The Ice is Singing Read online

  And the mother? She who has been the source of all love all comfort all warmth and wetness of milky breasts, through whose nipple holes have spun the white life-lines of liquid connecting still her child’s belly with her own? What of her? I am a mother and a child, but write of comfort lost as a child.

  Because the baby’s love is for itself. It sucks and cries and demands and lays claim, in order to survive. Its huge self-love admits the existence of no other. Mother is home, food, warmth, life. Its love for its mother is its love of life itself, sweet life to be sucked from the source. The mother, who was herself a sucking baby once, knows her function. She is God, the source of life and happiness: and she is an old dried fruit to be spat away.

  Sun. Feb. 9

  My lips are so bad I haven’t been out. I’ve passed the time writing nonsense, looking through the window, and pacing up and down. I want to get in the car again. I’m wearing gloves to stop myself from mauling my lips.

  And the lips of my children, which feasted on my flesh, now curl or close tight at the sight of me. Only the twins grin and slaver; and as is only natural, they’ll grow out of it.

  No lips seek me. Like the housewife that I am, I start to unravel the old useless garment (starting from the site of the hole) in order to make new use of the rewound yarn. My lips spill words, phrases drip from the end of my pen, sentences flow out in a river.

  Mon. Feb. 10

  The car windows were encrusted with frost this morning – both inside and out. I tried rubbing it with a cloth, which was useless, then walked to a garage and bought some spray. The spray leaves a filmy coating on the glass, which the windscreen wipers smear without removing. I have had trouble focusing, because of this, all day.

  I drove for an hour or two, in no particular direction, attracted by roads that promised wide views and few towns. But after a while I found myself coming back into industrial suburbs, the outskirts of Sheffield. I stopped and consulted the road map, because I felt quite clear about what I wanted today: space, snow, straight roads. Emptiness. I decided to head west, where the map showed an empty-looking area, sparsely crossed by roads – the Pennines. In an hour my road led me down into a tight dark town wedged between hills. The blackened stone of its buildings dripped and pressed in around me. There was a fine spray of sleet beating through the air, that melted when it hit street or windscreen. They’d forgotten to switch off a sign warning that the Manchester road was closed due to snow.

  As I turned right at the foot of the steep hill out of Holmfirth, I imagined soaring up above the blackened stone walls and slate roofs, and looking down over the valley; if the mist and rain would let me. The wet black road was lined to the right by large Victorian houses, ponderous behind white gardens. The sleet became heavier, thickening up from transparency to whiteness, clotting into snow. And as I cleared the row of houses, breaking into countryside, the wind hit me from the north. The car shifted a foot or so across the surface of the road, where sleety snow was sticking lightly. The wipers were already on; I switched on the lights and the beams picked up two rods of moving air in front of me, as if the snowflakes were dancing atoms in a pyramid of solid matter. In the inch or two of clear screen following the wiper blade I saw the road (no longer even grey now, but white) curving up on ahead of me. I wasn’t at the top. I considered the fact that it would probably be worse up there. Already the solid houses of Holmfirth seemed a long way back. I pressed down on the accelerator, and as I surged on round the next bend, noticed an uneasiness beneath the wheels. Gradually I realized that the deepening snow on the road was in layers, rutted with the passing of earlier traffic.

  Above the engine noise the sound of the wind was a constant note – a screech across the metal surfaces of the car, a great howl across the invisibility of the moors, which I guessed must now stretch out all around me. Though I could see nothing. The fact that I could see nothing grew on me slowly. Slowly I realized that the eerie darkness in the car was due not just to the weather, but to the right-hand windows being completely plastered with snow. Odd powdery fragments of flakes danced in through the ventilation system. The atmosphere out there was solid with them. It was impossible to follow any difference caused by the movements of the wipers. They cleared the glass but did so to reveal air half an inch ahead, already clogged with streaming white dust. I slowed down. When I did so the feeling of slipping between ruts in the snow became more strong. I was not sure if I was on one side or in the middle of the road, straddling the tyre tracks of vehicles travelling in opposing directions.

