The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  I felt my shrunken stomach spasm. It was horrible.

  ‘What could I use as a splint?’ I said, in a forced, breezy tone of voice to distract myself. ‘Chair leg?’ But the chairs were all metal and plastic.

  ‘Jesus,’ Jeffreys was saying. ‘Jesus, fuck.’

  ‘What do you think?’ I pressed. But I was losing him. Maybe, I thought, distantly, he was in some sort of shock. The pain must have been terrible. I stood up and paced around the office in an unfocused way. I thought of pulling down one of the neon-lights from the ceiling, half-thinking that I could break splints from the square plastic casings. Then I thought of breaking up a desk drawer, of using the wooden sides to one of the drawers. I went down the stairs to the second floor, because the two of us had started breaking up the furniture the week before in anticipation of our using up the last of the gaz-fuel. I’d had the vague idea of preparing a supply of burnable material to make an actual fire, although Jeffreys had forbidden it, scolded me, told me that without a chimney we’d asphyxiate ourselves. I think I didn’t really care. ‘We should have asphyxiated anyway,’ I said.

  But I didn’t make the fire.

  I selected two or three pieces, and ran back up the stairs. But I had no idea how to splint even the simplest break; let alone a complicated fracture up near the hip, or possibly of the hip itself. I dropped the fragments of wood beside Jeffreys and went down again to retrieve the first-aid box we had found. It still contained some bandages and plasters, which I supposed would be useful. I ran back up again. Then it occurred to me that I ought to fetch up the campingaz. It was our last tin, and only had an hour or so of use left in it, but it occurred to me that I ought to make Jeffreys some tea. ‘Hot sweet tea,’ I said to myself as I went down the stairs again, a mantra. ‘Hot sweet tea.’ It was stupid, really, because we had neither tea nor sugar; but I scooped out some snow and gathered up the little cooker. I was halfway up the steps when I thought to bring some beans as well, that he should have some food, so I left my stuff on a step and went down again for a tin.

  When I finally emerged at the top again Jeffreys had stopped breathing. I dropped all the material I was carrying with a clatter and rushed to bend over him, but his naked legs were cold as any stone, and his face had settled into a sort of icy grimace. I tried pumping his chest, not sure what I was doing, but it made no difference.

  Eventually I gave up, and sat in one of the office chairs looking down at his body. I tried to work out whether he had died of the break, the pain, the cold, but there was no way to know. I think, maybe, that the pain had over-stimulated his heart. I have talked to doctors, subsequently, and they said it could have been that. The pain would have produced a lot of adrenalin in his blood-system and the adrenalin would stimulate his heart, and this might kill him, because his heart wasn’t really very strong. He had smoked all his life, after all. Sometimes, though, I think that it was my stripping his legs bare that did him, because it was so very cold in that place. I’d prefer not to think that, because I would prefer not to think I was so directly responsible for killing him. But who can tell?

  Nine

  I went through a phase of wanting, with an animal desperation, to be out of that place, to be away from Jeffreys’ dead body. I couldn’t bear it. He was a much more potent presence in the building dead than he had been alive. I don’t know why this should be. For a day I lurked on the second floor, carrying the cooker and the beans back down with me. I used up more precious heat to boil some water, I ate the beans I had been going to take up to him, but all the time I was aware of him – up there – pressing down on the floor as if it were my skull. I imagined him magically swollen in size, his corpse so huge it stretched from one side of the building to the other, his hands as big as desks, the veins on his legs big as hoses. Like that scene in Alice in Wonderland. Or is it Looking Glass? – where she zooms up in size inside the room and her foot goes up the chimney? You know the bit I mean. I fantasised that Jeffreys’ body had grown like that. I’m not sure why. It created this sense of morbid wonder in my head. I lay under a desk, but the thought of the dead body was palpable. I imagined it bruising all over with the slow violence of decay, imagined its skin going black and olive and cyan, filling like an air bag with corruption from within, but infinitely slowly. I tried to sleep, but the more I thought about it the larger the body became in my imagination, until it was packed impossibly into every corner and crevice of the top floor, grown like a sea cucumber of prodigious dimensions. Lowering over me like a black cloud, threatening what unspeakable storm I could not say.

  Eventually, after maybe twelve hours of fretting and scaring, I crept back upstairs. I turned on the lamp with trembling fingers. Jeffreys was still there, still normal size, his skin white as paper, his face stuck in a slightly uncomfortable expression. It was almost an anticlimax.

  I tried leaving the body there, but it continued to prey on my imagination. Eventually, summoning my courage, I moved it to the top-floor toilet, dragging it through and leaving it lying on the floor by the window. That reduced its presence in my thoughts to a certain degree, although I still woke from clammy gelatinous dreams.

  One morning I snapped. I couldn’t bear it any more. I went to the broken window on the second floor and started scrabbling at the snow with Jeffreys’ little shovel. I didn’t have anything planned clearly in my head. I probably thought of digging clear through to the surface – impossible, of course – just to see the sunlight once again, just to feel the sun on my skin before I died. The thought of simply giving up and lying in that mausoleum with Jeffreys was obnoxious to me. To lie there in the cold for ever and ever?

  No.

  But the snow had packed so hard that I could barely dent it. On some level I think I realised that this meant the weight of total snow must have been very great, and that accordingly the snow must have fallen to a very great height above me. But I was crying, with the frustration, and with the effort of cracking the shovel at the bulging wall of white like an axe. A small quantity of tiny fragments flew off the ice with every blow, like sparks, but after an hour of digging I had made so little progress that I gave up in self-disgust.

  When I was a little calmer, the following day, I tried to cultivate a philosophical frame of mind. I told myself that a thaw might still come; that one day I would hear the ice cracking, and see it run away as water down the glass in fat rivulets, and see the sun shining brightly through. This, I said, was surely going to come. There had been a million snowfalls in the history of the planet, I said to myself, and a million thaws. How could this one snowfall, the million-and-first snowfall that I had experienced, be the single exception to this universal, planetary rule? It was impossible that this would be the case. All I had to do was wait until the thaw, and then I could go back to my ordinary life. I did not dwell too completely on how this ordinary life might be changed – how many people had died – how much had gone forever. Instead I told myself stories about the strange escapes that my various friends had made from the catastrophe. Improbable though it all was, I needed the fiction. I fantasised about meeting up with them again after the thaw, about sitting in a pub with a glass of wine and a cigarette and laughing at the absurdity of it all.

  Then, some mornings, I would weep at the futility. I would cry those sorts of tears that squeeze out between reluctant eyelids, whilst the side of the hand is pressed between the lips to stifle the sobs. There was never going to be a thaw, and everything was finished, and that was that. I vacillated between the two states. The most likely fate I ignored, mostly: even with the food wholly to myself, even without Jeffreys eating half the store, my supply of food was running low. Soon I would be without light or food or heat, and soon after that I would fall asleep with starvation and cold in the dark and not wake up. But I didn’t think about that.

  I slept more than I had before. I put the one remaining lamp on its lowest setting to reread all the printed matter in the office, with a bizarre avidity: everything I could find, from bo
oks about cinema to accounts documents and inventories, going through the lists of things as if my life depended on checking each thing and memorising every number. The food ran out. I had been on starvation rations for a while, so the cessation of eating did not strike me with any too pronounced pangs, although it was uncomfortable. And still the hoped-for thaw did not come. And two days after I wiped clean the food from the last tin, just two days later (as if on cue), the building shivered.

  First a noise, a sort of soft groaning. Then silence. Then the noise again, and I noticed that a sheen of ice particles on one of the desks was trembling slightly. At first I thought it was an earthquake. Then, my heart thudding, I thought perhaps the weight of snow had built up to the level where the entire building was going to be collapsed. I leapt up, uncertain how to meet my fate. Being squashed out of existence in one push downwards. I wanted it not to happen, it horrified me; and in exactly the same motion I wanted it to happen, I wanted to rush to embrace it.

