The Ice is Singing (12 page)
Read The Ice is Singing Online
Authors: Jane Rogers
‘Leave him alone, you bullying bastard. You lay a finger on him and I’ll kill you.’ Bill usually backed down. But if ever he was on his own in the room with Gary, he would
start to taunt him. ‘Thick head. Throwback. Loony.’ And pull faces, with lolling tongue and rolling eyes. The boy lived in terror.
Bill’s comings and goings were erratic. He was generally out during the daytime, and sometimes for the evening and night as well. There was a constant tension in the air because of the
fear of his return, since no one knew when that would be; but when he hadn’t appeared by 6.30, Leonie and Gary, and Darren and Tracey if they were in, would eat their tea together then sit
around the telly in fragile peace. Leonie would put her arm around the boy’s shoulders and he would rest his head against her.
Once when Bill came in he marched straight up behind them, where they were sitting on the sofa, and struck Gary’s head sharply with the side of his hand.
‘Grow up, you fucking baby.’ Gary began to cry and Leonie started shouting at Bill. He slammed her in the face too, and went out to the kitchen, where he broke every plate and dish,
hurling them against the wall.
Tracey comforted her mother, when she was sure Bill had gone out. ‘Why d’you have him here? We don’t have to put up with this. Just lock the door and don’t let him
back.’
But Leonie, bleeding from the nose, her arms around a sobbing Gary, shook her head. He was hurting her children, beating her up, destroying her life. The physical need he had served for her was
long gone. But she knew it was impossible for him not to come back. Like an animal on its journey to the slaughterhouse, Leonie knew she hadn’t arrived there yet. She had never made a
conscious choice in her life; you get herded and pushed where they want you to go. And there are a few times when your own dumb animal instinct – for food, sex, survival – drags you
down a one-way route. Had there been any choice? At the point at which she leant in the kitchen doorway, watching him paint, unable to support herself for the weight of desire in her limbs? No.
She accepted her own powerlessness in the face of the evil that had entered their lives.
Since cruelty to Gary was the only thing that provoked a reaction from Leonie (even the dumb animal protects her defenceless young), Bill began to persecute the boy more systematically. He
shouted at him suddenly for no reason, and laughed at the boy’s panic and distress. If he could creep up behind Gary he would slap his head or pull his hair.
One night when Leonie lay still as a lump of lard beneath him, he suggested waking Gary up. It produced the desired effect; she began to scratch and wrestle with him, and he had to fight to hold
her down. They rolled off the bed and on to the floor, and Bill, who had achieved his aim as they made contact with the floor, climbed off her and back into bed. He fell asleep immediately, and
only noticed that Leonie was still on the floor when he woke an hour later. She felt cold. He heaved her up on to the bed. She was breathing, so he slapped her face a couple of times but there was
no response. After a while he slipped out of bed, dressed, and left.
When Leonie came round she could not remember what had happened. She had a bad headache, and felt sick.
Mon. 24
What’s the matter with you, Marion? You’re making me sick. Rubbing my nose in dirt, like a dog. Leave it, for Christ’s sake.
Perhaps she likes to write it. Does it give her a thrill? Perhaps she likes the power: watching characters caged like rats. Perhaps she likes to line them up along the edge of the pale, and
slowly, one by one, push them beyond. She likes dirt. If you give her the
News
of the Screws
she’ll read it before she throws it away. Isn’t it disgusting? Ooh,
let’s look a bit closer. Just hand on while I fetch my camera – God, I can hardly bear to look. Ooh!
Is that her? Perhaps it turns her on. That careful cataloguing of pornographic detail, of lust, of violence – the slow burning moves of Leonie from the bedroom to Bill, the tension and
climax on the page – doesn’t she love it? Perhaps she’s Leonie and wants to be beaten; she’s a woman, all she needs is a good thumping and a fuck. How do I know what
she’s up to, under that long black narrator’s mantle – and then under that reader’s cloak of respectability: what are you up to? Enjoying yourself, are you? Getting hot?
Marion?
Leave.
Leave and away. It’s enough. Listen.
What am I doing with Leonie? Why dabble in this? I can walk about my quiet, pleasing room, where I have spent the time since I’ve been ill. The room is simple: white walls, blue
woodwork, deep blue carpet. Blue curtains with white spots; and a faded candlewick bedspread that doesn’t match, and eases me. From the window the view is small: an enclosed, snow-filled
garden, bordered by a garage and a hedge of snow-covered domestic firs, green-black and white. I like this room, I am living in this room. The luxury in this room is the table and chair, an
unpretentious white formica table, at which I sit, in comfort, by the window – and write Leonie. Now why?
Maybe it’s letting something out. Like lancing a boil; letting the pus and poison which have made a hurting pressure flow out on to the page through my moving pen. Even though it never
happened to me. In one form or another, dirt will out.
Maybe. Before, while I was writing, I thought, this is the worst. I am drawing the bottom line, the base level, people sunk to half-formed animals in the slime and now I’ll know it
can’t be any worse. Wanting to know the worst, as a child strains its eyes in the darkness to make out the evil face of the beast that haunts its dreams. Yes, I want to know the worst.
But once I’ve looked up from the page and broken the hold of that ‘worst’, it’s milk and water. There are always worse. Tortures, gas chambers, massacres, people who
take little children and –
There’s no bottom to evil, if I dive in for a penny at the deep end, I’ll be sinking still for ever. It goes on down.
