The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Has it gone cold?’ he asked, with a slightly whiny, fastidious tone of voice.

  ‘Tepid, maybe. I heated it five minutes ago. You want I should heat it up again?’

  ‘No,’ he said, wrinkling the bridge of his nose. ‘No, I’ll eat it as is. It’ll be fine as is.’

  He sat next to me, and we ate our meal together, and carried on our strange puppet-show simulacrum of married life together, and he chatted glumly about trivia for a while. Then I said, ‘Did you ever smoke?’

  ‘Smoke?’

  ‘Before the Snow?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. That’s not healthy.’

  ‘I used to,’ I said.

  And there was silence. Thoughts pinged and ponged through my brain. If I had to categorise my thought processes at that time, I guess I could say I thought about proximity. How recently I had been naked and pressed up against a different man from this man, from my husband. I thought about how near [Blank] was, in his little room, a few hundred yards away, a few minutes away. I thought of all the people in the city crammed together, rooms tidied closely up against rooms, boxes against boxes, with the air in common. Cooking smells insinuating their way along ice-glinting side-alleys, and people coming and going, noise, presence, the whole of the city (zooming, in imagination, up into the air) compressing itself into a compact node of multiple humanity in the acres and acres and continents of open white nothingness.

  ‘You alright?’ Crow asked me. ‘You off in your own world there, maybe?’

  ‘Do you think,’ I said, ‘that it’s funny how you can’t buy cigarettes in any shop?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Surely miners must come across cigarettes down below? Don’t they? Why don’t they bring any up? You don’t think,’ I said, ‘that there’s a secret government interdiction against mining cigarettes?’

  ‘Cigarettes?’ said Crow. ‘Well, they’d hardly be the priority of miners, would they. You can’t eat cigarettes, can you?’

  ‘They do sometimes bring up luxury items. They brought up all those pictures, recovered all those pictures from that gallery.’ Many members of the senior staff had benefited from that. Crow had bought a two-yard-wide oil painting from, its tag said, the nineteenth century: Collins’s The Sale of the Pet Lamb. It was hanging in our front room now as we ate; a rural scene of a country mother selling her weeping daughter’s pet to the butcher. I don’t know how much it was worth before the Snow, but I daresay it had once been traded for a deal more than the twenty dollars Crow paid for it.

  ‘That’s hardly the same,’ said Crow, slurping his soup. ‘Man cannot live by bread alone. That’s art, food for the soul, if you see what I mean. That’s hardly the same thing as tobacco. Tobacco’s a drug.’

  ‘So’s wine,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t think there’s an official embargo on tobacco,’ he said. ‘There are probably some shops that sell cigarettes, if you’ve the money for them.’

  ‘They probably sell out as soon as they get stock in,’ I said, dourly.

  Crow shrugged again. ‘The way I look at it,’ he said. ‘The snow has wiped a lot of old habits out. Cigarettes are just one of those things that will go down the dinosaur road. When we get fields of things growing, as God willing we will soon, you don’t think there’ll be any spare space for growing tobacco? Of course not. We’ll be growing food. Better to let it go, to think about other things. We should be thankful to the snow for getting rid of cigarettes for us.’

  Later that night I did a strange thing. I got out of bed in the dark, walked through the flat and out the door into the cold in my night-things. I wasn’t naked, of course; I wasn’t Lady Macbeth. I slept in a long-sleeved top, long johns, night-socks; some nights I even pulled a cap on my head. So I didn’t get immediate frostbite, but it was still ferociously cold. I wasn’t sleepwalking. I just wanted to go outside. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t quite wake up either. And outside the night sky was immensely distant. There were some wall-lights lit in some part of the barracks to my left, staining the night-time with a milky patch of illumination, but there was nothing but blackness to my right, and in that direction the stars were clearly visible. In that direction I could see right through – black being the transparency of night, not its blockage: white being its opacity, not clarity. The chill and the darkness gave the world a deep, deep-sea feel, the blackest of blacknesses. The road outside crunched under my feet. It only took a moment for the cold to come through the material of my bedsocks. A fiery cold. I rocked side to side to shift my weight from my right foot to my left foot and back again. For a long time I was looking down at the ground all around me. I was trying to make sense of the pattern made by starlight on the glitter of the night frost, orange sparkles reflecting the artificial lighting, and a dimmer, silvery set of gleaming points that must have been from the starlight. But they were swelling before my eyes, spreading out as if flattened between two glass plates prior to being placed in a microscope, beading and blurring. By the time I realised what was happening the tears were freezing on my cheeks with little soft pinches.

