The Ice People (20 page)

*

But they were waiting for me, in that cold stiff bag, and I had a little time to get to know them.

My nights were as busy as my days. I had a new, burning interest to catch up on, ironically a bequest from Sarah. She had left the stuff she didn’t want behind, including threequarters of her books. Remember, Sarah had passions, then dropped them (as she dropped me; as she dropped men). But when we first met, and she was crazy about me, she’d had that shortlived passion for black history, and I had been grudging, awkward, bored …

Now, however, I went into her study, the room that had once been my darling’s study, knelt down and found them. Two crowded shelves. My orderly Sarah sorted books by subject.
The Black Diaspora, The Black Experience, The Endless Crossing, Black People in Europe, The Colour of the Present, African Journey …

The titles suddenly glowed with interest. I couldn’t wait to get inside them. Now Sarah was gone, Africa called me. It was there all along, in the flat, in my bones, but it couldn’t speak until I listened.

And so a new inner life began. I started to see our family’s story as part of something stretching back through the centuries. Shadows and secrets when I was a child, halfheard conversations, began to make sense. And my sister, who I’d scarcely seen in two decades (she had moved to Bristol with her halfJamaican husband; the marriage hadn’t lasted, but she had three kids, conceived without problems, my mother hinted) – was the awkwardness between us to do with race? She had drunk too much after our parents’ funeral, and I’d heard her say to my father’s younger sister, who turned up at the church unexpectedly, ‘That boy does not know who he is.’ I’d known it was me they were talking about, but only later did I guess what they meant. Many different things began to sink into place.

There were voices, statistics, numbing numbers that I lay awake trying to make real … If Africa had lost twenty million people to slavery – that’s
twenty thousand thousand
people … My father’s father swam out of the darkness, and an endless shimmering continent, and above it beeswarms of unknown people, my own people, being blown away. I scrolled on hungrily, trying to find them. I woke at nine to find the light still on, and the screen glared blankly from the wall, but I made myself get up and get cracking. My days were needed for practical plans.

Luke, my son.
We would travel together. Ask the ancestors to take us in.

There was a kind of moral dilemma, which it took me two minutes to dismiss. Should I ask Sarah if she’d let Luke go? Should I give her a chance to be reasonable?

No. She had never been reasonable.

Besides, Wicca World were under huge pressure, the elections were coming in the next few weeks and they were almost certainly going to lose to the Manguard coalition of male liberationists. Sarah had too much on her plate to listen.

Moreover, trouble was expected after the elections. Wicca World were coming under scrutiny for their use of the money they had collected, the fund they called ‘People Against the Ice’ – PAY, as the newstexts instantly renamed it – which had brought in billions, at least in the early days, before male critics began to suggest they were using the money to promote the party. It seemed likely things would get nasty. Even more reason to get Luke out.

My reasons were good, my logic impeccable. And yet, I took a son from his mother, without any warning. I can’t deny that.

Who could I trust? I’d stayed away from the club since the incident when I knocked Richard’s tooth out. Paul had rung a few times to see how I was, but I sat alone with the answerphone on.

Now I needed friends. Paul was a friend, and more important, he had hundreds of friends, he was very well liked – well loved, I should say, by most of the regulars at the club. I don’t think they had much feeling for me. I was always a bit of an outsider. But on the other hand, I was a man, and a man mistreated by women, at that, and nearly all of them detested women, and especially Wicca World, the archenemy, the witches’ coven, the ‘Cunts’ Coven’ as the lads called it, snickering with hatred, spitting at the screen … It wasn’t my scene, but I needed them.

Paul was happy – too happy – to get my call and be asked to the house, after all this time. He came that same evening, smelling of
Le Musc.
(I know because I asked him; it was overwhelming.) He was rather shy with me at first, but after some weed he began to relax. He told me they missed me at the Scientists. ‘No one much liked Richard, anyway, she was always being bitchy about people’ I had never got used to that knowing way gays had of referring to each other as ‘she’. ‘You were like a man possessed, you know, it took a dozen men to pull you off him … Where did you get so strong? I’d never have guessed, you seem so gentle.’

I suppose I realised he wanted me, I suppose I took advantage of him – But I didn’t know what was going to happen. How could anyone have foreseen what happened?

