Snow Garden (11 page)

‘You’d better buy me a drink first.’

She had never said that to a boy before. It was the sort of thing Patty Driscoll and the other girls would say.

Now it was the boy’s turn to laugh, and as he did, little tucks and creases flew from his eyes towards his cheeks. Then he shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

She watched him waiting his turn at the bar. He didn’t look back and it gave her a proper opportunity to take in his height, his hair combed into a quiff, his coat that stopped short of his wrists and knees and was too small. Perhaps it wasn’t even his. She had never seen anyone so complete and so alone, and it made her laugh just to keep watching. Then the woman behind the bar must have asked what he wanted because she nodded and went to fetch his order. The woman laughed when she came back to him with two drinks. It seemed to be an effect he had.

He pushed his way towards Maureen, holding out two plastic cups. When he saw her waiting, she could tell he was moved, that he had believed she would go and was both relieved and touched that he was wrong. He smiled in a shy way, as if he couldn’t quite face her, and she smiled too to show him not to be afraid. They touched their plastic cups carefully. The drink was clear; she guessed it must be gin. She didn’t want gin but she wanted to accept his kindness so she took a gulp of breath and stopped her nose. She decided to empty the cup in one go and get it over and done with.

It was tap water.

Maureen smiled, more deeply this time, as if she knew the boy and he knew her. ‘Thank you,’ she said, projecting her voice clearly above the music so that he could be in no doubt.

‘That’s OK.’ He lifted his cup to his mouth and knocked it back. Afterwards he wiped his mouth with the side of his hand. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Maureen.’

‘Maureen.’ He said it again, ‘Maureen,’ as if he were trying to get the taste of the word. Maureen had a feeling that he wanted to stay and tell her something else and she wanted the same, and yet there was nothing else to say and so they looked at the dance floor.

In the far corner Maybe-Howard was approaching a girl in coral. He gave a little bow as he offered his hand and then he turned the colour of her dress while he waited for her to answer. She shook her head but the girls around her pushed her forward so that she landed against him, then he in turn pushed her away as if overwhelmed.

It was almost the end of the evening. Maureen had no idea how it had passed so quickly. The singer left the stage and the band began to play ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and once again the floor began to fill. Maybe-Howard and the coral-dress girl were shuffling in a stiff wooden circle, her hands perched like claws on his shoulders. Pauline and Paulette Gordon swayed in a threesome with Peter Green. Patty Driscoll was slow-dancing with Esther Hughes, her chin heavy on Esther’s bone-thin shoulder, the halo of her orange hair touching Esther’s lips, her large hands around Esther’s scrawny fingers. And there was the singer, his mouth open wide over Charleen’s, as if he were emptying every song he knew straight inside her.

Maureen watched them all. This was how it was, she thought. People would find one another, and sometimes it would last moments and sometimes it would last years. You could spend your life with a person and not understand them and then you could meet a boy across a dance floor and feel you knew him like a part of yourself. Maybe it was the same out there in the fields. Maybe the sheep were sitting two by two with the foxes and so were the rats and worms.

She thought of her mother, the way she had gazed out from the upstairs window as Maureen walked away, not waving or smiling, as if willing her daughter not to come back.

‘You look in a world of your own,’ said the boy.

She smiled. ‘I was.’

‘They were saying at the bar there’s snow.’

‘There can’t be.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Still. That’s what they’re saying. So you and I could stay here, wondering about it. Or we could go outside and look.’

Without another word he turned his back on her and moved towards the door. This time she followed. She did not think. He reached his hand backwards as if, even without looking, he knew she would be there. His fingers curled in a perfect fit around hers.

And if anyone had said to her that night as they made their way past the embracing couples, across the parish hall with the floor all sticky now, the evergreen garlands unhooked and hanging like limbs, the paper chains in torn-up fragments on the dancers’ shoulders, if anyone had said that this was the man she would soon marry, abandoning all thought of university, that they would share a child and one day lose him, that they would move into separate bedrooms and talk over breakfast about nothing because silence, or something close to it, would be easier than words, that they would forget the Boxing Day Ball and the things that had seemed so funny, she would have hung her head so that her long hair lapped her cheeks. ‘No, no,’ she would have said, and then perhaps, ‘I think—’

But this was all to come. For now, the boy helped her into her red coat and pulled open the door. The sting of the cold almost pushed her backwards.

