I chuckled. ‘Take a glance over your shoulder.’

  She did, and her eyes were suddenly bright, with the queer quick emotions I liked in her. ‘They never got enough chance to play. Life in the Cocoon was so serious.’

  For Luke was bent double, scraping up the snow, making what could only be a snowman. It was crazy, but we all joined in. Our hands ached with cold, we slithered and slipped, but we laughed like drunks; we were a family.

  ‘You’d be a great mother,’ I whispered to Briony, when Luke skidded off to find stones for the eyes. He came back too quickly, so I’m not sure she heard me. But she would have been, could have been –

  ‘Let’s get back on the road. Night comes down so fast,’ said Briony, and looked at me blankly, as if she were suddenly unutterably tired, as if the cold had pierced her body.

  It was noon, in fact, and the sun was almost hot, but the strange small clouds were boiling away.

  We got puffed very quickly in the thin air. By two we only seemed to have moved a few hundred metres from the place where the snowman sat, looking faintly mocking as he receded, too slowly, wrapped in Luke’s red scarf. I decided we needed encouragement. Somebody – me – should do a reconnoitre to find out how far we still had to go. I left the others resting together, and set off walking as fast as I could.

  The road rose steadily to the horizon, but I couldn’t see if another slope lay behind it. Then the road changed course very slightly, just enough, with the steepness of the banks, to put me all at once in shadow. And then I was aware of the depth of the cold, the physical, cutting power it had, the way it gripped and squeezed your flesh, trapping the blood in your swollen fingers, driving the blood from your frozen toes. And in that shadow I was afraid, for I knew the cold would kill us, if we couldn’t make it. If we didn’t manage to get to the top before dark came we were as good as dead. And the road was getting steeper. Sharply steeper.

  If we all died here, would Sarah ever know?

  I told myself not to think of that, crunching on upwards, eyes on the ground, making myself take it one step at a time, don’t look at the slope, don’t look at the skyline …

  I had a sudden sense that something had changed. I looked up, and the ground had dropped away before me. A high bleak basin, flat, bare, surrounded me, but then the road dipped down. This little patch of land must be protected from the wind, because a few straggling fir trees survived, and away behind them stood a tall building, fifty metres from the road. It was gaunt, dark, without any sign of life, but there was glass in the windows, and yes, that was surely smoke from the chimney, hard to see against the boil of clouds … thankgod, it must be the monastery. This must be the pass of Roncesvalles, where Charlemagne fought, where Roland died, and I turned and ran down the mountain to find them, slipping and sliding, dizzy with joy, and to my surprise they were only two hundred metres away, though to me on the way up it felt like a thousand, and behind them I could clearly see the little snowman with its flapping, snakelike scarlet tongue, and I realised that our epic effort had only pushed the car eight hundred metres.

  But I shouldn’t have said so to Briony, who didn’t seem to hear that we were very near the summit.

  ‘ We’ve been pushing this bloody thing since eleven. Four hours, and we’ve only gone eight hundred metres, according to you. I don’t believe it.’ Redcheeked and furious with effort, Briony smacked her hand on the bonnet.

  ‘Her fingers are bleeding,’ Luke said, worried, though when I looked, his were bleeding too.

  ‘I reckon we’re about a halfanhour from the top. Like you said, the monks will give us food and fuel.’ I wanted her to share my optimism, but she was too exhausted to respond. I hugged her, kissed her, she looked magnificent, sturdy, glowing, orgasmically flushed – I saw Luke blush and look away. ‘I’m proud of you, Briony,’ I said.

  But she shook me off, angry, or just tired. ‘We’re not there yet. And you sound like my father. You don’t own me, you know.’

  This was it, with women. You couldn’t get it right. Say something nice to them, and they bit you. ‘Okay,’ I said, patiently. ‘I’m proud of Luke. And I admire you. Is that better?

  She nodded; I hope she was ashamed of herself.

  I noticed Luke was sitting on the bonnet, and I yelled at him at the top of my voice, ‘Get off that fucking car, for godsake!’ I was in pain, and cross with them both. I imagined the car sinking into the snow, but of course it stood on solid ground. Luke jutted his jaw, and got down, slowly, but he said these words, he spat them out – ‘My mum said you had a horrible temper. My mum was right.’

  My mum, my mum … He was still a child.

  Briony went and put her arm around him. She didn’t have to disapprove so clearly. I left them to get on with it. I thought, we’ll have to lighten our load. I got into the car and looked around.

  Dora sat there, looking blank and despairing. I switched her on, to feel her warmth, to hear her voice, since I felt friendless. I stroked her strokeyfeely panel. ‘That feels nice,’ she said, sweetly. Then ‘I feel hungry. It’s cold, isn’t it?’

  I agreed with her. ‘Sorry, no spare food. We’ll try and give you some food in Spain.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘give me some food.’ Of course she didn’t understand the future, and just sat there staring blindly at me, her baby beak curved in a foolish smile. I turned away and snatched up some things, books, a spare radio, tins, bottles, anything I could see that was heavy, filled two rubbish bags and hauled them out – wanted to chuck Dora in as well, to protect myself from her trusting face.

