The Ice is Singing (7 page)

I was running across the grass landscape again, sweating and sobbing, with the renewed clamour of the children’s voices rising up around me. There was nothing – flat grassland, not a
bush or a hillock for a body to hide behind. And each way I turned, on all sides, the cries – ‘Mummy! Mum! Help me, Mum’ – and shrieks of fear and panic from the twins. My
heart was hammering in my chest, my head was bursting. I crouched to examine the ground more carefully, then I started to look for them in the grass.

It was logical, for me to bend and hunt for them amongst blades of grass no more than two inches high. Indeed, as I searched, and the hot sun beat down on my neck, I was reminded of the time,
years ago, that Ruth and I spent an afternoon cricket-hunting. She noticed their whirring noise when I took her and Vi (still a sleeping baby in her pram) along a sun-hot lane in France on summer
holiday, and I parted the grass at the roadside to search. As luck would have it, I uncovered one immediately, and we both stared in fascination as the little green insect rubbed his wings together
in a blur of speed. Then he suddenly leapt out of sight. We parted more grass, and more – no luck. We walked on along the lane to a spot where their noise was particularly loud, and searched
the grass again. But though we searched on and off for the rest of the afternoon, we didn’t see another one – only heard their noise in the air all around us.

And so it was in my dream, only my useless searching in the hot sun was warped by a terrible anxiety, and my children’s voices cried and pleaded and came and went in the air around my
ears, above my head, in front of me and then behind me, imploring me to save them, to help them. Gradually as I searched I felt the dream slipping away, I was filled with anxiety, I couldn’t
remember what I was looking for or why. I couldn’t remember what I had to do.

I managed to claw my way into wakefulness, and when I did, the beginning of the dream came back to me.

I shall leave the light on, as I try to go back to sleep.

Fri. 14, evening

It took me a long time to fall asleep again, and I woke with a jolt at quarter past nine. I felt anxious and confused, as if I had forgotten something or was late. My head ached
badly. I needed to get moving as quickly as possible, to feel the smooth steering wheel turning in my hands and see the scenery slipping by. As I opened the front door the landlady called me back.
I had forgotten to pay her. Standing at the desk trying to count out the money, I was afraid I might be sick; the floor and desk seemed to be moving slightly, as if on a sea swell, and I could not
prevent myself from breathing quickly and shallowly. I needed to get into the car.

The woman moved slowly, looking in different boxes for change, talking lugubriously about the weather. I snatched my receipt from her and ran to the door without managing so much as a
goodbye.

Outside it had snowed again, and the clouds looked heavy with more. I crossed the road to the car park on the other side, and for a moment I couldn’t tell which was my car, under the layer
of fresh snow. When I started the engine, the windscreen wipers wouldn’t work – there was too much snow on the screen. My head was racing again as I got out. The cold made my fingers
ache. I cleared the front and side windows – some snow got stuck under my cuffs and melted before I had time to get it out.

I revved the engine. Only a few cars had driven in the car park since last night – the snow in front of me was unmarked. But as the car started to move it went into a peculiar bumping
motion. It would not steer straight. Already knowing the worst I got out and looked at it. The front left tyre was completely flat.

I had never changed a tyre, although I must have watched Gareth two or three times. I forced myself to look in the boot. There was a spare tyre, and a long plastic case containing a spanner, an
iron rod, and a contraption which I took to be a jack. I lifted the tyre out and laid it beside the car. It sank to its full thickness in the snow. I began to scoop away the snow from around the
flat wheel. A car slowly entered the car park, drove past me and stopped. A woman who got out came up to me.

‘Are you having trouble?’ I didn’t reply. She bent over me and repeated her question insistently.

‘No, it’s all right. A flat tyre.’

‘Oh, what a mess. Can I help at all?’ I didn’t reply. When I turned to get the jack, I saw that she was crouching in the snow, fiddling with it. She set it beside me and knelt
down to look under the car.

‘Yes – you’re better putting it under the front than the side, I think, with this sort of car.’ She slid the jack under the front of the car and cranked it up. I stood
watching her uselessly. Then she took off the hubcap and wheelnuts, removed the old tyre and put on the new one.

