The Ice People (2 page)

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘For heaven’s sake.’

‘I don’t like black people,’ I said. ‘The screen said even more of them are trying to get in.’ To me they seemed like liars and scroungers who would keep my family poor for ever. ‘I hate black people. Why must they come here?’

She looked at me with a little frown, a puckered white thread in her sunreddened forehead. ‘Saul – they’re not all the same, you know. You can’t go hating black people.’

‘It’s
true,
Mum. I saw the pictures.’

‘You don’t understand.’ She sounded peculiar. ‘Saul, listen … look … there’s something …’ She stared at the ground, her mouth working. Then something burst out like a stone at a windscreen.
‘Haven’t you noticed your father’s black?’

‘That’s mad,’ I said. It hurt my chest.

‘Yes. Well – half. Your grandpa was from Ghana. He came here as a student, in the last century.’

‘I haven’t got a grandpa. Shut up. I hate you. Why are you saying these horrible things?’

‘Because it’s true. Grandpa died when you were two.’

I stumbled to my feet. She tried to hug me but I broke away and ran into the house.

In the bathroom mirror I looked for the truth. My skin was golden, as it was before, but I watched it change and become light brown. Spots, I saw, and curly black hair, and features broadening with adolescence. My nostrils, flaring. Yes, and my lips. I saw Dad’s face behind my own.

She said no more. I was stunned, confused.

I tried to talk to my father. It was never easy. He was a shy man, who preferred to be alone. He liked birds; perhaps that’s why he’d gone to live in the country, and until he died he always kept pigeons.

He was throwing them dull yellow kernels of seed, as I tried to talk to him about being black. It was dark in the shed. Everything was dark. There was a dirty little window, high up. But the eyes were bright; so many pairs of eyes, darting about on sheeny silk necks, and Dad and I looking past each other. He didn’t say a lot, but he touched my arm. We stood together in the airless darkness, with the warm bodies quivering and shuffling around us, and I thought, this might be like Africa, though I didn’t have a clue about Africa.

What did he say, exactly? That I should be proud (but how proud was he? He had never told me about myself). That the first humans were African (but ‘You kids are as British as the next person’). That skin colour was not important (and yet it had ‘held me back in the force’). That we were ‘the same as anybody else’ (yet ‘people like us always have to watch our backs’). And the sentences seemed to come out muddled, the pigeons pecked, and it was hard to ask questions.

The thing Mum had told me didn’t make enough difference. At first I expected the sky to explode and the earth to blacken with astonishment. Thirty years later it would change my life, send me off on an odyssey round half the world – But at the time I just became restless, unsettled, no longer sure I was like my neighbours. Not that I looked particularly different. My sister was darker skinned than me, but her lips, like Mum’s, were on the thin side. And yet we shared the same grandfather … In the end I got tired of going over it all.

Our school had very few black people. Remember, this had recently been countryside, and most black people preferred the city. There were Italians, Asians, Swedes … And fifty or a hundred kids were probably mixed race, many of them good friends of mine. We hung out together, liked the look of each other, followed Renk and Roots music avidly, but no one mentioned what we had in common. And what was there, really, to mention? We were mostly third or fourth generation British, all with more white in us than black. Yet I think I longed to be recognised. That hidden part of me was waiting to be seen.

Which was partly why I fell in love with Sarah, a dozen years later, when I was twentyfive.

I came to central London when I was eighteen, and lived in a hostel near Regent’s Theme Park. It was noisy, but I liked the freedom. Samuel’s police career had ground to an end, without leaving him better off or happier. Now he disapproved if I played the wrong music or brought a friend home or used a dreampad to relax after work. Mum, who was retraining as a nurse, explained to Dad that the new way was safer, the little silver pads we stuck on the skin so the drug was absorbed straight into the bloodstream. ‘But why do you need drugs?’ Samuel would demand, pouring himself another cold beer.

(It’s like a dream, to remember those days, when you could flick what you wanted from any dispenser. Now we can’t even get hold of painkillers, and one of my teeth has been throbbing for days … I wish I had one of those old silver dreampads. I’d slip its coolness on to my skin. Then the slow rush, the sweet slide forwards, flying away from stress and pain.

