by Guy Jones
A MESSAGE FROM CHICKEN HOUSE
I dream a lot – and sometimes it feels real. The Ice Garden is a novel trapped in that magical place between dreaming and waking. Jess finds the garden through a sense of longing – and lack of belonging – and soon she wishes she never had to leave. But what about the mysterious boy she encounters in this other world, and the strange darkness haunting the ice? Guy Jones tells a moving, dizzying tale – sometimes funny, sometimes sad. Brilliant and beautiful.
BARRY CUNNINGHAM
Publisher
Chicken House
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Copyright
For Isabelle
They called it the Hat. It was a long white hood that masked the whole of Jess’s face and neck, over which she wore something like ski goggles. The rest of her body was covered up with a baggy top, trousers and thick gloves so that no part of her skin was exposed to the sun.
‘I don’t like it here,’ she said, lifting the goggles to get at a maddening itch on her nose.
‘No one likes hospitals,’ replied her mother.
‘So, we can go?’
‘You’re in one of those moods, then.’
Jess sighed, releasing a mouthful of sickly air. The numbers on the lift display began ticking up towards the children’s ward. Already, beads of sweat were forming on the back of her neck, sticking fabric to skin. Summer was the absolute worst time of year.
‘It’s only a couple of times a month,’ said her mother.
‘Only?’ said Jess, her voice rising.
‘Must we do this?’
Jess thought they probably must. At least until her mother understood how much she hated this building and everything in it.
The doors opened on the second floor to reveal a woman in a purple dress. She took a step towards them but stopped short at the sight of the Hat. Her mouth gaped like a fish but no words came out.
‘Can we help?’ asked Jess’s mother.
‘Oh . . .’ she said, recovering herself a little. ‘Up or down?’
‘Going up.’
‘Right. Well. Down for me. Thanks.’ The woman took a step back, still staring.
‘You can close your mouth now,’ Jess said, as the lift doors closed.
‘Darling, that was rude,’ her mother scolded.
‘She didn’t hear me.’
‘Shame.’ They both smiled, without looking at one another. Her mother jabbed the fourth-floor button a few times and tapped her foot. The lift clunked and juddered as it started up again.
‘I don’t like him,’ said Jess.
‘He’s perfectly nice.’
‘He’s nice to you. He talks to me like I’m an idiot,’
‘He talks to you like you’re a child.’
‘Exactly.’
‘He’s a very good doctor.’
‘How do you know? You don’t have medical training.’ Game, set and match, Jess thought.
‘Put your goggles back on,’ said her mother. ‘There are windows in the corridor.’
‘But, Mum . . .’ she started.
‘Jessica,’ her mother replied, firmly. Game, set and match.
Doctor Stannard was extremely tall, extremely thin and, Jess thought, extremely annoying. He had a habit of leaning forward at the waist, like a flagpole bending in the wind. He was so large that surely his father had been a giant – not just an ordinary person who happened to be on the big side, but a genuine giant like the ones you read about in books. Jess had written a story like that herself once, about a particularly nasty character who lived in a cave stacked high with the bones of unfortunate passers-by.
Doctor Stannard didn’t look like he’d ever lived in a cave. Perhaps his giant parents had decided to modernize? If so, then every day would have been a struggle not to eat the postman, she thought.
Her own father, as far as she could remember, was relatively normal-sized. In the absence of clear answers from her mother, Jess had formed her own conclusions as to where he had gone. If asked, she’d explain that he was the unfortunate victim of alien abduction and that a shadowy government agency – for government agencies are always shadowy – had tried to keep this fact locked tightly away.
‘Jess?’ It was Doctor Stannard.
‘Yes?’
‘Doctor asked you to take your gloves off,’ said her mother.
‘Right,’ she said.
‘She was miles away, Mummy,’ said the doctor. He always called her mother ‘Mummy’. It was idiotic. ‘You were miles away, weren’t you, Jess?’
‘I suppose so,’ she said.
‘What were you thinking about?’ he asked.
‘Puppies,’ she replied.
Her mother shot her a look that said I don’t know what you were thinking about, darling, but I’d bet our house that it wasn’t puppies, but Doctor Stannard seemed happy enough.
He took her hand and turned it this way and that, rolling up the sleeve to look at her arm. When he was done, he moved to the other side. ‘And what’s this?’ he said.
‘What’s what?’ replied Jess, with an innocent smile.
‘What is it?’ asked her mother, concerned.
‘Well, that’s not good to see, is it, Jess? No, very nasty.’
Her mother leant over with the doctor and Jess looked down at the tops of the two adult heads as they peered at a patch of burnt skin on her wrist. ‘I barely even felt it,’ she protested.
It had happened a few days before. Her mother had been in the kitchen at the back of the house when shouting had started in the street outside. Mr Olmos from number thirty-three was on the pavement screaming at the postman, who, he said, had yet again failed to deliver his new ice-cream-making machine. The postman tried to make the point that he could not, in fact, deliver an item that hadn’t yet arrived at the sorting office, but Mr Olmos hadn’t wanted to listen. The postman was certainly an incompetent fool and, very possibly, the kind of scoundrel who’d steal another man’s ice-cream maker.