  Then I had a thought. It was a straight road. She had a ‘nonslip foot’ option. We were going so slowly she could certainly keep up, so I told her ‘Walkies time!’ and got her out.

  I went and patted my son on the shoulder. He said, ‘It’s okay,’ but wouldn’t look at me. We covered the first half of the remaining road in relative silence, concentrated, grim. Now all three of us were in the icy shadow that began when the road turned the corner, and besides, the cloud had swollen, suddenly, after its long
horizontal simmer, boiling towards us, dark, livid. Our goal was coming nearer but each step was an effort, the quiet only broken by our gasps and curses and the sound of our feet, scuffing, skidding, and the car lurching onwards, slowly, slowly.

  And then there were only fifty metres left before the road met the angry sky, and it was threethirty by my watch, and I caught a look of appalled exhaustion on Luke’s face, and his white mouth. And so we went on to the final haul. We took no breaks; now the car was moving we maintained a desperate, precarious momentum, so if one of us slipped, the others pushed on, we had become subhuman, the sum of our forces, we didn’t have to think, we mustn’t feel pain, the three of us were all part of the machine. We were the machine. We climbed the mountain.

  We must have looked extraordinary, with Dora rocking along behind us, three humans bent like chimpanzees, pushing their burden through the wastes of snow, followed by a blue stumpy bigheaded bird, talking to herself, inanely cheerful. No one had breath to answer her. I wished I had switched her Voice option off, but it wittered on. At least she was happy …

  ‘Ten more metres,’ I hissed to Briony, ‘just ten more bloody metres, woman!’

  ‘Don’t talk,’ she ordered through gritted teeth, and we staggered, stumbled, willed ourselves on. Then suddenly Luke was whooping, hooting, he had stopped pushing, he was wild with joy, dancing and jumping as he yelled, ‘We’ve made it! Done it, done it, whoowhoowhoo …’

  Remember, he was only fourteen, and I let go of the car, and grabbed him, hugged him, trying at the same time to shut him up, ‘Shhh, shhh, everyone will hear us. We don’t know who’s up here yet, do we.

  Which meant that only Briony was pushing the car, and she stopped, for a second, to take in the view, not realising the road wasn’t flat, and the car had started to run away before she suddenly shrieked, and ran like a sprinter, dived through the door and hauled on the handbrake.

  I ran after her. We hugged each other. We stood in the Pass of Roncesvalles and hugged each other, sweating, freezing, as the icy wind cut across our wet skin. We had made it up to the roof of the world. Despite all the pain, despite the brown clouds building sourly above us, I felt alive. And proud, as well. Of all of us. I had never been so sure I loved her.

  17

  We stood, all three of us, and looked at the big building with its strange narrow windows and smoking chimneys. It was too early for it to be getting dark, but the storm clouds were eating up the daylight. The smoke from the chimneys was black on the sky. I felt eager to go in; didn’t monks brew beer?

  But Briony seemed suddenly stunned with tiredness. She insisted she needed things from the car, perhaps female mysteries, tampons, unguents. I humoured her; perhaps she wanted a bath. I was used to Sarah needing sackfuls of lotions. I waited. Women are sometimes very slow.

  We began to walk across the snow. ‘I was a teenager when I came here,’ said Briony.

  ‘I wish you were still my age,’ said Luke, then as she looked at him he blushed bright red, and I realised he had a crush on her, and felt stricken, because he must feel so jealous of his father, but part of me was glad that I had what he wanted.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to be fourteen again,’ she said lightly, kindly; I’m sure she understood. Then she turned and said to me, as well, ‘You know, I’ve been very happy with you two. It’s been horrible, and well, wonderful. Some of the best weeks of my life.’

  And why, when I should have felt such pleasure (because I really like to make people happy; that was why life with Sarah was all wrong) – why did I feel suddenly empty, and sad? The sunlight on the storm clouds was dramatic, magnificent, we’d lived such amazing adventures together, and there were so many things I wanted to ask her.

  ‘But you will come with us to Africa?’ I said. ‘We can pretend that you’re Luke’s mother.’ But she only smiled and turned away, and her blonde hair blew across her face.

  Just before we reached the building the door opened, and to our relief two monks came out, wearing the traditional brown hooded vestments. They had been reintroduced at the beginning of the century with the great revival of the monasteries, when so many infertile young men found a vocation, and so many childless women married God.

  It was almost impossible to see their faces, shaded by their deep hoods, eyes cast down, even when they greeted us, sombrely. They spoke a queer accented French, although Luke spoke to them in Spanish. I had to hand it to Wicca for their language teaching. And their music teaching. And he knew a lot of history, so perhaps they did teach him a few things, after all. Perhaps I wasn’t entirely fair.

  I couldn’t help wishing I could see the monks better, since they didn’t shake hands or look us in the eye, even when, in a sudden overflow of good feeling, I put my arms around one of them, and said Dieu merci, nous sommes arrivés’ He stayed completely still until I let him go, and I seemed to hear him breathing heavily. Of course, one should never lay hands on a monk.

