The Ice People (16 page)

‘First of all I thought it was silly,’ he said, ‘but now I don’t notice. And they don’t always do it, anyway. It’s because … I’ve forgotten what they said. Something about boys being like girls.’

‘Your name is
Luke,’
I said. ‘You’re a
boy.’

‘I know,’ he said, as if it was obvious. We hugged again. My heart was still pounding. They were all crazy. The world had gone mad. And what was this ‘Cocoon’? Were they turning into insects? ‘I did once want to be a girl,’ he continued. ‘I mean, it’s not that horrible, being a girl. Just a bit stupid,’ which made me laugh. ‘Girls are hopeless at football, and maths.’

It was good to know some things hadn’t changed. I was glad Sarah wasn’t there to contradict him. ‘Do you still play football?’

His face fell. ‘Not really. But I still know about it. I’m still good. I watch it on the screens. When they think we’re in bed. I practise in my bedroom, nearly every day. I haven’t got a ball, but I do the moves.’

Half an hour together. We played a game of Goofball. Sarah never let him play ball inside, but now I let him, now we played, his yellow curls flying through the strips of sunlight, his long shins flashing too pale as he ran, but he was laughing and shrieking, a wonderful sound. He fought with me too, and he was getting stronger, there was a wiry strength in him I’d never felt before. But
Lucy. Lucy!

Mad evil bitches.

‘I’m sorry, but we have to go,’ Briony called through from the hall.

She put out her arms to comfort Luke, who stood frozen in his doorway, tense and dejected, and I briefly noticed her wellbuilt muscles, which didn’t seem to go with her soft round cheeks.

‘Why won’t they bloody let me see him?’ I hissed, in controlled fury, as they left. ‘Don’t any of the fathers see their kids?’

‘Most of them don’t want to.’ But she looked uncomfortable. ‘Men are sometimes irresponsible. With you, it’s more that I believe there was some trouble. . .’

‘With Sarah, you mean? Yes, so what?’

‘She’s very concerned about male anger.’

She parroted that. I did want to smack her. She wasn’t very old, and she knew nothing, and I’d never hurt Sarah, nor my son. ‘I’ve never been violent, if that’s what she’s saying.’

They were backing away from me down the landing. ‘Twelve is an impressionable age … It’s to do with role models, Sarah says.’

‘Dad,’ said Luke, ‘when am I going to see you?’

‘You’d better ask your bloody mother,’ I said.

Violent? I had never been violent! But as soon as they disappeared into the lift, I nipped back into the flat, got my car coder, and followed. I had to know where my lying wife lived. How else could I launch a firebomb attack on Wicca? It was a tall red building on the Marylebone Road. It burned into my mind like a witch’s finger.

Winter lingered into that spring. There were elections in April, and pundits predicted a low turnout because of the cold (yet only five years earlier they were blaming the heat. The fact was, people had lost faith in elections). What was the vote – ten or twelvepercent? Two- percent lower than ever before. Elections of course were already a shadow of what they had been in the twentiethcentury, when the socalled Parliament still played a real role, when there were centralised policeforces, hospitals, schools – but our Speakers still had some importance because of their weekly access to the screens. They could affect people’s buypower, and sometimes their opinions.

Wicca World stood in the elections. There must have been money behind them somewhere, because they bought screentime on several channels. Sarah didn’t stand as a candidate, but hovered in the background as Mother of the Party. Doubtless her old screen connections helped. She was interviewed several times, very upbeat. We were on the verge of a ‘caring revolution’ … Mother of the Party! Ha, I thought. I could tell the world a thing or two about her mothering.