‘Well, look at that.’ He laughed.

The moon was gone, the land an even paler blue. All around them swirled the Boxing Day snow, like melting stars. It seemed to be both lifting out of the ground and tipping from the sky. Her life was her own. It wasn’t her mother’s and it wasn’t Patty Driscoll’s or any of those other girls’. She thought of the boy dancing, the question he had posted into her ear. The answer was so simple, so clear, there was nothing to do but laugh, as if to laugh and feel happiness was the most serious thing in the world. Almost unbearable.

She said, ‘Yes.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes.’ She did not turn her head to face him. She did not need to. She would see him now, everywhere she looked. He would be a part of everything and she did not even know his name. It was no less than a small miracle.

She stood in silence and looked up at the falling snow.

The boys kept asking if there would be snow at the new flat. ‘Yes,’ he told them. It began as a joke but then it got serious. ‘Yes, Yes, YES!’ ‘I don’t know why you keep promising there will be snow,’ his sister said when she rang. ‘It only happens in films and that bloody advert.’ ‘Because it’s what everyone wants,’ Henry told her. ‘They want snow. It’s traditional. It makes Christmas – you know.’

‘What exactly?’

‘Magical,’ he said, but with a rising inflection so that instead of sounding certain he only sounded sort of desperate.

‘Are you sure you’re ready for this?’ his sister asked. ‘You can’t afford to blow it, Henry.’

She was right. As always. There was so much to fix before the boys arrived. Henry checked every day but she was right about the weather too; there was no snow forecast. There was no forecast for anything much except low-level grey cloud. Sometimes the day had barely got going before it turned dark again.

Meanwhile Henry’s head was feverish, flurrying with all the details he had to get sorted. First off, the flat needed a lick of paint. Henry had bought the place ten months ago just after the divorce came through and so far he had taken no interest in it whatsoever. The flat – not even
his
flat, but
the
flat, as if it was a neutral space he’d drifted into and might leave at any moment, the middle of the night maybe, whenever the urge took him – the flat was somewhere Henry ate a takeaway after work and drank a glass of milk whilst watching television until his eyes burnt so hard they had no choice but to close. When he washed a mug or a plate he replaced it not in a cupboard but in its storage box. Sometimes he even re-wrapped it in newspaper; he found his belongings seemed super-imposed on his life and had nothing to do with him. Even his sons didn’t quite seem to fit. At the weekends Henry went to the park or he drove to his sister for a proper Sunday roast. Bea was five years younger than Henry but behaved like his mother. Well, someone had to, she often joked.

‘I wish I wasn’t going away,’ she said.

‘I’ll manage. It’s OK.’

‘I don’t even like skiing.’ They laughed. And then she asked, ‘So what will you do with the boys? Six days is a long time.’

‘Oh, I have lots planned.’

‘You do?’ He could hear the surprise in her voice and also relief. She was trying not to show it and this made him sad, for some reason.

‘Well, bye now. I must get on with things,’ he said.

Normally when Henry had an arrangement to see the boys it was only for the afternoon. He never met them at the old family house because he still couldn’t face going back; it made him feel too guilty and uncomfortable. He’d allow a few hours for the drive down the motorway, stopping at a service station for coffee, and there he’d plan all the things he might do with the boys, though when it came to it he always did the same thing and took them to the pictures. It was easier to watch a film than sit around a table, just the three of them, not knowing what to say. It was certainly easier than something like a museum. (‘And who even goes to museums?’ asked Conor. His older son had become so ashen and elongated it looked as if his height was robbing him of both colour and ballast. Feathery hints of a beard shadowed his jawline and upper lip; his face had a hard, unforgiving look. ‘
I
might like to go to a museum,’ said Owen. Unlike his fifteen-year-old brother, Owen had not grown at all.) After the film, there was always just enough time to eat. Sometimes Henry suggested Chinese food, but to his relief they always chose stuffed-crust pizzas, which they ate from the boxes in Henry’s car. There was something about the packaging and the car that kept everything small and temporary and eyes-down, where it was easiest. If Henry braved a question about school or home or Debbie, the boys said, ‘Fine.’ Everything was ‘fine’. No more, no less. It was like meeting an unfamiliar wall where there had once been plain, open spaces. Henry still couldn’t get the hang of it.

