Susie and the Snow-it-alls

by Dark, Gregory

  For the same reason when each heard the polo-bears’ anthem gently reeding to them within the bassoon of the legato wind, no-one dared say a word. It was only the wind, they each told themself. No-one wanted to be branded as ‘mad’ or as ‘hearing things’.

  That night the wind howled like a wolf. And it bit into them with the teeth of a wolf. If they’d huddled any closer together they’d have been on the other side of those they were cuddling. Shivers scurried up and down their spines, along the lengths of their arms like a marathon of sprinting ants.

  “W-w-w-we h-h-h-have t-t-t-to s-s-s-sleep,” Susie shivered. They all agreed they had to sleep. The snowtel did provide some protection, but the protection it provided was scant. The wind whipped up, cat-o’-nine-tailsing them as they huddled together, seeking a desperate sleep. In ever greater ill humour Susie and her Sufrogs eventually grumbled their way to a sleep which was fractious and fractioned, one so thin and fragile it was like the skim of ice on a November puddle.

  Chapter 49

  Even before the sun there was light. A fairly robust light, even.

  Susie and the Sufrogs continued to huddle together, but there was now knowledge that such would not relieve the cold. It was like standing next to a radiator which refuses to work. It wasn’t just that they were chilled. It felt like they had been dunked in water and then frozen. They were no longer iced, but of ice.

  As the sun rose, its light changed hue and texture several times: a charcoal silk ceded to an indigo velvet. And then ribbons started to flutter, like the standards of medieval armies whose troops were hidden by the brow of the hill. Fruit-pastilly sorts of colours – a winegum orange and a lemon-drop yellow. It was, and they all started to sense this, the start of their last day alive.

  Susie, through the night, had come to accept that. She wasn’t overjoyed at the idea, but a sort of slightly indigested peace had rumbled into her. She remained anxious, however, to die fighting death, remained anxious that death should not only have to kidnap her, but also to steal from her her avowal to life. Too often during her stay in Grammarcloud she’d witnessed her dignity being compromised, seen her dignity become dingity. She wanted to die with her dignity not dingy but intact. With her head held high.

  Leadenly, Susie got to her feet. Snow had blanketted her throughout the night. This she shook from her, as Bo shook water from himself after a loch swim. The frogs were under her feet. Everywhere she turned there seemed to be another frog. She was fed up with frogs. She’d had frogs, in fact, up to here. And then some.

  Skirmishes were breaking out between all of them.

  Before long these had bred, and sniping was being exchanged between them all with the rat-a-tat-tatness of a garrulous Gatling gun.

  “Stop it,” Susie said eventually. “Please stop it. If you cannot stop bickering, all of you, I’ll leave you here. I swear I will. Pick you up again on the way down.”

  “You wouldn’t blueming do that!” Bluemerang waisked.

  “Watch me,” Susie said.

  They all looked at each other. They didn’t want to be left there on the side of the mountain. They didn’t want Susie faring for herself either. Each one of them reckoned themself indispensable to Susie’s survival. They owed it to Susie that she bring them along.

  Cold and cranky, bleary-eyed and Bassett-faced, Nespa sought out snowwiches.

  All was at a rumbling peace. At a tummy-rumbling peace. Until the snowwiches arrived! When Mimimi wanted Bluemerang’s and O’Nestly wanted Miss Chief’s and all the bickering flared up again, like giant Catherine wheels on a starless night.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Susie exclaimed. “For God’s sake.” She took Miss Chief from her bib, put her on the ground. “It’s no good. Sorry. I just can’t cope with this. Not any more.” She picked Bluemerang up for no particular reason, and – without any undue show of concern or courtesy – shoved him in her pocket. ““I’ve got to survive this. We’ve got to. We’re not going to survive if we’re arguing all the time. I’ll leave you here. Sorry, but that’s the way it is. I’ll leave Mr Nip here too. Pick you all up on the way back.”

  “And if you don’t make it back?” asked Mimimi.

