The Ice Child (31 page)

He looked.

They were dogs. Puppies. Two barely weaned huskies, with their knowing, vixenlike faces, stared back at him. The girl bundled them out of her arms and into his.

“Captain!” he called.

But before Crozier could reply, there was an explosion.

The Esquimaux froze: a tableau of surprise. One of the marines closest to the first tent was standing with his gun raised in the air, the barrel slightly smoking. In front of him stood an Esquimaux woman, her hand still outstretched. She stood, dumbfounded and stock still. The report of the gun seemed to go on forever, rolling away across the tundra. The Esquimaux dogs began to bark wildly.

Irving was first at the marine’s side.

“She tried to take it off me,” the man said.

The woman raised the outstretched hand to her head. The hood of her jerkin was marked with a scorched brown line: she took her hand down and looked at it. Blood seeped from her palm and fell on the snow.

“She’s wounded,” Irving called. He tried to approach her: with a cry, she sprang backward.

“Let me see,” Irving said. “Where is the wound?”

“Has it touched her?” Crozier shouted.

“She is bleeding,” Irving replied.

The women were crowding around. They took down the woman’s hood and explored the crown of her head, her face, her neck.

Crozier began to run.

Abruptly the man who had touched him blocked his way, gesticulating. Others came up behind him and pulled on his arms. There was a flurry of talk; the crowd eased back, across the snow, across the rutted ice.

The girl who had been standing next to Gus turned to look at him, eyes wide with fear. Then, turning on her heel, she made full pelt across the ground, flinging herself to the sleds. The women followed.

“Is she hurt badly?” Crozier demanded.

“It’s impossible to see,” Irving said.

“I told you not to shoot,” Crozier shouted to the marine, furious. “You had an order not to fire!”

“I didn’t shoot, sir. She pulled the gun.”

“For God’s sake!” Crozier stormed.

They watched, helpless, as the sledges were manned. The dogs bounded forward, lead dog biting its neighbor on each team under the cut of the whip. The snow made a slurring, whining sound. From the rear of the last sled Gus saw the girl stare back at him. He shielded his eyes to follow them; dropped his hand to the place on his face where she had touched him. Behind him, on the snow, the puppies yapped and squirmed in the open crate where he had stowed them.

Crozier threw the chest that he had still been carrying, to the snow.

“God damn it!” he cried. “God damn!”

Not a man moved. No one had heard him utter an oath in his life.

They stared at him, while the full significance of the gun and the shot dawned on them. It had been the first time in over two years that the crews had seen other living human beings. It was the first time that they had been given fresh meat for which they had not had to fight with every ounce of their strength. More terrible still, much more of a loss, was the knowledge that the first sweet human kindness had been shown to them, a portion of the pity that any of their families at home might feel for them, and wish could be extended to them. And they had frightened it away.

They stared at the ground, while the first few flakes of gathering snow fell on them.

Finally, rousing himself, Irving edged the nearest sealskin bag—lying on the snow before him—with his boot. “We shall eat now, at least,” he murmured.

Handforth glanced over at the dogs. “Aye,” he agreed. “There is that.”

Twenty-four

Catherine rang the doorbell of the house in Lincoln Street that night.

She had tried phoning Jo several times that day to see what the doctor had said about Sam; and although not overly worried, she made a detour on the way home.

No lights were on at all downstairs; she glanced at the upper windows, frowning. Then the hall light came on. Jo opened the door.

Whatever Catherine had been about to say froze in her throat at the sight of Sam’s mother. Jo looked drained, white. Behind her in the house Catherine could see Jo’s shoes lying at the foot of the stairs; and, all the way up, Sam’s clothes littering the steps—his socks, dungarees, T-shirt.

“Jo,” she said, “what on earth’s the matter?”

Jo said nothing. She left the door open and, without a word, went upstairs. Catherine closed the door behind her and followed her.

“What is it?” she asked. “Jo …”

The bathroom and bedrooms were on the third floor. As she reached this landing, she at last saw a light in Sam’s room. Jo had sat back down on the floor opposite his bed. Sam was asleep, only his head showing above the coverlet.

There was a glass of red wine, almost drunk, sitting on the top of Sam’s toy box alongside Jo. Catherine came over and sat down beside her. Softly she stroked Jo’s arm.

“What is it?” she repeated. “What happened?”

