The JRB presents an excerpt from Ice Shock, the new novel by Elleke Boehmer.
Ice Shock
Elleke Boehmer
Karavan Press, 2025
HERE
2010–2011
WINTER, EDINBURGH TO LONDON
Leah Nash was not looking for love. Love was the last thing she needed. That winter morning, she wanted only to get out of town and head home.
But then the trains south from Edinburgh were cancelled. Floods on the line. So here she was at the coach station, ten minutes to spare, dragging her backpack up into the London coach.
Yesterday’s interview had taken everything. It had felt like her life depended on the outcome—the fulfilment of every dream she’d ever had. The shelf of books she would one day write.
But had they liked her? The seven blank faces at the long table gave away nothing. She had blundered on through, ears ringing.
‘Sorry, could you repeat that, please?’ she’d asked twice, three times. ‘I didn’t quite get the question.’
Niall Lawrence wasn’t looking for love either. Leant up against the coach window, he was trying to get home, too. Kent, via London. But he did like to be loved. That idea of a love-match, a soul-mate—this past weekend something had changed about that. He’d been up north for a school friend’s wedding. Steph, who was marrying Rosie. He’d watched the couple take their first dance, looking into each other’s eyes, faces glowing, never dropping their gaze, and he’d thought—amazing.
So if someone this early morning had asked him about love—say this nameless stranger with red-brown hair in the seat beside his, asleep on his shoulder, uninvited—then he might have said yes, carefully. ‘But,’ he might have added, ‘I don’t think I’ve met them yet.’
The stranger stretched her arm across his waist.
Inside her evaporating sleep, the body under her arm was warm, warmer than her own.
Niall felt her breath on his face, feathering his cheek.
A jolt. The coach engine coughed deep and low under their feet. Leah opened her eyes, rubbed her temple. She saw pale eyes, somehow bearably close-by. Curious, maybe quizzical. The man they belonged to must have been cradling her for some time. She was slumped half across his chest.
Beyond his head, she saw London’s brown fuzz begin to thicken along the horizon.
‘I’m sorry,’ she straightened up. ‘I seem—’
She craned round, checked the seat number, her hair roping across her shoulder. Niall rotated his, numbed, and watched her. He liked how she turned her head that way. Her chin was held sideways; she was smiling to herself but somehow without lifting her lips. He wanted her to do it again.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you must’ve been pretty tired. You were sleeping when I sat down and that feels like half a day ago. Where did you get on?’
‘Edinburgh. Edinburgh coach station. You?’
‘Newcastle.’
‘God, I’m so sorry. But I was, I was—’
‘It’s fine. Really. I should say sorry, too. I had to push you to the side to sit down, literally. This seat was the only one I could find. Anyhow, you didn’t wake up. I’m Niall, by the way. I was up north for a wedding.’
‘And I’m Leah, as in two syllables, Lay-yah. I had to be in Edinburgh for an interview. For this amazing gold-dust award. It would let me do everything I want to do. But I don’t know if I got it. And it’s only the second-stage interview. If I make this one, then there’s one more.’
‘Those things are difficult to second-guess,’ Niall said. ‘Here, don’t you want some water? You’ll be thirsty by now. After all that sleeping.’
She took his offered thermos. Her fingers touched his for a second. Blood warm, as warm as his chest under her arm.
He watched as she tipped back her head, drank. Again, the tilt of her chin, the angle of her jaw, a sharp line of bone, and now her hair falling down her back. He felt his hands fold around her, the round of her waist, her hip.
But he was not touching her.
‘I was thirstier than I realised, thanks.’ She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘The costs of being out all night. Me and the other candidates, we went out afterwards, climbed up to Arthur’s Seat with a bottle. Maybe two. Sat there in the fog, comparing notes. Turns out that in the interview I mainly talked about stories, how we use stories, but the others got up and actually told stories.’
‘So, the interview was about that, storytelling? This dream you have, everything you want to do, it’s about telling stories?’
‘I didn’t say anything about a dream. But yes, I write. I try to write. Make stories, I suppose. I’m never happier than when writing. Writing, I feel in control. But to write that way, I need to understand better. I need to go further than where I am now, know more.’
‘You showed the panel that, I’m sure.’
‘I was too much about books, the others were all about energy. They were performers, they swapped anecdotes, jokes. By midnight though, I’d stopped caring. No one cared any longer. See, without us noticing, the fog had come down. One minute, the sky was as clear as it is today, the next, the fog was everywhere. We had to think about getting off that hill in one piece. We all had trains and coaches to catch in the morning.’
‘And obviously, you did catch them.’
‘How we got out of there’—her hand lightly touched his arm, she tucked up her legs—‘is that we read the fog.’
‘Read the fog?’ He leant into her touch, a little. He felt the pressure of her hand grow infinitesimally.
‘We began swapping stories about fog. There are loads of them. It stopped us panicking. It was like we were plotting our route out with stories. And in the end, the stories did give us a route out.’
‘Let me think, you told horror stories—?’
‘No way!’ Her eyes flashed.
He looked away, immediately looked back.
‘Horror stories, ripper stories were out,’ she said, her face alight. ‘It was fantasy that worked, fairy-stories. Especially when, at four in the morning, someone still awake picked out a huge ice-palace in the fog, a Snow Queen palace. That showed us the fog was thinning. It was lighting up slowly, turning silver. The city lights were illuminating a ceiling of fog.’
The coach swung sharply through a roundabout. They were in London.
Ten minutes or so from Victoria, he calculated.
Ten minutes or so till this ended, she reckoned.
She leant back against the window and looked at him side-on. The neat folds of his ear, the red mark in his neck. Had she caused that? The pressure of her head on his shoulder.
There was something more she had to say, before they reached the coach station. Something like, this was the last thing she needed, and yet—some kind of course was set.
‘If you have time,’ she said, touching her keys in her bag, ‘would you like to come around to mine for a drink? Least I can do, really, offer you a drink.’
‘I’d like that,’ he said, and watched the rectangles of sky swimming in her eyes.
~~~
- Born in Durban, Elleke Boehmer writes fiction, history, criticism and biography. She is the author of five novels, including Screens against the Sky (shortlisted for the David Higham Prize), Bloodlines (shortlisted for the Sanlam Prize), Nile Baby and The Shouting in the Dark (winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize), and two collections of short stories. Elleke’s To the Volcano, and Other Stories was commended for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize, 2019. Her work has been translated into many languages, including German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Thai and Mandarin. Since 2008, she is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford.
~~~
Publisher information
An Icelandic volcano has thrown an ash cloud into the atmosphere and, across the world, planes have stopped flying. Overhead, the skies are severely blue. Leah Nash and Niall Lawrence, twenty-somethings in love, grow strangely restless. They set out on different but parallel pathways.
He takes on work at an Antarctic polar station and experiences the strange and lonely beauty of the precarious ice-world. She studies writing in England and struggles to find her way. They are both determined to stay together though separated by thousands of miles.
Elleke Boehmer’s Ice Shock is a love-story set against the backdrop of the melting ice-caps. The novel asks what it is to be close even when we are far apart—distant yet proximate. How do we go on loving each other when the environment around us is changing catastrophically by the day?
