by Adam Roberts
We had that conversation twice, I remember. The first time it didn’t really strike me as out of the ordinary; it seemed just the sort of thing that [Blank] was given to saying. That first time I replied: ‘You mean you’ve got this Seidensticker memo that you keep talking about?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, excited. ‘Yeah, I’ve seen it. It’ll blow the whole government out of the water, really.’
‘What does it say?’
‘You can read it,’ he told me, hopping from the bed, pacing the tiny room, getting back on the bed. ‘I’ll bring it. But it proves that the US government was to blame for the Snow, and that the NUSA government is covering it up. Proves it!’
‘Wow,’ I said, drawn in almost despite myself. ‘That’s amazing. How are they to blame? What did they do? Was it secret nuclear testing?’
‘That whole nuclear testing thing, that attempt to blame the Russians, that’s way off the mark,’ said [Blank] earnestly. ‘I’ll show you the memo.’
He didn’t bring the memo the next time I saw him, and that knocked my faith rather. I believed, then, that it was all a fantasy spun out of [Blank]’s brain. ‘I couldn’t get the memo,’ he said. ‘I’m not alone in this, there are plenty of people involved. I can’t just pick up the memo and walk away with it.’
‘Copy it,’ I suggested. ‘In case it gets lost … you know?’
‘Oh it’s easier said than done, copy it. What, get access to an army photocopier without clearing the documents first? Besides a copy’s no good to us. If we present a copy then they’ll say that we forged it. We need the original.’
‘So what’s in this original then?’
‘I told you. It lays the blame for the whole disaster, for the whole Snow, fair and square at the feet of the government …’
‘Exactly,’ I said, sternly, ‘how?’
‘What?’
‘How did the government bring disaster upon the world?’
‘Look,’ he said, grasping my shoulders with his hands, ‘the details don’t matter. It’s the blame that matters. Don’t you see?’
‘I think you’re making this whole thing up,’ I said.
The next time we met he was on about my husband the whole time. ‘Did you speak to him about it? Did you mention it to him? I’m thinking if we set up a time, maybe I could show him the memo …’
‘I feel,’ I said, sourly, ‘like I’m living out a cheap Robert Ludlum thriller called The Seidensticker Memo.’
‘Robert who?’ he replied.
Then I lost my temper. ‘You’re not interested in me,’ I bawled. ‘You’re using me as a means to get to my [expletive deleted] husband, aren’t you? You’ve been using me the whole time to get to him. That’s what it’s all been about.’
[Blank] turned gruff at this. ‘That’s insane talk,’ he said. ‘Don’t be so stupid Tira. You think I could fake this? Fake what we got together?’
‘Fake this?’ I said. ‘Fake bad sex with an ugly man, sure, that would be hard to fake.’
‘Now,’ said [Blank], with a warning inflection.
‘I don’t ever want to see you again,’ I told him. ‘I’m sorry I ever set eyes on your ugly mug.’
‘Mug?’ he repeated, with a hurt-baffled expression on his face. ‘What do you mean, mug?’
‘Just [expletive deleted] off,’ I told him, ‘and leave me alone.’
‘What mug?’
‘[expletive deleted] you.’
‘Will you just stop feeling so sorry for yourself,’ he barked at me. ‘Hey, you know what? – there are more important things to worry about than your hurt feelings.’
We got into a row. We yelled at one another. He grabbed my hair at one point, like a toddler in a tantrum, though he didn’t actually hit me. Finally, though, we seemed to end up in one another’s arms on his bed, with me sobbing and sobbing and saying ‘Minnie’ into the cold air.
But after that I called it off. It felt wrong, doing the sex thing. I wasn’t enjoying it. His fanaticism had turned from being an amusing character-trait to being an alarming obsession, acted-out in the world. The next time he and I met for one of our assignations I sat him down and told him that I didn’t want to have sex with him. He took it pretty calmly. He said, ‘We can still meet, though, yeah? Friends, yeah?’ I said yes.
I should have asked him – you want me to tell you – what he meant by I’m not alone in this, there are plenty of people involved. You want names, numbers involved, all that. But I didn’t want to talk about it any more. I think I was more hurt than I let on. I think it upset me that [Blank] had been interested in my husband all along, and not in me. There’s naive, I guess.
Certainly my husband was an increasingly influential figure. I would often come home to find the front room filled with senior, famous military personnel, or even famous civilians: [Blank], for instance. [Blank], or [Blank]. You remember him? [Blank] was sometimes there. And Mayor, Senator I should say, [Blank].
I was on the outskirts of it, but I would come and go, pass into the meeting and pass through the other side, and it gave me this definite sense of things coming together. Of stuff happening. The depression had removed me from that world. And I was numb to the various little kindnesses my husband arranged for me. Getting me the medication was no small achievement, for instance. I didn’t mind the medication. Tiny little blue sector-plates. They didn’t make me feel happy or girly, but they made the depression shrink away. Let me put it this way: before the drugs I Didn’t Care, that’s the nature of depression; but in some deeper sense I cared that I Didn’t Care, it bothered me that I Didn’t Care. That’s where the emotional pain of depression comes from. But after the medication I no longer cared that I Didn’t Care. I lived easier with myself. I could focus on the meaningless tasks I was doing to fill the day.
A month would go past in which I would hardly see Crow. Then we’d spend three evenings together in sequence. One evening we ate a meal together, with nobody but [Blank] in attendance – he was a jolly sort, one of Crow’s junior staff. He was the sort of man who has made a career out of being inoffensively jolly. He gossiped, too. My husband was too serious, too straitlaced, to gossip; but this new guy chatted away. Some of the people he gossiped about were unknown to me, but on one occasion his gossip really stuck home.
‘And [Blank],’ he said, speaking to Crow rather than me. ‘Do you know her?’
‘I know her,’ I said. ‘I used to be on a committee with her. We have coffee sometimes.’
The junior guy looked at me, looked back to Crow. ‘Married to General [Blank], of course. Our would-be Senator.’ He made a scoffing noise; Crow only smiled, weakly.
We were eating a sort of semolina, set in slabs and drizzled with tomato sauce. There was no wine. I remember that meal very clearly.
‘What about her?’ I said.
‘Well,’ said the junior guy, with a feline expression. ‘She’s been seen.’
‘Seen?’
‘Keeping company with, my mother used to call it,’ he said. ‘A man, but not her husband. An official.’ He sucked in breath, disapproving. ‘There you go.’
The conversation moved on to other things. But I knew, without needing further information, that the man with whom beautiful [Blank], with her beautiful long black hair and her politically ambitious little husband – that the man with whom she was now sleeping was [Blank]. He had tried me, to get at Crow, and had failed. So now he had, somehow, seduced the beautiful [Blank], and was trying to get to her husband.
The thought infuriated me. I suppose it should have saddened me, or piqued my jealousy, or, perhaps, left me indifferent, but it did not do these things. It infuriated me. When I next saw [Blank] I yelled at him, right out there in the open air, shouted at him across the street. He hushed me and pulled my arm and tried to get me to be quiet. But that evening when I first heard, with Crow and his junior, I just fumed. I sat silently and glared at the food on my plate.
Later, after [Blank] had saluted primly and gone, and I s
craped the last crumbs of food into the re-use bag and wiped the plate clean, Crow asked me to sit down. So we sat down on the couch together. ‘Are you feeling OK?’ he asked, like the line on the record. ‘Are you feeling OK?’
‘Sure,’ I lied.
‘Tira, I don’t want to pry, you know? How is it going, with the pills?’
‘The antidepressants,’ I said. ‘Fine.’
‘They make you feel better?’
‘Feel better, sure.’
He looked at me intently for a while. He smiled. ‘You look great,’ he said. ‘That’s a great tan you’ve got. You look so much healthier.’
‘You know,’ I said. ‘We’re not stinted for sunshine up here.’
‘I’m glad the pills are helping,’ he said. ‘You deserve more than being depressed you know.’