Jo’s lip trembled. “Do you know where he is?” she asked.

“Who?”

“John.”

Catherine stared at her. “John? No.”

To her surprise Jo suddenly grabbed her arm. “Because if you do, you have to tell me,” she said.

Catherine looked from Jo’s hand and back to her face, truly disturbed now. “I haven’t heard from him at all,” she said. “And that’s the truth.”

Jo put her head in her hands. “I’ve got to find him,” she murmured.

Catherine glanced across at Sam, worried that the obvious panic in Jo’s voice would wake her son.

“You must hate me,” Jo said. “Why don’t you hate me? You have a perfect right. I drove him away in the first place.”

And to Catherine’s utter surprise Jo suddenly dissolved into tears. Catherine reached forward and took her in her arms. They stayed there in the awkward embrace, on the floor littered with Sam’s plastic soldiers and Pokemon mascots and pieces of wooden jigsaw.

“For God’s sake,” Catherine said, “I don’t hate you.”

“You should,” Jo said. She pulled away, and sat, wiping her face with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

“What the hell happened today?” Catherine asked.

Jo didn’t reply. She merely shook her head repeatedly. “It’s ironic,” she said. “That’s what it is. A bloody irony.”

Worse than the outburst of sobs were the tears that now coursed silently down Jo’s face. Catherine’s heart wrenched to see them. Jo hardly ever cried. She would curse her fair share on occasion; she had seen her kick a door or two if truly frustrated. And she didn’t suffer fools gladly, Catherine supposed. But this … not this total abandonment to grief.

The last time Catherine had seen her in this state was at Doug’s funeral. Standing then at John’s side—and God knew, that had been difficult enough, with John barely speaking, and as rigid as stone—Catherine had felt seriously divided loyalties when she had seen Jo. It was hard to get through to John, who had withdrawn into himself and seemed intent on rebuffing and excluding her; but Jo’s feelings were evident for all to see. Catherine had wanted to rush up to her then and hold her. She had been prostrate with grief.

Now, it seemed, she would have her chance.

Something as bad as the loss of Doug seemed to be etched on Jo’s face. “Come out,” she whispered, tugging gently on Jo’s arm. “Come downstairs. Talk to me.”

Jo resisted. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t leave him.”

Her eyes were fixed on Sam’s sleeping form.

“Can’t leave Sam?” Catherine said. “Why? Just for a minute.”

“Not even for a minute.”

“But, Jo …”

“You don’t understand,” Jo said. She picked up the wineglass next to her, drained it, and put it down. She cast about her as if looking for something, and then picked up one of the jigsaw pieces. It was the face of a magpie, black-and-white, with a patch of green behind it. She made a sad little huffing sound. “One for sorrow,” she mumbled. She turned it around in the palm of her hand, over and over.

“He has to be watched,” she said eventually. “We have to watch him all the time. He can’t be allowed to cry or have a nightmare, or have a tantrum, or fall down, anymore. He can’t throw himself off the couch downstairs. He can’t be allowed to cycle down the path. We can’t let him try to climb.…”

Catherine was totally confused by now. “We can’t?” she echoed. “But why not?” She looked at the glass, then back at Jo. “What did the doctor say?”

“He sent me to the hospital.”

“Hospital?” Catherine echoed. “Why?”

Jo put her head in her hands.

“Jo,” Catherine said. She put both hands on Jo’s shoulders and shook her gently. “What has John got to do with this?”

Jo finally raised her head.

“Have you ever heard of aplastic anemia?” she asked.

“Aplastic what?” Catherine echoed. “No.”

Jo gave a ghost of a smile. “No, neither had I,” she replied. She put down the jigsaw piece. “It can’t be seen.” She shook her head again. “That’s what I can’t understand,” she said. “You can’t see it. It’s inside … it’s not like a broken leg. It’s not like a cut. I mean, even if you took an X-ray … you couldn’t see it.…”

She bit her lip.

“Aplastic anemia,” Catherine guessed. A nightmarish feeling had just shot through her, a kind of terror. “The blood.”

“The bone,” Jo said. “The bone marrow.”

Catherine swallowed hard. “And Sam’s got this? A failure of the bone marrow?”

“Yes,” Jo said. She flung the jigsaw piece away. It clattered behind Sam’s bed. They watched him turn over, arms flung out.

