Maggie Gee - The Ice People

We drove back up a narrow road with bends so sharp we seemed to hang in the air. It was exhilarating, doing it at speed. The sun was already getting hot. Luke was giving me directions, but we soon got lost, and turned up the wrong track into a ghost village. I shouted at him a bit, a lot, of course I was nervous, and he was nervous. Too much was hanging on all this. It was the longedfor end to all our adventures, and instead we found three or four low stone hovels with broken windows and a scrawny cat, yowling at us as I gunned the engine and yelled at Luke, spurting small stones.

Turning the bend as I retraced our tracks I went too fast again and nearly killed us, and this time it was Luke shouting at me, calling me a fool and a maniac and demanding to get out. He was shrieking, screaming, his voice shooting up to soprano again before it sank croaking back to adulthood. He had never gone this far before, and I know I deserved it, but it was a shock. I was used to him deferring to me. Of course I wasn’t frightened of my own son, but the strength of his anger was alarming.

The sun was getting up high in the sky. It blazed like white metal on the distant sea. I drove hellforleather up another steep turning and plunged into a little wood, dark shiny holm oaks, black after the brightness — as I braked, I saw them.

Mother naked .

Why did that phrase come into my mind? A couple, two couples, mother naked, struggling together on the ground, and others lounging by the road, watching — longhaired, slender, animal shapes of more salvajes, lithe, slinking, and they suddenly scattered, as we rocketed through — the watchers scattered but the couples continued, and I saw more clearly, from the corner of my eye, the moment before we shot out of the wood and back into the blinding light, they were fucking, oldstyle, they were making love; naked, oldstyle, natural fucking .

I saw or imagined something else, as well. Behind them, playing on a bank where a tree had fallen and lay uprooted, three or four naked babies played, watched by two women with long black hair.

I felt sick and shaken as I drove on. These animals had babies, and we could not. How on earth would they look after them? It was criminal, it should not be allowed. Sex on the ground, en masse, out of doors …

‘I’m sorry, Luke,’ I said, after a minute. I could see a little white granja in the distance, and this time I was sure we had found our goal. I sneaked a sideways glance at him, but he was staring straight forward, probably embarrassed, fourteen was surely a sensitive age — I remembered my own parents embarrassing me by trying to tell me things I knew.

‘That was horrible, wasn’t it?’ I said, quietly. I wanted him to know I knew he was upset, but I didn’t want to say too much. His expression wasn’t encouraging. ‘If you want to talk about it, that’s fine.’ He said nothing.

‘I’m hungry,’ he remarked abruptly. ‘Starving. That must be the place we want.’

This time he was right, and two hours later we had our tickets, and it was midday, the sun was beating down above us, and Pedro, the short swarthy man who’d sold us the tickets, was giving us directions for getting our visas from a man called Juan who would see us through, since we had tickets from Pedro, and I had spent four million ecus, but it didn’t matter, we had nearly made it. Besides, I’d be able to earn money in Africa. The brighteyed dwarf I had just made rich was expansively friendly after the deal, which made me even surer that I had been rooked, but I didn’t care, with the tickets in my hand, feeling their corners press into my fingers –

‘Too hot for the boy,’ Pedro said, pointing upwards at the unbearable disk of the sun. ‘ El rubio, yes. He stay with me. I give him bread, wine, cheese. Padre go down and get the visas. The boy stay, have siesta, be happy. I have sons, daughters, everything.’

‘Not at all,’ I said, in my fractured Spanish. ‘He comes with me. We stay together. Thank you very much for offering.’

I don’t know if the little man understood, but Luke did, and he wasn’t pleased. ‘I’m not coming,’ he said, very definite. ‘It’s going to be endless waiting in queues. I’d like to stay here. You go, Dad.’

I nearly insisted. And he would have come. I think even then he would have come, if I had shown him how worried I was. But I wanted to give him enough leeway, I didn’t want to play the heavy father, and also I thought about the little man’s daughters, ‘sons, daughters, everything’ . Perhaps Luke wanted to meet the daughters. I only wanted him to be happy. And so I agreed, without a fuss, without showing Luke how hard it was to let him out of my sight for an instant, without showing him how much I cared. And that is why I torment myself, why I shall always torment myself, because we’d quarrelled more in two days than in our whole lives as father and son, and maybe he thought I hated him, maybe he genuinely didn’t realise that I’d thrown everything up for him.

My choice, not his. I don’t reproach him –

I blame myself. Stupid, blind.

My last memory is of Luke’s back, turning away from me, looking outwards, gazing back across the yellow hill to the little black crest of trees on the skyline, the little wood we had driven through, the little wood with those naked creatures. The squat little man who had taken our money put one brown corded hand on his shoulder and grinned at me fatly, showing one gold tooth. ‘Very okay with me, señor ,’ he said, and I nodded, and went away.

Driving back through the wood, I saw no one at all. Maybe we had dreamed it, the whole strange tableau, I told myself, and my spirits rose.

Now it will be plain sailing, I thought, the worst is over, we are home and dry .

I’d imagined getting visas from an embassy, but the address I had been given was a dingy office block. Upstairs — and there were no lifts, only stairs — there was a door which announced, in fading letters, SUBAGENCIA CONSULAR, and then a string of specialities: Tramitación de Visas, Pasaportes , was it? Licences for Importatión/Exportatión , and then, thank heaven, in smaller letters, Immigratión/Emigratión etc . It was all apparently ‘Autorizado’ by the Council of the ‘Estados Ajricanos’ .

Behind it was a warren of openplan offices, with peeling plastic and dusty posters. I asked for the Ghanaian department, but a yellow-faced woman laughed at me. There were three or four Juans in the Inmigración section my friend in the hills had indicated, but in the end I found the right one, or one who acknowledged he knew Pedro. Juan was tall and thin and baked dry, with an acute pot belly like a pregnancy, and he chainsmoked incessantly, the acrid smell of nicotine tobacco that seemed so foreign, so twentiethcentury, for at home, of course, cigarettes meant dope …

Sometimes I long for it. You need it, here. But nowhere in England now is warm enough to grow cannabis .

Juan smoked sourly and never smiled. He was intensely cautious, and unwilling to admit he had a special connection with the man who sold the tickets, but ‘Si, le conozco,’ he said, and shrugged, exhaling like a dying dragon, scaly, leathery poisonous. At last he suggested we go outside and discuss the matter over a beer, but once we were in the open air he changed his mind, and we went to the car, and drove to a deserted factory on the outskirts where I suddenly thought, he intends to kill me, they’ve had our money, now they’ll silence us, but I knew I would never let anyone kill me while Luke was alive and needed me.

He showed no signs of doing anything dramatic, though his smoking in the car nearly choked me to death, and he sat with his arm over the back of the seat, halfturning around so he could see our belongings, his little brown eyes darting fiercely about, picking everything over, valuing, calculating. He told me there was a fee, for a visa. An enormous fee, way beyond our means, nearly all of the million we still had left after paying so much to the crook in the hills. I pointed out how much I had paid for the tickets. He pretended not to understand me, telling me instead how much they were worth, which was a figure ten times less. I told him exactly how much money we had left. He said we would have to pay in kind. I offered our car, since I knew we would never be able to ship it across to Africa.