Maggie Gee - The Ice People

Gun clutched to my body like an awkward baby, I ran round the back. Everything was locked. A shuttered French window was my best bet. I put down my rifle and tugged at the shutters, quietly at first, then fiercely, desperately, bruising my fingers, but the wood didn’t yield, all my life I had been out in the cold …

A great tide of anger swelled my chest, the blood poured into my face, my fingers, I took the old gun by its pitted barrel and began to smash my way in through the shutters, using everything I had, shoulders, boots and the giant swell of rage surging through me, and feeling no pain, I had smashed my way in and ran yelling on with the gun outstretched until I was suddenly in the kitchen and pointing it at a startled crowd of identical, black leatherclad, longhaired men. They were panicking and gibbering and swearing in French and yelling instructions I couldn’t understand, but as long as they grasped that I was going to kill them … They seemed to get the point fast enough: they looked at the gun barrel, backed away and stood in a tight bunch of eight or nine in the corner of the kitchen by the micronizer.

I had got so far, but I wasn’t an expert at holding up a large crowd of men. Where did we go from here? I thought. Do I have to shoot someone to get respect, on the principle I followed when I was a teacher?

‘ Qui êtes-vous? ’ I demanded, aggressively, loud, but my voice did a curious squeak at the beginning which was probably the effect of adrenalin, so I tried it again, rougher, deeper, and waving my rifle in the air. In a small space, a large gun is frightening.

One of them, who was tall and slender with a bald patch on top and long hanks of red hair, said with a slightly shaking voice, but a certain dignity, ‘ Mais je suis chez moi . I live here, Monsieur. So who are you? ’

Oh dear. I had just smashed his shutters. In any case, what did they look like, he and his friends, with their drooping hair and little chains and heavy boots, and their pierced faces dangling small metal symbols?

Of course, I thought, they must be Scientists, the French equivalent of Scientists. They’re a male club, but they grow their hair: fashions are different over here.

All of us must have been sweating with fear. I could smell a strong smell of acrid maleness mixed with the lingering smell of roast chicken. It suddenly felt very hot in the kitchen — I think I was in shock, hysterical.

I pulled myself together. ‘Okay,’ I said. I thought, I’ll have to lock them up, but how, for godsake, where and how? Why was it never like this in the movies? I got no further, because a black violent arm came round from behind, closed over my face, crushed my nose, moved down in an instant to get me by the throat, jabbing painfully into my Adams apple, and I dropped the gun in shock and pain.

Then for what seemed like at least halfanhour but may have only been a few dreadful minutes all of them shouted and punched and kicked me, hard in the ribs, knocking the air out of me, the sickening feeling that something was broken, in the teeth, the lips, the side of the head as I lay on the kitchen floor blinking at the light, I thought, They’ll kill me, of course they will, I came here to die in this small bright hell …

Actually they ran out of steam quite quickly, once they had seen I was thoroughly flattened, and they in turn had restored their amour propre. Perhaps I briefly lost consciousness, for the next thing I remember is lying on the sofa in the room where I had been sleeping with Briony. My teeth and tongue felt jagged and huge and my aching head rolled horribly, as if a rock surged around my brain. I opened my eyes, and the room swung past me, then the first thing I saw was blood on the sofa. A lot of blood. Beside my head. I tried to feel my face with my right hand, but there was an agonising pain in my shoulder. Left, left, I tried my left. It felt oddly reluctant, muddily moving, then I realised my hands were tied together, amateurishly, in front of my body. Slowly, I raised them to my face, and found a long ridged gash on my forehead — I remembered breaking in through the French windows. No wonder I’d frightened the men in the kitchen, I must have burst in dripping blood. Then I saw Briony twenty feet away, her arms jammed behind her back. Her expression was a mixture of anger and terror. She looked at me without seeing me. I tried to wave, but my shoulder stabbed.

Luke wasn’t here. Perhaps they hadn’t found him.

It was easier with my head on the pillow. The rock didn’t roll about quite so much. I could hear a tide of noise and laughter coming from the kitchen or diningroom, explosions of oaths, then more laughter. A moment later, the redhaired man with the long nose and wide cruel mouth looked in through the door to check on us, but I lay doggo, and he went away.

They were making so much noise they would never hear me. ‘Briony,’ I hissed. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Oh, you’re all right,’ she said, and smiled, and suddenly looked a lot more normal, ‘Saul, thankgod, I thought you were dead. I was asleep. I couldn’t do a thing. I don’t think they’ve found Luke .’

The sounds from the other room were getting louder in a way I associated with drink. There were little snatches of song, as well. If they got drunk we might have a chance. On the other hand, drunken men were unpredictable … I thought of their chains, and their pierced ears and noses, the strange little symbols I hadn’t decoded. Perhaps they were sadomasochists. I thought of Luke. My mouth went dry. Foreign perverts. We had to get out.

Then a strange, unsettling sound came soaring through above the noise of the party, and with it, the noise of the party died. A man singing, but this time really singing, steadily, fullthroatedly, with concentration — it was a Puccini aria, mygod, he was singing ‘Nessun Dorma’ — I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Perhaps I would meet Sarah there, like our very first day, my redheaded love, in that glorious hourglass of sun in the foyer …

He couldn’t be a brute or a bad person, how could he, singing out his soul like that? Then I remembered the twentiethcentury Nazis.

‘Is that Turandot?’ Briony whispered, amazed.

But just as the chords were drifting over us, the dividing doors into the nextdoor room where Luke was sleeping burst violently open, and Luke’s muffled voice was shouting ‘I’ll bite you’, and a fat laughing man with greasy blonde hair manhandled him in, arms behind his back, and Luke was naked, I saw to my horror that Luke was completely white and naked. The man had piggy eyes and a loose pale mouth, and he muttered obscenities as he held him –

Without thinking, I was up off the sofa and staggering absurdly towards my son, running without arms, like a skittle on legs, shouting in English, ‘Let him go, you fat pig —’

But that was as far as I got before I fell, landing painfully on my swollen jaw. My teeth crunched sickeningly together, Briony screamed, I had a mouthful of fluff. I tried to roll over and get up again but the fat man kicked me hard in my stomach.

‘So you want me to kill you? Quel con! ’ He hissed, gleefully, pulling my face up by the ear. It was agony, I was much too heavy, my ear would come away from my head — but he suddenly gave a sharp yelp of pain, and let me go. I managed to roll over and saw my son, whitefaced with rage, attacking our tormentor with his fists, panting, yelling, and I tried to help him, wrapping my legs round Fatty’s feet, but with a roar that would have woken the dead he fell over on top of me, winding me completely, and ground his elbow into my neck.

The aria next door faltered to a halt. Before Fatty and I could kill one another they had all rushed in, and seconds later, I recognised, pushed up in my face, my own battered carbine, its sour dead smell, the black foul eyehole in its barrel. I lay quite still. Fatty heaved himself off me, pointing at Luke, making crude remarks about his beauty. And now the nightmare was really upon us. Now we had to wake up, or it was better to die.