The Ice People E-Book

Maggie Gee

• Herausgeber: Telegram Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

It's the middle of the twenty-first century, and the next Ice Age has suddenly sent global warming into reverse. Saul is one of the Ice People, the threatened peoples of the northern hemisphere, who, watching their world freeze over, try to move south towards the equator... 'Excellent ... intelligent, driven, imaginative, obsessive yet still gracious, one of our best ... Exciting stuff.' Fay Weldon 'Ambitious and subtle... She writes elegantly, unsentimentally, expertly... The Ice People works persuasively as science fiction, and is truthful about our emotional lives.' Independent 'Infused with poetic intensity ... this is a gripping fictional realisation of what we fear: the death of civilisation. Maggie Gee achieves her apocalyptic vision without the clank of hardware and intergalactic wars. Her detail is precise and controlled and her beautifully orchestrated whisper of redemption is rooted in eternal myth.' Elizabeth Buchan The Times 'An intriguing novel of ideas, fully fleshed out ... Classy science fiction.' Mail on Sunday 'A remarkable novel... up there with Orwell and Huxley.' Jeremy Paxman 'A gem of a book.' Rose Tremain 'A rattling good page-turning yarn.' George Melly 'A fantastic book' Mariella Frostrup

Leseprobe

Maggie Gee

The Ice People

TELEGRAM

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

eISBN: 978-1-84659-138-9

First published in 1998 by Richard Cohen Books, London

First edition published by Telegram in 2008

This eBook edition published 2012

© Maggie Gee, 1998, 2008 and 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

TELEGRAM

26 Westbourne Grove, London W2 5RHwww.telegrambooks.com

For Richard Cohen and for my beloved husband, Nick Rankin

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Society of Authors for their support and Christine Casley for meticulous editing. Grateful thanks also to E. J. Scovell (Joy Elton), Barbara Goodwin, Roger Pemberton, Fatima Bellacosa, Caroline Winterburn, and Moris and Nina Farhi.

About five million years ago, our ancestors were arboreal, apelike creatures contentedly going about their business in the forests of East Africa. Then, for reasons that are still only partly understood, the Earth entered a series of recurring Ice Ages … typically a little over 100,000 years long … separated by interglacials about 15,000 years long. We live in an interglacial that began about 15,000 years ago … Even during a full Ice Age the forests of East Africa do not freeze …

John and Mary Gribbin, Watching the Weather

… during most of the last half million years the climate was … considerably colder than now … The term interglacial is used to describe major warm phases, each of which … lasted 10,000 to 15,000 years … We are now living within a major warm phase, which has so far lasted about 10,000 years (the warm-up began as early as 13,000 years ago.) It compares closely with previous interglacial periods … and … it seems likely that colder conditions will return …

Anthony J. Stuart, Life in the Ice Age

The great glaciers of the Ice Age will return … the four previous interglacials lasted between 8,000 and 12,000 years, and the present one, called the Holocene, has already endured a little longer than 10,000 years.

Windsor Chorlton, The Ice Ages

… the detail of the ice-core record has also revealed short-term periodicities [which] occurred very suddenly and may have been important in stressing populations … The Younger Dryas has now been recognised world-wide as a sudden reversion to glacial conditions following a generally milder phase of the Late Glacial. After a ‘false dawn’ of warmer conditions, the world was plunged once more into relative dryness and cold.

Andrew Sherratt, Climatic Cycles and Behavioural Revolutions

The Belgian botanist Genevieve Wollard examined the pollen in layers of peat that were deposited in what is now Alsace, in north-eastern France, some 112,000 years ago, in … the last interglacial epoch … Within the space of a mere twenty years, pollen from the temperate climate trees had vanished altogether. Just two decades had been sufficient to transform a balmy climate into one as frigid as Lapland.

Adrian Berry, The Next Five Hundred Years

Europe should prepare for temperatures to fall to Arctic levels, even though meteorologists have declared 1997 the Earth’s hottest year on record, an American scientist says. Wallace Broecker, of Columbia University, says … winter temperatures in northern Europe would fall by at least 10°C within a decade. Britain would be as cold as Spitzbergen, 600 miles inside the Arctic Circle … the consequences would be devastating.

