Read The Ice People for Free Online Page B

frozen ocean. Were they coming nearer? I still couldn’t see. The light on their faces was intense, blinding.
    ‘The ice is growing,’ I whispered to Sarah. ‘It wasn’t a mistake. The ice is thickening. Our little boy might even see snow.’
    ‘Our little boy!’ She kissed me, tenderly. ‘No, you’re deluded. We’ll have a girl.’
    ‘Twins,’ I said, as I pushed inside her. ‘A boy and a girl. Snowbabies.’

4
    A nd so we began on our epic of conception. The details blur, but it took ten years. Ten years of learning to eat my words.
    It was as if we shared two different lives, one all success, the other slow failure.
    In our waking life, we pursued our careers, began to make money, moved from the room to a threebed flat, then a fourbed flat in a better part of London, less fun but safer, a flat where we could finally have a study each, if we managed with only one guest bedroom.
    Sarah, after all, had no family to speak of. Her father was untraceable, and she wasn’t on speaking terms with her mother, who was on her fourth marriage, to a twentyyearold skater. Perhaps that’s why she clung to me. It’s certainly why she adored my parents. The guest bedroom was for Samuel and Milly to come and marvel at their son’s success.
    And I
was
successful, though I felt a little trapped. I divided my time between working on a consultancy basis for the Learning Centre where I first met Sarah, and researching applications of nanotechnology for one of the two big Nanocorps. I felt proud of what we were doing, designing minute immune machines, ‘like minisubmarines’, I told Sarah, which could travel through the blood and identify and destroy an enormous range of viruses and bacteria. My friend Riswan was the medical star; my part was the protein engineering. True, it turned out later that many of the agents we’d targeted for destruction had benign effects that we hadn’t understood, so the application was never used, but those were the early, heroic days.
    I earned a lot, but Sarah earned more. Sometimes it seemed she never stopped working. And she made the flat beautiful; it mattered to her. She would come home exhausted from performing, then work for two hours cleaning and dusting till the flat was immaculate. At first I used to try to stop her, but that made her crosser than cleaning did.
    ‘Someone has to do it,’ she would say.
    ‘Sure. The cleaner. That’s why we have one.’
    ‘But she can’t make it look like a proper home. She doesn’t
love
it, like I do. It’s … our nest.’
    But she wasn’t laying eggs. My mind went blank. ‘All the same, you’re exhausted. Stop.’
    ‘I want it to look nice.’
    ‘What can I do to convince you?’
    ‘You
can’t
convince me. I suppose you could help me.’
    ‘Okay then.’ I probably sounded reluctant. I’d had a tough day at the office; I wanted to sit and chill onscreen. ‘I mean, if I must, but you worry too much. The flat looks perfectly all right to me.’
    ‘You
won’t
help me,’ she remarked, tightlipped. ‘You make me feel bad about asking you to help. So don’t pretend to be all concerned.’
    She wasn’t logical, because she was tired, always hyperactive, living on her nerves. She found it hard to say ‘No’ to things. Each invitation to write an article, appear on the screens or speak at a conference might be her last, so she never refused. She put her work before everything – she was always exhausted. Perhaps that was why … Stress
can
make human beings infertile.
    (But was I so different? No, just less successful.)
    When my parents came, they were amazed and frightened. The way Sarah’s phone never stopped ringing, the gourmet food at every meal (when most people in England lived on pills and Fibamix), the huge china bowls that Sarah kept filled with expensive real flowers in the diner and the screenroom, the way we darted around, without a second thought, in taxis and, slightly less often, minicopters (my mother had only taken