The Ice People (30 page)

I must have been asleep for over an hour when the car woke me with its new strange rhythm. It caught a little; it choked; stalled. Then the road dipped, and it went back to normal. When we climbed again, the stuttering returned. I was trying to concentrate on this when Briony’s unbelieving voice reached me.

‘Saul. The fuel tank can’t be empty? Have we got a can in the back?’

‘No. But you’re right, it can’t be empty. I filled up in the village yesterday.’ The fuel gauge said empty, but it wasn’t reliable.

‘I don’t suppose we’ve got a hole in the tank.’

I cut her off. ‘You’re being neurotic.’

She went on driving for four hundred metres before the road suddenly steepened sharply. The car coughed, strained, then ground to a halt.

I got out and looked. The tank seemed all right. I checked it over and saw nothing. Then Briony looked, and spotted a tiny crack right along the corner. That was the problem with hubron cars, which had been so popular when I was a boy. They were amazingly cheap, and extraordinarily light, onethird the weight of fibreglass, but they shattered unpredictably. You could mend them in minutes with a hubron melder, but the one that came with the car was a dud, as we had discovered back in Normandie. Ever since we’d been praying that nothing would go wrong.

‘What now?’ Briony asked, and just for a second she leaned her head against my shoulder, but I winced away involuntarily, in pain. I could think of nothing to say to her.

The snow stretched blankly away on all sides. It was still pretty early; nine
AM
, but soon other travellers would be on the road, other travellers, strangers, dangers. A dog, or some other creature, howled. I believe I kicked the car quite hard, waking up Luke, who asked what was the matter.

‘We’re fucked, that’s all,’ I may have said.

‘Tea,’ said Briony. I knew she was right. I got out the primus, and we used our bottled water, for with all this snow we should never want for water. I felt better with the tea, and we ate some tinned ham, and started to think what we could do. Should I hike back down the mountain and look for fuel? Should we flag down the next car and beg or buy just enough fuel to get us over the mountain?

‘They’ll never stop,’ Briony said. ‘I mean, we might be murderers.’

‘He is a murderer,’ Luke quipped.

It made me think. How far would I go? I had a gun. If we stopped a car I could siphon off all their fuel at gunpoint, I didn’t have to play Mr Nice Guy. But I was Samuel’s son, a policeman’s son.
Yes, but he’s dead,
another voice said.
And it will get very cold, on this mountain. Do something, or you’ll die too
.

‘We could try on foot,’ said Luke. ‘There must be footpaths across these mountains –’

‘– But we don’t have maps. And how about Dora? She can only toddle a few hundred metres.’

‘Oh yes.’ His face fell. ‘I was forgetting her …’

‘We can’t consider Dora,’ said Briony. ‘There are three human beings to think about.’ She looked guiltily over towards the car, as if afraid that Dora might hear her.

‘If we had something to use as a sledge, I could push her,’ said Luke.

I was touched by his affection for Dora, after all that time when he hadn’t even liked her, but if we went on foot, it would be without her. And we’d have to leave most of our possessions behind. Useful ones, like stoves and food stores. And precious ones, like my few books and pictures and family letters and photographs – things I had not been able to leave.

Perhaps now at last I could be rid of them
.

I think I understood, in that brief moment, why Luke wanted to go on foot. There was something exciting as well as frightening about the thought of getting rid of it all, the nets of history, the lifelong mistakes, and starting again, just us and the mountain. There must be a lot Luke would like to forget. He could start again, be a nomad, a caveman.

Only Luke wasn’t old enough to be a man.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll go back for fuel. My legs are all right. I can carry lefthanded.’

But Briony shook her head. ‘In your condition, you won’t make it.’

We looked at each other, the gallant band. The brilliant light made everything unnaturally clear, and bright, and painful. I remember the colour of Briony’s irises, icy blue with rifts of gold, and the blonde rats’-tails of her hair. Luke’s cheeks were pinkened by cold and adolescence. The intense cold was like a photograph, freezing us into a single frame. How much I felt I loved them at that moment, more, suddenly, because we were in danger. We’d come so far, but our luck had run out.

Then Briony started talking again. ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if we all pushed together … I think we might be very near the top. I told you I came over here before? I was eighteen, with my first boyfriend. He wanted to walk the old pilgrim’s route,
el camino de Santiago
, which leads through the pass of Roncesvalles –’

‘I know about Roncesvalles,’ Luke interrupted, eager to show off. ‘ We did it in history. It’s where Roland was killed, and he blew his horn, but I forget what happened … All the birds dropped dead, I think that was it. He was the bravest of them all.’

