The Ice People (22 page)

I felt as if I had killed both my friends, for we’d left Timmy in the clutches of Wicca. That green horde closing in from behind, their cruel, identical, sexless faces … How could I have abandoned him?

You don’t know what you can do until you’re desperate.

Lucky for Paul that the wound was fatal. They took Timmy alive, and although he was sprung from prison by the Manguard not many weeks later, he’d already confessed at length, on screen, to being one of a highly organised ring of ‘pederasts and childmolesters’.

How much torture must that have taken? I have never seen Timmy, since that cold white day, but I think he was a brave man. A decent man, surely. I can only guess how long he was tortured. My mind goes numb when I think about him, when I think of the damage I have done.

My son. What did I expect Luke to feel? We hadn’t seen each other for over a year, ever since the farcical evening when Sarah discovered me in bed with Dora. I had no idea what she said to him, or what those other bitches had told him, how much they had tried to blacken my name … As I now longed to blacken her name, to try and explain to him why Wicca were mad, mad and wicked and –
the death of us all,
for if men and women couldn’t live together …

I looked at Luke. He was thirteen years old. It was hard to believe; he was still slight and slender, with an almost girlish beauty of face, smooth pale skin, smooth rounded shoulders – I knew he wouldn’t understand.

He spent a lot of time staring at Dora, though mostly when she was switched off, his expression a mixture of repulsion and fascination, but when she was switched on he practically ignored her. He seemed to have lost his old love of Doves; I suppose that Wicca had demonised them.

He would only talk to Briony. They were the innocent parties in this. He shrank away when I tried to hug him, and perhaps my attempt was hopelessly clumsy. Do you hug boys in their early teens? I didn’t know; I had had no practice. Often I caught him looking at me sideways under long white lashes, broodingly, as if he were trying to work out who I was.

One night when Briony had gone to sleep, something happened to give me hope. We were hiding with Eric, a contact of Timmy, who ran a boys’ Learning Centre near Weymouth. He wore nuskin trousers that hugged his crotch, an unnecessarily bulging crotch, and I’d tended to keep Luke away from him.

I was lying on the couch in the screen room, netting and dozing, using my headset, wearing the new pyjamas I had bought against the cold – expensive fluffy things in real ‘natural sheep wool’. They were white as well; I was a giant lamb. At least, I looked less alarming than usual.

Luke suddenly appeared, halfasleep in the doorway. He stumbled through, blinking at the light.

‘Water,’ he said, a command or a question.

‘Of course,’ I said, switching my headset off. ‘Can’t you sleep?’ I got him the water. He took it, silently. He still had no beard, not the faintest hint of a dark shadow, and his voice was clear, light, high. He didn’t seem eager to go back to bed.

‘Am I a prisoner?’ he suddenly asked.

It was a reasonable question. I had a gun beside my couch.

‘You were a prisoner before,’ I said, ‘with Wicca. You weren’t allowed out. You weren’t allowed to see your father. I did want to see you, you know.’

He nodded; maybe Briony had told him. ‘But now I’m not allowed to see my mother,’ he said. ‘Did you two always fight with each other? I don’t remember. You must have done.’

This stung, and I began to deny it, but he shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter. Could I go back if I wanted to?’

He didn’t say he wanted to.
‘I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it yet.’ How could I simply let him go back, after Paul had died, after Timmy had been tortured? I’d risked everything to get him out. All the same, I was afraid to say ‘No’ to him.

He said, and for once he looked straight at me, his blue eyes alight with intelligence, ‘I think you’re scared to say ‘‘No’’ to me.’ This fact didn’t seem to displease him, though.

I nodded. ‘I …’ The words stuck in my throat. ‘I’m – very fond of you, you see.’ There was a pause. He listened, sipping his water, looking down at his toes, which I saw were bare. He must be freezing, but this moment was precious, I wasn’t going to tell him to get his slippers. His toes were long and white, like fingers. ‘Look, I don’t like guns,’ I stuttered, uncomfortable. ‘Or any of this kidnap nonsense. To be honest, I didn’t know what to do …’

‘You aren’t going to kill me, are you?’ he asked. He must have seen I was hurt, because he answered his own question – ‘I know you aren’t. But where are we going?’

‘I haven’t decided,’ I temporised. ‘Partly it depends on you.’

‘I want to see my mother. I miss her.’

There was a long silence. I felt like a brute. ‘We’re going to have an adventure,’ I said, trying to work out how to cheer him up.

