The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  Our committee was one of several discussing the construction of permanent tunnels, reaching down through the snow to the resources buried beneath. That was what we were about; that was our big project, part of the bigger project of siting Liberty. We were not the only government committee engaged on this talking-shop work. Given the fact that, of the seven of us, four were wives of senior military officers I’m prepared to wager that we weren’t even the most important. But we did our job. We read documents, and pored over plans, and discussed and discussed.

  The advantages of a permanent tunnel were obvious: we could roll trucks down the ramp, fill up with goodies, and roll them back up again. We could dig them with manpower, mine stuff with manpower, avoid all the breakable electrics and fuel-hungry machinery we were using up to that point. We could up productivity enormously. Of course, it was the problems with our project that were more pressing. We were not talking about digging through a firm substance, such as earth; even when compacted at depth snow is a friable medium, highly sensitive to heat, and at higher levels sensitive to vibration, to sideslip, to many other problems. Do you dig it straight down? Say a thirty-degree angle, straight down, you’re thinking of a tunnel fifteen or twenty miles long. Do you bend it, concertina it down to the ground? Do you curl the tunnel in a helix, to arrive at the place directly beneath you? Liberty had been built by NUSA directly over the site of buried London, but had, it seems, slipped a little out towards the buried Thames estuary. This slippage was common to all the Seven Cities, I was told: some of the ones built in mountainous areas that slipped several kilometres. Snow is not rock, and deforms and moves and slides around underneath you.

  How do you keep the tunnels intact? Do you sheathe them, internally, floor-walls-ceiling, all the way down? What do you use? Wire mesh? Where would you get so much material from? What about tunnel supports for the deeper areas of the mine, where the pressure of so much weight overhead was hundreds of pee ess eye? How do you actually excavate the snow? Dig it out, deposit it on the surface, like old-fashioned mining? Or heat it and pump the water away? How do your miners breathe? Maybe thirty degrees was too steep an incline for fully-laden trucks to make their way up; how about fifteen? Double the length of your tunnel, and of your problems. How about five degrees? How many hours’ drive away would the excavation-face actually be? You’d be surprised how much discussion these questions can provoke in a group of seven where only three of the seven have any actual, technological know-how, but the other four are determined not to seem like wastes of space.

  I’ve mentioned [Blank], the Chair, the man with whom I was soon to begin an affair. A dangerous man. There is one other person on that committee, a woman, I should mention, for she is also important in the story I’m going to tell you. She was called [Blank], and was married to Chief of Staff [Blank], who was a four-star general then, I think, and now is a five-star. Or maybe he was already a five-star? I ought to know. The number of stars that defined her husband, like a recommendation in a guidebook, was a matter of great importance to [Blank]. She used to talk of it often, so it is rather ironic that I can’t remember the details.

  My first day of working on the mine-shaft committee came to an end with this woman catching my eye. ‘Tara,’ she said. Most people called me Tara. I no longer cared. ‘Tara,’ she said. ‘How’s [Blank]? I hear he’s a changed man since you married him – lucky girl, he’s a fine fellow, a good man. A good catch. How is he? How is he? We haven’t seen him since his wedding. Is he well?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve a little coffee,’ she said. ‘Would you like some?’

  Of course I said yes. She might have been the devil herself offering me coffee and I would have said yes.

  So we walked through the compound and back to her apartment. She walked with a self-consciously stately walk, the way a beautiful person walks when they really know that they are beautiful. And [Blank] was certainly very beautiful. She looked the way models looked: tall and pale and slender, with an amazing display of ink-black hair.

  Her husband was an inch (or whatever is the proper mode of measurement) above Crow in the military hierarchy that ran Liberty, and their apartment was accordingly a little plusher than ours, although only in petty ways. A slightly nicer sofa, salvaged from who-knows-which under-snow city. The window in the front room was not plain, but was rather a piece of criss-cross leaded glass. It looked out of place in the white-painted, metal-walled room, like fishnet stocking on a man. The apartment was essentially the same prefab block of metal rooms as my own apartment, the same layout.

  I sat on the sofa. [Blank] brought a small metal pot of coffee from the little kitchen, and poured warm and black-sandy coffee into two cups. It was fantastic to me. I drank, I’m rather ashamed to say, greedily. There was no sugar, but that didn’t matter. The coffeeness of the coffee was like a spike going into my mind. I had to restrain myself from gulping the whole cup in one go. [Blank] sat herself in a chair, slightly higher than my low-slung position, and looked down upon me with a faint smile, almost condescending. But it really didn’t matter. I was swept away by the hit of the coffee. I took a mouthful, and held it behind my teeth for a moment, letting my tongue hang in the middle of the fluid like a blissed-out person in a sensory deprivation tank.

  ‘The troops get coffee every day,’ she was saying to me. ‘That’s where most of the coffee goes.’

  I swallowed. ‘It’s enough to make you want to join the army,’ I said.

  She laughed politely at this, as if it had been a great witticism.

  I finished my coffee.

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ she said, leaning forward a little in her chair. ‘But I think you’re lovely.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, nonplussed.

  She lifted her own cup of coffee and took a dainty sip. ‘Such pretty eyes,’ she said. ‘I can see why [Blank] fell in love with you.’

  I shifted my position. ‘So tell me,’ I said, awkwardly trying to reorient the conversation. ‘How long you been on this committee then? This mine-shaft thing?’

  She smiled again, but I could see her teeth were shut behind her lips. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘weeks. But let’s not talk about work.’

  And, in my head, the caffeine was starting to work its bright-lit magic on my mind. I looked up at her again as if there were some small revelation happening. Her black hair was so sheer, so completely black, so perfectly brushed to fall in an uninterrupted wave to her shoulders that it looked almost as though she was wearing a black scarf over her head.

  ‘I love your hair,’ I said, the coffee pricking a slight extraversion out of me. ‘It’s so black—’

  ‘Not a grey hair,’ she replied with feline smugness. ‘I am glad you noticed. Not one grey hair. I’ve never had a grey hair. Imagine it!’

  I smiled. I wanted to reach out and touch her hair. Its blackness was a kind of perfection. It was more than black. It was the colour of blindness, or of oblivion. I wondered if she dyed it, and then decided that she obviously dyed it, it was too perfect not to be dyed, but then I wondered where she found hair dye nowadays. Or perhaps the colour was real.

  ‘D’you know what?’ she was saying. ‘I never used to believe that people just went grey. Never really believed that. I mean, it’s funny, isn’t it? Hair changing colour. Your eyes don’t start brown and then go grey when you hit forty, do they! Your fingernails,’ (she was looking at her own nails, immaculately purple: ink-dyed, almost certainly, since nail varnish is incredibly hard to come by up here) ‘your fingernails,’ she said, ‘don’t start pink and go, you know – white.’

  I looked obligingly at my own brown nails.

  ‘So why?’ she said. ‘Why should your hair start one colour and go another? It doesn’t really make sense.’ She smiled at me again as if she had spoken some great profundity. ‘What I mean to say,’ she added, with a little spurt of energy, sitting straight up and jerking her hand forward so that it touched my knee, ‘I know people do go
grey, of course. But it is weird when you think about it. Isn’t it? It’s not like you ever see people with, like, half their head grey, at the top, and half, like, black. Do you? Does it mean that hair just, you know, goes grey, like—’ and she lifted her hand from my knee and clicked her fingers. ‘I don’t know,’ she concluded, serenely, sitting back in her chair and smiling at me again.

  I smiled back. I imagined blackness draining from her head. I imagined each hair as a supple transparent quill, filled with black ink, and then I imagined each one broken off at the tip so that the ink poured slowly away, and the whiteness spread slowly from a line along the crown of her head all the long way to the fringe at her shoulders.

  She had a slimline heater mounted on the wall, and she had turned this on when we entered. Another function of her husband’s seniority: we had one in our apartment too, although Crow was too fastidious actually to use it. By the time we had finished our coffees it was warm enough in the room for us to unzip our jackets. She slid herself completely out of her coat, and stretched as if it had been rather constricting inside. She was an extraordinarily thin person. Two small breasts poked like elbows against the fabric of her shirt. The crossbar of her clavicle was very sharply defined against the cling of her skin. Her face was pert, a sharp little nose and a wide mouth under axehead cheekbones. There was nothing fat about her flesh at all; only her hair was fat, a big spread of glorious hair. Her hair, and possibly, in a smaller sense, her eyes; for her eyes were huge, porcelain curves with glistening brown pupils, dark brown sprinkled with shreds of a lighter brown. Only the sweep of her hair and the circles of her wide eyes gave her any sense of female curviness at all.

  ‘You’re so thin,’ I said, I guess still a little addled by the coffee. I had not tasted coffee in weeks, and on the rare occasions when I did get some it was always a plastic instant coffee, not this grittily real brew. ‘You’re so slender,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, blithely, as if that had been the last thing on her mind, although surely she had removed her coat to show off her figure (and she slipped her arms back into the sleeves of the jacket soon afterwards). ‘It’s a drawback, of course.’

  ‘Drawback?’

  ‘In the cold. You’ve no idea how much I’d love to be a fuller-figured woman. Like you are. You know, a little insulation.’ She drew the sides of her open padded jacket closer around her body. ‘It never gets warm here, after all. Never warm. A little insulation would be good, a little padding like you have. But, then again, [Blank] does like me to be slimmer, rather than fatter. I wish he was more like your husband, and preferred a little more body-fat, but what can you do? A wife has a certain duty to please her husband, don’t you think?’

  We chatted for a while. I hated her more and more as the afternoon went on, and yet she seemed to grow fonder and fonder of me. ‘I do so love making new friends,’ she said. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Right – me too.’ Later she said something that struck me: ‘There’s so much rear-end-kissing you got to do, you know? There’re so many people you got to pretend to like, just to get on in this life. You know? If you had any idea how much work it was getting on this committee. It’s nice to meet somebody you can just like for who they are.’ And she took my hands in her hands and gave them a squeeze. Her hands were cooler than mine. I smiled, nodded, but thought to myself that I didn’t understand, that I hadn’t worked at all to get on this committee, I had kissed no rear-ends at all, it had just fallen into my lap. I think it was dawning on me that this committee was a platform from which ambitious people could launch themselves. I didn’t care about that, however. All I cared about at that time was the fact that this woman, this Mrs [Blank] with her extraordinary black hair, was about the most self-centred, vain, bitchily irritating human being I had ever met.

  Our little session came to an end when [Blank], her husband, blundered in. He was a stout man in a blue uniform, with a bald head and a half-startled, half-sneering expression. ‘Uh,’ he said. ‘N’see ya there. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK, darling,’ said [Blank], affecting a southern drawl.

  ‘Didn’t know you had company.’

  ‘Darling,’ said [Blank], standing up, in her usual voice. ‘This is Tara [Blank].’

  ‘Didn’t see ya there,’ he said to me. ‘Sitting down there. Didn’t know my wife had company. Uh.’

  ‘Tara [Blank],’ repeated his wife, with emphasis.

  ‘Uh!’ he said, this time in surprise. ‘You [Blank]’s new wife? That’s fine, is fine to meet you. [Blank]’s talked of you. Said plenty about you.’

  ‘Good things, I hope,’ I said, because I was nervous, and because it’s the kind of thing a person says in that sort of situation. [Blank] looked at me with a little crease of non-comprehension sitting vertically in his forehead.

  ‘Oh he adores you,’ said [Blank], coming round behind her husband and kissing his shoulder. ‘You don’t need to worry there; he loves you. Doesn’t he?’

  But [Blank] was too much the military man to be drawn into such talk. ‘Got to go out on the snow,’ he said, to his wife. ‘’Nother collision, or detonation, or whatever. I was talking to [Blank] just now, but I got to leave him. Come and speak to him whilst I’m away, keep him sweet.’

