The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  I recognised her without difficulty because, from above, I saw her hair. It looked, from that distance, shockingly unchanged from the hair she had on the day we first met. It was long again, down past her shoulders, it was that chestnutred I’d loved, it was scattered with snow, with melting snow, and it made me stupid, it made me helpless, for I’d always loved her, always, always.

  Her face came into focus as she mounted the stairs. Her determined chin, her delicate nose, her cheeks, which were somehow both puffy and sunken, her mouth, which was twisted with tension and pain – and yet she was still a beautiful woman. Then I noticed her eyes. I saw she was blind. She was gazing ahead of her, seeing nothing. But then, Sarah had always been blind – she swept past me, imperious, or worried she was late, and she wasn’t blind, she just hadn’t seen me, and I spoke, I croaked, ‘It’s me, Sarah …’ And so I was humbled before we began, because I had grown too old to be noticed.

  She pulled off her gloves with an awkward little movement and put her hand, which was mysteriously old, as old as I was, into mine. She looked at me. ‘Saul,’ she said. Her voice was harsh, but it was full of sorrow, and I preferred sorrow to contempt, just then.

  We sat on one of the glazed leather seats that seemed to have stood in the gallery for centuries, a circular, segmented seat, and we were too shy to sit next to each other, so we left a segment free between us – not free entirely, because freighted with coats, gloves, scarves, all that icy moraine – and looked out at the world, away from each other.

  We asked the obligatory questions first. She was ‘very well’, but had bad arthritis, ‘probably the climate, I should move south.’ I suspected from a hint of tannin, a suspicion of fruit, upon her breath, that she drank; which would explain the puffiness. I too was ‘well’, but I really was well, stronger, tougher from all the searching, from living life so much outdoors, from eating simply, sleeping long nights. I looked old because I had been baked in the sun, but when clay is baked it becomes stronger.

  ‘You know he’s not with me?’ I began.

  She knew. She had guessed. ‘I think I know.’ She dragged the big bag she had brought off the seat and began to rifle through papers inside. I could see her hand was hurting her. Wearily she motioned me to sit beside her. The gap between us was bridged too easily.

  ‘I traced that phonecall you made to Spain. It’s him, isn’t it?’ she said, pushing a sheet of paper into my hand, then another. They were colour images downloaded from the screens, things I had seen in my shabby Spanish office but lacked the facilities to print, distant images of the salvajes, one taller figure rising from the group or standing a little apart in the background, the white undetailed halo of light that might conceal the head of our son, our mysteriously tall and different son. None of them made identification certain, though looking at them with such passionate desire we could both see precise curves of ear and mouth in the vaguest patches of light or darkness.

  ‘He’s become a myth, hasn’t he?’ she asked me, staring into my face, and I saw a reflection of my own awful hunger in her blue iris, faintly rimmed with white, the ice was coming there as well, the slow stiffening of cataract. ‘The Spanish people are saying he’s like their god, because he’s blonde, because he knows things.’

  ‘Of course those kids were brought up wild, there must be so much that they don’t know –’

  ‘And other things they know that he doesn’t. Here, look at these. This one. That’s it.’ She pushed another image into my hand which at first looked exactly like the others. But as I looked closer, I saw what she meant. Instead of one blonde head there were several. The tall blonde youth, a darkhaired woman, and three other white heads so small I hadn’t seen them, three blonde children, playing with a black one.

  We looked at each other, and her mouth was crooked, and neither of us could say anything, because this was the point, maybe the point of everything, though we never saw what we were moving towards …

  Probably it didn’t matter what we aimed for. Blindly following the arrow of light.

  Then it was time to tell my story.

  It happened in the year when Luke would have been twenty. The little village of Buena Ventura was quiet that night. I had arrived after a long day selling tickets too late to wake the woman at the pensión, and since it was August, and a warm dry evening, I decided to sleep in the square in my car. This village had been overrun, the week before, by a daylight visit from fifty or so of the wild children, descending like locusts on the shops and the houses, grabbing all the food they could carry and running off with three goats and six horses, one of them ridden away up the track by a tall blonde boy, handsome, laughing. (‘The bastard was laughing,’ the mayor raved on the phone. He thought I was an investigator. Indeed, I was an investigator, but he didn’t know how we were connected, or what a shock of happiness that detail gave me.)

