by Adam Roberts
‘A weasel? Have you changed your mind, dear? Well, looking at it again, if I squint my eyes a little, I suppose it’s a weasel. The long neck and the small head are weaselly, I suppose, and those legs do look rather tiny. That camel-hump could be the weasel bending, wriggling into a hole. Yes, I see what you mean.’
‘Are you trying to provoke me? I said that it looks like a whale!’
‘Oh, a whale now, is it? Well, if we imagine one of those whales with the long snout, that could be what the neck was, and that curved back you thought was camel-humpish could be the whale flexing in the water, yes, I see it.’ And so on.
I remember when we lived in a flat in Hounslow, my father used to raise his voice, and my sister and I would huddle together, frightened at the noise. He used that phrase several times: woman, must you contradict me? But our mother was always able to placate him.
I think my heart responded to something else about this speech in Hamlet. It was the implied progression, not a logical progression but somehow intuitive and profound, from camel to weasel to whale, therefore I shall come to my mother by-and-by. As if some symbolist, irrational truth linked these three creatures and brought me back to the family, to home, to the mother. Desert beast, wetland beast, ocean beast, and home. Dry, moist, wet. A thawing of the snow; a transformation from desert to ocean. Clouds drifting before my eyes and cavorting like a carnival of animals. Home. It’s all memory, you see, memory and remembrance and memorialising.
A Sunday. I wandered the empty streets, through the sunlight and the lightly falling snow. Snow from a clear blue sky. Drifts of snow everywhere, over every building like white camel-humps. The compound buildings looked draped with white sheets, as if the owners of the town had gone away for a two-month holiday and had not wanted dust to accumulate in the upholstery during that time. The sense of emptiness was absolute.
At the compound edge, looking over the wall, I stared at the wilderness outside town. The snow lay like light petrified, like white light solidified as it fell on everything. Is this what God looks like? That was an appropriate Sunday thought, wasn’t it? Cold Heaven, and the sound of hymns sung coming from inside the compound church, the sound of piano and guitar chords holding wavering voices together like stitching on cloth. I walk towards the building, wander along its side-wall and turn the corner. The street is empty. New snow has blurred the outlines of the older footsteps, melting them to a cobbled vagueness, and eventually to flatness again. I am the only person in the compound not in church. I had weaselled out of attendance by claiming I was a Hindu, but I’m not, and they didn’t really believe me anyway, and I didn’t see how I could keep them at bay for much longer. Hymnal melodies rose through the air as the snowflakes came sparsely down.
Six
Let me tell you about [Blank] and about my affair with him. That is, after all, the main point of this document I’m writing here. That’s what you want to know about, isn’t it? Let me get to it: plots against the government, terrorist action, war and destruction raining down. My suntan, and the baleful effect it has had on my life.
Here, to begin with, is a little study in contrasts. One time I asked Crow, as we were eating supper together (tinned asparagus and a drift of white rice like a snowfall on the plate): ‘Is it true what they say about Australia?’
‘What do they say,’ he replied, his eyebrows curling in suspicion, like those diacritical marks that sometimes go over the letter ‘n’ in Spanish, ‘about Australia?’ (what are those little marks called? I can’t remember).
‘I’d heard that parts of the southern hemisphere—’ I started.
‘Where did you hear that?’ he interrupted me.
I was startled by his brusqueness.
‘Now listen,’ he said. ‘That’s a rumour. That’s started by subversives, and terrorists.’
‘OK,’ I said slowly. I felt an inappropriate urge to laugh. He looked so serious, so intense suddenly. There hadn’t been any razors for a week, and his old razor had gone blunt, so the beginnings of a beard were peppering his chin and upper lip. And his eyebrows were pursed, like a petulant child. What are they called, those funny little curvy accents that go over the ‘n’ in Senor and words like that, to make the ‘n’ into ‘ny’ – is it tilde? Or cedilla? Mañana, man[y]ana. That’s what his eyebrows looked like.
