The Ice is Singing Read online

  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 pa
st 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.

  Sally recognized that this was not an immature longing; she was twenty-eight. She had a satisfying job, friends, commitments. She knew she was not seeking a baby to define her own individuality. She already was, and knew what she was. No, she wanted a baby because she was a woman – it’s a natural desire. And it made her glad, and proud in a way, that her personality could embrace not only feminism and her work commitments, but also the desire for self-expression through motherhood. It made her feel almost superior to those women she knew who renounced it, who found it necessary to deny part of their own natures and physicality so vehemently.

  She discussed the matter with her friends – at her women’s group, at home, and in the shop. Most women she knew with children had had them young, and brought them up either separate from, or despite, men. Most were married, or pregnant by accident. Very few had chosen, deliberately and singly, at a sensible age, to breed. Sally established that the women she lived with were eager to share childcare and would love a child as much as she would.

  Sally decided to have a baby. She was an organized woman, and set about the task efficiently. To begin with she read everything on the subject she could find. She read about times and positions most favourable for conception (and with some scepticism, about methods for securing the conception of a female). She read about exercises, herbs and foodstuffs most helpful for the development of a healthy foetus and a relaxed supple womb; the stages of pregnancy, the stages of birth. She read women’s descriptions of the births of their own children; she read about hospital mismanagement of childbirth, and the intrusion of technology. She read about the hormonal changes which affect a pregnant woman, the increased progesterone levels which flood her with calm and well-being. She read about the importance of relaxation, and she read about natural childbirth.

  Then she prepared herself for the conception, as a boxer gets into training for a big fight. Her carefully balanced vegetarian diet was adhered to even more strictly than usual. Sally had been a vegetarian for years, ever since leaving home. Eating meat was unnecessary and unnatural, injurious to health. She disapproved of it on humanitarian grounds too, being opposed to factory farms and the slaughter of animals; she was also politically opposed to the guzzling of first-class protein in the Western World, when the Third World was starved for lack of the second-class protein which was used to fatten the Westerners’ meat. And then there were the health hazards caused by growth hormones being pumped into cows and sheep . . . Sally could not understand how anyone could eat meat. Especially when she passed a butcher’s, and saw it on the slabs: the swollen ripe livers leaking blood, the small barrel-hoop curves of lambs’ ribs, with thin red flesh clinging to them. And the implements, long knife and axe to chop through bone. She averted her eyes and walked past quickly. The smell . . .

  As well as yoga, she took up jogging and swimming, so that her physical fitness would be at its peak. She laid in supplies of homoeopathic substances such as caulophyllum to improve the muscle tone of her uterus. She made careful selection of a mate, from the three candidates within her circle of acquaintance whom she thought might oblige her, and decided on Alistair after a detailed scrutiny of his family’s history and health records.

  She was going to have a home delivery, assisted by her friends Mary and Sonya, and a midwife. She would not need any drugs or medical interference. Childbirth was a natural process, and Sally was going to do it naturally.

  For Sally it is a nice clean modern word, ‘natural’. She eats food that is full of natural goodness, and wears clothes made from natural fibres. Natural now is brown bread, organic vegetables, bio-degradable washing-up liquid. On the telly it’s a girl with blonde hair in a field of daisies in the sun, and she recommends a tampon or a low-calorie yoghurt. Sally thinks natural means good.

  And so it does, my dear. But more than good. It meant a bigger stronger more powerful kind of good altogether, when the word was young.

  NATURAL: as occurring in, sanctioned by, Nature. Right. Sweet-smelling. Morally acceptable. Knowing its place in the world. Loved by God.

  UNNATURAL: against Nature. Vicious, evil, perverted. Artificial, rejected by God.

  It meant order. The cosmos was a neat construction, each man and woman had a station in life, ordained and blessed by Nature. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate. But once it meant order, it had to mean the opposite too. Don’t you see?

