by Adam Roberts
I watched him do this many times. It was virtually a sexual ritual for Jeffreys.
In fact, if I am honest, there was more ritual and a more sensual pleasure for him in this than in actual sex. We had sex a few times, but after the first few occasions it became more and more rare between us. Partly this was simply a function of the cold. We might start cuddling and hugging one another, working up a degree of heat inside our many layers of clothing, but as soon as either of us pulled any part of our skin out into the air it would chill at once. Even kissing was difficult, the fat rims of our hoods getting in the way unless we bared our heads, and if we did that our scalps felt the chill in moments. Such sex as we did have was more or less fully clothed, and didn’t take long. Jeffreys seemed unengaged. I didn’t feel strongly one way or the other. ‘Difficult to get turned on in this cold,’ I said, one morning.
‘I like the heat,’ he replied. ‘Heat’s more erotic.’
He told me almost nothing about his personal life, about his situation before the coming of the snow. ‘You married?’ I asked once, in as offhand a way as I could. ‘Separated? Divorced? Widower?’
‘No,’ he said, and that was all.
I told him various things from my own life and whilst he demonstrated no great interest in these revelations he did not quite discourage me either. I told him about my daughter, and mentioned that she had a girl of her own. ‘You a granny?’ he said at this, and grunted his half-surprise. ‘You don’t look old enough.’ The following day he followed this up with, ‘What happened to the father?’
‘Father?’
‘Of your daughter?’
‘Him,’ I said. ‘I lost touch with him.’
‘Were you married?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We weren’t married.’
He was lying on his back on the carpet, looking straight up. He said: ‘I used to go to Thailand.’
‘Really?’
‘Hot, there. Very nice. Steamy. An annual thing, me and a couple of mates.’ He got up and went through to open another tin. It only occurred to me an hour or so after that this apparent non-sequitur had been Jeffreys talking about his sex life before the Snow. I remember feeling quite startled by the thought of it, and even, for a while, worried: to think of all the sexually-vectored diseases he could have picked up. But when I reflected on the situation it seemed daft to fret. The world had ended, after all. Why worry about anything more personal?
Jeffreys’ occasional trips out of the building came to an end when, with a sort of shuffling noise, the ice-tunnel outside fell in. The little collapse pushed a few cubic metres of granulated snow in through the broken window to pile up like a miniature model of a ski-run. The noise woke Jeffreys, who had been napping under a desk. I had been rereading one of the books we had found (all the books were about the cinema industry; presumably the office had housed a film company, or something similar). He got up and went to examine the window. After standing in front of it for a while he grunted and turned away.
The glass doors in the entrance lobby downstairs opened inwards, and the two of us spent one day trying to undo them. ‘I could just dig through to the block next door,’ he said. ‘There might be more supplies we could find.’
‘Didn’t you already check it out? This block next door?’
‘Sure. There’s a newsagent’s, some offices.’
‘And you cleared them out?’
He didn’t answer this. I understood that it was less a need for supplies and more a simple matter of boredom that inspired him with the desire to break into a new building. But we didn’t open the door; the two of us heaving on the handle shifted it slightly and the whole mass of snow beyond creaked and shuddered, showering dusty white powder through the miniature crack at the top. We hurried back, and up the stairs, hearts pounding.
Eight
Week succeeded week. Jeffreys kept the light on in the main office for hours each day to give the plants light. ‘We need their oxygen,’ he said. I wondered whether gazlight was enough to keep the plants alive. It felt very different to sunlight; a bluer, Hadean quality. But the plants seemed to be lasting; going a little yellower maybe, but still alive. Jeffreys would scoop snow from the broken window and lay it carefully around their stems.
I became convinced that the snow had stopped falling, far above us. I’m not sure where this conviction came from, but I badgered and badgered Jeffreys that we should dig up to the surface and find out. ‘I’ll wait ’til the thaw,’ he said. ‘Til the flood washes up and down Charing Cross Road and the world emerges clean and new. Besides,’ he added, carefully bending back the cut rim of a tin-can with pliers all around its circumference, so he could run his finger around the inside and sop up the last of the food inside without cutting himself, ‘besides, even if it has stopped it’ll be thousands of feet above us. Thousands and thousands. The snow looks as compacted at these windows as it does at the topmost set of windows. Mark my words.’
But I was getting more and more restless. I paced up and down the room, wandered pointlessly up and down the stairway, wasting the torch batteries.
‘When’s it going to stop then?’ I asked, one day.
‘Dunno.’
‘You said before that this building could stand a mile of snow on top of it – is that how much snow you think is going to fall? A mile?’
‘I dunno.’
‘So why did you say a mile, then?’
‘Leave it. Alright, Tira? Just leave it.’
‘What if it’s more than a mile.’
‘What if it is?’
‘How much more? Ten? Fifty?’
‘Leave it, I said, just leave it.’
But I couldn’t leave it. I was the Rat In The Cage. I went round and round. How deep will the snow get? How long will it keep snowing? Where has all this snow come from? ‘You’re like a kid, you know?’ Jeffreys yelled at me one day. ‘On and on and on. Give it a fucking rest, will you?’
But we were too far gone to conciliate one another. ‘You give it a fucking rest,’ I shrilled. ‘Don’t take that tone with me – I’m only trying to think of the future, of how we get out of this mess.’
‘Maybe we don’t,’ he barked back. His face had gone red. ‘You think of that? Maybe we’re going to die. You’re certainly going the right way about killing me, and no mistake. So we’re both going to die and I’m glad.’
We shouted and yelled at one another for quarter of an hour, although no blows were struck. After the fight we both curled up under different desks and went to sleep, worn out with our bickering. For a day or two after such fights we would be wary of one another, and then we would fall back into easier habits. Then another fight would brew, and the words would come flurrying out in their petty tempests.
‘Even if it lay five miles thick,’ I said one day, ‘there would still be mountains and high grounds poking above the snow. Wouldn’t there?’
‘Doubt it,’ said Jeffreys. He didn’t say anything else. This was one of his traits I was finding increasingly annoying, the way he would speak gnomically and then not explain. So I pressed him.
‘Why? Why d’you doubt it?’
‘The terrain is up and down, I agree,’ he said. ‘But if the snow is falling everywhere, then it’ll just lie unevenly over the world. Your mountain might be ten miles high, but it’d still have several miles of snow over it. Your lowlands would have the same amount.’ He was playing with a cigarette, drawing out the foreplay with the tiny tube.
‘But the oceans would be clear,’ I pressed, unsure why I was so eager to prove this point.
‘Unless they froze. Think of the polar ocean, the what’s-it-called Arctic Ocean. That was frozen over. Maybe all the world’s oceans are like that now, frozen with bergs and smothered with snow.’
‘You have to be so down, don’t you?’ I cried out, the anger buzzing out from god knows where. ‘It would kill you to be even a little optimistic.’
‘Don’t start,’ he retorted.
‘You�
�re like death, you’re the figure of death himself,’ I said. ‘You’re dragging us both down. Bastard, bastard.’
‘Don’t blame me – I fucking saved you.’
‘Wish you hadn’t.’
‘A-men to that.’
‘And so selfish,’ I went on. My voice was rising into uncontrollable levels. ‘You must have smoked a hundred fags since we got here and you’ve offered me none at all.’
He looked startled at this, as well as angry. ‘I,’ he said, hiding his cigarette inside his fist as if ashamed of it. ‘I gave you one, you cow,’ he said. ‘Last week, or before. You begged and begged and I gave you one then.’
‘One,’ I said, furious. ‘One! And you only gave me that because I had sex with you.’
‘It wasn’t worth it,’ he yelled.
‘Well I shan’t bother you again,’ I called, stung into a feeble sarcasm.
I slept that night in the office above, but it was less comfortable because all the light, the minuscule heat and the food was downstairs. The next day I came down, and we spent a day of surly silence. After that we started exchanging pleasantries again, and soon enough we were back to normal. Except that the normality was constantly simmering, ready to break out into another fight.
Dark, dark, dark.
Let’s say I was there for a year. It might have been less; it was probably longer. I don’t know. After a while you become bored with being bored, the monotony achieves its own tenor of variety. Jeffreys ran out of cigarettes and spent a long time in a torpid state, unresponsive and depressed. When he came out of this, it was with startling bursts of energy. He concocted a plan to dig a roofed tunnel, making use of the objects in the office. ‘We could use the chairs and the desks,’ he said. ‘They might not hold out for ever, but they’d be good for a while.’
‘You’re bored,’ I observed.
‘I thought you wanted out of here.’
In fact I wanted that escape so desperately that I did not dare name it to myself. Instead of facing that fact I sulked in the corner, rereading one of the cinema books again and again by gazlight, whilst Jeffreys pranced about the office like a goat. All the books in the office were about cinema, or about education. I don’t know why.
Jeffreys wasn’t a reader. ‘Time to turn out the light,’ he said. ‘We’re going through the tins at a fearful rate.’
‘But the plants,’ I said. ‘They could do with more light.’ And, indeed, they were starting to die, going sepia and brown and losing their leaves. I didn’t care about the plants. I wanted the light for myself. I was a plant myself.
Jeffreys gave the plants another ten minutes.
Let’s say we were there for a year. The plants died, all of them. ‘I don’t understand it,’ said Jeffreys, muttering in the dark. ‘We ought to be asphyxiating.’
‘Maybe we are,’ I replied.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, we ought to be dead. We ought to have breathed all the oxygen in here. Where’s the oxygen coming from?’
I didn’t know where the oxygen was coming from. I didn’t know if it was coming from anywhere.
‘We can’t wait around here to be suffocated,’ Jeffreys said. ‘I’m going to start digging. Maybe we can break out and up, get to the surface. At the very least we’ll need to dig to a new building – there’ll be air in other buildings. Maybe we can go from building to building, breathing the air, like bottled air.’
‘The plants have been dead for months,’ I said. ‘We must have already asphyxiated. We must already be dead.’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he fretted. ‘It can’t be months – that must be an illusion. We’d die. Where’s the oxygen coming from?’
I still can’t answer his question.
Jeffreys became agitated about his tunnel. He had to start the tunnel now, he said. I didn’t see the urgency. We’d been there, in the dark, for so long. There were only a few canisters of gaz left, and the batteries had long since expired. We tried to bring power back to the batteries by warming them in our armpits and tucked into our groins. This brought us a few extra minutes of power, but it wasn’t a trick we could repeat too many times. Eventually they refused to be resuscitated. Jeffreys insisted that we ration the remaining gaz canisters. He took a lamp upstairs to illuminate his digging of the escape tunnel.
Dark.
He didn’t start digging at the window he had originally broken through – superstition, perhaps. Instead he went up to the top office and broke a window with a chair. He had a little shovel, originally a gardening implement I think, with which he cleared away the packed snow outside, and started hollowing out a space large enough to fit a chair in.
I went up from time to time to watch him do this, but I was going through a depressed phase myself (I think), and mostly I lurked on the second floor in the dark. A week passed. ‘You should help,’ he told me. ‘Those tins won’t last forever.’ And indeed the supply of tins was starting to come to an end; another canister of gaz was sputtering to a halt. But I didn’t care. I had no energy in my system at all. I went downstairs and slept. I woke thirsty. When we needed a drink, we usually scooped snow from the broken window into a metal mug and heated it, but lately we had decided we couldn’t afford the heat, so I munched miserably at gum-chilling ice for a minute or so. I sat in one of the wheeled office chairs and stared at the pattern of wall-tiles until the lines started creeping and twitching in my weary eyes, and the light finally went out. I toyed with a tin of beans for half an hour, wondering whether to open it.
Eventually I began to think it odd that Jeffreys had not come down. Making my way up the stairs involved a conscious effort at each step, boredom, not exhaustion, making the climb interminable. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen the colour green in a very long time. The office walls were white, the carpeting a deep blue that looked black in the half-light in which we lived. There were orange and red and purple objects, plastic devices and pictures here and there, but I could not remember seeing anything green. But that was absurd: there must have been something green in one of the many illustrated books I had read so many times. There must. Mustn’t there? A photo of grass, or trees, something? Was it (I was physically straining my mind, trying to remember) that the inks in the colour process made the green look more aquamarine? Dark green, conifer green, bottle-green. But what about the bright green of sunlit lawns? The uncomplicated green? The way my mind was then, I could almost have believed that this colour had been banished from the world forever.
In the topmost office I found Jeffreys lying on his front. His breath was coming in steam-like little hisses, and when I bent over him I could hear that he was swearing on every whispery indrawn breath: fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
‘What happened?’
‘Stupid fucking thing,’ he gasped. ‘Fell off the chair.’ I looked behind him, and saw that he had placed one chair on a desk, the better, I supposed, to be able to fiddle around with something on the ceiling.
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Let me help you up.’
But when I tried to lift him he howled like a beast in pain. I was so startled that I dropped him and flinched back. ‘What is it? What is it?’
‘Leg,’ he gasped. ‘Hip. Leg. Dunno.’
‘Oh Jesus,’ I said. ‘Is it broken?’
‘Fucking stupid,’ he panted. ‘So fucking stupid. The chair slipped. The desk, slippy, or. Something. Fuck. Fell off, like. Stupid.’
‘Let me try and roll you over,’ I said.
He howled again and again as I shifted him, but as he screamed he flopped over onto his back. I couldn’t see anything wrong with his leg, but that was because it was so bulked up with the layers of winter clothing.
‘D’you know,’ he hissed, ‘first aid?’
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘I was working in the Abbey National when the Snow came. First aid was no big requirement for my job.’ I was thinking that he couldn’t have fallen that far, that he couldn’t have done that much damage. He had put a chair on top of a desk, and stood on
top of that. But how far was that to fall? Six feet?
‘Got to do,’ he gasped. ‘Something.’
‘Do we have any painkillers?’ I asked. But I knew the answer to this question already. Jeffreys had not salvaged any when gathering his supplies together; we had found a half-used first aid box in one of the offices, but the only paracetamols inside had been gobbled months ago to counter an intermittent bout of Jeffreys’ toothache. And what good would paracetamol be, anyway, for a broken limb?
‘We should splint it. Can you get downstairs, do you think?’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Let me have a look at it.’ I took off his shoes, fumbling with the chilly, wormy laces, and drew down the snow-trousers that were the outer layer of his legwear. Each shift in the material made Jeffreys wince, or shout out in agony. I tried pulling down the second layer, the canvas trousers he was wearing underneath, but the massed-up bulk of the snow-trousers got in the way. In the end I had totally to remove the outer trousers to get the canvas pants down, and then take those off to get the inner jogging-pants down. Finally, Jeffreys was lying on the carpet, cursing, more naked than I had ever seen him; his legs were white, with twig-shaped blue veins running up and down. At the top of his left thigh, just below his underpants, was a bruise, the size of a fist. The area was swollen, and a comma-shaped protuberance was visible at its centre, poking up underneath the skin like a thorn. I didn’t want to think that this was a splinter of leg bone propping up the skin from within. The very thought of that made me feel queasy, dizzy. I told myself that it couldn’t be, that he hadn’t fallen far enough. That his hip would have been cushioned by his clothes. But the evidence was there, unmistakeable. The bone had broken to put up a little spike that lifted bruised skin like a tentpole.
