The following morning’s breakfast was barely over when Lisa and Mikey came running into the lounge.
“It’s been snowing!” they shouted, wild with excitement, “Dad said to ask are you gonna come build snowmen or what? Come on,” they begged, “please, please, please.”
Rita looked up at Jeff and grinned.
“Oh no,” said Jeff, “No way.”
But Rita had grabbed his hand and was already pulling him towards the door.
“Come on, you guys,” she urged the others, “it’s stopped snowing. It’ll be fun.”
Annie shook her head.
“I’d love to, but I can’t,” she said, “I have to protect my voice from extremes of heat or cold.”
Lisa and Mikey looked crestfallen; they’d really wanted their mom to come with them.
“But,” said Annie brightly, overcompensating with feigned enthusiasm, “I’ll go sit right at the window, so I can watch everything. Would you build the snowmen just outside the window, Sweeties, so mommy can see? Would you do that for mommy, would you please?”
The two children nodded, turned and walked resignedly to the door. They hadn’t said anything more, but Annie could feel their sullen disappointment.
“Don’t be like that, Sweeties,” she said, “You do know mommy has to protect her voice, right?”
Eight year old Lisa turned and gave her mother a look far beyond her years.
“I told Mikey not to bother asking you,” she said, “I told him you wouldn’t play with us, you never do. But he’s too little to understand. Come on Mikey.”
Annie stood in awkward silence as Lisa led Mikey from the room. Jeff and Rita exchanged glances.
“OK then,” said Jeff, now quite glad to have an excuse to leave, even if it was to build a snowman, “guess we’ll see you all later.”
Dave looked down at Neil. Did he want to go out? No, Neil was looking bored with the whole business.
“You go,” said Neil.
It didn’t sound to Dave like permission to go and have fun, but more like an order just to go away. Dave stood, not knowing whether to go or not.
Annie decided him in the way she said, “Don’t get frost bite.”
It sounded to him like a dismissal, as if the matter was settled.
Opening the door from the honey-toned, comfortably heated corridor was a shock. The air rushing in was biting cold and the children’s voices rang sharp and clear, although they were both already out of sight. Dave pulled on his new ski gloves and turned up the collar of his jacket. Only two steps down from the stoop, he already regretted not bringing his new and splendid furry hat. Rounding the corner of the building, he had cause to regret it even more, as a large, wet snowball hit him, splattering on the side of his face. He swore and pawed at his face, as Lisa and Mikey came running over. They danced in front of him, delightedly copying and repeating the new words they’d just heard.
“Shhhit! Holy shhhit!” they mimicked, singing in happy, high-pitched voices.
With the bulk of the snowball melted or wiped away Dave opened his eyes to see not only the kids but also Rita and Jeff laughing at him. Bill however was more sympathetic.
“Hey kids, that was cruel,” he said, “You didn’t give Dave a chance. Now say you’re sorry.”
Lisa and Mikey immediately hung their heads; guilty as charged. To Dave’s benign and untrained eye, the two children looked the picture of contrition. He even felt bad that they’d been told off. But Lisa and Mikey were slyly peeking at each other, out of the corners of their eyes, co-ordinating the next wave of attack. Too late Rita spotted the snowballs hidden behind their backs.
“Look out!” she yelled, “They’ve got more. Run!”
But before Dave could gather his wits, Lisa and Mikey had loosed the snowballs at his unsuspecting head and dashed away to safety, laughing and shrieking. Behind them, apparently dazed, Dave stood, unmoving, as the compacted ice melted, burning, into freezing rivulets that coursed, tickling, down his neck. Biting her lip, Rita watched him closely, almost feeling the cold chill of the melting snow on her own cheeks. Jeff was looking equally unsure. They didn’t know this guy. Dave was, after all, Neil’s partner, and Rita would definitely describe Neil as being ‘humour-challenged’; the man seemed never to have fun, or ever really enjoy anything. Perhaps Neil had, in Dave, found someone like himself. If so, this would be a bad way to start the week. Bill too, was waiting expectantly for Dave to react. Even the two children sensed that they might have gone too far this time. They stopped, staring at Dave, anticipating the inevitable punishment.
