Snow Garden (6 page)

The silence was broken only by the clanking of a hammer.

‘So why didn’t you?’

‘I got a cold.’

Alan’s throat tightened. He could barely swallow. He was about to shout, he would have shouted, but instead the polycarbonate roof panels above their heads gave a long creaking moan like a wooden ship at sea. Their eyes shot upwards. And then their heads swivelled left and right as all around them the silicone joins hissed and the glass walls rattled. The crack in the wall stretched as if yawning.

‘Keep calm,’ shouted Alan, leaping to his feet. He held out his arms, warning everything to stay in place.

‘Calm?’ shrieked Alice. ‘
Calm?
The conservatory’s
falling down
! I’m going to check on Will.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

She turned. Her face was red as a panic button. ‘You’re the one who built it! You stay here and sort out this mess!’ Alice kicked off her mule slippers and fled towards the stairs.

Everything was exactly as usual on the first-floor landing. Not one sign of disturbance. You could be up here and have no clue about the mayhem below. Lamps shone a buttery yellow over the flowered wallpaper. Will’s Christmas stocking hung from the handle of his closed door. Alice knocked quietly. More a
tap, tap
than a knock. She eased the door open, just a few inches.

Will lay fast asleep, tucked on one side, his head clasped between his hands.

Everything was so much easier when he was asleep. It was the only time these days when she truly stopped worrying.

Alice crept past his bed to the window and parted the curtain. She could see right down into the conservatory. Alan was back on the floor, screwing pieces together like a madman, his hair sticking out in tufty patches. All around him the garden glowed lime-cordial green.

Perhaps it was because she was looking down on Alan or perhaps it was to do with the strange night, but set there against the darkness, a middle-aged man in a glass conservatory – even if he was backlit by his own green shrubbery – seemed such a small thing. Everything did. Everything seemed so small and fragile, as if it were made of wet tissue paper and might disintegrate at any moment. Fleetingly Alice pictured the young woman she had once been, who reeked of rose oil and was going to travel the world with a rucksack. She remembered Binny, the girl she had followed everywhere, the way they would lie on the grass and laugh for hours, smoking Binny’s mother’s Sobranie cocktail cigarettes. And now look at me, she thought. I’m half of something, but I am not a whole. If we met, Binny and I, she wouldn’t even know me.

Alice had other friends, of course. But how did you say to them, those friends, those women she’d passed on the avenue with pushchairs and bags of shopping, those women she’d helped when washing machines packed up or sugar ran out, how did you say, I think my marriage might be –
what
? What was the word for what her marriage had become? Not
over
. Not that. But what?

Different
.

Not the thing she had expected when she started.

And then how did you say to your friends, I think my son might be –
what
? What might he be? She remembered the way Miss King had spoken to her at the school. The questions she’d asked. Was Will happy at home? Were there difficulties? Was everything in his parents’ relationship as it should be? Of course he was happy at home! It was school that was the problem! Will was very happy at school, the infuriating Miss King had replied. He was always laughing. Always the centre of things. Everyone adored him. ‘But sometimes we don’t see what is under our noses,’ Miss King had observed, not looking at Alice, but straightening the zipper on her jacket. ‘I think Will is going through a period of adjustment.’

Alice thought again of the way Miss King had lifted her gaze suddenly, her eyes unblinking, as if she had given the important cue and was now waiting for Alice to speak her line.

The clock chimed eleven. She should go back downstairs. At the door, she turned. Suddenly she had an odd feeling, no more than a hunch, that Will was watching. That he’d been watching all evening. She closed the door quickly, brushing her hand against the felt stocking on the handle, and heard something rustle.

Dear Santa. For Christmas I would like
…

Alice read with her mouth open.

‘Alan?’ She stood at the doorway of the conservatory, Will’s letter in her hand. ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

Alan had fitted most of the pieces together now. The kit was taking shape – sections were almost a foot in length. Carefully he lifted the largest piece and balanced it upright. As he removed his hands, she held her breath, transfixed, but it only gave a small unsteady wobble like a child taking to its feet for the first time, and remained standing.

‘Will doesn’t want a racing bike for Christmas,’ she said.

‘That’s maybe just as well,’ said Alan.

Meanwhile the crack in the wall had become almost an opening; you could have stuffed a tight roll of newspaper inside it. A pool of powdered grey cement lay on the floor. And Alice was certain, now she looked, that the pitched roof was not so much pitched any more as buckling. ‘Are you absolutely sure this conservatory is safe?’ she asked.

‘Would I be sitting here if I didn’t think it was safe?’

Nevertheless there was something disjointed about Alan too, surrounded by all those tiny pieces. There was something disjointed about everything.

Alice held out Will’s Christmas letter. ‘He says he wants a dress. A green one. With a sweetheart neckline and a ribbon belt. Also a pack of Top Trump cards and a memory stick. I’ve got both of those. Just not the dress. I didn’t … you know. I didn’t think of that.’ Alice stooped for a screw, only instead of pairing it with a nut, she cradled it in her palm.

Alan slammed one stretch of tubing into another, but somehow he missed and they both leapt out of his hands and shot towards the Christmas tree. The crack in the wall gave a low murmur and spat out a shower of freezing dust.

Alice dropped the screw and clung to the doorframe. Oh, here came that cold, screaming feeling again.

‘Do you
think
,’ she said fiercely, ‘do you
really think
you’re any
good
at DIY? The number of times, the number of
times
, I’ve had to call out a
proper builder
once you were at a safe distance from the house! And what about the time you fitted showtime mirror lights in the bathroom and practically
fried
me? You should be
locked up
for the damage you’ve done!’