‘The government is clear, the IP made a speech specifically on this subject. Right? The snow is general, over the whole globe. The depth of snow varies, of course. But the snow is general.’
‘Right,’ I said.
There was an awkward moment of silence.
‘And,’ I said, looking at my plate, ‘it was started by a Russian environmental disaster, yeah?’
‘That’s right,’ he said, quickly. ‘It started in Siberia, and snowballed over the world. It was a Russian disaster. The deregulated Russian nuclear industry.’
‘Snowballed,’ I said, pushing my fork through my meal. ‘That’s funny. You’re a funny guy.’ He glowered, he was silent. It wasn’t a comfortable moment.
That was my husband.
Now, here’s a version of a conversation I had with [Blank] on the same subject.
‘Have you heard,’ I asked him, ‘the rumours about Australia?’
He looked instantly suspicious, but in a quite different manner from Crow. He glanced about him, like a central-casting actor playing paranoid. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’d heard a rumour,’ I said, ‘that some parts of the southern hemisphere weren’t so badly snowed under. Maybe that they weren’t snowed under at all.’
[Blank] looked at me. ‘Listen, Tara,’ he said. ‘I’m going to trust you, OK? I’m going to ask you, first: did you say that because your husband set you up to say that to me?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘That’s OK. I’m going to trust you, alright?’
‘You can trust me,’ I said.
‘I heard that rumour. I heard more. It’s the truth.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Large bunches of southern Africa are free of snow. Southern Peru. Pretty much the whole of Australia. And a whole lot of ocean. All snow-free. That’s what I heard.’
‘Jesus,’ I said, my heart sparkling with hope and excitement and perhaps fear. ‘And there are people down there?’
‘Sure. I mean the climates have changed, so the societies down there are bound to have changed too. It could hardly be otherwise. It’ll be much colder than it was, and crops and so on will have a hard time growing. But I heard that the Australian government is still pretty much in control, that Australia is pretty much the way it was before the snow.’
‘Christ,’ I said.
‘They’re fishing – the cold-water fish are now swimming at much lower latitudes, and I heard there are big cod and other fish to be fished off the Australian coast. They’ve got rainfall now in their deserts, and they’re growing wheat. Imagine it! Real bread, real fish!’
‘Christ,’ I said. ‘This is fantastic news. Why are we struggling along here? Why don’t we all just go down there?’
‘Hush,’ he said. ‘You got to be quiet. The official line is that only subversives talk about Australia being snow-free.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘What’s the story? Why don’t they come and get us?’
‘They? Australians? They got in communication with the NUSA government, that’s what I heard, and we told them to stay well away. We’ve got a whole lot of military hardware still, don’t forget. If the Australians sent a jumbo up here, it could easily get shot down.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘We’re barely keeping alive up here. Barely keeping alive. Why wouldn’t we want help from Australia, or anywhere still snow-free? Why wouldn’t we want to just go there?’
‘Think about it,’ said [Blank]. ‘If this was widely known, then that’s exactly what would happen. Everybody not under direct military orders would simply go south. The government wouldn’t have anybody
to govern. They’d lose all their power. They’re a government – power is their reason for being. They don’t want to sacrifice that. And, listen to me, Tara.’ He gripped my shoulders with his hands and looked into my eyes. ‘Listen to me. You may be [Blank]’s wife, but that won’t necessarily protect you if you start blurting this all around town. OK? They’ll lock you up, I wouldn’t put it past them to execute you. So you – be – discreet – OK?’
‘OK,’ I said, my head buzzing. My heart was slapping at the inside of my ribs.
Hope. It was a lot to take in. In the earlier stages [Blank]’s own certainty was contagious. Or perhaps, if I am to be more honest, it was, on my part at least, a sort of nostalgia. There was something deliciously old-world about his anti-government paranoia. It reminded me of the way things had been before the snow, of the sorts of people I would sometimes encounter in pubs or via friends. The revolutionary socialists, the conspiracy addicts, the aliens-Roswell people, the Queen’s-a-lizard people. There was that addictive element of blame about it: that’s an almost sensual pleasure if it is indulged at the right level, with the right degree of emotional investment. I’d like to blame my dad for getting asthma and dying. Sweet. The problem is that I can’t persuade myself to think that it was actually his fault. What can you say? I’d like to blame Minnie for – no, actually, I’d rather not talk about that right now.
