The Ice People by Maggie Gee

depressed. But then, it was Sarah who had depressed me. I decided not to apologise.
    She reappeared like an angry queen bee, the blue flowered curtains draped round her neck. ‘Why are you sleeping on the sofa?’ she said. ‘Have you turned back into a student again? You have no idea how odd it looks. And by the way, what on earth are you wearing?’
    (From the hall, Luke put in ‘Daddy’s dressing up.’)
    People with showercurtains round their neck should not throw stones, but nothing stopped her. ‘You look pretty silly yourself,’ I jeered. She looked at me with an attempt at scorn. I so much didn’t want us to quarrel. ‘Sarah, let’s not have an argument. It’s great to see you. I hope you’ll stay.’ She paused in her rampage; her expression softened, and I pressed on. ‘I do miss you. I have missed you. And Luke. Badly.’ Perhaps I should have left it at that, but she’d made me suffer, I’d
pined,
without them, I was her husband, I had been wronged – ‘He needs his father. Boys need their fathers.’
    ‘Rubbish,’ she said. ‘It’s been disproved.’
    (Did I look like a father, in my orange lycra?) ‘Disproved by what?’
    ‘Studies.’
    ‘What studies?’
    ‘I’m not going to argue with you, Saul. You’repickingafightbecausetheflatisdisgustingandyoufeelguiltybutwon’tadmitit.’ She said that last sentence in less than half a second .
    The nerve of the woman! The outright nerve! ‘This is nothing to do with the flat,’ I said mildly. ‘I didn’t mind it the way it was, but if you don’t agree, just clean it.’ I had never tried this tack before. It made me feel calm and surprisingly powerful.
    By now she was armed with a forest of brushes. ‘I can’t be expected –’ she shrieked, automatically, peering at me over the head of a broom, when her voice failed, simply trailed away, as she looked at something just over my shoulder, and I turned, rather stiffly and painfully because the sofa had twisted my neck, to see.
    Luke.
    Standing in the window, the curtains open, the window open. We were four floors above the ground.
    My son’s thin body outlined against blue sky, the soft shocking texture of the sky without glass, fragile as a spider in the terrible sunlight. He said, in a brave voice, much too high, ‘If you’re going to have a row, I’ll jump. I can’t bear it. I’m going to jump.’
    Then everything went into slow motion, as we tried very hard to do the right thing. Sarah put down her brushes, one by one. ‘Darling –’ we said gently, with almost one voice. We bore down on him, excruciatingly slowly, afraid to upset or startle him.
    ‘We’re not having a row. See?’ said Sarah, putting a shaking hand on my arm.
    ‘Of course we’re not,’ I corroborated.
    ‘You
were,’
said Luke, and he suddenly crouched down, so quickly that we both gasped with fear, but he had just gone into a foetal position, shivering and staring at us silently. I moved another metre, then grabbed him in my arms (surely he shouldn’t be so light, at seven?), while Sarah banged the window shut with desperate force, and said, ‘Sorry,
Sorry
.’
    I sat down with Luke on the sofa, and wrapped him in the blanket I’d been sleeping under. I held him until he stopped shaking and crying. ‘Mummy and I are so sorry,’ I said. ‘We weren’t really rowing. It was just about the cleaning. Not important. Silly old cleaning.’
    ‘You always row about cleaning,’ he said. ‘That’s why I don’t want to be alive any more. I’ll go somewhere else. I’ll get away. I’ll go to heaven and live with Grandpa.’
    It was so absolutely shocking to hear a child say that. I hoped his mother was listening.
    She was. She came and sat beside us on the floor, her crimson head upon her crimsontipped hands, but when she looked up she was white as death, whiter than Luke, if that were possible. She reached out and patted Luke’s ankle. ‘I promise not to row with Dad any more. I’m …