Maggie Gee - The Ice People

She was staring at me, letting her frank blue eyes run over my neck, my arms — and was she looking at the curly hair on my chest? ‘You have a slightly old-fashioned look yourself,’ she said, and smiled. ‘We could almost coteach.’

Then neither of us could look at each other, but I could feel, a centimetre away, her small white hand beside mine on the desk, burning into me like a naked current. We stood transfixed in a cube of sunshine, saying very little, staring at the glass where hands had begun to wave at us, gesturing, impatient, frustrated, irrelevant. I hardly saw them, because I was with her.

Was it ten minutes, or an hour, before the building yielded? By that time, I was falling in love with Sarah.

And Sarah? I’ll never know about her, but she told me later she felt the same way.

We said very little, and a lot. That we both had dreams of escaping from the city. That both of us needed to escape our families. That we both wanted children, and expected them. We couldn’t say the word ‘children’, of course, which would have meant ‘sex’, to both of us. I said ‘I’d like a family of my own, one day,’ and she said ‘Of course,’ and smiled at me.

‘I like you,’ she said, although it was obvious.

‘Why?’ I said, feeling happiness spread through my body like oxygen.

‘I like the look of you. You’re — different. You’re not just English, are you? What are you? French? Spanish?’ She looked straight at me. Her curiosity was like a kiss. Then she lit up. ‘You’re beek, aren’t you. You must be, of course! Tell me I’m right.’

And she had seen the thing that I wanted her to see. Beek was short for bicolor, the French insult that black people themselves had taken over to mean ‘mixed race’, and she used it so easily.

‘Yes, I’m beek. Most people don’t notice. My father’s halfAfrican, my mother was white.’ Had I ever said it straight out before? She made me feel I could be myself.

‘That explains why — well, you look good to me.’ She finished the sentence in an awkward rush. ‘I’m very interested in all that. It was part of my Ethnicities diploma course.’

I’d always disliked the word ‘ethnicity’ — it sounds like someone cleaning their teeth — but on her lips, it seemed tolerable. ‘You’re English, I suppose.’

She shook her head fiercely. ‘I’m Scottish and Cornish. Not an English drop of blood in me.’ (Which must have been nonsense, but it sounded exciting.)

‘Did your parents have red hair?’ I looked at her hair. It was like some glossy animal fur. What couldn’t a man do with hair like that? Wrap it around him, burrow into it.

But something was happening outside the door. Two beings had arrived in brilliant spacesuits. Somewhere to the rear my colleagues hovered, leaving a clear space between themselves and the spacemen. ‘The emergency services are going to invade,’ I told her, thinking now it will be over.

‘I hope they don’t sack me for crashing the system.’

‘Come dancing with me tomorrow night.’ I had to say something or lose her for ever.

‘Mygod, just look at the size of those vappers!’ she said, amused, and then suddenly alarmed. ‘Are they going to use them with us inside?’

And then I remembered; it was mirrorglass. We could see out but they couldn’t see in. The people outside weren’t waving to us, they were simply beating on the glass in frustration. No one would know there was anyone inside. We were in danger; she was in danger.

I tried to sound calm. ‘Let’s get out of range.’ But the spacemen were aligning their vappers with the doors. Something earthshattering was going to happen. Without thinking, I grabbed Sarah by the shoulders, flung her to the ground, and fell on top of her, covering both our heads with my outstretched elbows. She felt soft and small, and smelled of sweat, and flowers, and part of me registered these pleasant things as most of me waited for the end. One second, two, three, four –

I felt her struggling, her small steel fists. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she panted, furious. ‘You’ve torn my dress. Get off me, you idiot!’

Then the building spoke. Both of us froze. ‘…contained,’ it said. ‘Waiting to code. Waiting to code. Good morning. Please approach and code. Please show all codecards so we can help you.’

It was over. The lift doors glided back like silk. I rolled off Sarah, and patted her placatingly. Outside, the silver spacemen laid down their vappers, and the crowd behind them began to push forwards.

‘I was trying to save your life,’ I gabbled. ‘They couldn’t see us. It’s mirrorglass.’ She was straightening her dress and staring at me. Her pupils were pinprick small with shock, and her skin was webbed with pink where I’d clutched her. ‘I was trying to shield you with my body.’

She suddenly stopped frowning and touched my arm. As the entrance slid open, to great whoops and cheers, I watched her pupils expand and darken. ‘Why should you?’ she said. ‘I mean — you’ve only just met me. I mean, you were risking your life for me.’

I thought about that in the split second that was left. I couldn’t say ‘Because I’m in love with you,’ for fear she would think me completely mad.

The thing I did say seemed simple, obvious, though normally I would never have said it. ‘Because I’m a man,’ I told her. ‘Because I’m a man, and you’re a woman.’

That was the way it began with us. An absolute feeling of rightness together. My colouring, my size, my sex. They all felt right as never before. They married her smallness, softness, toughness. She reminded me a little of my mother, slight but enduring, loving, fierce, good with her hands, helpful, maternal. She was — womanly, that was the only word, old-fashioned though I knew it was. So I could be manly, as I wished to be.

‘You beautiful man,’ she said, when she first saw me naked, not long after. No woman had ever said that to me.

‘But I’m so — hairy,’ I said, humbly. I did feel humble. She was too good for me. Seeing her like this, it was obvious. Her small sweet breasts. Her delicacy. I was halfashamed of my hairiness. The pressures against it were overwhelming; ninetyninepercent of men were smooth and neat, displaying their gleaming narrow bodies in clubs, corrugated chests that shone like oil and only the faintest grey fuzz on their scalps. I was an ape by comparison, a pelt of blackness from chest to groin.

‘Esau was an hairy man,’ she whispered, gently running her fingertips through my chest hair, going down, lower, lower, bliss, till she reached the place where I was hard and hairless, and she bent her head and kissed me there, then looked up and smiled — ‘See, you’re smooth as well.’

Such happiness. Such a time of peace.

Only one thing was less than perfect, and I put that down to my stubbornness, a streak of pride and resentment that had sometimes got me into trouble at school. She was wild about me, everything about me, as she assured me earnestly, running her hands over my lips, my nose, telling me I was the first beek she had slept with. (How very dated that slang seems now!) She seemed to think about that more than I did. It must have made me more romantic, my mixed race background, my unusual looks. She wanted me to read the essays she had written for the Ethnicities part of her diploma, and I tried, I tried, but it was very solemn, and the language incomprehensible.

She ordered what seemed like dozens of films about black history, and urged me to watch them. The Black Diaspora, The Black Experience, Caliban in London, African Journey … She saw at least half before she got bored, but I made excuses not to watch them with her, I didn’t want her telling me stuff, teaching me stuff, about my past, I wanted her to love me for myself, I didn’t want to be part of black history, I needed to be myself, her man. ‘I’ll use them later,’ I said, meaning never. And she sulked a bit, but then she gave up. We made love so much, there was no time to quarrel.