Maggie Gee - The Ice People

So now Europeans were ice people — perhaps we had always been ice people. ( Yet I wasn’t one of them, was I? That longlost part of me snickered, jeered. Black man’s turn! Serve them right! )

The rest of the report drifted over me, but I looked with wonder at the pictures on the screen of African scenery drenched in sunlight, a wildebeest quivering behind a thorntree, the canopy of velvety mixed greens in the forest, the bougainvillea, luscious, grape red, and a group of chattering barechested children, sitting in the dust playing music on pipes — goodgod, it was still truly hot in Africa. It might be the last place the ice would come. Indeed where the ice might never come, for previous ice ages stopped short of the equator …

I began to think, idly, I could go there. Halfheartedly, because I’d never gone back, had never wanted it enough, till I was suddenly forty, and it seemed too late. But a buried wish began to stir. Though no one suspects it, I have black blood, I could just walk in and claim my kingdom … ‘Look, Dora,’ I said, and turned her to the screen. ‘That’s Africa. We could go there.’

‘Is it a tree?’ she asked hopefully, which made me laugh, because she had gone into ‘Recognition Test’ mode.

They were showing the boys by the road again, all clustering round the piper, laughing and clapping, and I thought, they’re not so much younger than Luke, I wish that Luke could be there with them –

Then the realisation pierced me, he could be. He had Ghanaian blood, his greatgrandfather’s blood. He was part Ghanaian, for all his blonde curls. He had a right to be there, in the sunlight. Stupid, why didn’t you think about Luke?

I started to listen to the programme very carefully. One greatgrandparent was the minimum requirement. If you had one Ghanaian greatgrandparent, you qualified. Luke qualified, but I’d neglected him, I’d abandoned him to the clutches of the women. He could have a life, be free, survive …

But the border would close at the end of the summer. There was not much time left. I got to my feet. Adrenalin, a white electrifying wall of it, lifted me like a tidal wave. I would do it for Luke. I was no longer depressed. I was a man, a father, not some godforsaken wimp. I could suddenly feel the strength in my body, the strength I’d been proud of when I was a boy but had almost forgotten when I was with Sarah, the muscles and tendons I had slowly rebuilt over the last six years’ sweating and grunting in the gym.

I was pretty fit. I was going to use it.

Moreover, I had something I had never shown Sarah, never shown Luke, never shown anyone, something that Samuel had left me long ago and I’d never worked out what to do with it, something I went to look for now, locked in a cupboard by the ventilator shaft, wrapped in a bag of stiff green canvas.

Forbidden fruit. Completely illegal. Left me by that careful, godfearing man whose whole life was about upholding the law. ‘In case you need them. You’re my son …’ Dying, Samuel had entrusted me with the cache of shooters he had confiscated over his years as a police enforcer. Instead of turning them in, he’d kept them. So his belief in law and order had its limits. Perhaps he sensed that the sky would fall in …

There had been a total ban on private ownership of guns in the UK since the massacres of the 2020s, though the licensed policeforces and National Army had sophisticated stunguns and other immobilisers. It was almost the only national law that was still enforced in every council district, since all the police saw it was to their advantage. Domestic manufacture of guns had ceased, and smugglers were gaoled for life or termed, so most illegal guns were twentieth-century metal things, old and heavy, but still dangerous. They were in frequent use among criminals and outlaws, despite a mandatory life sentence for using a gun while committing a crime. If anyone ever discovered my bag, I was planning to say it was a gift from my father, a set of golfing irons, as far as I knew.

When Samuel died we had to burn the mattress, and I saw the bag lying under the bed. Dragging it out, it felt heavy as death. I didn’t open it till I got it home, and even then I locked myself in my study. Unzipping the bag and peering inside, I’d felt nauseous, and thrilled, and afraid. It was like looking at a secret part of my father I’d never known before. I’d seen the Speakers’ Medal he collected for shooting a maniac straight through the eye in a siege. But now I began to understand that my father must have loved the guns themselves, the weapons with their rich oily sheen. You could tell from the care with which he’d packed this bag, the layers of padding, the swaddling cloths. Down one end were the boxes of ammunition, precisely labelled coloured cardboard boxes packed inside larger ones of clear plastic. There were lubricants, swizzle rods, a set of guntools, magnificent, enigmatic, satisfying gadgets. Down the other end there were halfadozen pistols, and blunter, longer heavier things, wrapped in pillowcases, huge, menacing … I found myself sweating with desire and panic.

On that first look into Samuel’s bag, this was as far as I could bring myself to go. I pushed them back in and closed the zip and locked it away in our security cupboard. Since then I’d been tempted to look many times, particularly when feeling low, but the sheer enormity of it always stopped me. I’d unlock the cupboard, I’d pat the bag, and something would stop me from going any farther. So much power, so much concentrated damage … Yet I knew I would never hand them in. They were so exciting, so seductive. Their lumpy, masculine shape in the darkness, their rigid bulk, their unspeakable promise.

There was something else to all this, as well. It was a very strange gift that Samuel had given me. He’d given me life, and he’d given me death, because stockpiling guns carried a death sentence.

There was no conscious connection between the bag in the cupboard and my learning to shoot at the Scientists. I didn’t even decide to do it. It was just one of the things that the lads all did, like pumping iron, or wanking, or dancing, like every other men’s club in the country. We didn’t have real guns, of course, just a variety of simulators, and we blasted away at virtual screens, destroying all the people who frustrated us. I found to my surprise I was good at this. I was always the top scorer at the Lonesome Corral, even if Paul occasionally beat me at Red River; I was a crack shot, I had the gene, I was my father’s son, though I’d never used a gun.

*

But they were waiting for me, in that cold stiff bag, and I had a little time to get to know them.

My nights were as busy as my days. I had a new, burning interest to catch up on, ironically a bequest from Sarah. She had left the stuff she didn’t want behind, including threequarters of her books. Remember, Sarah had passions, then dropped them (as she dropped me; as she dropped men). But when we first met, and she was crazy about me, she’d had that shortlived passion for black history, and I had been grudging, awkward, bored …

Now, however, I went into her study, the room that had once been my darling’s study, knelt down and found them. Two crowded shelves. My orderly Sarah sorted books by subject. The Black Diaspora, The Black Experience, The Endless Crossing, Black People in Europe, The Colour of the Present, African Journey …

The titles suddenly glowed with interest. I couldn’t wait to get inside them. Now Sarah was gone, Africa called me. It was there all along, in the flat, in my bones, but it couldn’t speak until I listened.

And so a new inner life began. I started to see our family’s story as part of something stretching back through the centuries. Shadows and secrets when I was a child, halfheard conversations, began to make sense. And my sister, who I’d scarcely seen in two decades (she had moved to Bristol with her halfJamaican husband; the marriage hadn’t lasted, but she had three kids, conceived without problems, my mother hinted) — was the awkwardness between us to do with race? She had drunk too much after our parents’ funeral, and I’d heard her say to my father’s younger sister, who turned up at the church unexpectedly, ‘That boy does not know who he is.’ I’d known it was me they were talking about, but only later did I guess what they meant. Many different things began to sink into place.