The Ice is Singing (3 page)

Snow. More snow every day. Many roads are blocked. I thread my way along those that have been cleared; even in frost they remain wet because of the salt. The verges, heaped high
with snow-plough packed snow, are ruined and blackened like a building after fire. On the other side of hedge or wall the white begins, snow clear to the next blobbed wall. There are no colours in
this landscape, it is black and white, and even the black is faded – grey black, faint black: whiteness of snow overpowers all, bleaching the eye, leeching colour.

My eyes are suffering; they ache, and at times white masses seem to shift before them, even when I’m not driving. The world seems slippery to them, they can’t get a grip on it.
Perhaps I should buy some sunglasses. My neck and shoulders ache as well. I need to take a rest from driving.

You talk rubbish. A tube of chemicals fizzing, changing colour by the minute. Lions pace. Pigs chew. Marion drives. It’s Nature’s way, my dear – survival. Do you think
you’ve made a choice? Bid for freedom, escape? Can you escape your own nature, your own substance, the sloppy porridge of cells which are your construction, flesh and bones? All they’re
programmed for is to keep you alive – they don’t care how.

1.  Lion. In a cage, paces. Hormones thereby released dull its anxiety, keep it sane.

2.  Pig. (More satisfyingly, more symbolically) in a factory farm, secured in its stall with chains, chews them. Day and night, obsessively. Survives, pain of captivity blunted, high on the
heroin substitute its body manufactures in response to chain-chewing. Remove its chains, it cracks up: beats it brains out against the walls.

3.  Marion. The case is less extreme. Drives. Brain pleasantly numbed from consideration of more serious matters.

Chemicals. Programmed to survive. All you are.

That’s enough.

Sat. 8

At times I can go down in an eddy – down, down, below the static-noise surface, into the quiet spaces (underwater?) where vision is peculiarly clear. One thought one image
leading to the next like slippery underwater rope I’m on a trail, can’t let go in the dark clear depths for fear of total loss, but if it’s possible to pursue the thought to its
end (cave diver in the liquid hollows of the earth) then I will win –

What? No more than a journey of that length. Always at the end, finally, a rock wall, a crevice too narrow for my shoulders.

Strange changes in my body as I travel through no-time. I seem to swell and bloat like a drowned woman. My hands and feet have puffed up so that the skin is tight. Reasonably, I argue that
it’s due to hours of driving, sitting still, blood not circulating. My body remembers it as a sign of pregnancy. My aching eyes never recover from assaults of snow glare. And now my lips are
dried and cracking like sun-baked mud. They too seem to have swollen; they are bursting through the old skin, which shrivels back, to be peeled absentmindedly by me as I drive. Today I peeled a
section raw.

Reasonably, reasonably. The air outside is sharp and cold. Inside my car is hot and dry, the heater like a breath from the desert. My lips are simply dry. A sensible application of Vaseline or
Lypsyl three times a day would sort them out. In the mirror I see a woman I’ve never met, with tiny squinting eyes and swollen bleeding lips.

My lips must be constantly touched. I find myself stroking the silken new skin; pressing them together and moistening the dry corners; brushing the back of my hand against them, peeling with my
teeth the onion layers of old skin. I have picked foolishly at the scabs until they’ve bled again.

I am continuously aware of my lips. I feel them move and crack. I lick them to taste the blood. I can’t rest, I can’t leave them alone to heal. Last night I lay on my back with my
hands clenched beneath me, to stop them stealing up to touch and peel my gigantic lips. I imagined I might unpick myself. Picking and picking, peeling back the skin, touching and brushing the moist
new flesh, laying the backs of my fingernails against it, fretting at the edges of what is (already, for God’s sake) a hole; I might unpick enough to find an end to pull – that would
make the whole lot unravel.

They’re a neat edge around a hole, lips. Like a button hole. We girls learnt button-hole stitch at junior school. Blanket stitch, the stitch for binding raw edges. Over and over goes the
thread, passing the needle through each previous stitch’s loop, linking them together to make an edge.

I circle it. Over and over (sewing or unpicking?) I painstakingly circle the hole. The world resolves itself into images and theories of lips.

