Free The Ice People by Maggie Gee

many the choice was homosexual, but others just liked the camaraderie, which made them less lonely than before. This way of living could get competitive, vying with peers for sex or friendship or leadership within the group, so some of those early experiments failed and the men went back to live with their parents. The older generation thought the world had gone mad. Perhaps it had, perhaps it had.
    The women lived together for different reasons. Some of them drew up the battlelines around the scarce, precious children. Four or five women would look after one child. Those rare, petted, unhealthy children … Again this could get competititive, but the childless ones found a kind of fulfilment. Not that all women were domestically inclined. The gangs of girls who roamed the towers were said to be more violent than the men. Some teenage girls found inspiration in older women’s groups which mimicked the men’s. Their ‘sheroes’ were hard, fighting fit: musclebuilders, shaved bulldykes who rode big motorbikes and had big arms. Men looked, and giggled, and looked again, and invented new subgenres of sex magazines in which such women were humiliated, or humiliated us, according to taste. But secretly we were afraid.
I
was afraid. Was this the future?
    It reminded me of life in the Gendersense programmes that Sarah had fronted on the screens, which had always struck me as too weird to be true. I must unconsciously still have thought the norm was a home like Samuel and Milly’s, or mine and Sarah’s, as it once was.
    I had known a lot of vaguely sympathetic couples who were trying for babies when Sarah and I were, clinging together like drowning people. Now, in my loneliness, I contacted them. But the ‘friends’ we had made in Dr Zeuss’s waiting-room – to be precise, that Sarah had made – had mostly split up since they’d been through the Batteries, whether the treatment were successful or not. Or else, to my surprise, they had never lived together. Some of them barely remembered each other …
    They had all moved on, but I had not.
    It took me some while to take this all in. I confided in Riswan, my friend at work. ‘Sarah has left me. And taken the baby. I only see him a few times a week.’
    ‘What do you mean, she’s left you?’ Riswan’s big dark eyes were opaque and puzzled.
    ‘For good. She only comes back to visit.’
    ‘You mean, you were living in the same flat?’
    ‘Of course. We’ve been together for over ten years.’
    ‘You should be glad, my friend, to be free of the woman! Women and babies make a mess everywhere –’
    ‘Well, she did do most of the cleaning –’
    ‘Men should stick with their own kind, actually. No trouble that way. No shouting, no crying. Tell this woman not to visit.’
    He was the third person to react this way. I couldn’t deny there’d been some shouting and crying. ‘But I love my son,’ I said, puzzled, and saw the envy in Riswan’s eyes.
    ‘You’re lucky to have a son. But it’s women’s business, looking after children.’ And then he began to complain incoherently how now there were more and more male nannies, which once again had passed me by. ‘They call them ‘‘mannies’’, instead of nannies.
Mannies,
I ask you! It’s … humiliating. One of my best friends is training to be one!’
    ‘It was Sarah who kept me abreast of things … I love my wife.’
    ‘You mean, you got married? In the twentyfirst century?’
    ‘Well – yes.’
    There was evidently little point talking to Riswan.
    All the same, he was a loyal friend who had covered for me after the baby was born. And any friend now seemed valuable. When Riswan suggested I go along to his club, the Scientists, I agreed. ‘But not just yet, Riswan. I still have a few things to sort out with Sarah.’
    In fact, my despair had been premature. Her arrangement with Sylvie was not a success, despite their ‘shared aims’ and ‘deep mutual understanding’ and ‘desire to support each