The ice sculptor


The ice sculptor had long black hair and an aristocratic profile and his name was Enrico. He sat with his legs crossed, resting his arm over my sister’s arm, as though his was very delicate and needed to use hers for a bed.

“On the third day,” Evie was saying, “it was very strange; I began to remember all sorts of things. I remembered entire conversations. Conversations I’d had with you — and with other people — they all came back to me completely, like I’d recorded them.”

“And then by the fifth day,” she went on, “the conversations were getting quieter and quieter and by the sixth day they’d stopped entirely.”

Evie spoke more slowly since her return, and her voice had a weird echo to it, although maybe that was only because she’d cleared so much stuff out of her apartment. There was endless room, now, in which her voice could float around, developing echoes.

“How do you fall in love with someone on a silent retreat,” I asked. “How do you even know you like each other?”

At this, Enrico and my sister looked at one another and laughed and their laugh felt violent in a vague kind of way, like receiving a slap from a sudden gust of wind.

The company Enrico worked for was based in Turin. They’d given him two weeks off work so he could seduce my sister and cajole her into flying away with him. I knew I absolutely could not allow this to happen, because then I would also have to move to Italy, and what would become of Girl if I was not around to care for her? I didn’t trust her official owners, who surely fed her disgusting little pellets and thought of her as a dumb animal.

“This one’s my favourite,” Evie said and she showed me a jaguar perched on a rock, its splotches cloudy against its transparent body. We were looking through Enrico’s portfolio. The jaguar looked over its shoulder and held one paw just above the surface of the rock. It had all the fluidity of life and all the stillness of death. It looked solemn. It was ghostly and perfect. I stared at it for a long while.

“Its tail looks pretty short,” I managed finally.

“Maybe,” Evie said. Her eyes glowed with cold, bright love.

Evie was the older one but at some point over the past year the balance between us had shifted and now I was the one who gave her advice. I had taken on this role willingly and with great seriousness. When I offered Evie advice, it was as though my future, better self were occupying my body. I spoke more eloquently than ever before and offered up wisdoms that occurred to me on the spot, and which as I spoke them seemed to me utterly true. Sometimes, after these conversations, I would try to write down the things I had said, but the minute I was no longer in her presence it seemed I could not recall them; or else, if I did, they seemed uglier, more ordinary, like coloured river stones when you pulled them out of the water.

Since Evie had met Enrico, though, all my words simply slid off her and as a result I was getting stupider.

“How long does it last?” I said, imagining the jaguar puddling off its plinth. Evie’s apartment was obscenely hot and it was worse when we were huddled around the computer.

“Four to six hours. Depends on the temperature.”

“That’s dumb.”

Evie shrugged. She just went on holding out the screen in front of us, and the more I looked at the jaguar, its liquid muscle and heart-shaped skull, the more ashamed I became of what I had said. The jaguar was beautiful. It was a lie to pretend otherwise.

*

Evie had lived in London for six years, whereas I had lived there for only one. When my friends and my parents had queried my decision to move — it was so very, very far away from Sydney, they reminded me — I told them I wanted a change of scene. Only I knew the real reason I’d moved, which was to find Evie and bring her home. It frustrated me that I’d had to wait this long to go after her. With every passing month I felt Evie moving further and further away from us. I knew that as soon as I was free to follow her, I’d be able to persuade her to return, so long as she didn’t fall in love.

As soon as I’d saved enough money, I quit my job at the marina and broke up with my high-school boyfriend. He cried a lot when I told him I was leaving. To make him feel better, I’d snapped a little flower off my lucky bracelet and pressed it forcefully into his palm, where it left a small floral imprint on his skin. The bracelet wasn’t a whole bracelet, just part of one. Evie had found it in the sand many years ago: a little chain of metal flowers. The flowers had little red jewels in their centre, like the blinking eyes of nocturnal creatures. At first Evie said that it might be silver and rubies, but our mother took one look at it and said it was a children’s bracelet and probably not valuable. After that Evie lost interest in the bracelet, which surprised me. I didn’t see why it should matter that it was a children’s bracelet seeing as we were, at the time, children.

Evie gave me the bracelet as a present and I kept it. With every year that I kept it, it grew more magic. It brought me luck — in love, and in exams, for example — but something about this luck had always felt borrowed. I was confident it was the bracelet that first brought Girl to me last summer, though the heat was undoubtedly a factor. It had been hot then, too.

The house in which I rented a room had an outdoor garden ringed by high walls that didn’t let in any sun, so it remained dank and cool even when the rest of the city withered under the unrelenting sun. Girl appeared one Saturday afternoon atop one of the walls. Her mottled coat was greasy and looked too loose, as if all her internal organs and bones were knocking about haphazardly inside her body. She didn’t have a collar, so I called to her with diminutives. Little cat, I would say. Come here, little girl. Eventually the diminutives fell away and I called her, simply, Girl.

I convinced myself she was a stray, though she did not exactly look underfed. She was nothing like Mr Slippers, the cat we had when we were younger, who had had an effortlessly regal manner and a muscly build. Girl was sickly and plaintive. She craved attention and struggled with basic tasks. Her weaknesses bewitched me. I coaxed her into the house with bits of cheese and butter which I extended to her on a fingertip. She always purred as she swallowed the food and the sound of it was wet and deep and mechanical, like a big sunken clock.

I built her a little den in the garden and gave her all the butter and cheese she desired. Then one night she slept over in the den, and this was a mistake, because that’s when her owner came knocking. She asked if I had seen a cat and guiltily I invited her in. Girl was stretched out inside the den, and at the sight of the two of us she extended herself lazily, like a concertina, and jangled her bones and licked her lips. The woman asked if I’d been feeding her and I admitted I had. Then she picked up Girl and swung her over her shoulder like a damsel and carried her right out the front door.

But Girl continued to visit, all the way through that summer and the threadbare autumn, through the winter, when the sky stilled and grass sparkled, and through the green spring. Now the heat was creeping back into the city, and Girl once again found refuge in my high-walled yard. She would continue to visit as long as I had the bracelet.

 

I brought the bracelet with me everywhere, so of course I’d had it with me, in my wallet, on that day one month ago when Evie had told me she was going on a silent retreat. We had taken a chessboard down to the riverbank and were sitting on the concrete in the sun. Between her moves Evie seemed to forget the game entirely. I caught her looking down into the milky brown water that sped by. I wondered if she loved this ugliness, or if she simply put up with it as I did. In Sydney the water was full of fish and turtles and sparkled blue and moved with the restlessness of a million lives.

“Checkmate,” I said.

Evie looked up with the river still rolling in her eyes. “Already?”

It was the middle of the day. My skin felt hot and sticky but Evie was immaculate.

The heat bothered me in a way that wasn’t only physical. Lately I had been doing more research and found many articles about what might happen in the future. The rich would all move into big underground bunkers, most of which were in New Zealand. My parents would have no trouble hopping over to New Zealand, I thought, which was a comfort. Maybe they could find employment in one of these bunkers, as music teachers or as chefs or perhaps as housekeepers. If I managed to get Evie home, the two of us could join them. It had been a mistake for her to leave Sydney, even if she could not see this yet. She could not see as clearly as I could what was coming. She could not see that now only one thing was important, and that thing was for all of us to be together: our mother, our father, Evie and me.

Before Evie had got on the train to the airport, I’d pulled the little bit of bracelet out of the internal pocket of my wallet and made her take it. This was unwise, because if she had not had the bracelet with her at the silent retreat, perhaps she would not have met Enrico.

 

I began to miss Evie as soon as she left, in a way that seemed ominous, as though I were mourning her in advance. I felt naked without my bracelet fragment. At work, people kept asking me what was wrong, which was strange because I was a temp and usually nobody noticed me. I wasn’t even sure they knew my name.

I gagged on my sandwich, which tasted — like most things here — as though it had been reconstituted out of the pulp of other expired sandwiches.

“I’m fine,” I told them. “It’s just the heat.”

The week Evie got back, there was a lot of water in the air and the sky felt low and close. After I returned home from her apartment, I sat with my laptop by the window in my underpants so I could keep an eye out for Girl. A small spider clung to the window frame, perched just below the feeble web it had constructed. It was so hard for life to find a foothold in a city like this. The minute I closed the window, the web would be crushed. I thought about moving the spider, because I knew that I would forget it was there next time I went to close the window. At first, when I’d arrived here, I’d liked the fact I could pick up these spiders in my hand and not have to worry about them sending me to hospital. Now the creature seemed pointless and depressing, precisely because it was harmless.

If it hadn’t been so hot this summer, if I had been thinking more clearly, perhaps I would have been more wary that something like Enrico would come along sooner or later. For months now, Evie had been saying something was missing from her life. “You know when you say a word so many times that it begins to lose its meaning,” she had said to me one evening, shortly before she left for the retreat.

“There’s a word for that,” I offered.

“It’s like that, except it’s not a word, it’s my life.”

“There’s a word for that too.”

“What?”

“Depression?”

“I’m not depressed,” she snapped. Briefly I saw a glimpse of the old Evie, whose certainties had always been presented like this, brisk and perfect, each one like a little paper cut.

