The Ice People (36 page)

And so I had to face the possibilities. One, he had been kidnapped by the
salvajes.
But we waited, and no ransom demand came. Two, he had been kidnapped by some other wrongdoer, bandit, mafioso, pederast, things too dreadful to think about. Three, he had gone away of his own accord, and was living somewhere quite happily, though Pedro flatly refused to believe this. ‘My children never leave me,’ he said, beating his chest for emphasis. ‘Your son never leave you either. You a good
padre,
you love your son.’ I knew this to be true, but it proved nothing. I recalled, wincing, how much we had quarrelled in the last few days before he disappeared … Four, he had been murdered, and there was no hope, but I knew I would never be able to believe that unless they sent me his bones, his blood –

I remember how often I found myself sobbing, sobbing and roaring like someone mad. I stayed with the family for over two months, until their patience must have been exhausted, and when I went to Pedro at last and told him I’d decided to move down the coast and search for Luke there, in the big resorts, he amazed me by taking me by the arm and dragging me down to his tiny office where he counted out, with elaborate gestures, every single ecu that I had paid him, and solemnly gave them back to me. I was glad to have it. I needed the money.

He promised me he’d listen, locally, ‘ear to the ground’. All might still be well. His wife had heard things, nothing solid, just gossip among the women and children …

When I questioned him, this disappeared, like mist unravelling in the sun, or hope dissolving, leaking away. But he did mean well. I know I misjudged them.

I had been searching aimlessly, frenetically, for over three months when Pedro left me a message at Estepona, where I had written to say I was staying. There was a rumour around the villages that a blonde boy had been sighted with the
salvajes.
There wasn’t a date, or a place, or a time, and the whole thing might be a garbled version of the story of Luke’s disappearance. All the same, I had been desperate for news, and my spirits rose unreasonably. I didn’t take it seriously enough to break off my search among the international crew of teenagers, some destitute, some wealthy, who smoked and dreamed in Estepona, the kind of friends my son might have made, but I let myself hope, I pulled back from the brink, I was a man again, no longer a drunk who shouted at women in flyblown bars.

Hope gave me the courage to do something I dreaded, something I knew I should have done before.

I rang Wicca, to find their number unobtainable. Phonesearch in London suggested a variety of other, more innocuous women’s institutions. By blind chance, or else god’slove, I found Sarah actually answering the phone at the fourth one of these I tried, the Women’s Institute for Cooperative Childcare.

I recognised her voice, smoky, snappy, deeper, drier than before, and I thought she would know mine, but my heart had stopped beating, my breathing was laboured – I probably sounded like any other heavy breather.

‘Yes, who is it?’ She sounded even more impatient than usual, possibly because I was a man. I knew she hadn’t recognised me.

‘Sarah’, I said. ‘It’s you, I know. Look, it’s Saul …
Saul
. I have something to tell you.’

There was a long silence. When she spoke again, her voice was unrecognisable, a howl, then an unsteady, furious, choking stream of incoherent questions. But she stopped herself, before I could answer, and her voice became very cold and thin.

‘Tell me where he is, Saul,’ she said, distinctly. ‘Or I swear I’ll kill you.
Just tell me
.’

‘He’s not with you?’ I said foolishly, remembering in the split second I spoke that we used to have exchanges like this when I was looking after Luke at home and she’d ring from work to see how he was and I would say, ‘Oh – isn’t he with you?’ A little joke, but against the rules.

She was screaming in my ear, ‘Are you winding me up?’

I wasn’t. It was a very faint hope. ‘No … no … I’ve – lost touch with him. I’m sure he’s all right –’ I couldn’t tell her I feared he was dead.

‘He’s
fifteen years old.
You can’t have lost touch –’

‘Temporarily. I thought I should ring you. He was absolutely fine, healthy, happy –’ I realised this call was impossible, but I’d had to make it, just in case he was there. ‘Got to go,’ I said, and then ‘Don’t worry.’

‘Where the hell –’ I hung up as her voice skated skywards. I was shaking, and cursing myself for a fool.

The force of her hatred. Sheer blind hatred. Of course, no wonder. I had stolen her son.