Alan leapt to his feet, brandishing a wrench and one of Alice’s make-up brushes. ‘You think you’re a
slave
to the home? The house is filthy. It’s a
tip
! I have to take my clothes to the cleaners after you’ve washed them! You –
Essex girl
!’

‘You –
financial adviser
!’

A green lightning ball seemed to shoot through the crack in the wall and skipped across the floor, striking the Christmas tree and felling it with a bang as if it had been shot execution-style through the heart. The metal supports of the conservatory twisted and buckled. Alan charged towards Alice and lifted her into the safety of the hallway just as the polycarbonate roof panels gave a ripping noise and split. There was a sound of cracking and snapping as the outer supports lifted and then, one by one, the sides of the conservatory popped open and peeled outwards like a pack of cards.
Plink, plank, plonk.
It took barely seconds to fall, but in doing so, it must have cut short the power supply because the green-lit shrubbery was suddenly not green any more but night-coloured. There was nothing but the bitter smell of burnt electrical wires.

‘Alan?’ said Alice.

‘Alice?’ said Alan.

Alan and Alice stepped through the gap in the wall. The side of the house was a wound letting in the night and where there had been a conservatory there were only empty frames and layer upon layer of rubble and plastic roofing. Strands of silicone hung in streamers.

‘What have we said?’ Alice wrapped her arms around her body like a belt. ‘What have we done?’ She stared into the dark.

The truth was, there were no instructions when you got married. There was no manual in the birthing suite that explained how to bring up a happy child. No one said, you do this, and then you do this, and after that this will happen. You made it up as you went along. And the people who had brought you up were no use either. They seemed to have completely forgotten what they’d done to make things work. How a couple stayed together or brought up a child was anyone’s guess. But just because it was not the thing you’d expected did not necessarily mean it had not worked.

Alan and Alice stood silent and side by side.

The hall clock chimed midnight. Once more, Will took up his watching post at the bedroom window. He had seen everything. He always did; he was always watching. But now something was different. What was it?

There was no conservatory.

Two stooped figures stepped into the black nothingness below. One was his mother, her hair all curly, and the other his father, covered in dust. Will saw his father’s hand grope its passage around his mother’s waist. He saw her head lower like a drawbridge to rest on his father’s shoulder.

Will took a good look at the present his parents had made. It had a leaning spire and two small wheels like hands and a set of flappers that kept it upright. Its body was a tower of ill-matched nuts and screws. Caught over one shoulder was his father’s jacket and at its feet were thrown his mother’s mules. It seemed to grow out of the wreckage like a wild flower on a bombsite. He was glad it wasn’t a bicycle. Will liked it. He liked it very much.

And in that moment Will knew something. It was so big and strange, this thing, he barely had the words for it. It was only a thought really, a shape. Long after his father had gone, and his mother too, there would be this. This whatever it was. This fact. His parents had put him together with the chaos of their loving. They had done their best and they had made mistakes, yes, and most of the time it was no more than a botch-job, and now those mistakes were a part of who he was. But he had been loved, he
was
loved, and he too could love. Take courage, Will.

Overhead an aeroplane passed, its lights blinking in the dark. Will watched for a while, and as he looked he noticed another and another and another, like stars. He imagined all those people inside the planes, some sleeping, some awake, some staring down at the ground below, seeing house lights and street lamps and maybe even the houses on the avenue. All those people flying to wherever they were going for Christmas. Each of them so different, but travelling above him, all the same.

Will looked up, and at the same moment he saw himself looking down, as if he had just passed himself and said hello.

Then a soft wind picked up and wiped the sky clean.

It is early Christmas morning at the airport. All flights have been suspended until further notice. Nothing is landing and nothing is taking off.

Travellers gather beneath the departures board and gaze upwards. It’s like waiting for a sign, only in this case nothing happens. All these people, some dressed for skiing holidays, some for a break in the sun, others in casual clothing for a long-haul flight. There is no seating left. People sleep at tables with heads in their hands and sprawl on the floor, using coats and rucksacks as makeshift blankets and pillows. Suitcases stand like garden walls between one group and another. It is not yet fully light outside. The airport eateries are already running low on food.

Magda stands in stillness. She wears jogging pants and a loose hoodie that sits over her belly. Her hair is pinched into a ponytail and it hangs like the scrappiest bit of rag. Magda, too, is waiting for a sign, only hers is a different kind, and she has no idea how it will come, whether it will be a feeling or a smell or maybe something she hasn’t even known before. Something she doesn’t yet have a word for. Once when she was a child she saw a deer in the middle of the road and she thinks of it now, with its nose to the air, its haunches frozen, in the grip of fear. She has never seen a deer since.

The thickset woman at her side wears a denim boiler suit and nickel bracelets that hang with the weight of chains. Her arms and neck are blue with tattoos: painted birds and mermaids and dragons. You wouldn’t know but on her back she has a painted warrior with hair to her waist; Magda loves that. It’s like looking at a painting in a museum. The woman is almost twice her age, old enough to be her mother, and her hair is dyed punk-pink and shaved to fuzz. Passers-by give the two women a wide berth. Trailer trash, someone mutters. Well, so what? They’ve heard worse.

The departure lounge is so polished and shiny it could be made of glass. It is reflected in the windows, even more brilliant and doubled in size, spread across the early-morning light as if it were made of water. Everywhere there are flashing signs and reduced-price duty-free gift ideas. The air smells of coffee and a thousand perfumes. From a giant screen, the same short film keeps playing on a loop, something to do with a young woman walking through snow and some little animals, only they are not real, not like the young woman in her red coat, they are cartoon animals, with exaggerated ears and fluffy tails like pom-poms and buck teeth that give them a cute look. It must an advert for something, because everything here is an advert for something, but the girl can’t imagine what. It’s like a no man’s land, this place. You could lose yourself.