We roared with laughter when one of their campaign films came on at the club. It showed radiant, kindly, softfocus women (I recognised Briony’s face among them) dancing in a caring ring, in green fields, around a herd of blonde children. The voiceover spoke about ‘revaluing nature’, ‘nurturing the future’; ‘the future is green’. We would ‘bloom again’ with the ‘cooling earth’. We would ‘give thanks to the Goddess’ for water (some footage of flowing rivers, with laughing women drinking from them), clean air (shots of blue sky, and clouds) and earth (a troop of women digging, with spades, old-fashioned twentiethcentury spades, in rich black earth, among redberried bushes. They looked very cheerful. Had they just buried their husbands?). Then the film came on to that vexed topic, Men. Some men, it seemed, had taken a wrong turning (sinister, repetitive music over shots of bald men in studded leather, bent over banks of flickering screens, blending into shots of other men whooping and yelling with glee as they played on a simulated weapons range – we had one at the club; I was a top scorer – while in a subliminal halfsecond image, two furtive men disappeared round a corner together, and the audience at the Scientists whistled and ‘Frohr’ed and catcalled and slapped one another with glee). But Wicca were at pains to say not all men were bad. Men were basically loving (now ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’ rose tenderly over a shot of Michelangelo’s
David,
his penis looking smaller and milder than usual, and another shot of Jesus, surrounded by children, with big kind eyes and flowing hair). Men had a part to play in Wicca too! If we voted for Wicca we voted for a future where contradictions could be reconciled, where hatred could be turned into love, Outsiders (who had votes) could be Insiders (shots of laughing actors playing Outsiders, not dirty and thin, as the real ones were, but brown and happy – thanks to Wicca? – being greeted and embraced on a fat woman’s doorstep); where the old could be young, the ill well, black white … The film returned to its opening shots, the ring of smiling, sunlit women, then panned out to show, all across the meadow, a motley collection of contented people representing every possible voting interest, many of them men, waving to the women (waving their children goodbye, I thought), showing support for the triumphant climax, as chords surged up under that throbbing, urgent, thrilling voice, which I suspected was Juno’s, saying ‘Vote for Wicca. Wicca Cares’ To my horror I realised what the music was. It was ‘Nessun Dorma’. Was that Sarah’s idea? Had she given away our special music?

Apart from that final act of treachery, I really enjoyed it. It was
gross.
We adored it. Someone pressed the ‘Recall’, and we watched it again. Only madwomen, we thought, would vote for them.

On Election Day, the
Greek Sheet
’s early headline sneered ‘Votes for Wimmin!’ over photographs of women queuing to vote. The other parties were the usual crew, venal, arid, selfserving, hopeless. The Liblabs had amalgamated with the Conservers. There was no one to vote for. Men abstained in droves. We waited for the same grey frauds to be returned.

Something dreadful, mad, unspeakable happened.

The results came in.
Wicca World had won.
I couldn’t believe it, but the figures were there. We thought they were a joke, but they had won the election. ‘Wacky Witches Win!’ shrieked the
Greek Sheet
’s final issue. We weren’t quite so clever as we thought.

Sarah was interviewed, looking tired and haggard but flushed with triumph under the lights, gabbling about nurturing nature, and I thought I spotted just a smidgin of panic, as if she hadn’t really expected this.

The postmortem told us the turnout was abysmal, ten or twelve-percent, I can no longer remember, threequarters of that female, with women voting overwhelmingly for Wicca. This seemed to me barely believable. I was sure there were still many sensible women who would never have fallen for Wicca’s tosh … Would they? The pundits said women wanted a change. Wicca ‘spoke to women’s spiritual needs’. They were ‘sick of arid materialism’. Yet to me they’d always seemed so practical, noticing that a floor needed cleaning, wiping surfaces, remembering bills, sending birthday presents, flushing loos, knowing from a baby’s congested face what type of thing had just leaked from its bottom … And they enjoyed it, surely. It was what women liked.

Or had men got it all wrong again?

In any case, now we were going to be punished. We were frightened, actually, as well as incredulous, because the Speakers still had some degree of power.

A succession of men went on screen to suggest a campaign of male civil disobedience, withholding communications tax or Comtax (our last remaining tax, which subsidised the net, Leamonline, Speakers’ Hour and ScreenRecycle) on the grounds that we had no Speaker representation. But Wicca said they spoke for all, for woman in man and man in woman, the goddess in god and god in the goddess, which wasn’t an easy line to argue with. Men held mass switch-offs during Speakers’ Hour and swamped Wicca’s phone lines with angry phone calls, but the only serious effect of the campaign was the deficit to Comtax. The Witches had announced their intention to raise it by twentyfivepercent, to fund more nursery schools (‘Catch ‘em Young!’, the
Greek Sheet
roared. ‘Witches Snatch Our Babies’). But the men refused to pay
en masse,
and as one man remarked of the increases, there were hardly any babies for the witches to school.

And that was at the root of all that happened, of course. That’s why men and women hated each other.

