The Ice is Singing (14 page)

Vi is there. She says don’t cry. She says it will get better, honestly Mum. You must do what he says now. Please. You’ll get better. It’ll be all right, see?

At night which is so terribly long while I sit in the dark with the boy on the right or the girl on the left, listening to the house creaking around me, and cars in the night streets outside, I
stop crying. I must stop feeding them. I am no good to them. Their crying drives me mad, I only want them to sleep. I don’t want to hurt them, but I want them to sleep. I want them to leave
me alone.

Do what the man says, then. Take the tablets, sleep, let them leave you alone. Let them cry at the bottle, instead of you.

Then what? This baby is sucking at my breast. While it sucks, it is quiet. I give it food. I am their food. Nothing else. No good to Ruth or Vi. No good to them, even, but as food. I am their
food.

And if I can’t even give them that – if I can’t even feed them – I am no good at all.

All right. I know what to do. But while they want it, at least I can provide milk. If I can’t do anything else for them, at least I can do that.

I fed them. I was a milk machine. He said, ‘Loss of appetite is a symptom’, but I was not ill. I can choose to be bad, not mad. I was ravenous. I ate dry sliced bread from the
packet, I ate chocolate biscuits, I made the girls bring me cheese and apples and ryebread. I ate tuna fish out of the tin with my fingers, I drank yoghurt from the pot while they fed. Making milk,
like a giant cow gone mad and trying to stuff the world down its gullet to make it into milk.

If I can’t do anything else, I can do that. At least, I can feed them.

9 p.m.

I went for a walk. There was a bitter wind, the sky is leaden, it will snow again tonight. Everything is at zero point, locked into this eternal winter. Beneath the snow and ice
you sense the final death of plants, the last resistance they held in reserve for the spring has been clinched out of them by the cold. Only freezing holds the world up; if the ice ever melts it
will all fall down and lie, sodden and limp, on the ground. I am full of ice.

There is no point in writing this. What is there to be found, in the dregs of the last eight months? I had the twins. I made a mistake. Which was simply the latest in a long line stretching back
to Ruth’s birth, maybe before. The right thing for the wrong reason. The wrong thing for the right reason. What does it matter, finally? It’s ordinary.

I’ll tell another story. Other people’s stories are better. They have shape. I’m sick of this endless going on from day to day. I’ll write a life whose shape is tight and
firm, drawn on the page like a pattern. A woman who stole a baby. Her story; her reasons, the subterranean links under years, between one thought, one chance event, and a growth in the imagination
which will materilize half a lifetime later. The story is circular, satisfying . . .

You’re playing, Marion. Hiding, bluffing. I don’t know what you’re up to. Your list isn’t finished.

Thurs. 27

It’s morning; the sun has just come up into a clear blue sky, and is catching the snow with pink splashes of light. Everything is frozen still, and unreally beautiful in
the late dawn light. What was pointless and hopeless last night is maybe still so, but I said I would tidy up, and the list isn’t done. Jackie’s not on the list yet.

* * *

Jackie. When she came back she said, ‘You’re in a mess, Marion. Why didn’t you write? Why didn’t you let me know?’

I said, ‘I’m all right Jackie, leave me alone.’

‘No.’

‘I’m busy. I’ve got to put the washing on.’

‘I’m taking you out. Helen can babysit.’

‘I don’t want to come out. I’m all right. Go away.’

Jackie was my friend. Jackie was in the ward sixteen years ago when they brought me up after having Ruth. Her Helen was one day old. Like two excited dogs we yapped and nipped and chased each
other across that first year of their lives, from crisis to crisis, from exhilarated discovery to latest breakthrough, from commiserations to confessions. When she went back to work I was sorry for
her. But she was sorry for me that I didn’t. After a while we were both sorry for ourselves as well, when we realized neither of us could have everything.

I was really, complacently sorry for her when I was huge with the twins and she came round to tell me about Hong Kong.

‘It’s only six months,’ she kept saying. ‘It’s a fantastic opportunity. And Helen’s coming out for a holiday when she’s finished her O
levels.’

I tried to imagine working in Hong Kong for six months, and being parted from the girls for however long it was before they came to join me ‘for a holiday’. I was glad I
couldn’t imagine it. I promised to ask Helen round a lot, and write. I did neither.