  I was crying because I was thinking of my daughter. If I look back on that moment now I can say to myself that, illogical as it sounds, some tiny trigger in my head had been flipped by the cigarettes conversation from earlier. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but with hindsight that’s what it must have been. Looking back, I might represent my own state of mind as a series of interlocking support-sticks, like a Dali painting, and with every shock or every little trauma I had propped up this or that part of my mind from collapse with one more crutch-like assumption or suppression. Let’s just hold on until things get back to normal. It’ll all be over soon. The whole world’s gone mad, not just you. I got to the surface, other people maybe got to the surface too. Maybe she got to the surface. Each one of these pit-props kept the roof of my consciousness from caving in, and they all held one another up, which was both a strength and a weakness. That last thought in particular was a comfort, other people got out, maybe she did. I thought, sometimes, of hundreds of thousands of enterprising human beings, scrabbling their way up through the thickening environment of snow, each in their bubbles making their way to the top, moling their way upwards to the light. I did not imagine my daughter doing this, not actually picture her doing this, because if I had done that the implausibility of it would have collapsed the whole fantasy. But I thought, vaguely and non-specifically, that a lot of people made it out of the snow, and that left open the possibility of somehow, someday, seeing her again. But it wasn’t true. When I thought that way, I – very deliberately – wasn’t facing the truth.

  Now, the thing about cigarettes is that my daughter had always scolded me for smoking cigarettes, so there already existed in my head that connection between cigarettes and guilt, between my selfish pleasure and my daughter’s disappointment in me. But I don’t think it was only that. I think it was when Crow said that the snow had put an end to cigarettes, that we would never again see cigarettes. That was what twitched over the pit-prop, that brought all the other pit-props down, and with it the sagging collapse of everything. I thought to myself: I’ll never see her again. Never. The least comfortable word in the English language. It echoed and reechoed in my head. I would never see her again. I could live to be a thousand and never see her again. I cried.

  Crow came outside and fetched me in again eventually, but I don’t really remember that. I only remember the things he told me the following day. ‘You were out in your socks. When I got you inside and took the socks off you your feet had gone blue. You were crying.’

  I was upset, I said. It didn’t sound like me talking.

  ‘Do you know what you were saying?’ He had made up some coffee, a special treat, and although it was instant it was better than nothing, and he had brought it to me in my bed. I was sitting there as listless as a doll. ‘Do you know what you were saying?’

  What was I saying?

  ‘You kept saying, over
and over, “Do you think the snow is haunted?” What kind of a thing is that to think? That’s just going to get you depressed. Isn’t it, now? Do you think the snow is haunted! You shouldn’t be thinking like that.’

  All those people down there. All buried underneath it.

  ‘You see? You’re doing it again. Stop. Just hold up, there. Stop thinking that way, Tara.’

  I sipped my coffee, and thought, but didn’t say aloud, that their spirits had nowhere else to go, that their spirits must be weighed down by the weight of it, squashed and cold. I could picture a woman, a young woman, in a room; and the snow had forced its way in through every window and through the door and had squeezed up, cold and deadly, through the cracks in the floorboards, until the whole room had been filled with it, and the woman crammed close about with whiteness so close it became blackness. How could the snow be anything other than haunted? Of course it is haunted, all of it, all around us.

  ‘You’ve got to think of it positively, Tara. Think of it as a new start. A blank page. Think that God has given us a new start.’

  ‘He didn’t,’ I said, the sobs starting again, ‘give Minnie a new start.’