The kids had been the glue that held us together. When babies stopped coming, the men got the blame. The women felt thwarted, and abandoned us. And so we moved further and further apart, and turned into parodies of ourselves – the shavenheaded, giggling, machineloving men, the shorthaired, shortfused, furious women, shriving themselves with nature worship.

They didn’t want us. We were no good. And we believed them, deep inside.

The women seemed to hate my whole sex, which was hard. The things that made my body a man’s, my balls, my penis, my male voice – my size, my sweat, my manliness. The things that had denied them what they craved. And I think they began to hate their sons, the few there were, the weakling boys. They called Luke ‘Lucy’ … godforgive them.

I couldn’t forgive her that for years.

After the elections, we expected summer, but there was a curious patch of real cold. The summer scanties were in the shops, but people were walking around in coats, some of them heirlooms, twentieth-century furs that hadn’t been out of the cupboard for decades, and laughingly showing off the goosepimples they were feeling now for the first time. People began to wish for summer as they must have done in my parents’ childhood. We thought it was a little freak, of course, a byblow of the general miraculous cooling that had come to save us from global heat death. And spring did eventually arrive, at roughly the time when summer should have done, and then it got hot, as it always did, and we all forgot it had ever been different.

It was July or August. I had stayed late at work. I was involved in a project to design a mouthwash which was a solution of minute nanomachines, each of which would clean and polish the teeth as it fed off the plaque and gunge on the surface. It would make normal tooth-brushing obsolete, and might even make me rather rich if I were lucky enough to scoop that year’s ‘Hundredpercent Prize’, a hundredpecent bonus on salary awarded for ‘significant innovation’. I suppose there wasn’t that much ‘significance’ in freeing us from one of our last bits of labour, but I had been told I was in line for the prize. Perhaps they meant, ‘makes a significant profit’, which this certainly would, if I could crack a few problems. I was having trouble dealing with the chemists who were supposed to be coming up with the flavour, and I’d started to wonder, not entirely idly, if they were being nobbled by toothbrush manufacturers. That evening I was frustrated, or bored … so I started browsing, which I usually made a big effort not to do, in the lab.

Quite soon I glimpsed the title of what looked like a fairly routine scientific paper, dated that day, ‘Development Phases of Climatic Change’, and thought ‘Why not?’ So I started to read it. Two pages in, my heart began to race.

It was a study of the rate at which ice ages came, based on fossil evidence of bands of vegetation, the speeds at which deciduous trees liking warmth were replaced by coldloving conifers, for instance. I had always assumed – hadn’t everyone? – that ice ages took hundreds of years to get established.

But the new paper had resurrected an eccentric study from the last century which said it took only
two decades
to move from temperate to permafrost. They had rerun all the data, meaning to disprove it, and found the original conclusions held. So they took new measurements of fossilised pollen all over Europe. The findings were clear.
Twenty years,
that was all it took. Twenty years to slide into an ice age. Two decades. The blink of an eyelid.

I had a sudden feeling that I knew what was happening, I knew what was coming, had foreseen it all, had lived it already as my own heart chilled, as our happiness darkened and began to freeze over.

It got into the news a few days later. ‘New Ice Age?’, headline after headline enquired. For a few days the screens talked of nothing else.

The sensation would certainly have lasted longer if something hadn’t driven it off the news.

One evening I was sitting in front of the screen, feeling relatively happy, since it was Friday. I had done my work and had a pint of beer, eating chicken and halflistening to the news. It was a chicken breast, oval and pink, and I was just thinking that it looked like a face when a voice that had been weaving through my head and somehow becoming confused with the chicken breast suddenly said, quite clearly, ‘Tonight the manufacturers categorically denied that a Dove could feed off a living face. A spokesman for the company pointed out that Doves had long been especially valued for their excellent safety record with children. Meanwhile the baby is in intensive care and we await developments. Tonight women picketed …’ Et cetera, et cetera.

Dora was watching the news with me, her large blue eyes flicking from side to side in a parody of animation. Just when it got to the climax of the story – we saw the child who had been attacked, a sturdy blonde baby with crewcut hair, then an ‘after’ picture, a disc of bloody mess, a featureless horror in a tangle of tubes – Dora chuckled, with her ‘random’ chuckle, and turned to me, as she often did, and said ‘That’s funny. I feel happy’. I threw the rest of my chicken away and didn’t talk to Dora for the rest of the evening.