  I’d never been in a monastery before, and I’d imagined something a little more oldfashioned, romantic, twentiethcentury, I suppose. This was a bit like a giant factory, with plain xylon furniture, crude preformed stuff which looked like a job lot, greyishwhite like dirty snow, and nothing on the walls, no crucifixes, no tapestries. There were packingcases half unpacked in the corridors, and through a doorway I saw a ring of middleaged men in ordinary clothes, sitting smoking and peering at a screen and laughing. When they saw us in the corridor they pushed the door shut. The building seemed to be full of people disappearing silently as we passed by, probably because we had interrupted their devotions, or perhaps because we looked strange and frightening, me with my livid bruises and cuts, Briony so undeniably female. This, after all, was male territory …

  Though once I heard something like a female shriek, and a chuckle. I looked up, startled, and my companion quickly said something dismissive about the local domestiques. His voice was unusual, rough, impatient, I suppose that monks don’t make a habit of talking.

  He seemed kind enough, kinder than we might have expected. Did we want to sleep? Did we want to eat? Did we want to put our car in their garage? Bad storms were predicted, he told us, for that day but they had held off. They would come tonight. I said that that would probably explain the lack of travellers on the road, but the robed one said, ‘There are many roads. Not everybody crosses the mountains this way.’

  Briony didn’t seem to be trying. I began to feel slightly annoyed with her. (Perhaps I was doomed to feel annoyed with whatever woman was with me in public, for I certainly used to get mad with Sarah.) She’d been curt and distant with the monks from the start, refusing to put our car in their garage, and insisted on my borrowing a melder from them so we could patch the fuel tank straight away, though obviously we couldn’t leave till morning. I felt like nursing my injuries, but ‘I want us to do it now,’ she insisted. ‘We’ll pay them for some fuel. And fill the tank. Now, Saul, please. Luke can help.’ Sometimes you have to humour women. She looked tired, and strange, with hectic cheeks.

  I admit that the two of them did most of the work, but I got covered with methanol, mending the fuel tank. The monks seemed to have a lot of cars and tools. ‘We help many travellers,’ one old monk said, when I remarked on their wellstocked hangar. ‘Sainte Christophe is our saint, here.’ St Christopher, the saint of travellers. He grinned at me, showing a broken tooth. His eyes looked merry in the shade of his hood. ‘You will eat with us at sevenoclock.’

  I thought Briony might like to freshen up with me, but she refused. She preferred to stay with Luke, who was much livelier than either of us, asking questions of the monks, wanting to see everything. Briony was uncharacteristically short with him, snapping at him to stay with her, but it wasn’t surprising, we were all exhausted, and I was pretty peevish too, I wouldn’t have minded a bath with her … I left them sitting propped upright by Briony’s bag, on a dirty white sofa.

  I was shown upstairs to a small bleak room with a bath next door. They told me to c
ome down when I had finished. I took off my clothes with such relief, hauling them over my cuts and bruises, wonderful to be safe, and naked, though my teeth were chattering with tiredness. I ran a bath, which was scarcely warm, but as soon as I eased myself into it I fell into a stunned torpor. I woke up with a painful start to find a hooded man staring at me, just a metre away, under the bare bright bulb his scarred nose stood out pink and disfigured beneath his hood … I swore, and then apologised profusely. It must have been his room, and I said sorry again, but he stood there for a moment, then went out, silent.

  When I got down, it was tentoseven, and Briony and Luke had fallen asleep, they were both stretched out on the sofa, sleeping. It was such a strange feeling to find them together, a little upsetting, I don’t know why, his light curls touching her white cheek, their immobile bodies mirroring each other, they could have been lovers, or mother and son. Luke’s arm lay across her, as if to protect her. A little group of men were watching them, speaking in low voices in the shelter of their hoods. When they saw me the group dissolved. The monk who had come out to greet us in the first place – I recognised him by his rough voice – led us into the diningroom.

  ‘They call it the refectory,’ I told Luke, proud of this scrap of knowledge from somewhere. I turned to my companion for confirmation. ‘On dit le réfectoire, n’est-ce pas, Monsieur?’ but he looked at me blankly. Perhaps conversation was forbidden at meals, or else my French was not so good as I thought.

  The diningroom was more as I’d imagined it. There were candles on the long wooden tables. Someone outside kept revving an engine, and the wind had begun to rattle the windows, but we were all right, we were safe inside. They offered us bread and strong hard cheese and sausage riddled with disgusting white fat, but we were so hungry, it slipped down fine, and there was red wine. So it was wine that they made, I knew that monks were famous for something. I smiled at them as nicely as I could, since Briony still wasn’t making an effort. ‘I believe you monks are famous for your wine.’ This sally was successful; they laughed appreciatively, and passed it down the table, so everyone chuckled. I took my first sip with high hopes, but probably the cold had ruined the grape harvest, for it seemed much rougher than I would have expected. But it didn’t matter, they were very generous. Whenever I looked, my glass was full.