She never knew how much I’d loved him. If she had known, she would have let me see him, she wouldn’t have locked him away from me and forced me to take desperate measures.

She didn’t know how I’d cared for him. She didn’t know – I wished she had known, there was a childish part of me that wished she knew – she didn’t know I had been a hero. I wished she had seen me sailing the Channel, shooting at bandits, fighting off wolves. Perhaps I still wanted her to praise me. She didn’t know I had sacrificed everything to try to give Luke a life in the sun, him and his children, our grandchildren, for surely in Africa there would have been children. She didn’t understand I was trying to save him from the nanomachines, the thrumming headsets, the speaking buildings, the wretched tech-births, the rare sickly children, the lonely sexes. She didn’t understand that I wanted to free him from all the debris of the ice people. And now I had failed, she would never know.

I hated her for not knowing me. Yes; for not appreciating me. That was what women had done to men – they had lost interest, turned away, they no longer reflected what we did or showed in their faces what we were. Lighting us up, making us taller. It isn’t a lie, if it comes from love. My mother’s eyes shone when she looked at my father. And without that reflection, men were terminally lonely. We froze into ourselves, we accepted the ice.

The trail went dead on the Costa del Sol, no longer quite so sunny by the next summer. Inland, however, where the wild bands lived, the sightings had become more frequent, more detailed. The rumour had found a home on the screens; people contributed their stories of a blonde young man, godlike, handsome, running with a pack of swarthy children. I followed up every one of these sightings, but never got more than a road to travel, olive groves to tread, villages to wait in, hoping vainly for a glimpse of them so at least I would know if it were my son … The god,
El rubio,
the blonde one.

It was clear, in the end, he didn’t want me to find him.

M
y hands are so cold I can hardly write, though I’m wearing two pairs of xylon gloves, and most of the fingers are intact. Kit goes past, grey, crooked, head skewed away from me, ugly little arse-eye. Thrusting along, muttering, angry. He doesn’t look at me directly, but I know he’s seen me, I know I’m rumbled.

Time’s running out, I’m sure it is. I’ve had my fun, but nothing lasts. I’ve nearly got to the end of my story, but the Doves can’t wait, and the boys can’t wait –

They’d better come, then. I’ll be ready.

Saul will meet them face to face.

Time ran out in the old life too.

It went too fast when I was following a lead, trying to drive to some high village before the wild children moved on. It was slow as death when there was no news, but months mysteriously turned into years, and I had to take a job as an interpreter with a travel firm, friends of Pedro. You could feel time pressing in the middle distance, in the cooling of the climate, even here, as the ice advanced steadily across Euro, as the winter citrus harvest failed, as the golden Spanish summers grew paler, shorter – though the ice would never reach this coast. And then there was the nagging, immediate time that was just my reckoning of Luke’s age, he was fifteen now, perhaps taller than me, old enough for sex, though I don’t suppose he waited, and then sixteen, old enough to vote, had there been elections, or anything to vote for; and then he was seventeen, and a stranger, and then he was eighteen, and I gave up hope.

To say ‘I lost hope’ is not the whole truth. I gave up hope of reclaiming him. I gave up hope of ever completing my dream voyage to Africa. Taking Luke back to Samuel’s land. Completing the circle I’d drawn in my head. The serpent with its tail in its mouth. I thought that circle meant something precious, but maybe to Luke it was prison, incest … Children always have different dreams.

I gave up hope of ‘saving’ him.

Perhaps it was the
salvajes
who saved him.

I never stopped hoping that I would see him. I imagined him, more times than I can tell you. I would see brown figures on a far horizon where the heathazed hill met the fluid blue, and among the brown, a flash of blonde, and I’d drive hellforleather up some dirt track to find they were goats with a strange blonde girl who looked at me as if I might kill her, there must have been such longing in my eyes … In cities it was worse, with such a scrum of lost children, and occasionally a blonde head among the others. But never Luke, never my child.

Until once. Just once. I’m sure I saw him. I’m reluctant to say, in case it disappears, like a dream of happiness you start to wake up in. I’ve only told this once before, and that was to – to – Yes, I told Sarah. For nothing could be over until I had seen her, however old and tired we were.

