The Ice People (25 page)

Now Samuel’s blood was going to save Luke’s life. Opening the gates of Africa. Giving us the key to the last warm places, the retreating deserts where fruit would grow, the great grassy plains that had once been sand, the blueing hills, the returning streams, the sapling woods of the new green Sahara.

I
suppose you never know who you are until your life is over. What you are is the sum of what you do – leavened with wishes, dreams, regrets – but I never knew half of what I could do until I was prised from my shell of habit.

I found I could sail across the Channel, which after all is a limb of the Atlantic. I could barter, in French, a boat for a car, and not do too badly on the deal. I could come across as tough, and taciturn. I could make people afraid of me. I could do without sleep, and books, and good food, and buzzers and soothers and all the rest …

I could live at a slower speed than before, rougher and slower, because I had to. Cars in Euro were a different life-form to the speedy hydrocars we drove at home. Since half of Paris was burned to the ground in 2056, the year before our journey, by the explosion at the hydrogen plant at Boulogne-Bilancourt, there had been no fuel for hydrocars, so the old bangers had come into their own, poor people’s cars, essentially, a few still running on blackmarket petrol, more of them adapted to run on alcohol that enterprising peasants brewed from plants. Hemp plants mostly, after smoking the leaves. You soon got used to the sweet, choking smell. But the car we’d got hold of, a red battered thing which had green and yellow fins painted on the back, did forty kilometres an hour flat out – pretty average for a French Alco – and you couldn’t go flat out through unfamiliar country where most of the signposts had been burnt for firewood. Sometimes it felt as if we were crawling, covering eighty kilometres a day. I began to understand what I’d never grasped when we flew all over Euro in less than halfanhour, when we slid like silk over the surface of things – that the world was large, and wild, and hard.

I could smash down the shutters of deserted houses, break in through other people’s windows. I felt nothing, looking at the scattered glass from a family photo in a brass frame.
My
family mattered more than them. I learned staying alive mattered more than anything, staying alive to protect my son.

Once I broke in and found a middle-aged woman whimpering with terror in the kitchen. Her face was a slab of tearstreaked white. She stared, transfixed, as if I might kill her. I took what we needed as if she weren’t there, and left her twitching, shivering, pleading. Perhaps she was mad, and had been abandoned months ago by indifferent children.
Perhaps the father had stolen her children …
I forced myself to act, not think, but I’ve never forgotten the colour of her eyes, blackishgreen like an oiled mallard, and her greasy dark hair, licked to her scalp.

I could forage for food and always find something, always enough to keep us alive, for the fleeing French never took it all with them, there were always tins of chestnut purée or vacuum packs of
langue de chat
biscuits or apple
compôte
or great wheels of cheese. We sometimes ate almost too well, in the north, on greasy pâtés or
confit
of duck, food that made poor Luke want to throw up, for he was used to spartan vegetarian fare, but we nagged him to eat it, and sometimes he did.

I could wring the necks of chickens. That was a shock, how easy it was, once you caught the damn things, with their hysterical squawking and long scrabbling feet and outraged eyes, once you’d felt the pain of their steely peck on your naked hand, it was easy to kill them, to squeeze and twist their long leathery craws with their prickly unpleasant ruffs of feathers. I could pluck them, too, once Briony taught me. Her mother had owned a battery farm, and she wouldn’t eat meat for our first few weeks, but by the end of March she was eating everything.

I could make a fire, lighting up every time, persevering even if the wood was wet, and cook whatever we found, very badly, either boiling it or burning it, in a cooking pot stolen in Normandie.

I could fish, with a line that Luke and I made, and we enjoyed it, father and son. But we never caught very much with the line, though we once removed halfadozen gasping and wriggling ornamental carp from a pond by hand, overcoloured orange and vermilion things. ‘Like taking candy from a baby,’ said Briony. She skinned them and fried them over the fire, and we ate them, and it was like eating salted leather, and Briony threw them up in the bushes. ‘That’s a waste,’ said Luke, transparently gleeful, which was what we’d told
him,
a hundred times.