  Perhaps I haven’t made it clear enough that the salvajes were a band of thieves. They called them mestizos, too, ‘mongrels’, because these kids were such a mixture, Arabs, Africans, Andalucians. If Luke were a leader among the wild children, to most people he was just a criminal. One of my fears, as I hunted Luke through Spain, was that an irate farmer would shoot him dead.

  I knew they probably would not come back, because they hardly ever did. They were nomads, really, they always moved on. But it didn’t lessen my need to follow, my need to be where Luke had been. To imagine him happy – that was best of all. I had a few drinks from a bottle of wine I’d picked up along the way and drifted off, thinking of Luke in the saddle, laughing, imagining him in the dusty square … I fell asleep feeling happy, for once.

  I woke up uncomfortable, and needing to piss. It’s a sign of age; you need to piss.

  (Sarah interrupted; ‘Women too.’ So that was an advance; women weren’t perfect.)

  I heard a dog or a cat outside, rooting about in some rubbish nearby, as I opened the door to take a leak, and looked across the square, which was flooded with moonlight, in the direction of the little whitewashed church of the Sagrada Vista, twenty metres away.

  He was there, in the moonlight, astride his horse, holding it steady, watching me. His face was black and white in the radiance. His expression was unreadable, shadowed by his curls. He was taller, larger than I had expected. I tried to speak; I tried to run. As soon as I began to move towards him he pulled the reins, wheeling away, and I managed a brief, strangled ‘Luke’ before I remembered I mustn’t wake the village.

  The sound of his hooves, a heartbeat drum, grew steadily fainter on the steep road down.

  I know it was him. I am utterly certain. God’slove brought my son to me. I suspect he had been watching the car, watching me sleeping, perhaps, when I woke. And though he didn’t want to talk he raised one hand, I am almost sure I saw one hand rise and fall in the moonlight, but the moving shadows blurred it all. He was saying ‘Stay back’, or else ‘Goodbye’, or maybe it was a kind of blessing. I think so, yes. A blessing. Kindness.

  It was all I had, and I passed it on, my small thin story, to the boy’s mother, hoping it wouldn’t rub away in the telling, hoping she wouldn’t disbelieve or sneer. But the new, tired Sarah didn’t sneer.

  We sat beneath the small dark canvas of Cranach’s The End of the Age of Silver, under the naked generations suffering and struggling in the cold, ejected from paradise, awkward, knowing. The old men raged and fought in the background, the women held the children away from us, their bodies both virginal and erotic, curves of exclusion, silvered, serpentine …

  The gallery grew colder. It was time to close, but it was hard for us to leave each other. An aged guard with a long grey moustache came and told us we had to go. Some last little puff or squirm of anger made me say to her, as she got up and stroked her hair with a remnant of vanity, an echo of beauty, ‘You were wrong, you know. You Wicca women got it wrong.’

  ‘You were wrong too, you Doveloving men. Whatever happened to that thing you had, the one I was so absurdly jealous of �
�?’

  ‘I was never sure that you were jealous … Dora. Dodo. She’s still with me. If you want her, you can have her. She’s got Luke’s voice. Singing Figaro. . . .’ (It would be all right, I had a sudden surge of hope, Sarah had been jealous, that was all it was, we were on the verge of a new understanding.) ‘Singing Voi, che sapete che cosa e amor … you who know what love is, ladies …’

  But she’d stopped listening, her face stiff with distaste. ‘You know we tried to exterminate them. Wicca, and the clowns who followed us. The public didn’t know the half of it. We had to seek out all the thirdgenerations, they were breeding at random, eating cats, children … I think they might have wiped us out. Before the ice could wipe us out. In Euro they say they’ve bred like rats.’

