Fragments (3 page)

As she stood to
prepare herself for the battle back out into the wind, she noticed
something gray and furry, back in the shadows. Was that a dog?
Alone, abandoned? She moved forward.
Oh dear god, please don’t
let it be a poor dead thing, abandoned here in the cold and
muck.
She approached the mound cautiously; like humans, dogs
were animals. Animals required caution until you had the measure of
them. The closer she got, the less it looked like a dog, the more
it looked like... a wolf? Here? It was hard to see, between the
shadows, the falling sleet, and her tiredness. She called to the
animal under her breath, making reassuring noises. The sleet was
starting to settle in slush piles around the fur... surely it would
move out of that puddle that would soon form ice, if it
could...?

She’d had to
kneel down, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in her knees as they
soaked in the cold. Her hand reached forward to touch the thick
pelt, but she couldn’t feel anything through her layers of gloves.
She stripped her right hand free, and touched the pelt again,
gently trying to shake whatever it was awake. Warmth flooded into
her fingers, over her palms, as she connected with the fur.
Whatever was here, wasn’t dead, that was for sure.

Shaking it
brought no response. She took her other glove off, and tried to
search around to find the head, the legs, anything, that would make
sense of this shape. Her hands moved under into the slush and
little daggers stabbed into her. Ice was forming well under there.
A touch of panic prompted her to grab what she thought might be the
ruff of the animal and pull it back up and out, trying to unfurl
it. It gave too easily and she fell back onto the sludge of the
alleyway. The fur had come with her, and ended up on her: it was a
fur coat. She was holding the thick collar and the lining had been
revealed up to the skies; the fur side was touching down on her
body. Her butt was stinging, with both the impact and the puddle of
sludge she’d landed in. She stared at the coat in her hands, then
panicked and jumped to her feet as well as she could: the coat
lining was getting wet. Without a thought, she stood and whipped
the coat over her back, like a cloak: why was there a thick warm
coat, lying in the gutter..?

The warmth, the
unctuous slide of heat that smoothed out over her shoulders
distracted her. The fur repelled the sleet, the cold. She felt the
chill lift and her body relax. Even her frozen backside was warmed
through.
This is why they raised minks... to keep out the thick
cold. This is why they suffocated them by putting their heads in
jars... to keep the fur intact...

She’d never
bought fur, ever. Not only had she never been able to afford it,
she’d been repelled by the thought: repulsed. Now, as the seasonal
enemy that relentlessly assaulted her was beaten back and
conquered... she shivered her arms into the coat, snuggled it round
her. The collar wrapped up over her head, in a hood. The coat went
past her knees. The thick sleeves engulfed her hands. Only her feet
stayed cold but with the rest of her warm, that was bearable. She
closed her eyes and wrapped her hands tightly across her chest.

She no longer
felt cold! She felt warm... she felt dry...she felt safe.

She stood, her
eyes closed, drinking it in.

Her feet asked
her to move.

She opened her
eyes and was a little transfixed to find herself still in the
alleyway. The sleet was still slamming down but it simply didn’t
penetrate the coat at all. Her feet, however, still stood in
freezing sludge. She looked down and shuffled them, urging the
blood warming in her core to pump down and get her feet moving. Her
feet responded, and the urgency to move diminished.

As she brought
her gaze back up, she looked on what the coat had covered. What the
coat had been hiding.

Her feet jumped
back as her mouth let out a puff of silent, strangled air. It was a
body: a woman’s body.

Maggie stared.
It was not the first body she’d seen, and she supposed it would not
be her last. It was, however, the most pathetic body she had ever
seen. The woman was face down, her dark hair matted over her head.
Nothing of her face could be seen. She was skin and bone. Like an
old chicken stripped for broth making. The hand that lay dead and
cold, so very cold, so very blue, on the rat droppings and rubbish
the wind collected in the back of the alleyway, was tiny, shrunken:
like a sick child’s. Ankles showed above canvas sneakers and below
the hem of her pants: wasted. Maggie was sure that if she pulled
back the sweater she could see there would be track marks all over
her arms. A crack whore, no doubt. A body that wasted, a life that
ruined, would rarely fall so far, without serious addiction. The
sneakers were worn and split. Maggie pulled the coat tightly around
her, tears dripping out of her eyes. To die like this, to die
alone, face down in dog shit, in this cold... it was her worst
nightmare.

