Maggie Gee - The Ice People

I tried to put my arms around her, to steady her as she wept and screamed. She seemed to be wearing very little; she must have woken up warm from sleep. At first she resisted me, then all at once she clung, weeping and cursing, ‘You shit, you shit … You hateful bloody man, how dare you blame me? If it wasn’t for me Luke wouldn’t be here, I hate you, I hate you … ‘

But then it seemed she didn’t hate me. Her nails were digging into my back, hurting me but pulling me closer, she was pushing her head up under my chin, butting at me, nuzzling me, clawing the muscles of my arms yet pressing herself fiercely against me. I was confused, then less confused, for this was the thing I had dreamed of happening, happening now, in the cold, in the moonlight. But I smelled myself, ‘I’m dirty,’ I choked, ‘Briony, let me go and wash,’ then, gabbling, for she was younger than me, I wasn’t a bad man, nor irresponsible, ‘I am okay, I haven’t had sex for over two years, and I take my hiv boosters regularly,’ but she was pummelling my chest, pulling my shirt off, plucking at my trousers, oh, oh please, easing down my pants, and my penis rose like a seal into her hand, quite separate from me, happy, hungry, my penis was in Briony’s hand, and she ringed it, rubbed it, silent, greedy, and then she led me through to the salon where the moonlight poured through the open shutters and perched herself on the edge of the table, that massive, funereal French table, and without some wretched calculation about ovulation to kill all pleasure, opened her legs, and pulled me inside her, silently, hungrily, I was inside her, without a condom, gloriously naked, the first woman other than Sarah in fifteen thirsty years of marriage, and it was so warm, so wet, so tight — I came with a little cry like a baby after thirty seconds at the most, and then it was ‘Sorry, Briony, sorry. Thank you, Briony. That was so …’ I felt shattered, and tender, and slightly ashamed, and also fucking wonderful. Fucking wonderful. My blood zinging.

Then she tugged down my hairy head, I always liked women to touch my head, to stroke my hair, to knead my scalp, as Sarah did, years ago, when she loved me — and Briony nudged my face to her lips, the hot small knot of her clitoris, salty, slippery with my sperm, and I worked with my tongue until she came, in a long diminuendo of dove-calls, her hips twitching helplessly against the hard table.

And then she cried, but with release from tension, and I groped my way through and found her a blanket and wrapped her in it, and told her again how sorry I was if I’d frightened her that evening. She said nothing (I’ve learned that slowly — it’s never enough just to say you’re sorry), and both of us wished we could drink a cup of coffee without having to gather wood for a fire … So many things we once took for granted.

Bless you, Briony. Forever bless you, though I’m sure you acted half out of fear, to placate the brute, to tame the monster. It was something — natural, instinctual. We were all going back into the dark again. The return of the secret life of the caveman.

And yet she slept in her separate room, and next morning, which was sunny, she had gone back to being normal, friendly, asexual, although I gave her longing looks that I hoped my sulky son wouldn’t notice.

I thought he was sulking. In fact he was sad. Because Luke was quiet and wouldn’t look me in the eyes, I thought he was still angry about my fit of temper. But it was his voice he was thinking about … It’s never about you, with teenagers.

I had woken full of energy, and gone to find fuel. I managed to buy proper French bread from an old man in the village three kilometres away. He was a handsome, vigorous old chap with a huge drooping growth on one of his eyelids, the kind of thing we were getting used to now doctors were just for the megarich. According to him, only the young had left the village. ‘The grandparents stayed. We love our village. Life goes on as normal here. Except it’s … quieter. And colder.’ I bought pastries, too, for an inflated price, but they were light as an eggshell, and fluffed with fresh cream, and I wanted Luke and Briony to like me. He told me where to go to buy fuel. It wasn’t so easy to find in the north, where the unseasonal cold had spoiled the cannabis harvest, but the family to whom he directed me were growing in bulk, hydroponically. I asked them for three or four cans of methanol, then found to my embarrassment I’d left most of my money in the jacket I had taken off the previous night. They looked at me with the blank fear and hatred they must have got used to feeling for cheats. I was weak, for some reason, I didn’t argue, perhaps because the old man had been charming, perhaps because Briony and I had made love, I just paid for the topup of my tank and left, instead of shooting them and keeping the fuel.

When I got back, I found Briony was up, and washing a duvet she’d found in a cupboard. ‘We don’t want to drag that thing along,’ I told her, but ‘It’s natural goosedown, worth a fortune, and light as a feather,’ she told me, happily, bundling it out into the drying wind. ‘Might be useful in the Pyrenees. In any case, it’s too good to leave behind —’ She’d turned back into a chaste, respectable housewife, but I watched her hips as she disappeared.

I burned the broken table to make a fire and boiled some water for coffee and to cook the duck eggs we’d plundered yesterday. We had a tasty breakfast, with that and the baguettes, though in a perfect world there would have been French butter, unsalted, creamy, delectable –

But no, the old world had not been perfect. We were finding new skills, new strengths, new closeness.

‘I ought to record myself,’ Luke suddenly said, as he sat eating his choux at the end of breakfast, while Briony was stretching more damp washing on some overgrown rose bushes in the sun. His voice sounded perfectly normal again, that high clear treble I had always been used to — I’d halfexpected that last night’s row might have cracked it forever, with the strain. But it had to signal the beginning of something. ‘Mum’s got all the recordings, hasn’t she?’

‘Well — I’ve got two. Years out of date.’

‘I’ve got to get to some recording equipment. I don’t mind my voice going, but it’s sort of weird … Juno made me feel as if I were my voice.’

‘Juno was a psychopath,’ I said. ‘I don’t see how we get to recording equipment. I suppose there are still places in the big cities …’

‘We have got recording equipment ,’ said Briony, pausing like a dancer, both hands uplifted, speaking above the snap of the sheet in the wind. ‘Of course we have. We’ve got Dora, haven’t we?’

‘I’m not giving Dora my voice,’ Luke mumbled. And yet, they’d been getting on better of late. Luke had been less standoffish and suspicious, more interested to find out what she could do, and Dora had stopped automatically malfunctioning whenever she recognised his voice.

He thought about it, and then he said, ‘Is the RV good quality?’

‘Perfect,’ I said. ‘With this model, and everything later … It was a bit dodgy with the early Doves.’

‘Great,’ he said, and swallowing his bun, he ran inside to try it out.

Perhaps that was the point, when Luke started singing. Distant stars must have paused and listened. Sometimes, mygod — my God exists. As blessing, not as half a curse.

Sometimes I think of the earth from the air — how the blues and browns the first astronauts saw have slowly gone under the spreading silver, reflecting the sunlight back out into space, now an icebright ball with a bluebrown girdle, a narrowing band of grass and trees, a shrinking stretch of unfrozen water …