  ‘They exaggerate.’ But I remembered the mutants, pouring over the musicians like a tide of excrement. Could they have been right, those wrongheaded women?

  ‘They were the children of our brains, not our bodies.’ She went on, insistent, tubthumping – and we had so little time left together.

  ‘I did remove Dora’s replicator module.’ Did it still matter, after all these years?

  ‘But I bet she still has her SD and R.’

  ‘SD and R?’ I had forgotten. ‘Oh yes. SelfDefend and Recycle, isn’t it? I’m pretty sure she’s never used it.’ The Doves’ ‘emergency defence’, so horribly effective in the French mutants.

  ‘Someone else could.’ She’d gone slightly pink, rising to the battle, keen to win.

  ‘They couldn’t,’ I said. ‘Dora has personalised Voice Recognition. Just me, and you, and Luke, and Bri –’ but I stopped in time, and she didn’t hear, ‘so there’s no danger.’

  ‘They were very dangerous,’ she insisted. ‘You men made a pact with the devil.’ She was growing theological, in her old age, and the set of her chin, pulling threads of tension in the flesh underneath where the skin would never be smooth again, and the slightly hectic glint in her eye, reminded me she would never stop fighting, we would never stop fighting as long as we lived, these late generations of men and women, shivering, struggling in the frozen grove. But the clock struck three. We would go, we would pass. I remembered the little oak wood in Ronda, and how the wild children, who I thought were fighting, lay naked in the cool grass to make love.

  (And it frightened me. Too close, too tender. I thought I was shocked, but I was envious.)

  Now I see something else instead. Everything that lives is good. Everything that freely lives. Even Kit, even the wolves. You can never see it when you’re afraid.

  Outside the gallery the wind was bitter, and little flurries of snow blew up and stung our noses in the fierce white light. She looked older, so much older out here, and I dreaded to think how I must look to her. The colour of her hair was flat, unnatural, and I remembered how she’d once valued ‘ the natural’.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked my old love. ‘Will you be all right?’ For the snow was getting thicker, and the wintry light would not last long. I had some vague sense that I should look after her, should make sure at least that she got safe home, but her face stiffened, maybe thinking (wrongly) I wanted to go home with her, maybe resenting my protective tone – ‘I live Southside,’ she said, to my surprise. ‘All Wicca members were banned from the north after the fighting. We had our own enclave in the south for a bit, but I don’t know what happened – I think I grew bored … Believe it or not, I live with my mother now. Or she lives with me. She’s very old. I think perhaps it’s what I always wanted. Except I wanted her to look after me.’

  I saw, or thought I saw, her old wounds. I suppose I was still in love with her, and some nonsense came spurting out of my mouth, ‘I wanted to look after you, you know –’

  ‘Why didn’t you, then?’ she said in a flash, some halfremembered tart refrain, and she smiled, showing her familiar teeth, sharp, slightly yellowed, in that cold light, by age and the painful whiteness of the snow.

  A taxi floated past us, vague in the storm, but its orange light caught my eye at the last and I hailed it for her, I could at least do that. But she laughed at me, not a very kind laugh, or perhaps I should say, not a happy laugh, and said, ‘I never use them. They won’t come Southside. When I can’t afford a minicopter, I always go under.’ Then she turned and set off towards the station, trying to be jaunty, though the newly fallen snow made the ground slippy and she skidded for a moment before she got her balance and walked off stiffly, red head held high.

  No, I must tell you the whole story. As I ran along the pavement to grab the taxi I found myself only a metre behind her, reached out my hand, touched her shoulder and whatever she felt – I didn’t care – I took her in my arms and hugged her, crushed her stiffness against my heart, and her mouth avoided my clumsy lips but at the last, I don’t know why, she turned just a little, and her lips were like paper.

  Draw a line under us. Finish us off. Sorceress. Maneater. Bitch. Beloved –

  If she read this, would she understand?

  I am stuck in the past, moping, mourning, when Kit bursts in on me in a rage.