Jess had pulled on the Hat and opened the door to listen. The downstairs windows were tinted but whenever she ventured outside she had to make sure she went ‘Full Hat’, as her mother put it. She liked Mr Olmos. He was a restless man, who caught new hobbies like other people catch colds. This month it was making his own ice cream, the one before it had been learning the harmonica, and a few weeks before that he had attempted to build a small working rocket in his front garden. Jess suspected that even he’d been a little bit relieved when that one hadn’t worked.
Watching the scene unfold, she’d reached down to scratch an itch on her arm. Her bare arm. She’d jumped back into the hall, slamming the door. Looking down, she could see where her sleeve had snagged, revealing a smooth white patch of skin. After just a few short minutes in the sun the spot had flared up into a nest of angry red blisters.
‘What was that?’ her mother had said, coming into the hall.
‘Mr Olmos is angry about ice cream,’ Jess had replied.
Her mother shook her head. ‘That man.’
&nbs
p; ‘I like him.’
‘You can peel the potatoes,’ she’d said, heading back to the kitchen.
Jess had pulled her sleeve down and gone through without complaint.
‘Jess . . .’ said her mother, fingers worrying at a loose strand of hair. ‘If I can’t trust you to look after yourself . . . I can’t watch you every moment!’
‘You don’t need to.’
‘You went outside in the day!’
‘I was covered up.’
‘Not well enough.’
‘My sleeve got stuck – it’s not like I did it on purpose.’
‘Don’t take that tone.’
‘I’m not taking any tone.’
Her mother glanced up at Doctor Stannard, who was looking at them with an expression that screamed, I understand, and made Jess want to hit him with his own stapler.
‘What do you think, Doctor?’ sighed her mother.
‘I think she needs to be careful, Mummy. Very careful indeed.’
‘You hear what Doctor says, Jess?’
She opened her mouth to respond, to shout at them both that it had been an accident, that she was careful, that she was always careful. Instead she set her face and stood. ‘Can I go?’ she asked.
‘Go where?’
‘For a walk. You can talk about me more easily if I’m not here.’ Her mother’s glance was knifelike. ‘Please,’ Jess added.
‘You’ll have to go Full Hat.’
‘I know that.’ Jess snatched the hood up from a plastic-looking desk.
Her mother slipped back into the chair with a sigh. ‘Five minutes, then,’ she said, ‘no more.’
Jess gave a sharp military salute and let the door swing shut behind her.
She pulled on her goggles and scowled as the orange lenses made the world just that little bit duller. A sad painted rainbow arced across one wall of the corridor. An orderly came by pushing a wheelchair that chirped like a small bird. In it was an elderly woman who looked her up and down. ‘You poor thing,’ she said as she passed. ‘Everything will be OK.’
Jess knew that adults found it difficult to see her in Full Hat. Most likely they had no idea why a child had to dress up in an outfit best suited to tending bees. In any case, it was obvious to them that that this child isn’t normal and is therefore in need of my sympathy. Jess didn’t want anyone’s sympathy. She had what she needed. Her mother, for one thing. Her maddening, frustrating, wonderful mother.
And of course she had her stories. Just that morning she had added another entry to her Big Book of Tales. This creation would one day make her rich and famous, at which point she would buy a better desk so that she could embark on her dream of writing an Even Bigger Book of Tales.
She navigated a few turns but each hallway looked much the same as the last. Fluorescent lights cast a blue-green tinge. Here and there rows of orange plastic chairs were bolted to the walls. She came to a window. A shaft of sunlight cut through the glass and Jess let it play across her gloves, feeling a familiar shudder of desire and fear. I could take them off, she thought, and imagined how furious Doctor Stannard would be if she did. She was snapped from her fantasy when a football thudded into the glass pane in front of her.
She peered down to see a group of children in the road below. One of them, a scrawny boy, was climbing into the flower beds by the hospital wall to rummage under the bushes there. His friends milled around, conducting their conversation as loudly as if they were at opposite ends of the street rather than standing right next to each other.
‘Get a move on!’ one of the girls shouted. She had the same sandy-blonde hair as the boy. His sister, Jess thought. There was a yelp from under the bushes and he emerged with livid red welts on his arms, looking every bit as deflated as the football he was holding.
‘What did I say about kicking it?’ the girl barked. ‘You’re going home to get another.’ The boy started to protest but was quickly shouted down. Only when he jogged away did the rest of the group move off towards the park at the end of the road.
There was a familiar hollow feeling in Jess’s chest, as if someone had been to work inside it with an ice-cream scoop. The sandy-haired girl stopped, falling behind the others, and went down on one knee to retie her shoes. She looked interesting, Jess thought. Her clothes were too big and her jeans were worn through and grass-stained at the knees. What would the girl make of Jess introducing herself, she wondered? What would it be like to spend the afternoon with them, kicking the ball around in the sunshine, teasing each other, talking about whatever came into their heads? She found herself smiling – a smile that bubbled up like foam from a bottle of fizzy drink and vanished just as quickly. Because at that moment the girl looked up and saw her.