Let’s leave that subject well alone.
This is one of the things [Blank] said: ‘the government are responsible, yes? It’s their fault. Of course they’re going to cover that up – that’s what governments do when they’re culpable for some giant crime.’ Even at the time I thought that was classic anti-government paranoia, of the sort that inadvertently grants the government super-competency, super-rationality. Faced with the situation in which they find themselves, of course the government has covered it up, they’d be mad not to. Or – to take the first statement. ‘The government are responsible’; just the way that is put folds together ‘it is the government’s fault’ and ‘the government are capable’. Who, after all, would want an irresponsible government? Not even a conspiracy theorist – in fact, especially not a conspiracy theorist – would want that. By positioning the government as being in charge of a disaster you are still unwittingly presenting the government as being in charge. And being in charge is all that matters to a government.
But [Blank]’s enthusiasm was thrilling, in its way. I was caught up. He told me that the snow was not, no indeed, not the consequence of Russian nuclear incompetence, but of the US government prosecuting some secret project, some new technology that went wrong. He wasn’t sure what this technology was, but he was sure it existed. He was as certain of the personal complicity of all seven members of the Senate as a geocentrist is that the sun circles the earth. ‘There’s a scientist called G S Seidensticker,’ he told me. ‘I’ve never heard the name,’ I replied. ‘No?’ he said. ‘He’s pretty famous, for a scientist.’ ‘I guess I don’t know my scientists,’ I said. ‘I guess you don’t,’ he said.
We were naked as we had this conversation.
[Blank] did not know precisely what this Seidensticker had done, or how it had brought about the Snow, but he was certain that it was something culpable, some military-governmental project that had horribly backfired. I would ask him, how can you be so sure? He would look at me with an almost-pitying face, and then he would hurry on with his theory. ‘There are a number of secret official documents,’ he said, ‘that make plain Seidensticker’s part in this catastrophe.’
‘Is he still alive?’
‘Sure he is. Still alive and still working for the government.’
‘Why not go and ask him?’
‘Well,’ said [Blank], ‘for one thing, he lives in New LA’. He pronounced it ‘newla’, the way people were starting to do then. ‘For another he’d deny it all, of course he would. He’s the government’s man.’
‘I guess so,’ I said, rather admiring the way [Blank]’s theories presented a smooth, impermeable roundness to inquiry. They could have been wholly true, or wholly false, but there was no place where they could be tested and checked. There was no getting through his intellectual armour. It was the same with everything he said. But, I reminded myself, this fact in itself was not enough to render his theories invalid.
However much we talked about conspiracies and government complicity and culpability and so on, I never got [Blank] pinned down on what practical good was going to come of it. Say the government were exposed, and the remaining population of the seven cities rose up and overthrew them – then what? Maybe we’d all trek down to the Australia that became, with each of [Blank]’s mentions of it, more and more like a terrestrial paradise. Maybe there was something about the technology that would mean we could reverse the Snow, if only we could find out what it was. He believed that secrecy was the evil. I don’t know how much I agreed with him, but it was a more entertaining mode of living than the drudge of reality. Besides, it was undeniable that at least one impossible thing had happened – the Snow itself, I mean. Given that unnatural, or supernatural, or quintessentially natural (I’m not sure) impossible phenomenon, other impossibilities became more, not less, likely.
[Blank] and I became lovers. I mentioned that already. At least one person I’ve spoken to thought it an unlikely pairing, but I don’t think it is. He was older, it’s true, and less able to offer a woman the status or privileges some other men might have offered. But he was one of the few men unawed by my status as Crow’s wife. And the energy of his beliefs, as well as the fact of those beliefs being secret, drew me to him.
