Maggie Gee - The Ice People

He had three days left, though I never realised. I was popping across to Berlin for work, and Sarah asked me if I thought I should stay, but I didn’t understand her. Deaf, blind. And so I never saw him again.

Why didn’t I take him seriously? I think he wanted to say he was dying, to tell me something about life, and death, and what human beings are capable of — and my father knew; he had lived his life. But I looked at my watch, and chattered on, and never looked inside the bag.

‘You’re tiring him,’ Sarah said at last. ‘I’d better give him his injection.’ I said some nonsense, and left for the airport, so she was left with the hardest part.

I do realise what she did for me.

I thanked her, inadequately, several weeks later, as we stood with Luke and my alcoholic sister, dark glasses shading her raw dark cheeks, beside the muddy stream where they had asked to be scattered. The church where Samuel married Milly had long been abandoned; her parents’ village lay in ruins. Brambles ramped over the fallen gravestones. We took it in turns to scatter the ashes. There was far too much ash, like dirty hailstones, lying on the grass around our feet. I wished they had been buried instead. I didn’t want my parents to be crumbs of bone, and this little valley seemed mean and flyblown, though there were some purple irises, and a few rare sparrows hopping about. Then Sarah swore she saw a dragonfly, and when I tried to tell her they were extinct my sister hissed at me to keep quiet.

‘I did it for them, not you. I loved them, ’ Sarah tried to say, but she was crying too much, her cheeks wet in the patchy sunlight. ‘I wish we’d managed to live like them.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They stayed the course. We didn’t, did we? They stayed the course.’

Which puzzled me, because wasn’t she the one who had wanted her whole life to be different? Hadn’t she decided to redraft the rules? The older I get, the less I’m sure of. We argued so much, but does anything matter? Except whether you and your seed survive? It’s as if the game were extremely simple, yet we kept on attempting impossible moves, stupidly intelligent, frowning in the mirror.

*

We were in our midforties — that dangerous age.

Sarah had been staying away from the flat for longer periods than ever before. I suspected her of setting up another home, with some lucky bastard who worked on the screens. Some musclebound kid with castiron balls. Whoever he was, he must have slimed around Luke, because for the first time she was taking Luke with her. They vanished for a month, then two months, three. I suspected my son of disloyalty. I couldn’t sleep. I dreaded our bedroom, because it was the place where I lay awake and horribly alone night after night. I lived like a slob on chips and beer, online till the early hours, but the pleasures of loneliness soon palled. I had done some new work on self-replication that my Nanocorp was ecstatic about, but I couldn’t love the nanomachines: too tiny to love, too predictable. They were fit for a task, that was all, like me.

Whereas Sarah was never predictable.

I began to go to the Scientists more often. It was one good way of devouring time. If I dropped in after work, and took a few buzzers, I could laugh and dance with the lads till ten. And I was no longer embarrassed about dancing. Sarah used to tease me for the way I danced, but at the Scientists, we just did our own thing, flailing, hopping or slinkily erotic, and no one minded, no one mocked. ( Men don’t like to be mocked by women. Bite your tongues, you sour sisters.) Then when the drugs began to fade I would slip into the saddle of one of the computers and ride away into the shimmering screen.

Once or twice I let a sweet young lad called Paul give me relief in the massage room, though it didn’t take away the loneliness. I admit I enjoyed it. It was very exciting. He was tall and slender with beestung lips and a mischievous, appealing smile, rather feminine as well as boyish. His hands were marvellous; he understood men. It made me feel that I still had a body. And everyone seemed to be doing it, in those days.

But another part of me felt dismayed. Did I really believe we were all bisexual? The people who said so all seemed to be gay.

The flat got dirtier, felt darker … thankgod it was a little cooler, at least. Our overheated planet was at last cooling down, with everyone queuing up to claim the credit, virtuous big business, responsible governments. All complete nonsense, but I welcomed the cooling. I started to leave food out of the fridge in a way I would never have done when it was hotter. It still grew blue mould; I tried not to see it. I fed the cats, resentfully (they were getting old; if I neglected them they’d die, and how would I cope with that, without Sarah?) but I never bothered to clean their bowls. The spoons were dark with crusted meat. I ate out every night, and came back to sleep uncomfortably on the screenroom sofa, going nowhere else except the lavatory. I kept the doors of the kitchen and the bedroom closed.

Weekends were the worst, long and empty. The club didn’t open till six pm. On Saturdays I usually got up late and cleared out of the flat as soon as I could, putting in laps on the walking track where I had become a regular — of course no one walked outside in the cities. I needed the exercise badly. All day I was hunched over microscopes or screens, earning good money by wrecking my spine. I needed to walk or fight or run, I was a big man with a big man’s body … And I wasn’t having sex, that was the nub of it. I needed it. Men do need sex. Wanking is nothing compared to sex. It’s like packed lunch compared to hot dinners.

That Saturday I got up late as usual, and switched the screen on while I got dressed. I’d never cared much about the news, but now I liked anything that made me forget, like appalling disasters to total strangers.

But that morning’s news stopped me in my tracks.

After decades, nearly a century of trying, human beings had succeeded in making ‘mobots’, cute little domestic animats. Robots available ‘to every home’. Robot cleaners. ‘Robot friends’. They cleaned, cleared rubbish, walked, talked. The report was long and very exciting, till pundits arrived to pose and drone, at which point I lost interest and began to pull on my skintight orange tracksuit. (I had bought it from the shop at the club. Encouraged by Paul, I must admit. Now it seemed a brighter orange than before, and showed my genitals embarrassingly clearly, but I told myself it was okay, lots of other men wore ‘skins’ like that.) I walked to the door, ready to go out, swigging a cup of strong black coffee that I meant to put down on the ledge by the door –

Suddenly the key turned in the lock, the door swung open, it was Luke, it was her ! I spilled my coffee down the front of my suit.

At once I felt naked in my lurid lycra, but Sarah hardly looked at me. Her eyes were red, as if she had been crying, and Luke looked older, pale and tense, though he jumped up at me as if I were a whale, as if we could swim away together … A scarf of spilled coffee grew cold on my chest, but he didn’t care — children never do, it’s only their mothers who make problems and fusses. He ran off to the loo, she went after him, and I stood in the window, my heart thumping.

‘Daddy!’ Luke yelled in his high reedy voice, dragging me out of my brown study, ‘Mummy says why is the flat so dirty?’ But neither of us listened to my answer, as I hugged and wrestled with his beloved skinny body that still felt as if I could break it in two, if I forgot, and stopped pulling my punches.

I wanted to say how horribly I’d missed him, but instead for some reason I told him the news. ‘I just saw something on the screens about some wonderful robots,’ I told him, brightly. ‘They do all the housework.’