Maggie Gee: The Ice People

She let me kiss her, then pushed me away. ‘I’ve got to get on. I must finish my work.’ She was preparing one of a series of reports for the government on the success of the project, which would help them to decide on further funding. Each night she was working till the breeze began to stir, long after I had fallen asleep. I would bring her iced coffee as she bent over her screen, though she started to reject it in favour of water.

‘But you love iced coffee,’ I said to her, hurt. ‘And you know I like to look after you —’

‘Why don’t you, then?’ she cut me off. ‘I used to like iced coffee. But people change.’

And she began to change more obviously, wearing trousers to work instead of dresses, which she said antagonised the girls, and trimming her hair ‘because it gets in the way’. In the way of what? She was going somewhere.

Meanwhile I was online whenever I was able, to update on the latest tech data. Teaching for me had been a temporary plan; now it was time to move back into research, where there was more money, and freedom, and travel. The room seemed smaller when we were both working, two screens like two extra living things in the space, two busy, whispering, hurrying voices. Even so, it felt companionable. I was sure we were working towards the same end, the imagined future of shared freedom. A beach, sanddunes, small feet running.

She made the food; I ate it, gratefully. She washed the clothes; I put them on. I never really noticed that she was doing more (but she could have spoken; she could have complained) until one day we had our first quarrel.

She was standing by the window, drying her hands, preparing to sit down to work after supper. I remember there was a bright sunset. I couldn’t see her face, but the new short shape of her hair made her head sharp and black against the scarlet light.

Something was beginning, something very important, but I didn’t understand it, nor anything else. ‘There’s some weird data here from the Antarctic,’ I said. I was reading from the net about the rate of melting of the icecaps, and the various tech fixes trying to slow it down. ‘Some of these results are coming out skewed.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They seem to show the ice is getting thicker. I wish I were out there. This woman must’ve left out some of the variables.’

‘What if it’s true?’ she interrupted. ‘I’m sick of this heat. I wish it were true. Imagine it. Having fires in winter like my grandmother did on the island … This cold fog used to roll in from the sea, it was like walking through clouds, it was marvellous.’ After Sarah’s violent father left, she’d been sent to stay quite often with her grandma in the Hebrides. Her memories of Coll were absurdly romantic.

‘Or else they’re taking samples from the wrong place,’ I continued. ‘There has to be some obvious error. Why do these people always screw up?’

‘Wrapping up in coats ,’ Sarah went on, ‘like they did in the last century. Not every day the same in this godawful heat. And this godawful baking city.’

That brought me up short. ‘But you like the heat, don’t you?’ She turned and stared. I knew her. I loved her. My mind went back to the data again. ‘It’s curious. Her reports seem to show the icecap thickening in different places. You’re right, it would be amazing, wouldn’t it? I mean, imagine, if global warming ended.’

But a new, unlikeable expression stiffened her face into a righteous mask. ‘I wasn’t serious, Saul. If it’s anything, it’s some kind of fraud by business interests. Trying to prove global warming’s slowed up. So they can go ahead and crash the planet.’

‘It’s just a few data, Sarah. Not enough for a fully fledged conspiracy theory. I don’t believe it either. We agree.’

‘You always think we agree about everything. And could you wipe the bloody table, for once? I’ve got a headache … Must I do everything around here?’

I sat and gaped. That was just the beginning. She hated our room, and the heat, and the city, and living together, and wished I would die, so she could live in the country, and have a big house, and a life, and a baby, and another man who really loved her, unlike me. By the end she was yelling. Then she was sobbing. She was wildly unreasonable, then contrite.

It didn’t mean anything, or so I thought. I made love to her, and her headache went away, and so did that first queer flurry of awareness, light as the first little flutter of snow.

But the ice didn’t go away for long. It returned quite soon, like the nerve in my tooth, the ticking of a faulty electric current.

As Sarah had expected, the industrial lobbies were quick to make use of the discrepant data. ‘GLOBAL WARMING A BLIP’, shouted the newstexts. ‘SCIENTISTS CLAIM POLES NOT MELTING’. This was followed by a flurry of denials from scientists and politicians all over the world, worried that this freak bunch of results would undo every hard-won environmental resolution. Then the denials were challenged by a third group of scientists known to be paid by big business. But no one believed them, no one could envisage that global warming was coming to an end. It was too damn hot, and getting hotter by the day, for the news broke in spring, and soon it was summer … No one took the odd data seriously, and the original scientist who’d published the results kept her head low while she repeated the probes.

Twelve months later it had all been forgotten. We still hadn’t managed to escape from the city. I’d been offered several posts in exciting places; I could have gone to the Galapagos, or Lisbon; I was offered a highly paid job in Africa, helping with a nationwide updating of screens in Ghana. I longed to accept the last job in particular, knowing how proud my father would have been, and knowing I’d been chosen partly for my ancestry, the gift I was so proud of and had never used. The interviewing board had an atavistic sense that my Ghanaian blood made me less likely to cheat them. (They were right. I wanted to pay my dues, and my father’s dues, and my grandfather’s.)

But I turned them down, and I don’t blame Sarah. Perhaps that means I do blame Sarah. She told me yes, of course I must go, use my talents, live my life. ‘You’ve been dreaming of travelling for as long as I’ve known you. Go, and I’ll come out and visit you.’

‘Come with me,’ I said, but she wouldn’t.

She was fronting a screen show called Gendersense, dubbed ‘Utter Nonsense’ by Conserver pundits disappointed by the way her position had changed from the early days of her Role Support work. Now she saw her mission as ‘giving a voice to the different views of men and women’, ‘exploring the options for separate development’ and ‘reflecting the range of the fertility debate’, to quote from the twopage synopsis for the series she submitted to Brainscreen at the start.

I read it as I set the table one evening. I was heating up some Thai food for her. She had come home late, and I had made an effort. I wanted her to be pleased with me; there were generefreshed snowberries and cream for dessert. ‘Darling,’ she said. ‘I really love you.’ But I couldn’t understand this thing she had written.

She laughed when I asked her what it all meant. ‘Nothing, really. I just have to sound — well — challenging, but not too controversial.’

‘Are you going to tell them what you believe?’

‘What?’

‘I mean, about men and women loving each other. And living together. Then the babies will come.’

She nodded abstractedly. Her cheeks were full of food. ‘Mmm. But it has to sound a bit more theoretical than that. I mean, it is Brainscreen. Look — it’s not about us. Please understand, Saul, it’s just a job. We’re going to live together, and have a child — one day. I mean, I know we shall. But most people don’t live like us —’