I outlined the situation to Paul. I showed him my favourite pictures of Luke. When I talked about Sarah, a frisson of distaste curdled Paul’s sensitive, handsome mouth. He said he thought Luke was ‘beautiful’. Then I played him one of the two recordings of Luke’s voice which had escaped Sarah’s furious search. He was singing Mendelssohn, by an irony. We sat and listened to it in silence, that slender thread of filigree wire, singing, it seemed, of some other world where no one would be unhappy or lonely:
Oh, for the wings, for the wings, of a dove … Far away would I roam, far away, far away … In the wilderness build me a nest, and remain there for ever at rest …
His eyes filled with tears. I knew Paul was with me.

The beginning of the plan seemed lighthearted, exciting. Paul had recruited Riswan and Ian and another man, Timmy, whom I hardly knew but am sure must have been a lover of his. Timmy was a specialist in unarmed combat, tall and lean with narrow, sculpted muscles and a wellshaped, blueshadowed naked head which he displayed even when out of doors, unlike most of the boys who by now were adopting little nuskin caps in the face of the cold. Timmy had mixed feelings about me, I think, but his desire to impress Paul must have prevailed over his jealousy. Riswan had known me for over a decade, and understood the situation with Sarah. Ian was friends with all of us.

There wasn’t going to be any violence. I was meant to come up with an immensely cunning scheme, though as yet the details weren’t quite clear. The guns in my mind were just a kind of backup, in case the women tried anything silly. I knew they would be needed later, when Wicca might come after us, and then as protection for Luke and me on the long drive across Euro. You couldn’t fly to Africa without a visa, so my plan was to drive down through France and Spain and make a seacrossing to Africa …

I meant the guns to come in much later, so why did I show them to the guys, the very first time that we all got together?

Some devil made me go to the cupboard, unlock the door and drag out the bag, heavy and cold, smelling of oil and sour metal. I wanted to impress them, show them I was serious, not just a wild man with a crackbrained plan. Not just another crazy lonely man.

They were sitting round the table in the dining-room, smoking green and drinking beer, a little subdued by the new surroundings. It took all my strength to get the bag on to the table. It landed with a thud, and I didn’t say a word. They stared as I unzipped it. We peered inside. They saw the pistols first. There were whistles, and gasps, and a lot of swearing.

I didn’t understand it until that day, but guns were made for men to play with. They’re the ultimate machine, the perfect toy, and all the guys wanted to handle them. I was first, picking up the .357 Magnum. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as my hands closed around the wooden grips of the handle. We were all crowding round and reading out Samuel’s labels, the ink slightly faded, sellotaped on. I bet he loved the words as well as the guns – ‘Heckler and Koch’, ‘Browning’, ‘Beretta’ … I got my own love of words from both parents. Dad used to read the Bible to me.
Thou shalt not kill,
pausing between phrases, his dark eyes looking up at me.

The big guns in their pillowcases came out last. There was a ‘Chinese Kalashnikov AKM’ (I’d thought Kalashnikovs were Russian), which had an ammunition clip that curved like a banana. There was a sawnoff doublebarrelled shotgun, ‘Made in Spain’, and an antique ‘US M1 Carbine 3006’, whatever that was, ancient, its wood deeply pitted and scored. (It looked used. How many people had it killed?) There was a ‘Tikka Finnish Hunting Rifle’, and one or two others I don’t remember. At the very bottom was the
pièce de résistance,
a brutal great matt black ‘Special Purpose Automatic Shotgun: 15 Shot: Pump Action: Made in Italy’. We looked at that shocked. It was such a bloody monster. It was a few seconds before Timmy hauled it out. Then I took it from him. It was mine;
mine.
It had a hefty pistol grip, and a chunky foldedover swag of grey metal that I worked out must be a shoulder stock. I hefted and swung it; this was the business. I was utterly absorbed. I forgot the others.

Then Riswan brought me back to earth by asking if we were going to take them with us. ‘Well, maybe just for backup,’ I said, unsure.

‘You mean, carry them,’ he said.

‘Well … I suppose so.’

There was a silence, while we imagined ourselves, five big men
carrying loaded guns.
It was thrilling. We had seen it in so many old films. It was what men did, in the age of heroes.

