In February it snowed. It was a wild, white surprise. The snow fell for days, in a confusion of climate. Long past Christmas in the wings of spring, the world was white. Ice on the corners. Snow on the hills. Traffic formed on the A roads and the back roads. The white stuff piled on rail tracks, halting trains and increasing signal failures. London does not know what to do with snow. It lives in hope that if it falls it will do so lightly, and leave smoothly, pulling away into ice, the ice disappearing into light, the streets returning to themselves. But this February, no. The fall began on the first day and came down heavy. Before it could disperse there was more, another layer of difficulty which smothered the rooftops and the tiny surface areas of the thinnest of naked branches, making pretty winter trees. Cars would not start and schools were closed. All the buses were cancelled and Heathrow was closed. Even in the centre of town, in Piccadilly and Covent Garden and Trafalgar, those places whose endless activity had the power to nullify movements of weather, where the city itself was the defining factor of experience, making songs of rain, laughing and tooting in the face of sleet, even they could not shrug this off. It was covered, everywhere, the city, the suburbs, white. The Thames formed rafts of ice, and closest to the water was coldest of all.
Damian was at work in Croydon, whose high metallic skyscrapers were also icing capped, as were the tips of the telephone masts, the railings of the ugly flyover, and the ledge of the fifth floor window that looked in on the blue-carpeted area of his desk. There were three other desks in this corner, belonging to Angela, Mercy and Tom, who watched EastEnders religiously and owned a tie with prints of tiny pineapples on it. Angela and Mercy were talking.
‘You know what happen?’ Angela said, her red earrings matching her red fingernails, her black braids swirled into a bun. ‘When you climb on people’s heads to get to the top? Well, guess what? When they all leave, you fall right back down to the ground.’
‘That’s it,’ Mercy said, munching her mid-morning marshmallow, which matched her baby-pink shirt. ‘And you think someone’s gonna come and put out their hand to help you up when you’re down? No. They’ll just be watching you and laughing innit.’
‘You know. And not with you, but at you. What goes around comes around. God is just,’ said Angela. ‘Treat your neighbour as you would want to be treated yourself.’
‘Reap what you sow.’
‘Yes.’
Their fingers clattered for a while over their keyboards and Mercy offered Angela another marshmallow which she accepted, even though, as everyone was aware, she didn’t like marshmallows because they were an unsatisfying, disappearing kind of food, but the snow was such that it caused aberrations of character and habit. The person they were talking about, Heather, had recently been promoted, using, they felt, underhand and treacherous tactics. They now decided that they were going to just go the whole hog and bitch about her.
‘She’s one of those people,’ Mercy lowered her voice, ‘who thinks she’s better than everyone else, better than you or me. I hate people like that.’
‘Going around with an inflated sense of themselves, yeah.’
‘But you can’t hide who you really are.’
‘Maybe that’s why she wears so much make-up …’
‘It’s the wrong colour as well. Next time look at her neck, you’ll see it …’
From there they went on to talk about comfort duvets, the special, very old duvet that is kept by the television and that you wrap around yourself at times of extreme pampering and hibernation, the perfect thing for this kind of weather and the very item they would both be making good use of when they got home that evening. Damian listened to them, rather he heard them, hoping that they would not try to include him in their conversation as they sometimes did. He was having particular trouble being at work today. There had been another in-lawed Sunday roast with Patrick and Verena two days ago that he was still recovering from, plus he had a headache, and he resented more than usual the irritating nature of nine-to-five existence, that you chat endlessly with the same people simply because they are stationed in your patch, that you come to know their daytime physical intimacies, Mercy’s need for regular face powder and lip balm, Angela’s chilblains and resulting office slipper-wearing, what Tom and his keen-hiker wife and their two boys were going to be doing this weekend. The snow was making everything more intense, louder, closer. He felt shut in. The heating was on too strong. The cold whiteness outside the window was both inviting and incongruous.
