He half ran with the dog in the direction of the heath, their breath floated before them. He was aware of the smell of the dried sweat on his body! It drifted up to him as he walked through the sterile landscape. The bushes were hung with silver webs, like the doylies his grandmother had used for Sunday tea throughout his childhood. Christopher let the dog off the lead and broke off a twig from a hawthorn tree, bent it into an arch, and with great care lifted a frosted web from a bush. His grandfather had taught him how to do this. He would have liked to have demonstrated this skill to a child of his own.
When he saw the police Land-Rover parked by the ditch, he threw the twig on to the hard ground and called to the dog. But it was already running towards the Land-Rover and cocked its leg against the back wheel, yellow urine ran in a melting stream along the frozen earth. There were three policemen inside the Land-Rover. A side window slid open and a burning cigarette stub fell to the ground. He saw the policemen notice him and he raised his hand to them. Perhaps the gesture looked foolish to them because they began to laugh. He pretended to be absorbed by the dog as it ran out of sight. Then he heard the Land-rover door open, and saw a policeman clambering out of the back.
“Morning,” said Christopher.
“Morning, sir,” said the policeman, who was putting on thick leather gloves. “Are you a regular at this time of the morning?”
“I’m here most mornings,” said Christopher. “With the dog.” He was suddenly aware of how he looked: unshaven, exhausted, his hair uncombed. The policeman was looking at the sticking plaster on Christopher’s hand.
“At this time?”
“Bit later, usually.”
“And were you here yesterday morning, sir?”
“Yes, I was.”
“And your name, sir?”
“Christopher Moore.”
“Local, are you?”
“Down the road, Curlew Close. Number fifteen,” he added.
He kept his head turned away from the ditch, but when the dog barked and the policeman looked away he quickly glanced down. The bag had gone. The policeman pulled his right hand glove off with his teeth, and took out a Biro and a notebook and wrote down Christopher’s name and address.
“You didn’t notice a green plastic bag in the ditch here yesterday morning did you, Mr Moore?”
Christopher pretended to think. “No,” he lied. He could feel the sweat trickling down his back and chest.
The policeman said, “Can I ask where you work, Mr Moore?”
“For myself…I’m a bookseller.”
This was another lie, though it was something he had always wanted to do.
Christopher pushed his hands into the pockets of his anorak and wiped his palms on the lining. The dog came hurrying back along the frozen bed of the ditch. He shouted, “Cm here!” and to his relief the dog obeyed him and scrambled up the slope of the ditch.
“Nice dog. Bull terrier?”
“Staffordshire.”
The policeman bent down and stroked the dog’s smooth head. The dog arched its head back and rolled its eyes in pleasure. A woman known only to Christopher as ‘red coat’ came in sight with two Alsatians walking obediently by her side. The policeman left Christopher saying, “So, if we need to talk to you?”
Christopher said, “Yes, any time.”
He put the dog oh the lead. It was afraid of the Alsatians. As Christopher passed the woman and the policeman, he heard the woman say in her hoarse voice. “Yes, it was me who reported it. Yesterday morning, eight o’clock. It was horrible. I shouldn’t have looked inside.”
He wanted to stay and hear more but he walked on. When he got home he crouched in front of the fire, he felt frozen through. He imagined that his bones were icicles and that his legs would shatter when he tried to get to his feet. It was snowing now. Christopher got up awkwardly and stood at the window and watched it settle. He hoped there would be enough for a snowman.
The fantasy came into his head that his daughter Catherine was alive and was watching the snow like him. She would be seventeen he thought. Too old for a snowman, but young enough to be excited by the thrill of deep snow. He shook the thought away.
He and Angela had never discussed exactly what had happened at the nursing home. He had not found the right words at the time, and she had volunteered nothing. Once, in the middle of the night he had woken and heard Angela crying quietly. “What’s wrong?” he’d said. “Are you crying for the baby?”
“Baby,” she’d said. “What baby? I’ve got toothache.”
He had got up to find some paracetamol for her.
He had a shelf full of books on child café and development bought from second-hand bookshops. He studied them in the evenings when Angela was out. She had never said to him, in so many words, “The baby’s dead,” only, “After it was all over I asked them if it was a boy or a girl.” The abortion was very late, too late for the usual suction method to be used. Angela had gone into labour. It had taken her fourteen painful hours to expel the child from her womb. It would have been possible for the child to live; its lungs would have been formed, its heart could beat. Its brain would have been working, giving and receiving messages. Sometimes he dared to imagine that the child had been kept alive somehow, been taken away from the clinic and adopted. Perhaps he had seen her, had sat next to her on a bus? Miracles happened, he had read the headlines several times, ‘My Miracle Baby’.
He shut the dog in the kitchen. Put his coat on and went outside to the small shed where he kept his tools. He selected a large chisel from the rack, where the tools hung in an orderly line. He found the metal coal shovel and went outside and cleared the snow away from a flagstone. He looked up to his next-door neighbour’s bedroom window, the curtains were still closed. He would have to be quiet.
The flagstone lifted easily. The earth underneath was brown and friable. He used the chisel and the shovel to make a hole about a foot long and nine inches deep, then he went inside and picked up the baby. “Hello, chick,” he said.
He wondered whose baby she was. It seemed wrong to lay her in the hole with nothing but a white sheet between her and the cold earth. So, he went in again, found a shoe box, and wrapped the little swaddled baby in two layers of green tissue paper, laid it inside and replaced the lid. As he lowered the box into the hole and raked the cold earth over it with his fingers, he kept his eye on his neighbour’s bedroom window. He had only five minutes before the alarm clock rang at eight AM and his neighbour opened the curtains. He strained to drop the heavy flagstone quietly into its place. Then he scuffed the snow around it. As he went back into the house he heard the neighbour’s alarm ringing through the party wall. An hour later enough snow had fallen to obliterate the small grave completely.
He picked up several books, but found he couldn’t read. With the television, radio and sound system gone, there was nothing in the house to watch or listen to, except the gas flames and the sounds they made. He was swallowing continuously. He kept thinking about the people he had lost in his life. He examined his hands. Since he had stopped working they had become smooth, his fingernails had grown again and he needed to cut them to stop them looking like a woman’s.
When he was a young teenager he had worried about his sexuality. He had been afraid of the casual physicality of men. His grandfather had expected Christopher to accompany him to the Working Men’s Club on Sundays, while his grandmother was at home cooking the dinner.
They left the house together at 12.30 PM and returned at 2.30 PM to the smell of roasting meat. In the intervening hours Christopher saw his grandfather coarsen and become boastful. Had even seen him threaten violence to a stranger who had inadvertently spilled his drink. He had had to force himself to laugh at the crudeness of the men’s jokes and conversation. He would have preferred to stay at home in the company of the women who crowded into his grandmother’s kitchen to talk about births and deaths and new scandals.
He went up to the bathroom intending to have a shave, then he remembered that his electric razor had been stolen. He took his clothes off and turned on the bath taps. He watched as the warm water crept slowly up the sides of the bath. A small mummified spider bobbed about on the surface of the water. Christopher lowered himself into the warm bath like a convalescing invalid. He lay still and watched the snowflakes as they passed in a diagonal pattern behind the small frosted window high up on the wall in front of him. Then he cupped his penis in his hands and fell asleep. He dreamed that everyone had died and he was the last survivor of an eternal winter.