Consider Lips

Mouth edges. The rims of darker skin that frame the hole into which go air drink food thumbs lollipops cigarettes nipples and other parts of other people’s anatomies. Out
from which come breath (used air) spit (lubricant and dissolver of those anatomies and lollipops) vomit (regurgitated food and drink) and words. Which have no counterpart in any of those things
that go in. Except that words name them: identify them, ask for them, and so appear to own and control them all.

It’s not all to do with going in and coming out, though – don’t think of lips as just an entrance way. That would be to disregard their intrinsic beauty and agility. They are
the face’s leading actor. Curving in smiles and grins, stretching in exasperation, pursing in annoyance, hollowing to a thin round O of desolate misery, downturning at the corners in set
lines of anticipated and fulfilled mediocrity and boredom. And when you touch them with your fingers doesn’t your skin wonder at their smoothness and durability, their appearance and texture
of inside-the-body skin, which yet survives in the dry outside? Their sex colour, the bruised pink-brown of all hole-edges. Their luscious, curving shape, which makes you want to lick them.

As for their movements, in speech alone their flexibility is extraordinary. When Billie Whitelaw played Beckett on TV, they filmed nothing but her speaking lips. Her lips filled the screen with
a life, a tension, a manipulation and concatenation of muscle movements which was riveting; awe-inspiring. The words formed by these lips were lost – meaningless, insignificant – beside
the movements which formed them. Medium made mincemeat of message.

On another surface – the surface, say, of your body – lips can mould, brush, skim, suck, infill any space or crevice. Against your lips they can breathe, tremble, press, grind, hold
in open-mouthed suspension. Kiss.

Lips move; lips touch; lips signal. Lips are on the outside for show, and on the most secret inside of your mouth. Lips frame words that lie. Lips frame a hole that wants to be filled.

My children’s lips. My husband’s lips. Lips that have touched me.

Babies’ lips.

They come ready pursed, as big from top to bottom as they are from side to side. In age our mouths elongate – wider and wider in grin or grim, both of which are similar in that they are
lines that know; alas, that know. A baby’s mouth knows and seeks to know nothing beyond nipple. Ejected from warm wet inside to cold dry outside, from darkness to light, from flesh-fluid
suppleness to the disparate harsh angles of metal, plastic and starched white sheet, the baby wants home. Warmth. Wetness. Flesh. Insides. Its body is nothing but an aimless sack, with every nerve
leading to its lips. Only its lips know how to make it survive. Its lips slot and damp like a vice over nipple. Nipple, source of warm wet nourishment, connection with mother’s insides,
meeting of flesh.

At the first closing of new-born Ruth’s jaw on my breast I shouted in pain. If she could have sucked my nipple off and wormed her way back inside through the bloody hole it left,
she’d have done it. A new-born baby’s suck is a desperate thing. The mother’s breast is the life-line, the life-hole. The greedy twins sucked me raw, till my nipples swelled and
cracked. Little animals chewing at dugs; would tear the flesh and eat it if they could, if it would help them.

On the breast, a baby’s lips (contrary to popular belief) do not form the shape that we call suck. Sucking goes on inside, further down the baby’s maw. The lips are there for
manipulation and control, making, in the course of feeding, a score of tiny adjustments of motion and position. The top lip closes over the flesh in a straight line, so that neither the pinky-brown
of lip nor of areola is seen. The infant’s top lip is a flat surface; when they grow older children’s lips become fuller, but roundedness here would prevent that neat seam, one plane of
flesh cleanly fitting another. The underlip is turned out, in a pout, around the underside of the nipple. When the first gush of milk stops and the baby requires more, it allows the nipple to slide
very slightly out of its mouth. No longer sucking, it holds the nipple between jaws and applies with the lower lip an infinitesimal trembling motion. The upper lip remains still, a pressure point.
The effect upon the nipple of being ever-so-slightly trembled from below is a tickling, turning to a tingling, turning in the mother’s body to a sense of yearning which is satisfied by the
sudden release of a hidden reserve of milk shooting through the breast. The lower lip stops trembling, slides quickly over the edge of the areola, to clamp in position and allow the open gullet to
fill again with gushing milk.

Consider a child in distress. Not a baby, a child, with teeth and an appetite for crisps and gum. How is its unhappiness signalled? Eyes, yes, brimming with tears. But about the mouth? A
trembling, a much-described, a clichéd wobbling of the lower lip. Baby wants more milk. Wants connection of blood-warm liquid flowing from her mother’s body into her own. Wants
comfort.

