by Chloe Mayer
She felt a fierce flush of guilt whenever she thought this; but the truth was that the boy – and his serious, solemn face – reminded her of everything she’d prefer to forget.
The snow wouldn’t be so bad if he weren’t shut up in here with her. She could go to bed and stay there and never have to talk to anyone. Talking was such an effort now. She felt exhausted all the time, although she slept deeply at night and napped during the day.
Of course, it was an effort to get dressed and go to the shops on the High Street, but at least she could walk around hoping to bump into someone who might distract her for a while. She also hoped for news of Hans, in truth, stupid as that was. Was he really out there somewhere, still on the run, or perhaps safely back home in Germany? It was so hard to believe he wouldn’t send word. Or had he been caught somewhere or attacked, and that was the real reason he’d never tried to contact her?
These were questions she had asked herself thousands of times.
Another drag of the cigarette, while looking at the blank sheet of nothingness outside, was like a salve to her restless mind.
She had tried to believe the snow would soon melt away, leaving black tarry sludge behind, until that melted too. But by Monday she finally accepted that it was getting worse and now they would have to stay inside until the thaw.
Annabel wrenched herself from the window, stubbed out her cigarette, and put down her ashtray amongst some of the clutter on the sideboard. She went through to the hall to wrap up before braving the cold. Not all of the shops would be open but she’d have to venture out with her ration book for provisions before they were sealed in.
The boy was upstairs, reading in his room most likely, and she called out to him as she left to tell him to bring as much coal from the cellar as he could manage into the sitting room. All of it, ideally. God knew how long they’d be trapped.
Snow crunched beneath her feet with the same sound as gravel as she carefully made her way down the lane. The icy wetness of it seeped through her shoes. The leather would be stained and she could tell her toes must be white and shrivelled from the water pooling in each sole. Although she soon lost sensation in her feet apart from the burn of the cold, she could feel an unpleasant squelching with every step. She knew she’d be left with red welts on her cheeks where the frigid wind slapped her face as it screamed past her ears.
She pulled her scarf up over the back of her head and trudged on to the High Street to gather supplies from the few shops that had fought to stay open. She’d buy meat and bread, but also things that wouldn’t go off while they were trapped: powdered eggs and condensed milk and tinned food.
The greengrocer’s was closed. Old Sid Mitchell and his wife must have battened down the hatches to hole up in the back flat. It was in their shop that she first learned about Hans’s disappearance, and there too when she heard that the war had finally ended. Annabel shook her head to try to clear it of the past as she walked by. Too many memories in this village, but she had to stay, because how else could Hans find her?
A light flurry of snow began to dance in the air around her and she hurried into the butcher’s. The sawdust scattered on the red concrete floor was doing little to soak up the snowy footprints left by his customers.
Jean Bainbridge was at the counter when she went in and there was an awkward greeting; Annabel had gradually stopped pretending to be friendly, although she continued to maintain normal social etiquette.
‘I was just saying it’s definitely worse today than it was yesterday,’ Jean said, nodding at Mr Lupton carving the carcass on his block. ‘Much colder.’
The butcher chuckled. ‘If you say so. Snow’s snow, isn’t it?’
Jean glanced at Annabel, inviting her to join in. Her hair was red against her white mohair hat. ‘Bitterly cold.’
‘Bitter,’ Annabel murmured. The word itself sounded as though she was spitting it out of her mouth. Yes, she was bitter.
After buying some pork she finished the rest of her shopping and made her way back to the cottage. Just before she reached Ivy Lane, she slipped on some ice, falling backwards onto the pavement. But the snow softened her landing and the sound of her cry felt as though it had come from far away.
She lay still for a moment, surrendering to the snowdrift cradling her. It was so quiet. The landscape was not just featureless; it was obliterated.
After a while, she picked up her shopping bag from the pavement, brushed snow off the seat of her coat, and trudged onwards. The cold wind made her eyes water and before long they were streaming.
She would change into dry clothes when she got home. Perhaps she would have another gin or two before lunch. Just to warm up.
Once home, she took her string bag through to the kitchen and called for the boy to put everything away in the larder. He came running down the stairs and set about the shopping.
Leaving the room, she headed to the sitting room to make herself a drink.
She could feel the boy gazing after her, no doubt looking infuriatingly sad. She thought he had started to say something, but she was gone before he could even form the words.
Upstairs, she shrugged off her wet clothes and sat down heavily at her dressing table. She was wearing just her slip.
It was too chilly for this. To conserve coal she should really only heat the sitting room and stay down there, but these days she spent more time in her bedroom, so she kept a small fire going.
The wood she’d bought from Hans had run out long ago, and she never could bring herself to return to the orchard to buy more from a different PoW. She’d started buying coal from the coalman instead – never mind the expense and the shortages, despite the best efforts of the Bevin Boys conscripted to work in the mines. Many of the PoWs had been sent home now, although she’d heard some had chosen to stay.
The blaze in her grate was too paltry to warm the whole room; she could only feel the heat if she stood directly in front of it and then it burned her shins while the back of her body felt colder than ever.
Still, she sat in her slip and studied herself in the mirror. She hadn’t the energy to pull on her nightdress and dressing gown yet. Although she would get up eventually to do that, so she could climb underneath the eiderdowns and counterpanes piled up on top of her bed. A reversal of the princess and the pea – she’d be buried by the soft mountain instead of sleeping on top of it.
She sipped her gin – was this her fourth or fifth? – and studied her face. She was thirty-one. She still looked young; she could easily be mistaken for a girl in her early twenties. She could see small lines at the corners of her eyes. She was pale from the winter – and looked more so with the shock of red lipstick she’d applied before going out – but her face wasn’t unattractive. She was quite pretty still, really. She tried to think of Reggie, who’d be home soon, but she felt nothing.
The cold had leached into her bones and she shivered. She’d have a bath before climbing into bed, she decided, and crossed the landing to run the tub.
Naked, lying in the shallow water as it slowly filled, she continued to assess herself as she drank more gin. Her body was fine, although she would need to be a little bit curvier to have the hourglass shape she’d always strived for. Her breasts and stomach showed only minimum damage from the baby that claimed them once, and the stretch marks on her flat belly had faded to nearly invisible white lines; tiny folds in her skin like a secret.
If there was no one to see her, to speak to her, and to love her, did she really exist?
34
There was a whirling, rushing sound; and on the wall were strange shadows of horses with flying manes … ‘Oh, they are only dreams,’ said the crow.
From The Snow Queen
I heard her go from the bathroom to her bedroom. She’d have a nap. It wasn’t yet midday but Mother often slept during the daytime. I was jealous of the way she could sleep – so deeply, so untroubled by monsters. But it was nice to think of her sleeping peacefully upstairs.
I turned
back to my Boy’s Own comic on the kitchen table. I didn’t read fairy tales any more. I blamed them, somehow, for the lies that came so easily to me when I was younger. Stuff about Trolls and woodcutters and other nonsense. I felt embarrassed, ashamed about all of it. Lies were like stories; and both were dangerous.
But maybe the stories in those old books weren’t all lies. Maybe monsters did exist. I’d seen them. I’d seen them in real life. And I was being haunted by them in my dreams, too.
The nightmares took over from the stories in a strange way.
When Gerda in The Snow Queen was trying to find Kai, she spoke to the roses to find out if he was lying dead in the earth where their roots were. I didn’t need to speak to the roses; I knew exactly what was down there. Those cold bodies rotting in the ground were monsters who wanted me down there with them.
The man in the mine would whimper for me, calling my name. His hand bursting up through a muddy marsh, blades of grass stuck to his grimy skeletal fingers, clutching at my feet as I tried to walk over where he lay.
Or else it was another beast, with matted black hair, looking into my soul with its red eyes as its head exploded under the impact of a wooden bat. Its eyes remained fixed on me, even as the flesh was beaten away from around the sockets. Sometimes, as it died, it looked at me as though I was the monster, and that was the worst of all.
I liked it when I cried out, because that woke me up.
She must have heard me, but she never came. Never mentioned it.
Did she pull the covers over her ears? Burrow down into her bed to drown me out?
That night, watching her curved back as she sat hunched over on the stairs; that was another nightmare that tormented me sometimes. She just sat there, silent, unseeing, even when I stood in front of her. And when I tried to touch her, to make her see me, my hands floated through her because she didn’t exist any more – or was it just that I didn’t exist to her?
The terrors in my own mind were punishing me because I deserved it. I deserved sometimes to wake up screaming and covered in hot stinking urine because of that hand coming for me out of the ground.
I jumped up from the table now and ran upstairs as though I could escape my own thoughts.
Her door wasn’t shut because of the mess on the floor, so I crept in to look at her sleeping. She looked so peaceful. I quite liked the idea of being snowed in together. We could make the cottage cosy and warm inside. I thought maybe we might be able to begin again in our little house buried beneath the whiteness. Everything looked like a fairy tale in the snow, didn’t it?
I couldn’t bear to think of the stories themselves, but I still missed our story-times. I couldn’t ask her to begin reading to me again, but I wondered if there was another way I could bring her back to me. Maybe I should remind her of those evenings; I knew she’d enjoyed them too. Then I remembered her Darlings, and how much she’d loved them. If I reminded her of that, perhaps she’d remember how she only felt that way about them because she’d wanted a real-life Darling. She’d wanted me.
A couple of the dolls were on top of the bookshelves in my bedroom. Maybe I should bring them down? She’d be so happy to see them – it was bound to cheer her up. I rushed across the hall into my room and dragged the wicker chair over to the shelves so I could stand on it. One of the Darlings was too far back for me to reach, but I was able to grab hold of the dusty skirt of a porcelain doll. I pulled it down and sat on my bed to clean it up a bit. It must have been up there for years. Dust and cobwebs had knotted together to form thin strands of grey that fell like hair across the doll’s pale pink face. I licked my thumb and then rubbed at the porcelain to reveal blue glass eyes looking up at me, and a tiny painted rosebud mouth. I brushed the worst of the dust from the doll’s blonde ringlets and faded pink pinafore dress. Then I took it into Mother’s room.