Jess lifted a hand in greeting but the girl on the street below didn’t move or return the gesture. At that moment a broken fragment of cloud passed in front of the sun and Jess could see her own reflection in the window – could see herself as the girl saw her. Could see that her face was masked and that her waving hand was clad in a thick white glove.
She jerked back from the window, wanting nothing more than to be invisible. Her face and chest burnt red-hot, and she could hear the blood pumping in her ears. No wonder she hadn’t waved back. Jess didn’t even look like a little girl. She was different. She was strange.
A nurse with a greying shock of wire-wool hair hurried out of the room opposite and away down the corridor. As the door swung shut Jess caught a glimpse of a boy lying inside. On impulse, and checking that the hall was empty, she ducked through.
The room was empty apart from the figure in the bed. He looked about her age. There was a vase of yellow flowers on the side and the windowsill was crowded with get-well-soon cards. She fixed one, which had fallen over. It showed a floppy-eared baby mouse wrapped up in quilts and blankets, with a thermometer in its mouth. The boy himself was lying perfectly still. Tubes snaked into him from a variety of machines. Green lights flashed and a steady beep tapped out a deadening rhythm. Jess drew the blinds and pulled off her hood and goggles: Half Hat. At once her nostrils filled with the reek of pollen. She dipped her head and breathed deeply, allowing the scent to overwhelm the sharp antiseptic tang of the hospital.
A photograph was propped up on the bedside table. In it a family stood on a rickety-looking jetty that extended across a frozen lake. Frost-covered flower beds lay in the foreground while snowy mountains reared up in the distance. Sunlight played across the ice and Jess felt a sudden pressure and tightness in her chest. She pushed the sadness away and turned to the boy.
He was almost as colourless as Jess herself. Spiderwebs of blue veins showed through the too-pale skin at his temples. His chest rose and fell with a faint hissing sound. He was thin – thinner than in the photo. There he was grinning into the camera while on either side of him his parents were laughing at something out of shot.
Who was he? The son of a spy, she thought. His father – no, his mother – worked for the government in some of the most dangerous places in the world. She spoke eight languages, was a black belt in judo and could do twelve backflips in a row. It seemed obvious to Jess that such a woman had almost certainly trained her son to follow in her footsteps. At the age of just twelve, he could already shoot the top off a bottle from a hundred metres, fly a helicopter, and survive in the wild with only a cagoule and a tin of beans.
What had brought him here? Well, that was obvious. His mother had been investigating corruption at the highest levels when she’d been discovered. Agents had been sent to capture her family and even though she’d fought them off with nothing but the contents of a cutlery drawer, she hadn’t been able to stop the bullet that had put her son in a coma . . .
All at once Jess felt very tired and buried her head in her hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last, her voice sounding thin and artificial in the hushed room. ‘It must be awful, just lying there like that with all those things stuck into your arms. Hearing nothing but doctors and nurses talking about you all t
he time.’
For one mad moment she half expected the boy to answer, but of course there was nothing but the slow rasp of his breath. Where are you? she wondered. Had his mind floated off to some other place? Was he dreaming? Or was he just waiting? Waiting for something to change so that he could finally wake up.
She moved on to the side of the bed, feeling the mattress sag under her weight. ‘I know how you feel a little bit. With the doctors, I mean. I come here every few weeks and all they do is talk about me, about how I am or what they want to do to me next. And no one ever asks me, not really. Do you know what I wish? I wish there was no sun, ever. No sun for anyone, and everyone the same as I am. Does that sound bad? To wish everyone else had to live in darkness too? Well, I don’t care if it does.’
She pulled off one glove and reached down to take the boy’s hand, half expecting to feel his fingers curl around her own. But there was nothing; they just rested there, still and cold. So cold, she thought. A sudden flutter of terror came upon her. How could a person have so little warmth in their body and yet still live? But then some would ask how a person could live without sun, as she did.
‘I wouldn’t,’ she said at last. ‘Make everyone else be like me. But I wish there was a place I could go. Somewhere safe.’ She let out a long, sad breath.
There was a bag on the chair in the corner. Brown leather, beaten up. A woman’s bag, much like the one her mother had. She could see a set of keys nestling inside its open mouth, which meant that whoever it belonged to had probably only gone out for a moment. Which meant they were most likely on their way back. Which meant she had to get out of there or risk having to explain herself.
‘I hope you wake up soon,’ she whispered, leaning over him. She swept away a strand of mousy hair that had fallen over his eyes. ‘And I hope you have good dreams until then.’
She zigzagged back to Doctor Stannard’s office only to find her mother already standing outside. ‘I said five minutes.’
Jess nodded. This one wasn’t worth fighting.
‘We need to get that burn seen to.’