The Ice People (3 page)

Then the music cut out. The welcome was repeating. I turned and saw a woman with her back to me, staring mystified at the input by the scanner.

‘Just show your coder,’ I began to say, but at that moment she raised a pale hand and tried to do something to the input panel. At once the warning buzzer sounded. ‘Security,’ the building said. ‘Security to entrance, please. Security. Security.’

The entrance doors closed firmly behind the woman, who was spinning round slowly, looking nervously upwards, and then the lift doors, which were opening for me, changed their minds, shuddered, closed again. ‘Entrance hall sealed,’ the building remarked. ‘Secur-’ But it didn’t finish the word.

‘Ohgod,’ the woman said. I looked at her. She had long hair. Most females under fifty had short hair, unless they were under ten, that is. She was small, slim, in a loose white dress, not fashionable, a ‘pretty’ dress. What my mother would have called a pretty dress.

‘I’ve done something awful. I’m new,’ she said. ‘I’m Sarah Trelawney. How do you do.’ Her voice was composed, soft, with a burr. A very young voice, despite her appearance.

The voicetone hissed, seethed, strained, as if the building were trying to breathe. Then it suddenly said, in a cheerful voice, ‘The emergency has been contained. We apologise for any break in transmission.’ I waited for the doors to move, but nothing happened. And the music began to unroll again, wave after wave, into the vacuum.

She walked towards me, and the fog fell away. The sun sheared across her, shining on her hair. She wasn’t old. She was younger than me. But how strange she looked, with that loose pale dress, how perversely erotic, when everyone else was wearing clothes that were thinner than skin and clung to the body, to halfglimpse the swell of her belly, her breasts. I tried very hard not to stare at her breasts.

That weird waterfall of hair. Such childish hair. Reddish-brown, shiny, glinting like conkers against their white shell, and her skin had tiny freckles like dots of honey. She looked miserable, but her eyes were very blue. She came closer. The music gathered and poured. My heart swelled absurdly.

‘Nessun dorma …’
Let no one sleep …

Then she spoke, and her firm voice cut through my fantasy. She had sharp small teeth, which caught the light. ‘I seem to have locked us in. Sorry.’

‘I’m Saul,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. The others will be here in ten minutes or so.’ She had a small nose, a square, strong jaw. We shook hands. Hers was mysteriously cool – most handshakes then were a slither of sweat.

‘You must be an officer,’ I said, ‘to be coded.’

‘It’s a new post,’ she said, shy. ‘I’m something called a Role Support Officer.’

‘What does that mean, then?’ I asked her.

‘The government’s decided that boys and girls have to be taught to get on together. It’s partly political, I’m afraid. They’re making appointments all over the country. Because the fertility figures are down again, and they have to seem to be doing something. Elections next year, of course.’

‘How do you mean, get on together?’ We were leaning side by side against the desk where normally the guards were posted. I noticed her nails: very white moons. Small freckled hands. No rings. A chain. She wasn’t pierced, or tattooed. I wanted to get on with her.

(Be honest: I wanted to make love to her.)

‘Well – I mean – you know – ‘ She was intensely embarrassed. ‘Live together, I suppose. Try to get them living together again.’

Live together.
It was shockingly intimate.

‘I bet you got the job because you look like that.’ As soon as I’d said it, I knew it was offensive. ‘I didn’t mean –’ I said, then stopped.

But she smiled. ‘You mean – I look twentiethcentury,’ she said. ‘What they used to call feminine. Probably, yes. And I’ve dressed the part. But I
can
teach. As a matter of fact, I’m good. I’ve taught Outsiders, you know. I can teach without screens. I even taught for two months in the towers –’

‘Wow,’ I said. So she was tough. Like everyone else in my year at college, I’d turned down the chance of practice teaching in the towers, despite the huge bonuses they offered and the promise of fulltime protection from zapsquads.

She was staring at me, letting her frank blue eyes run over my neck, my arms – and was she looking at the curly hair on my chest? ‘You have a slightly old-fashioned look yourself,’ she said, and smiled. ‘We could almost coteach.’