At 11.30 a.m. the sandwich trolley arrived, a tall silver vehicle which lately had developed a squeaky wheel. It came at the same time every day, too early, at the lunchtime of children. The arrival of the sandwich trolley was Damian’s proof that school was preparation for this kind of future, that from a very young age our training for captivity is in motion – the uniform, the fifteen-minute breaks, the ridiculous premature lunch. The sandwich trolley was the moment in his working day when he felt most strongly that his life required a dramatic change, a splintering, some kind of scandal or shock or tremor, when he most wanted to flee, to rip off his suit and run screaming from the building, and go – where? Not home, not to Dorking, but to some loose, untethered place, any kind of ocean or other country, to a transcendental sphere where breath itself was marvellous and the breeze was open and palpable and there was nothing in the way of it to make it seem irrelevant. Instead though, usually, he got up from his navy-blue swivel chair like everyone else, stretched, and walked over. The hungry huddle bantered amidst the crinkling of plastic sandwich wrappers and packets of crisps and the jangling of change, returning to their desks afterwards temporarily enlivened by the approaching meal, through which their computer screens would remain switched on, so that they could peer at them, or enjoy a moment of unbridled and legitimate net-surfing. Today Damian could not join that brief, low-ceilinged voyage to the sandwich mecca. The sound of the crisp packets and the squeaking of the faulty wheel made his head ache even more. When Tom nudged him and asked him if he was coming to the trolley he just wanted to beat him down. He looked out of the window, saw the clouds moving slowly across the firmament, and from somewhere very close, yet also seeming to come from the sky, he heard his father talking to him again, in that now frequent harsh whisper, those same seventeen words, How long will you go on living your life, as if you were balancing on a ribbon? That was when he fled.
He did not scream as he left the building. The screaming was internal. The cold, after the claustrophobic heat inside, made him shiver. And not just that, but the sharpness of everything, the enormous difficulty of each moment. He had not been to the grave yet. He had not laid flowers or knelt in the necropolis, or taken care of the boxes in the garage. He was afraid, afraid of the emptiness, of finding reflections of himself, and now they were hounding him, these small failures, so that he couldn’t think straight, and yet it was so much more than that, everything, everything, was wrong – specificities were fading, foundations were crumbling. Indeed he was walking on a ribbon, tripping, falling, with Laurence on his heels, pulling him down, along this white-cushioned southern pavement, on this alternative journey to another kind of sandwich, to Pret A Manger, which he now entered, realising, beneath his turmoil, that he was nevertheless hungry.
Damian was a Pret frequenter. He came here on such days when he couldn’t handle the trolley. Inside all was retro and metallic, silver floor, silver cabinets, silver ceiling. He stared at the sandwiches. There were other people also staring at the sandwiches, in their neat office clothes, their dark winter coats, considering what they wanted to eat in this single, special hour, this small portion of freedom. Should it be meat or fish, cheese or egg? Should he pick the sandwich that foolishly claimed not to be a sandwich by forsaking its bread, and therefore was actually a salad? Or should he just have a plain and honest salad, a Niçoise, a bean feast? He stood there in this pressured Pret cluster, which was not really very dissimilar to the one in the office, it was just less friendly. Everyone was trying to appear as though they didn’t care which sandwich they had, when actually they did care, a great deal. There was an acceptable amount of time that you could stand here for, between thirty seconds and a minute, and Damian was aware, as time passed, that his perusal was bordering on the excessive. The problem was that he was no longer staring at the sandwiches, but beyond them, into the silver of the cabinet, into the distractions and reflections there. He saw a picture of Stephanie, early this morning, putting on her dressing-gown to leave the bedroom, a reluctance in her movements suggesting defeat, dejection. He saw Laurence’s eroding dead skull beneath the earth with soil clustered around it, yet still, in the midst of all this, he was supposed to choose between chicken-avocado and ham and Pret pickle. The more he stared, the more incapable he became of choosing. He glanced around and upwards, the ceiling swayed, a sweat was forming on his neck. Next to him a black thing reached out and took a sandwich, a woman’s gloved hand. It seemed a sinister hand, he realised that he was trembling. In an attempt to pull himself together, he closed his eyes and opened them again. Then he reached out, following the movements of the sinister gloved hand, and grabbed the first thing he touched. Egg mayonnaise. He went quickly to the till and paid for it. Just as quickly, he went back out into the biting air and threw up on the pavement.
The rest of the day was spent in a smog of ongoing qualmishness, until at 5.45 p.m. he went to the station to get his train, only to find that it had been cancelled. The tracks were snow-clogged. There were red crosses all over the departure boards. He called Stephanie. He called Michael (Bell Green was only a couple of stops away and some of the local lines were running). When there was no answer on Michael’s mobile, he called Michael’s house. Melissa picked up.
