Maggie Gee - The Ice People

‘You mean, they’re starting again? From scratch?’

‘Yes —’ But I didn’t like his intonation. ‘Luke. They’re not a good thing, you know.’

‘Didn’t say they were,’ he said crossly, and drove on in silence in the blank white heat.

I think I had a tendency to tell him too much. I wanted to save him from my mistakes — I wanted to save him from any mistakes.

‘I know our family wasn’t perfect,’ I said. ‘But at least you always knew we loved you.’

‘Yeah yeah.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Stop going on. I just looked at them. They looked — interesting. I’m not in love with them or anything. Christ.’

Yet all that day he seemed distracted, and I felt he might be thinking of them, those brown, lean, dirty kids, darting out in front of us so we nearly ran them over, and the arc of the missiles against the blue air … his daft idea that they were just lemons, lemons from that green lemon grove.

(Of course they were stones. They meant pain, trouble. I was grown up, I knew the truth.)

We slept that night in the car, all three of us, in the country just outside Malaga. Next day, I knew, was going to be crucial. I would have to bargain with one of the operators in Malaga who sold tickets for the crossing. The system was horrendously complicated, but I had done my research in advance, I was sure I had everything worked out.

I’d been told in England by Paul’s Spanish lover, who had come from Ronda a year ago, that first you bought tickets, for an inflated price, and then you went to sort out the visas, which seemed weird, but you couldn’t get a visa without a ticket from one of a cartel of small boat operators. The cartel dealt ferociously with outsiders, though occasionally you might find a fisherman poor and desperate enough to take you across. If you took that risk, you had to sail without a visa. I preferred to buy from the cartel. According to Manuel, however, quite often, even with the right tickets, the Ghanaian agent wouldn’t grant you a visa, and there was no refund on the tickets. Still, we had a contact, the documents, five million ecus to buy the tickets and square the visa officials, if we had to. So far, luck had been on our side. I told Luke I was confident.

That night I was terrified in the early hours, and the car was musty, frowsty, hot, recalling times I had almost forgotten. I had drunk too much wine and could not sleep. Lying with my spine uncomfortably kinked, I felt the sweat running down my body …

Remembering being young with Sarah, far away and long ago. The long curve of her back, gleaming with moisture in the queer timeless light that came up from the street, the way her hair coiled across my pillow, smelling of some sweet musky perfume, streams of red hair, in the early days, before she cut it, cut me off … I wondered how far she had tried to pursue us. Did she ever trace us as far as France? Did she know that we had crossed the Channel? Did she try to follow us? Or had she been trapped in the civil war? From what Briony said, Sarah’s role in Wicca was precarious; Juno halfloved and halfhated her … Poor Briony. I must have bored her stiff with all my questions about my exwife. She asked me once if I was over her, and I got quite cross and said ‘Of course’, but I’d never ceased to be obsessed, never stopped wanting to understand.

I wanted to know why Sarah couldn’t love me. I wanted to know what was wrong with men, and if women would ever love us again. Whenever I had enough time to be lonely, I still wondered, still brooded.

It was a waste of time, of course. I turned over again, knocking my elbow, and told myself to be sensible, I was fiftyone, I should know better. It was just the heat, something physical, random, that made her memory so sharp that night. Tomorrow we’d leave Euro, if all went well, and say goodbye to her forever. Great, I told myself. Go to sleep.

So Luke would never see his mother again, and I …

But that was all in the past. I turned over, crossly, and banged my knee, and accidentally switched Dora on, which gave me the idea to use her cooling fan. ‘Hallo, how are you?’ she asked, too loudly. ‘Be quiet, Dora,’ I hissed, wearily. I turned on her fan. ‘Everyone’s asleep.’

There was a pause, and I hoped she had obeyed, but in fact she had slipped into her ‘Logical Assessment’ programme. I jumped when she said, in the same bright voice, not at all the right voice for three in the morning, ‘That is not correct. You are not asleep, I am not asleep.’

‘I’m not asleep either,’ Luke said quite loudly from the front seat where he was lying.

‘Damn,’ I said. ‘So no one’s asleep. You should be asleep,’ I told my son. ‘Big day tomorrow.’ But inside my head a tune was playing, unforgettable, ‘Nessun Dorma’ in a sunlit timewarp, and we had just met, and my fate was sealed …

‘Too hot,’ Luke said. ‘Open the window.’

Sarah. How did we lose one another?

I’d thought we were safer with the window closed, on the edge of the town, in a car with French plates, so easily identified as one more group of vulnerable refugees. But Dora’s fan was noisy, and the night was long, and after all I still had my Magnum … And two men together made a lot of methane. I opened the window, said, ‘Go to sleep,’ and tucked the gun underneath the seat where my hand would find it straight away.

With the window open the night came alive. The olive trees rustled, the crickets sang — a high thin noise like electricity, trembling and shrilling through the moonlight, and there was a faint cool waft of green herbs, a promise that we were somewhere near water. I began to relax, to dream, to doze …

In my dream, children were laughing and shrieking. There were three or four of them, playing with Dora and feeding her lemons, which she didn’t like. They laid them on the ground like a clutch of yellow eggs, not understanding she could never reproduce, and Dora told them it was all my fault, and then it was Sarah who was kicking the lemons, she was shouting at me for deserting her, saying I’d forgotten to make love to her, and everything seemed to end with Sarah, would I never get away from her?

I woke up, startled, to hear children laughing, shrieking with laughter, very close. The velvet oblong of open window held something moving, something alive, and as it turned briefly towards the moonlight, it became a face with two bright eyes, and I was half-standing, cursing, shouting, fumbling for my gun, unlocking my door –

I chased them off before I realised who they were. Halfnaked bodies, matted hair. The wild boys again, the kids, the salvajes. They ran as if frightened, but they laughed as they ran, and hooted Spanish words that I was sure were insults.

I got back into the car. Luke was sitting up, staring out of the window at the hot darkness. Neither of us slept much after that, listening to one another’s restlessness, the rustling of the trees, the birds waking up, for there were still birds, still singing, in Spain.

Goodbye, Sarah. Goodbye, my love. I was migrating south, as the swallows did.

It was hard to get up, next morning, with a dry mouth from wine the night before. My right arm was still awkward and painful, and the new aches from sleeping in the car jarred unpleasantly against the old ones. Luke was very quiet, and kept staring around him as if he had left something behind, which he had, of course, or soon would have done.

I had an address, supplied by Paul’s lover. The woman who answered after thirty rings looked frightened, and only halfopened the door. She spoke in Spanish, through thin red lips, and Luke translated to his dunce of a father. We had to go back up into the hills. She told us the name of a little granja where we could find the man we needed.