  ‘Minnie? Is this about your daughter? You can’t think like that, Tara. You can’t! You’ve got to look forward.’

  Easy for you to say.

  ‘And anyway,’ he said, bouncing anxiously around the room in his imaginary high-sprung heels, ‘anyway, you don’t know she’s gone. You don’t know it, do you? She might have got out. A lot of people got out. Maybe she did.’

  Crow repeated this line several times over the course of that day, I suppose because he could see it reviving me, almost against my will. It was even, in a sense, sweet of him; because he hated lying, or told himself he did, and yet he was saying this to me – a lie, of course – in order to try and rouse me, as if my spirits were more important than his truth-and-honour.

  In the end this was the lever with which I pushed and brought some sort of normality back to my life. Over that day I tried repeating that as a mantra, and told myself that things weren’t so bad, that maybe she had got out. It was possible, after all. It was not impossible, at any rate. And by the day after that I was able to go back to the committee, and go back to work. [Blank] expressed her sympathy for me, that I had had flu (for so I told them), and as we walked back from work that afternoon she became solicitous, urging me to ‘take better care of myself and other similar phrases. ‘You can’t be too careful in this sort of weather,’ she told me. ‘Make sure you’re eating enough.’

  Here are a couple of moments I remember from my daughter when she was young. These have nothing to do with [Blank] and his terrorism, and his threats to the state, and the detonations, and of course I know that you’re only interested in [Blank] and you’re not interested in my daughter. But she matters to me. I’ll limit my maternal reminiscences to two. Bear with me.

  One is very brief. When Minnie was tiny, less than a year, I used to put her to bed at seven. She would, often, not go to sleep: either because she had colic, or sometimes just because she was a restless soul. But I would try and keep her to the schedule, and then I would bite my nails, because at that stage I was living in a very small flat with my parents and my sister, and Minnie’s cries would disrupt the evening meal, the evening TV rituals. I would sit there wishing her asleep, and quiet, and getting myself more and more stressed and upset. But you can’t force a baby to sleep. She sleeps, or she doesn’t. If she didn’t go to sleep straight away, she would cry; but sometimes this crying would be a gradually diminishing sobbing sound that would lead eventually to sleepy silence, and sometimes it would be an increasingly frantic stabbing series of howls that would go on and on, worse and worse, as she became more and more hysteric. ‘Leave her,’ my dad would say. ‘She’ll tire herself out crying, eventually.’ And then, later, ‘Surely she’ll tire herself crying, won’t she?’ But it is so exhausting, the pressure of hearing your child cry, it’s like metallic scratching inside your skull. It is very hard to bear. I remember one night she was crying in this fashion, the noise growing and growing. Finally I went through to the other room, and in the light from the hallway I could see her in the cot. She had sat up in the cot, and didn’t know how to lie down again, and in her exhaustion and desperation for rest and her frustration she had cried more and more vocally. As she saw me come into the room she started flapping her arms up and down, like a chicken trying to fly, and calling out ‘mama-mama-mama’ with a piercing, bell-like intensity. I don’t believe that I can convey to you, with sufficient force, the full, tart, marvellous, overwhelming mixture of love and hilarity that swept through me at that moment. I felt again the pungent epiphany of how much I loved my child, of how beautiful and funny and endearing she was even in the midst of her crying and her distress. I swept her up in my arms and hugged her as she sobbed, and kissed her as she settled, and walked round with her in the darkened room until she fell asleep against my shoulder. There was a brilliant-lit buoyancy in my heart. I was happy. I really don’t believe that I can properly convey to you, given the complete breach that has been effected between that time and this, how happy I felt in that moment.

  If I’m right (and memory plays tricks, so I may not be) my father died less than a month after that. He had always suffered from asthma, and wasn’t as regular about taking his medication as he should have been. But that’s another thing. Let’s not talk about that.