She opened the door wearing a flared grey tracksuit with DANCEFIT printed across the chest and white cord string, and her slippers. She looked very young, yet older, closer into her face, some recent darkness around the eyes, an argument with her smile, an uncertainty. Or maybe people just look different when they’re at home on a weeknight not expecting anyone special and it’s snowing outside in February.
‘Come in,’ she said. He started apologising – the trains, I’ll be out of your way first thing, rocking up on you like this … ‘It’s fine, Damian, honestly, it’s really not a problem. Pass your coat,’ which she hung to thaw over the back of one of the dining chairs. He left his briefcase leaning against the wall by the door.
‘Where’s Michael, is he trapped as well?’
He had expected to find him sitting on the sofa or coming out of the kitchen, but there was no one, just Venus and Serena Williams playing on a news clip, mythical, like shooting stars, distant yet familiar, and the radio on in the background.
‘I don’t know where he is,’ Melissa said. ‘I mean, he’s away with work so, I don’t know.’
This was not strictly true. Michael was staying at the Queen’s Hotel in Crystal Palace, on a temporary sojourn away from unmarried life, at her request, after another argument that had started with his objection to the returning of the onion to the bedroom windowsill, but which was really about deeper things. The frost between them had thickened further after his confession. Michael had moved to the sofa full-time because the master court wasn’t big enough any more to hold their distance. For a while they had lived purely by the light of the children, but during that last quarrel Melissa had said, ‘I can’t take this any more. I can’t live like this, it’s making me sick. I want you to go.’ ‘What about the kids?’ Michael had said. ‘I’ll manage,’ she’d said. And so he was gone, return date as yet unspecified. Which meant it was true, in answer to Damian’s question, that she didn’t know whether he was trapped in the snow or not. He could be, there were lots of hills in Crystal Palace, a train could have come off the tracks or he might have stumbled in a ditch. Strangely these possibilities were out of her jurisdiction. For now he was not her man. He was a snowman, out there, and she was in here, in the crooked warmth, with her sleeping cubs, and now this other man, who was drifting around as if embarrassed by himself.
‘Why don’t you sit down? Sit down, chill.’ Damian took this as an order, descending into the sofa at the last pop of Venus. He couldn’t chill, though. It was weird being here without Stephanie and Michael. It was releasing all kinds of unacceptable feelings in him. ‘Are you hungry? I just ate but there’s some couscous left over if you want some.’
Couscous. Stephanie did that sometimes, cooked couscous. Couscous, Damian believed, was not meant to be eaten in the home. It belonged in North African restaurants where they knew what to do with it, so there was not much hope for this meal that she strode across the room into the kitchen to prepare for him. She put feta cheese on top of it. There were chunks of grey aubergine and carrots. She laid it out on a place mat with a glass of red wine and a spoon. ‘Thanks,’ he said, sitting down to it. He wanted to ask for a fork but he was paranoid that he might say fuck instead.
‘When I was growing up,’ Melissa said relatedly, ‘we always ate rice with a spoon and fork.’ She was sitting on the edge of the chair diagonally across from him with her leg tucked underneath her, watching him eat, making him more self-conscious. ‘But Michael and his family ate it with a knife and fork, so that’s how he always eats it. So now, whenever I’m having rice or couscous or something like that, there’s this confusion in me that wasn’t there before, about whether to get a knife or a spoon to eat it with. Don’t you think it’s problematic how when you’re in a couple you lose your grip on who you really are, on how you do things, on your own private culture? Do you know what I mean? Do you ever have this issue? I mean, what kind of a person eats rice with a knife? I don’t want my children to grow up to be the kind of people who eat rice with a knife.’
She was looking at him with genuine interest. She wanted a response. She wanted him to engage with her on this.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you definitely can’t eat couscous with a knife.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But you do need a f-fork. You always need a fork, unless it’s cereal.’
She gasped. ‘You haven’t got a fork! I’ll get you a fork. Of course you need a fork, to get the dregs on to the spoon! You see? You see what’s happening to me? I’m confused. My inner make-up has been rearranged and now I’m spoiled. It’s so sad.’
She went away and got the fork and gave it to him. He was chewing on some tough aubergine. It all tasted quite nice but the textures weren’t necessarily the best. ‘Actually, you know what?’ she said. ‘I think I’ll have some wine too, even if it is red. It’s Michael’s wine. He’s the one who drinks red. I prefer white, as you know, but I’ll have some red with you. It’s no fun drinking alone.’