She knelt in the snow to force the new wheel on, and when she stood up I saw that there was a hole in her tights, and a little smear of blood where she must have cut herself through kneeling on
a sharp stone.

‘I’m so sorry – your knees –’ I was not able to finish my sentence, and she stood awkwardly for a moment before slamming the boot on the old tyre and smiling at
me.

‘It’s no trouble. I’m glad I was able to help. Goodbye now.’ She walked quickly away across the car park, brushing her hands against her skirt as she walked, to dry
them.

When I got into the car I burst into tears. It was a silly thing to cry about. She had been so kind. Helping me, kneeling down in the snow on her bare knees. I hadn’t cried since I came
away.

Wed. Feb. 19

I’ve been ill.

She’s brought me a paper. The date says I’ve been here five days now, it feels longer. Or – I don’t know. Maybe not. It’s been so fast and slow, so black and lurid,
so hot and cold I can’t really tell. She wanted to get the doctor in but apparently I told her I wouldn’t see him. I told her it was only the flu, and not to bother him. I thought
I’d said that, but then I remembered it as intending to but forgetting, so it stuck in my head as another irritation.

I don’t know what else I said, perhaps not much; the woman, whose name I keep forgetting, is kind and a firm believer in sleep, so she has left me quite rightly to sweat it out.

I’m tired now, but over it, I think. My temperature’s lower, I’m not hungry yet – even writing is an effort, pushing the pen across the paper. I feel weak –
drifting, defences down. Open. I’ll sleep again now.

Thur. 20

Open.

When Ruth was being born, after I had lain in misery for seven hours, contracting without my cervix opening at all, the hospital shift changed and a new midwife came on. She was calm. Although
she was efficient, she seemed to be giving only a fraction of her attention to what she was doing – the rest was absorbed elsewhere, in some great mind-expanding well of tranquillity. As if
she could calmly have run the world and still had attention over to gaze at the stars. She examined me and said,

‘You’re fighting it. Go with it, stop fighting it. Let the pain do its work.’

At first I was angered – I was doing the best I could. As each new wave of pain rose and mounted I was clenching myself and resisting it, beating it off. I hadn’t let it make me cry
or call out, I had the upper hand. I was fighting the pain that was attacking my body: my muscles were tense against it, my spine was stiff to repel it. ‘Relax,’ she told me.

For a while, as I tried to relax, as I tried to imagine pain ‘doing its work’, pulling open clenched muscles, pushing back tight fearful walls of flesh to make space enough for a
baby’s head, I understood her. I knew what she meant by going with the pain; I allowed myself, briefly, to be open to it. I don’t like pain. It is a hard thing to open yourself to. It
is hard to surrender control.

But now I am here. It has all come roaring and tumbling about my ears. I thought, a great ball, like a planet, careering after me across the countryside. Now it has caught up with me it is a
wave not a ball; a giant wave which has broken over me and engulfed me in a flood of memories and emotions, a swirling mass of flotsam and jetsam, days of my life. It is hard to surrender
control.

The surf – on honeymoon with Gareth. We went down to the beach every day; the wet-suit-clad surfies had been out with their boards since dawn. The first morning I watched them with glee
and imagined myself riding and swooping among them. Then I waded out into the sea. As I got to waist height I began to realize the size of those waves. They were breaking well before they reached
me, but still the frothing torrent of broken water was half as high as me, and had the power to lift me off my feet and carry me backwards. Unbroken, what would the force of such a wave be? I swam
on out with a mounting sense of exhilarated terror. There was a lull in the sea. I managed to get out quite some distance without meeting any big waves, only unbroken mounds of water not yet
cresting, which I slipped up and down like a fast car on a humpbacked bridge. I was enjoying the cool freedom of the water. Then, looking ahead, I saw it. It looked as though the whole sea had
gathered itself up, drawn itself together to make a giant vertical wall of water, which was racing towards me as fast as a train, blocking out the sky. I watched in terror. It was impossible to
know whether to go back or forward. No way would I slide up this like a humpbacked bridge: already it was cresting at the top, frilled with a curl of white, gleaming teeth poised at the top of a
giant jawbone which would come crashing, clamping down with the force of hundreds of tons behind it. It was as high, I think, as a house – a normal, two-storey house. It seemed as high as a
block of flats, as it towered over me, and the crested white rim at the top curled over more swiftly, still suspended in air but caught in the pull of gravity. At the same moment the swell running
before the wave lifted me towards the curling wall of water, and I realized that it would break, exactly, on top of me. That molten iceberg which hung in glassy suspension would break, the surface
tension which held it together during its arched triumphant race towards the land would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of water it had amassed, and that mountain of water would collapse, with
the force of an avalanche, on my head.