‘I have a feeling we’re very near,’ Briony went on, smiling faintly. ‘If only we can get the car to the top. There was a monastery up there. Incredibly old. Reconsecrated in the twenties. I’m sure the monks would let us have some fuel.’

‘But how can I push like this?’ I lamented.

‘Luke and I can do most of it,’ she said, nodding firmly. ‘I’d better push from the front, hadn’t I? Steer and push, through the front door. We’ll take it in very easy stages. This car may be crap, but at least it’s light.’

The car was light, but we were heavily loaded – yet Luke was nodding, brighteyed, determined. I got up and stared back down the mountain. The road wound away into the far distance, a thin black line in the expanse of snow. Below I remembered the endless foothills. Along the horizon I saw tiny clouds, grey and white mixed, small but busy, bubbling slightly like life in a pond. I had a sudden sense of urgency.

I went to the rear and put my back into the car, trying to protect my damaged arm. Luke and I pushed side by side.

(Things had changed a lot since we sailed the boat. We knew each other better, but the strains were greater. He resisted me; rejected me. If I talked about Africa, he always fell silent, and then I was afraid it was just a delusion, my reborn pride, my belief in the future. Sometimes he reminded me of Sarah, who always made me feel like a hopeless dreamer. But I persevered. In the end, he would see it, he had to see it, as Briony did. I only wanted the best for him. All that I did, I did for him.)

Every five minutes we had to rest. Luke talked to Briony, not me. Once or twice I felt almost jealous. He always seemed to be sitting between us. I realised yet again how close they were, how they teased each other, how he cared for her, perhaps in a way he couldn’t care for his mother, for Briony was so much gentler.

‘Briony,’ I said, as Luke took a piss and she smoked one of her rare cigarettes, ‘how did you ever get involved with Wicca? I mean – you’re not remotely like them.’ I know I had asked her that question before, but today for some reason she wanted to talk, or else I happen to remember her answer.

‘You don’t really know what they were like,’ she reminded me, with a wry smile. ‘They weren’t all like Sarah … duller, most of them.’

‘Sarah wasn’t dull.’

‘No … she isn’t an easy person, though.’ The tense she used gave me a faint shock, reminding me Sarah was still alive. ‘I admired her enormously, you know,’ she continued. ‘She was very strong. Very forceful. I think I wanted to be like her. She was like my mother, but much – nicer. At first, you know, she didn’t really hate men.’ She blushed. ‘I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but by the end they really did hate men, her and Juno particularly … Later we argued. And they didn’t trust me. I lost my job. And I couldn’t escape. If I’d tried to leave they might have killed me. And besides, there was Luke. He was … like my son … I would do anything for him. Now he’s growing up so fast he scares me.’

I chuckled. ‘Take a glance over your shoulder.’

She did, and her eyes were suddenly bright, with the queer quick emotions I liked in her. ‘They never got enough chance to play. Life in the Cocoon was so serious.’

For Luke was bent double, scraping up the snow, making what could only be a snowman. It was crazy, but we all joined in. Our hands ached with cold, we slithered and slipped, but we laughed like drunks; we were a family.

‘You’d be a great mother,’ I whispered to Briony, when Luke skidded off to find stones for the eyes. He came back too quickly, so I’m not sure she heard me. But she would have been, could have been –

‘Let’s get back on the road. Night comes down so fast,’ said Briony, and looked at me blankly, as if she were suddenly unutterably tired, as if the cold had pierced her body.

It was noon, in fact, and the sun was almost hot, but the strange small clouds were boiling away.

We got puffed very quickly in the thin air. By two we only seemed to have moved a few hundred metres from the place where the snowman sat, looking faintly mocking as he receded, too slowly, wrapped in Luke’s red scarf. I decided we needed encouragement. Somebody – me – should do a reconnoitre to find out how far we still had to go. I left the others resting together, and set off walking as fast as I could.