Nigel Hawkes and Nick Nuttall, reporting in The Times, 28 November 1997

PART ONE

1

I, Saul, Teller of Tales, Keeper of Doves, Slayer of Wolves, shall tell the story of my times. Of the best of days, and the end of days. Of the new white world that has come upon us. For whoever will read it. For whoever can read.

I am sitting in the halfdark by the fire. A circle of eyes reflects the firelight. The wild children, surrounding me. Not a circle, really. Too regular. They crowd, and bulge outwards, and fight, and crow. Kit, and Jojo, and Fink, and Porker, and some who have roars and grunts for names …

They are eating something. That familiar smell. Delicious because all food is delicious, then fatty, sweetish, sickening.

They see I am writing. Their eyes flicker. Beyond them, it’s black to the horizon, where the afterglow of sunset is brighter than before. The unearthly radiance beyond is coming closer, like the deep new cold. A ring of fire from a ring of ice.

I’m an old man now – old for these times, over sixty. Not long ago, people lived more than twice as long, if they were rich and lucky enough not to be terminated. In the easy days, the long hot days when there were so many human beings …

I’m not afraid to die. This morning I saw it coming, or did I dream it? – the white bear with a cub beside it, lolloping, joyful, glassbright in the sunlight.

Why should I be afraid? I have lived through interesting times. I have been loved, by a woman and a child. I have seen the world change utterly, perhaps for ever. I have had a son, who is now a god. I have lived through great adventures. I have crossed the Pyrenees in deep snow, fought off the wolves side by side with my son; I rode across Spain on the waves of blossom, from north to south, from winter to spring. I have seen almond blossom, cherry blossom, orange blossom, whitening the blazing skies. Following the seasons down to the sea.

No, I’m not afraid to go. Yet I shiver a little when their eyes turn on me. Writing fascinates them, and makes them jealous. Sometimes they pretend to copy me. A few of them can do it, clumsily. Jojo can do it, and speak in sentences, he lived Inside till he was twelve. More of them can read, perhaps six, a dozen, though I doubt if they’ve ever read a book, they wouldn’t even know the word. They look at me expectantly, waiting for me to tell my story. They like stories about love and adventure, and my story’s full of love and adventure …

But how can they ever understand?

I shall tell this story for myself. And for Luke, perhaps, should he survive. If these packs of wolves let their gods survive.

For Sarah; yes, dead or alive.

I tell this story because I must.

– The wild boys dance between me and the fire, and the cold increases, suddenly. I am an ancestor, to them. Quite soon now they will – celebrate me.

But perhaps my story will keep me alive. Perhaps they will let me finish my story.

They want me to tell them about the future. I tell them I’d better stick to the past. Human beings have always foretold the future. Self-deluders. Wishful thinkers. I used to do it all the time, obscenely self-confident, a tech teacher … I told my pupils about global warming. I told them why we were so hot, why despite all our efforts it could only get hotter –

Well, as I say, let’s stick to the past. Let’s hear how the old world turned into this. Me and the wild boys shivering here in the shell of an abandoned airport. The fires that keep us warm are steadily burning their way through the airline’s abandoned fixtures. Old desks and partitions collapsing like foam, carpets unravelling in thick black fumes.

By day we don’t need them. By day we keep busy. If you’re not busy, these days, you die.

We share this airport with hundreds of Doves. Maybe no one in the future will know what they are.

Our mechanical friends. Our robot loves.

My Doves, my dears. How you once obsessed me. My love of machines drove poor Sarah wild. Once I thought their descendants would outnumber ours … and who knows? They might do, one day, in Euro. We know how many Doves escaped, and some of the escapees must have survived.

Mutating, as they were designed to do. Maybe the Doves will have the last laugh yet, out in this strange new frozen world. But I don’t think so. They … have their limits.

And here in the airport they don’t look good. They crouch in rows, looking dull and lifeless, so the wild boys grow bored with them, and I am too tired to maintain them all.

Fleets of them. Quiet now. Heads bowed, wings back.

But if you had seen them in their heyday. Those amazing, brilliantly successful inventions. ‘DOVES – The Wings of a Brave New World.’

And me, white-haired Saul, when I was dark and dashing.

And beautiful Sarah, with her waterfall of hair ….

Time to begin at the beginning.

I, Saul, Teller of Tales, Keeper of Doves, Slayer of Wolves, bring you the story of my glory days.

2

I was born in 2005, in the country on the edge of London, when the Tropical Time was just beginning, what we look back on as the Tropical Time.