I don’t know how I came by the knowledge that saved me; whether I had been told it years before, and stored it unconsciously in the life-saving depths of my skull, or whether I worked it
out on the spot; but as that wave hung timelessly over me, I took a huge breath and dived as deep as I could, into its base. Underwater, I heard the roar of its collapse, and felt the planes of
water shifting and trembling around me. When my breath was used up and I fought out to the surface, it was gone, tearing away towards the beach in a seething, frothing, broken mass.

I did get caught by one later that day – not such a big one. I underestimated it, thinking it was not quite going to break and that I could just slide up it. I slid up to its crest then
the crest turned, curled, and dropped me to the depths. The water falling on me pummelled and pounded me and swirled me about at the bottom of the sea, bruising and scraping my shoulders and legs.
It tumbled me over and over below the surface till I had no sense of which direction was up; the fine balancing channels of my head were awash and awhirl with salt water. It carried me up to the
shallows, though, and from there I was able to crawl to dry land, stunned not to be drowned.

If I try to set it out, resolve it on paper – what form can it take?

Resolve.

It’s a pleasing word, a good fit. Resolve; to find a new solution. Resolve; to dissolve the lumps and chunks that stick in my maw, to turn them to a sweet and palatable liquid. ‘O!
that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.’ Resolve me, then let me be resolved. What a beautiful, meaning-flowing word it is, how generously it
encompasses all the hints and drifts of thinking I would like it to hold.

Be brave, melt, solve again.

It doesn’t though, does it? Resolve.

Sweetheart, what is there to resolve? So much melodrama, this Marion, who does she think she is? What’s her problem anyway?

You make me sick.

Leave. Time to sleep.

Fri. 21

I slept well last night. I think I have slept for most of the time I’ve been here, waking occasionally, feverishly, to have a drink and remember where I am, before dipping
back under the surface of sleep, to be tumbled and rolled through time. I feel as if I’m travelling in my sleep, over landscapes where I have lived – through time as well as space. To
talk of resolving is silly.

There is nothing to resolve. Nothing so concrete. Just images, some familiar, some forgotten. Just times, moods, impressions. An undigested life – a ragbag. It’s all ordinary enough,
except for leaving the children. Not many women do that.

What kind of a mother leaves her children? An inadequate, a selfish, an unfulfilled? Or a possessive, a demanding, a clinging, a smothering?

OK. I’ve stopped. I’m not running. I’m not hiding. I’m not David or Alice, I’m not in someone else’s story, I’m in my life, and there won’t be a
resolution. There isn’t the structure for it. It’s not a story, it’s a list of days.

All right. Make a list. It is after all the most sensible, housewifely thing to do. Make a list, tidy up. You can at least manage that, if not to resolve.

List

When Ruth was a baby, each new skill she mastered was a gigantic milestone. Sitting up, crawling, standing, walking: her first word. I crowed with delight when she did it, then
I waited for Gareth to come home and see it. There is a flavour to that waiting that hangs in my head like a smell: the pride, the excitement, the determination that his pride and excitement should
equal mine, the keen anxiety for the child to perform to order, the nagging sense that his smiles and applause may be feigned, that he may have preferred to have his tea first, that he’d
rather have taken my word for it. My disappointment when she couldn’t walk for him, didn’t talk to him; my swallowed anger that both of them weren’t behaving exactly as I wished
them to.