Maggie Gee - The Ice People

The sound of his hooves, a heartbeat drum, grew steadily fainter on the steep road down.

I know it was him. I am utterly certain. God’slove brought my son to me. I suspect he had been watching the car, watching me sleeping, perhaps, when I woke. And though he didn’t want to talk he raised one hand, I am almost sure I saw one hand rise and fall in the moonlight, but the moving shadows blurred it all. He was saying ‘Stay back’, or else ‘Goodbye’, or maybe it was a kind of blessing. I think so, yes. A blessing. Kindness.

It was all I had, and I passed it on, my small thin story, to the boy’s mother, hoping it wouldn’t rub away in the telling, hoping she wouldn’t disbelieve or sneer. But the new, tired Sarah didn’t sneer.

We sat beneath the small dark canvas of Cranach’s The End of the Age of Silver, under the naked generations suffering and struggling in the cold, ejected from paradise, awkward, knowing. The old men raged and fought in the background, the women held the children away from us, their bodies both virginal and erotic, curves of exclusion, silvered, serpentine …

The gallery grew colder. It was time to close, but it was hard for us to leave each other. An aged guard with a long grey moustache came and told us we had to go. Some last little puff or squirm of anger made me say to her, as she got up and stroked her hair with a remnant of vanity, an echo of beauty, ‘You were wrong, you know. You Wicca women got it wrong.’

‘You were wrong too, you Doveloving men. Whatever happened to that thing you had, the one I was so absurdly jealous of …?’

‘I was never sure that you were jealous … Dora. Dodo. She’s still with me. If you want her, you can have her. She’s got Luke’s voice. Singing Figaro. . .’ (It would be all right, I had a sudden surge of hope, Sarah had been jealous, that was all it was, we were on the verge of a new understanding.) ‘Singing Voi, che sapete che cosa e amor … you who know what love is, ladies …’

But she’d stopped listening, her face stiff with distaste. ‘You know we tried to exterminate them. Wicca, and the clowns who followed us. The public didn’t know the half of it. We had to seek out all the thirdgenerations, they were breeding at random, eating cats, children … I think they might have wiped us out. Before the ice could wipe us out. In Euro they say they’ve bred like rats.’

‘They exaggerate.’ But I remembered the mutants, pouring over the musicians like a tide of excrement. Could they have been right, those wrongheaded women?

‘They were the children of our brains, not our bodies.’ She went on, insistent, tubthumping — and we had so little time left together.

‘I did remove Dora’s replicator module.’ Did it still matter, after all these years?

‘But I bet she still has her SD and R.’

‘SD and R?’ I had forgotten. ‘Oh yes. SelfDefend and Recycle, isn’t it? I’m pretty sure she’s never used it.’ The Doves’ ‘emergency defence’, so horribly effective in the French mutants.

‘Someone else could.’ She’d gone slightly pink, rising to the battle, keen to win.

‘They couldn’t,’ I said. ‘Dora has personalised Voice Recognition. Just me, and you, and Luke, and Bri —’ but I stopped in time, and she didn’t hear, ‘so there’s no danger.’

‘They were very dangerous,’ she insisted. ‘You men made a pact with the devil.’ She was growing theological, in her old age, and the set of her chin, pulling threads of tension in the flesh underneath where the skin would never be smooth again, and the slightly hectic glint in her eye, reminded me she would never stop fighting, we would never stop fighting as long as we lived, these late generations of men and women, shivering, struggling in the frozen grove. But the clock struck three. We would go, we would pass. I remembered the little oak wood in Ronda, and how the wild children, who I thought were fighting, lay naked in the cool grass to make love.

(And it frightened me. Too close, too tender. I thought I was shocked, but I was envious.)

Now I see something else instead. Everything that lives is good. Everything that freely lives. Even Kit, even the wolves. You can never see it when you’re afraid.

Outside the gallery the wind was bitter, and little flurries of snow blew up and stung our noses in the fierce white light. She looked older, so much older out here, and I dreaded to think how I must look to her. The colour of her hair was flat, unnatural, and I remembered how she’d once valued ‘ the natural’.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked my old love. ‘Will you be all right?’ For the snow was getting thicker, and the wintry light would not last long. I had some vague sense that I should look after her, should make sure at least that she got safe home, but her face stiffened, maybe thinking (wrongly) I wanted to go home with her, maybe resenting my protective tone — ‘I live Southside,’ she said, to my surprise. ‘All Wicca members were banned from the north after the fighting. We had our own enclave in the south for a bit, but I don’t know what happened — I think I grew bored … Believe it or not, I live with my mother now. Or she lives with me. She’s very old. I think perhaps it’s what I always wanted. Except I wanted her to look after me.’

I saw, or thought I saw, her old wounds. I suppose I was still in love with her, and some nonsense came spurting out of my mouth, ‘I wanted to look after you, you know —’

‘Why didn’t you, then?’ she said in a flash, some halfremembered tart refrain, and she smiled, showing her familiar teeth, sharp, slightly yellowed, in that cold light, by age and the painful whiteness of the snow.

A taxi floated past us, vague in the storm, but its orange light caught my eye at the last and I hailed it for her, I could at least do that. But she laughed at me, not a very kind laugh, or perhaps I should say, not a happy laugh, and said, ‘I never use them. They won’t come Southside. When I can’t afford a minicopter, I always go under.’ Then she turned and set off towards the station, trying to be jaunty, though the newly fallen snow made the ground slippy and she skidded for a moment before she got her balance and walked off stiffly, red head held high.

No, I must tell you the whole story. As I ran along the pavement to grab the taxi I found myself only a metre behind her, reached out my hand, touched her shoulder and whatever she felt — I didn’t care — I took her in my arms and hugged her, crushed her stiffness against my heart, and her mouth avoided my clumsy lips but at the last, I don’t know why, she turned just a little, and her lips were like paper.

Draw a line under us. Finish us off. Sorceress. Maneater. Bitch. Beloved –

If she read this, would she understand?

I am stuck in the past, moping, mourning, when Kit bursts in on me in a rage.

‘What hell you wanking bloody play at?’ he demands, running right up to me, stocky, smelly, his face red with anger, his black eyes gleaming. His hairline makes a low V on his forehead. He snatches my notebook from my hand and stares at it, frustrated, right way up, upside down. He notes, I imagine, that I have drawn a firm black line underneath my story –

No, not the epic I once intended. And yet it is finished. All but finished. Saul, the Hero, says it is done.

‘You finish, wankpig?’ he shouts at me. ‘Because now our babies all die, thanks you!’ He shakes my notebook so forcefully that its pages flap like inadequate wings, and I snatch it back with a frightening roar, a roar I mean to be frightening, a roar that would have frightened him once, but it sounds weak to me, weak and old, and he looks furious, not frightened.