Things changed for me early on. All my life I’ve remembered the beginning, though. Green fields, a sandy track, conkers, the low whirrclap of a wood pigeon’s wings. Black and white cattle. A slaughterhouse, a blank brick building where animals moaned. Climbing a hawthorn and spiking my hands. Cow parsley heads like plates of frothed cream, rising to meet me as I fell from above. Thrashing the long wet grass with a stick.

Then fences went up with cartoonlike speed, there were months of dust and hammering, the neat pink houses rose one by one, and when the dust settled, we were in London.

My mother was a loving, worried woman, softly spoken, but a terrier. Almost everything about her was a faded beige, her tired mouth, her pleated cheeks. She read me poetry at bedtimes, watched every move, and denied me sweets, but she was very loving, when she wasn’t tired, and my school shirts were always white. She liked reading, she made me love reading, and yet her jobs were never with books. There were too many jobs; she was often exhausted. She was a care assistant in a Last Farewell Home, where people over a hundred were ‘termed’ unless they had family to take them in. I’m sure she did the job kindly and cleanly. My dad made jokes about her terminating him. Her other main staple was oneoff assignments driving huge haulers for a teleshopping firm, roaring up the emways in the middle of the night. And yet she was a slight woman, not that strong.

My father liked quiet, but he worked for the police, as an enforcer for home prison contracts. His hair was curly, scattered with grey. His face was strong and grave, heavily lined, with big dark eyes, and his voice, heard rarely, was low pitched and slow. It made people listen, that quiet voice. Perhaps it helped him in his job. In those days London had a public policeforce, though the days of public prisons were over. He was also a general law enforcer. If he saw something suspicious, he would go straight in. Most policemen didn’t, according to Samuel. ‘The police have become a bunch of cowards.’

(Dad taught me to be brave. I’ve tried my best. And my son, his grandson, has his brave blood.)

Dad talked less than Mum, and I’m not sure he listened, which must be where I got it from, for Sarah said I never listened … He was a big man. He had high standards. He drank too much. He was slow to anger, but sometimes – Yes, he had terrible rages. I still don’t like to think about them.

But he was a good man. They were good parents. They loved each other, and me, and my sister.

Samuel and Milly. So far in the past. They seem so little now, so innocent, and the time they lived in so safe and tidy. My photos have all gone, of course, but they sit imprinted in my brain, posing for the camera, holding hands and smiling. While I’m alive, they are not forgotten.

All they ever seemed to talk about was the shortage of water and the heat.

I was muddled about it, aged twelve. On the one hand there was never enough water, and watering your garden from the tap was a crime. On the other hand, sea levels were rising, and the white cliffs of Dover had to be shored up after part of them toppled into the sea.

Then the crumbling cliffs and the endless money the government paid to underpin them grew confused in my mind with foreigners. People from even hotter countries were always trying to get in to Britain. The screens showed pictures of the eroded white cliffs, then scenes of dark people, sweating and furious, bullying the immigration officers, shouting and swearing, their black mouths open. Often the army would be called in.

I started to hate these foreigners. There wasn’t enough to share with them. We lived in a threebed brick twentiethcentury cottage with plasterboard doors that never quite shut, and my parents worked harder than anyone.

One day when my mother had come home exhausted from an allnight run to Edinburgh, I told her I hated black people. She came into the garden in her dingy pink nightgown, and begged me to stop slamming my football against the shed. I did three more kicks, then went and lay down on the prickly yellow lawn, ignoring her.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘For heaven’s sake.’

‘I don’t like black people,’ I said. ‘The screen said even more of them are trying to get in.’ To me they seemed like liars and scroungers who would keep my family poor for ever. ‘I hate black people. Why must they come here?’

She looked at me with a little frown, a puckered white thread in her sunreddened forehead. ‘Saul – they’re not all the same, you know. You can’t go hating black people.’

‘It’s true, Mum. I saw the pictures.’

‘You don’t understand.’ She sounded peculiar. ‘Saul, listen … look … there’s something …’ She stared at the ground, her mouth working. Then something burst out like a stone at a windscreen. ‘Haven’t you noticed your father’s black?’

‘That’s mad,’ I said. It hurt my chest.

‘Yes. Well – half. Your grandpa was from Ghana. He came here as a student, in the last century.’

‘I haven’t got a grandpa. Shut up. I hate you. Why are you saying these horrible things?’

