Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

When the clouds clear, it does not get warmer. It gets much, much colder—cold to cause glaciation and kill mammoths and drive migrations in the Neanderthal men whose existence the Evangelist denies, thus inspiring a brief but frantic exploration of the library for malprinted or heretical Bibles and fierce debate about the nature of Esau. Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.

The alcohol thermometer in Gonzo’s garden cracks, and Old Man Lubitsch has to arrange a curious external heating system to preserve his bees, which he does using piles of compost which are in the grip of an exothermic reaction (although Gonzo’s father calls it an eczozermic ree-ekchon ), which means that the process of decomposition is generating heat. Old Man Lubitsch carefully creates piles of warm rotting garden goo around his bee houses, and the smell is curiously pleasant and grassy rather than rotting and deliquescent, but Ma Lubitsch does not approve and mutters darkly about dratted bugs and how much honey can one eat in a lifetime anyway? But Old Man Lubitsch takes this in good part and hugs her—he actually gets his arms around her and lifts her off her feet—and she swats at him and demands to be put down before he does himself a harm. The Lubitsch house retains its unorthodox external heating arrangements (although Ma Lubitsch extracts a promise that they will be gone when the spring comes, so as to avoid any possibility of explosions). On the following Sunday, and for the first time ever, Megg Lake freezes over.

Megg Lake is an oxbow, a hoop of water named for the Greek letter , one of the few Greek letters of which the Evangelist approves, the others being in some mystical way gateways to licentiousness. It is constantly refilled by an underground river which flows down from the Mendicant Hills, and when there is a great deal of rain, the lake bubbles over the rocks at the western end and finds its own floodways to the sea. At any time, Megg Lake is a choppy and turbulent body, ripples sprinting out from the centre where the water boils up, and reflecting off the craggy shores to make (according to our geography textbooks) a pattern of constructive interference where the splashes collide and produce waves, and destructive interference where their interaction yields little patches of calm. But now it is frozen, a broad grey-blue crescent of bowed ice, thick and growling.

Ma Lubitsch parks the car. It is a 4 × 4, and it is completely forbidden to Old Man Lubitsch, who (on the occasions when life’s exigencies place him, against his spouse’s better judgement, behind the wheel) drives it like a racing car, in a pair of nasty shades, and draws admiring glances from women younger than his suit. Ma Lubitsch brings the beast to a halt by the lake, and Gonzo scrambles over me or possibly through me in his urgency, and then we are all unloading the car. Tackle box, check. Rugs, check. Charcoal burner, check. Ice saw, check. This family—extended family—is going Eskimo fishing, something Old Man Lubitsch and Ma Lubitsch used to do back when she was a sylph-like thing with no hips and he was a bull of a man, short and powerful as a tropical storm, and my, how she adored him. And from the immodest twinkle in her eyes, at least as much of them as I can see through folds of skin and squint and woollen comforter, she still does, and shall do evermore. It is only the ghost of one soldier that stands between them, and even this is not a separation, but a strange sad bridge and a deep mutual knowing like nothing else. Marcus Maximus Lubitsch, tennis player and able cook, laid to rest now, and visited sporadically in a well-kept corner of the churchyard at the edge of town. At this moment, Marcus is present. Even Gonzo, thigh-deep in snow, and flailing gleefully at the powder, quiets his voice and shares the solemn smile which passes between his parents.

Ma Lubitsch lights the burner, but she uses somewhat too much fluid and the thing fairly erupts, singeing her muffler. She gives a great shout of Polish obscenity and then looks guiltily around, but there are no linguists within thirty miles, and she giggles (more constructive and destructive interference, no doubt, in the pattern of her wobbling fat, but this is concealed), and Old Man Lubitsch goes to get the ice saw.

Megg Lake’s ice is not lightly to be cut. It is oddly clear and hard, more like glacial ice (which is pressurised and squeezed over thousands of years) than lake ice (which is fraught with cracks and rivulets). Gonzo’s father assails the ice with the saw—initially near the shoreline, but latterly further out when it becomes apparent that there’s no earthly danger of it breaking—but to little effect. Old Man Lubitsch hacks away, but this is serious frozen stuff, ice like Arctic ice, with a bad attitude and a stubborn mien. It is ice, in fact, a lot like Old Man Lubitsch himself, who was hounded from his home town for being cheeky to the communists, and then refused return when he was cheeky to the new fellas in much the same way. Perpetual exile, letter-writing malcontent, “Furious and disappointed of Cricklewood Cove,” Gonzo’s father will not concede. He will get through this ice if he must declare an eternal feud upon it. And so it is that Gonzo comes to his aid with a plan.

In the normal run of things, I am Gonzo’s plan-confidant. It is to me he brings his worst ideas, and it is my job to squash them and propose, as an alternative to connecting an electric torch directly to the mains power so as to make a lightsabre, some activity less mortally perilous. Today, however, Gonzo’s plans receive an audience less jaded and, perhaps, less sensible. Parents dote. Fathers, in particular, indulge their sons in matters of manly comportment and tasks which approach the sacred duties of the heteropatriarch, such as shooting enemies, blowing things up and hauling mighty armfuls of dead animal across the white wastes to feed the tribe. This situation—the possible defeat of the clan hunters by an inanimate icecap—falls broadly into these categories, and thus it is that when Gonzo proposes a simple solution, swift and sure, Old Man Lubitsch gets a look in his eye. It is a look which says that, when he was Gonzo’s age, he had some idea of similar magnificence, and this jewel was crushed beneath a weighty grown-up heel. But here he, Gonzo’s father, is in a position to carry through the deed, and in one stroke to avenge himself and demonstrate a more enlightened understanding of his son’s unbridled genius than was shown to him. Grizzled and rugged, red flannel shirt and preposterous fur hat upon his head, Old Man Lubitsch looks down benignly on his child.

“Say it again!” says Gonzo’s father proudly.

“We should use the lighter fluid,” says the infant anarchist, “and burn a hole in the ice!”

Ma Lubitsch sighs a little sigh, but trapped within the matriarch it seems there is still a breathless groupie falling for her husband’s wild eyes and floating hair (such as remains) because there’s a sparkle about her which says loudly she does not approve, does not think this is wise, will not be held accountable, but is absolutely dying to see it happen and will reward most richly whatever prince of men can carry off this splendid boast.

This tacit complicity established, my formless worries are brushed aside, and an order of service is drawn up as follows:

1) a spot will be appointed, no less than thirty metres out, where this conflagration may safely be begun, and where fishing may latterly occur;

2) Old Man Lubitsch, and he alone, will walk out to the spot thus designated and deploy the matériel, in quantity. He shall do this by: