by Adam Roberts
Jeffreys sat on a desk. Sheaves of paper were stacked beside its blank monitor. One mug, packed solid with pens and pencils, bristled like a fox’s brush. Another mug beside it was one-third filled with black coffee, as dead and cold as diesel oil. A gonk, a blue ball of artificial fur with yellow felt seagull-feet and outsize cardboard eyes, perched on top of the printer. I stood on the carpet and looked around. At every window save the one that served as entrance the snow pressed up close like the densest mist. ‘It’s a wonder the windows haven’t broken,’ I said.
‘A wonder,’ Jeffreys murmured. ‘Upstairs two flights they have broke, most of ’em. Snows all piled in, filled half the space. On the other floors, on this floor, I don’t know. Double-glazed I know, for I had the devil’s trouble breaking in. But the floor where the windows broke, that was double-glazed too, so I don’t know. Maybe the street’s narrowness prevented too great a pressure – that side is Charing Cross Road, and it isn’t too broad. And that side,’ he said, swivelling to look at the far wall, ‘is a narrow yard and another tall block beyond, Leicester Square. I’m glad for the snow at the windows, though. It insulates marvellous well. I can light a fire in here and almost none of the heat escapes. The warmth stays.’ He looked at me. ‘A small fire. We don’t want to use up the air.’
‘The air?’
‘We could be down here some time. I got a scrubber,’ he said and gestured at a grille-faced box on one side of the room. ‘And,’ he said, ‘and there are the pot plants, but they’ll probably die. Or some of them will, but hopefully not all. Still, we need to be careful. Don’t want to asphyxiate.’
He thought, I suppose, that we’d be down there a few weeks. We were down there a lot longer than that.
Six
We slept that night together, cuddled up, but Jeffreys didn’t make any advances. It wouldn’t have been too easy anyway, with the pair of us swaddled up in so many layers of clothing. We ate beans, heated in their tin over a tiny gas fire, and afterwards Jeffreys made two cups of tea with a tea bag. ‘No milk,’ he apologised. ‘Nor lemon neither.’ But I was only glad it was hot. Then we snuggled up together on the carpet under a desk and he fell almost instantly asleep.
I lay awake for a long time in the silent darkness. The lack of traffic noise was a distraction. I kept thinking about something Jeffreys had said on the journey through the ice-tunnels about the snow just falling and falling and never stopping. I thought: it can’t go on forever. But that night, lying under that desk with my arm for a pillow, I wondered. I imagined the whole world covered with snow, every square yard of it. What would happen if it kept snowing? Would it accumulate and accumulate, heaping up and up? The world swollen to twice its size, a massive globe of white, snow reaching up towards the moon. I fell asleep to dream of creeping through tunnels, and the snow falling silently over my head.
But this is how life is. It doesn’t land on you all at once, like the house in the Wizard of Oz that flattened the witch – or perhaps for some people it does, but not for most. For some, maybe, I guess, I can see that some instant catastrophe, their own illness or some disaster, knocks them down, concertinas them into a hat and feet. But for most, for the many, it doesn’t come all at once. It drifts down, tiny torn-up pieces of your heart, of your job, your body, your weariness, responsibility, pressure, expectations, of little day-to-day specifics, of ordinary setbacks and difficulties. It settles and settles and then, one day, you look out of your window and you see that all of the stuff has covered the ground all around you, has built up without your noticing. And then, another day, you look to your windows and realise you can’t even see through them, that the snow has cataracted the glass, and your only surprise is that the panes can withstand the pressure of all that snow pushing in from outside. It is not that you really care, either. Some miniature, mandrake-shaped core of you cares, perhaps: but the peripheries – the face and the limbs, the heart and the brain – are too numb, and cold, and weary to care.
To give you a for-instance.
You’re a foreigner, an Indian girl. You spent your childhood as a lawyer’s daughter in an East African country, part of a small Indian community in a mostly black land. It’s a privileged existence, really, but since you’ve never known anything different you don’t realise that it is. You read a lot. You love books, and when they call you a bookish girl you think they are being complimentary. Everything in your childhood is hot, the landscape glowing orange and yellow with the heat, the sky low and dropping continual daytime pressure of hot light. The night sky is glorious: enormous, gleaming with stars like snowflakes scattered thinly over the widest, deepest, purplest depths of sky. And when the sun rises each day the buff plains warm and seem to breathe out joy, and the sunlight glows almost neon off the white hair of the horizon mountains. Today is not a school day, so you play in the garden with your sister, although she is too small to be much of a playmate. The dust and dirt is warm. The leaves of grass tower and sway around you. Here you creep through the grass. Here is a bug, sluggish in the mid-morning heat, as big as an electrical plug, and as strangely pronged. You lift it from the blade and let it creep over and over your turning hands. You discover more of these bugs, a little colony of them, and lie on your front watching them for hours as they make their bumptiously tiny way about their inscrutable business.
But then your father’s house is set alight by one group of malcontents or another (for there is a great deal of political unrest in this country in which you live). The arsonists evade police detection, which makes your father more bitter than he was. You don’t like the stale, damp-burnt smell of the kitchen and lounge after the firemen have quelled the blaze. Everything is blackened, ruined. And in this country, where goods are sometimes hard to come by, it takes many months for the new kitchen to be installed, for new carpets to go down. Over months the house comes together again, and you settle back to normality. But a year later the house is set alight again. This time your father’s hand is tautened to a claw by the burns he suffers trying to rescue some of his belongings. You are twelve. ‘We’re going to London,’ you hear. But you know nothing about London except what you’ve gleaned from Dickens and Sherlock Holmes and James Bond movies.
You’re still twelve when you step from the plane at one of the London airports, but there is something wrong with the sky. It seems to be clogged with cold white fluff falling, and it takes you a moment to realise that this is snow, because you’ve never seen snow before. You’ve read about it, seen it on TV, but somehow you thought it would be more crystalline, more defined, than this puffy nebulous matter. And then you stand there, amazed, with your mouth open for these drifting insects of ice, but too soft to be ice, to drift in, to meander lazily through the cold air and into your mouth, touching your tongue like a cold fingertip.
And London, you discover, is not like Dickens or Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. London is filled with cars and dirt, and grim people shouldering you out of the way on the pavement, and for every day of luminous, stilling snowfall there are fifty days of relentless rain and three hundred of dull cloud-covered grey. Grey is London’s colour. Buildings and roads are grey. The pigeons are grey; even their shit is grey.
Your family – your two parents, your sister, you – live in a three-room flat in Hounslow that is so poky and rundown you literally cannot believe it when you first come through the door. The African house was three storeys tall and had fifty acres of garden. ‘This could fit in our shed in Africa,’ you complain, tears in your eyes. ‘I hate it, I’ll never get used to it.’ But you do get used to it. You get used to sharing your bedroom with your sister, and eating your food off your knees in front of the TV, and used to brushing your teeth in the bathroom whilst your father is sitting on the lip of the bath changing the dressing to his burnt arm, inches away from you. You get used to the constant serenade of traffic sounds, and the incoherent noises of yelling and sobbing from the flat above. You do get used to these things, but at the same time they rub away that part of you
that was carefree and child-like and lying in the sun watching the insects in the grass. This flat has no garden, and there is no grass.
In Africa your school had been an elegant timber building with a well-watered lawn and acre upon acre of open ground running away to the purple-shouldered hills. In London your school is a concrete building with a twenty-foot-square walled yard. In Africa you had made friends with the Indian and Pakistani children and with white children, and even with those few black children whose parents did the same sort of well-paid work your parents did. But in London your schoolfriends are Indian because you are Indian, just as white kids all have white friends – although white boys, you discover after a few years, are less picky than white girls in their associations, provided you grant them their intimacies and their touchings-up. Worse, in this school you find yourself mocked for your love of books, for your studiousness, and so you learn to mimic interest in the cares and passions of your peers. You yield to the urgent necessity of fitting in, which is the most important thing in the life of a child. You start dressing to attract boys. With your girlfriends you talk about boys, and relationships, and love, and sex. Everything you talk about comes down to this – not books, or study, or future career, or ambition, but love and sex. Playground discussions about celebrities and pop-stars are, in essence, about the love-lives of the stars. Discussions about boys are about who is dating whom, about whom you’d be prepared to date yourself.
Boys are really not interested in you though, no matter how much make-up you wear or how low you unbutton your shirt. And then, mysteriously, boys are interested in you – you don’t know why – although their interest is wholly physical, and fades off as rapidly as it comes. Your father shouts at you that you are too young to wear such make-up or such clothes, but you shout back that you are fifteen now and you’ll wear what you want. You have sex with various boys standing up in tucked-away places, in cloakrooms and toilets, lying awkwardly in cars, and this brings with it a sort of acceptance, but mostly you hug to yourself the melancholy satisfaction that if your father knew he’d be horrified – that he doesn’t know you, that you don’t need him, that it’s all his fault and that, in some obscure inarticulable way, you’re paying him back.
Then you’re sixteen and you have a steady boyfriend. When he has sex with you he says he loves you, and he coos and caresses your skin. Because he loves you he omits to wear a condom and you fall pregnant, and although he says he will stand by you, marry you, he doesn’t – he’s only sixteen, after all. So you give birth to a baby girl, and spend two years making the cramped flat even more cramped, with an infant crying in the middle of the night and all the paraphernalia of child rearing. You love the baby sometimes, when she smiles, when she sleeps; but more frequently she is noisy with colic, or vomiting, or growling with a miserable look on her face, and then she just grinds you down. You sleep on the settee in the TV room with Minnie, your daughter, in a cot; and you wake with a jolt at 3 a.m. because her whimpers have caught, like a petrol engine coughing into life, and flourished into actual cries. So you get up, the weariness registering in your inmost bones, but you get up because you must, and you pick her up and cuddle her, bounce her in your arms, pace the tiny room until she calms. When you try to replace her in the cot she begins crying again, so you hold her and feed her and jiggle her and soothe her for an hour or more. You stand by the window and outside, below you, is an orange-stained lamp-lit road, troubled by occasional cars. The traffic lights, to the right, go through their pavane-like changes of colour, apparently equally indifferent to the traffic or the absence of traffic. Then the night starts snowing, the scene fuzzing, grey flakes swirling up against the glass like an infinity of moths.
Life goes on, and death also, but mostly life. Your father dies of an asthmatic attack when Minnie is fourteen months old. His last words, gasped in between attacks – although they are not literally his last words, but rather the words you remember most clearly afterwards – are: ‘you could have done great things, great things, my daughter,’ and ‘I love you.’ But this latter phrase only focuses the oblique rebuke of the former, because you don’t go to university, or get a good job, or meet a good high-caste husband, or do any of these things. Instead you move into a tiny council flat in Streatham and you raise your child. Just the two of you, the twosomeness, queerly, more lonely than actual solitude. Your friends are other single mothers, none of whom read books. You smoke. You drink. You take turns looking after one another’s children on a Saturday night so that the rest of you can go as a group to a Salsa dancing club. Boyfriends come and go. Years pile on years. Your mother moves to Slough to stay with very distant relatives, and your sister marries a dentist and moves to Dundee, and you see neither of them as much as you ought.
Sometimes in your life the skies clear, the sun emerges, the light reaches you. One relationship, with an older man called Sam, lasts several years. You live with this kindly, tubby bloke in a house – a real house – in Collier’s Wood, behind the superstore. With him you go on holidays to Portugal two years running. It’s almost exactly as if you are a proper family. Minnie seems happier in school. You take an access course and plan to go to university as a mature student, to study literature – rebelling against your world as always, although this time it is a secret rebellion against your circle of friends. To wallow in books, to read and read! But the relationship with Sam ends. Nothing catastrophic happens between you, just the build-up of rows, of nagging and sniping and bickering, of day-to-day petty unhappinesses. Sam helps you move out to a flat in Balham. It’s only up the road but it is a different educational authority, so Minnie must change school. You find work in a shop, then in a bank, then in a shop again whilst Minnie goes to secondary school and does her equivalent of what you did when you were her age. She pierces her face, she wears make-up and short skirts. You want to communicate with her, not to warn her off exactly, not to nag her, not to be a tyrant-parent, of course not; just to explain to her what your experience was like, to let her know that she doesn’t have to follow the same path that you took. But you don’t have access to those forms of communication. Those train-lines were long since snowed under. The only language you have as a mother is to nag, is to be to her what your parents were to you. Love takes that form too, sometimes, or so you tell yourself. But your daughter can surprise you; despite her Hindu heritage (although you never raised her as a Hindu) she decides to convert to Islam. That, ultimately, is the form her rebellion takes. It’s hard to name a more serious form of rebellion a Hindu girl could undertake – more shocking than having sex with boys, even with white boys, more shocking than drinking, or smoking. You tell yourself that she’s chosen the one thing still capable of shocking you, that by comparison all those other things would have been positively welcome to you. But there’s nothing you can do. She covers her head and goes to a mosque and has earnest discussions with you about how vital it is to live a life that embodies the will of Allah. It distresses you, for some obscure reason you cannot articulate to yourself, but you do not berate her: you don’t tell her that this is just a phase, that she will grow out of it. You keep your disapproval hidden, and with the see-saw nature of the dynamic that exists between the two of you this lack of disapproval on your part conjures forth a violent form of disapproval on hers. She criticises you in vehement terms for your boyfriends, for the mode of your dress, for the cigarettes and alcohol. You try to take this in your stride but it grinds you down; the weight of her teenage scorn, and the added weight of the whole world of Islam on top of that, it presses down upon you. But she is sixteen now, and you are thirty-three, and in a moment she has gone – married to a good Muslim man and living in Southampton with a baby on the way.
That’s just a for-instance. There are a million similar stories.
Seven
I soon lost track of how much time we spent in that discarded old office. A month passed, perhaps, or so I thought, but when I taxed Jeffreys he insisted it had been a week, no more. I explo
red every room in the block, from the glass-doored entrance lobby on the ground through to the office at the top, a copy of the one we occupied on the second floor, complete with windows whited out by snowfall. Six storeys of tall building long since buried. Walking through it with nothing but a torch, blowing a delicate bubble of light into the sheer weight of darkness. Going from room to room I felt like a drowned sailor haunting the cabins of a five-fathom-sunk liner; and then, with an unpleasant twist in my intestines, it occurred to me that this was close to the truth, that there were millions of gallons of water over my head.
But, in general, it was comfortable enough, being buried. For a while at least. We got used to the dark all around; hours and hours of pure dark, with a few hours of gazlight a day, throwing our vast and fuzzy shadows on the walls. There was food, some of which we heated on the campingaz stove, although Jeffreys husbanded the blue tins of fuel with something approaching ferocity. There was alcoholic drink, for a few weeks at any rate, until we drained it all; after that we made do with meltwater. Each floor had its own toilets, with three cubicles and urinals against the wall like cowls of ice. We used each toilet bowl in turn until they filled, and then moved on; when we had filled them all we took to shitting in the fifth-floor office. It was cold though, despite Jeffreys’ boast about the insulation. The chill all around us chilled us too, and we could venture only a little heat with our precious supply of gaz.
To begin with, Jeffreys ventured out through his ice-tunnel on several occasions to try and gather more supplies; mostly, I assumed, to find more cigarettes, for we had many months of food in tins and frozen tidbits. But he could find no more cigarettes.
Each smoke was now a little ritual for him; the most significant moments in his day. He would take out the tiny white tube, like a hyphen made of snow, and simply look at it for a long minute. Then he would run a finger along its length, and press it against his upper lip to sniff the tobacco smell. Finally he would snap the lighter flame into being and caress the cigarette-end with it, like tickling a small brown button with a ghostly orange finger: running the foxtail flame past and past the end of the cigarette before finally clamping his lips on the filter and sucking the fire in to ignite the tobacco in the tube. When he did this, his eyes would roll white in their sockets and the creases and lines of his face would visibly relax. He drew each breath in as if it were more precious to him than air – which, of course, it was. And he exhaled with a drawn-out shuddering reluctance. The smoke came out of his lungs and throat fine and white as talcum.