‘Because it’s true. Grandpa died when you were two.’

I stumbled to my feet. She tried to hug me but I broke away and ran into the house.

In the bathroom mirror I looked for the truth. My skin was golden, as it was before, but I watched it change and become light brown. Spots, I saw, and curly black hair, and features broadening with adolescence. My nostrils, flaring. Yes, and my lips. I saw Dad’s face behind my own.

She said no more. I was stunned, confused.

I tried to talk to my father. It was never easy. He was a shy man, who preferred to be alone. He liked birds; perhaps that’s why he’d gone to live in the country, and until he died he always kept pigeons.

He was throwing them dull yellow kernels of seed, as I tried to talk to him about being black. It was dark in the shed. Everything was dark. There was a dirty little window, high up. But the eyes were bright; so many pairs of eyes, darting about on sheeny silk necks, and Dad and I looking past each other. He didn’t say a lot, but he touched my arm. We stood together in the airless darkness, with the warm bodies quivering and shuffling around us, and I thought, this might be like Africa, though I didn’t have a clue about Africa.

What did he say, exactly? That I should be proud (but how proud was he? He had never told me about myself). That the first humans were African (but ‘You kids are as British as the next person’). That skin colour was not important (and yet it had ‘held me back in the force’). That we were ‘the same as anybody else’ (yet ‘people like us always have to watch our backs’). And the sentences seemed to come out muddled, the pigeons pecked, and it was hard to ask questions.

The thing Mum had told me didn’t make enough difference. At first I expected the sky to explode and the earth to blacken with astonishment. Thirty years later it would change my life, send me off on an odyssey round half the world – But at the time I just became restless, unsettled, no longer sure I was like my neighbours. Not that I looked particularly different. My sister was darker skinned than me, but her lips, like Mum’s, were on the thin side. And yet we shared the same grandfather … In the end I got tired of going over it all.

Our school had very few black people. Remember, this had recently been countryside, and most black people preferred the city. There were Italians, Asians, Swedes … And fifty or a hundred kids were probably mixed race, many of them good friends of mine. We hung out together, liked the look of each other, followed Renk and Roots music avidly, but no one mentioned what we had in common. And what was there, really, to mention? We were mostly third or fourth generation British, all with more white in us than black. Yet I think I longed to be recognised. That hidden part of me was waiting to be seen.

Which was partly why I fell in love with Sarah, a dozen years later, when I was twentyfive.

I came to central London when I was eighteen, and lived in a hostel near Regent’s Theme Park. It was noisy, but I liked the freedom. Samuel’s police career had ground to an end, without leaving him better off or happier. Now he disapproved if I played the wrong music or brought a friend home or used a dreampad to relax after work. Mum, who was retraining as a nurse, explained to Dad that the new way was safer, the little silver pads we stuck on the skin so the drug was absorbed straight into the bloodstream. ‘But why do you need drugs?’ Samuel would demand, pouring himself another cold beer.

(It’s like a dream, to remember those days, when you could flick what you wanted from any dispenser. Now we can’t even get hold of painkillers, and one of my teeth has been throbbing for days … I wish I had one of those old silver dreampads. I’d slip its coolness on to my skin. Then the slow rush, the sweet slide forwards, flying away from stress and pain.

Finished. Gone. There are no more escapes, except through lighter fuel or cleaning fluids, which every so often the wild boys try. Then there is mayhem, fire and death, and Chef and I creep away and hide … Such beautiful, desirable words: aspirin, somnifer, paracetamol, diamorphine, tenebrol, heroin, lullane. Lulling us away from hurt and grief. We grew used to them, and then we lost them.

Now I suppose the only drugs are stories. That’s why the kids still look to me. They see I’m writing. They’re curious. Don’t you see, you boneheads, I’m Scheherezade? I’ll spin out my story night after night, hamming, stalling, to save my life –

Scheherezade! Don’t make me laugh. None of them knows what I’m talking about. It’s a world ago, the Arabian Nights my mother used to read to me, the Bible, Dickens, Hans Andersen ... What a waste, what a shame, the old twists, the old tales, all of them lost on these little savages. Vile little shits, ignorant brutes, spitting out their elders like chickenbones, I’d like to kick them to the back of beyond …

No use, no use. Too many of them.

