The Gone-Away World (5 page)

What has happened today is therefore something of a shocker. An actual decision has been taken, in the face of all the odds, and it is one which absolutely no one saw coming. It is also, to use a technical term deployed by a chortling analyst, something of a corker. The island of Cuba, which is a long way away, has thrown off its communist rulers (who were in fact
not communists
but
totalitarians
—and here Old Man Lubitsch looks as if he may spit, but Ma Lubitsch gives him a totalitarian look of her own and he subsides) and has chosen a somewhat improbable route to enter the modern world. The people of Cuba have petitioned the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (which is not really a
kingdom
—that would be another form of
totalitarianism
) for admittance, and been accepted. The resulting entity is the United Island Kingdoms of Britain, Northern Ireland & Cuba Libré, and is already being referred to by the wits as Cubritannia.

As an introduction to
politics,
this is pretty much in at the deep end, but Old Man Lubitsch is well-informed and patient, and by the end of the night I understand that I have seen a historic thing and that the people of Cuba have opted to join a nation of shopkeepers because they want
infrastructure
(roads and sewers),
freedom
(not being beaten up for pulling faces at politicians) and a decent injection of cash and junk food (this is called
standard of living
). The people of Britain have accepted them because they relish the notion of an influx of well-trained, educated people of pleasing physical appearance who
have rhythm,
and because their national psyche needs somewhere to replace another island called Hong Kong which they apparently lost somehow and are still sulking about. Mostly, however, it seems they have accepted this arrangement because it has
put the wind up
the rest of the world, and that pleases them greatly. The people who seem most upset are elements of the
global business community
based in distant places like Johannesburg and New York and Toronto and Paris, who basically assumed that Cuba belonged to them, and was on lease to the
communist totalitarians
all this time.

This intelligence means very little to me, but Old Man Lubitsch insists that the time will come when I am glad to have seen it, and proud to remember it. And while Gonzo finds this unlikely, and sees in his mother's eyes a deep patience with her husband's folly, I believe it. The silent bristling heat of conviction is in Gonzo's father, and it passes in some small measure to me. I carefully store Cubritannia away in my mind's attic, and throw a blanket over it for good measure, and the next day is a Wednesday and our first lesson is history and the Evangelist puts her head around the door to tell Mr. Cremmel specifically not to talk about it, and she sits in to make sure. Mr. Cremmel dutifully teaches us about the Industrial Revolution instead, but he makes some kind of innocent error when it comes to homework, and the page references he gives us are for Cuba after all.

S
NOW
comes to Cricklewood Cove that winter. It is early December, and the temperature rises from below zero to a comfy one or two. There is a strange, crisp smell of pine and woodsmoke and something clear and different. A wide, low cloud settles over the cove and over the Lubitsch house and (thanks be to the God I no longer believe in) over the school. The cloud does not loom, nor does it threaten. It is warmer and deeper than a rain cloud and has a definitely benign feeling, and when it is finally ready it unburdens itself of a vast quantity of white flakes, which fall straight down. They are not the thick wet flakes of spring snow, which are sort of misplaced, like confused geese. They fall in an endless flow, small and dry and floating evenly and covering everything, and when they go down the back of your neck and chill your spine, they are still solid when they reach the waistband of your trousers. This is real, bona fide snow, come down from the high mountains and stabling the sheep and visiting the saloons, and raising a ruckus over a girl in little frilly trousers (the blizzards strand me inside and I discover the Western, and John Wayne is my hero for evermore, although a hero of admiration rather than emulation because he always ends up dead—Gonzo plays at being the Duke and lies dramatically and probably auto-erotically splayed upon the hall carpet, gasping out his last).

When the clouds clear, it does not get warmer. It gets much, much colder—cold to cause glaciation and kill mammoths and drive migrations in the Neanderthal men whose existence the Evangelist denies, thus inspiring a brief but frantic exploration of the library for malprinted or heretical Bibles and fierce debate about the nature of Esau. Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.