  I couldn’t see the wall that had run alongside the road to my left. Perhaps now I was on the moors it had stopped. Perhaps it was still there but I just couldn’t see it. Perhaps in its place there was a five hundred foot drop to a rocky streambed below. I had no idea. Nor, except when the wheels guided themselves by slipping down the packed sides of my predecessors’ tracks and turning obediently to follow in the full depth of the ruts, did I know when the road was doing anything other than running straight ahead. There could be curves, hairpin bends. I could not see the road in front of my car.

  I tried to remember whether anyone had passed me. There had been someone in front. He must be up there somewhere in the blind whiteness, extending the road before me. Or stopped dead in his tracks, thirty yards ahead.

  I changed down to second gear, let my speed drop to below 10 m.p.h. I was beginning to lose any sense of the road at all. I was slipping and skidding frequently. I noticed I was hot – in fact, sweating. My hands on the wheel were sticky. I switched off the car heater. Part of me was braced, at each bump and slither, to go on falling – off, over, away. To nothing.

  I didn’t decide to stop. But I did stop. My foot lifted itself off the accelerator, my left hand moved the gearstick across to neutral and reached down to yank up the handbrake. The car stopped. The bumping and slithering underwheel stopped, although the solid white wind continued to streak across my windscreen. I turned off the engine. The howl of the wind rendered its absence unnoticeable. The window wipers stopped, and the inside of the car darkened a shade. The atmosphere had congealed. Not like darkness, which is penetrable by light. Not like water which, though solid, is clear. This was solid and opaque; like being buried, like soil. Buried alive in whiteness. The wind was pummelling the car from the right, and it shivered and trembled in the force of the gusts, as a larger vehicle will shudder at the idling of its own engine.

  I sat still, hands on the wheel. I was still hot. The windscreen was solid now, dark. I tried to imagine what my car would look like from outside. How long it would take it to lose its shape. Then I did something stupid – pushed down the handle and tried to open the door. My weight forced it open an inch or two, before the power of the wind slammed it again. The car was filled with a flurry of snow, which flew all over my face and clothes, and melted on me. The air was ice cold. I don’t know what I had intended. Even if I had been able to open the door – clearly – it would be madness to get out. There was nothing there. Nothing but blizzard.

  I was cold now. I couldn’t have come more than five miles from Holmfirth. Five miles from wet black roads, houses, shops, mothers hurrying their children home from school. Five miles from pubs and boutiques, four miles up the road from solid burghers’ houses with gas central heating and wall-to-wall berber. On other roads there are traffic jams; people wait, their windows misting up impatiently, the soft beating of their windscreen wipers ticking off the time to tea. I was as far away as Antarctica. I was cold. I turned on the engine.

  I needn’t have come this way. I could have seen – I did see. Sickeningly, I remember the ‘Road closed’ sign. I saw it. Discounted it and drove on. I look at my watch. Four ten. Soon it will be dark. It will be pitch dark in the car, then; not just dark, but black. I have no torch. Nor blanket. Nor drink. I have half a packet of Polos. I remember that people can die through sitting in cars with the engines on. Something to do with the fumes.

  While I sit there, very still, in my bubb
le of space under my snowdrift, and balk and panic, and still find my predicament incredible – I am watching.

  Watching Marion, who has stupidly (unthinkingly – perhaps uncaringly) endangered her life. Whose cold flesh is sweating; whose ears are tensed and intent on the whine of the wind (muffled now), searching its note for any hint (impossible to hear) of other noise that might mean rescue; whose aching snow-blind eyes are riveted on the dark solid mass beyond her windscreen, willing it to shift; a compartment of whose racing, panic-stricken mind is calmly planning Girl Guide methods of survival, considering how long it will take to use up the air in the car, and how a breathing tube might be inserted through the snow; searching her memory for weather forecasts she might have casually overheard at breakfast. Watching Marion who is very intent on not dying. Who wanders the countryside professing to seek blankness – running scared from a burial in clean white snow. And indeed, in part of her head, grovelling (to a swiftly resurrected God) for her rebellion. For her present death can be seen only as just reward for her ingratitude. If she had valued her life, she would not have endangered it.