His eyes brightened. ‘I like adventures – at least, I like reading about adventures. I don’t think I’ve ever had one yet.’

‘We’re going to Africa,’
I blurted out.

There; it was said.

‘What about Mum?’ said Luke, blankly. ‘I don’t want to go to Africa. In any case, Africans hate white people. They won’t let us in. I’ve seen it on the screen, they’re always saying there are too many of us.’ He was gabbling now, fully awake.

‘Do you remember what I told you when you were little? How I’m partly black? I mean, I’m not all white.’

‘No,’ said Luke, peering at me. ‘You never told me that.’

‘I did.’ Probably when he was too young to take it in, because I didn’t want to leave it too late, like Samuel.

‘But
I’m
white,’ said Luke. ‘I’m white as anything’ – Suddenly sounding like a sixyearold. And indeed, he couldn’t have looked much whiter, sitting in the light with his brilliant pale curls, the skin on his face almost transparent, his limbs like twigs with their bark peeled off.

‘You look it, but you’re not. You’re my son, Lukey. I’m a quarter black, so you’re an eighth –’ A look of incomprehension and disbelief. ‘Don’t worry about it, never mind. But they’ll let us in to Africa. If we get there in time. We have to go soon.’

More definite now, his shallow jaw setting.
‘I don’t want to go to Africa.’

‘We’ll talk about it another day. . .’

‘Are the Wicca soldiers trying to shoot us?’

‘No … Yes. Not you. Me.’

‘Mum wouldn’t want to shoot you. She says she’s sorry for you.’

‘Really.’ The tone of my reply was lost on Luke.

‘Yes. And that’s what the teacher said in the Cocoon. We were meant to feel pity for all the men who like Doves better than anything else. Like you do, Dad.’ It was an accusation.

‘Actually –’ I said, but again, when I needed it, my voice choked up. ‘Actually, I love you more than anything. More than Dora. Easily more. Most in the world.’ It was something I’d never said before, for always before there were the two of them, Sarah and Luke, level pegging, jostling.

He grinned, and then the grin faded. ‘You don’t love Mum any more, then?’ It sounded as though he had accepted it.

‘Yes, in a way, but – we don’t agree.’

‘It’s because of me,’ he said, slowly. ‘She’s sent the soldiers because of me.’

‘It isn’t your fault. It’s our fault, Lukey. One day maybe – one day, who knows.’ I spread my arms hopelessly in fluffy white wool, indicating vaguely that things would get better, but he nodded forlornly and rubbed his forehead as if he were rubbing a line away. Without a word, he slouched off towards his bedroom, looking like a teenager at last, and turned in the doorway, not fully towards me, and repeated, softly, ‘Don’t wanna go to Africa.’

After that night, though, he wasn’t frightened of me, and often asked to sit in the front when we drove, and I let him, after dark, when his blonde curls would not be noticed. (I’d suggested a haircut, but he refused, and I wanted to avoid a battle about it.) I hoped he was forgetting the horror of the kidnap, but one day to my surprise he started asking about it, eager to know all the practical details, where we got the guns, how we’d learned to use them, how I had got Briony to open the door …

I realised, with a little shock of pleasure, that my teenage son had begun to admire me.

The kidnap was a public relations gift to Wicca, who used it to improve their position in the polls by fifteenpercent over the following week. ‘MEN KIDNAP CHILDREN’ the headlines howled, with details of the incident both real and imaginary. Even I didn’t know how much to believe. According to the screens, some children had been shot, not fatally, but one in the cheek, ‘threatening her sight’, and another in the knee. Hideous, but possible. Timmy had been carrying a heavyduty shotgun, and the pellets would have sprayed, maybe ricocheted, and hit two of the children I’d heard singing next door, so calmly, with such dreadful normality … Not one of the reports said that I was Luke’s father. The kidnap was supposed to be the work of an unspeakably sinister group of perverts, not far away, it was strongly hinted, from the leadership of Manguard.

I’d been following the news obsessively from a succession of safe houses, men’s safe houses, mostly Manguard connections, as we drove by circuitous roads to the south, trying to avoid the emways with their constant camera surveillance and unpleasant little sixstrong fleets of bikepolice, cruising up and down like arrows of geese in their dark greased plastics and menacing goggles –

That poor child’s cheek. ‘Threatening her sight’. Once I woke up shouting, and was instantly afraid the noise had put us in danger. I don’t think I ever did that again. Remorse, I learned, is a luxury …

(And that was a lie. Only yesterday I woke with a thin bony hand across my face, clamped over my mouth like a great spider of ice, and it was Kit, one eye furious in the firelight, hissing ‘Shut up, Sol. You was shouting in your sleep. Who this Sarah you keeps shouting about?’)

