Maggie Gee - The Ice People

‘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 morning 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.