  “I’ll make it back,” Susie brittled back at her. Then she softened. “And if I don’t … Well, you won’t know anything about it, will you. Maybe you will, Mr Nip. Sorry. There’s nothing I can do about it. Our survival depends on mine; and I’m not going to survive unless I’m alone.”

  “One more thing …” said O’Nestly.

  “Excuse we …” said Miss Chief almost simultaneously.

  “No,” said Susie, cutting through them both as if she were a combine harvester and they a pat of butter. “No discussion. No more discussion. Or debate. Or argument. Or anything else. That’s it. My mind’s made up. I’ll see you soon.”

  And with that, she took Bluemerang too from her pocket and placed him within a squabbling huddle of the other Sufrogs. She tried to accommodate these within the snowtel to effect their maximum protection. But each time she touched them to do so one of them broke ranks, so she eventually gave up the struggle. Mr Nip’s jar she was able to place strategically. She didn’t know whether or not he was able to hear. Certainly he wasn’t audible. But as she started to turn away from the jar, she saw him mouth a “good luck” to her.

  She gave one last look back at her Sufrogs. It was a fond one. Like the mother of a cranky baby, now her charges were finally unconscious, she was able to dote on them again. Nostalgia takes no time at all to put on its slippers.

  She set off into the snow. Alone.

  Everything, they say, is relative. Which just goes to prove that ‘they’ can be wrong. Death is not relative, for instance. Is life? To say of Susie’s steps that they were light would be to exaggerate the situation. To say they were relatively light would not. Previously her footsteps had been those resisting a date with Madame Guillotine. They were now of Shakespeare’s schoolboy crawling an unwilling way to class.

  The sun started it seemed to Susie reluctantly to rise, its arc not the constant progress of a thrown ball, but of an old-fashioned clock, whose minute hand jerks from one position to the next. It started to thaw the marrow which had frozen within her bones. But not nicely to thaw it. Rather to scorch her, and char the marrow.

  One foot after another. One foot … after another.

  Alone.

  An alone which after a thousand metres became very alone.

  After two thousand it became extremely alone.

  After three it became the alonest ever of any creature ever in the whole history of the universe.

  And then it hit her: Well, it wasn’t the first time she’d been alone. Not even the first time alone in adverse conditions. For months she’d been alone in the Snow-it Hall dungeons. Before that even, at home. For hours at a time.

  She was fine all alone. She enjoyed her own company. Thrived in it, in fact.

  Only, in her own company she’d never been quite so exposed. She found herself enormously vulnerable, all of a sudden. And enormously insignificant: a lone snowflake within an Arctic circle-like vastness.

  She forced herself not to look up. Up was never-never land. Up was the unattainable. And she had to attain. Her only attainable was the next footstep. That she had known for some time. But now she also intuited it. And her intuition fed her knowledge. It is no accident that the greater part of the word ‘intuition’ is ‘tuition’. The wisest of us heed that teacher we all have within us.

  Footsteps which had been heavy now were shod in divers’ boots; horizons once distant now became unreachable.

  On she went.

  And then on some more.

  On to the next ridge.

  And then on to the ridge beyond that.

  Each step was trod with stubborn determination.

  Each step could be her last, if only she would let it.

  She could not let it. She would not let it.

  She now no longer noticed the sweat stinging agai
n already stinging eyes. She no longer noticed her face, her shoulder-blades awash with perspiration. She both melted with the sun and was petrified by the cold. That she didn’t notice either. Nor that she was both soaking and dehydrated.

  She didn’t notice the view, nor the views. She saw her feet crunch into the snow beneath them, but she didn’t notice them. Even huge boulders blocking her path she noticed only when she was virtually on top of them.

  An old man spoke to her. She couldn’t see the old man. She couldn’t do anything but hear him. It wasn’t Phil or her dead father. Neither was it Syllabylly. It was an old, old man. She’d seen self-portraits of da Vinci in his last years. It was that kind of gnarled old, old man – wizened by wisdom, cataracted with kindness – that spoke to her. Maybe it was Mr E. Or Mr E’s father! Never did Susie know.

  “You have to have them with you, Susie,” the old Mr E-ish man told her. “Leave them and you will perish.”