  The irony is, of course, that I did not wilfully endanger it today. I am here, now, buried alive, not by choice but by accident.

  I was there for two hours. The wind must have dropped because I heard the noise of the plough before I saw anything – or felt, rather than heard, the deep vibration of its engine. He was passing to my right, very slowly. I turned on my engine and pressed the horn, which made a tinny, muffled sound. I pressed the handle and flung my weight against the door, which was packed solid with snow. It swung open and I half-fell out with force of my push. The snow was falling in flakes – vertically, from sky to ground. A different substance altogether. In the dim blue light I could see that the plough had cleared half the road, passing me with inches to spare. He was already lost in the darkness ahead, had not even noticed my buried shape. I flailed at the snow above the bonnet with both arms, and dug out a patch of windscreen. I put the car into first gear, turned the wheels to the right, and pressed the accelerator. It moved, almost easily, out of its snowdrift and on to the cleared road. The wheels did not stick or skid or spin. They turned, and took me on to solid tarmac. I got out and cleared the windows again, put on my lights and slowly, carefully, gratefully, followed the snow-plough on over the moors and down the winding descent to a village called Greenfield.

  Tues. 11

  Today she’s sorry for herself. No driving. Hollowed out, sunken, collapsing inwards. Sees herself: Marion, a silly woman stuck in a metal case under a layer of snow on top of a hill, afraid of dying. A mindless scuttler along roads.

  Keeping moving. Does she think she’s driving towards freedom, escape? That because she’s driving she’s going somewhere? What will there be at the end of the long narrow road? Does she expect to arrive at flowery fields of freedom? Uninterrupted peace, stillness, after the harassment of continual motion? Sounds like she’s going to heaven.

  But when that kind white stillness came down around you, Marion, padding and wedging you in peace – oh sister, when the snowy angels stretched out their spotless arms to clasp you to the breast of heaven – she didn’t want. Not at all. No intention of reaching journey’s end, thank you. No interest in peace and freedom. No desire for tranquillity or angel choirs.

  Trapped in motion like a rat on a wheel. You can only move or stop moving. And the only place you can arrive at by moving is somewhere else where you must either stop or move on.

  Under the brittle ice my brain begins to stir and thaw. I have managed well on the surface. I like the ice. It holds me up. If I could have kept going – if I could go faster. If I could fly at the speed of light, travel on a rocket to outer space – then I’d be fine.

  That’s enough. Don’t poke and prod me.

  Story. An elderly woman. Not moving. Blocked and muffled in her life, immobilized. A musty spinster. An ageing daughter. Restrained. A pale drawing, not even pen and ink, I’ll do it in pencil; a shadowy colourless stationary life.

  The Spinster Daughter

  Restraint. But. The clearest thing about her is the house. Kitchen painted bright gloss green and yellow. Should have been like buttercups, like daffodils, sunny. But the colours were too strong and the gloss too shiny, especially the green, and the room had the enclosed and sweaty air of a primary school cloakroom, a public changing-place. Gloss paint for walls is out of fashion now. And the curtains Alice Clough had made were a large and colourful floral print. The floor, of red quarry tiles, was fresh redded and polished every week, and glowed in the light of the brilliant fire which always burned – always, come summer come winter – in the kitchen grate. On the walls a variety of calendars, still supplied by agricultural merchants and purveyors of farm implements (despite the sale of the farmland back in the sixties), showed country scenes, smiling busty girls, and prize-winning shire horses. On the windowsills and sideboard stood orange and mauve gauze flower arrangements, which Alice had made following instructions in a monthly handicrafts magazine. The blanket that she had on the go at the time would be draped over a chair, with multi-coloured tails of wool dangling to the floor.

