The Ice is Singing (15 page)

One of them starts to cry. I go automatically to pick it up. She follows me.

‘It will work out better in lots of ways, for now. Dad was saying it might be nice for you if Aunt Sarah came and stayed for a bit, it might make a break – she could have my room.
And we get on with Linda OK, I mean she won’t interfere with us – it’ll be good for us really, like we’re learning gradually to get more independent.’

I sit on the bed and give the baby my tit. Vi is standing in the doorway looking at me. ‘Yes, yes,’ I say. ‘That’ll be fine. Of course.’

She stands and looks at me a bit longer, as if she thinks I’ll say something else. Then she goes away.

* * *

After they’d gone. The house is quiet, I’m on my own. Except for the twins.

I leave the landing light on – in case of burglars? Or for the girls? I wait for them to come home.

I know they’re not coming, but part of my head still carries on, with ‘They’re late, they’ll be tired for school. What can they be doing at this time of night?’ I
nearly phone Gareth to see if he’s picking them up from somewhere, before I remember that they’re not to be my concern.

When I go to bed I lie listening for them. But they don’t live here any more. I think I’ll ring Gareth anyway just to be told they’re safe in bed, then I’ll be able to
sleep. If I know, definitely, that they are safely tucked up in bed. It’s the not knowing, not even knowing if worrying is necessary.

I open the curtains. My room is darker than outside. Cars go by, lights shine in other houses. Are Ruth and Vi together? Are they in a car that might crash? Or walking along a street where a man
is waiting, lurking in the shadows between two houses? Where are they? And if they don’t go home, will he tell me? When? Will he wait till morning? Or might he ring me to see if they’ve
come here?

They won’t come here. They’ve taken their duvets to Gareth’s. They are at Gareth and Linda’s, talking, drinking cocoa, laughing, watching a late-night film, finishing
painting their new bedroom door. They are in a different life.

When I go back to bed I can’t sleep because my feet are freezing. The twins should wake soon. They are both snuffling, their noses blocked. I get up and put on my socks.

* * *

Vi was wrong about me and Gareth. We didn’t pretend to be a devoted couple. It was her imagination that demanded that.

Like mine.

If a child can’t have what it wants it has a screaming tantrum. It doesn’t want something else, an alternative. It throws it on the floor, and screams. It would rather smash
everything.

We did live together; you can’t pretend to live in the same house. We did. He was always there at night, his possessions were there, his clothes were there. We were both parents to Ruth
and Vi. We talked about them, worried about them, made plans concerning them. We both took them into account. We both paid for them.

We were husband and wife. Distantly, cynically, warily. In separate beds, and with a chilling respect for one another’s privacy. But we knew each other better than anyone else. So well
that there were no rules. Ruth and Vi thought it disgusting that I got pregnant. I know they did. (Disgusting of me, of course, not of Gareth. Double standards in my liberated daughters. Ruth may
even despise me for it – see it as a deliberate attempt to blackmail him?) They are both wrong.

August. They were both away in France for a week with school, and it was hot. Gareth and I didn’t discuss it, but I assumed he would stay at Linda’s most of the time, since the girls
weren’t at home. I was going to have an idle week, weeding the garden and reading some real adult novels, instead of all that teenage crap from work. I remember I bought a pile of Viragos and
King Penguins, and settled in the sun on the lawn. Gareth came out into the garden on the first afternoon. I was surprised.

‘Aren’t you at work?’

‘I came to fetch a script I need for a meeting tonight. You look like you’re on holiday. This weather – can I join you?’

I said yes, and he went to put his shorts on. He came out with a bottle of white wine and some ice. We lay in the sun and drank and talked – I don’t know, about books, the girls,
work – for an hour or more. It was easy, completely easy. We knew each other so well. He leant over and stroked my leg, and we looked at each other. Yes.

We were in a hurry, we didn’t get further than the lounge – the French windows were still open and I said, ‘What if someone comes round the back?’ and he said,
‘We’ll charge them fifty pounds for the performance’ and his skin was hot and dry and the smell of him made me tremble.