  “That’d mean I’d have to go back for them,” she complained.

  “If you continue, you’ll merely have to go back further.” “It’s hard enough to go forwards without having to go back first.”

  “If you are to survive, you must listen to me. You must …” and here he paused for emphasis, “ … heed me.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Susie said grumpily. “I blooming know.”

  “Enjoy it,” the old man urged her.

  “Being wrong?”

  “Each time you are wrong you become wiser; each time you are right you become only smugger. Which would you prefer: to be wise or smug?”

  Susie thought about it for a while. “I suppose right and wise is not a possibility?” she asked. She already knew.

  She stopped.

  She gazed at her snow-encrusted shoes for a beat. She huffed. She snorted.

  And then she retraced her steps.

  She was still far from happy. She knew each step she took back to the Sufrog pile represented a tripling of the effort she would otherwise have needed.

  “Stop, Susie,” the old man told her. “Look at the view.”

  “Very pretty,” Susie said condescendingly.

  “No, Susie, look at the view.”

  She stopped. There was an ocean around her. Blue like the ocean. With a flotilla of teeth bobbing on its surface. There were the peaks of the smaller mountains, all of them peeping from within cotton-wool clouds that wisped their dandelion-clock progress on the will of a gust. From above the sun sheeted its brilliance in layers of a light gold and a luminescent silver and an almost transparent bronze.

  The vastness sucked her into herself, and she felt tiny and insignificant, not even a grain of sand in the Sahara desert. But then the vastness spat her out again and she was a giant, mistress of all she saw. All-powerful, all-knowing.

  For three or four of its breaths, Susie was totally sucked in by the landscape and gently blown out. And then, magically, she became one with it. And then being breathed in and out, she realised herself to be both: both mightily tiny and insignificantly gigantic. The landscape, she realised, could only be that landscape with her within it. Even Mount Neverrest, the mightiest phenomenon in the known universe, even that could not be the Mount Neverrest of that moment without her being there to complete it.

  She told the old man what she was feeling. The old man laughed. Susie was not amused.

  “No, you misunderstand,” he said. “I’m laughing with you. At the whimsy, the whimsicalness of life: The simplest lessons are so often the hardest. You’ve just learnt humility. It’s such a simple lesson most people never learn it. Humility is not self-debasement, it is self-knowledge.”

  “Is it?” ‘asked’ Susie unenthusiastically.

  “You won’t remember this view always. But you will remember it sometimes. And on some of those sometimes times, you will remember it when it is important for you to do so.”

  “Right,” said Susie. She didn’t want to be rude, but she also wanted to live. No-one, she had been told, had survived climbing Neverrest. It was a tough enough task anyway. She really didn’t need the additional burden of a portable guru. There was an increased huff in the stride which took her back to the Sufrog pile.

  Which was now covered in a light furze of snow. She took hold of O’Nestly. The frogs, of course, returned immediately to life.

  “I’m sorry,” said O’Nestly.

  “Me, too,” said Mimimi. “A row boat don’t go too far with all eight oarsmen pulling in different directions.” The insight caused a few eyebrows to rise.

  “I need your support,” Susie told them. “Mimimi, you’re right. Unless we all strive together we will all die.”

  “I died once,” said Mimimi. “I don’t recommend it.”

  “No more bickering, hey, guys?” Susie pleaded.

  “No more bickering,” agreed Miss Chief.

  “A red letter day, to be sure,” O’Nestly responded.

  “No more bickering,” Miss Chief reminded him.

  “Sure, and how was that bickering?” O’Nestly countered.

  “You know very well,” hoity-toitied Miss Chief.

  “Guys!” warned Susie.

  Miss Chief and O’Nestly hmmphed. And then they smiled.

  Bickerlessly, they resumed their ascent of the mountain.

  One step after another.

  Bickerlessly, they did indeed progress more swiftly. And more easily.

  It lasted, the bickerlessness, about thirty-two seconds.