Can the trembling of a child’s lip really be cured by the application of Germolene to a grazed knee, or a mouthful of Smarties? Most adult lips have given up, forgotten how to tremble.
Never again will they close on flesh as close, as real, as one-with-them, as mother’s breast. All others are substitutes. They seem to be – for a while, almost certainly are – as
good, as potent to comfort and banish the dark. But they are not the real thing.

And the mother? She who has been the source of all love all comfort all warmth and wetness of milky breasts, through whose nipple holes have spun the white life-lines of liquid connecting still
her child’s belly with her own? What of her? I am a mother and a child, but write of comfort lost as a child.

Because the baby’s love is for itself. It sucks and cries and demands and lays claim, in order to survive. Its huge self-love admits the existence of no other. Mother is home, food,
warmth, life. Its love for its mother is its love of life itself, sweet life to be sucked from the source. The mother, who was herself a sucking baby once, knows her function. She is God, the
source of life and happiness: and she is an old dried fruit to be spat away.

Sun. Feb. 9

My lips are so bad I haven’t been out. I’ve passed the time writing nonsense, looking through the window, and pacing up and down. I want to get in the car again.
I’m wearing gloves to stop myself from mauling my lips.

No lips seek me. Like the housewife that I am, I start to unravel the old useless garment (starting from the site of the hole) in order to make new use of the rewound yarn. My lips spill words,
phrases drip from the end of my pen, sentences flow out in a river.

Mon. Feb. 10

The car windows were encrusted with frost this morning – both inside and out. I tried rubbing it with a cloth, which was useless, then walked to a garage and bought some
spray. The spray leaves a filmy coating on the glass, which the windscreen wipers smear without removing. I have had trouble focusing, because of this, all day.

I drove for an hour or two, in no particular direction, attracted by roads that promised wide views and few towns. But after a while I found myself coming back into industrial suburbs, the
outskirts of Sheffield. I stopped and consulted the road map, because I felt quite clear about what I wanted today: space, snow, straight roads. Emptiness. I decided to head west, where the map
showed an empty-looking area, sparsely crossed by roads – the Pennines. In an hour my road led me down into a tight dark town wedged between hills. The blackened stone of its buildings
dripped and pressed in around me. There was a fine spray of sleet beating through the air, that melted when it hit street or windscreen. They’d forgotten to switch off a sign warning that the
Manchester road was closed due to snow.

As I turned right at the foot of the steep hill out of Holmfirth, I imagined soaring up above the blackened stone walls and slate roofs, and looking down over the valley; if the mist and rain
would let me. The wet black road was lined to the right by large Victorian houses, ponderous behind white gardens. The sleet became heavier, thickening up from transparency to whiteness, clotting
into snow. And as I cleared the row of houses, breaking into countryside, the wind hit me from the north. The car shifted a foot or so across the surface of the road, where sleety snow was sticking
lightly. The wipers were already on; I switched on the lights and the beams picked up two rods of moving air in front of me, as if the snowflakes were dancing atoms in a pyramid of solid matter. In
the inch or two of clear screen following the wiper blade I saw the road (no longer even grey now, but white) curving up on ahead of me. I wasn’t at the top. I considered the fact that it
would probably be worse up there. Already the solid houses of Holmfirth seemed a long way back. I pressed down on the accelerator, and as I surged on round the next bend, noticed an uneasiness
beneath the wheels. Gradually I realized that the deepening snow on the road was in layers, rutted with the passing of earlier traffic.

Above the engine noise the sound of the wind was a constant note – a screech across the metal surfaces of the car, a great howl across the invisibility of the moors, which I guessed must
now stretch out all around me. Though I could see nothing. The fact that I could see nothing grew on me slowly. Slowly I realized that the eerie darkness in the car was due not just to the weather,
but to the right-hand windows being completely plastered with snow. Odd powdery fragments of flakes danced in through the ventilation system. The atmosphere out there was solid with them. It was
impossible to follow any difference caused by the movements of the wipers. They cleared the glass but did so to reveal air half an inch ahead, already clogged with streaming white dust. I slowed
down. When I did so the feeling of slipping between ruts in the snow became more strong. I was not sure if I was on one side or in the middle of the road, straddling the tyre tracks of vehicles
travelling in opposing directions.