Maggie Gee - The Ice People

‘Because we have a lot of enemies. Wicca World has enemies. Disgusting people. Terrible people —’

Now I had become one of them.

Things moved fast after that, in several wrong directions.

Sarah moved out. Although she had been with me so irregularly, the flat felt empty in a different way. Small details hurt; the missing patch of pink where her wrap always hung open on our bedroom door. The bathroom, surgically stripped of all her pretty paints and powders. She took the kettle, and the gilded bowl she once kept piled to the brim with apples, and my favourite mugs, three matching mugs painted with jaunty, impossible bluebirds, which used to hang on the wall in a line.

(One of the cats went missing at around the same time. In my griefstunned state I could never quite remember if I’d let them both out that morning, as usual, or whether one had got left behind. And if he had … Not a hair remained. His brother, Snowball, grew stout and nervous. We had called them ‘the boys’, like the original pair we had bought in the early days of our marriage to fill up the emptiness in the flat. Now there was one boy. He mourned, like me.)

I clung to the hopeless phone numbers that never let me through to Sarah. I rang them, often, nevertheless, and doggedly questioned whoever answered. The first time I asked after ‘my family’, but I could sense the antagonism at the other end, like a knifepoint pressed against my eardrum. I learned I must ask for ‘Luke and Sarah Trelawney’.

Mostly the women were noncommittal. Of course they were fine. Of course Luke was well. Happy? ‘Of course he is perfectly contented.’ I suspect that they took many such calls, from one or other wretched father. After I had phoned I always felt worse.

Then one day I got a familiar soft voice with a strong westcountry tang. I realised it was Briony, the cornblonde girl who had come to the flat, the totally implausible ‘Weapons Officer’ in whom I’d sensed a certain sympathy for me, a certain reservation about Sarah’s manner.

‘Is that Briony?’ I asked, desperately. ‘It’s Luke’s father. We met. Saul. Please can you give me some news of my son. No one will tell me anything.’

There was a long pause. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s fine, and all that.’ Another pause. ‘But he misses you. Perhaps — have you thought of — You know you can apply to come to see him?’

‘I’m banned,’ I said. ‘You must know that.’

‘It’s not my department,’ she said. ‘But there’s no formal ban on men. Men are welcome to vote for Wicca … Some men do support us, you know. We want a better world for everybody —’

I wasn’t going to listen to their propaganda. ‘I’m not a man, I’m a father. I love my son. Don’t you understand? They won’t even let me talk to him.’

I heard her breathing. She sounded upset. ‘I can’t say anything,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’ And then she put the phone down.

It was a Saturday in spring. I was beside myself. I drank four cups of coffee and smoked like a chimney, then opened all the windows and played Wagner very loud, so loudly that I nearly didn’t hear the door.

It was Briony with Luke. He fell into my arms, crying ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. ’ Briony looked pale and apprehensive. ‘I’ve taken a risk doing this,’ she said. ‘Just half an hour, okay? Then we go.’

She went into the screen room and left us alone. He wore green xylon dungas, the knee-length kind, and was taller, of course, and his hair had grown, curling down almost to his shoulders, and the proportion of his features had changed, or something was different about his face. Did he look somehow more handsome than before? I began to imagine he was wearing lipstick, but of course his lips had always been red. He was kissing me passionately, and I felt confused, his thin bony body was squeezed against mine, loving, needy, like a baby or a woman; but this was my son, my lad, my boy. The tears were running down his cheeks, and I realised they were mine as well.

‘Lukey,’ I said. ‘Lukey, Lukey.’

‘Some people call me Lucy,’ he said. ‘At the Cocoon. It’s my new name.’

My heart began to thump with anger, but I swallowed it and asked him quite calmly if he minded.

‘First of all I thought it was silly,’ he said, ‘but now I don’t notice. And they don’t always do it, anyway. It’s because … I’ve forgotten what they said. Something about boys being like girls.’

‘Your name is Luke,’ I said. ‘You’re a boy.’

‘I know,’ he said, as if it was obvious. We hugged again. My heart was still pounding. They were all crazy. The world had gone mad. And what was this ‘Cocoon’? Were they turning into insects? ‘I did once want to be a girl,’ he continued. ‘I mean, it’s not that horrible, being a girl. Just a bit stupid,’ which made me laugh. ‘Girls are hopeless at football, and maths.’

It was good to know some things hadn’t changed. I was glad Sarah wasn’t there to contradict him. ‘Do you still play football?’

His face fell. ‘Not really. But I still know about it. I’m still good. I watch it on the screens. When they think we’re in bed. I practise in my bedroom, nearly every day. I haven’t got a ball, but I do the moves.’

Half an hour together. We played a game of Goofball. Sarah never let him play ball inside, but now I let him, now we played, his yellow curls flying through the strips of sunlight, his long shins flashing too pale as he ran, but he was laughing and shrieking, a wonderful sound. He fought with me too, and he was getting stronger, there was a wiry strength in him I’d never felt before. But Lucy. Lucy!

Mad evil bitches.

‘I’m sorry, but we have to go,’ Briony called through from the hall.

She put out her arms to comfort Luke, who stood frozen in his doorway, tense and dejected, and I briefly noticed her wellbuilt muscles, which didn’t seem to go with her soft round cheeks.

‘Why won’t they bloody let me see him?’ I hissed, in controlled fury, as they left. ‘Don’t any of the fathers see their kids?’

‘Most of them don’t want to.’ But she looked uncomfortable. ‘Men are sometimes irresponsible. With you, it’s more that I believe there was some trouble. .’

‘With Sarah, you mean? Yes, so what?’

‘She’s very concerned about male anger.’

She parroted that. I did want to smack her. She wasn’t very old, and she knew nothing, and I’d never hurt Sarah, nor my son. ‘I’ve never been violent, if that’s what she’s saying.’

They were backing away from me down the landing. ‘Twelve is an impressionable age … It’s to do with role models, Sarah says.’

‘Dad,’ said Luke, ‘when am I going to see you?’

‘You’d better ask your bloody mother,’ I said.

Violent? I had never been violent! But as soon as they disappeared into the lift, I nipped back into the flat, got my car coder, and followed. I had to know where my lying wife lived. How else could I launch a firebomb attack on Wicca? It was a tall red building on the Marylebone Road. It burned into my mind like a witch’s finger.

Winter lingered into that spring. There were elections in April, and pundits predicted a low turnout because of the cold (yet only five years earlier they were blaming the heat. The fact was, people had lost faith in elections). What was the vote — ten or twelvepercent? Two- percent lower than ever before. Elections of course were already a shadow of what they had been in the twentiethcentury, when the socalled Parliament still played a real role, when there were centralised policeforces, hospitals, schools — but our Speakers still had some importance because of their weekly access to the screens. They could affect people’s buypower, and sometimes their opinions.