  There was a crack and a crash from upstairs, and I could barely control my trembling legs as I rushed up the stairway with the lamp turned up bright. The third and fourth floors were empty, but in the fifth floor Jeffreys was standing, swaddled in strange gear. I called out ‘You’re dead,’ or something, I don’t really remember what. Then I noticed that the figure was not Jeffreys at all. He pulled back a visor from his head-hugging helmet and I saw it was a young man with bright blue eyes.

  It was a shock. I had forgotten how other people looked, it had been such a long time. The shock was so profound that I started laughing.

  Ten

  This was the captain. He didn’t tell me his Christian name, he said ‘call me the captain’. The first thing he said was, ‘Jesus my Saviour, there’s somebody alive in here.’

  From behind him came whoops of disbelief. He had emerged from a tunnel cut in the ice, taller and broader than any tunnel Jeffreys had ever cut. It took a few moments for me to piece together all the visual detail my eyes were being presented with after so long in solitary isolation. This figure was carrying a device that looked like a leaf-blower. Over his shoulder another helmeted head emerged.

  ‘Alive?’ said this second figure.

  ‘Who are you?’ I said.

  ‘Jesus my Saviour,’ said the first man. ‘It’s a woman. You a woman?’

  I blinked. ‘I am a woman,’ I said. I pulled the hood from my head. I saw his eyes widen. ‘And a damn pretty one,’ he called back, over his shoulder. ‘Pretty woman. What’s your name, honey?’

  ‘Tira,’ I said.

  The second figure emerged fully from the tunnel, stepping down from the window sill. A third head was visible in the shadows. ‘Never mind that now,’ said the second. ‘Lady, tell me one thing.’

  ‘Who are you?’ I said again.

  ‘Tell me one thing, lady. This the bank?’

  ‘Bank?’

  ‘Bank of London,’ said the second. ‘Bank of England, whatever.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Found a sign, a subway sign, said Charing. Charing’s one step away from the Bankment, according to our maps.’

  ‘The Embankment,’ I said, slowly. My head was chilly, so I pulled my hood up again. ‘That’s not far, but there’s no bank there.’

  ‘So why is it called what it’s called?’ The second figure seemed very cross.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Stupid fucking city.’

  ‘Is this a bank of any kind?’ said the first figure.

  ‘It’s an office.’

  ‘Jesus. How long you been here?’

  ‘I lost count.’

  ‘Alone here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll have a look through,’ said the second figure. ‘You want to take her with us? Better than nothing.’ He bustled past me, and started checking the desks. As I was being helped up the window and into the ice-tunnel beyond I heard him say, ‘I guess we can use some of these computers.’

  ‘How long you been down here, ma’am?’ asked the third figure.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  Still dazed I was led along the tunnel and through a hatch into a low-ceilinged metal chamber. It was all so new, and my mind was so poor at taking it all in, that I barely remember any of the many details, for all that I stared and stared at them. I have a hazy sense of a positively Christmassy profusion of lights, of a sharp stink like a fox’s hole, of a further door through which I was bundled. The first figure introduced himself to me, as the captain, and asked me to sit down on the floor. I sat down. I don’t know how long I was sitting there.

  Eventually the second figure came through, and deposited an armful of stuff from the office. He went out and came back several times, bringing computers, chairs, pens and pencils, paper, ornaments, all sorts of things. He said nothing to me at all, and I watched in a sort of blissful non-comprehension, just sitting in their odd craft.

  Later still the three men in the strange craft started yelling at one another – in anger, I thought at first, until I realised they were simply preparing the craft for cast-off. ‘Doors locked!’ one shouted. ‘Doors locked!’ echoed another, further away. ‘Heating!’ ‘Heating!’ ‘Central fan – check it, Harry.’ ‘Checked!’ And so on. There was a change in pitch of the engines, and a huge shuddering that grew and grew, like a washing-machine on spin-cycle. Then we tilted, tilted back, shifted, and started to creep away.

  I was in some sort of daze. It occurred to me that these people might be the angel of death, might be some new incarnation of the angel of death, and that they had collected me to carry me away to the afterlife. I thought: perhaps the angel of death came with a scythe in the older days of hand-harvesting, and now He comes as a technical crew and a large machine. That’s how muddled up my brain was.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked the captain, when he came through to see how I did.

  ‘Up top,’ he said. ‘You really been down there since the snow started?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So – what? Did you work in that office, or something?’

  I thought about explaining the true state of affairs, but I couldn’t – really – be bothered. It seemed unnecessarily messy. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Man. That’s some survival. How you last that long? What did you do for food? For air?’

  ‘We stockpiled some tins,’ I said, vaguely. ‘Air, I don’t know. I don’t know how we managed.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘There was this other guy.’

  The captain seemed hugely interested and energetic to my tired perceptions. ‘Other guy,’ he said. ‘Really? Work colleague? Husband?’

  ‘Friend.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We did find this, like, body in the rest-room,’ said the captain. ‘That him?’

  I nodded. For a while we were silent. The conversation had taken place at an exaggerated volume, because the engines of this strange sub-ice craft were so noisy. After a while, I said. ‘We’re going up top?’

  ‘That’s right. We’re going to the Free World. I guess it’ll all be new to you.’

  ‘The free world,’ I said. ‘It’s still snowing?’

  He laughed at this, and went out through the little door. I stared at the door after him; it was a hatch, not a door. The shuddering and trembling of the walls and floor struck me paradoxically as symptoms of the big chill – I say paradoxically because it was very hot in that little, cluttered space, so much so that I had to take off my coat. The first time I had taken off my coat for the longest time.

  After an hour, or five hours, or perhaps a few minutes, the whole craft gave a lurch and tipped through fifty degrees. I fell along the floor. There was a sort of rubber matting down to provide grip, but the tilt caught me off guard. Then everything stopped. The engine noise shrank to a sort of purr.

  I got to my feet and manoeuvred my way through the hatchway, leaning against whatever might provide purchase. In the cockpit (I assumed
it was the cockpit) the three men were huddled around a tiny screen. There were no windows, and the sense of clutter, the oppressive hot fug was even stronger in here. ‘What’s happened?’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘We’re at the surface,’ said the captain without looking at me. ‘More or less. We’re waiting for our hovercraft to come collect us. Shouldn’t be long now.’

  ‘Did you go to the bank?’ I asked, slightly febrile with the unusual heat and all the excitement.

  ‘Bank?’

  ‘Bank of London, she means,’ said the second figure, the guy who had pushed past me in the office.

  ‘No, we didn’t. We didn’t have the energy to manoeuvre through the streets all the way along. I mean,’ he added, enunciating carefully as if it mattered very much to him that I understand, ‘we found it, we got our map-book and we found where it was, so we can go back another day. But we don’t have unlimited energy to go crawling through the icebound streets. You know?’

  I didn’t know. ‘OK,’ I said, uncertainly.

  ‘We’ll try and book another dive, dig out some new tunnels closer to the site.’

  ‘You want money?’ I said.

  ‘Money, food,’ said the captain. ‘But, whatever, we didn’t manage it. We got some other stuff.’

  ‘Junk,’ grunted the second figure.

  ‘Whatever. Plus we got you.’

  ‘How you mean?’

  ‘He means,’ said the second figure, ‘we went looking for valuables and all we found was you.’ He laughed, obscurely, and then was silent.

  ‘Valuables?’

  ‘Young women,’ said the captain, beaming. ‘They’re valuable in their own right, women, you know.’