The Ice People (26 page)

‘Nothing important,’ Briony said.

I began to see. Yes, of course I saw. I probably halfsuspected the truth as soon as he mentioned ‘protecting his voice’, for of course his incredible, thrilling soprano had survived too long, he’d stayed young too long, he was nearly fourteen, why wasn’t I suspicious? Once they used to cut the little boys’ balls off, the poor little castrati, singing their hearts out, but they’d done it to Luke with chemicals …

I shouted at Briony, and Luke. Perhaps I broke a few things, I’m not sure. I demanded to know what Wicca had done.

I was justified. They had drugged my son. The bitches wanted to steal his manhood. Any father would feel the same –

As I hectored them, as I raged and roared, I was adding up the details, somewhere inside, Luke’s amazing, delicate youthfulness when I first saw him three months ago, the absence of adolescent stigmata, for which I was grateful at the time, because that way he could still be my child. Then the sudden pimples, the thickening jaw.

When did Briony admit it was hormones? I’d been shouting at her as if she were Sarah. At some stage she stopped sitting meekly on the grass, stood up and stared with those strange pale eyes, like blue ice, suddenly, cold and sharp, told me to calm down, began talking. When she told me he’d been taking highdose oestrogen and other, subtler, more complex drugs, I started to swear, and smashed a glass, and then another, and another, and Luke sat hunched, gnawing his fingers.

‘I don’t take the blame,’ she said, firmly, ‘but I knew it was wrong. It was against our principles – Wicca’s principles. I mean. They’re so keen on being natural’ (I recognised Sarah’s influence here) ‘and then they start stuffing the boys with hormones. They wanted to see if it made them gentler. And Juno so adored his voice …’

‘Sarah should be shot. Garotted –’

‘I hate you! You … bastard!’ Luke suddenly shouted, ‘I love my mum! And I hate you!’

I suppose I deserved it. And yes, it proved that the hormones had worn off, and my son was adolescent. The words proved it, but so did something else, for as rage and grief burst out of him, his clear voice suddenly fell apart, and through it a bullfrog honked, croaked, a clumsy, hoarse, uncontainable thing, the first sign that his voice was breaking.

And then I felt sad.

And then I felt guilty, and most of my anger leaked away. It was nearly dark. We were all getting cold.

I picked up the glass as best I could, cutting my finger in the process, and we all went in. Just inside the door Dora sat quietly glowing in the dark. Someone had switched her on and then forgotten her, possibly Luke, in the middle of the row, and she sat there muttering peacefully. ‘Hallo,’ she said as we came into range of her sensors, ‘Hallo, good to see you. By the way, I’m hungry,’ oblivious to the trauma we had all been through. Looking at her round innocent face and the gentle smile in which her mouth was fixed, looking at the kind dim light of her eyes and the transparent lashes quivering above them, I thought, much better to be a machine than suffer this crazy tearing pain. Better not to feel, or pass the pain on.

(You tell me – now that the ice has come, now it’s getting dark, and the cities are ruined, and most of the galleries have been abandoned, and the theatres are full of snow, now the ice lies white along the plastic letters that used to blaze the names of actresses in orange light across navy skies, now hardly anyone reads or writes, now the churches have bonfires on the altars and plastic sheeting in their stainedglass windows, now Buckingham Palace is a burntout wreck, its cellars swarming with secret police, now the old are dead, and the young know nothing – you tell me, what is the point of us? What was ever the point of us, our struggling, quarrelling, suffering species, getting and spending, wasting, grieving?

There was love, wasn’t there? I know there was.

That can’t be the point, though. We loved so badly.

Perhaps we were meant to be recording angels. Ringing the earth with consciousness. Mirroring it in our net of signs. Solar singers, messengers …

But our net tore, a tattered cobweb.

And here I crouch with my stub of a pencil in a windowless cupboard that smells of piss, penned in the dark like a dirty beast, trying to scribble my small story.)

I sat there, that night, in the empty
salon,
lit by a flickering candle on the table which must have been too massive to remove. It sat in the denuded space like a tombstone. My thoughts were no longer springlike and hopeful.

