In the Falling Snow

by Caryl Phillips

  ‘Shall we go back to my flat? I’ve got better coffee than this, and at least it’s more comfortable.’

  ‘Comfortable?’

  She picks up her cup and takes a noisy sip.

  ‘Well, this is McDonald’s. You know, everything is secured to the floor, no reclining allowed. It’s not exactly relaxing in here. And it’s cold, particularly every time someone opens the door, so that’s what I mean by more comfortable.’

  He points through the window.

  ‘We can get that bus and be at my place in five minutes.’

  The following day he works well on the book. His only interruption is a call from Ruth, who wants to know if he has taken home a file about racial violence in Cardiff. Apparently, she needs to give the file to a researcher who is putting together a piece about the cultural insularity of South Wales. He asks Ruth which researcher, and is relieved when she does not mention Yvette’s name. There is a pause and then, lowering her voice, Ruth asks him how he is doing. She seems embarrassed.

  ‘I’m all right, Ruth,’ he says. ‘Recharging my batteries. You know I haven’t had a break from work in over twenty years. I don’t mean holidays or anything like that, I mean a real break. So I’m just exploring other things. I’d almost forgotten that I had any other interests or talents.’

  Ruth says nothing, and awkwardness overtakes them both. He realises that he probably sounds immodest, but it is too late now. Suddenly he is conscious of the presence of the telephone in his hand, and he longs for her simply to ask him what he is doing with his time, or make a joke, or tell him that the photocopier in the office isn’t working, but she remains silent.

  ‘Has Clive asked after me?’

  Ruth seems momentarily surprised.

  ‘Mr Wilson?’

  ‘Yes, Clive Wilson.’ He laughs now. ‘The boss.’

  ‘No, he’s not said anything. You know what he’s like.’

  He regrets having mentioned Clive, for it makes him appear anxious and weak. However, this is not how he feels, nor is it the impression that he wishes to convey to his secretary. Having closed the telephone he finds it difficult to reapply himself to the words on the screen. He would still like to write a few paragraphs on Gil Scott-Heron, but he wonders how much, if anything, his potential British readers will know about the chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs of the United States? If they don’t know anything then it will be impossible for him to develop his thesis about how black cultural heritage is passed on from one generation to the next. After all, he can’t illustrate the principle by pointing to Liverpool or Birmingham. Okay, so the Romans brought black soldiers to build Hadrian’s wall, and there were black trumpeters and pages in the sixteenth-century courts of England and Scotland, and everybody knows that eighteenth-century London was full of black people, but that was then. He is trying to write about a deeper and more substantial tradition of cultural inheritance, and this means that he has to look across the Atlantic for his models. Of late he has found that the same is also true in the race relations business. Increasing numbers of social policy papers seemed to cross his desk arguing that one can only understand Bristol or Leicester or Manchester by looking at Oakland or Detroit or Chicago. He switches off his computer and admits defeat for the day, but he had worked well until Ruth called. Now he has time on his side.

  By quarter past four it is apparent that everybody has left the building. There are no longer any students ambling down the steps before peeling off to the left or right in search of a bus, and nobody else appears to be emerging from inside the school. It is not raining, but he stands beneath the red awning, although he now admits to himself that he is wasting his time loitering on this far side of the road. Today he will use the pedestrian crossing. He waits until the beeping begins, and the little green man appears, before dashing quickly in front of the idling traffic. There is still no sign of her and so he decides to go inside and see if he can locate some kind of administrative office. Yesterday she chose not to come back to his Wilton Road flat, and having walked her to the bus stop, and thanked Danuta for having coffee with him at McDonald’s, he watched her get on the bus. It was his bus too, but he decided to walk back in the rain, without an umbrella, and think about what a strangely pleasant distraction the girl was. However, when the skies really opened he realised the extent to which rain could hurt, for the heavy drops felt like needles of glass. By the time he reached home he was drenched to the skin, so he took a long hot shower to prevent himself from catching a chill, and then he kicked up his legs on the sofa and spent the evening continuing to think about Danuta, or his book, jumping nimbly in his mind from one subject to the other, happy to be able to focus on something other than the situation with Yvette and the frustration of not knowing when he will be able to return to his job.

  The unfriendly woman looks up from her desk and peers at him over the top of her glasses.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  It is the end of the day, and it is apparent that she is the only one left in the reception office of the language school.

  ‘I’m looking for somebody. A friend.’

  The woman peels off her glasses and places them on her desk. She stands and crosses to the hatch. He guesses that she is in her late fifties, and almost certainly a spinster. There is no sign of a ring, and no hint of sensuality to her.

  ‘And does your friend have a name?’

  ‘Danuta.’ He pauses. ‘She’s Polish.’

  ‘I take it you’re not with any official organisation? Immigration? Housing?’

  ‘I told you, I’m just a friend.’

  ‘Then I’m afraid I can’t help you. Students come and students go, but we have to respect their privacy.’

  He smiles and nods.

  ‘Yes, of course, I understand what you’re saying, but it’s just that I arranged to meet her. Today at four o’clock, and I’m worried because she’s not here.’

