Maggie Gee - The Ice People

It was in those weeks when I couldn’t read the papers that more news about the ice began to break. I learned about it later when I went back to work, a very different man from the proud expectant father who had surfed the net while the world was sleeping.

Now people were starting to ask new questions. I suppose climatologists had always known that the temperate climate of recent history was only part of a short ‘interglacial’ between much longer glacial phases, but climatologists weren’t listened to much, except when hacks harassed them for shortterm predictions. On average, I discovered, there were ten to twelvethousandyear warmings between ice ages of a hundredthousand years. And way back at the end of the twentieth-century, the scientist James Lovelock had famously said, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, that ‘if it weren’t for the activities of man, the earth would be entering a new ice age.’ But Lovelock was known to be an eccentric, and no one had taken him literally. We were too busy worrying about rising sea levels and the spread of deserts in Africa. Now we began to see the larger picture. Not that anyone was thinking of a new ice age — we just saw the logic in the earth cooling down. As Lovelock had also said, the earth’s warm phases, which seemed so agreeable and natural to humans, were more like the planet having a fever.

‘It’s good news, darling. Don’t you see? After all our fears about the future, the climate may go back to what it was in the last century … Our son’ (but was he really our son, this long thin creature with tubes in his arms?) ‘won’t have to live in a desert.’

But she stared at me as if I weren’t there, and her wide blue eyes began to water again. ‘Why are you telling me all this shit? I don’t bloody care. I don’t want this baby. Maybe it’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true, Saul, I don’t want him —’ And she looked at me, begging me to understand, but I was shocked and became selfrighteous, though I’d secretly felt the same way myself.

‘You have to want him. He’s our son,’ I barked. I was brutal with her because I felt guilty.

‘I wanted a daughter. My beautiful daughter.’ She lay and wept, and I wanted to hit her. She was the mother. It wasn’t fair.

‘Don’t cry. Get a grip on yourself. You’re a mother.’

I didn’t see this was the turning point. I thought it was something temporary. Sarah would have to love me again once she and Luke came home together.

They did come home, but things didn’t get better.

She was too weak at first to look after the house. Luke seemed to suck up all her energy. I would come home from work and find her exhausted, with milk and avocado all over her blouse, and the floor, and the table, and the chair. Our flat had never looked like this. I got the cleaner to come more often. I did my best, but Sarah glowered at me. She lay with the infant clamped to her chest and watched old films with her friend Sylvie who always seemed to be by her bedside. If I spoke, they stared at me resentfully. ‘You never listen,’ was Sarah’s refrain, but they only spoke to me to give me instructions, to tell me to heat bottles or bring a fresh nappy. And I worked all day. It wasn’t easy.

In any case, it was Sylvie she talked to. ‘I know, ’ I would hear her cooing, ‘I know. ’ Her son sometimes came along on sufferance, and sat picking Sarah’s flowers to pieces. They didn’t leave when I came home. I found myself unable to be pleasant to them. Sylvie had a patch of eczema by a stud in her ear, which was some kind of stupid lesbian symbol. If she’d been a man, I would have been jealous …

Then Sarah did find a man who listened. He was one of the doctors who treated her depression. Most of them disappointed her. His consulting rooms were only two blocks away from Melville Road. She went three times a week, and came back pinkcheeked and invigorated. I was happy to stay at home with Luke, glad that something was doing her good …

(I still don’t know what she wanted from me. I only know that I didn’t give it. It seems to me that men couldn’t get it right — we were either too brutish or too wimpy for them. But we were ourselves, we were men, for godsake. What did they think they could turn us into?)

I was slow to resume our sex life after Luke was born. I wanted to be sensitive. I spit with derision to think of it now, but I didn’t want to hurt her where she had been hurt. If you love a woman you don’t want to hurt her.

And then you want to smash her, rape her, kill her.

Another man’s hands on her milky breasts. His filthy hands on her tender belly, still soft and stretched from bearing our child … Did she laugh with him? Did she come with him? That helpless little crescendo of whimpers –

She told me, one day when Luke was nearly a year old, that she had decided to take a lover, ‘since you no longer want to sleep with me’.

If Luke hadn’t been there, lying sleepless on the sofa, I think I might have killed her, for I still adored her.

‘You’ve slept with someone. You lying bitch …’

I wanted sex at once, there and then, I wanted to drive that bastard away. I had a right, I was her child’s father …

But she wouldn’t. ‘I don’t belong to you. I’m not your wife. I don’t have to. As a matter of fact, I think we’d get on better if one of us moved out. I’ll keep Luke, of course.’

She would steal my child! No, I’d kill them both, her and her lying, cheating lover … but instead I picked up a little chair, a pretty thing of painted wood, blue and gold, some nursery rubbish, and smashed it hard against the wall. I remember hearing her scream insanely. I suppose I may have been holding a chairleg above my head, but seeing her terror I dropped my arm. I felt suddenly tired.

‘You’re my family,’ I said. My voice had gone wobbly. ‘You and Luke. I know things have been … difficult. But he’s getting stronger. So are you. You said you would marry me, remember.’

The odd thing is, she agreed to it, because she had promised, because of Luke. She would marry me, as a pledge to the child, but no longer live with me or love me. ‘I’m tired of men, as a matter of fact. They’re okay as friends, but I’ll live alone. Or else with Sylvie and her child. That would be company for Luke. Don’t cry,’ she said, seeing my stricken face. ‘Get a grip on yourself. You’re a father. And you’ll always be special,’ she added, more kindly. ‘It’s just … I trusted you too much. I think that women should be independent.’

And so we got married; a kind of divorce.

And much of it’s still a mystery to me. How can I explain it to these crazy kids, who live for food, and fire, and sex? How love was so important to us. How tiny shades of wants and wishes made us fight, and sob, and part. How humans had everything, and valued nothing.

Cold, cold, battering cold, cold that howls and bites and burns, cold we shrink from like an enemy, as darkness comes, as the sun slips away. We huddle together round the fire like friends, but can anyone be friends with the wild children? They let me creep close, they tolerate me, because they want the things I have — my expertise with the machines, my stories. They think I am as old as god …

They have no family, no history.

In the middle of the night, the cold is like stone, black and solid and hard as death, and as the dawn comes it sharpens to pain, as light creeps back with the morning wind. (I loved it, once, that little wind. In the Tropical Time, it came like grace. Now it’s the wind that takes the dying. Comes like a blade to finish them off.)

And then the sun. See, it’s rising. Our friend the sun, my only friend. The line of white along the horizon, the light reflected off the back of the ice … It will redden soon, then the sun will appear, and this frozen ball will roll towards it, the sun will climb over the smoking towers (that stain of foul greasy smoke from the chimneys, hinting at a long night’s killing and eating), piercing the mesh of the perimeter fence, till the heat begins to melt the grey grass, and a dull soaked greenness spreads in patches, and the torn airport fence begins to drip, glitter and weep as the frost dissolves, and the broken windowpanes catch fire, great burning lakes for a few brief moments, and the human mound starts to shuffle and groan, what looked like a pyre of blackened bodies begins to colour and shift and dissolve into hundreds of moaning, stretching creatures, and my own blood creeps back, slowly, painfully, my aching limbs unclench and stir.