It was a two-thirds-full bottle of Rioja. Soon they were chilling at the table postprandial listening to Jaguar Wright. She had a sharp, hot voice rafting over choppy beats. Melissa nodded to it intermittently as she was drinking. Damian had discreetly left a few bits of aubergine on the side of his plate.
‘Space is good,’ she was saying, in an upbeat rumination about coping with stress. ‘I like it when Michael’s away. I feel different, brighter. Even this house feels different. I’m returning to myself, experiencing myself clearly again, you know? It’s like, I’m not opaque any more, I’m stronger in fact, more positive. Positivity is the way to go – that’s what my sister’s always saying. It’s our mental landscape that holds us back.’ (Since Michael had left, Melissa and Carol had been chatting more on the phone in the evenings.)
‘Um-hm,’ Damian said nodding, because he could see that she really wanted him to get her, and he really wanted her to get that he was getting her. ‘Yep, space is the thing. Whenever you can get it, take it. I could use more of it myself. When’s he coming back?’
‘Er, Thursday,’ she lied, ‘maybe Friday. How’re Stephanie and the kids?’
‘They’re fine, they’re good …’ But he didn’t want to talk about Stephanie. He did not want to bring her, or anyone, into this perfect, warm and temporary cave where everything was just so, Melissa, all to himself, even if she was going on and on about Michael, but it was OK, it was just the two of them. They were alone together in a world of snow. Everything was still and soft. There were occasional sounds from the London outside and he liked that too.
‘OK, look,’ she said suddenly, ‘I hate lying. Michael isn’t away with work. We’re having space’ (she made quote marks with her fingers) ‘from each other. You know, space space. That kind of space. There, I’ve said it. Everything got too much so I kicked him out.’
‘You kicked him out? Seriously?’
‘Well,’ the Jaguar Wright LP ended and Melissa got up to change it, ‘I didn’t actually kick him out per se, as in, literally, with my foot. I just asked him to get out of my face for a while and he agreed. It was kind of a mutual decision in the end. I thought you would’ve known. Didn’t he tell you?’
‘No, I haven’t seen him.’
‘But I thought you were buddies.’ She found Susana Baca on the shelf and slipped her out of the CD case. The congas came in, the taps of the xylophone. In the kitchen she washed up Damian’s plate straight away so that dust wouldn’t build on it. She still had the image in her mind of Michael packing his tiny blue suitcase, the way he’d looked at her as she’d walked into the bedroom. She had wanted to lie down with him on the bed, a last holding, but he’d given her such a hard, hollow look.
From the way she was talking about it, so flippantly, Damian sensed that Melissa was fronting about Michael, that she was more upset about it than she seemed. There was a picture of them both with the children on the shelf above the television that he was trying not to look at. ‘I guess he must be lying low,’ he said, assuming the same levity in his voice, though really he wanted to know everything, all the details. He felt spurred, guiltily so. ‘Anyway, I don’t think Michael considers me a bonafide spar on that level that he’d go out of his way to call me up about something like that.’ Not that he wanted, in any way here, by thus speculating, to imply that Michael was not a close enough friend for it to be such a big deal if something were to happen here tonight, something unrighteous, something secret. No. Absolutely not. Because that would be dark of him. But if only, in this sweet snow …
‘What happened?’ he asked as she came back into the room.
‘Oh, nothing and everything. He slept with someone but that’s not what happened. It was everything else that wasn’t happening that happened.’
‘Wow. He cheated,’ Damian said.
Melissa looked at him, bemused, a little condescending. ‘He doesn’t belong to me. Fidelity is so overrated. I think it’s childish, the way people think of it.’
‘So it doesn’t bother you?’
There was a suggestion in his tone, a hint of expectation, that made Melissa see him for the first time in a different way. She noticed the roundness of his shoulders and the thickness of his waist. There was a rich warmth to him that she had always thought of as brotherly, but now it was alluring, rugged. His fingers were very thick, not smooth and elegant like Michael’s. She studied them, for long enough for him to notice. The Rioja was going to her head.
‘If it bothers me it’s my problem, not his,’ she said.
Damian could feel a wide, foolish smile trying to take over his face and he suppressed it. It was just that he was content, being here in her company, so different from how he’d felt earlier today, and the way she’d looked at him just then had given him something, it had lifted him. ‘I think I had a panic attack today,’ he blurted.