  ‘Have you tried calling her?’

  He stares at the woman.

  ‘Well? You do have her number, don’t you?’

  In the evening it starts to rain hard, lashing, stormy rain. He sits at his laptop and types ‘Danuta’, then ‘Polish’, then ‘London’, then ‘language school’, then ‘cleaning agency,’ and hits the return button, but he is offered a choice of an expensive maid service near Marble Arch or two escort agencies. There are some websites in Polish, but these are of no use to him, so he tries again, but this time for an image search. There appear to be many Danutas of all sizes and ages, but nobody that he recognises. Then it occurs to him that perhaps Danuta is not even her real name. He cut the conversation with the unfriendly woman short, for she clearly regarded herself as the commissar of the language school and there was nothing to be gained by arguing with such a woman. Once he abandoned the office hatch, and left the language school, he caught the bus to the library where he sat for nearly two hours staring at the door in the hope that she would walk in. He thought about simply asking the librarian if she had seen the strange Polish girl who usually arrived with a dictionary and a copy of the Evening Standard, but he worried that the woman might regard him as some kind of stalker. He was sure that the librarian would know who he was talking about, and if Danuta had signed up for a reader’s ticket then her real name and address would be on file, but by the end of his second hour of gazing at the door he had convinced himself that her ‘disappearance’ was not his problem, nor his fault, and he should just get on with his own life.

  He tries another web search, this time typing in ‘Danuta’ and ‘Warsaw’ but again there is nothing. He logs into the wine warehouse site and types in his username and password. Clicking on past orders he deposits a dozen screwtop bottles of Sauvignon Blanc into his basket and then quickly checks out. She seemed to like this wine, and he wants to be ready. As he waits for the order to process, he stares out of the window into the black night where he can see that the few leaves that remain on the trees are now falling like confetti. The rumble of distant thund
er is now complemented by lightning, which sporadically illuminates his living room, and he can hardly believe that a second storm is brewing.

  The following morning the sun is out, although a stiff wind blows litter so that the empty crisp packets and plastic Coke bottles swirl crazily about the Acton street. He leans casually against the wall at the foot of the steps that lead up into the language school, and then he sees her. Danuta is walking slowly and is bent forward into the head wind. When she reaches the school he moves away from the wall and blocks her path.

  ‘I was worried about you.’

  She looks up at him and scrutinises his face.

  ‘You didn’t show up yesterday. Neither here nor at the library. I was working on my own stuff but I was finding it hard to concentrate.’

  She continues to stare at him.

  ‘Look, I’m not weird or anything, I’m just concerned. I care.’

  ‘Why should you care? Who are you to care?’

  He puts his hand gently on to her shoulder, but she pulls her body away from him so that his hand now hovers foolishly in midair.

  ‘I know you’ve got your classes so why don’t I just see you back here at four o’clock. We can talk then, when we’ve both finished what we’ve got to do.’ He smiles in a manner that he hopes will put her at ease. ‘Okay?’

  At four o’clock he hands her the travel-size umbrella, which is immediately blown inside out by the powerful gale. She lowers it and begins to struggle with the contraption, so he takes it from her and pushes it back into shape.

  ‘You can hang on to it like this and stop it from popping up on you.’

  He places her hand in the right position, then folds his own hand around hers to make sure that she has the correct grip before quickly releasing both her hand and the umbrella.

  ‘Bloody hell, I can’t believe that it’s raining again.’

  Rain is now trickling down her angular face, and her damp, unclipped, hair hangs limp.

  ‘You’re going to catch your death of cold in those clothes.’

  ‘I should go home. Tonight I must work.’

  ‘But I’m just down the road. At least come by and get dry before you go to work. You can wear some of my clothes while we put yours in the tumble dryer. Then you can get a minicab to work. I’ve got to go out tonight anyhow so I’ll just take the cab on.’

  He stands in the darkness, his back against the trunk of a tall oak tree. He doesn’t know anything about flowers and plants, but many years ago an overly keen young supply teacher once tormented his class for a whole afternoon with silhouette shapes of various trees until they became imprinted on the pupils’ minds. The windows of the office building are illuminated like square portholes on the side of a ship. Occasionally a figure drifts into view, then retreats into the room and out of sight, but as yet he has not seen her. The security guard sits only twenty feet away in his small hut staring intently at a tabloid newspaper. The man is perusing the sports section, and so far he has turned only one page. Clearly the rest of the newspaper holds no interest for him. He guesses that this heavy-set man with a peaked cap set at a jubilant angle, and a blue blazer that appears to be bursting at the seams, is probably only a few years younger than him. He seems to have settled contentedly into his life as a watchman who does not watch, and the man probably has no ambitions beyond his weekly wage packet and his food being on the table when he gets home early in the morning. But who is he to feel superior? He envies the man who has organised his life so that he has no desire to elevate himself. The overweight guard is a Buddha of tranquillity in his heated shack, with a newspaper for company and silence all about him.

