Maggie Gee - The Ice People

‘Good for them if they have,’ said Richard. ‘They have as much right to live as those bitches.’

Round the table, several shaved heads were nodding. I thought yet again how dull it was when everyone looked and thought the same. We wore a uniform — bluestubbled heads, lycra vests and calf-length leggings, black cotton jackets with a logo of a Dove and often an ‘add-on’ artificial fur lining, transparent boots that showed off the toenails, which many men kept brightly painted. (But women, who of course never came here, wore an offputting uniform of short hair and shrouds, long featureless garments, sexless sacks above which their heads looked small and hard. They seemed to be determined we should never see their bodies.) We men went in for desperate display, saying, ‘Look at our bodies, our buttocks, our cocks, the shape of our balls. You may not love us but you can’t unmake us.’ I myself wasn’t quite the norm, with my longish curls and my wedding ring, yet wasn’t I one of them, socially, even sexually? For Paul was now more than a charming catamite once or twice a year when I was desperate. He was a friend and confidant, he gave me affection, he mattered to me, and I even caught myself feeling jealous when he went into the massage room with someone else. Still, I didn’t believe all women were bitches.

‘It’s just that women and babies are, well — human,’ I said, uncertainly. ‘They’re — natural.’ (Goodgod, I was stealing Sarah’s word, the one I had so often disagreed with, but it seemed to be the only one that would do.) ‘I couldn’t put a Dove’s life before a human’s.’ And yet I loved Dora, in a way.

‘Women aren’t human,’ Richard said, and everyone laughed, but I did not.

‘So what should we do about the Doves?’ I asked.

‘No, what should we do about the women?’ asked Richard. He was slowly getting annoyed with me. ‘I’m never going to stop my Doves reproducing. It’s a human right — well, it’s a right.’ He reddened. ‘It is a right, to reproduce.’

Yet none of these men could reproduce, because they had no women to carry their babies. And probably our sperm was useless.

I thought of telling them that I had already removed Dora’s replicator module, but I realised that they would never understand, they would see it as an act of terrible betrayal. I looked round the table. It was chilly in the club, since the heating system they had first installed had been quickly overtaken by the progress of the cold, but everyone around it had bare brawny arms; a dozen male biceps and six male vests that clung to the curves of six male chests. I thought, I must get out of here.

‘I see things differently,’ is all I said. Perhaps I should have mentioned my devotion to Dora.

‘You’ve been listening to your wife,’ said Richard, angrily. And then, indistinctly, into his beer, partly through cowardice and partly through drink, ‘Bloody Queen of the Witches herself.’ A ripple of laughter ran round the table.

Why did I lose my temper so completely, when I hated Wicca World myself, their crackpot ideas, their lying screen faces, the way they had stolen my son from me? Why did I fight for my wife’s honour when she had just told me she was going to divorce me? Whatever the reason, I was suddenly halfway across the table, and both Doves toppled, wailing nasally, their calls of alarm like minisirens, and then I was on top of Richard, crashing my fist into his nose, his chin, his mouth, his teeth, his tongue, and something gave as I punched his face. It was wet, and beer glasses were flying, and plates were crashing to the floor, but I punched his disgusting face again, I knew how to hit, I had boxed as a boy, and gouts of something were hanging off him, snot, and blood, and a tooth on a red string, a little dripping string of flesh ( I hated our bodies, they were stupid and useless ), I wanted to smash him into the ground, and everyone was shouting and pulling at me.

Perhaps I had taken too many buzzers, which didn’t always go well with beer. Perhaps Sarah’s letter had turned my brain. It took a dozen men to pull me off him, and someone was yelling that his nose was broken and asking which hospital his contract was with.

It was all entirely shaming, later, but at the time I felt nothing but hatred, for the club with its banks of gleaming computers and the gleaming hairless bodies of the guys, for Richard and Nimit and Ian and Riswan and Billy and Timmy and even Paul … Though Paul brought me home in a taxi that night, tenderly wiping a cut on my forehead, delicately picking broken glass from my hair, keeping a protective arm round my shoulder, and came to the door, and wanted to come in, wanted me to want him to come in, I thanked him brusquely and sent him away.

That’s what happens, you see, when you lose too much, when too many things all go at once. It happened to me; I had a kind of breakdown, and all over the world things were breaking down, cracking under too many new strains, like hot water pipes in a sudden frost. A hot water pipe! Such a simple thing, one of the million things that we all took for granted, but the world cooled down and everything changed, metal piping soon became something to loot, something to cannibalise, something to fight with, something worth killing or dying for. Not that that means a lot, any more. Hardly a day without a death.

I must watch my back. Good job I’m in trim.

Days draw down to the final battle.

The divorce dragged on. My letters weren’t answered, the letters and cards I sent to Luke. I tried not to go into his room. The jumble of toys and tools on his table, the map of the world, the photographs … One of them was of the three of us, Luke in a red baseball cap, swinging from our shoulders, one arm round each of us, kicking up his feet in baseball boots, and he looked surprisingly sturdy, boyish, not the delicate, gentle boy he was, and Sarah and I both looked happy and proud, our eyes meeting over his head. It was in her second period of longish hair, before she adapted the Wicca crewcut. Her red hair swung in a bob in the sun … I tried not to look at that photo too often. It was interesting, though, that Luke had liked it and chosen to stick it in pride of place, a photo of a regular, boyish boy. That comforted me, when I thought of the witches.

It was silly, but I brooded about his football. I was never one of those sportsmad fathers, pushing their kids to be great jocks, but when he was at home we used to practise every Sunday, and he had a marvellous eye for the ball. Now he couldn’t even watch it onscreen. Wicca weren’t keen on anything with balls.

I believed that Luke was still in London, still in whatever lay behind the narrow red frontage of Wicca World’s headquarters. It was a tall, slightly grimy nineteenthcentury building with complicated swags of brickred sandstone, rising on the north of the Marylebone Road to a series of sunlit mansard windows. I always imagined a flash of Luke’s face, high up in the attics, when I drove past, which I did too often, a hundred times maybe, and always that stupid lift of the heart as I saw the bright windows like living eyes, surely one day he would look out and see me … Always the blank depression and loss as the traffic swept onwards, time carried me past, and he was inside, changing, growing.

Unbelievably, his birthday came round again. I hadn’t seen him for nearly a year. I rang every week, but never again got the soft country tones of Briony Barnes. He would be thirteen. His voice might be breaking … I hoped his mother understood something, anything at all, about adolescent boys. I hoped Wicca didn’t hate them too much. I was smoking like a chimney. I lost weight.