My friend Jackie. Nights in the kitchen, late, when we’ve been sitting talking and talking ourselves out, unravelling all the events and thoughts and half-thoughts and theories, holding
our lives up to each other for verification, making each other real. It was too late by January. She brought back Christmas presents for the twins, little Chinese silken suits, emerald green and
peacock blue. ‘The blue’s for the girl,’ she told me. She was expansive and happy, she’d been promoted, she said I ought to see a doctor.

So I told her I had, and I had tablets, thank you, and I didn’t want her fucking help any more than I wanted anyone else’s.

* * *

Karate nights. Why do I remember them? Ruth started karate when she was thirteen, so Vi must have been eleven. We used to go and meet her, at nine when it finished. In the
autumn we walked, I was glad to be outside after the artificial light and heat of the library. Vi was full of the comp., all those new people; she rattled on to me about teachers and school and I
half-listened while I scuffed my feet amongst the fallen leaves and remembered new autumn terms myself, new shoes, frosty mornings, conkers. Vi would talk about anything, she never stopped. I think
she liked to have me to herself.

Those evenings were a chore in theory, having to go out at eight-thirty broke up the evening to nothing. When the nights got darker and wetter we’d go in the car and quite often stop at
the Italian café for a cappuccino and apricot tart, or a water ice. It became a ritual, he smiled at us in recognition when we arrived. Ruth was nearly always in a good mood, flushed with
exercise and self-confidence, explaining movements to Vi. The coffee was frothy, with grated chocolate on top; Vi scooped if off delicately with a spoon, and licked it like a lollipop. I
don’t know what we talked about – but we were always talking, always buzzing. They stand out clear, the karate evenings.

* * *

Vi. Vi is soft-hearted. Vi comes into my room when she gets back from school, she looks at the twins and seems to like them. I watch her pick one up and sit on the bed, holding
it, touching its small claw-fingers with her free hand, smiling patiently until the slow-focusing eyes can capture her. Then the baby smiles at Vi and Vi laughs at the baby. I get off the bed
irritably, gather up mugs. Without looking up she says mildly,

‘I’ve put the kettle on, Mum.’ I go into the kitchen to watch it.

She has a little girl’s face still; little girl’s shoulder-length straight hair, which she sometimes plaits; little girl’s wide-open eyes and slightly upturned nose.
She’s taller than Ruth already, lean and rounded and growing. I used to look at her and think, like I did when she was a toddler, ‘What a lovely body.’ And I thought – not
that I created it single-handed – but that its perfection was through me, of me. The beauty and firmness of her limbs – a share of it – was mine to delight in.

Vi pushes me. If I look up from the bed or the baby I’m holding I notice she’s come in, she’s walking round my room picking up tissues and cotton wool and dropping them into a
plastic bag, then she takes out the nappies. She comes back with a tray and loads up the cups and yoghurt pots and banana peels. I don’t meet her eye. Then she says,

‘Do you need any shopping?’ I don’t reply.

‘Mum? It’s a nice day. Shall we put them in the pram and take them out?’

‘They’re quiet now, Vi. If they wake up.’ When they woke up I fed them and changed them and by then it was one and a half hours later and Vi had gone out.

‘Mum? Don’t get mad – can I make a suggestion? Look, I was talking to Dad and he’s really upset – he is, honestly – and he asked me what he could do so I
suggested –’

‘What?’

‘Well, why don’t we get a cleaning lady for a bit and he could pay her, and then you wouldn’t have to worry about that and you could just concentrate on the twins and getting
better and –’

I was just looking at her. I watched her falter into silence, and then pick up again in anger.

‘Look, I know you think me and Ruth should do it all but it’s not working, Mum. We’ve been doing it for weeks. We’re at school, we’ve got work to do, you
can’t expect us to run the house, get the food, cook and clear up and everything – it just doesn’t work. It puts everyone under pressure – you make us feel guilty as soon as
we come in the door – it’s horrible coming into this house, and you act as if it’s our fault they’re here and you’re ill, as if we’ve got to pay you back or
something –’ She burst into tears. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t care what they did. Let him pay for a cleaner if they want one.

When the cleaner came I shut my bedroom door. She knocked on it but I didn’t answer. But I couldn’t sleep because of the roar of the vacuum cleaner, and the idiotic babble of daytime
TV that she kept on while she worked. When it went quiet I crept out to the kitchen to find a drink and she was sitting at the kitchen table as if she owned it, reading a magazine and eating
sandwiches. I went back to bed and she brought me lunch on a tray, then she looked at them and said how sweet they were. I wanted to leave it but I was starving.