The alcohol thermometer in Gonzo's garden cracks, and Old Man Lubitsch has to arrange a curious external heating system to preserve his bees, which he does using piles of compost which are in the grip of an
exothermic reaction
(although Gonzo's father calls it an
eczozermic ree-ekchon
), which means that the process of decomposition is generating heat. Old Man Lubitsch carefully creates piles of warm rotting garden goo around his bee houses, and the smell is curiously pleasant and grassy rather than rotting and deliquescent, but Ma Lubitsch does not approve and mutters darkly about dratted bugs and how much honey can one eat in a lifetime anyway? But Old Man Lubitsch takes this in good part and hugs her—he actually gets his arms around her and lifts her off her feet—and she swats at him and demands to be put down before he does himself a harm. The Lubitsch house retains its unorthodox external heating arrangements (although Ma Lubitsch extracts a promise that they will be gone when the spring comes, so as to avoid any possibility of explosions). On the following Sunday, and for the first time ever, Megg Lake freezes over.

Megg Lake is an oxbow, a hoop of water named for the Greek letter Ω, one of the few Greek letters of which the Evangelist approves, the others being in some mystical way
gateways to licentiousness.
It is constantly refilled by an underground river which flows down from the Mendicant Hills, and when there is a great deal of rain, the lake bubbles over the rocks at the western end and finds its own floodways to the sea. At any time, Megg Lake is a choppy and turbulent body, ripples sprinting out from the centre where the water boils up, and reflecting off the craggy shores to make (according to our geography textbooks) a pattern of
constructive interference
where the splashes collide and produce waves, and
destructive interference
where their interaction yields little patches of calm. But now it is frozen, a broad grey-blue crescent of bowed ice, thick and growling.

Ma Lubitsch parks the car. It is a 4 × 4, and it is completely forbidden to Old Man Lubitsch, who (on the occasions when life's exigencies place him, against his spouse's better judgement, behind the wheel) drives it like a racing car, in a pair of nasty shades, and draws admiring glances from women younger than his suit. Ma Lubitsch brings the beast to a halt by the lake, and Gonzo scrambles over me or possibly through me in his urgency, and then we are all unloading the car. Tackle box, check. Rugs, check. Charcoal burner, check. Ice saw, check. This family—extended family—is going Eskimo fishing, something Old Man Lubitsch and Ma Lubitsch used to do back when she was a sylph-like thing with no hips and he was a bull of a man, short and powerful as a tropical storm, and my, how she adored him. And from the immodest twinkle in her eyes, at least as much of them as I can see through folds of skin and squint and woollen comforter, she still does, and shall do evermore. It is only the ghost of one soldier that stands between them, and even this is not a separation, but a strange sad bridge and a deep mutual knowing like nothing else. Marcus Maximus Lubitsch, tennis player and able cook, laid to rest now, and visited sporadically in a well-kept corner of the churchyard at the edge of town. At this moment, Marcus is present. Even Gonzo, thigh-deep in snow, and flailing gleefully at the powder, quiets his voice and shares the solemn smile which passes between his parents.

Ma Lubitsch lights the burner, but she uses somewhat too much fluid and the thing fairly erupts, singeing her muffler. She gives a great shout of Polish obscenity and then looks guiltily around, but there are no linguists within thirty miles, and she giggles (more
constructive
and
destructive interference,
no doubt, in the pattern of her wobbling fat, but this is concealed), and Old Man Lubitsch goes to get the ice saw.

Megg Lake's ice is not lightly to be cut. It is oddly clear and hard, more like glacial ice (which is pressurised and squeezed over thousands of years) than lake ice (which is fraught with cracks and rivulets). Gonzo's father assails the ice with the saw—initially near the shoreline, but latterly further out when it becomes apparent that there's no earthly danger of it breaking—but to little effect. Old Man Lubitsch hacks away, but this is serious frozen stuff, ice like Arctic ice, with a bad attitude and a stubborn mien. It is ice, in fact, a lot like Old Man Lubitsch himself, who was hounded from his home town for being cheeky to the communists, and then refused return when he was cheeky to the new fellas in much the same way. Perpetual exile, letter-writing malcontent, “Furious and disappointed of Cricklewood Cove,” Gonzo's father will not concede. He will get through this ice if he must declare an eternal feud upon it. And so it is that Gonzo comes to his aid with a plan.