‘No point taking them if we don’t know how to use them,’ said Timmy, calmly. ‘We might have to use them.’

No one commented, but each of us ran our hands more boldly down the guns’ cold noses, and soon we were chattering loudly as we started to work out, in theory, how to load them, opening chambers, sliding levers, clicking triggers … But I wouldn’t let them use the ammunition in the house. I had a feeling this was getting out of hand, but my life was out of hand, and I was going with it.

‘Be careful of Dora,’ I said, stupidly. She had just bumped into my leg, quite hard, almost as if to remind me she was there. She had been wobbling about in the corner of the room, for once being ignored by everyone, which made her solitary speech and laughter seem slightly vacant, even pathetic.

We drove out of the city the next weekend, five men in one car on a brightish afternoon, looking like five gays off for a Greek party. Or like criminals from the twentiethcentury, when only male criminals drove four or five to a car, so my father had told me, expressing distaste at the new fashion for men driving round together.

Not possible, but we were criminals – when all my life I had been so straight! We were laughing a lot, and drinking beer, and we had the green bag full of death in the back, and we drove deep into the country and found ourselves a wood to muffle the noise. It was the first time I had really noticed what the cold was doing to our woodlands. Some of the trees were brown and dead, others becoming bare in patches. It looked as if something were eating them. I thought, the cold is beginning to bite.

We stretched out a tartan rug on the ground – the remains of a snowfall had frozen hard – got out the guns and spread out the ammo. Then slowly, carefully, we matched them up. Smaller bullets for the revolvers, fine long cartridges for the shotguns. The metal felt cold as ice to the touch, and stuck to our skin. It was almost erotic. Painstakingly, rigid with excitement, we loaded up, growing slowly less clumsy. The enjoyment felt private and intense: the deep delight of perfect machines, of oiled parts clicking in, of something that works – the pleasure a woman could never understand.

Timmy was first to feel sure he’d got it right. I don’t know what he aimed at, but he didn’t hit it, and the noise was like the end of the world. We all reeled around, shocked and deafened. Paul, thankgod, produced from his bag a fat roll of cotton waste for earplugs.

So we all loaded up, and aimed at the trees, then we aimed at beer cans balanced on trees, and I heard Timmy yelling as he pulled the trigger, ‘Die, you witches’, which made us laugh, great clouds of frozen steam against the firtrees. Soon we were all joining in the fun, yelling ‘Here’s one for Juno!’ and ‘Bang bang, bitches!’ There was a kick like a mule after every shot, but after a while I seemed to master it, and it was such pure and mindless pleasure, blasting chunks of bedraggled green from the trees, blowing tins to smithereens … And we were remarkably successful, considering that this was a first for us all. Most of the cans got holes in them before we decided to hang on to our ammo. We were sweating and redfaced, but I think we felt great.

Then a cat shot yowling and screeching from the bushes, fat and grey and terrified, and that made us laugh even harder, and I had to stop Timmy shooting it. It was a boys’ prank, nothing more than that.

(Though it made me think of my poor sad cat, Snowball, who sat alone at the flat and got fatter and fatter till his heart gave out.)

My plan. Though it wasn’t much of a plan. Paul and I went off to do a reconnoitre, in dark glasses and the kind of clothes that no Insiders would ever be seen in, layers of rags Paul wore for painting, and two woolly hats Paul had bought from an Outsider – he told me I looked good in mine. We were the same size, though I was brawnier. No one would have looked at us twice, dressed like that. Insiders rarely looked at Outsiders, for fear the Outsiders would ask them for money. We hung around that part of the Marylebone Road, and tried to get an idea of how things were run. We were there for days, shivering, waiting, perched on uncomfortable steps and walls, staring at the fortress of Victorian brick. I envied the pigeons on the window-ledges. Paul patted my arm as I gazed at the glass.

My clothes smelled of him – it felt oddly intimate. We’d never talked at such length before, and I confess I found Paul slightly boring, though it seems unkind to say so now. (He talked a lot about his life; he was an only son. They had wanted him to marry; he had not been forgiven. His violent father had rejected him … My eyes grew fixed and glazed as he talked. It was
my
only son that I cared about, my beloved Luke in the hands of hags.)