* * *

Ruth. Ruth didn’t come and sit on the bed. I didn’t know if she was in or out. Sometimes Vi said, ‘Ruth’s gone to Gareth’s’, or ‘Ruth’s gone to
Annie’s’, sometimes not. Sometimes when I asked where she was tonight Vi said, ‘Up in her room’, in amazement, as if I must be mad.

She came to the bedroom door sometimes to offer a cup of tea or food. She never even looked at the twins, it was as if she was pretending they didn’t exist. I wanted to shake her. But I
couldn’t even have grabbed hold of her. She never came quite that near. She kept away from me, she was disappearing, her face was hidden. I wanted to catch her, or shout, ‘Come
here!’ but I was afraid of what they would think. Or of breaking something, by shouting that – breaking something tenuous and fragile, so that she would slip out of sight behind the
doorpost, out of the other room, out of the house, like a helium balloon when the string breaks.

* * *

The day Vi came to tell me. I hadn’t noticed, but Ruth had already gone. It’s like a faulty television, the pictures are all reduced to varying shades of grey, with lines of marching
dots across them, and a faint angry crackle overlying the sound. The pictures stop and start again in a different place.

It’s like slow motion. Everything goes slow. I sit on the bed and remember what I’m looking for. Clean bra. I look around the floor. I must get rid of those nappies. I think I can
see a bra under the blue cot. But it’s dirty. The boy wakes up, I put him over my shoulder. I sit down again. I’ve forgotten what I’m looking for. He needs changing. What did I do
with the cotton wool? Vi comes in. She stands looking at me for a bit.

‘Aren’t you at school?’

‘It’s Saturday. Shall I open the window?’ I can see the cotton wool on the windowsill so I go and fetch it. It’s raining outside.

‘No. It’s cold.’

‘Are you putting him to bed, Mum?’

‘I’m changing him.’

‘Shall I?’

‘No. It’s all right.’ She sits on the bed and watches me, I can’t find the Vaseline. She is watching my every move. ‘Why don’t you make us a cup of
tea?’

‘OK,’ she says. ‘D’you want to come and have it in the kitchen? I bought a cake.’ She goes out, which is a relief. I sit down again. When I hear the kettle
whistling I remember she’s making tea so I change the boy on the bed. The sheet’s dirty anyway. The changing mat must be in the bathroom. I put him back and put his thumb in his mouth.
He won’t sleep.

She is cutting me a slice of chocolate cake, the tea is steaming. I start to eat the cake quickly, it sharpens me up. I sit down and look at her. What’s going on?

‘Ruth and me have been talking, Mum.’ She pours tea. ‘We think it’s very hard work for you, with the twins, even though you’re a lot better now.’

‘Oh.’

‘We’ve been thinking it might be better – it might make it a bit easier on you – if we went and stayed with Dad for a bit.’

‘With Gareth? In the flat?’

‘Well, no – you see, what he’s doing – well actually, he’s buying a house. He’s buying a house in Stoke Newington – we’ve been to see it.
It’s pretty tatty but it’ll be great when it’s done up, and he said he’d like us to help decorate anyway.’

‘A big house? He’s bought a big house?’

‘I think he’s buying it with Linda. I think she’s buying half.’ Vi gets up and boils more water and fusses with the teapot. I finish my cake. It is quiet.

‘Mum – I’m not . . .’ She doesn’t finish.

‘You and Ruth want to live there?’

‘Not live – just, you know, for a bit. Look, it makes a lot of sense; you’ve got your hands full and hardly get any sleep and aren’t well anyway, so it’s no good
for you having to worry about where we are at teatime and what’s going on. And he nearly always ends up giving us lifts home which is a bit rough on him because he’s got to bring us
back here then go all the way back there, I mean, it’s a waste of petrol really. And it’s not – well, more peace and quiet would probably be better for you, and I think – in
the long run –’

Silence.

‘It will be better in the long run, Mum, because it’s quite hard for me and especially for Ruth with her exams, living here because it’s so tense and you feel – well, we
feel, it makes us feel guilty but there’s nothing we can do. So that’ll probably be a relief to you too, won’t it? If we’re not here feeling like that. It means we’ll
come and see you because we want to, instead of having to. And we won’t be a responsibility to you. He can worry about how late we stay up, and all that.’ Vi pretends to laugh.