Rita broke the silence.
“Are you OK?”
Dave said nothing, but slowly turned his back on them all and leant his head against the wall. Thinking he must be hurt, Bill and Rita hurried over. As they came close they could see Dave’s face reflected in the glass of the window next to him. Suddenly he caught their eye and winked. They were confused for a second, until they realised that he was sneakily fashioning snowballs from the drifted snow on the window ledge. Bill smiled and Rita composed a rather severe look on her face. She turned to call to the children.
“I think you two had better come over here right now and say you’re sorry,” she said firmly.
Slowly, Lisa and Mikey came over, nudging each other forward. Dave waited until they were right next to him, heads down and mumbling some words of apology, then he spun round and wedged a snowball down each exposed collar.
Lisa and Mikey were almost incoherent with shock. They frantically wriggled and hunched their shoulders, mittened hands scooping snow from the folds in the scarves at their necks
The adults laughed and scattered, running for cover. Battle was joined.
Hectic snowball warfare continued for a half hour, until everyone was caked in a cracking layer of powdery snow. Exhausted, they all fell together in a laughing heap.
“OK kids,” said Bill, “I think that’s enough.”
The children whined their objections. Rita tried to deflect them.
“You guys, I thought we were going to build snowmen,” she said.
“But I want to fight some more,” Mikey wailed.
“No, she’s right,” said Dave, nodding at Rita, realising he’d forgotten her name, “I was enticed out here with misinformation. I was told that we would be building snowmen and, let me tell you, I really wanna build a snowman. Plus I know a pretty sharp lawyer, so, if I don’t see some snowman-building pretty soon, I’m gonna sue,” Lisa and Mikey frowned at him, “C’mon you guys,” Dave pleaded, “it’ll be fun.”
The children admitted defeat and Dave soon had everyone agreed; they would each build a snowman that looked like someone here in the hotel. He, of course, only really knew Neil, so he built a snowman with a briefcase in hand and a cell phone at his ear. He was proud of his creation, but no one recognised it until he added the final touch; Neil’s exceptionally long nose. Shrieking with laughter, Lisa and Mikey both ran to the window, knocking on the glass to attract Annie’s attention. They pointed back at Dave’s snowman and then inside to Neil. Annie seemed not to understand, but it was clear that Neil saw the likeness immediately, and he didn’t look pleased. He caught Dave’s eye and stared at him coldly for a few seconds before deliberately turning away.
Dave awkwardly dusted the snow from his hands.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Rita quietly, “He’ll get over it. Never did have much of a sense of humour. Isn’t that right Jeff?”
Jeff nodded.
But the fun was over for Dave.
“Think I’ll go inside,” he said, “I’ll see you later.”
The children were about to object to Dave’s departure, but Rita again distracted them, this time with extravagant praise of their own artistic endeavours.
As Dave walked, somewhat dejectedly back to the hotel, he saw Emma standing alone, watching them all from a safe distance. He called to her, but she feigned deafness, turned and walked away. That’s one really strange kid, he thought. In spite of the cold, her face was absolutely white but for the stark black lipstick and thick kohl smudges lining her eyes. And she had managed to buy only black cold weather gear so that, out here in the fresh snow, she almost faded into the background monochrome of trees and snow. He watched her walk away, smiling to himself at the exaggerated way in which she had to raise each heavily booted foot up and clear of the deep snow. It made her gait clumsy and ungainly and Dave was sure that wasn’t the look she was striving for.
He felt sympathy for her; being a teenager was never easy. But then, it wasn’t always that easy being an adult either.
Emma was struggling to walk quickly, but the snow was making her progress embarrassingly awkward so she decided to duck under the cover of the trees right at the edge of the clearing until Dave had gone back inside. Turning from her hiding place to look, she saw him climb up the steps, pause to stamp the snow from his boots and go in. He hadn’t been watching her, spying on her; he’d just called out to be friendly. He was OK.
Still hidden by the trees, Emma brushed the snow from a fallen stump and sat for a long while, watching Jeff, Rita and Bill playing with Lisa and Mikey in the snow. Only a short time ago, maybe even last winter, she would have been there with them herself. But that was then. Such childish activities now seemed a pointless and rather foolish waste of time and energy. She sighed, her breath drifting slowly in the icy air. What was she supposed to do? There was nothing for her here. This place had nothing to offer her and no one to hang out with. She was already bored, and had begun the descent to the monumentally numbing depths of world-weariness to which only adolescents are capable of sinking.
The snowballers were shrieking and laughing. In the clearing, their voices had seemed as clear and brittle as ice, but here under the trees everything was muffled, absolutely still and quiet, as if the whole forest was hushed, alongside her, watching the playing children. She could no longer hear her father’s voice. He must have gone back inside. Emma shivered and rubbed her hands together; they were becoming painfully cold even within her thick black gloves. She could go back to the hotel. No. She would go back, but not yet. How long, she wondered, would it be before her father noticed that she was neither out in the snow with the children, nor in the lounge, somewhere silent in the background of the adult conversation? Emma herself had lately become increasingly aware that her place was no longer with either grouping. She was neither child nor adult; she just didn’t fit. It was incredible that her father couldn’t grasp that, when to her it seemed so obvious.
Emma was reasonably sure that Jeff did try, in his own clumsy way, to understand her, but his efforts were routinely frustrated by his preoccupation with his work and his new life with Rita. That said, Emma occasionally found herself wondering whether she was deluding herself; maybe her father didn’t actually care about her feelings at all. After all, living most of the time with her mother, Emma saw her father only rarely, but that arrangement appeared to suit him just fine. And it wasn’t as if he were spending time with her here, now that he had the opportunity. Where was he? Most likely, he was now comfortably settled by a roaring fire, not having given her even a moment’s thought. She wondered whether she should stay out for a good long time, long enough even for him to notice she was missing. That would give him a fright. That would shake him up a bit; make him pay her some attention. With a wicked little smile of satisfaction, Emma pictured Jeff anxiously running along the corridors, darting from room to room, searching for her. She would let him suffer a while. Then, later, she would appear in the lounge, really cool, acting like nothing had happened.
She snapped back to reality at the sudden breaking of a twig close by. She span around, but saw nothing save the snow-laden branches and the pillows of deep snow beneath them. Nothing was moving and nothing seemed out of place. Frowning, Emma turned back towards the hotel.
And there he was.
Just a few feet away.
A tall, painfully thin man, dressed all in black, stark against the snow.
Muscles flexing automatically, with the shock, Emma fell back off the tree stump and landed in a mound of powdery snow. Gagging and spitting icy mouthfuls, she scrambled to her feet.
“Get away from me!”
The man made no reply. He merely inclined his head to one side and continued to stare directly at her, his dark eyes glittering in the deep hollows of his face.
Emma’s heart was racing and any thoughts of teasing her father now fled; she wanted Jeff here with her, right now. But she was alone and this weird-looking man stood in her path, between her and the cheerfully shouting children; between her and safety. She felt a sudden, freezing grip of fear constricting her chest. She struggled for air.
“Go away! Leave me alone,” she rasped, her throat suddenly dry.
Again, the man said nothing.
Emma summoned all her courage and poured it into her voice, forcing the words to come out evenly; their apparent strength conveying a confidence she certainly did not feel.
“What do you want? Why d’you keep staring at me?”
Finally, the man stirred. His voice was disturbingly dry and thin, but Emma took a fleeting scrap of reassurance from the apparent normality of conversation.
“Pardon me,” he said quietly, inclining his head in the merest hint of a bow, “The snow deadens every sound, every sound. I can move as silent as the grave,” he raised his head once more to look at her, his dark eyes sharp as shattered glass, “I’ve been watching you.”
“What? Why?”
What did he mean, he’d been watching her? What the hell?
Emma was almost overwhelmed by the urge to turn and run in blind panic. Her breathing was becoming impossible to control and there was no disguising the rapid, shallow breaths, as the puffs of warm vapour jostled in the icy air.