In the normal run of things, I am Gonzo's plan-confidant. It is to me he brings his worst ideas, and it is my job to squash them and propose, as an alternative to connecting an electric torch directly to the mains power so as to make a lightsabre, some activity less mortally perilous. Today, however, Gonzo's plans receive an audience less jaded and, perhaps, less sensible. Parents dote. Fathers, in particular, indulge their sons in matters of manly comportment and tasks which approach the sacred duties of the heteropatriarch, such as shooting enemies, blowing things up and hauling mighty armfuls of dead animal across the white wastes to feed the tribe. This situation—the possible defeat of the clan hunters by an inanimate icecap—falls broadly into these categories, and thus it is that when Gonzo proposes a simple solution, swift and sure, Old Man Lubitsch gets a look in his eye. It is a look which says that, when he was Gonzo's age, he had some idea of similar magnificence, and this jewel was crushed beneath a weighty grown-up heel. But here he, Gonzo's father, is in a position to carry through the deed, and in one stroke to avenge himself and demonstrate a more enlightened understanding of his son's unbridled genius than was shown to him. Grizzled and rugged, red flannel shirt and preposterous fur hat upon his head, Old Man Lubitsch looks down benignly on his child.

“Say it again!” says Gonzo's father proudly.

“We should use the lighter fluid,” says the infant anarchist, “and
burn
a hole in the ice!”

Ma Lubitsch sighs a little sigh, but trapped within the matriarch it seems there is still a breathless groupie falling for her husband's wild eyes and floating hair (such as remains) because there's a sparkle about her which says loudly she does
not
approve, does
not
think this is wise, will
not
be held accountable, but is absolutely dying to see it happen and will reward most richly whatever prince of men can carry off this splendid boast.

This tacit complicity established, my formless worries are brushed aside, and an order of service is drawn up as follows:

1) a spot will be appointed, no less than thirty metres out, where this conflagration may safely be begun, and where fishing may latterly occur;

2) Old Man Lubitsch, and he alone, will walk out to the spot thus designated and deploy the matériel, in quantity. He shall do this by:

3) we shall await him and when he is safe,

4) jointly ignite the furnace.

This all duly done, a strange and beautiful thing happens, which is absolutely not what we had in mind.

The thing begins as advertised, with a bright flame licking smartly across the ice to Old Man Lubitsch's reservoir. That reservoir, lighter fuel with an admixture of dry wood and charcoal, and a couple of rags from the back of the 4 × 4, catches and burns well, a five-foot-high column with its feet in the ice. A certain amount of smoke goes up, which may also be steam. The whole thing seems to be doing very little in the way of melting the ice, but perhaps it's early days. And indeed, it
is
early days; the next stage is somewhat more dramatic than we had envisaged. There is a noise as of incoming mortars or a train crash or the steeple of the church falling into the vestry. It is a vast, tectonic, tearing noise which seems to come from everywhere. In truth, it is probably none of these things, but it is very loud, and I am a small boy.

The ice has split, as it does when you put an ice cube in your drink on a hot day. The fissure is narrow, but it is lengthening at speed, and other cracks are forming, and something vast is shrugging underneath. Ma Lubitsch, with a mother's sense of threat and consequence, perceives the shape of things to come. As dinosaurs battle beneath the icecap, she throws her beloved, idiot family into the car and takes off at a clip Old Man Lubitsch himself finds somewhat startling. Gonzo and I stare back at Megg Lake, fascinated, through the rear window. Thus we alone in all the world are positioned to see what happens when the run-off of an entire range of hills is pent up for several days beneath a plug of ice and air, and then released by a rebellious sexagenarian with a yen to relive his glory days in front of his family.