I didn’t know what to say to that.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
He didn’t move. ‘I thought,’ he said, after a little while, ‘that maybe [Blank] upset you this evening. He’s an old woman, in some ways. He loves to gossip.’
‘He loves to gossip,’ I confirmed.
‘I don’t much like gossip myself,’ said Crow. ‘I try to discourage it. But a commanding officer needs to cut his men a little slack sometimes. Anyway, I’m glad the pills are, you know, helping.’
Crow leant a little closer. ‘Goodnight,’ he said. He laid his lips against my cheek in a dry, almost ticklish kiss. But he didn’t withdraw his mouth; he lay his lips against my tanned, dark cheek. I thought, what’s this? But I was also thinking that that’s a great tan you’ve got was probably Crow’s private self-talk for you’re pretty but I mustn’t forget you’re really black, and this combined with my annoyance at the gossip about [Blank]’s new lover to fuel a fierceness in my heart. I sat without a single tremor, without even breathing, my body a perfectly motionless shell wrapped around a thundering heart. Then he brought his lips across my face until they met my lips, and our two mouths became a single warm circle. My heart juddered. It was exciting, the buzz you get when you’re a teenager and making out, that slightly taboo thrill. It was nice, actually. It lasted as long as it lasted.
Then Crow leant gently back, away from me, and our one joint-mouth became two mouths, four lips, and there was a pause.
‘Tira,’ he said. ‘You know [Blank]?’
‘[Blank],’ I repeated. It felt strange saying the name of my ex-lover to my husband. My head was experiencing interesting swirly effects on the inside. ‘Sure.’
‘He chaired the mining committee you used to sit on? Before you sat on the supply committee?’
‘Mining committee,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to – look. I’ve heard, things about him.’
‘Heard things?’ I said, starting to come out from the spell of the kiss. ‘Gossip, you mean?’
He smiled at this. ‘Touché,’ he said, pronouncing the word without the accented final ‘e’, as if it were tush. ‘Maybe it is gossip, and maybe I oughtn’t pay it any heed. But he may be a dangerous type. That’s all I’m saying.’
‘Dangerous,’ I said.
‘I’m only saying that you should, maybe, steer clear, you know?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I don’t see him too often. Just bumping into him from time to time.’ This was strictly true, but it felt to my heart like a lie, and so I couldn’t help myself embroidering it. ‘You know it’s a small town? Sometimes we’ll say hello on the street, that’s all.’ The truth, but sounding more and more like a lie. ‘I guess we might have a coffee or something, but only really infrequently. Hardly at all.’ I stopped.
‘It’s OK,’ said Crow, after a pause. ‘It’s probably nothing. Like you say, I shouldn’t pay attention to gossip.’
And he said goodnight, and he went through and lay on his little wooden bed and rolled himself tightly in a blanket and went to sleep. I took myself to the bigger bed and lay in it, and my heart was still keeping loud time in my chest. I thought to myself: why did that happen? The kiss? Where did that come from, after a year of living like brother and sister? I thought of that’s a great tan you’ve got, and tried to imagine inside Crow’s head. I believed that he was so much a creature of habit that, once the habit of celibate cohabitation had been established, it was easy for him to maintain it. But he kissed me. Had it been a momentary lapse? And then I thought of I’m only saying that you should, maybe, steer clear, and I wondered if maybe it was a jealousy thing, an alpha-male possession thing. I could take her to bed, but she’s soiled goods, another man has had her. Could that chain of thought start up a kiss and then curtail it so abruptly? I found it hard to go to sleep.
Eight
So I’m trying to remember what’s important to remember over that year, that eighteen-month period. I transferred from the mining committee; several shafts were sunk, braced with wire and concrete, down to the ground, and shafts spread across the frozen, bleached-out floor. Some videos were made. I never went down the shafts, but some videos were made – freaky things, really. They were, effectively, films of the life you remember, only yellowed and gloomy in white-walled tunnels. I understand that they cleared bodies away before shooting the videos, but the Pompeian evidences of death-interrupted lives were all around. To follow the miner, vicariously, video-linked, through these bizarre tunnels, dark all around except in the twin white ovals of illumination cast by the miner’s headlight and the camera’s bright bulb – to watch the TV footage of men trudging down nondescript shafts and turn a corner to see a shopfront, a house, and to realise that this strange urinous-coloured stubble underneath their feet had once been green grass, that this oddly short metal fence was actually the radiator grille of a car still almost wholly buried in the snow. It was spooky. I could hardly bear to watch the footage, although some people became obsessed with it – paid their dollars, sat in rooms with the screens on, time after time.
