The Ice People Read Online Free PDF Page A

than the sleepmat, and in the showerroom, and in the kitchen. We slept intertwined, in a slipknot of sweat. That amazing heat of that first summer.
    It was always with us, like a third person. If we hadn’t been so madly in love with each other, hungry for each moist salty centimetre of skin, we couldn’t have borne to share that space. The middleaged, the slows, the bits, rarely seemed to touch each other. By June or July, handshakes had shrunk to a tentative tap inside the wrist.
    But to us that summer was like a mother, holding us clasped together in the heat. Deep down we were very different people, but for months of bliss we lived like twins. I made iced coffee; she made iced coffee. I showered; she showered. We made love again.
    The first time we did it, she said, insanely, ‘Come on, Saul. Let’s make a baby. I know I’ll get pregnant. I just feel it.’
    I was naked and stiff in the candle flame (which was strictly illegal because of the fire risk). My sweat ran down like melted wax, but a cold little voice from somewhere else hissed in my ear, escaped my lips.
    ‘But if we want to travel, Sarah,’ I said. ‘You thought, in a year … once you’re established in the job. We talked about going to the ends of the earth …’ I felt as if our dream might slip away, but perhaps I was looking in the wrong direction. ‘But never mind,’ I added, hastily. I would have done anything she wanted.
    I was too late. Her fluid mouth, which had been like an anemone, red and inflamed and fully open, instantly hardened. ‘Of course you’re right. I’ll fix myself up.’
    Regret hit me like the back of a spade. I knew I should have trusted her instincts, and we would have made a baby at once, a bouncing, beautiful, healthy baby.
    Then she came back towards me, with her copperred hair running in heavy streams across the apples of her breasts, her eyes cast down, her eyes on my penis, and her fingers touched my neck, and I groaned, and forgot.
    ‘There’ll be other times,’ I said, when we’d finished, and lay entwined in the airless night. All the windows were open, but the breeze never came. Below in the street, car doors slammed, sirens wailed in the distance, a drunk was singing a sentimental song about tomorrow, a can clattered and crumpled underneath a car wheel, a couple continued a distant row – but the sound of her breathing, loud and real in the foreground, turned the sadness of the city into perfect contentment. Or almost perfect.
    ‘Are you awake, Sarah? There’ll be millions of times –’
    ‘What?’ she asked me, sleepy, happy. ‘What are you worrying about, Saul?’
    ‘We’ll have lots of babies, like you said.’
    ‘Oh that. Thankgod you were sensible.’ She yawned, turned over and fell asleep.
    At first we seemed to want the same things. This life in a high poky room in London was temporary, we agreed. We dreamed of making for the last open spaces. Our private mantra was ‘the ends of the earth’. We imagined raising a family by the sea, with forests, fields, clean bright water. The children were running, shouting, towards us.
    But two years went by and they had run no closer. Sarah was getting more involved in her job even as she began to find its premises ‘simplistic’, as I heard her tell a colleague in the lift. She was one of the most vocal of the first group of Role Support Workers to be appointed, and because she talked well, and looked good on the screen, she began to be looked on as a spokesperson.
    She talked about it to smug presenters. How the children resisted her, how they jeered. The tactics she used to make them take her seriously. How the boys reacted better if she presented herself in a more androgynous way; otherwise they tended to fall in love with her, though of course she didn’t put it like that. (I burned with jealousy when she told me about these great lustful adolescents, staring at her.) On the whole, though, the boys were more receptive to her message. They