The road rose steadily to the horizon, but I couldn’t see if another slope lay behind it. Then the road changed course very slightly, just enough, with the steepness of the banks, to put me all at once in shadow. And then I was aware of the depth of the cold, the physical, cutting power it had, the way it gripped and squeezed your flesh, trapping the blood in your swollen fingers, driving the blood from your frozen toes. And in that shadow I was afraid, for I knew the cold would kill us, if we couldn’t make it. If we didn’t manage to get to the top before dark came we were as good as dead. And the road was getting steeper. Sharply steeper.

If we all died here, would Sarah ever know?

I told myself not to think of that, crunching on upwards, eyes on the ground, making myself take it one step at a time,
don’t look at the slope, don’t look at the skyline …

I had a sudden sense that something had changed. I looked up, and the ground had dropped away before me. A high bleak basin, flat, bare, surrounded me, but then the road dipped down. This little patch of land must be protected from the wind, because a few straggling fir trees survived, and away behind them stood a tall building, fifty metres from the road. It was gaunt, dark, without any sign of life, but there was glass in the windows, and yes, that was surely smoke from the chimney, hard to see against the boil of clouds … thankgod, it must be the monastery. This must be the pass of Roncesvalles, where Charlemagne fought, where Roland died, and I turned and ran down the mountain to find them, slipping and sliding, dizzy with joy, and to my surprise they were only two hundred metres away, though to me on the way up it felt like a thousand, and behind them I could clearly see the little snowman with its flapping, snakelike scarlet tongue, and I realised that our epic effort had only pushed the car eight hundred metres.

But I shouldn’t have said so to Briony, who didn’t seem to hear that we were very near the summit.

‘ We’ve been pushing this bloody thing since eleven. Four hours, and we’ve only gone eight hundred metres, according to you. I don’t believe it.’ Redcheeked and furious with effort, Briony smacked her hand on the bonnet.

‘Her fingers are bleeding,’ Luke said, worried, though when I looked, his were bleeding too.

‘I reckon we’re about a halfanhour from the top. Like you said, the monks will give us food and fuel.’ I wanted her to share my optimism, but she was too exhausted to respond. I hugged her, kissed her, she looked magnificent, sturdy, glowing, orgasmically flushed – I saw Luke blush and look away. ‘I’m proud of you, Briony,’ I said.

But she shook me off, angry, or just tired. ‘We’re not there yet. And you sound like my father. You don’t own me, you know.’

This was it, with women. You couldn’t get it right. Say something nice to them, and they bit you. ‘Okay,’ I said, patiently. ‘I’m proud of
Luke.
And I admire you. Is that better?

She nodded; I hope she was ashamed of herself.

I noticed Luke was sitting on the bonnet, and I yelled at him at the top of my voice, ‘Get off that fucking car, for godsake!’ I was in pain, and cross with them both. I imagined the car sinking into the snow, but of course it stood on solid ground. Luke jutted his jaw, and got down, slowly, but he said these words, he spat them out – ‘My mum said you had a horrible temper. My mum was right.’

My mum, my mum
… He was still a child.

Briony went and put her arm around him. She didn’t have to disapprove so clearly. I left them to get on with it. I thought, we’ll have to lighten our load. I got into the car and looked around.

Dora sat there, looking blank and despairing. I switched her on, to feel her warmth, to hear her voice, since I felt friendless. I stroked her strokeyfeely panel. ‘That feels nice,’ she said, sweetly. Then ‘I feel hungry. It’s cold, isn’t it?’

I agreed with her. ‘Sorry, no spare food. We’ll try and give you some food in Spain.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘give me some food.’ Of course she didn’t understand the future, and just sat there staring blindly at me, her baby beak curved in a foolish smile. I turned away and snatched up some things, books, a spare radio, tins, bottles, anything I could see that was heavy, filled two rubbish bags and hauled them out – wanted to chuck Dora in as well, to protect myself from her trusting face.

Then I had a thought. It was a straight road. She had a ‘nonslip foot’ option. We were going so slowly she could certainly keep up, so I told her ‘Walkies time!’ and got her out.

I went and patted my son on the shoulder. He said, ‘It’s okay,’ but wouldn’t look at me. We covered the first half of the remaining road in relative silence, concentrated, grim. Now all three of us were in the icy shadow that began when the road turned the corner, and besides, the cloud had swollen, suddenly, after its long horizontal simmer, boiling towards us, dark, livid. Our goal was coming nearer but each step was an effort, the quiet only broken by our gasps and curses and the sound of our feet, scuffing, skidding, and the car lurching onwards, slowly, slowly.