‘Did you? How come?’
‘I don’t know. I was trying to buy a sandwich and I just … I don’t know. I freaked out.’
‘Do you know what caused it? Was it something to do with the sandwich? Michael hates egg mayo, it turns his stomach.’
She was like a record on repeat. Michael Michael Michael. ‘Sorry,’ she said, realising, as Damian got up from the table. There seemed to be a collusion emerging between them, unspoken, a secret twoness. ‘It was egg mayo, funnily enough,’ he said, turning away from her towards the bookshelves. Melissa shuddered. It was getting colder. She went to adjust the heating and wrapped the blanket off the sofa around her, by which time Damian was sitting on the floor looking through the records on the bottom shelf. His shirt had come untucked at the back. His back was like a warm mountain, thick and rotund.
‘You’ve got some classics here, man. Millie Jackson. My dad used to listen to her.’
My dad. Had he actually said that? It sounded absurd coming out of his mouth, yet he’d said it so naturally. He was shocked.
‘Why don’t you play it?’ Melissa said.
She showed him how to change the speed on the record player. Millie sloped in slinky, white with the snow in her white jumpsuit and long cape. The voice took Damian right back to a time when Joyce, he and Laurence were sitting at the table playing blackjack. It was all crisp edges and clusters of colours in his head, Joyce’s purple cardigan, the gold buttons, the flowers on the table, the orange curtain. The vividness, the immediacy of the image, brought tears to his eyes.
‘Are you OK?’
He was hunched on the floor, staring at the turntable. He breathed deeply, a long, violent exhale. ‘God, it’s amazing how music can make up your life, your whole life, and bring it back to you in bits, things you thought you’d forgotten.’
She agreed with him, and he felt that she was gently listening to him. ‘Are you thinking about your dad?’
The song played on, both of them inside it. ‘It just struck me that he was alive once. I mean, really alive, before he died in his life. Do you understand what I mean? That’s what happened to him. He was already dead.’
‘The greatest challenge in life is not to die before we die,’ Melissa said. ‘I read that somewhere. It happens to a lot of people.’ She was going to add, ‘I think it’s happening to me,’ but didn’t.
They were both a little drunk by now. They were next to each other on the rug with their backs against the sofa in the zigzag lamplight. Damian wanted to put his arm around her, to hold her, just for a minute. He’d never talked like this about his father to anyone and he felt lighter, as though a touch could carry no guilt, no reproach.
‘I think my dad’s going to die soon,’ she said. ‘He’s getting frailer and frailer, every time I see him. I should go and visit him more.’
‘Why don’t you?’
She paused. ‘It’s a long story. It’s in the past and I don’t like to go there … Lots of people have difficult childhoods. The important thing is how you rise above it to meet yourself.’
‘Where did you read that one?’
‘Nowhere.’
There was an extended silence, for the dead and the undead. The vinyl too fell silent, in the space between songs. Melissa finished her wine. ‘Have you tried writing about it,’ she asked, ‘about what it feels like, in a diary or something? It must rock your foundations when a parent dies, no matter how you felt about them or how close you were. You should just splurge it all out. That’s what I used to do. It helps.’
Damian had never kept a diary. ‘It seems depressing, staring your problems in the face like that, writing them out … I have written about him, though, in a way, a long time ago. I wrote a novel that was sort of based on him.’
‘Did you?’ She sounded impressed. ‘Did you finish it?’
‘Kind of. Not properly. It fizzled out in the end.’
‘What’s it called?’
He was shy. ‘It doesn’t really have one title. There were two or three of them. “Canon and the Storm” was the main one.’
‘Canon and the Storm. Hm.’ She rolled it around on her tongue. ‘Canon. That’s an interesting name. Is Canon the father? … I like it. It’s a good title. It’s intriguing.’
‘So it gets your approval?’ Damian was overjoyed. It was beginning to come to him again, the finger-tingling writing feeling, the cocooning thrill of it. She even said, ‘I’d like to read it some time,’ glancing over at the empty bottle on the table and draining her glass again, even though it was definitely finished.
‘Are you serious?’ he said.
‘Yeah, seriously. Email it to me.’
‘OK, I might.’ (He would.) ‘Once I’ve got it all together …’
‘God, I don’t know how anyone could write a novel. It must take ages. All those words. All those sentences.’ She was getting up, clinging to the edge of the sofa. ‘I couldn’t do it. Two thousand words is about my max.’