I could drive the car for eight hours at a stretch before I yielded the wheel to Briony, then sleep in the back while she did her stint. I could steer by the sun, without uptodate maps – too much of a risk to try to buy them on the road, a way of advertising our foreignness. Besides, how could we know which of the furtive little shops still open in the rows of closed steel shutters sold anything but looted possessions? No maps would have shown the reality, in any case, the towns abandoned in the rush to the sun, the places where meganauts had crashed across the road and been left to rust once the looting stopped, or where there had been great fires in the riots and black melted plastic, several metres deep, made the route we had planned an inky nightmare, fantastic skewed nests of dark loop and curve. We could never relax, because the road might end, or the little black shape buzzing innocently towards us might prove to be a carload of bandits – but I could cope, I could handle it.

I could travel with a loaded gun in my lap, and be ready to use it when I had to. The worst time was one day when Briony was driving, I’d opened the window to chuck out some paper and an old yellow bus at the very last minute veered purposefully across the road towards us, a dozen male faces, swarthy, avid, were suddenly staring into mine, and they would have forced us off the road, but I let them have it through the open window, blasting their windscreen, windows, faces. The noise inside our car was like armageddon as we swerved and screamed across the tarmac and Briony wrenched the steeringwheel back just in time.

I could kill people, and not feel ashamed.

I grew closer to Luke, slowly closer. I think he began to feel happier. I know he preferred this uncouth life to the terrible safety of the Cocoon.

I could be a father, as I’d wanted to be.

But I couldn’t make Briony love me. I think she liked me, she got on with me, she adored my son, she was my mate, my comrade, but she felt the force of my dogged desire and she always said no, she rejected me, kindly but firmly, Nurse Sensible …

Why can’t they ever be Eve, in the Garden?

True, I was too old for her. And the shadow of Sarah stood between us. Looking back on it now, she was right to demur. In those early days, Luke could not have borne it, for he still missed his mother, and talked about her, and sometimes asked what I felt about her –

Then something happened to change all that.

They had given him hormones. Luke let it out.

For a while I felt nothing but hatred for Sarah.

For decades, of course, it had been considered normal for men and women to take hormones. Mostly it was women who wanted to be male (not male, exactly, but masculine – they wanted to steal our strength, our hardness). There were also the men who wanted to be female. Their numbers had grown, particularly since the women had taken the children away. Men were caught trying to infiltrate Wicca with newly swollen breasts and whispering voices. They were treated with terrifying ruthlessness, though many of them just wanted to be with children. Others, I think, were actually trying to be the women who had rejected them; to become the women they could not have. Mostly it wasn’t sinister, though godknows we men were pretty confused …

Of course we were; we were redundant. They had sperm on ice that would last for decades – defective, most of it, but it would serve – and there was nothing better between our legs, they seemed to say, when their cold eyes appraised us.

So men and women had been taking hormones or ‘taking charge of their identity’, as the first, immensely pompous book I read about the subject put it, since the beginning of our century. But the rules had always been strict; no hormones were to be sold to anyone under sixteen. They were one of the last ‘Restricted’ drugs, after the prescription system ceased to exist and all recreational drugs were made legal, in the socalled ‘Leary Year’, 2020 …

Women can be more ruthless than men. I didn’t suspect; I missed the signs.

We were camping in a beautiful farmhouse in Anjou – we called it camping, but in fact we’d broken in. The water was switched off, naturally, but when I turned the stopcock, to my joy it worked, it wasn’t frozen, it wasn’t broken, so the area still had essential services, unlike Normandie, where everything had gone. We were staying a few nights to dry some damp things and rest the drivers; we did need rest. This new kind of driving was deeply exhausting. Bliss to have water, bliss to rest. But closeness to Briony was bad for my sleep – nights of crazed hope, of hopeless lust.

It was April, and there were rustling alders, silver with new leaf, bordering the garden, and drifts of pale primroses and daffodils, and pastel forgetmenots floating like lace across the wild green depths of grass, and they were late, I registered, because it was cold, spring was replacing summer in Anjou – but never mind, it was beautiful, the light felt young and bright and strong after the terrible gloom of the year of the volcano. I had in my hand a bottle of red wine that I’m sure the Duponts never meant to leave behind, twentyfive years old, a
grand vin de Bordeaux –
and I thought, let’s all have a glass together, let’s raise our glasses to this great adventure. They were three lousy toothglasses, but what did it matter?

