Maggie Gee - The Ice People

‘When?’ I asked, ‘when will you be ready? I’d like to try now.’ She wouldn’t answer.

She looked different these days from when I first met her. More beautiful perhaps, cooler, more refined, the softness leaving her mouth and cheeks, her jaw more pronounced, her nose more sculptured. She hardly had time to teach any more, but she kept a loose attachment to give her credibility. She wore crisp white trousersuits and structured dresses that bared the long neck under her groomed red hair. She was known as a beauty, now, on the screens, though she avoided gossip and photographs, and particularly frowned on any mention of me, or snatched papshots of the two of us together.

‘You’re not ashamed of me, are you?’ I asked her that evening. She was looking like a model, lean and contained, in a pale yellow suit with combat trousers.

‘No — of course not. How could I be? But perhaps you could sometimes wear a shirt. I mean, we’re not nineteen any more.’

‘That’s why I think we should try for a baby.’

She looked thwarted, as though I were being obtuse, but surely she was being obtuse? ‘I’d just like to earn enough for us to have a house. Move out of the city. Then the child could have a garden.’

‘You mean, stay in England?’ I was dismayed.

‘Don’t take me so literally,’ she snapped. ‘I just think we should be practical. You’re a dreamer, Saul. I have to plan for us both.’

‘I thought we’d already made plans,’ I said. ‘Travel, remember. Children. Freedom. I could earn good money with my research.’

‘Well, they don’t give a crash about gender in Ghana,’ she flared at me. ‘Have you thought about that? Do you ever think? I couldn’t do my work in Ghana. I couldn’t earn any money in Ghana.’

‘Look, I gave up Ghana, you know I did. But I could support you. I could,’ I begged. ‘It’s what we used to talk about. You could be a mother, I could be the man … I’d really like to look after you.’

To my surprise, she began to cry. ‘It sounds beautiful, when you say that. I don’t know why I’m crying, I must be going soft … Of course I want a baby, more than anything.’

‘Then why don’t we try? Let’s try right away!’

Her precise new face was blurred with tears. She stared up at me from her seat in the window. She had tugged her tailored hair out of shape; it looked softer, more human, fraying at the edges. ‘I’m afraid, I think,’ she said, slowly. ‘I don’t want to fail, like everyone else.’

And then I was a man, and she was a woman. ‘I’ll make you pregnant. Of course I will. Just let me finish looking at this data … I’m tying up loose ends on that hoax last year.’

‘Not the Antarctic thing? I thought that was all forgotten?’

‘This woman is testing her ice thicknesses again. It has to be done at the same time each year.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ve got things to do. We’ll meet at bedtime and — have a go.’

Not very romantic, but I didn’t care. My heart was singing. Now life would begin. I flicked on my screen and stared at it through a brilliant film of happiness, scanning automatically across the sites till I came to Professor Raven’s homepage.

The data was back, I registered at once. Good, so now this thing would be buried. The Globecorps would have to try another tack. The future would be hot; hotter; hottest … I hope our baby won’t be hairy, I thought, particularly if she’s a girl … Yet something on the screen was demanding attention, pulling me down from my place on the ceiling.

Improbably, it had happened again. Raven’s second set of data showed the icesheets still thickening. The results this time were more dramatic, an increased rate of change upon the year before. The report was concise, but Professor Raven had added a footnote. ‘I am of course aware that these results will be scanned by screens all over the world and made use of for various ends by the Globecorps. I am not responsible for their interpretations or misinterpretations, but I can vouch for the data’s accuracy. Sceptics might care to crossrefer to Achtheim, Dr Gisele, Alpine Glacial Movement, and Geronimo, Professor Jean, A Puzzle for the Icebreakers.’

When I finally lay naked with Sarah in my arms, more excited perhaps than I had ever been since the first time I lay with her, my love was shivering with nervousness, and as I stroked her arms and breasts and felt the small goosebumps begin to subside I thought about cold, and the sheets of ice, the vast fields of ice where the sun never set, and how strange and beautiful it would be if the great bluewhitenesses were creeping back. The children came running over the ice, shrieking with laughter, clutching each other, sliding down to the frozen ocean. Were they coming nearer? I still couldn’t see. The light on their faces was intense, blinding.

‘The ice is growing,’ I whispered to Sarah. ‘It wasn’t a mistake. The ice is thickening. Our little boy might even see snow.’

‘Our little boy!’ She kissed me, tenderly. ‘No, you’re deluded. We’ll have a girl.’

‘Twins,’ I said, as I pushed inside her. ‘A boy and a girl. Snowbabies.’

And so we began on our epic of conception. The details blur, but it took ten years. Ten years of learning to eat my words.

It was as if we shared two different lives, one all success, the other slow failure.

In our waking life, we pursued our careers, began to make money, moved from the room to a threebed flat, then a fourbed flat in a better part of London, less fun but safer, a flat where we could finally have a study each, if we managed with only one guest bedroom.

Sarah, after all, had no family to speak of. Her father was untraceable, and she wasn’t on speaking terms with her mother, who was on her fourth marriage, to a twentyyearold skater. Perhaps that’s why she clung to me. It’s certainly why she adored my parents. The guest bedroom was for Samuel and Milly to come and marvel at their son’s success.

And I was successful, though I felt a little trapped. I divided my time between working on a consultancy basis for the Learning Centre where I first met Sarah, and researching applications of nanotechnology for one of the two big Nanocorps. I felt proud of what we were doing, designing minute immune machines, ‘like minisubmarines’, I told Sarah, which could travel through the blood and identify and destroy an enormous range of viruses and bacteria. My friend Riswan was the medical star; my part was the protein engineering. True, it turned out later that many of the agents we’d targeted for destruction had benign effects that we hadn’t understood, so the application was never used, but those were the early, heroic days.

I earned a lot, but Sarah earned more. Sometimes it seemed she never stopped working. And she made the flat beautiful; it mattered to her. She would come home exhausted from performing, then work for two hours cleaning and dusting till the flat was immaculate. At first I used to try to stop her, but that made her crosser than cleaning did.

‘Someone has to do it,’ she would say.

‘Sure. The cleaner. That’s why we have one.’

‘But she can’t make it look like a proper home. She doesn’t love it, like I do. It’s … our nest.’

But she wasn’t laying eggs. My mind went blank. ‘All the same, you’re exhausted. Stop.’

‘I want it to look nice.’

‘What can I do to convince you?’

‘You can’t convince me. I suppose you could help me.’

‘Okay then.’ I probably sounded reluctant. I’d had a tough day at the office; I wanted to sit and chill onscreen. ‘I mean, if I must, but you worry too much. The flat looks perfectly all right to me.’