In 2064, Luke was twentyone, or would have been, if he survived.

It was time to go home, but where was home? Should I use my one visa and try to cross to Africa, or should I take Dora back to England? Poor Dora, battered now, her feathers dull … She had never been the same since I tried to sell her, though I’d never completed my side of the bargain. A certain reproachfulness was in all her responses, a certain watchfulness in her logic, as if she were waiting for me to show my hand. It didn’t matter. We were used to each other.

Of the four adventurers, only two remained.

It was suddenly possible to go back to England, though there was only one reason for going. I checked through old records, and my name was no longer on police files as hunted. Perhaps because, after Wicca’s fall, all their accusations were discounted, perhaps because police records were in chaos.

She was on her way to sixty. We were both old. Surely it was time to talk to each other. Besides, I did have something to give her. The recording Luke did with Dora that morning, at the very last point before his voice broke. Second, the news that Luke was probably –

No, no ‘probably’s. She wouldn’t want conjecture.

I had been away from England for seven years. I travelled armed. Most people did. There were no more weapons checks on boats or planes. Flying had become increasingly dangerous, with nearly all the big airlines collapsing, most of the central airports taken over by Outsiders – children, or Wanderers, or the starving – and air traffic control a thing of the past. I bought the cheapest ticket I could get through my work. Why should I care if we were hijacked (there were hijacks now ten times a day)? What did it matter if we crashed in flames? This company owned three ageing planes and flew to a private airfield in Kent. They boasted of ‘Dee Icing’ as if it were an extra, but I took no notice. Why should I care?

I found I did care, when the very young pilot, who had a frightened, foolish voice, told us at the end of a juddering flight that he couldn’t get the undercarriage down and would have to attempt a crash landing. The stewardess came shrieking along the gangway, the first time she’d shown her face that day, pushing our heads into crash position, but at the last moment the wheels rumbled down, there were three hard bumps as we bounced off the runway, the brakes roared on and we stopped in time. I realised I cared, because of Sarah.

Yet the more I thought about it, driving a hired car through wrecked, icy England, my heart racing, the less sure I was what I had to tell her.

She did agree to meet me, at least. I had put off phoning again and again. I called her, and her voice was older, so much older and harsher than before, but she didn’t sound angry, she sounded sad, even after the first question, harsh, insistent, ‘Have you seen him?’

I said, ‘I’ll tell you later.’

I knew I was old, but I didn’t know how old till Sarah walked past me without recognising me. We’d agreed to meet in the Sainsbury Natgallery, which still opened daily from twelve to three, in Trafalgar Square at midday. The shapes of the lions were softened by snow, and scaffolding still surrounded the column where once some famous hero had stood – Wicca had unseated most male statues. One or two minicopters hovered overhead, but they didn’t seem to be getting much business. Of course it was too cold to meet outside, as we had so often when we were young, sitting in the sun on the wide stone steps. It was a relief to get in from the bitter cold, to pass the armed guards with a deferential nod (see –
I’m old
–
don’t be frightened of me
) and stand at the top of the internal staircase which gave me a good view of the doors.

I recognised her without difficulty because, from above, I saw her hair. It looked, from that distance, shockingly unchanged from the hair she had on the day we first met. It was long again, down past her shoulders, it was that chestnutred I’d loved, it was scattered with snow, with melting snow, and it made me stupid, it made me helpless, for I’d always loved her, always, always.

Her face came into focus as she mounted the stairs. Her determined chin, her delicate nose, her cheeks, which were somehow both puffy and sunken, her mouth, which was twisted with tension and pain – and yet she was still a beautiful woman. Then I noticed her eyes. I saw she was blind. She was gazing ahead of her, seeing nothing. But then, Sarah had always been blind – she swept past me, imperious, or worried she was late, and she wasn’t blind, she just hadn’t seen me, and I spoke, I croaked, ‘It’s me, Sarah …’ And so I was humbled before we began, because I had grown too old to be noticed.

She pulled off her gloves with an awkward little movement and put her hand, which was mysteriously old, as old as I was, into mine. She looked at me. ‘Saul,’ she said. Her voice was harsh, but it was full of sorrow, and I preferred sorrow to contempt, just then.