Maggie Gee: The Ice People

Never, never …

Never say never.

For a while we were everything to each other, Sarah and I in a box of a room. (Property, of course, was insanely expensive since the government had stopped all further building to protect the last socalled green spaces. But the illicit shanty town still grew, though every day police tore it down. And in the centre of London flybuilders slipped buildings into every tiny gap and garden.) We were grateful for our sweaty box, though it was on the third floor and had no aircon, no voice response, no autoservice. It was primitive, but so were we.

We made love on the floor, which was cooler than the sleepmat, and in the showerroom, and in the kitchen. We slept intertwined, in a slipknot of sweat. That amazing heat of that first summer.

It was always with us, like a third person. If we hadn’t been so madly in love with each other, hungry for each moist salty centimetre of skin, we couldn’t have borne to share that space. The middleaged, the slows, the bits, rarely seemed to touch each other. By June or July, handshakes had shrunk to a tentative tap inside the wrist.

But to us that summer was like a mother, holding us clasped together in the heat. Deep down we were very different people, but for months of bliss we lived like twins. I made iced coffee; she made iced coffee. I showered; she showered. We made love again.

The first time we did it, she said, insanely, ‘Come on, Saul. Let’s make a baby. I know I’ll get pregnant. I just feel it.’

I was naked and stiff in the candle flame (which was strictly illegal because of the fire risk). My sweat ran down like melted wax, but a cold little voice from somewhere else hissed in my ear, escaped my lips.

‘But if we want to travel, Sarah,’ I said. ‘You thought, in a year … once you’re established in the job. We talked about going to the ends of the earth …’ I felt as if our dream might slip away, but perhaps I was looking in the wrong direction. ‘But never mind,’ I added, hastily. I would have done anything she wanted.

I was too late. Her fluid mouth, which had been like an anemone, red and inflamed and fully open, instantly hardened. ‘Of course you’re right. I’ll fix myself up.’

Regret hit me like the back of a spade. I knew I should have trusted her instincts, and we would have made a baby at once, a bouncing, beautiful, healthy baby.

Then she came back towards me, with her copperred hair running in heavy streams across the apples of her breasts, her eyes cast down, her eyes on my penis, and her fingers touched my neck, and I groaned, and forgot.

‘There’ll be other times,’ I said, when we’d finished, and lay entwined in the airless night. All the windows were open, but the breeze never came. Below in the street, car doors slammed, sirens wailed in the distance, a drunk was singing a sentimental song about tomorrow, a can clattered and crumpled underneath a car wheel, a couple continued a distant row — but the sound of her breathing, loud and real in the foreground, turned the sadness of the city into perfect contentment. Or almost perfect.

‘Are you awake, Sarah? There’ll be millions of times —’

‘What?’ she asked me, sleepy, happy. ‘What are you worrying about, Saul?’

‘We’ll have lots of babies, like you said.’

‘Oh that. Thankgod you were sensible.’ She yawned, turned over and fell asleep.

At first we seemed to want the same things. This life in a high poky room in London was temporary, we agreed. We dreamed of making for the last open spaces. Our private mantra was ‘the ends of the earth’. We imagined raising a family by the sea, with forests, fields, clean bright water. The children were running, shouting, towards us.

But two years went by and they had run no closer. Sarah was getting more involved in her job even as she began to find its premises ‘simplistic’, as I heard her tell a colleague in the lift. She was one of the most vocal of the first group of Role Support Workers to be appointed, and because she talked well, and looked good on the screen, she began to be looked on as a spokesperson.

She talked about it to smug presenters. How the children resisted her, how they jeered. The tactics she used to make them take her seriously. How the boys reacted better if she presented herself in a more androgynous way; otherwise they tended to fall in love with her, though of course she didn’t put it like that. (I burned with jealousy when she told me about these great lustful adolescents, staring at her.) On the whole, though, the boys were more receptive to her message. They saw great advantages in the old roles, in having women to love and support them. The girls, on the other hand, were not all that excited about developing their nurturing sides.

She came home very thoughtful after one discussion. She described it to me as she made supper. ‘I want to look after kids,’ one girl had said, a big, loud creature who spoke her mind. ‘I worry in case I never have them. But why should I want to look after a man? They’re not babies. And most of them are hopeless. That’s what Mum says, anyway.’

‘We only want them for one thing, eh girls?’ her friend had shouted, ‘and they’re not much good at that, either,’ and all the girls shrieked with crude laughter, while the boys sat sullen, their faces burning. ‘Slags,’ one shouted. ‘Lesbians.’

The girls were often hostile to Sarah, too. ‘It’s because you’re so beautiful,’ I suggested. ‘They’re jealous’. But ‘Women are more complex than you think,’ she replied. ‘They don’t know how to relate to me, that’s all. I’m not like their mothers or their sisters. I’m telling them things they don’t want to hear. But they’re halfafraid I’m on to something.’

‘Well, you’re the right person to be teaching them,’ I said. ‘You do love a man. And live with one happily.’

There was a little pause before she said, ‘Yes,’ and when I glanced across at her, curious, she left the washingup and came and sat on my lap, looking over my shoulder at the square of night sky.

‘Indifference is the danger,’ she said after a while. ‘And boredom and resentment and a faint sense of guilt that the other sex exist at all. It’s as if we would be happier —’ She paused and tried again. ‘As if they would be happier if the whole of life were segged. Boys feel safe with boys, girls with girls. The downside is, the girls want children. And the boys still want the girls to love them. But they don’t, and so they try to ignore them.’

There had been a lot of shuffling and giggling when she showed them old films about love from the Learning Centre’s midtwentieth-century collection. It was true that they tended to go silent by the end, and she could tell quite well that a lot of them enjoyed it, but they were sheepish about saying so. ‘Boring,’ they chorused, when the lights went up. And yet perhaps this part of the course was not a failure, for they always showed up in strength for the films.

She’d begun to get on better with the girls as she started to understand their point of view. ‘They’re not just yobs,’ she told me. ‘I used to be scared of them because of their violence, the way they beat boys up outside the gates, but they’re quite thoughtful, when you listen to them. I think they have a point about housework, too.’

‘But you enjoy it,’ I said. ‘Partly because you’re so good at it. Your food always looks so beautiful. I mean, you turn that side of things into pure pleasure. I wish those girls could see what you do.’

She didn’t smile, but nodded slowly. ‘It takes a lot of time, though, Saul, you know.’

‘Time well spent,’ I said, kissing her.

(I was a fool. I didn’t spot the signs.)