  And then he sees her. She has a cloth duster in her hand and she is running it along the windowsill, first to the right, and then to the left, and then she disappears as quickly as she appeared. Once again the lighted box is empty. He cranes his neck, sure that she is going to appear in another window, but all sixteen are empty and for a moment he imagines that the building has in some way swallowed her whole. Perhaps she is in danger, but he cannot leave the safety of the tree’s shadow and show himself. Suddenly, in a window on the floor above, he sees a tall blond boy, and she joins the boy in the window and says something to him, and then as quickly as she appeared she is gone again leaving the blond boy by himself. And then he too is gone.

  He is sure that this is the same boy that he saw her with the day before yesterday on the steps of the language school. In fact, the same boy he had asked her about only a few hours earlier when she came back to his flat to dry her clothes.

  ‘Your roommate is called Rolf?’

  ‘Is there something the matter with his name? Perhaps it is a popular name in Latvia?’

  He didn’t know how to explain that to most people in England, Rolf is a strange Australian man with a beard and glasses who draws cartoons and sings kids’ songs very badly. He is a figure of fun from down under, a man who bears absolutely no physical resemblance to a tall young Latvian.

  ‘Rolf is harmless, but he has an interest.’ She paused as though expecting a response. Realising that none was forthcoming she continued. ‘In me.’

  ‘And do you have an interest in him?’

  She looked momentarily startled and then she began to laugh, and although he understood that she was to some extent laughing at him he felt relieved that he had finally connected with her. He wondered if there were other buttons he might push that would encourage her to relax and perhaps believe that as a couple they were actually quite good together. But maybe he was the one who needed to unwind and take things easy. Obviously, to some extent, she trusted him. She had come back to his flat and accepted a large towel and gone into the bathroom and removed her clothes. She emerged with the towel wrapped tightly around her, and in her arms she cradled a damp pile of garments like a newborn child. He took them from her and tossed each article separately into the dryer.

  ‘Because a man is interested in me, this does not mean that I have any interest in the man. Are you interested in every woman who is interested in you?’

  He wanted to keep the conversation alive, but suddenly he was aware of the loud hum of the dryer as the cylinder lumbered its slow way around the fixed circle. Once the buzzer signalled the fact that her clothes were dry she would no doubt leave, unless they were deeply involved in this, or some other, conversation.

  ‘Of course not. But you said that he had an interest and so I thought things might be difficult for you. But obviously they’re not, which is good.’

  ‘And why is it good?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know? Then you should maybe say nothing. I am happy with silence. Unlike you English, I do not have to talk to fill in the silence.’

  ‘I see.’

  He watched as she reached into her rucksack and pulled out a book whose title was in Polish. She began to read and he understood that, at least for the moment, this peculiar young woman had nothing further to say. He stared at her collarbone, which was unusually prominent beneath the thin layer of skin, and which curved left and right like the bow of an archer, and then she looked up from her book and he quickly averted his gaze.

  Half an hour later, she emerged from his bedroom in her warm clothes and handed him the neatly folded towel, which he placed on the arm of the sofa. He stared at her petite and perfectly formed feet which, unlike her nicotine-stained and somewhat scrawny hands, appeared to be so smooth they might be waxed. Her toenails were cut short and not painted, and for a moment he understood why, in some cultures, women are encouraged to walk delicately on the bodies of men. But presumably not in Poland. He stood and offered her a glass of wine, which she refused by simply looking at her girl’s watch and insisting that she could not afford to be late. She informed him that Rolf would be upset if he had to make up an excuse on her behalf, and this is how he discovered that Rolf was not only her roommate, but they also worked together as cleaners. She asked him to please call the min
icab, and so he eased by her and passed into the kitchen where he had left his mobile. ‘Two minutes, mate.’ It was then that he heard Danuta close the door to the bathroom and then immediately flush the toilet. A few moments later she tiptoed back into the living room and he watched as she clumsily pushed her feet into her scuffed shoes, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she was breaking down their heels. They both heard the doorbell.

  The rain had stopped at some point, but the streets remained damp and strewn with puddles into which drivers seemed to be deliberately steering. She held her face close to the window, and whenever they passed beneath a lamppost he was able to catch a fleeting glimpse of her pensive reflection.

  ‘Near the BBC, you said, mate?’

  The minicab driver had a heavy West African accent and he was wearing a lime green dashiki, which made his attempt to speak cockney come across as vaguely absurd.

  ‘You’ll be wanting this side of the Westway, or just over the other side?’

  ‘Just before, please.’

  The African driver nodded to let him know that he had heard, and then he signalled and took the last left before the motorway. Danuta turned from the window and pointed through the front windscreen.

  ‘The building there.’

  The driver ducked into a space by the night-watchman’s hut, but the man kept the engine running and his eyes focused straight ahead.

  ‘Perhaps I could see you tomorrow? I’m not working this week.’

  She smiled, and then gathered up her rucksack and opened the door in one smooth continuous movement.

  ‘Thank you for my dry clothes.’

  She slipped out of the car and slammed the door behind her. The minicab then began to move off in the direction of the West London Boys’ Club by Wormwood Scrubs, one of the community centres that fell under his jurisdiction. As they passed under the Westway he asked the driver to stop.

  ‘You have changed your mind?’