Foreigner – “Cold as Ice”

Dr. Erica Bohannon

Jaydyn Ridgely

Kim Clarkson

Charlize Ridgely as a child.

Charlize Ridgely as a mature woman.

Forensic Anthropologists at work in the Morgue of the OCME.

Lord Shiva

Shiva as the Lord of Dance.

A lioness

The Peaceful and Benevolent Dove

Satan

Satan and Evil Angels

You’re willing to sacrifice our love

You never take advice
Someday you’ll pay the price
I know

I’ve seen it before
It happens all the time
You’re closing the door
You leave the world behind
You’re digging for gold
Yet throwing away
A fortune in feelings
But someday you’ll pay

You’re as cold as ice
You’re willing to sacrifice our love
You want Paradise
But someday you’ll pay the price
I knowI’ve seen it before
It happens all the time
You’re closing the door
You leave the world behind
You’re digging for gold
Yet throwing away
A fortune in feelings
But someday you’ll payCold as ice, you know that you are
Cold, cold, as, as, ice, as cold as ice to me
Cold, cold, as, as, iceOoh, ooh, ooh, cold as, cold as ice
You’re as cold as ice
You’re as cold as ice, cold as ice, I know
You’re as cold as ice, yes I know
You’re as cold as ice, cold as ice, I know
You’re as cold as ice, oh yes I know
You’re as cold as ice, cold as ice, I know
You’re as cold as ice, oh yes I know
You’re as cold as ice, cold as ice.

It was on a bright, beautiful summer’s day, way back in 1980, that Erica Bohannon married the love of her life, Jaydyn Ridgely, in New York City. She would have liked to have thought that this was the happiest day of her life except for a vague, niggling feeling of unease that comes after a prolonged and difficult courtship that breeds too much familiarity. She had been dating Jaydyn – or so it seemed – from the time she was barely 17 years old herself. For all her appearance of an adult, mature woman, she was still very much a child at heart – eager to please the world in the slightest way possible; seeking attention every step of the way & desperate for a kind word and anything that was akin to affection and love.

Jaydyn was, actually, far from anyone’s dream come true – he was a filthy rich, ‘spoiled brat’ used to having all the luxuries in life without working even a single day for it. He took sadistic pleasure in demeaning his domestic help at the huge, opulent mansion  called “Glen Haven” that belonged to his parents.  Erica may not have married him had she known that he was habituated to having any one (or more) of his Philippino maids share his bed and give him a “soothing, body massage.” I don’t think that I need to precise, in so many words, what that so-called massage inevitably led to. I’ll only go so far as to say that each night he raped a woman/women  and reveled sadistically in their fear and pain because it was customary for him to beat them up, ‘black and blue’, on a regular basis too.

Jaydyn was the model of the macho, handsome, rich “bad guy” – he walked with an arrogant swagger and nonchalance that comes from a man who knows that the world is watching him in awe. He had charisma – there was no doubt about that at all – but no breeding or refinement, worth the name, despite the renowned Ridgely family’s vast wealth, fame and fortune. His father owned a huge network of pharmaceutical companies that had many subsidiary firms, all across the U.S.A. and the globe. Jaydyn wanted to be made a partner in the family business, with access to a huge chunk of their business profits. However, his wise father was of the opinion that all people should learn to climb the ladder of success, from the lowest rungs upwards and through their own diligence and sincerity.

The father –  Sr. James Ridgely knew that his son lacked the intelligence and foresight for such a responsible position of being named a partner in the company and as you can well imagine, it  led to many an unpleasant and bitter argument between father and son. But the Senior Mr. Ridgely remained unmoved and unfazed in this matter. Jaydyn was one of the worst examples of a man – he was self-centered, a compulsive liar, devious, malicious, vengeful and highly manipulative in his behaviour. Yet, it seems so surprising how Erica could marry such a selfish and mean man, isn’t it? Well, love is known to be blind (at least Erica thought she was in love) and stranger things have been known to happen in the world, in the name of love – don’t we all know it?

Erica was an African-American woman and she had, in her lineage, a lot of mixed ancestry from down the ages, including a Scottish heritage to boot. She was barely a month old when her teenaged, alcoholic mother abandoned her yowling baby in a heap of garbage by the roadside. The only conceivable reason she was found at all was that an elderly man, out walking his dog, heard a baby’s whimpering and had cared to look further.

As far as Erica was aware, she was an orphan – left totally alone, helpless and unloved by a world who couldn’t care less or at all, especially for a dark-skinned baby. Can you imagine the extent of racism and racial discrimination involved here? Can you even begin to understand the levels to which people can and will stoop in this matter? After all, this was an innocent baby who had not asked to be born – yet no one cared. Anyway, the baby was handed over to Social Services and the latter wasted no time in putting her in a series of foster homes. She was barely 6 years old when she passed through a fair litany of such foster homes – one worse than the other. She grew not to care so much when her foster parents insulted her, manhandled her or even mercilessly beat her up for the most trivial and inconsequential mistakes – along the way, nobody seemed to care or remember that she was only a child.

Well, it was no great surprise that Erica grew up to be a  rebellious and sulky teenager and she had soon earned the name of, “the Ice Maiden”  in the neighborhood where she lived. The people called her as such, of course when her back was turned, but she was aware of its sting and hated the implied insult. She was a highly intelligent and intellectual person and even though she had attended high school, she was more often than not, self-taught. It was at this time, when she was barely 17 years old herself that she happened to meet Jaydyn, one fine day, in one of the many roadside bars of the neighborhood.  She soon got intoxicated by his devilish smile and wicked charm and later she also got drunk on excess alcohol, which was to be expected, in  the circumstances. Of course, Jaydyn loved his women when they were at their most vulnerable and defenseless and from then on started a series of  ‘so-called dates’ that ended in rough, painful sex. If Erica was lucky,  at the end of it, she got no beating that left her battered and bruised, for days together, at a time. She took to wearing trousers and a long-sleeved polo-necked cardigan, regularly, to hide her various physical injuries from the prying eyes of society.

Erica was not a particularly good-looking woman, in the conventional sense of the term, but there was a certain allure in her bearing and carriage that made her a striking and attractive woman, capable of turning the heads of both men and women alike. She was voluptuous and had curves in all the right places. She exuded tremendous sex-appeal. When she married Jaydyn, she was desperate to have a child of her own. However, again – when she was in the presence of children, she was totally at a loss as to the best course of action – love (the way we know it) didn’t figure in the equation at all. She loved children in the way that she knew best and it left much to be desired, I can assure you. She desperately wanted to become a mother, with a baby of her very own. It was hardly surprising that she lacked the hands-on knowledge of how to go about the matter in the right way. It made her all the more embittered, angry and frustrated.

After marriage, Erica was happy to see Jaydyn settle down to a family life – he became just the slightest bit more caring, kind and understanding than he had ever been towards her – surprisingly, he wanted children just as much as she did. She had always liked him – but now she grew to love him – not surprising for one who has never known the true meaning of selfless, unconditional love. She never ever expressed her love to him – in any case, she would not have known how to do so. Jaydyn was keen on starting a family and they worked diligently and daily in that direction. But Fate smiled cruelly down upon them and she had 3 miscarriages and one more pregnancy where she carried her fetus (a baby girl) for 8 months –  but the child that she finally bore, after much pain and suffering, was stillborn. She spent days together, in bed, crying her heart and eyes out. She went into a deep clinical depression; remained largely inconsolable and had ever-increasing crying spells. Destiny had given her the most cruel punishment that any mother should have to go through in her life and she never ever did get over her grief of not being able to conceive a child of her very own.

She soon found herself getting desperately bored and lonely at home. Over time, she had gained her strength and sanity, after years of medication. She grew tired of reading novels, listening to music, going shopping for food supplies or visiting the fitness club everyday. One day, she suddenly decided that she had had just about enough of this aimless existence. She started pursuing her Master’s of Arts in forensic anthropology (M.A.) in graduate school and she went on, later, to earning her Doctorate of Philosophy degree in the same subject (Ph.D.). It took many years of strenuous studies but she finally managed to become a competent, full-fledged, forensic anthropologist and managed to land herself a job in the  OCME-NYC (Office of the Chief Medical Examiner- City of New York.) It is the largest Medical Examiner’s Office in the United States, responsible for cases in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island.

For those of you who might not know this -forensic anthropology is the application of the science of physical anthropology and human osteology in a legal setting, most often in criminal cases, where the victim’s remains are in the advanced stages of decomposition. A forensic anthropologist studies the bones of the human skeleton to identify deceased people whose remains are decomposed, burned, mutilated or otherwise unrecognizable. “Forensic” refers to the application of this sub-field of science to a court of law. Dr. Erica Bohannon found herself gaining some measure of peace from her work with the dead  – the cadavers that she dealt with on a daily basis were undemanding and patient; they posed no threat to her being or her sanity. The corpses that she examines seemed to wait only for the fact that they be accorded a measure of justice in their unnatural death. She soon found herself totally immersed in her work and spent long hours, daily in the morgue.

It was at this time that she found that her husband, Jaydyn, had started going on frequent and long, “business trips” abroad. Whenever she questioned him, he tended to be extremely vague, non-committal and irritable. He never gave her any of his contact details on such trips where he was away from home – Erica could never contact him at all; she had to wait for Jaydyn to contact her – if he bothered to do so, at all. She immersed herself further and further in her work and even though her instinct told her that all was not well on the home-front, she pushed the thought away to the back of her mind. She had had enough problems of her own throughout her life without having to deal with a new, emerging, worrying issue in their marital relationship. This went on for several years – each one pretending as if nothing was ostensibly the problem between them.

Late at night, on a certain day, Erica was taken aback to see two police officers standing at her door-step. They told her that a terrible accident had taken place – somewhere near the mountain, log cabin owned by the Ridgely family. Jaydyn was dead after his car flipped over the edge of the mountainside, into the deep ravine below. The alcohol level in his blood was found to be sky-high. However, what was more shocking was a woman who had been seated next to him, at that time, had died in this accident too. On further investigation, it was found that she was Jaydyn’s ex-girlfriend all along – he had continued seeing her and living with her, many years after his marriage to Erica. The latter found herself grief-stricken, even though Jaydyn had been far from a kind and exemplary spouse towards her. Added to her grief, she had to deal with the many lies that Jaydyn had told her over the years; his deviousness; manipulative behaviour; deceit and ultimate betrayal at the end of his life. What was the sense of being married to a man who she barely knew, since the last 19 years or so? It seemed such a waste of her life – years that could have been fruitfully spent with someone more worthy, had all gone down the drain. Erica became more and more introverted and her general demeanor was one of being increasingly dismissive and insulting towards her colleagues and neighbours – she had unwittingly become a veritable ‘ICE MAIDEN’ – hated and despised by one and all.

Barely a fortnight after Jaydyn’s death, Erica received a telephone call from Jaydyn’s lawyer, Mr. Mathews – he wanted to explain the details of Jaydyn’s Last Will and Testament to her. The essence of the Will stated that the majority of Jaydyn’s vast fortune was to be handed over to Kim, his girlfriend. In the event that Jaydyn and Kim were to die simultaneously, the majority of his estate was to be handed over to his love-child, Charlize – whose parents had been the now-deceased, Jaydyn and Kim. A pittance was to be collected by Erica from Jaydyn’s lawyer – as part of her legacy from her late husband – an allowance that was so minuscule in its amount that it barely covered her monthly, living expenses. It became mandatory for her to continue working to earn her keep and livelihood.

One Sunday morning, Mr. Mathews brought Charlize to the home of  her step-mother. Charlize was an 18-year-old teenager; she had all the attributes and demeanor of a kind-hearted, considerate, caring and responsible person – she was so incredibly beautiful that she could melt the heart of the most hard-hearted person alive on this planet. As a child, she had been chubby, rosy-cheeked and had a curly mop of  blonde hair. She was fair of skin – not surprisingly so, since both her biological parents had been white-skinned, Caucasians. She had a tremendously infectious laugh and for a teenager of her age, she was warm-hearted and forever smiling. Erica marveled inwardly at how Jaydyn, with all his various negative qualities could be the father of such a veritable, beautiful angel.

Well, as the case would have it, Erica did allow Charlize to stay with her, even though she didn’t understand why she should have to do so. She made it amply clear to Charlize, in the bluntest possible terms that she had absolutely no use for Jaydyn’s “bastard love-child.” Charlize could stay with her so long as she was seen and not heard; she was not to try to make any conversation with Erica at all – whether it concerned her daily activities in college or about any personal problems that she might have. Erica even went so far as to state that it would be preferable if Charlize didn’t even show her face to her at all because she couldn’t care less for a child born out of sin and deceit.

Charlize was an intelligent girl. She adhered to her step-mother’s rules as far as possible and kept her own grief and sorrow at the loss of her parents strictly private. She saw that Erica could be generous and kind-hearted too, despite her cruel words. Of course, it was a matter of pride for Erica for her not to express a strange, happy and comforting feeling that she had begun to evince of late, whilst living with Charlize – a feeling that filled her heart with deep affection, love and joy at the sight of her ‘daughter.’ She never went to so far as to make these feelings known to Charlize – it went against her ego and self-respect. The woman that Charlize lived with was, for all intents and purposes, forever cold-hearted, remote and aloof.

Well, time flew by, as it is wont to do. Erica used to come home late at night and she was rather surprised to find one night, atop her pillow, a lovely poem, composed by Charlize, expressing the love that she felt for her ‘mother.’ Along with the poem, lay a single, red rose kept carefully on top of the poem. This became a regular feature between mother and daughter – it took the form of notes, consisting of a small, two-lined message about anything under the sun which Charlize skilfully created to warm the heart of her mother. She never thought of Erica as her step-mother and for that matter, Erica took care to conceal the fact that she considered Charlize as the daughter that she never had. The notes were placed in various places throughout the house – it became a kind of special game for Erica to go looking eagerly for the notes and rose – a game that she found that she greatly enjoyed playing at.

Every night, Charlize used to wait for her mother to fall asleep before she tip-toed into her room and kissed the tear-stained face of her mother. Erica used to wait anxiously for her daughter’s hug and kiss, night after night, but she took special pains to pretend that she was asleep, all along. She couldn’t quite explain why but it went against her grain to show that she had begun to care deeply for this kind-hearted, loving teenager – a fact that is so rarely seen in today’s indifferent day and age. Unbeknownst to her daughter, Erica had kept each and every single note, arranged in chronological order, tied neatly together in a ribbon, in a shoe-box. The roses had dried up, withered and died long-since but each and every dead rose was kept too. The notes and dead roses were kept hidden in this shoe-box at the bottom of a dark closet. Erica had re-read the notes so often that the paper was creased and yellowed over time. She took up a rose each time and smelled it, even though its scent had long disappeared. These were Erica’s treasured mementos – they formed a testament, in no small way, of the immense love that mother and daughter shared for each other. Even then, Erica kept convincing herself that her feelings were grudging – an automatic response to kindness and affection that had nothing to do whatsoever with feelings of love.

One evening, Charlize found herself rummaging for a pair of her own shoes that she thought might have been mistakenly placed, by the housekeeper, in her mother’s closet. She found Erica’s treasured shoe-box and felt heartened, yet so very sad with its contents – sad because she just could not imagine why her mother found it so difficult to express her love for her.

Well, the next day dawned as usual. Erica left the house, at dawn, well before Charlize had even awoken – she didn’t want her daughter to see her grief and her tear-stained, blotchy face. She was NOT going to meet Charlize that day. She kept convining herself that Charlize meant absolutely nothing to her –  she was just a girl born out of the fundamental selfishness, callousness and betrayal of her deceased spouse, Jaydyn. Erica felt that Charlize ought to know when and where to tow the line – she was not going to become a victim to her threats. That afternoon, Charlize waited for her mother, anxiously, for more than 2 hours but in the end, she accepted the cruel reality that Erica was not going to come at all. Charlize was heart-broken -she tearfully left the college premises and disappeared completely from Erica’s life – as if she had vanished into thin air.

Somehow, Erica had never believed that Charlize could or would live up to the threat in her ultimatum to her mother – Erica felt her loss so deeply that it was like the jagged edge of a knife piercing her heart incessantly. The days rolled by into years; Erica became more and more of a workaholic and against her better judgement, she pined for the loss of her beautiful daughter, every single day for the rest of her life. She was ridden by immense pain, guilt and shame for her cowardliness.

Foreigner is a British-American rock band, originally formed in 1976 by 4 veteran English musicians. Foreigner has sold over 37.5 million albums in the United States alone. 

I will not be discussing the lyrics of this song with you this time around – my story of the Ice-Maiden should be self-explanatory.