All right then. These combine. There is a thing to be let out. It is to be named. Naming it will let it out, and I will know it. I imagine it a creature in a sack, something alive and
vicious with fear, like a ferret or a pig or a wild cat, tied in a sack. The story is the sack; inside it is the thing I know, the creature I know well. I can’t name the creature, it is
too familiar to describe. But I can make a sack for it, and in the sack the beast threshes about – tenses, scrabbles in frenzy, feigns sleep. The sack moves, stretches, sags: it can
resemble different things. But inside it the creature remains the same. The sack is the clearest I can get to naming it, containing it – dumping it outside the door for someone else to
take away.
It won’t go away, of course. It’s my beast, it lives with me. But each time I bag it, catch it in a sack – no matter how ugly and unfamiliar the shape it makes – at
each capture I strike a blow for freedom, diminish its power to harm. I will know it.
Bill did not return for eight days. As each day passed, it became more possible to consider the thought that he might not return at all. The days were long; fragile, suspended
time waiting for a thunderstorm to break, a bomb to fall. Time long in its isolated acts of tenderness, Leonie’s arm around Gary’s shoulder as they sit watching telly; Gary’s jump
of fear when the door is opened; the mutual wryness of relief as it’s Tracey who comes in, not Bill. Leonie daren’t let Gary back into her bed, although she longs for his warm comfort;
but when he goes to bed she sits with him, legs tucked under the sheets, to read him a bedtime comic as she used to, long ago, before Bill came. In the silence and space she can see Gary again; his
beautiful spreading smile, his timidity, his desire to please. He’s such a good boy to her, for no reason, her eyes keep filling with tears.
On the eighth day there was a knock at the door. She didn’t guess it was Bill, because he’d always walked straight in. When she opened it he stared at her, then pushed her aside and
walked in in silence. Gary was sitting at the table, laboriously filling a sheet of paper with uneven letters. She’d been finding him things to do because he was lost, in the holidays –
he always was – moping around without his school to go to. What she’d do when he finished there she didn’t know. Bill ripped the sheet from under the boy’s pen in a single
movement, and Gary froze, a look of terror on his face. Bill glanced at the uneven jumble of letters on the page then crumpled it and hurled it viciously into a corner.
‘What you got him doing?’ he shouted. ‘Think he can write? That thick cretin?’ With a snort of contempt he cuffed Gary across the head then barged out of the room to
slump in front of the telly. ‘Cup of tea!’ he shouted. Leonie put her arms around Gary’s head, cradling it to her breast. The boy was crying quietly, and they both froze into
silence as the man’s threatening voice rose a pitch.
‘Cup of tea, I said, you fucking idle cow. Now!’ Leonie moved automatically to put the kettle on, and Gary sat at the table, his arms by his sides, staring ahead of him. He had wet
himself, and the urine dripped slowly from the chair to the floor below. As she made the tea she watched the way he sat unmoving, hopeless, like a dog.
She gave Bill his tea in silence and he turned on her, raising his voice above the telly.
‘Haven’t you got a civil word for me, bitch? Lost your tongue? I bet you were gabbing to that retard before I came in, weren’t you? What’s wrong with me?’
She shook her head in silence, turning away, but he grabbed her arm and twisted it up behind her back. Involuntarily, she screamed. Gary’s white face appeared in the doorway.
‘Let me go, you bastard.’ Gary, standing in the doorway, began to clap his hands with terror, shouting, ‘No no no no’ in rhythm, like a football supporter.
‘Doncha like it?’ Bill leered at him. He yanked Leonie’s arm up a notch.
‘No no no no no!’ The boy’s high-pitched voice was nearly screaming.
‘Wanta see what grownups do, Gary?’ asked Bill. ‘Wanta see what big men do to women?’ Bending Leonie’s arm he forced her to the ground, and holding her twisted arm
still with his right he yanked up her skirt with his left, and began to tear at her underclothes. ‘It’s what your Mummy likes to do, kid. Has she done it with you, eh? Better ask her
to, eh?’
‘Nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh –’ The boy’s voice was a whisper now, his face round-eyed and terrified, his hands bumping together in a fast frenzy. Bill fumbled at his zip,
finally letting go Leonie’s arm to get two hands to it, and she managed to rear up and hit him. They fought across the room, knocking over the sofa, and Leonie screamed ‘Help me,
Gary!’
The boy stood rooted to the spot, shaking his head now to the same intolerable rhythm as his hands, the heels only meeting in a swift pattering drumbeat accompaniment. Bill was stronger, and
pinioned her again on the other side of the overturned sofa. He made a few quick thrusts, grunted, and was off within a minute. As Leonie heaved herself up, gasping for breath, she looked at the
boy’s face and saw that he was not even seeing her; his eyes, fixed on the middle distance, were lost in a trance of terror. Bill pushed past him in the doorway, thumping him on the shoulder
as he went.
‘That’s what big boys do, Gary. They stick it in, see.’ She heard him go into the bedroom and slam the door. Her arm ached badly where he’d twisted it. She pulled her
clothes around her and crossed to Gary.
‘Nuh nuh nuh nuh – ’ The trembling head and twitching hands continued their motion, the breaths quick with terror.
‘Gary,’ she said. ‘Gary, you thick bastard – shut it.’ She shook him roughly by the shoulders. ‘Quiet.’
She led him into the kitchen and made him sit down. There was silence.
‘Cup of tea,’ she said. ‘Shall we make a cup of tea?’
He did not reply. Leonie sat down carefully at the other end of the table, and began to cry.
He’s my baby. He’s mine. I made him. And when he come back – after that meningitis – all sad and floppy – it’s me what coped with it. Me
what stayed up nights, nursing him. Me what changed his nappies and mopped up his piss and shit for years, not months like with the others. Me what loved him.