The coat warmed
her through.

The coat.

How could this
woman have such a coat as this?

The contrast
between the clothing still on the woman –
the body
– and the
coat Maggie now wore could not have been greater. Everything about
the body screamed poverty and neglect. Perhaps she had stolen
it...?

Thoughts of the
body, and how she might, or might not, have lived her life, was
scaring the bejeezers out of Maggie. She needed to go get help, and
bring someone to this poor wretch, and get her out of the alleyway.
She turned, and headed back out to the main street.

The wind picked
at her within a few feet and the sleet once more slammed in
horizontally. Or it tried to. With her muffler over her mouth and
the hood covering her forehead and shielding her eyes, Maggie found
she could stand against it. She was aware it was there, but it
didn’t scour into her. She pushed herself into the wind and back up
the street. She should find a telephone and call the police. She’d
left her gloves back at the body and she pushed her hands into the
deep pockets of the coat, wondering what they might hold. They held
warmth: delicious, delirious, warmth. She moved down the street so
quickly she was across the main road and skirting the park in a few
moments. There were phones at the bottom corner, by the bus lines.
As she walked, she felt the niggling weight of her rucksack: the
coat felt tight and bulky across it and a cold draught slipped up
the back of her legs at each stride – the shape of the bag causing
the coat to billow out. She put up with it, as she couldn’t bear
the thought of taking the coat off to unhook her back pack.

Maggie stared
at the phone. Even though taking her gloveless hands out of the
pockets and picking up that plastic handle would hurt... she should
do it. She should call the police and ask for aid. She should.

Once she’d done
that, however, there would be a whole world of standing around in
the cold wet terror of the street. She might miss the heat going
on... if she phoned and didn’t say who she was, there would be
questions. The police would ask who’d been about at the time of the
call. She looked up and down. Plenty of people on the way to and
from work, fighting the elements as they plodded on. People
standing at the bus lines beside her.

People were
already looking at her coat. At the comfort it was affording
whoever wore it, under that hood.

A spasm of
agony flamed through her body. Oh my goodness, she’d stolen a coat
off a poor dead woman! She was standing in the coat and that poor
woman was back there, alone, in the sleet and ice...

She stumbled
back up towards the alleyway. She needed to go back, give the woman
her coat back, and then phone the police.

Give it
back.

Everything in
her rebelled: she couldn’t. She just couldn’t.

She couldn’t go
back to being cold.

She stood at
the mouth of the alleyway, wondering at the feeling of not being
cut in two by the wind; feeling her soul cut in two instead.

She turned away
from the alley, faced into the wind and began the slog home.

The walk back
took forever. Sneaking on a bus somehow, with that coat, was
impossible. No bus driver would look on her kindly and pretend to
look out the window as she slipped past in the stream of pass
flashers. So she’d trudged on, weariness finally overriding the
ecstasy of the warmth. She’d finally reached the point where seeing
her own door brought a sense of relief and welcoming, where being
in the tiny one room apartment was heaven on earth.

Arriving home
just as the heat started to pump through left her in a strange
dilemma. Normally, any cloth or clothing she brought back for
salvage or for selling on, was immediately put into a plastic bag
with lice powder and left on the tiled floor in the toilet area for
two days. Then it was shaken out, in the street, and checked for
any other infestation, before washing it or whatever needed doing.
Standing in the warm coat, even with the chill beginning to lift as
the radiators fired into life...
removing it
... to confine
it to a plastic bag for two days... it made her shudder. But she
was damp and sweaty in areas all over her body. Her feet throbbed
with threatened chilblains, her bum was still sodden, her knees
still wet. She needed to follow through on her normal routine: get
out of all her clothes, all of them, and into warm soft indoor
layers. Warm soft
dry
indoor layers...

She forced
herself to take off the coat: it felt like she was slicing her skin
off. She dropped everything she wore to the floor and rather than
wrapping herself in a towel to go back into the warmer room to
dress, she put the coat back on. She trotted barefoot over the cold
tiles into the main room, and got dressed in indoor clothes. She
dressed herself from the waist down easily, but had to take the
coat off to get a bra and tops on. She did so unwillingly, but
secured herself back in the coat, fully clothed, quickly enough.
Finally, she was seated in her arm chair, sipping hot water with a
spoonful of sugar in it, as she reveled in the heat. Her feet were
toasting on the radiator, every other part of her was covered in
luscious fur. The steam from her cup, billowing up over her exposed
face, warming her cheeks through: that was just bliss.

The backfire
from the street, or was it a muffled, far off gunshot, woke her
with a start. She’d fallen asleep and was stiff and her joints
ached. Her feet, which had slipped down onto the floor, felt like
ice. Worse, she’d left the television and the overhead lights on,
using up her precious credit... how long...? Aghast, she discovered
it was three a.m., and she’d slept a lot of electricity away. She
gave the TV a hateful look and yanked the plug from the wall.
Groggy, she tried to settle herself into the cold bed. She found
she had a problem: she couldn’t sleep in the coat: no way it
worked. Pulling it off to get into the bed was agony. She settled
for putting the coat over her blankets, and after she managed to
warm the bed through with her body heat, it worked well enough. She
pulled the edge of the coat up onto her face, so she could still
touch some of the fur, entombed as she was in layers. She fell
asleep thinking of Bertie.

She was in the
woods, wild winter woods. She could hear growling in the drifts and
mounds around her. The snow in front of her was trampled down by
foot prints and paw prints. Huge paw prints. Fresh blood splattered
the snow, bright red cherries of death, in all directions. As she
stared, her breath gusting out in white sheets, it became night:
the red bleeding to thick black scars in the snow. The moon rose,
washing her in silver light and far in the distance, a wolf howled.
She almost panicked, almost bolted off, but she didn’t know where
she was or where she could go. The sound of undergrowth crunching,
being pushed down, reached her. The wolf emerged from the snow,
bloody jaws wide, saliva flying, breath as white as her own. She
screamed.

She felt so
foolish, as she fought off the coat, and fell out of the bed. What
a silly thing to do. The floor was hard and cold, she hurt her
elbow and her hip. She shook herself up and pulled on the coat. The
day before her social security was due: noodles for breakfast
then.

She spooned
them into her mouth and looked out the window. Sleet was driving
everyone and everything before it: no one and nothing was safe. As
she watched, three people slipped and fell over. Had she not had
the coat, she would have decided she had to try at least a couple
of hours in the library. With the coat, she could survive indoors
all day, she was sure. Besides, there was a dead body out there
being loaded into a hearse. Or on a slab somewhere, being sliced
open. She was better, safer, inside.

She sat by the
window hugging the radiator, using the light to read a book, her
radio playing music on batteries: she avoided the news.

No matter how
she tried to settle, the thought of the body she’d discarded as
rubbish pricked at her conscience. Finally, after reading the same
page three times and still losing what it was about, she stood up
with a weary sigh: it just would not do. She was better than this.
She packed herself into her usual outside protections and wondered
what the heck to do with her backpack. It didn’t work with the fur:
it reduced the protection and the fit. Equally, she lost heat,
valuable heat, from wearing it under. She changed the routine by
adding a long belted satchel under the coat, slung across her
shoulders diagonally: it settled on the hip and was hidden by the
bulk of the coat. In went emergencies supplies, including gloves:
she’d need a new pair of thicker gloves from Goodwill, as soon as
she could find them. A flashlight, some candy bars for emergency
calories – these were so old the wrappers were about to crumble. It
was time to eat them and then replenish the supply. She hesitated
at the door, faced with the problem of taking the coat out into the
hallways. Being seen. Being noticed. Being of note. She took the
coat off, turned it inside out and put it back on again. The lining
was good but everyone would assume the fur was in bad condition for
her to be wearing it that way. She scuttled out, head down, in a
‘don’t talk to me’ manner well known to anyone in any city.