Briony was inside, looking for bedding, washing some crockery in the kitchen. ‘I’ll wash some plates, then we can eat.’ ‘Don’t bother –’ ‘You’re joking, Luke is starving.’ ‘I mean,
don’t bother to wash the plates.
Come and sit down.’ ‘Yes, in a moment.’

– It’s one thing I never really liked about women, that they didn’t know how to enjoy themselves in those days when there was so much to enjoy. There used to be moments that deserved a celebration, when life, in fact,
demanded
it, but the women would be somewhere being goodygoodies, cleaning or packing or sorting or preparing, and they’d say, in a holierthanthou sort of voice, ‘No, you enjoy yourself, I’m too busy’. (Granted, she just said, ‘In a moment’, but I understood perfectly the implication. Sarah had said ‘In a moment’ too.)

Luke, by contrast, was tearing round the garden, trying to catch a squirrel that he wanted to skin. These are the moments when it’s good to have a son.

‘Luke,’ I said, ‘have you ever drunk wine? Because if you haven’t, this is a great time to start. It’s a wonderful bottle. Come and look.’

He pulled up, panting. ‘Wine? Me? Do you mean it? Great!’ He was flushed with running, his curls flattened back and dark with sweat, and I suddenly thought, Luke’s thickening up, his neck is no longer a boy’s thin neck, and his face is changing, ever so subtly …

We spent a lot of time in the car, you see, or lurking by candlelight in houses where the electricity was cut off, so I didn’t get much chance to look at Luke properly. Now I looked. The sun shone straight across the hills into his face. His eyes were the clear strong blue of his mother’s, but what had happened to his skin? There were some pimples round his mouth, and was that peach fuzz? I was shocked but also touched to see it. A teenager at last. I said nothing. Perhaps we weren’t giving him enough fruit. Sarah had been
obsessed
with fruit, and left behind a worry like a little worm.

‘You could have wine mixed with water,’ I said. ‘That’s the way French – young people – drink it.’ I managed to stop myself saying ‘French children’.

A cloud of uncertainty darkened his face. ‘I’m not sure I’m allowed to have it. It’s –
alcohol,
isn’t it, wine?’ He said it as if alcohol were deadly poison. But then, he had been living a protected life.

‘What do you mean, not sure if you’re allowed? I’m your father, aren’t I? I
am
allowing you.’

‘No – I mean – I’ll have to ask Briony.’

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ His mouth turned down. There was clearly a secret he didn’t want to tell me. Something concerning his mother, then.

At that moment Briony came through on to the patio. ‘Phew. That’s done,’ she sighed, and smiled. Was she being a martyr? Never mind. ‘What shall we eat?’

‘First we have a drink … What’s this about Luke and wine?’ I said. ‘Did Wicca make all those poor infants take the pledge?’ I was joking, really, but I saw something pass between Luke and Briony, a quick, anxious glance.

‘I think it would be all right for you to have some, Luke,’ she said, slowly.

‘For godsake, woman, don’t make such a fuss. We’ve been through a lot, this is a celebration. One glass of wine never hurt a teenager.’ The look I gave her was hostile enough for Luke to come to her defence.

‘You don’t understand,’ he said, flushing up. ‘She’s not making a fuss. It was … medical.’

‘But that’s over,’ Briony rushed in quickly, her face clearly telling him to shut up.

‘What’s over?’ I asked, twisting the cork, pulling mightily, uselessly, feeling my face redden and swell with the effort. ‘Stop talking in riddles –
sod it, sod it!
’ For the top of the cork had come away, leaving half of it crumbled in the neck of the bottle.

I don’t think Luke noticed I’d mashed up the cork; he thought I was swearing at Briony. He leapt in at once, talking too fast. ‘It’s not her fault. She didn’t have any say. I was having these pills. To protect my voice. You weren’t allowed to have alcohol if you took them, I mean we weren’t allowed to anyway, but the older boys were always smuggling it in. Juno explained it would be dangerous for me.’

‘To protect your voice? What is this about? Was he on medication, Briony?’