Then the man smiled, revealing deadly cold white shards, the dreadful sight of which swept away the last reserves sustaining Emma’s paper-thin show of defiance. But it was too late. She was now incapable of running; frozen by the cold but also by a paralysing fear. She knew this man meant to do her harm, but she could do nothing but wait for him to strike. But the man made no move. Still staring, unblinking at her, he maintained his awful smile, but spoke slowly and quietly.
“Oh I think you know why I’ve been watching you, Doll. I think you know. Look at us. You and me, we’re not like these others,” he slowly motioned with long, thin fingers back towards the clearing, “We’re different. We don’t fit with their ways. We don’t dress the same. We don’t look the same. We don’t think the same. Know what I mean?”
Emma’s mind began to wake from its stupor. Unable to react for a moment, her mind replayed what he’d just said and she found herself smiling weakly in cautious agreement. Had she been wrong about this man? Had she misread the situation completely? Initially shocked by his sudden appearance she had panicked, but now she began to feel ashamed at having been so easily frightened. She felt her cheeks redden; this man must think her such a klutz, such a dorky kid.
She looked carefully at the stranger’s pinched face and wondered how old he was, but it was impossible to guess. His skin, which was the palest she had ever seen, wasn’t wrinkled, but it didn’t have the elasticity of youthful skin either. When he smiled, the skin around his mouth folded back rather than stretching as you’d expect, and it seemed dry, almost flaking. Perhaps it was make-up. That might also explain why his eyes seemed so very dark and unnatural. Or perhaps he was suffering from some skin condition, or some illness that might also explain his skeletal thinness. What was it? Cancer? AIDS?
“Are you sick?” she asked, almost without realising she had spoken aloud.
After a pause, he smiled his thin smile and said, “Some would say so.”
“AIDS?” she blundered on, surprising herself with the intrusiveness of her own question.
For a moment the man’s ashen face slid into a puzzled frown, then, abruptly, he seemed to lose all interest both in the question and in Emma herself.
“You’d better get back with the other kids, Doll,” he said, looking away from her for the first time.
Emma felt crushed. She had obviously hit a nerve or overstepped some boundary, and now she was being shooed away like an irritating child. With his abrupt dismissal, the man, who just minutes before had terrified her and reduced her to petrified helplessness, became immediately interesting; a mystery and an object of fascination. Furious with herself for having asked such a crass question, Emma now wanted to stay and talk, but she could think of nothing to say that would salvage the situation.
The man moved effortlessly to one side to allow her to pass and, realising that their conversation was over, Emma reluctantly walked towards him. As she passed by him, she shivered slightly, as a sudden chill, an echo of her earlier fear, momentarily gripped her. She hurried on to the edge of the trees before looking back.
“Do you live around here?” she called.
He made no reply.
“Will you be coming back this way again?” she persisted.
He turned his face towards her once more and paused, as if reconsidering something.
“I’ll be here again this evening, just before sundown.”
He was giving her another chance and she was absurdly pleased.
“Then I’ll be here too.”
“Sure you will.”
“No, really, I’ll meet you here, tonight.”
“Your folks won’t let you out that late, Doll.”
“It’s nothing to do with them,” she insisted defiantly, “I do what I want.”
“Is that right?” he said, rewarding her bravado with his chilling smile.
“Yeah, I’m not a kid anymore.”
She’d responded too quickly and she regretted the words as soon as she said them. Her effort to appear mature had been completely undermined by the clumsy, unprompted assertion. She was hugely embarrassed and her words hung, reverberating, in the ice-cold air.
Assuming that the stranger would now be smiling condescendingly at her, amused by her childish awkwardness, Emma kept herself from looking into his face. She realised that in spite of, or perhaps because of, his bizarre appearance, she found this man uniquely attractive and she desperately wanted to impress him. If only she could think of something intriguing or memorable to say, something witty and apparently spontaneous. But the words wouldn’t come. She was utterly tongue-tied, her mind a complete blank. Still, she felt she had to say something. Anything.
“I’m really a lot older than I look,” she finished lamely, finally daring to raise her eyes to look at him.
Again, the terrible, humourless smile,
“Is that right?” he whispered.