“Perhaps it’s time to go home,” I’d ventured.

“Perhaps.”

I was so close, I thought then. Just a few more weeks and she’ll be ready.

 

Enrico specialised in animal forms, it seemed: birds, big cats, wolves and seahorses, upon which he had articulated each feather and scale and strand of fur. There was only one humanoid figure amid his sculptures: a woman with flowing long hair and a scaly tail, her eyes frosted and empty, wearing nothing but a scallop shell over each of her breasts. At the bottom of the web page was a thumbnail image of Enrico himself, which remained there as I scrolled from one photo to the next. In the photo he was wearing a large, padded jacket and his silky hair was tied up in a bun beneath his cap. He was driving a large chainsaw against the neck of an ice swan, and a cloud of ice-dust was suspended midair, as if the swan’s soul had been caught on camera escaping its body. His jacket was splattered with crystalline ice-shavings.

I closed my computer and rang my parents, which I had hoped I wouldn’t have to do.

“I’m worried about Evie,” I said.

“Why, sweetie?”

“She seems really off. And she’s got this boyfriend.”

“Enrico? He sounds nice.”

“How would you know? I’ve met him. He’s got huge muscles from hacking up ice all day but he acts all weak, lounging around in his chair as if he can’t even hold himself upright. He gives me the creeps.”

My parents laughed at me kindly and changed the subject. I told them about Girl and they warned me not to get too attached, because come winter she’d likely stop roaming. I said I needed to make dinner. Then I texted Evie to let her know Mum and Dad were worried about her, and advised her to call them.

 

Evie moved to Italy in September as the leaves were going crusty and the wind was beginning to tear them off their stalks. She’d grown her hair out long so she and Enrico looked like the King and Queen of some elven race. Enrico lived near the mountains in the North. He lived, I imagined, in an enormous underground bunker carved into the mountainside, in which all the furniture was made of ice and never melted. Their bunker would be illuminated with little blue and gold lights that made everything shimmer and sparkle. The ice-jaguar would be there, and the ice-swan, and the ice-mermaid too, and their cold, unmelting eyes would follow Evie and Enrico like those eyes in old portraits, as they moved about the bunker.

Girl came less and less often to my garden, even though I left out bits of pickled herring and egg whites for her. One day she stopped coming altogether. The last time I saw her she was perched on the wall at the very back of the house, looking out at a patch of sky above me which I could not see. She was utterly still. The wind sent little patterns whispering through her fur, and if it hadn’t been for this, she would have resembled one of Enrico’s ice cats. Even from a distance I could see she was in the process of preparing herself for something. She turned to look at me, then, and from her eyes shot two thin beams, and the beams were a message meant just for me.

 

I did not have the will to follow Evie to Italy and I did not yet have the will to return home without her. Perhaps I would simply become part of the slow, graceless decay of this city, this doomed and bone-weary city where I now found myself alone. In the stories I liked to read, the heroes never failed in their quests. It was a humiliation too great to bear. The Ice Sculptor had stripped me of my one and only purpose and my one and only sister, and he had never even done me the honour of regarding me as a nemesis. “I hope you come to visit us,” he’d said to me the last time I saw them. “My brother works in the best restaurant in Torino, we take you there.” I’d searched and searched for the taunt hiding in his eyes and found nothing.

Evie had the bracelet fragment now, and therefore she, at least, would be fine. I thought about the other part of the bracelet, which might be with the original owner, or perhaps was still buried there beneath a weight of sand. Perhaps by now it had been ground to a fine silver dust. I did not know how quickly such things happened. I imagined myself scattered over all the beaches in the world, each grain of me a little eye, watching everything unravel.

Girl and all the other cats would be okay too. They would make their way through air vents and piping into the underground bunkers, or else they would smell out ancient caves and build their nests there, overcoming their aversion to the cold and the damp, feeding off small bats and drinking straight from the walls. The water would be mineral-rich and strengthen them. Over time, the cats would become more intelligent. They would formulate a language from the sound of their voices echoing in the caves or else from the marks their tough little claws made on the limestone. They would wait, and grow, and wait.

I was watching from the window when Girl jumped down over the other side of the wall, down to where her owners lived, and out of sight. I shut the window, and the spider was crushed to a little mark. With the wind trapped outside, my room felt so still, and I sat very still within it as I felt the house grow warmer.

Lauren Collee

Lauren Collee is a writer and casual academic living on Gadigal land. Her essays and fiction have been published in The Guardian, The Baffler, Joyland, Meanjin, The Sydney Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, and more. She is currently working on a non-fiction book about our relationship to artificial light.

More by Lauren Collee ›

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate.


Related articles & Essays