She was still sleeping, beneath a pile of blankets and clothes. Part of the pile had slipped off to one corner of the bed, and I propped the Darling up there so she’d see it when she woke.
I’d go back downstairs in a minute and make a pot of tea, but I’d just stay and watch her for a moment longer. Her dark hair was spilling across the white pillow, and her face was closed and beautiful.
Sometimes, I felt as though I’d spent my entire life waiting for her to open her eyes and see me.
35
In the middle of that enormous snow hall was a frozen lake. It had cracked into thousands of pieces and every one of them was shaped exactly like all the others. In the middle of the lake was the throne of the Snow Queen.
From The Snow Queen
The snow was burying the house. The snow was burying her. It would keep climbing higher and higher up the walls, the windows, silently packing the cottage away. It would be dark. Would air be able to get in, through the sealed windows and doors? She cried out as she sat up in bed. After her bath she’d pulled on layers of clothes that almost at once felt suffocating. She pulled at the scratchy woollen neck of her jumper.
Air! She needed air.
She struggled against the blankets, fighting them as they tied her down like ropes. The gin sloshed in her belly, her head was heavy, and she felt sick. As she fought to get out of bed she saw something from the corner of her eye and screamed. The unblinking face of a Darling was staring back at her. Annabel couldn’t understand. She reached over to grab her dolly. Her Darling’s ice-blue eyes seemed to sear into her soul; and the lack of love inside her was laid bare. Her Darling knew who she was beneath all the pretending: an unfaithful wife, a traitor, a bad and neglectful mother. But she’d have to go on pretending for ever, because Reggie was coming home. There’d be no end to it.
The walls closed in around her and she fell out of bed onto the cluttered carpet. She flung the Darling aside and pushed the empty glasses and dirty plates out of her way as she crawled to the door. She was suffocating. The room was getting smaller. She needed to get outside – she needed to breathe fresh, cold air – because now her lungs were constricting too.
She gripped the banisters as she staggered, panting, down the stairs. Couldn’t breathe.
Something was wrong with the front door; it wouldn’t open. She pulled and tugged at the latch but it wouldn’t budge. The doorframe had swollen from the onslaught of snow or else ice had frozen the lock solid. With a frustrated cry she ran to the back door in the kitchen; it might be easier to push a door open.
But the snow had already piled up against it and she couldn’t force that one open either. She slammed into it again and again as she tried to escape.
‘Let me out!’ she cried. ‘Let me out!’
‘Mother?’
She spun around. The boy was standing in the kitchen doorway, looking at her across the room. His eyes were wide and he looked frightened.
‘Help me! I have to get out. Help me.’ And she turned back to use her whole body to fight the snow again, ramming her shoulder into the door. ‘Can’t breathe.’
The boy didn’t move at first, but then he was next to her and began to help her push. The snow was more than a yard high from the wind-drift but at last it began to give a little. He pushed his small arm through the gap they’d made and scooped snow away from the door. When he brought his arm back inside, his jumper was crusted with ice and his hand blazed red with cold. She threw herself against the door with renewed panic and he stepped away.
Finally there was a gap big enough for her to wriggle through. She started to squeeze outside.
‘Your feet!’
She looked down and saw her stockinged toes at the bottom of her thick trousers. Clumsily, still only just managing to keep her panic at bay, she pushed past him into the hall and rammed her feet into the shoes she’d left lying there earlier, then lunged to grab a coat from the stand.
‘Where are you going?’
His voice sounded strange, she thought, as though a hand was around his throat squeezing it tightly. But she turned her attention back to the buttons on her coat.
‘Need … air.’
She stumbled back towards the door.
‘Going to walk. Need to move around.’
‘But it’s going to snow again!’
‘I have to—Got to get some air. I’ll be all right after a walk. Got to get out.’
She twisted her head as she slipped sideways through the crack, and found herself looking at her son as he watched her go. His face slipped from view as she escaped from the dark stuffy house into the clean white snow.
The sharp air cut her throat and lungs and she began to cry. As she wept, she felt her teardrops turning to ice.
36
The Snow Queen flew away and Kai was left alone in the endless hall.
From The Snow Queen
It was very quiet when she was gone. The snow didn’t just look like cotton wool – it seemed to work like it too, because it made it hard for me to hear anything. I thought I should probably leave the door open for Mother, so she could get back in again. But it was so cold. My arm hurt from when I’d pushed it into the snow and I rubbed at my hand to help the feeling come back into my frozen fingers. The cold was streaming in through the gap in the door like an icy river that would flood the house. So I pulled it closed and then it became even quieter.
I backed away from the slushy puddle on the kitchen floor. I was shivering.
Where was she going? I ran into the sitting room and climbed up onto the windowsill to see out above the line of snow. She’d already made it through the gate onto the lane. I took down the net curtain so I could see more clearly. She was stumbling like she was ill, but I guessed it was just that she was struggling to keep upright on the mounds of snow and ice. She was heading towards the forest. I watched until I couldn’t see her any more. The sky was grey; the shade of dirty snow, hovering between light and dark, even though it was only early afternoon. Nights ate up winter days though; it’d be pitch black by tea time.