Now Kit is offering me a leg. ‘Take it, old man! Save it for you!’ Long, fringed with blackened, gamey meat, glistening in the light of the fire, its shape unpleasantly familiar. Sometimes I eat, but today I’m not hungry. I want to feel human, as I once was. I wave placatingly. Back to my story.)

In the early 2020s I lived in central London. I was happy because it was so different from home. Walking the streets until the cool of the early hours, dancing in the squares, by the river, on the pavements. Teen life had come out of the molelike tunnels where the young liked to hide at the beginning of the century.

My generation did things differently. We travelled everywhere, easily as swallows, we students with money from waiting tables, on cheap, safe airlines that competed for our business. The countries we flew to still had governments. Lisbon, Reykjavik, Beijing – we saw the world, packed in like sardines. Everywhere we danced to the same music. And the smaller towns were even better. There you could dip into the twentiethcentury, a time when each place had its own special taste. That quiet square in Avila. Cool pale beer, smoky black olives. The townspeople were dark like me; there were darkeyed girls in bright satin dresses …

(Euro got bad in my early twenties. There were three years of plague that closed the frontiers, a new kind of Ebola coinciding with haemorrhagic sleeping sickness; blazing summers when viruses flourished and civil order couldn’t stand the strain as hundreds of victims bled to death in their cars, choking the roads to hospitals. Our government fell, and was barely replaced. Looking back, my late teens were paradise.)

We young ones chose to live in the open, though our parents hardly left their homes, hiding behind electronic gates. We ate in the sun; we danced in the sun. We laughed at the old – we called them ‘the slows’, and sometimes ‘the bits’, for all their spare parts – with their cautious, waxy masks of whitish suncream. When the evening came, we mobbed the streets.

We liked to be under the orange sky, with the flaring thunder clouds above us. We waited for the little chill of morning, the slight but miraculous lessening of heat that slipped in with the breezes of three or four am, so that people lying clammy and bare on their beds would reach out in their sleep and pull up a sheet. Outside, the kids drew closer and threw arms round each other, enjoying being young together … I was happy, whether cool or hot, and slept as little as I could. We were all hotblooded, we were raised on heat. I loved fiery middays and baking afternoons, and the long, familiar nakedness of summer evenings, when no one under thirty ever wore a shirt.

Yet my body was strangely illadapted to heat. I was hairy, unlike my father. I had a thick pelt of curling dark hair which ran down my chest and across my shoulders, and defined the strong muscles of my legs in shorts. Some women were fascinated by it, and would stare, letting me see them noticing. Others were shocked, even a little disgusted, for the fashion was for shaving, of heads and bodies.

Why was that? Hard to recall now, but it lasted for decades, that egglike baldness. Perhaps it was a kind of streamlining, an attempt to keep cool at any cost. And the style appealed to both men and women. The fashion of the time was for androgyny, so hair was suspect, for it signalled gender.

And yet, though our clothes and hair denied it, a great gap had grown up between the sexes. Segging we called it. From segregation. Almost everything we did was segged. Girls with girls, boys with boys, great droves of animals bypassing each other, eyes darting across, wild in the neon, jostling, signalling, twisting through the night, two big streams that couldn’t make a river.

The problems with fertility had started to get worse. The screens were full of alarming statistics. They didn’t mean all that much to the young, who were too busy having fun to think that having children mattered, but our parents discussed it in solemn voices. They wanted grandchildren. They wanted a future.

I knew, in any case, with that complete confidence that young people have once, then never again, that these reports weren’t about me. I wasn’t like them. I wouldn’t have a problem. I knew I was a man who wanted women. When I had had sex (which wasn’t very often because it wasn’t easy to get women to have sex, what with segging, and mutant hivs) the pleasure was huge, easy, instinctive. It seemed so natural, like having children.

I felt on the brink of owning the world. I was a man, and human beings ran the planet. There were eight billion of us, though numbers were shrinking, but few other animals were left to compete. Insects, bacteria, viruses. (And cats, of course. Cats everywhere. The city streets were patched with fur, ginger, tabby, blackandwhite. I liked cats though, so that was all right.) I was tall, and strong, and a techie, which qualified me for a lifetime’s good money. It was new and wonderful to feel like this; home had too many small sadnesses.

When civil order broke down, over the next few years, I stayed optimistic. Who needed governments? If you were young, you were selfreliant. The plagues passed me by, though I lost several friends. The streets grew rougher, but I stayed away from trouble. In wealthier areas, life went on as usual. I didn’t let the newscasts upset me.