  Here is my second remembrance. Minnie was nine, or ten; a thoughtful, soulful little girl. One day she came back from school and came up to the bathroom. It was a summer afternoon, and I was having a bath. I seem to remember having a great number of baths during that time of my life. I was between jobs, I think, and so home all day, and so I took a lot of baths. I was smoking a cigarette in the bath, looking up where the sunlight oranged the pebble-patterned glass of the bathroom window. I was admiring the way steam from the hot bathwater interwove itself with smoke from my cigarette until I couldn’t tell which was steam and which smoke.

  Minnie hovered at the doorway. ‘Hi, mum,’ she said, but she was reticent about coming into the bathroom.

  ‘Hi, love,’ I said. ‘How was school? OK?’

  ‘School was OK.’

  ‘Good. How was Miss Cicero?’ A favourite teacher of Minnie’s, or, at least, a teacher about whom she was often talking at that time. You know the way kids get favourites, how important their favourites are to them, at that age.

  ‘Miss Cicero is off sick,’ said Minnie. ‘Miss Cicero weren’t in today.’

  I didn’t say wasn’t in today in a motherly-condescending tone, as I might have done – as I would have done another time. The nicotine and the warm lassitude of the bath had temporarily robbed me of the urge to correct her.

  ‘What’s she got, a cold?’ I said. ‘Flu?’

  ‘Maybe she’s got cancer from smoking,’ said Minnie, coming a little further into the bathroom to make her disapproval plainer. ‘Maybe that’s why she didn’t come to school today.’

  ‘I’ve only had two cigarettes today,’ I lied, squashing the fag to death against the metal ashtray I had balanced on the side of the bath.

  ‘Cigarettes give you cancer and you die,’ said Minnie, matter-of-factly, dragging her feet through the strands of the carpet on the hall-floor just outside the bathroom door. ‘They’re stupid, and smelly.’ But she said this with a sort of desultory tone, as if she didn’t really want to press the point. She had certainly made her position very clear on the topic of my smoking over many months.

  ‘What did you learn today?’ I asked, to forestall further anti-tobacco preaching.

  ‘We did drawing with Miss Harth, and PE with Mr Doody, and we did God with Mr Felber.’

  ‘God?’

  Her voice faded slightly, and then grew clearer slightly, as she shuffled her way around the tiny hall outside the bathroom. ‘He said that Christians call God Jesus, but I knew that anyway, ’cause we have assembly. And he said that some people call
God Zen, and that some people call God La-la.’

  ‘La-la?’ I said. ‘He said that?’

  ‘Like the Teletubby,’ said Minnie. ‘Isn’t it funny?’

  ‘You sure you’ve got that right, darling?’

  ‘That’s how Arabs call God,’ she said, firmly. ‘And Indians. I said I was Indian and I didn’t call God La-la. No,’ she said, correcting herself without any change in her tone of voice, ‘I said I was half-Indian, but he said it didn’t matter where you were from, that God can see everything and that he’ll help with everything we do.’

  ‘Some people,’ I said, trying to be diplomatic, ‘think so.’

  But she wasn’t asking my opinion, she was telling me about her day, and so she continued with her narrative. ‘You got to pray to God, and call him the right things like big and strong and so on, and then he’ll help you with everything. So I asked God to make Picture number one in the charts, and to make you stop smoking, or stop getting cancer, and for Melissa Salzman to get fat, because everybody hates her.’

  The band-name I am remembering as Picture may have been something else, something that sounds like that word or that has, in some other way, an association with it in my mind (was it Pin-up, I wonder?): the latest pop sensation, four toothsome young boys who could dance in unison and sing in a melodious, high-pitched tone. Minnie had images of them on her wall, half a dozen glossy posters. She had her favourite band-member and her favourite songs.

  ‘That’s not very nice,’ I said, meaning it wasn’t nice to pray to God to make Melissa Salzman fat.

  Minnie was quiet for a time. ‘Everybody hates her,’ she said, after a while.

  I got out of the bath, with the usual sound effects of water pouring and trickling, and the unsteady steps onto the bathmat reaching for the towel. ‘I don’t think,’ I said to Minnie as I wrapped myself by the sink, ‘that you should pray for things like that. I don’t think that’s what praying is about. Did Mr Felber tell you to do that?’