Emma drew on her pride and tried to inject some defiance into her voice,
“Yes, it is. And if I say I’ll be here this evening, then I’ll be here this evening.”
“Don’t go doing me any favours, Doll,” he drawled, his menacing smile broadening, “Not yet anyhow.”
Emma had nothing to say in answer to that, so she turned and trudged through the knee-deep snow, back out into the bright sunlight of the clearing.
Lisa and Mikey saw her first. They called for her to join them, but she shook her head and walked on directly back to the hotel. At the door she turned. It seemed to her that she could still make out the dark figure standing just beyond the edge of the clearing. But the more she strained to see clearly, the more the dark shape appeared to shift and fade into the crowded tree trunks, until it was lost from sight.
Emma shook off her boots and hurried to her room.
She lay on her bed thinking over what had happened. Meeting the weird stranger was the only interesting thing that had happened since getting here and she knew she had to meet him again but, at the same time, she felt some unease. Obviously she couldn’t tell her father that she wanted to go out late to meet some strange guy in the woods. In fact, put like that, she wasn’t sure if she was completely relaxed about the idea herself. If she did sneak out to meet him it would be the most outrageous, daring thing she had ever done.
On the other hand, in expecting him to attack her, she had already jumped to the wrong conclusion about the man once. So perhaps she owed him the benefit of the doubt. It pained her that she had been guilty of judging by appearances, just like her father.
Though angry with herself, Emma was momentarily distracted. She smiled, recalling the stunned disbelief on Jeff’s face when he’d first seen her wearing her black gear. Then, and since, he’d tried so hard to appear relaxed about it, but he’d failed. The effort was futile; it was plain that he absolutely detested his little girl’s new look. Emma had overheard him describing it to Rita one evening. To Jeff, the ‘unrelieved black drabness’ of Em’s clothing was ‘evidence of an attitude of complete negativity’, which apparently would soon manifest itself in ‘an insolent intolerance of tradition, authority, family and all else that America held dear, up to and probably including apple pie!’ Rita, clearly surprised by this show of previously unsuspected conservatism in her normally liberally-minded husband, had tried to lift his mood and make light of his concerns.
Listening unseen at the top of the stairs, Emma had heard her father’s satisfyingly lurid tirade. And she had been rather pleased. After all, a major factor in her decision to wear the gear had been her desire to generate precisely this reaction. The look was sartorial shorthand; projecting an aura of contemptuous superiority to, and rejection of, everything and everyone around her. At least that was what other people read into her black clothing. These were the judgements people made, without ever actually speaking to the wearer to find out what she was really like. No one was interested in the person. Stuck fast in their dull, suburban way of thinking, people would make assumptions about her, based solely on the way she looked. And Emma reckoned that, if they were so judgemental and shallow, then they deserved to be shaken up a little.
Just then, the image of the stranger in the woods drifted back into her thoughts, interrupting her self-satisfied wallow in righteous indignation. Her smile fell at once.
Dammit!
She had made exactly those same hasty judgements on first seeing the stranger. She had leapt to exactly the same shallow conclusions about him, though she had far less excuse for her behaviour than did the disapproving citizens of middle America. After all, she and the stranger were, as he himself had pointed out, very alike. Like her, he was deathly pale, dressed all in black and like her, seemed to be all alone. She should have recognised him immediately as a kindred spirit.
But there was something about him. He had said he was different, and he was right. He was strange. Was he also dangerous?
Emma bit her lip.
No, surely if he had been intending to hurt her, he’d had ample opportunity and he had done nothing. No, she had misjudged him. Thinking of him now, Emma felt a thrill of excitement, a sense of fear mixed with desire. She recognised that some part of his appeal was undoubtedly the knowledge that her father would utterly disapprove of him on sight. If she did spend more time with her stranger, she would have to wait and choose the right moment to drop him into conversation; her father’s reaction was going to be something to behold: seismic! Emma allowed herself a guilty smile at the thought.
But she was getting ahead of herself. She wasn’t going to mention the stranger to anyone yet and there was still the small matter of how she was going to sneak out, unnoticed, to meet him at sundown.