The music had ended again, throwing the room into emptiness. ‘You know what I’d really love right now?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘A cigarette.’
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘I don’t. I used to.’
‘I’ve got some Marlboro Lights if you want one.’
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘I didn’t. I gave up.’ On giving up, that is. On New Year’s Day, to spite the resolution culture. Don’t stop, start. Stop denying yourself and live. Life is long, not short. Smoking kills? Life kills. This was Damian’s current philosophy, and it had been enabling abundant Marlboro Light puffing in the driveway at home and subsequent gum chewing to hide the smell, which wasn’t working.
Melissa tried to fight the craving but gave in. ‘Let’s have one, I don’t care any more,’ she said. ‘We have to go outside, though. You know it’s minus out there.’
She went to check on the children. Blake was sleeping through now, returning to her the night. It was Ria who had been restless recently. She had tried to sleepwalk downstairs at 2 a.m. with one crutch, before the cast was removed, and Melissa had found her under the skylight. But now she was sleeping deeply. They had gone out in the snow today, in the morning, and on discovering that the school was closed, they had gone on towards the park, along the silver birches, in through the gates. It was deserted, the snow a white floor untroubled. Amazed, Ria had run across the field, a decreasing figure advancing towards the tenements, her small dark footprints a trail of recent Rias. There was a slight limp in her left leg, which the doctor had said would disappear in time.
And they had made snowmen, a family of three, in the garden, who stared with their hard sultana eyes as Melissa and Damian lit up. Their noses were carrots. One of them, the tallest, was wearing Michael’s scarf. Other inanimate beings in the garden were the yellow teddy bear sitting stiff-haired on the red bench, and the toy figures in the white-topped playhouse. The sky was cold and lilac. The snow was turning to ice, making the snow family lose their definition. The wind chime sang as the ice wind blew.
‘Are you sure about this?’ Damian said when he offered the pack.
‘I’m sure.’ She took one. It felt big between her fingers. The first inhale was air-spinning, gorgeous against the wine. They had found more to drink at the bottom of the fridge, a half bottle of leftover Liebfraumilch which was pleasantly sweet. ‘Sometimes when you want something you just have to let yourself have it,’ she said.
For Damian too, it was one of the best cigarettes he had ever smoked.
‘Just don’t blame me if you start again.’
‘I won’t. I don’t wanna get cancer.’
‘If you smoke it to only halfway down it’s not as bad. Most of the cancer’s in the butt.’
The arms of their coats were touching, which didn’t seem a thing. They blew up at the sky, the skeletal aerials and the silhouettes of the chimneys. Long clouds lay out, some moving and pink and slipping away, and at one end, to the south, the moon slid full, round and golden into a case of silver wisps, until it was swallowed, whole, and all that was moving was a fading glow like a sun reduced to a common star. A bay tree, blackened in the darkness, stood up above the fences, watching over them with its still, black leaves.
‘I like it out here,’ Melissa said. ‘Sometimes I come out here at night to think, to be by myself. It’s not that private – I feel like people are watching me from the windows over there – but I can hide behind that tree.’ She looked up at it. ‘That tree is my friend. It understands me. It knows.’
‘What does it know about you?’ Damian said.
‘Everything.’ He was looking at her profile. She could feel him looking at her in a certain way. It reminded her of how Michael had looked at her in Montego Bay, waiting for her to answer his questions. ‘Everything I was and what I am now,’ she said, ‘whatever that is. I’m not sure I know any more. I seem to be losing a sense of it. It’s quite frightening. Do you ever feel like that, like you’re losing track of who you are?’
‘Most of the time I feel like that.’
She turned to him, stealing her profile away, emboldened. ‘And you’re looking for yourself, but can’t find it? You don’t even know where to look any more? Like you’re groping around in the darkness?’
Dominant in her face was that look of extreme youth he’d seen when she’d opened the door to him. The face of a child, the façade all gone.
‘It’s because we’re in the wrong place,’ he said. ‘It’s because we’re not living how we were supposed to live.’
‘Why, though? Why don’t people live the way they’re supposed to live? It should be the easiest thing in the world.’
He shrugged and lit another cigarette. ‘It’s scary. That’s why.’
So quickly does smoke enfold. Melissa wanted another and motioned for one. She took it in deep, right to the bottom of her throat before blowing back out, adding smoke clouds to cold clouds. The wine and the snow and the smoke were a red and white dance inside her and she felt carried with it, afloat.