Reminded me of some of the scenes in Titanic. I don’t need to tell you which scenes. You’ll need to be my age to remember that film, of course. My age or older.
Food was the most pressing concern, general across the seven cities of NUSA, as it certainly was in the various unaffiliated encampments and communities scattered around the overland, over-UK and the overstates. And all across the world – a lot of East Russians had survived the snow, we heard; and odd communities scattered here and there. There were several cities of Azerbaijanis and Pakistanis, apparently, although most of the Arab and Indian nations were ill-prepared for the snow. Two Israeli cities, under military control (I am tempted to say, of course) as was NUSA. Most European nations had been able to undertake the effort to float cities up through the slowly accumulating snow, like superslow-motion bubbles, but the co-ordination and discipline required meant a military regime in most cases. Equatorial nations had survived very patchily if at all. There was little contact with Japan, although scratchy shortwave and satellite reconnaissance suggested that some cities had survived. This sort of information was not in the public domain. Either the military were covering something up, as [Blank] insisted, or else they couldn’t quite shake their automatically secretive habits. I don’t know. Then there was the question of Australia. Was it open land? Officially there was no comment, no comment, but the rumours grew, people focused on the chances of a normalised life in the southern hemispheres, and there was no official comment, and then – without preliminary – there was a front-page story in Truth. Few people could afford the paper, and it was posted on barracks walls for people to stop and read. So, out of the blue, there was an announcement: destabilising rumours, possibly of terrorist provenance, claiming that large amounts of the southern hemisphere was unaffected by snow. The IP, the Senate and the People of the Free World Coalition denounce this cruel rumour. There is no truth in it. Snow is general, over the whole globe.
Is there a quicker way to root a belief in people’s hearts than for an official to deny it?
There was an
other front page, I remember, a week or two later, reaffirming the official explanation of the snow: Russian nuclear experimentation, unregulated, had got out of hand. We were living, the government said, in a form of nuclear winter provoked by this tragic accident. Scientists had long been theorising Snowball Earth, the occasional catastrophic ice-age events. We were caught up in one of these. This was in response, I suppose, to the general currency of rumours circulating throughout the cities. The Seidensticker memo, the same document that occupied such a large proportion of [Blank]’s paranoid fantasies, was whispered about in the food queues, in the streets, in the general rooms (they’re out of fashion now, aren’t they, general rooms – rooms where people simply sat, trying to share their general warmth. They used to be popular). Mostly the rumours assumed that the cause was correct, but the nation wrongly blamed – that, in other words, the Snow had been caused by some non-specific nuclear shenanigans, but that the culprit was the old USA. People grumbled about this, but I met few people – in fact no people – who became as worked up about it as [Blank] still did. It seemed, perhaps, a pointless thing to complain about it. Complain about the weather: as idiotic as a sailor complaining about the sea, as an old person complaining that they are old, as a young person moaning that they are young – a citizen complaining about city, government, world. Why expend the energy? You needed your energy for other things. You needed it to keep warm. Food was more expensive and wages were down, so people had less to eat. Fat people were rare. Everybody swathed and swathed themselves with as much clothing as they could. Anything warm would attract an audience – a truck idling in the street for five minutes would draw half a dozen people to its throbbing bonnet, like flies on jam. A laundrette down the road from me earned more money selling fifty-cent tickets to loiter in the room with the machines than it did in actually cleaning dirty laundry. The steam clouding out from the machines as they opened, the hot wet cloth, the warmth generated by the motors as they strained to spin the big drums; people paid to immerse themselves in this environment. A ticket bought you thirty minutes, I seem to remember, in the room with the machines and a dozen other people.