Before he left he said, ‘Can I come back tonight?’ The house was empty, the girls were away. We didn’t have to be together. We made love in every room in the house, that week,
as if we were marking out a territory. Nothing else existed. When Linda rang I reached for the phone by the side of the bed and told her I didn’t know where he was. He was inside me. It
wasn’t revenge, I knew he wasn’t giving her up. It wasn’t anything except what it was. Knowing each other as we did. As we do.

After the girls came back it stopped. It was the last time, because soon after I found I was pregnant, and then he was angry.

* * *

With the twins. It did begin – to sharpen out a bit. The blur, the grey time. It began to change. I said, ‘I’m keeping them alive, I made them and I’m
keeping them alive. If I can’t do that I’m not even an animal.’

In the autumn I took them out in the pram sometimes. When the health visitor came she said I could try them on solids. In October they both began to have mashed banana and baby rice. They sat in
high chairs, two brand-new ones Gareth had bought. I fed them one spoonful each in turn, I thought they looked like birds in a nest stretching out their heads for food. I watched them. The boy did
not close his mouth, the food kept dribbling out. They tried to touch things, they pulled my hair. When they smiled at me it made me cry. I said these are children, these will grow up like Ruth and
Vi, they are innocent. I wanted to sleep all the time. They smiled at each other, I saw, and I was glad of that. They seemed to like each other, perhaps that’s why there had to be two. So
they’d have each other’s love at least.

It stopped gently. By December they were only having my milk in the night. In the day they had food, and juice. Gradually my udders subsided, gradually they took less. It was they who decided to
stop. One night both of them refused the breast. I mixed them up a bottle of juice, and they drank it and went back to bed. They wouldn’t take any milk after that. They had finished with
me.

Ruth and Vi are pleased that I am so much better. They say, ‘You see, those tablets did work in the end, you’re much better than you were. Really, Mum, you really are.’

They say, ‘Will you let Sarah come now? You are better, you’re coping fine, you’ll see. Let Sarah come then you can go out on your own a bit, now they can be left to be fed.
You can stop being imprisoned in the house, it’s enough to depress anyone. Let Sarah come now, please, Mum!’ They don’t say they are moving back. Sarah will salve their
consciences. They wanted her to come ever since the summer. Mum’s sister Sarah, she can look after her, she can pick up the bits – she’s sensible, she’ll know what to
do.

I wouldn’t let them, last summer. I told them if anyone came to stay I would leave, the same day. I suppose they believed me.

Now Sarah can come. Sarah can feed the twins. I can take my tablets, three months’ supply, and go.

Monday March 3

I have been on the move again. I have driven all around, these past few days. The sun shines like steel; it comes with a razor-blade wind which slices and whips the lying snow back to life. It
rises in clouds, drifts, resettles. The ploughs have been out constantly on the moortops defining roads. Here, they say, pulling behind them a clear black ribbon and a traffic jam of slow cars and
lorries, this is the safe path across the snow. But when the little convoy has passed the heaped ditches of snow rise and spray up into the air, then fall again to lay false verges and edges, or to
bury in a flurry the whole road. The heaps of snow at bends attract more flying snow with their bulk, and encroach into the roadway exaggerating gentle curves to hairpins. The flying snow, and
sprayed-up slush from the road surface, mean that you drive blind on exposed roads.

I have driven. I have eaten. I have eaten a lot of good things in different places: home-made steak and kidney pudding, and tasty apple crumble; baked potato and steaming hot chilli, crumbly
Lancashire cheese, mince tarts and custard, pie and a sea of mushy peas. Big fried breakfasts, with tomatoes, mushrooms, egg, bacon, sausage and dripping toast. Creamy yoghurt from a local dairy
(the first I’ve had since then); crumbling fresh bread and buns and pies from small hot bakeries where men in filthy overalls crowd at lunchtimes, and pass lists of orders over the counter.
On Friday I waited nearly a quarter of an hour for the man before me in the queue to have his waiting cardboard box stuffed with his mates’ lunch orders, twenty-three of them. The warm bread
is so good I ate a brown loaf as I drove along, tearing lumps off, and was surprised when it was all gone. Yesterday I bought all the Sunday newspapers I could get from the local newsagent: the
Observer
, the
Mail on Sunday
, the
News of the World
,
Sunday Mirror
,
Sunday Telegraph
. I spent hours reading them. It reminded me of being a foreigner.
Of going on holiday to France, and reading the papers. Not knowing the stories, not quite understanding the significance of the language, the slant.