I found I had a gift with machines. They were alive to me, and entirely absorbing, like the aphids I once bred in a matchbox. I was fascinated by artificial life, by the huge range of mobots in the college labs, the multitravellers, the swarmers, the sorters, though my speciality was nanotechnics, working with invisibly small molecular machines. I had delicate powers of manipulation that helped me pass out with high honours. Job offers came in plenty from military and security firms. For some reason I found myself turning them down. My father was shocked, but I knew I wasn’t ready. Something had to happen first, some great adventure. For the moment I took a part-time job as a tech teacher in a Learning Centre.

One day a week was the teachers’ Dee Stress. No pupils came in, and only half the guards were working. The underground trains were back in service, after more than a year of being sealed off. I tubed in, reading a weird story about some people in Portugal living in caves. They said there were hundreds, maybe thousands of them, living as people did in the Stone Age. And they were breeding. There were children everywhere. They looked dark, in the picture, with sparkly eyes. The reporter wanted to know their secret. I thought how much I’d like to go and see for myself. Order in France had completely broken down, but things were still peaceful in Iberia.

The school garden was overrun with big pink mallow flowers like English faces burning in the sun. The litter waved gaily like little silver flags. I remember I felt something good was going to happen.

Three metres away, the front door coded me. I got the normal access signal. The doors opened. The lights came on. The uniformed guard was not in her place, but I was early, and besides, it was Friday. The voicetone welcomed me, as usual. ‘Good morning, Officer 102. It is eightothree am Cooling is in progress. Please specify rooms you want unlocked and conditioned.’

I always said ‘Good morning’ back, though other teachers laughed at me. They thought I was joking, but I wasn’t. It seemed to me anything might be alive. What was the boundary between living and nonliving?

(Now I would give a different answer, as I approach closer to the shadowy line that separates the living from the dead, but then I was besotted with our cleverness.)

I confirmed my code, then asked for the lift, and coffee upstairs in the Dee Stress room. Dee Stress began formally at nine, so there was probably halfanhour or so before the other teachers arrived. I had nothing to prepare; the sun blazed outside the window. And so I requested the day’s chillout sounds, sponsored by StartSmart Buildings Inc. ‘First up today, we bring you ‘‘Nessun Dorma’’ …’ I never tired of it. ‘Thank you, that’s great.’ When the wonderful music surged up through the silence, it felt as though the building were giving me love.

Behind me, the entrance slid open again. I was waiting for the lift, and didn’t look round. The normal welcome routine began, and the music continued more quietly. It spoke of passion, space, grandeur, of hot black windows in high white walls. It made me think with longing of Euro. Mountains. Plains. I should be free … What kind of life did they live, in the caves?

Then the music cut out. The welcome was repeating. I turned and saw a woman with her back to me, staring mystified at the input by the scanner.

‘Just show your coder,’ I began to say, but at that moment she raised a pale hand and tried to do something to the input panel. At once the warning buzzer sounded. ‘Security,’ the building said. ‘Security to entrance, please. Security. Security.’

The entrance doors closed firmly behind the woman, who was spinning round slowly, looking nervously upwards, and then the lift doors, which were opening for me, changed their minds, shuddered, closed again. ‘Entrance hall sealed,’ the building remarked. ‘Secur-’ But it didn’t finish the word.

‘Ohgod,’ the woman said. I looked at her. She had long hair. Most females under fifty had short hair, unless they were under ten, that is. She was small, slim, in a loose white dress, not fashionable, a ‘pretty’ dress. What my mother would have called a pretty dress.

‘I’ve done something awful. I’m new,’ she said. ‘I’m Sarah Trelawney. How do you do.’ Her voice was composed, soft, with a burr. A very young voice, despite her appearance.

The voicetone hissed, seethed, strained, as if the building were trying to breathe. Then it suddenly said, in a cheerful voice, ‘The emergency has been contained. We apologise for any break in transmission.’ I waited for the doors to move, but nothing happened. And the music began to unroll again, wave after wave, into the vacuum.

She walked towards me, and the fog fell away. The sun sheared across her, shining on her hair. She wasn’t old. She was younger than me. But how strange she looked, with that loose pale dress, how perversely erotic, when everyone else was wearing clothes that were thinner than skin and clung to the body, to halfglimpse the swell of her belly, her breasts. I tried very hard not to stare at her breasts.