Finished. Gone. There are no more escapes, except through lighter fuel or cleaning fluids, which every so often the wild boys try. Then there is mayhem, fire and death, and Chef and I creep away and hide … Such beautiful, desirable words:
aspirin, somnifer, paracetamol, diamorphine, tenebrol, heroin, lullane.
Lulling us away from hurt and grief. We grew used to them, and then we lost them.

Now I suppose the only drugs are stories. That’s why the kids still look to me. They see I’m writing. They’re curious. Don’t you see, you boneheads, I’m Scheherezade? I’ll spin out my story night after night, hamming, stalling, to save my life –

Scheherezade! Don’t make me laugh. None of them knows what I’m talking about. It’s a world ago, the
Arabian Nights
my mother used to read to me, the Bible, Dickens, Hans Andersen ... What a waste, what a shame, the old twists, the old tales, all of them lost on these little savages. Vile little shits, ignorant brutes, spitting out their elders like chickenbones, I’d like to kick them to the back of beyond …

No use, no use. Too many of them.

Now Kit is offering me a leg. ‘Take it, old man! Save it for you!’ Long, fringed with blackened, gamey meat, glistening in the light of the fire, its shape unpleasantly familiar. Sometimes I eat, but today I’m not hungry. I want to feel human, as I once was. I wave placatingly. Back to my story.)

In the early 2020s I lived in central London. I was happy because it was so different from home. Walking the streets until the cool of the early hours, dancing in the squares, by the river, on the pavements. Teen life had come out of the molelike tunnels where the young liked to hide at the beginning of the century.

My generation did things differently. We travelled everywhere, easily as swallows, we students with money from waiting tables, on cheap, safe airlines that competed for our business. The countries we flew to still had governments. Lisbon, Reykjavik, Beijing – we saw the world, packed in like sardines. Everywhere we danced to the same music. And the smaller towns were even better. There you could dip into the twentiethcentury, a time when each place had its own special taste. That quiet square in Avila. Cool pale beer, smoky black olives. The townspeople were dark like me; there were darkeyed girls in bright satin dresses …

(Euro got bad in my early twenties. There were three years of plague that closed the frontiers, a new kind of Ebola coinciding with haemorrhagic sleeping sickness; blazing summers when viruses flourished and civil order couldn’t stand the strain as hundreds of victims bled to death in their cars, choking the roads to hospitals. Our government fell, and was barely replaced. Looking back, my late teens were paradise.)

We young ones chose to live in the open, though our parents hardly left their homes, hiding behind electronic gates. We ate in the sun; we danced in the sun. We laughed at the old – we called them ‘the slows’, and sometimes ‘the bits’, for all their spare parts – with their cautious, waxy masks of whitish suncream. When the evening came, we mobbed the streets.

We liked to be under the orange sky, with the flaring thunder clouds above us. We waited for the little chill of morning, the slight but miraculous lessening of heat that slipped in with the breezes of three or four am, so that people lying clammy and bare on their beds would reach out in their sleep and pull up a sheet. Outside, the kids drew closer and threw arms round each other, enjoying being young together … I was happy, whether cool or hot, and slept as little as I could. We were all hotblooded, we were raised on heat. I loved fiery middays and baking afternoons, and the long, familiar nakedness of summer evenings, when no one under thirty ever wore a shirt.

Yet my body was strangely illadapted to heat. I was hairy, unlike my father. I had a thick pelt of curling dark hair which ran down my chest and across my shoulders, and defined the strong muscles of my legs in shorts. Some women were fascinated by it, and would stare, letting me see them noticing. Others were shocked, even a little disgusted, for the fashion was for shaving, of heads and bodies.

Why was that? Hard to recall now, but it lasted for decades, that egglike baldness. Perhaps it was a kind of streamlining, an attempt to keep cool at any cost. And the style appealed to both men and women. The fashion of the time was for androgyny, so hair was suspect, for it signalled gender.

And yet, though our clothes and hair denied it, a great gap had grown up between the sexes. Segging we called it. From segregation. Almost everything we did was segged. Girls with girls, boys with boys, great droves of animals bypassing each other, eyes darting across, wild in the neon, jostling, signalling, twisting through the night, two big streams that couldn’t make a river.

