The Ice People by Maggie Gee Read Free Book Online Page A

to the Batteries every day.
    ‘I didn’t mention the Batteries,’ Sarah protested. ‘I hate that name, in any case … The fertility clinics do their best for people.’
    ‘Eggboxes then.’
    ‘That’s stupid too. We just have to ask our own doctor for a few little tests to see what’s happening.’
    It turned out she was already wellinformed. She had discussed it all with her friend Sylvie, who’d had a successful techfix conception. I was very upset she had discussed it. I didn’t like Sylvie, a thin intense woman with too much makeup and strawlike hair. Her threeyearold son was out of control, and she talked on the telephone to Sarah for hours. To me she always looked slightly dirty.
    But then I was ignorant, truculent, proud, and wanted no one to know our problems.
    I grew humbler later. God, I did. I have tried to forget the humiliations.
    I gave them my sperm to be examined.
    I felt I was giving them my dreams.
    Of course, as the doctor told us, in his lying, caring, professional voice, no tests were onehundredpercent conclusive, and there were many things medicine still didn’t know …
    I was angry, and hurt. Sarah claimed I exploded. ‘Oh, you don’t know it all, then?’ I sneered at him. I tore his form in two, then in four. ‘Do you think that’s a surprise to anyone? Science knows
fuck all
about making babies –’
    ‘He’s upset,’ said Sarah, preemptively. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Um – I can never remember your name. Sorry.’
    ‘Wang. Dr Wang –’ (I laughed, rudely) ‘we quite understand these are stressful experiences.’
    Dr Wang ‘understood’ – but no one understood. I had just been told my sperm was semifertile. My balls were no good, that was what I heard. They were big and firm, I had trusted them, I’d secretly believed the problem was Sarah’s –
    I halfexpected her to leave me.
    She didn’t, though. She comforted me, back in the privacy of home. At least, she tried to comfort me. ‘It’s normal, now, you realise. The majority of men have semifertile sperm. At least you were brave enough to get tested. Most men won’t, which is simply pathetic.’
    ‘Pathetic?’ I said. ‘You haven’t a clue. You don’t understand how much it means to men … everything, really.’
    ‘You’ve still got me. And your job. And your future. And we’ll still have a baby, somehow, sometime. Other people do. So shall we.’ She was brisk and kindly, but thought my grief excessive. She always did think me too extreme –
    Yet wasn’t that part of what she’d fallen in love with, my passionate emotions, my grandiose self? The Saul who was ready to die for her when the spacemen appeared with their huge silver vappers? She was inconsistent, like all women.
    But I knew she liked me to make her laugh. I made an effort to stay cheerful.
    ‘I just need more sex. I’m not kidding. I’m not infertile, just
semi
fertile.
Half,
get it? So I need twice as much sex.’
    And then she laughed her beautiful laugh, husky, showing her small milky teeth with lower incisors sharp as cats’, and we were happy, and made love again. ‘Just one more chance and they’ll be in like Flynn.’
    One more chance, then another, then another, till nine years had gone by, and we were over thirty, and could have afforded another move to one of the smaller houses in the Northwest Enclaves where everyone aspired to live, but she refused, ‘until we have children’.
    By now it was Sarah who was utterly depressed, though she smiled for the world every week on the screens. She refused sex altogether sometimes, or else was insatiable and desperate. She read baby magazines all night, or couldn’t bear to look at children in the street.
    I loved her too much to let this drag on. On my thirtyfirst birthday I said, ‘That’s it. We’re going to do this the techfix way. Whatever it costs, whatever it takes, we’re going to get the doctors to make us a baby.’
    It was easier once we had given in. It was like being on