We were an odd crew, odder than I meant us to be, Briony, Dora, Luke, myself. We’d dropped Ian, minus his balaclava, at his mother’s house on the way to Bristol. I think he was relieved to say goodbye. But we’d ‘done our bit’ and ‘behaved like men’, he said something like that, something mute and embarrassed, and I nodded, hugging him – he’d risked his life. We’d behaved like the soldiers we had never been,
never had a chance to be,
like outlaws or heroes in a childhood film; we hadn’t been wimps, or panicked like girls …

In our Days, life wasn’t easy for men. It was softer – but it wasn’t easy.

I’d never intended to bring Briony – a
woman,
for godsake! One of the enemy!

– But she wasn’t, really. Nothing was predictable. In those months, everything was turned upside down. My behaviour to her had been appalling. I’d lied to her, manhandled her, sheltered behind her like a coward. I ‘took her hostage’, in the Wicca’s phrase, as though I were always taking people hostage, that clean little phrase for a demented cockup, so she started on the screens as a heroine, ‘YOUNG WOMAN SNATCHED AS SHE TRIES TO SAVE BABIES’. But soon it changed. The police ‘had suspicions’, there were ‘questions to be answered’, ‘discrepancies’, and before very long they had all decided that Briony was part of the conspiracy, and she had a price on her head as well, for Wicca offered hundreds of billions for our capture.

I
had done all this to Briony, who had merely been kind, worried, decent. I expected her to fear and hate me. On that first awful day I had sat in the back of the car with my Magnum jammed up against her ear while Ian roared out of London in a frenzy and Luke sobbed and wheezed on the seat beside us, but she’d suddenly said, some five hours later, as we drove down a rutted lane through a wood to a safe house Paul had arranged, ‘Could you take that thing away from my head please? It might go off by accident. Look, I was fed up with Wicca as well.’ And at first I took no notice of her, though Luke said ‘Briony’s my friend,’ but as days went on and her image on the screens changed from saintly virgin to demonic witch, I saw she had as much to lose as me if we were captured, and relaxed.

I thought about letting her go – I thought about dumping her, to be honest. Three might travel lighter than four, but when I suggested it she said, ‘If I get caught, you know they’ll kill me. You have to take me with you across to Euro.’

She had a heavy fringe, like a Palomino pony, and her pale blue eyes glittered underneath. I thought that she was going to cry. I’m not very good when women cry. ‘How do you know I’m heading for Euro?’

‘I’m not stupid. Take me with you.’

And so I did. She was young, calm, kind, and she liked Luke, and she was beautiful, which wasn’t important, but cheered things up, and I soon needed cheering up very badly, for it seemed we would never get out of the country.

I hadn’t meant to bring Dora, either. She was suffering a little as we kept on the move, unable to stop anywhere long enough for her to have a good slow twelvehour refuel, which all Doves needed as they got older. Nor was she ‘happy’ travelling in the boot; Doves’ mobility and bodytone wane with disuse, all around me now they are failing, waning –

Doves have no concept of the future, although some of them have a time delay. If that isn’t in use, they exist in the present, commands, perceptual apparatus, the lot. We were sitting round the table in a safe house near Bournemouth, I’d been drinking I suppose, and feeling expansive, and foolishly I started to explain to Dora, and perhaps to our hosts, who were Dovelovers, that once we’d got to Euro she could travel with us, look out of the window, play with Luke, see mountains, lakes, everything … But she looked at me with her big soft eyes, a little duller than usual from being switched off, and said, ‘This is not a correct message. I see a table, I don’t see lakes. I see a red bottle, I don’t see a mountain.’

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘or maybe next week. I shall show you and Lukey the lakes, and the mountains.’

‘I don’t see lakes, I don’t see mountains,’ she said, and it touched me with foreboding, as if she must be right, as if she were a prophet. But of course she was just a preprogrammed machine.

We were hunted everywhere. I couldn’t fix a crossing, all Manguard’s contacts couldn’t fix a safe boat, no one would risk it, all the ports were watched, or they asked for impossible amounts of money. ‘Lie low,’ was the advice. ‘They’ll get tired of watching,’ but I knew that Sarah would never get tired of it, I knew she’d stick at nothing to get Luke back.