  Oh Sally, I learned them at school, the meanings of ‘natural’. I learned from Perdita, whose noble birth shone through her shepherdess’ rags. And I learned from Edmund, bastard son, spawned by a natural lust. He knew his place, he called it natural. ‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess! . . . Now, gods, stand up for bastards!’

  Nature in conflict with civilization – which can sanction lust only within the bounds of holy matrimony, can recognize the rights only of those born within wedlock. But Edmund was a natural son. Born of that tendency and desire within nature to proliferate, to procreate, to increase in abundance through fair means or foul – nature rampant. For civilization’s sake he had to be labelled unnatural, the evil bastard who turned on his own blood, both father and brother; who forgot his place and grasped at a kingly crown. Terrible nature; the same stark Darwinian nature that menaced Tennyson with its bloody red in tooth and claw. Living nature which says eat or be eaten: rape: breed: kill: survive.

  I had a rabbit when I was little. She was put with a daddy rabbit and I knew she was going to have babies. One day when I went into the shed where she lived, she was having them. Two tiny bedraggled creatures lay in the straw, and another with blood and stuff was hanging out of her. I went out quickly because I’d been told I mustn’t disturb her.

  When I came home from school I ran to the shed. She was sitting at the back of her cage, ears flat along her back. There were no babies. Nothing, not so much as a drop of blood on the straw. She’d eaten them – every scrap. She’d licked the straw clean.

  Sally should have known about Edmund, or the rabbit.

  The business with Alistair was embarrassing and felt quite awkward. Sally’s period arrived on time after the first attempt, so in the next month they had to try several times. Sally remained anxious, feeling sure that she would know (as she had read some women do) the moment conception was achieved. But her fears proved groundless, she was pregnant this time. And, leaving no room for doubt, nausea and vomiting began within the fortnight.

  Sally knew about morning sickness. She knew it begins soon after conception, and generally ends at about twelve weeks, and that it can vary in severity. She knew that for most healthy women it is no more than a minor inconvenience, often averted by the precaution of eating a dry cracker in bed before getting up.

  But Sally’s morning sickness was not like that. She was ill. She was sick not only in the morning, but at noon and night – whether she had eaten anything or not, whether she got up or not. She was sick approximately twice an hour. She could not go to work. She felt constantly nauseous, dizzy and faint. She lost eight pounds in the first week. After consulting books and making her sample a variety of herbal and homoeopathic remedies, Sonya and Mary called in the doctor. He was sympathetic but unhelpful. He told them that there was no need to worry on th
e baby’s account, since a foetus is a perfect parasite and will take whatever it needs from the mother – only the mother’s health will suffer. There was nothing he could safely prescribe, since there were claims that Debendox was linked with foetal deformity. The safest course was simply for Sally to rest as much as possible, take plenty of fluids, and wait for the sickness to pass. If she suffered a more serious weight loss she would have to go into hospital and be fitted to a drip, to feed her intravenously. But since this in itself would prove strange and disturbing, he preferred to leave her at home for a week or two to see if she would settle.

  Sally was not used to being ill. She had never in her life felt as awful as she did now – and the sickness was unremitting, it would not even let her sleep. The days passed excruciatingly slowly, in exhausted dozing, vomiting, and tense sipping and nibbling at a wide range of drinks and foods, all of which proved equally unacceptable.

  In the middle of the second month of her pregnancy Sally was taken into hospital and put on an intravenous drip. Her weight was down to six and a half stone. She lay on her back with quiet hopeless tears trickling from the corners of her eyes, hating the hospital, hating the foetus, hating herself. Having babies was not a disease – why did this have to happen to her? Her mother, who had not been informed of Sally’s great decision, came to visit her and nearly cried at the sight of thin pale Sally; asked her if she had considered an abortion.

  They kept her in hospital till her weight stabilized and crept up to seven stone. Back at home she continued to feel nauseous, but gradually the sickness decreased and her appetite returned. She was very tired – more tired than she had ever been before, and after attempting a couple of full days at work she could hardly drag herself about. She still hadn’t regained her normal weight, so Martha suggested that she should work half days, until she felt better again.