And today it is raining. The first rain I have seen in four weeks. Deliberate, streaming rain, that pours continually from a grey sky on to the poor frozen earth, and slowly – pitifully
slowly – washes away the edges of the lumps of frozen dirty snow. Gradually they are being eroded.

One more story.

The Perfect Parasite

Sally Clay believed in nature, in what is natural. She used natural products, ate wholefoods, belonged to groups whose aim is to protect the natural world from pollution and
devastation by man. She expected that her body would be – natural. She was to be disappointed.

She was the only child of Maggie and Arnold Clay, both teachers. Her mother, who was more ambitious than her father, became a headmistress when Sally was twelve, and subjected Sally to
considerable pressure on the subject of her future career.

But Sally’s A level results were poor, and she failed to gain a place at university. Ignoring her mother’s advice to get a job and retake her A levels at evening class, she left home
and went to live with two other girls in a flat in a neighbouring town. One of her friends was a student at the Poly, the other worked in a bookshop.

After a few months of unemployment, and a few more as a waitress, Sally obtained a job in the bookshop alongside her friend. The shop was owned by a widow called Martha. She was well read, and
an ardent feminist, with that passion of someone who has found a cause late in life. The shop became a centre for a certain kind of woman, in the town. A noticeboard was covered in cards offering
lifts to Greenham, and information on demonstrations, meetings, women’s groups and publications. There was a rack of alternative greetings cards; there were feminist badges and earrings; and
there were books. There was political writing, sociology, women’s fiction. There was poetry and keep fit, wholefood recipe books and books about witches. There were books on female sexuality,
child care, and nuclear disarmament; books about subjects practical and theoretical, books for every type and kind of woman who went into the shop. There were types and kinds of women who did not
go into the shop, but they were of a different class, or age, or education. Sally knew little about them. They were the women who bought their reading matter from newsagents, who read Mills and
Boon. Sisters, of course – in need of liberation. But it is hard to help those who wilfully escape to the fantasy lands of
True Romance
, rather than seeking freedom.

Sally was busy. When she was not at work, she was often at a meeting. She went to her women’s group, to CND, to Friends of the Earth, to yoga, and to a women’s study group on sexism
in children’s books. When the shop next door to the bookshop fell vacant, a group of women (including Sally) formed a co-operative to raise money to open it as a women’s café.
They ran market stalls and raffles and held women’s cabaret evenings in a local pub, and each put in two hundred pounds of her own savings. The Women’s Café brought custom to the
shop, the shop brought custom to the cafe. Business boomed.

When Sally was in her teens she had a few sexual relationships with men. As she grew into her twenties, and her political views became more defined – and her social life more completely
involved with women only – she moved on to relationships with women. It was a priority with her to remain good friends with those women who were special to her, so she never lived with any of
them, or allowed the relationship to become over-important. She bought a house jointly with two other women from the Women’s Café Co-operative. Her life was settled and happy.

When she was twenty-eight she began to think about babies. Suddenly, they were everywhere. It was impossible to walk down the street without passing a baby staring from its pram, or one of those
mysteriously self-possessed women who float past like ships in full sail, bellies marvellously rounded. Suddenly she was noticing baby clothes in shops; how miraculously tiny, those little vests
and Babygros. Cycling home to visit her parents she saw lambs in the fields, butting their mothers’ flanks and nuzzling for milk – feet splayed, tail stumps wriggling in frantic
pleasure. The sight almost made her want to cry – and Sally was not sentimental. She examined her body in the mirror. Long and lean and well formed, with small neat breasts and generous hips
– a beautiful shape, a childbearing shape, like a pear. It deserved to be used. In the shop she pored over a book of photos of babies
in utero
, curled and dreaming in their
star-studded sacs, sucking their thumbs, faces blank and peaceful as icons. She wanted one. She imagined a baby cuddled in her arms, feeding from her breast; she wanted one.