That weird waterfall of hair. Such childish hair. Reddish-brown, shiny, glinting like conkers against their white shell, and her skin had tiny freckles like dots of honey. She looked miserable, but her eyes were very blue. She came closer. The music gathered and poured. My heart swelled absurdly.

‘Nessun dorma …’ Let no one sleep …

Then she spoke, and her firm voice cut through my fantasy. She had sharp small teeth, which caught the light. ‘I seem to have locked us in. Sorry.’

‘I’m Saul,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. The others will be here in ten minutes or so.’ She had a small nose, a square, strong jaw. We shook hands. Hers was mysteriously cool – most handshakes then were a slither of sweat.

‘You must be an officer,’ I said, ‘to be coded.’

‘It’s a new post,’ she said, shy. ‘I’m something called a Role Support Officer.’

‘What does that mean, then?’ I asked her.

‘The government’s decided that boys and girls have to be taught to get on together. It’s partly political, I’m afraid. They’re making appointments all over the country. Because the fertility figures are down again, and they have to seem to be doing something. Elections next year, of course.’

‘How do you mean, get on together?’ We were leaning side by side against the desk where normally the guards were posted. I noticed her nails: very white moons. Small freckled hands. No rings. A chain. She wasn’t pierced, or tattooed. I wanted to get on with her.

(Be honest: I wanted to make love to her.)

‘Well – I mean – you know – ‘ She was intensely embarrassed. ‘Live together, I suppose. Try to get them living together again.’

Live together. It was shockingly intimate.

‘I bet you got the job because you look like that.’ As soon as I’d said it, I knew it was offensive. ‘I didn’t mean –’ I said, then stopped.

But she smiled. ‘You mean – I look twentiethcentury,’ she said. ‘What they used to call feminine. Probably, yes. And I’ve dressed the part. But I can teach. As a matter of fact, I’m good. I’ve taught Outsiders, you know. I can teach without screens. I even taught for two months in the towers –’

‘Wow,’ I said. So she was tough. Like everyone else in my year at college, I’d turned down the chance of practice teaching in the towers, despite the huge bonuses they offered and the promise of fulltime protection from zapsquads.

She was staring at me, letting her frank blue eyes run over my neck, my arms – and was she looking at the curly hair on my chest? ‘You have a slightly old-fashioned look yourself,’ she said, and smiled. ‘We could almost coteach.’

Then neither of us could look at each other, but I could feel, a centimetre away, her small white hand beside mine on the desk, burning into me like a naked current. We stood transfixed in a cube of sunshine, saying very little, staring at the glass where hands had begun to wave at us, gesturing, impatient, frustrated, irrelevant. I hardly saw them, because I was with her.

Was it ten minutes, or an hour, before the building yielded? By that time, I was falling in love with Sarah.

And Sarah? I’ll never know about her, but she told me later she felt the same way.

We said very little, and a lot. That we both had dreams of escaping from the city. That both of us needed to escape our families. That we both wanted children, and expected them. We couldn’t say the word ‘children’, of course, which would have meant ‘sex’, to both of us. I said ‘I’d like a family of my own, one day,’ and she said ‘Of course,’ and smiled at me.

‘I like you,’ she said, although it was obvious.

‘Why?’ I said, feeling happiness spread through my body like oxygen.

‘I like the look of you. You’re – different. You’re not just English, are you? What are you? French? Spanish?’ She looked straight at me. Her curiosity was like a kiss. Then she lit up. ‘You’re beek, aren’t you. You must be, of course! Tell me I’m right.’

And she had seen the thing that I wanted her to see. Beek was short for bicolor, the French insult that black people themselves had taken over to mean ‘mixed race’, and she used it so easily.

‘Yes, I’m beek. Most people don’t notice. My father’s halfAfrican, my mother was white.’ Had I ever said it straight out before? She made me feel I could be myself.

‘That explains why – well, you look good to me.’ She finished the sentence in an awkward rush. ‘I’m very interested in all that. It was part of my Ethnicities diploma course.’

I’d always disliked the word ‘ethnicity’ – it sounds like someone cleaning their teeth – but on her lips, it seemed tolerable. ‘You’re English, I suppose.’

She shook her head fiercely. ‘I’m Scottish and Cornish. Not an English drop of blood in me.’ (Which must have been nonsense, but it sounded exciting.)