‘Can I tell you a secret, Damian?’ she said.
‘Yeah, course.’
‘I’ve never told this to anyone before. I’m almost afraid to tell it to you.’
‘I won’t tell anyone, I promise.’
‘It’s not that. It’s not that kind of secret. I’m just worried something bad will happen if I do.’
But she wanted to tell it, to say it out loud, in this quiet pure white, so she moved her fear out of the way.
‘When I was younger, before I had children, before I met Michael, when I was around twenty-four, I used to have this feeling. I’d had it all through my life, right up until about that age, twenty-four – that’s the age when I can still remember it being completely intact, as much as a feeling, a sense of something, can be intact.’ Her hands were shivering, partly from the cold. She took another sip from the Liebfraumilch, followed immediately by another inhale. ‘You might find this strange, or arrogant maybe, it was a feeling that I was protected by something, a kind of guide. A guardian angel, if you want to think of it like that. I had my own angel watching over me. It walked with me. She, I think it was most like a she, was there, everywhere I went, through everything that happened. I felt like I was untouchable, invincible. I used to walk across roads without looking, convinced she would stop the traffic. I used to take all kinds of risks with myself …’
‘What kind of risks?’
‘Oh, things I wouldn’t do now. Staying in strange men’s flats, getting into meat vans with them, jumping off —’
‘Meat vans?’
‘Another long story.’
‘OK.’
‘Anyway, the point is that I’m scared now, and I didn’t used to be scared. I used to live off my instincts. The instinct was guided by the angel and the angel by the instinct.’
Before Michael had left, Melissa had taken to going out alone in the evenings. She hadn’t felt like seeing friends. She’d go to the V&A, to galleries, to look at pictures, to see if maybe she could find it, what it might look like, this angel that she had always taken for granted. At the Tate Modern she had found something, a painting by Gaugin of a woman standing facing the sea. It was called In the Waves. The woman had long, bright hair and she was naked, the sea rising around her. She was open and unhindered, alone and whole in her nature. Melissa had stood there for a long time, gazing at this picture. There it was. That was what it looked like. How could she get back there?
‘So that’s my secret,’ she told Damian. ‘I can’t feel it any more. That thing that belonged only to me, that no one could ever take away. It’s not there any more. I think it’s gone.’
‘It hasn’t gone,’ he said.
‘It has, it has. Where is it, then? I’ve looked for it. I’ve been thinking maybe Blake’s taken it. Maybe that’s what happens with sons, they take their mothers’ souls away. Do you think he’ll give it back? He’s quite good at giving things back, like if I ask him usually he gives it back, whatever it is, my hair clip, my wallet, he’ll just give it back to me. Did you give your mother’s soul back to her? When does it happen?’
‘My mother never gave me her soul, so I never had to give it back.’
‘Oh sweetheart, I’m sorry. It’s so cold, I’m so drunk now I don’t even know what I’m saying any more. I must remember to think positively. Put your arms around me, let’s keep each other warm. I don’t want to go inside yet.’ He did what she asked, rubbing her shoulders to warm her, feeling that this was enough, they had transcended something.
‘It sounds like you’re talking about God,’ he said. ‘Your angel, your guide. Isn’t it God?’
‘It’s my own god. What do you do when you lose your god?’
‘You haven’t lost it,’ he repeated. ‘I can see it. It’s right there.’
‘Where?’
‘There. In your face. Your face is beautiful.’
She looked past him, into the lilac, the mist. ‘But I can’t feel it,’ she said, with tears in her eyes. ‘I don’t know who I am.’
He slept on the sofa, aware of her above him, every movement, the noise of the floorboards under her feet. He was the sea churning and drifting beneath her bow, and he fell asleep in the liquid motions of this longing and dreamt of the fishes he’d seen in the aquarium last week with Avril, the snake pipefish making question marks with its tail. In the morning, in the very early light, she came downstairs. He was already up and was standing pulling on his trousers. She paused, for just a breath of time, in which they reached for each other from inside themselves, only with their eyes, in that first purity of morning. She saw him, the whole possibility of him. Her vision swept up and down him and he felt it. He would have gone to her, right then. But he couldn’t move, only look at her, asking silently for her to remember. Then the moment was gone.
‘Morning,’ she said, and went to warm Blake’s milk.