  Where, in this hot bright little kitchen, is the restraint? Except in the form of the room itself. The windows were never opened; fresh air was poison to Alice’s mother and could set her coughing for hours. Layers of cooking smells accumulated beneath the shiny cream ceiling, jostling for airspace: smells of boiling bones and baking custards, simmering jams and roasting potatoes. There was nothing dirty or old about this – the kitchen was spotless. It was just so hot; so full of things; so oppressive, that the milkman when he called to be paid on a cold morning was relieved to back out again into the frosty air, and the doctor rinsing his hands under the sparkling tap would say,

  ‘The miners’ll thank you for keeping them in work, Miss Clough,’ with a nod towards the high-banked glowing fire.

  Added to the heat and smells was frequently an element of steam, rising from sheets and towels draped over an old wooden clothes horse which stood with its arms outstretched to the fire at night, like a large cold guest. The upper sections of the windows were often misted with vapour, and on Mondays the room would be totally enclosed, windows blinded with heavy condensation. Except that Alice would repeatedly clear a smear, at eye level, with her wet red hand, and peer out (at nothing) many times in the course of the day.

  Alice Clough worked hard, in a small hot room, amongst garish colours, and was sustained by air that was saturated with smells and heavy with moisture, between gleaming dripping walls and opaque smeared windows.

  They lived on the ground floor, she and her mother. Upstairs the house was decaying rapidly. The roof leaked, rafters were rotting, plaster was crumbling away and window panes rattled themselves loose and cracked. Lumps of Victorian furniture, furry with dust, stood in the shadows like stuffed bears. The electric did not work.

  Downstairs Ellen had for bedroom the old parlour with its generous tiled fireplace and double window on to the garden. Her room was permanently semi-dark, shrouded from light and more pernicious draughts by heavy velvet curtains. The still air was warmed to oven heat by the ever-burning fire in her grate. Along the wall opposite her bed stood the old three-piece suite, upright but unused, waiting stiffly to resume its rightful position in the room. Alice’s bedroom, a bathroom and scullery completed the downstairs, lived-in part of the house. The scullery, which was cold, was lined with her jams and pickles, and cluttered with broken furniture.

  The state of the house was a reflection not only of Ellen’s meanness but also of Alice’s conviction that this state of affairs was temporary. There was no point in repairing the roof, renewing the windows, rewiring or replastering. Because soon Ellen would die, and Alice would sell the house. No point in throwing away good money on it. In fact Ellen’s grip on her purse strings was so vice-like that Alice never had money, either good or bad, to throw at anything. When father died, he left everything to mother. When she di
ed, it would be passed on to Alice and her brother Tom. Each would benefit in turn. And Alice waited her turn.

  She had waited when she came back from her nursing in ’45. Nursed her injured brother and said no to Jacko. She had waited while her father’s health declined to invalid state, and waiting, had nursed him. Tom married and left home, and Ellen, suddenly deprived of both her menfolk, threw herself into illness with a determination that should have killed her within months. Alice waited, to nurse her. But Ellen did not die. She continued to be sufficiently ill to need constant nursing, regular doctor’s visits, and a lion’s share of sympathy, for twenty-five years.

  Alice did not know it would be twenty-five years. That’s the point about waiting. If you know it’s going to be twenty-five years then you go away and do something else in the meantime. Alice lived the twenty-five years in daily expectation of the time being up. Every activity she embarked upon was temporary. Each decision was provisional. Her own life, ‘for the time being’, was in abeyance; her mother’s demands were more justly pressing, for her mother was about to die.

  Alice filled her time, while she was waiting. She nursed her mother with such skill and efficiency that the doctor complimented her regularly. Ellen was turned, and washed, and exercised, and her diet so carefully adhered to, that she was almost entirely free from those secondary discomforts of long-term illness which cause so much distress. She never had a single bedsore, nor was she constipated, and she suffered from secondary infections only on very rare occasions. For years Alice forced her to get up for part of every day, just as she forced herself to cook twice a day – broths, custards, fresh vegetables in season. Ellen pointed out that she had no appetite – none – and that standing and moving was sheer torture to her aching bones. But she knew she owed it to Alice to make an effort, and she hoped Alice appreciated what it was costing her.