‘Did your parents have red hair?’ I looked at her hair. It was like some glossy animal fur. What couldn’t a man do with hair like that? Wrap it around him, burrow into it.

But something was happening outside the door. Two beings had arrived in brilliant spacesuits. Somewhere to the rear my colleagues hovered, leaving a clear space between themselves and the spacemen. ‘The emergency services are going to invade,’ I told her, thinking now it will be over.

‘I hope they don’t sack me for crashing the system.’

‘Come dancing with me tomorrow night.’ I had to say something or lose her for ever.

‘Mygod, just look at the size of those vappers!’ she said, amused, and then suddenly alarmed. ‘Are they going to use them with us inside?’

And then I remembered; it was mirrorglass. We could see out but they couldn’t see in. The people outside weren’t waving to us, they were simply beating on the glass in frustration. No one would know there was anyone inside. We were in danger; she was in danger.

I tried to sound calm. ‘Let’s get out of range.’ But the spacemen were aligning their vappers with the doors. Something earthshattering was going to happen. Without thinking, I grabbed Sarah by the shoulders, flung her to the ground, and fell on top of her, covering both our heads with my outstretched elbows. She felt soft and small, and smelled of sweat, and flowers, and part of me registered these pleasant things as most of me waited for the end. One second, two, three, four –

I felt her struggling, her small steel fists. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she panted, furious. ‘You’ve torn my dress. Get off me, you idiot!’

Then the building spoke. Both of us froze. ‘…contained,’ it said. ‘Waiting to code. Waiting to code. Good morning. Please approach and code. Please show all codecards so we can help you.’

It was over. The lift doors glided back like silk. I rolled off Sarah, and patted her placatingly. Outside, the silver spacemen laid down their vappers, and the crowd behind them began to push forwards.

‘I was trying to save your life,’ I gabbled. ‘They couldn’t see us. It’s mirrorglass.’ She was straightening her dress and staring at me. Her pupils were pinprick small with shock, and her skin was webbed with pink where I’d clutched her. ‘I was trying to shield you with my body.’

She suddenly stopped frowning and touched my arm. As the entrance slid open, to great whoops and cheers, I watched her pupils expand and darken. ‘Why should you?’ she said. ‘I mean – you’ve only just met me. I mean, you were risking your life for me.’

I thought about that in the split second that was left. I couldn’t say ‘Because I’m in love with you,’ for fear she would think me completely mad.

The thing I did say seemed simple, obvious, though normally I would never have said it. ‘Because I’m a man,’ I told her. ‘Because I’m a man, and you’re a woman.’

3

That was the way it began with us. An absolute feeling of rightness together. My colouring, my size, my sex. They all felt right as never before. They married her smallness, softness, toughness. She reminded me a little of my mother, slight but enduring, loving, fierce, good with her hands, helpful, maternal. She was – womanly, that was the only word, old-fashioned though I knew it was. So I could be manly, as I wished to be.

‘You beautiful man,’ she said, when she first saw me naked, not long after. No woman had ever said that to me.

‘But I’m so – hairy,’ I said, humbly. I did feel humble. She was too good for me. Seeing her like this, it was obvious. Her small sweet breasts. Her delicacy. I was halfashamed of my hairiness. The pressures against it were overwhelming; ninetyninepercent of men were smooth and neat, displaying their gleaming narrow bodies in clubs, corrugated chests that shone like oil and only the faintest grey fuzz on their scalps. I was an ape by comparison, a pelt of blackness from chest to groin.

‘Esau was an hairy man,’ she whispered, gently running her fingertips through my chest hair, going down, lower, lower, bliss, till she reached the place where I was hard and hairless, and she bent her head and kissed me there, then looked up and smiled – ‘See, you’re smooth as well.’

Such happiness. Such a time of peace.

Only one thing was less than perfect, and I put that down to my stubbornness, a streak of pride and resentment that had sometimes got me into trouble at school. She was wild about me, everything about me, as she assured me earnestly, running her hands over my lips, my nose, telling me I was the first beek she had slept with. (How very dated that slang seems now!) She seemed to think about that more than I did. It must have made me more romantic, my mixed race background, my unusual looks. She wanted me to read the essays she had written for the Ethnicities part of her diploma, and I tried, I tried, but it was very solemn, and the language incomprehensible.