“When I got him inside,” Jo said, “when I got him home today … I had to wash him. I had to bathe him. I had to get the smell off him.…” She squeezed her eyes shut. “He has to go back again in the morning,” she continued. “Oh, Christ.…”

Catherine looked at Sam helplessly, then back at Jo.

“We have to find John,” Jo whispered. “We must.”

“Jo,” Catherine said, guessing, but not daring to voice her suspicions, “why?”

Jo suddenly and unsteadily stood up, her hand to her throat. Catherine got up too. In a few short steps Jo went to the bed. Her hand hovered over Sam—over his face, his chest, as if she needed to touch him but was afraid to hurt him. “There’s things that can be done,” she said. She turned to look at Catherine. “To stop it, temporarily … if we’re lucky. There’s blood, and steroids … a thing called cyclosporine. But he’s so sick. He’s so very sick, Catherine.”

Catherine couldn’t speak at all now. She bit her lip, anguished.

But Jo had meanwhile lifted her chin, and for the first time since she had come in, Catherine saw a faint glimmer of hope in Jo’s expression. “There’s something called stem cells,” she said. “You can donate stem cells, your own, as his mother.… They take them out of me, out of my bloodstream. They give me a drug to make me produce more of them, so much more that they spill out of the marrow and into my bloodstream. They harvest the overproduction, then they freeze those cells.” She was ticking the stages off on her fingers, although her hands were trembling.

“They take them away and they freeze them,” she continued. “To use if there was nothing else left to do, nothing that had worked.…” Her face had gone very pale, so pale that it looked to Catherine more like a mask than Jo’s real, living flesh.

“And you know what’s so awful,” she whispered, “is that I would only be a half match for him. Even if I did all that, the chances of it working are small.…”

“Oh, Jo,” Catherine whispered.

Jo took a step toward her. This time it was Jo that gripped Catherine’s arm. “But there’s something else,” she said. “If we got that far, if he didn’t respond. There’s a bone-marrow transplant. And the closest matches are siblings. Brothers.”

Jo’s eyes searched Catherine’s face.

“But, Jo,” Catherine whispered, “John isn’t a brother. He’s a
half
-brother.”

“It lowers the chances of a match,” Jo said. “But—”

“There are bone-marrow registers,” Catherine said suddenly. “I’ve seen them on television. There was that baby on the news.…”

“The registers can search the world over and never find a match at all,” Jo said. She clenched her fist and put it to her mouth. There was a moment of silence, as she tried to calm herself. Sort the words, the explanation, out in her head. “Okay,” she whispered. “There might be a better match than John. It’s a long shot, because—God, this is so complicated, the doctor wrote it on a notepad, he drew me a diagram, for Christ’s sake, I tried to concentrate.…”

“It doesn’t matter right now,” Catherine said. “Come downstairs—”

“No,” Jo snapped. “It does matter. I have to get this straight.” She frowned hard. “John and his father and Sam might share the same tissue type. A haplotype. If it were rare, and if Alicia and I had the same
common
haplotype … then we’d match. We’d all match, and John would match Sam, and he’d be close enough. You see? He’d be close enough to save Sam.”

The silence seemed to balloon around them.

Catherine felt a tightening in the pit of her stomach, a dread. “Jo,” she said slowly, “that is an awful lot of
ifs.
”

“Yes,” Jo said, “I know.”

“How likely is it that John and Doug and Sam share the same tissue type, this—”

“Haplotype.”

“Haplotype,” Catherine repeated. “You’re saying that all three would have a
rare
haplotype.”

“Yes. They might. It’s possible.”

“Okay,” Catherine said slowly, “so father and sons share the same rare type. But then, you and Alicia—”

“That’s possible too,” Jo said. “Ten percent of the population have the same haplotype, and if I and Alicia had the same—”

“John would be a match for Sam.”

“Yes.”

Catherine put her hand to her forehead. “Oh, God Almighty, dear God,” she whispered.

“But it’s
possible
,” Jo insisted. “It’s probably more possible than finding an unrelated match.”

“Then John would be Sam’s best hope,” Catherine said.

“Yes,” Jo told her. “Yes.”

And she held Catherine’s gaze for a second, before her shoulders dropped. All at once she seemed to cave inward, her back bending, as though she’d been punched in the stomach. She crossed her hands over herself and bent forward over the hands. Quickly Catherine put her arms around her, holding her tightly.