The problems with fertility had started to get worse. The screens were full of alarming statistics. They didn’t mean all that much to the young, who were too busy having fun to think that having children mattered, but our parents discussed it in solemn voices. They wanted grandchildren. They wanted a future.

I knew, in any case, with that complete confidence that young people have once, then never again, that these reports weren’t about me. I wasn’t like them. I wouldn’t have a problem. I knew I was a man who wanted women. When I had had sex (which wasn’t very often because it wasn’t easy to get women to have sex, what with segging, and mutant hivs) the pleasure was huge, easy, instinctive. It seemed so natural, like having children.

I felt on the brink of owning the world. I was a man, and human beings ran the planet. There were eight billion of us, though numbers were shrinking, but few other animals were left to compete. Insects, bacteria, viruses. (And cats, of course. Cats everywhere. The city streets were patched with fur, ginger, tabby, blackandwhite. I liked cats though, so that was all right.) I was tall, and strong, and a techie, which qualified me for a lifetime’s good money. It was new and wonderful to feel like this; home had too many small sadnesses.

When civil order broke down, over the next few years, I stayed optimistic. Who needed governments? If you were young, you were selfreliant. The plagues passed me by, though I lost several friends. The streets grew rougher, but I stayed away from trouble. In wealthier areas, life went on as usual. I didn’t let the newscasts upset me.

I found I had a gift with machines. They were alive to me, and entirely absorbing, like the aphids I once bred in a matchbox. I was fascinated by artificial life, by the huge range of mobots in the college labs, the multitravellers, the swarmers, the sorters, though my speciality was nanotechnics, working with invisibly small molecular machines. I had delicate powers of manipulation that helped me pass out with high honours. Job offers came in plenty from military and security firms. For some reason I found myself turning them down. My father was shocked, but I knew I wasn’t ready. Something had to happen first, some great adventure. For the moment I took a part-time job as a tech teacher in a Learning Centre.

One day a week was the teachers’ Dee Stress. No pupils came in, and only half the guards were working. The underground trains were back in service, after more than a year of being sealed off. I tubed in, reading a weird story about some people in Portugal living in caves. They said there were hundreds, maybe thousands of them, living as people did in the Stone Age. And they were breeding. There were children everywhere. They looked dark, in the picture, with sparkly eyes. The reporter wanted to know their secret. I thought how much I’d like to go and see for myself. Order in France had completely broken down, but things were still peaceful in Iberia.

The school garden was overrun with big pink mallow flowers like English faces burning in the sun. The litter waved gaily like little silver flags. I remember I felt something good was going to happen.

Three metres away, the front door coded me. I got the normal access signal. The doors opened. The lights came on. The uniformed guard was not in her place, but I was early, and besides, it was Friday. The voicetone welcomed me, as usual. ‘Good morning, Officer 102. It is eightothree am Cooling is in progress. Please specify rooms you want unlocked and conditioned.’

I always said ‘Good morning’ back, though other teachers laughed at me. They thought I was joking, but I wasn’t. It seemed to me anything might be alive. What was the boundary between living and nonliving?

(Now I would give a different answer, as I approach closer to the shadowy line that separates the living from the dead, but then I was besotted with our cleverness.)

I confirmed my code, then asked for the lift, and coffee upstairs in the Dee Stress room. Dee Stress began formally at nine, so there was probably halfanhour or so before the other teachers arrived. I had nothing to prepare; the sun blazed outside the window. And so I requested the day’s chillout sounds, sponsored by StartSmart Buildings Inc. ‘First up today, we bring you ‘‘Nessun Dorma’’ …’ I never tired of it. ‘Thank you, that’s great.’ When the wonderful music surged up through the silence, it felt as though the building were giving me love.

Behind me, the entrance slid open again. I was waiting for the lift, and didn’t look round. The normal welcome routine began, and the music continued more quietly. It spoke of passion, space, grandeur, of hot black windows in high white walls. It made me think with longing of Euro. Mountains. Plains. I should be free … What kind of life did they live, in the caves?