  Chapter 50

  She’d read, Susie, of men crossing the desert, dying of thirst, seeing mirages. Perhaps like those thirsty men she too was seeing things: a polar oasis, a haven. Before her had leapt out one of the most stunning views she’d ever seen: A tarn, its surface like a darkened mirror, unfrozen. Not even its shore-line was rimmed with ice.

  Around which sprouted not firmament trees, but real fir trees. They stood majestic and huge – their dark green needles apparently no more prickly than petals. Beyond these, bald rock-faces gleamed a thousand different colours, beige and aquamarine, coral pink and a sparkling black. The scene was picture-postcardy. Bar one thing: Whilst the rim was iceless it was coated with a thick film of mud and sludge, of litter and oil-cans – of all the detritus of living. The casing of this jewel had been allowed to become a rubbish dump.

  As if hit by a meteor, the still of the lake was rudely shattered. Ripples the size of surfing waves roared across its surface. Some distance away a wiggly tail broke that surface, undulating like a child’s drawing of hills.

  Rarely had Susie’s gob been smackeder nor her awe strucker. Never had she seen anything even approaching such a size. The tail-end of the tail, the very last undulation, was the size of an oversized polo-bear. The scale was just enormous.

  BAM! The head was there. A monster head: Not too surprising really, Susie had to concede, as it belonged to a monster. Duh!

  A monster, though, with a monster grin. There was nothing alarming about this beast – well, once you’d got over its size. Its eyes, though they were actually the size of soccer balls, appeared in such a huge hulk to be tiny. They also appeared not to see too well. The monster was directly in front of Susie, immense, towering over her, and yet it seemed neither to see her nor her frogs.

  “Hello?” Susie asked, her knees amazingly unknocking.

  “You’ve done well, lassie,” said the monster, with a brogue of the same tweed as that of Ma’am Elaide, but somewhat thicker. Its undulating curves were meanwhile dredging, presumably from the tarn’s bottom, great mounds of gunk which it was lobbing at the shore. Each loop of its tail seemed to be doing its own such hurling.

  “Don’t tell me,” said O’Nestly, “the loch mess-monster.”

  “You’ve all done well,” said the monster. “Which is why I’m going to give you a hand. Well, a tail, point of fact, but who’s counting?”

  “Do you know,” Susie asked, “just how … beautiful it is round here?”

  “Aye?” asked the monster enigmat
ically, its undulating coils still lobbing gunk, like balls at a grotesque coconut-shy.

  “Really, really beautiful,” sighed Susie – both in admiration of the view and exasperation at the monster’s apparent disdain for it.

  “Exquisite,” said O’Nestly, with new found appreciation.

  “Magnifique,” said Nespa sincerely.

  “Fan-blueming-tastic.”

  “You’re ruining it,” Susie told the monster.

  “Rubbish,” shrugged the monster, “it has to go somewhere.”

  “There have to be other places,” Susie insisted.

  “Not cost effective, lassie,” said the monster. “It’s not your loch, what are you worried about?”

  “It’s beautiful,” Susie replied.

  “Magnifique,” Nespa said again.

  “No-one sees it, lassie. With the exception of felons, like yourselves, that is. And precious few of them. As I said earlier, you’ve done well. Most succumb before they even get here,” said the monster. “Let me give you a conundrum: There’s a tree in the middle of a jungle. There’s no-one around …”

  “That’s not the same thing,” petulanted Susie.

  “You don’t yet know what it was I was going to say,” the monster petulanted back at her, its beady eyes squinting badly as it tried to find a focus for her.

  “If the tree crashed to the ground,” Susie parroted, “would it make a sound?”

  “Okay,” said the monster. “All right. Maybe that was what I was going to say.”

  “It’s not the same thing,” Susie repeated. “You can see it’s beautiful. Surely you can.”

  “It’s no part of my job, lassie, to make that kind of judgement: beauty, that sort of thing. It’s not what I’m good at. What I am good at: rubbish. Waste. You’ve doubtless heard about a waste of space?”

  “Of course,” Susie replied.

  “Well, I’m his cousin – a space of waste. The Snow-it-alls make it. I get rid of it. I also help criminals to get to the top of mountains!”