Having decided that the sun must set at around supper time, she developed a plan that involved her feigning tiredness and returning to her room before the evening meal. Then, changing into the outdoor clothes that she would have to secrete by the back door in advance, she would slip out while all the rest of the group were together in one room, eating.
That settled, Emma found herself thinking about the stranger again. As she reviewed their encounter, she became aware of something that had only registered subliminally at the time; he had remained all but motionless throughout. Only his head and his left hand had moved at all, and they with only very slight movements. The rest of his body had not seemed to sway, or even tremble with the cold, while Emma, once she’d recovered from her terror, had been stamping her feet and rubbing her hands together for warmth. It was as if he were totally unaffected or unaware of the bitter chill. And when he’d finally left the path to let her pass, he had seemed almost to glide. Unlike her, he apparently had no difficulty with snagging roots or fallen branches hidden under the snow. He hadn’t had to wrench each foot out of and clear of the snow’s compacted grip. His movement had been effortless and smooth.
Emma puzzled over this for a moment, then let it drop. She tried instead to picture his features, but could recall clearly only his dark, compelling stare. His thin face had been pale, she remembered that, and his cheeks hollow; symptoms perhaps of his illness, whatever that was.
Perversely, Emma felt an odd thrill at the prospect that he might have AIDS. Having never, to her knowledge, met anyone afflicted with the disease, she felt a certain satisfaction that she was handling this meeting with a possible sufferer with such maturity. From daytime TV movies and waiting-room magazine articles, she’d formed a notion of the AIDS sufferer, not as an ordinary person like herself but as a tragic, almost poetic figure, as much a victim of the intolerance and fear of others as of the disease itself. With this in mind, Emma resolved to rise above such unthinking prejudice and treat this stranger with compassion.
But the sentiment behind her resolve was not pure altruism. The general stigmatisation of AIDS sufferers lent a measure of glamorous appeal to the idea of going against the norm. Emma saw herself as proudly following in the footsteps of the caring celebrities whose beautiful, glossy images so often smiled out from those same waiting-room magazines. These were the stars whose agents, no doubt recognising a bandwagon when they saw one, routinely had them attend charity fundraisers at which they could be photographed looking radiant, yet touchingly sincere, in their designer fashion and borrowed gems. It was surely just a happy coincidence that the selflessness of these beautiful people generated vital column inches of glowing praise.
Like these stratospheric luminaries, Emma yearned to be seen as admirably brave, principled and independent. Unlike them she had no audience to applaud her greatness of spirit but, in her own mind, she was satisfied that she was acting in a way which would have impressed even her parents, had she been able to tell them about it. It really was a shame that she couldn’t tell her father about the stranger, because, once he’d recovered from the tremendous shock of seeing his daughter associating with this weird person, Jeff would perhaps have finally come to appreciate how very understanding and mature his daughter now was; he would have to concede that his little girl was growing up.
Emma pulled herself back from her daydreams and reminded herself, with some reluctance, that the stranger hadn’t actually confirmed that he did have AIDS, so she shouldn’t be assuming that he had. He might of course have cancer, or some other awful illness she knew nothing about. However, there was also the chance that he was just naturally very thin and pale, and didn’t have any life-threatening illness at all. For the briefest moment Emma felt slightly cheated at this prospect. Startled at her own selfishness, she hastily pushed the fleeting disappointment from her mind.
Thinking back to their meeting in the woods, she wondered how old the stranger might be. He’d acted with the quiet self-assurance of an adult, but to her eye, his thin, lanky build suggested late teenage or early twenties. She really had no idea. Her prime concern for the moment was the possibility that he might turn out to be much too old for her, not that she had yet decided exactly how old was too old. She supposed that the acceptable disparity in ages would vary depending on the characters of the two people involved, and she wasn’t about to start setting any hard and fast rules before even getting to know him. That was just the sort of blinkered thinking she had come to expect from adults. And Emma had decided that, unlike the rest of them, all those old, blinkered, narrow-minded people, she would treat everyone as an individual.
The inconsistency inherent in her view of the world was not, even briefly, apparent to her.