Then neither of us could look at each other, but I could feel, a centimetre away, her small white hand beside mine on the desk, burning into me like a naked current. We stood transfixed in a cube of sunshine, saying very little, staring at the glass where hands had begun to wave at us, gesturing, impatient, frustrated, irrelevant. I hardly saw them, because I was with her.

Was it ten minutes, or an hour, before the building yielded? By that time, I was falling in love with Sarah.

And Sarah? I’ll never know about her, but she told me later she felt the same way.

We said very little, and a lot. That we both had dreams of escaping from the city. That both of us needed to escape our families. That we both wanted children, and expected them. We couldn’t say the word ‘children’, of course, which would have meant ‘sex’, to both of us. I said ‘I’d like a family of my own, one day,’ and she said ‘Of course,’ and smiled at me.

‘I like you,’ she said, although it was obvious.

‘Why?’ I said, feeling happiness spread through my body like oxygen.

‘I like the look of you. You’re – different. You’re not just English, are you? What are you? French? Spanish?’ She looked straight at me. Her curiosity was like a kiss. Then she lit up. ‘You’re
beek,
aren’t you. You must be, of course! Tell me I’m right.’

And she had seen the thing that I wanted her to see.
Beek
was short for
bicolor,
the French insult that black people themselves had taken over to mean ‘mixed race’, and she used it so easily.

‘Yes, I’m
beek.
Most people don’t notice. My father’s halfAfrican, my mother was white.’ Had I ever said it straight out before? She made me feel I could be myself.

‘That explains why – well, you look good to me.’ She finished the sentence in an awkward rush. ‘I’m very interested in all that. It was part of my Ethnicities diploma course.’

I’d always disliked the word ‘ethnicity’ – it sounds like someone cleaning their teeth – but on her lips, it seemed tolerable. ‘You’re English, I suppose.’

She shook her head fiercely. ‘I’m Scottish and Cornish. Not an English drop of blood in me.’ (Which must have been nonsense, but it sounded exciting.)

‘Did your parents have red hair?’ I looked at her hair. It was like some glossy animal fur. What couldn’t a man do with hair like that? Wrap it around him, burrow into it.

But something was happening outside the door. Two beings had arrived in brilliant spacesuits. Somewhere to the rear my colleagues hovered, leaving a clear space between themselves and the spacemen. ‘The emergency services are going to invade,’ I told her, thinking
now it will be over.

‘I hope they don’t sack me for crashing the system.’

‘Come dancing with me tomorrow night.’ I had to say something or lose her for ever.

‘Mygod, just look at the size of those vappers!’ she said, amused, and then suddenly alarmed. ‘Are they going to use them with us inside?’

And then I remembered; it was mirrorglass. We could see out but they couldn’t see in. The people outside weren’t waving to us, they were simply beating on the glass in frustration. No one would know there was anyone inside. We were in danger; she was in danger.

I tried to sound calm. ‘Let’s get out of range.’ But the spacemen were aligning their vappers with the doors. Something earthshattering was going to happen. Without thinking, I grabbed Sarah by the shoulders, flung her to the ground, and fell on top of her, covering both our heads with my outstretched elbows. She felt soft and small, and smelled of sweat, and flowers, and part of me registered these pleasant things as most of me waited for the end. One second, two, three, four –

I felt her struggling, her small steel fists. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she panted, furious. ‘You’ve torn my dress. Get off me, you idiot!’

Then the building spoke. Both of us froze. ‘…contained,’ it said. ‘Waiting to code. Waiting to code. Good morning. Please approach and code. Please show all codecards so we can help you.’

It was over. The lift doors glided back like silk. I rolled off Sarah, and patted her placatingly. Outside, the silver spacemen laid down their vappers, and the crowd behind them began to push forwards.

‘I was trying to save your life,’ I gabbled. ‘They couldn’t see us. It’s mirrorglass.’ She was straightening her dress and staring at me. Her pupils were pinprick small with shock, and her skin was webbed with pink where I’d clutched her. ‘I was trying to shield you with my body.’

She suddenly stopped frowning and touched my arm. As the entrance slid open, to great whoops and cheers, I watched her pupils expand and darken. ‘Why should you?’ she said. ‘I mean – you’ve only just met me. I mean, you were
risking your life
for me.’