He was, then, in his forties, or maybe his early fifties, with a large, well-inhabited face. Regular features, and eyes with a zing of sharp blue, but a nose more proboscoid than aquiline, and jowls that sagged like little saddlebags. His eyebrows were finger-thick over each eye, and both ended in the middle of his forehead with two little upward poking thorns of hair, like smudgy sketches of worry lines over the bridge of his nose. His ears protruded markedly. I quite liked this feature. When he stood with the sun behind him they would glow red-pink, their flattened upward-pointing ovals somehow accentuating the line of his smile, catching and mimicking the curve of the corners of his mouth. His hair, which he kept cut very close, had retreated to the sides of his head, leaving a tongue-shaped stretch of pink scalp from eyebrows to the top of his crown. This area of skin was often ruddy, or flaking slightly, with aftermath of sunburn. Sunburn was extremely common in NUSA. Suncream was dug out of the mines often enough, but people seemed not to use it. It was as if, deep down, nobody believed the sun could burn them with so much snow and cold around.
[Blank]’s was not, then, a face that could ever strike you as handsome, but it was the sort of face you felt comfortable looking at, which meant that it was the kind of face with which you could – conceivably – fall in love. You know? An expressive face, mobile and full of feeling. A pillow of a face, not like Crow’s sharp, die-cast features.
I knew [Blank] for nearly half a year before anything happened between us. First he let me into his secret world, his conspiracy theories, and we would sometimes meet and talk about that. Only later did we become lovers. I remember asking him, once: ‘Don’t you ever wonder about the clouds?’ That looks like a ridiculous question, written down, but it’s the sort of thing that pillow talk dignifies with significance.
His room, that tiny room; those tinny walls, those squared-off corrugations in the metal. Moisture used to freeze in dribbles as it ran down the grooves.
‘Meteorology,’ he said, gruffly. ‘Meteorology,’ he repeated, as if by saying the word he was pinning clouds down, fixing them. ‘Not my thing, not my tha-a-a-ang,’ he said, pulling himself up in his skinny little bed, into which we were both crumpled. ‘Clouds. They’re a kind of smoke, aren’t they?’
‘Smoke,’ I said.
‘But you know,’ he added. ‘That doesn’t settle the answer, does it? I mean, what’s smoke? Particles in air.
But everything, if you think about it, is particles in air. Air is particles in air.’ He liked that, and chuckled to himself. ‘You might say that that just shuffles the answer one notch along. What is smoke, after all?’ He said this as if the question had struck him for the first time. ‘What is it? Why does it sometimes rise straight up? Why, on a cool morning, does wood smoke sink into the hollows?’
‘Stop it,’ I said, happy-chidingly, pulling myself up beside him. ‘You’re giving me the yen for a cigarette.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘cigarettes. Been a long time since I saw any of them around. You know? Man, I’d kill for a smoke.’
‘It’s surprising,’ I said, ‘that they don’t pull more cigarettes out of the food-mines. I mean, there must be millions of packets sitting around down there. You could surely dig along any former high-street and go into any former little shop, and see racks and racks of the things.’
‘Tara,’ he said, smiling at my childish ignorance. ‘Of course the miners come across cigarettes. They come across them all the time. But they’re under secret government orders not to bring them back.’
‘Secret government plots?’ I said. ‘Again?’
‘Don’t mock, it’s an example of the larger pattern. On a trivial level, but it’s the same thing. The government thinks it unhealthy to smoke, and its instinct is – secretly, of course – is to act out its puritanical impulse on all of us. They were always that way, with drugs for instance, only now they control the supply. It’s another aspect of their fascism.’ He was always at least half serious when he talked like this.
Later, returning to Crow’s apartment – my and Crow’s apartment, I should say – I found myself thinking about it. It seemed to me more plausible that a government would act out this sort of petty denial on its people than the grandiose world-destroying plots [Blank] was always going on about. I cooked food, and was in the middle of eating it when my husband came in. Crow, my husband.
‘The other half of this,’ I said, pointing to the soup in my plate, ‘is in the pan, on the stove. You want?’
