The Ice People by Maggie Gee Page A

really sorry. It’s been a bad day.’ Then she took my hand, stroking it with one finger. ‘Sorry, Saul.’
    ‘So I should hope.’
    Luke saw my smile, and began to relax. He contrived a position where he could hug us both. ‘I like it like this,’ he announced. He was quick to appreciate a position of strength. ‘Can we have hot chocolate, Mummy? And biscuits? Can we all sleep in the same bed tonight?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Sarah, ‘Yes, my love,’ though she usually said ‘no’ to requests for chocolate. She got up to see to it, leaving us together.
    ‘Will she keep her promise?’ Luke asked in a whisper.
    ‘I think so. But never do that again.’ I was remembering what happened after he was born, how the doctors claimed Sarah was suicidal. Perhaps it was genetic. (Or was it me? Perhaps I drove everyone near me to suicide.)
    She came in smiling with mugs on a tray and a plate of chocolate biscuits. But old habits die hard. ‘There’s only one plate. Try not to drop crumbs.’
    Something occurred to Luke. ‘Daddy!’ he cried, so sharply that I slopped my drink again. Sarah noticed but managed to say nothing. ‘Tell Mummy you’re going to buy her a robot.’
    ‘What?’ she asked.
    I told her as much as I could remember about the Doves. They were dogsized or toddlersized, like household pets. They looked vaguely like stumpy winged birds, but the TV camera hadn’t lingered long enough for me to tell. They could dust, wash floors, recycle rubbish … And the cost was pitched low enough for everyone to buy one (the Outsiders could never have afforded them, of course, but then, they had no homes to clean). No more than the cost of a cheap car. I remembered the slogan: ‘A Dove in Every Home.’
    ‘Giant publicity campaign, huh?’ was her first remark, made without enthusiasm.
    ‘Well, they did look – remarkable. I really would like to buy you one.’
    ‘What do you mean, buy me one? Buy
us
one. It would be cleaning for both of us. Cleaning is as much your work as mine.’
    Feminism can be fucking pedantic, though my heart leapt up at that ‘both of us’. Still, I took her words as a ‘Yes’. ‘Mummy says ‘‘Yes’,’ I said to Luke, and he beamed hugely, showing straight white teeth. His front teeth had grown down while they were away, and his face was longer, more adult, but also more piercingly vulnerable. ‘I’m going to buy us a Dove, Lukey. Our own robot. You can play with it.’
    ‘Great!’ he said. ‘It can be my friend, now Polly doesn’t come round any more.’ (She didn’t come round because of Sarah, who had been dumped by Polly’s father – I’d managed to work this out for myself, but Luke was hurt and mystified.) ‘Is it really some kind of dove?’ he asked, more gravely. ‘How do we make it do what we want?’
    ‘It’s just its initials,’ I told him. ‘Short for ‘‘DO VEry Simple things’’. Jolly clever name, really. What’s the matter, Sarah? Aren’t you happy?’ She was discomfited, biting her nails. I couldn’t help enjoying her confusion. If she refused, she would upset her son. ‘You need never get cross about housework again.’
    ‘Um,’ she said. ‘I mean, that’s good. It just … doesn’t seem quite natural, to me.’
    They delivered it while we were out. The guard hailed me when I came home. ‘Enormous piece of furniture for you, sir. New screen is it? Feeling wealthy?’
    ‘Not after buying this,’ I told him.
    I took it up in the lift with me. To my surprise, I felt tremendously excited, though why is that surprising? It
was
exciting. For decades we had been promised this, robots to live with us as friends.
    I decided not to open it till Sarah came home, but then Luke was brought back from school by a neighbour, and he saw the big package and could not wait.
    ‘Please, Dad. You said I could play with it.’
    ‘Yes, but we said it was a present for Mummy –’
    ‘But Mummy said it was for you as well.’
    He kept walking round it,