I’d wrecked the frail bond between the four of us, killed the affection Luke was starting to feel. Although I’d told Briony I was sorry, she’d just said ‘Yeah, well,’ and marched off to bed, without offering to cook or clean up in the kitchen. (She had changed, I thought, she had changed already, and we had only spent three months together … Sarah started sweet, but it didn’t last. Women were fickle, like the poets said.)

I remembered the wine. I had got no further than mangling the cork, because of the row. It must be somewhere out on the patio. My spirits lifted. I went out and groped in the icy darkness – how fast the heat died, once the sun had gone. It wasn’t on the slatted garden table, and then I felt the jagged edge of the wood, apparently I had broken the table, and as I drew back, for the splinters were sharp, the bottle fell off and smashed on the concrete. I tried to scoop it up before the glugging finished and managed to save about half of it at the cost of bloodying my hand – the left one this time, so now they were equal.

The smell was wonderful: fruity, oaky, a smell of warm summers of long ago, plus the dark metallic smell of my blood.

Back in the
salon,
enthroned at the table, I watched myself drink in the big tarnished mirror, a big man, a monster with wild black hair, a darkskinned man splashed all over with blood, for the mirror didn’t show that half of it was wine. Reflected through the window was a fullbellied moon, a beautiful pregnant moon with an aura, a halo of light like a woman’s hair. I was a
man,
Esau, Moses, leading my tribe to the promised land, David fighting the Goliath of the ice, I looked at myself, I swelled, I expanded. (But would my son be a proper man? Had they ruined him for ever with their filthy medicines?) I had poured the wine into a plastic beaker – annoying how the French never left their good crystal. It filled three times. By the third, I felt good.

Till now we had all slept in the same room, for safety and to keep warm. But when I stumbled through with my candle in a saucer I could only see Luke, curled up like a foetus on one of the two mattresses Briony had found. She obviously couldn’t stand to be near me. I pulled off my jumper, meaning to sleep in the rest of my clothes, but the smell of rancid sweat was so overpowering that I changed my mind and went to wash in the kitchen, padding back barefoot in the silence.

There was only a narrow shaft of moonlight here. I had snuffed out the candle before I took my clothes off. I heard the tap running. Had Luke left it on? Then suddenly I touched something warm and soft, and Briony was screaming like a mad woman. She’d been bent over the sink drinking water from the tap, and as she flinched away into the path of the moonlight I saw the swing of one heavy breast, which she hid with her hand, but not before I glimpsed the dark star of the nipple, swollen with cold. ‘Don’t bloody frighten me!’ she screamed, once she’d calmed down enough to use actual words.

‘Don’t wake up Luke,’ I said, ‘he’ll be frightened,’ though actually I was frightened as well. My heart was hammering my chest, it was such a shock to find her there and then to unleash this monstrous terror. And I was horribly aroused, I could feel my erection tight in my trousers … But awful to know you are frightening. That I had caused such unreasonable fear, and all by showing a little temper …

I tried to put my arms around her, to steady her as she wept and screamed. She seemed to be wearing very little; she must have woken up warm from sleep. At first she resisted me, then all at once she clung, weeping and cursing, ‘You shit, you shit … You hateful bloody man, how dare you blame me? If it wasn’t for me Luke wouldn’t be here, I hate you, I hate you … ‘

But then it seemed she didn’t hate me. Her nails were digging into my back, hurting me but pulling me closer, she was pushing her head up under my chin, butting at me, nuzzling me, clawing the muscles of my arms yet pressing herself fiercely against me. I was confused, then less confused, for this was the thing I had dreamed of happening, happening now, in the cold, in the moonlight. But I smelled myself, ‘I’m dirty,’ I choked, ‘Briony, let me go and wash,’ then, gabbling, for she was younger than me, I wasn’t a bad man, nor irresponsible, ‘I am okay, I haven’t had sex for over two years, and I take my hiv boosters regularly,’ but she was pummelling my chest, pulling my shirt off, plucking at my trousers,
oh, oh please,
easing down my pants, and my penis rose like a seal into her hand, quite separate from me, happy, hungry,
my penis was in Briony’s hand,
and she ringed it, rubbed it, silent, greedy, and then she led me through to the
salon
where the moonlight poured through the open shutters and perched herself on the edge of the table, that massive, funereal French table, and without some wretched calculation about ovulation to kill all pleasure, opened her legs, and pulled me inside her, silently, hungrily,
I was inside her,
without a condom, gloriously naked, the first woman other than Sarah in fifteen thirsty years of marriage, and it was so warm, so wet, so tight – I came with a little cry like a baby after thirty seconds at the most, and then it was ‘Sorry, Briony, sorry.
Thank you,
Briony. That was so …’ I felt shattered, and tender, and slightly ashamed, and also fucking wonderful.
Fucking
wonderful. My blood zinging.