I thought about that in the split second that was left. I couldn’t say ‘Because I’m in love with you,’ for fear she would think me completely mad.

The thing I did say seemed simple, obvious, though normally I would never have said it. ‘Because I’m a man,’ I told her. ‘Because I’m a man, and you’re a woman.’

T
hat was the way it began with us. An absolute feeling of rightness together. My colouring, my size, my sex. They all felt right as never before. They married her smallness, softness, toughness. She reminded me a little of my mother, slight but enduring, loving, fierce, good with her hands, helpful, maternal. She was –
womanly,
that was the only word, old-fashioned though I knew it was. So I could be manly, as I wished to be.

‘You beautiful man,’ she said, when she first saw me naked, not long after. No woman had ever said that to me.

‘But I’m so – hairy,’ I said, humbly. I did feel humble. She was too good for me. Seeing her like this, it was obvious. Her small sweet breasts. Her delicacy. I was halfashamed of my hairiness. The pressures against it were overwhelming; ninetyninepercent of men were smooth and neat, displaying their gleaming narrow bodies in clubs, corrugated chests that shone like oil and only the faintest grey fuzz on their scalps. I was an ape by comparison, a pelt of blackness from chest to groin.

‘Esau was an hairy man,’ she whispered, gently running her fingertips through my chest hair, going down, lower, lower, bliss, till she reached the place where I was hard and hairless, and she bent her head and kissed me there, then looked up and smiled – ‘See, you’re smooth as well.’

Such happiness. Such a time of peace.

Only one thing was less than perfect, and I put that down to my stubbornness, a streak of pride and resentment that had sometimes got me into trouble at school. She was wild about me, everything about me, as she assured me earnestly, running her hands over my lips, my nose, telling me I was the first
beek
she had slept with. (How very dated that slang seems now!) She seemed to think about that more than I did. It must have made me more romantic, my mixed race background, my unusual looks. She wanted me to read the essays she had written for the
Ethnicities
part of her diploma, and I tried, I tried, but it was very solemn, and the language incomprehensible.

She ordered what seemed like dozens of films about black history, and urged me to watch them.
The Black Diaspora, The Black Experience, Caliban in London, African Journey …
She saw at least half before she got bored, but I made excuses not to watch them with her, I didn’t want her telling me stuff,
teaching me
stuff, about my past, I wanted her to love me for myself, I didn’t want to be part of black history, I needed to be myself, her man. ‘I’ll use them later,’ I said, meaning never. And she sulked a bit, but then she gave up. We made love so much, there was no time to quarrel.

Never, never …

Never say never.

For a while we were everything to each other, Sarah and I in a box of a room. (Property, of course, was insanely expensive since the government had stopped all further building to protect the last socalled green spaces. But the illicit shanty town still grew, though every day police tore it down. And in the centre of London flybuilders slipped buildings into every tiny gap and garden.) We were grateful for our sweaty box, though it was on the third floor and had no aircon, no voice response, no autoservice. It was primitive, but so were we.

We made love on the floor, which was cooler than the sleepmat, and in the showerroom, and in the kitchen. We slept intertwined, in a slipknot of sweat. That amazing heat of that first summer.

It was always with us, like a third person. If we hadn’t been so madly in love with each other, hungry for each moist salty centimetre of skin, we couldn’t have borne to share that space. The middleaged, the slows, the bits, rarely seemed to touch each other. By June or July, handshakes had shrunk to a tentative tap inside the wrist.

But to us that summer was like a mother, holding us clasped together in the heat. Deep down we were very different people, but for months of bliss we lived like twins. I made iced coffee; she made iced coffee. I showered; she showered. We made love again.

The first time we did it, she said, insanely, ‘Come on, Saul. Let’s make a baby. I know I’ll get pregnant. I just feel it.’

I was naked and stiff in the candle flame (which was strictly illegal because of the fire risk). My sweat ran down like melted wax, but a cold little voice from somewhere else hissed in my ear, escaped my lips.

‘But if we want to travel, Sarah,’ I said. ‘You thought, in a year … once you’re established in the job. We talked about going to the ends of the earth …’ I felt as if our dream might slip away, but perhaps I was looking in the wrong direction. ‘But never mind,’ I added, hastily. I would have done anything she wanted.