  ‘[Blank],’ she repeated, with an inflection of happy surprise.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, uh, I know,’ her husband drawled. ‘It’s been hell getting him to come on board with us, and it ain’t done yet. You sweet-talk him, some. I got to go on the snow now, got to go inspect this thing, but you keep talking to him. Tell him about the ticket, but spin it good, yeah? Make it sound like the sort of ticket he wants to join. Uh,’ he added, turning his face towards me as if remembering I was still there. ‘Sorry to break up your tate-a-tate.’

  ‘That’s alright,’ I said.

  ‘You British?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right. Good. Here.’ He had a small piece of card in his fingers, covered with tiny print. I took it.

  ‘He’s a big fool, really,’ said [Blank], apologetically. She stepped away from him and slipped her arm around my shoulder. ‘That’s his election card. He’s only had a hundred printed, so you’re lucky to get one.’

  ‘Pass it on,’ he said, gruffly, ‘to somebody else, when you’ve done reading it.’

  ‘Election?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s running for Senator,’ said [Blank].

  ‘Thinking of running,’ said her husband, looking cross.

  ‘Oh he’ll run,’ said [Blank], knowingly. She steered me to the door.

  ‘Is it politics season around here?’ I asked unwitting. ‘Is it election time? My husband is talking of maybe running for IP.’

  [Blank] froze in her steps. There was silence in the room. It occurred to me that I should not have said what I said.

  ‘He’s never even been Mayor!’ said [Blank].

  ‘—Senator, darling,’ his wife corrected him, with a distracted expression on her face.

  ‘Senator, Mayor, there’s not a [expletive deleted] difference.’

  ‘Bad word!’ shrilled [Blank], in rebuke.

  Her husband shook his head. He was blushing a little. ‘That don’t matter. Tara here’s no prude. That don’t matter, that I swore. Uh, that I swore, slipped out. Uh, what matters is that he – I mean your husband – that he has never run a city. Never sat in the Interim Senate.’ He smiled unconvincingly. ‘Nobody’ll elect him IP without that experience.’

  ‘Nobody will elect you if they find out you’ve got a garbage mouth,’ said [Blank].

  ‘Never mind that kinda thing now.’

  She bridled. ‘I will mind it. You don’t think about these things. But it’s not just soldiers who have the vote, you know. Swearing may be fine and hip in the barracks, but it will alienate the voters. You will stop swearing, you hear?’

  ‘Uh,’ said the chastised husband, as he searched his mental Filofax for my name. ‘Uh, Tara, is he serious, though? Your husband?’ He came over towards me. His
was a bland face, poorly defined, composed of notes towards facial features rather than the features themselves. A blocky nose, bald head, cuphandle ears, a brow that was a vague protuberance rather than a ridge, damp-looking grey eyes. It was as though rough face-shapes had been positioned beneath a soggy white cloth. ‘Uh, Tara. Is he really going for IP?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know, really. Hey, sorry, you know? I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s probably just a, you know, a vague idea. I don’t know.’

  There was a hiatus. Then [Blank] took my arm again and resumed her movement towards the door.

  ‘Anyway, it was lovely to have this chat together. You’ll promise to come for coffee again? Soon?’

  I was out in the street, saying goodbye to her, saying goodbye to him over her shoulder, and then the door shut. I stood there for a while. The sky was cold and as blue as gunmetal over the top of the buildings. Pedestrians had made slush of the snow on the street. I looked down and realised that [Blank] had made a short pavement outside his front door with an old piece of wooden board that must have been salvaged from the food-mines. Despites smears of sludge, the slogan that had been painstakingly and neatly painted on was perfectly legible: 99% of People in Turnworth Say No! to GMO Trials. I thought to myself that a bourgeois coffee-morning had suddenly gaped to reveal depths of realpolitik beneath. I told myself I really didn’t care.

  Five

  [Blank] approached me, seeing me in the main street. ‘Not chairing any meetings today?’ I asked him.

  ‘I only chair your meetings,’ he told me. ‘I only chair that one committee.’