Then she tugged down my hairy head, I always liked women to touch my head, to stroke my hair, to knead my scalp, as Sarah did, years ago, when she loved me – and Briony nudged my face to her lips, the hot small knot of her clitoris, salty, slippery with my sperm, and I worked with my tongue until she came, in a long diminuendo of dove-calls, her hips twitching helplessly against the hard table.

And then she cried, but with release from tension, and I groped my way through and found her a blanket and wrapped her in it, and told her again how sorry I was if I’d frightened her that evening. She said nothing (I’ve learned that slowly – it’s never enough just to say you’re sorry), and both of us wished we could drink a cup of coffee without having to gather wood for a fire … So many things we once took for granted.

Bless you, Briony. Forever bless you, though I’m sure you acted half out of fear, to placate the brute, to tame the monster. It was something – natural, instinctual. We were all going back into the dark again. The return of the secret life of the caveman.

And yet she slept in her separate room, and next morning, which was sunny, she had gone back to being normal, friendly, asexual, although I gave her longing looks that I hoped my sulky son wouldn’t notice.

I thought he was sulking. In fact he was sad. Because Luke was quiet and wouldn’t look me in the eyes, I thought he was still angry about my fit of temper. But it was his voice he was thinking about … It’s never about
you,
with teenagers.

I had woken full of energy, and gone to find fuel. I managed to buy proper French bread from an old man in the village three kilometres away. He was a handsome, vigorous old chap with a huge drooping growth on one of his eyelids, the kind of thing we were getting used to now doctors were just for the megarich. According to him, only the young had left the village. ‘The grandparents stayed. We love our village. Life goes on as normal here. Except it’s … quieter. And colder.’ I bought pastries, too, for an inflated price, but they were light as an eggshell, and fluffed with fresh cream, and I wanted Luke and Briony to like me. He told me where to go to buy fuel. It wasn’t so easy to find in the north, where the unseasonal cold had spoiled the cannabis harvest, but the family to whom he directed me were growing in bulk, hydroponically. I asked them for three or four cans of methanol, then found to my embarrassment I’d left most of my money in the jacket I had taken off the previous night. They looked at me with the blank fear and hatred they must have got used to feeling for cheats. I was weak, for some reason, I didn’t argue, perhaps because the old man had been charming, perhaps because Briony and I had made love, I just paid for the topup of my tank and left, instead of shooting them and keeping the fuel.

When I got back, I found Briony was up, and washing a duvet she’d found in a cupboard. ‘We don’t want to drag that thing along,’ I told her, but ‘It’s
natural goosedown,
worth a fortune, and light as a feather,’ she told me, happily, bundling it out into the drying wind. ‘Might be useful in the Pyrenees. In any case, it’s too good to leave behind –’ She’d turned back into a chaste, respectable housewife, but I watched her hips as she disappeared.

I burned the broken table to make a fire and boiled some water for coffee and to cook the duck eggs we’d plundered yesterday. We had a tasty breakfast, with that and the baguettes, though in a perfect world there would have been French butter, unsalted, creamy, delectable –

But no, the old world had not been perfect. We were finding new skills, new strengths, new closeness.

‘I ought to record myself,’ Luke suddenly said, as he sat eating his choux at the end of breakfast, while Briony was stretching more damp washing on some overgrown rose bushes in the sun. His voice sounded perfectly normal again, that high clear treble I had always been used to – I’d halfexpected that last night’s row might have cracked it forever, with the strain. But it had to signal the beginning of something. ‘Mum’s got all the recordings, hasn’t she?’

‘Well – I’ve got two. Years out of date.’

‘I’ve got to get to some recording equipment. I don’t mind my voice going, but it’s sort of weird … Juno made me feel as if I
were
my voice.’

‘Juno was a psychopath,’ I said. ‘I don’t see how we get to recording equipment. I suppose there are still places in the big cities …’