  ‘What hell you wanking bloody play at?’ he demands, running right up to me, stocky, smelly, his face red with anger, his black eyes gleaming. His hairline makes a low V on his forehead. He snatches my notebook from my hand and stares at it, frustrated, right way up, upside down. He notes, I imagine, that I have drawn a firm black line underneath my story –

  No, not the epic I once intended. And yet it is finished. All but finished. Saul, the Hero, says it is done.

  ‘You finish, wankpig?’ he shouts at me. ‘Because now our babies all die, thanks you!’ He shakes my notebook so forcefully that its pages flap like inadequate wings, and I snatch it back with a frightening roar, a roar I mean to be frightening, a roar that would have frightened him once, but it sounds weak to me, weak and old, and he looks furious, not frightened.

  He has cornered me in the concrete bunker where I bring rotting food for RefuelRecycle, except that I haven’t done my job for a week, and besides, we’re eating all the food we can get hold of, and we’re still hungry, and the Doves are starving.

  Kit and I have had a pact, of a kind. It’s all based on my care for the Doves. Most of the kids like them well enough, play with them, run them around a bit, wreck one or two, when they feel in the mood. But Kit is different; to Kit they’re alive. He worries, I know, when one gets sick, and grieves, in a furious, wordless way, if any of them gets smashed in the games. I matter to him because I am the Bird Man, the man he found less than halfalive in a writtenoff car in a blizzard with Dora. The evening of the day I last saw Sarah. I was trying to escape London forever, or trying to die, driving too fast, and came round to find Kit fiddling with Dora. She lay under the seat with her casing damaged and some of her programmes wiped forever.

  That was my entry to this brave new world. I had expertise. I knew things he didn’t. I helped Kit get dozens of them working again.

  I have been useful, and they have used me. And fed me, and let me sleep with them, an old man among hundreds of boys. They have taught me their skills in exchange for mine. Fighting with the sheared-off metal machetes that they call swords, made from defunct cars. Raiding the deliveries to the Enclaves, stripping empty buildings of everything flammable, finding dead bodies for us to burn, and not all the bodies were dead when we found them. We, us. I was one of them.

  I’ve been one of them for nearly two years, but in Kit’s eyes I can see it’s over.

  I’m not afraid. I’ve had my day. Our Days are gone; burning, frozen. We never learned to let things be … It was very bright, the best of it. My life was finished long ago, that afternoon in Trafalgar Square when a woman kissed me, and it turned to paper.

  Or maybe I outlived my use when I lost my son on a yellow hillside (but what does it matter? I got him there. It’s his turn now. The Days of the children.)

  We live in Luke. We can never be parted.

  Kit shouts some wordless wildboy
oath over his shoulder, and the others rush in, five of them, six, all jostling and pushing, and they smell bad, even the cold can’t kill their smell, a rank male taint of sweat and anger – They smell of the end of things, of death.

  Fear is sharp, hard, exact. The thump of my heart in the vault of my chest.

  Outside, I think, I prefer outside. It’s still light, out there. Or day is just ending. I’d like to catch a last glimpse of the sky. I don’t mind the cold. I accept the ice.

  But they seize me, and I hardly bother to struggle. There are six of them, seven, and their blood is up, and they bustle me back into the great hangar where the lines of moribund Doves are kept, grey in the dull grey epsilon light. I shall save my strength for whatever is coming. Let them carry me, if it pleases them. I think, I wouldn’t mind saying goodbye to Dora, and even as I think it I find I’m kneeling facing her, with my arms pinioned. I know each wine stain on her feathers; one or two marks are a darker red.

  ‘Speak to her,’ yells Kit. ‘Ask her if she hungry. Yes she is, she bloody hungry!’

  I touch ‘Hallo’, and she speaks to me. Her voice is so rundown that it wavers, wobbles as if she is weeping. Her old bright ‘How are you?’ sounds like a dirge. My mouth is dry – strange that it’s dry – but I ask her, obediently, if she’s hungry.

  ‘I am very hungry,’ Dora quavers. No one but me is close enough to hear her. Kit yells at me to relay it to them. Of course I am honest. ‘She says she is hungry.’