But there had been a shift. ‘An advancement,’ his sister called it. Now that Henry had landed a new job and settled into the flat, the boys were going to stay with him from 27 December to 1 January. It would be the longest period Henry had spent with his sons since his breakdown and the divorce. ‘Your looney tune,’ as his ex-wife Debbie referred to it, saying ‘toon’ to rhyme with ‘loon’.

Henry bought a tin of blue paint for the bedroom. He chose a cheap pine bunk bed in the sales with a matching set of drawers. He bought a set of matching plates and glasses with stems and a full set of cutlery. He tried to find a picture so that the flat would appear more lived-in and chose a reduced-price winter scene in a plastic clip-on frame because it looked seasonal, the trees piled with white, the deep troughs of snow, the young woman in her red coat and all those cartoon animals. The snow picture made Henry feel calm, as if a hand was resting on his shoulders and a soft voice was telling him to sleep. It was a long time since he’d felt like that. Often he sat looking at the picture, not thinking anything really, only looking. The young woman seemed happy but a part of him still felt sorry for her. He wondered what happened next in her story, because there must be a next part. Someone must have imagined it.

Just before Christmas, Henry bought a fir tree in a pot. Strictly speaking it was a reduced-price reject at the back of the grocery shop and it had grown crooked, drooping towards the left as if it was very tired and straining to lie down. (It made him think of Conor. And once it had made him think of Conor, Henry couldn’t just leave it there.) Both Henry and the grocer peered at the tree with their heads tilted to correct the angle. ‘I guess you could put a wedge under one side of the pot,’ said the grocer. Afterwards Henry hauled it up the communal stairs, shedding needles all the way, getting scratched and nicked, past the boxes and bikes and junk mail and bottles and takeaway packaging and all the other communal things people dumped outside their flats. He drove to a hardware shop on the edge of town and spent an hour trying to find the right Christmas lights and tinsel and baubles.

‘These are nice,’ the assistant said. She had soft brown eyes and a big ring through her nose as if she were searching for something to be attached to.

‘Are they?’ he asked.

She laughed. ‘Yes. The lights come with a remote control and six different settings. Your sons will like these.’ She smiled as she was bagging up his items and asked if he would like to go for a drink, but then she blushed so hard he wondered if he’d misheard. ‘See you around,’ she said.

Presents were more difficult. There wasn’t much money left once the month’s maintenance had gone into Debbie’s account and he had bought the beds and things for the flat. Henry asked the boys on the phone what they would like, but Conor grunted something that Henry didn’t like to ask him to repeat. Owen said he didn’t mind what he had for Christmas. He liked everything. When Henry texted Debbie the same question she replied, ‘Work it out.’

Henry bought computer games for the boys to play on their laptops. At least it would give them something to do. Passing a sports shop, he noticed a sign advertising cut-price sledges in the shapes of polar bears and penguins. ‘They’re a bargain, those,’ said the manager as he paid. She was a solid-looking, older woman with red hair and a smoker’s deep laugh. ‘They are made of foam. You can almost lift them with one finger. See?’ Henry explained his oldest son was fifteen and too old for sledges, but the woman gave another of her manly laughs. ‘No one’s too old for snow,’ she said. When Henry told his sister on the phone about the animal-shaped sledges, she sighed. ‘Why do you think they were cut-price, sweetheart?’ she asked. ‘It’s never going to snow.’