Read Online The Ice People by Maggie Gee - Free Book Online

stared at me as if I weren’t there, and her wide blue eyes began to water again. ‘Why are you telling me all this shit? I don’t bloody care. I don’t want this baby. Maybe it’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true, Saul,
I don’t want him –’
And she looked at me, begging me to understand, but I was shocked and became selfrighteous, though I’d secretly felt the same way myself.
    ‘You have to want him. He’s our son,’ I barked. I was brutal with her because I felt guilty.
    ‘I wanted a daughter. My beautiful daughter.’ She lay and wept, and I wanted to hit her. She was the mother. It wasn’t fair.
    ‘Don’t cry. Get a grip on yourself. You’re a mother.’
    I didn’t see this was the turning point. I thought it was something temporary. Sarah would have to love me again once she and Luke came home together.
    They did come home, but things didn’t get better.
    She was too weak at first to look after the house. Luke seemed to suck up all her energy. I would come home from work and find her exhausted, with milk and avocado all over her blouse, and the floor, and the table, and the chair. Our flat had never looked like this. I got the cleaner to come more often. I did my best, but Sarah glowered at me. She lay with the infant clamped to her chest and watched old films with her friend Sylvie who always seemed to be by her bedside. If I spoke, they stared at me resentfully. ‘You never listen,’ was Sarah’s refrain, but they only spoke to me to give me instructions, to tell me to heat bottles or bring a fresh nappy. And I worked all day. It wasn’t easy.
    In any case, it was Sylvie she talked to. ‘I
know,
’ I would hear her cooing, ‘I
know.
’ Her son sometimes came along on sufferance, and sat picking Sarah’s flowers to pieces. They didn’t leave when I came home. I found myself unable to be pleasant to them. Sylvie had a patch of eczema by a stud in her ear, which was some kind of stupid lesbian symbol. If she’d been a man, I would have been jealous …
    Then Sarah did find a man who listened. He was one of the doctors who treated her depression. Most of them disappointed her. His consulting rooms were only two blocks away from Melville Road. She went three times a week, and came back pinkcheeked and invigorated. I was happy to stay at home with Luke, glad that something was doing her good …
    (I still don’t know what she wanted from me. I only know that I didn’t give it. It seems to me that men couldn’t get it right – we were either too brutish or too wimpy for them. But we were ourselves, we were
men,
for godsake. What did they think they could turn us into?)
    I was slow to resume our sex life after Luke was born. I wanted to be
sensitive.
I spit with derision to think of it now, but I didn’t want to hurt her where she had been hurt. If you love a woman you don’t want to hurt her.
    And then you want to smash her, rape her, kill her.
    Another man’s hands on her milky breasts. His filthy hands on her tender belly, still soft and stretched from bearing our child … Did she laugh with him? Did she come with him? That helpless little crescendo of whimpers –
    She told me, one day when Luke was nearly a year old, that she had decided to take a lover, ‘since you no longer want to sleep with me’.
    If Luke hadn’t been there, lying sleepless on the sofa, I think I might have killed her, for I still adored her.
    ‘You’ve slept with someone. You lying bitch …’
    I wanted sex at once, there and then, I wanted to drive that bastard away. I had a right, I was her child’s father …
    But she wouldn’t. ‘I don’t belong to you. I’m not your wife. I don’t have to. As a matter of fact, I think we’d get on better if one of us moved out. I’ll keep Luke, of course.’
    She would steal my child! No, I’d kill them both, her and her lying, cheating lover … but instead I picked up a little chair, a pretty thing of painted wood, blue and gold, some nursery