Snowstorm, page 2
'Are your parents at home?'
'There's a garage round back.'
She nodded, having seen the fork at the start of the drive.
Inside, the house reassured her by its utter normalcy – brass coat stand, pale wooden floors, cream walls, classy oak armoire which Richard himself would approve of, and in the sitting room, a tempestuous northern seascape in a carved and gilded frame, two squishy leather sofas the colour of malt whisky, and an enormous TV and sound system. It took her a moment to discern the only odd note, which was the extreme quiet – no humming from the heating system, no pinging of snow against the windowpanes, no skirling of the wind under the eaves. Even their footfalls had a muted quality, as though they were treading on a thick carpet rather than polished floorboards.
Their voices, however, sounded much as before, if slightly flat, a detail whose import she would never fully appreciate. Mack, years later a leading studio engineer, would have been fascinated, though a bit disbelieving, had she told him. But of course she would tell no one.
'Sit down, and I'll fetch something from the kitchen.'
'Where is everyone?'
'It's a big house. We'll have a look for them right after eating.'
'Do you want some help?'
'No, I'll do it, you've been driving for hours.'
Soon she'd need a toilet, but for the moment she was glad to sink into one of the sofas, shut her eyes, and think about nothing. Richard, and his children, receded to ghostly silhouettes amidst the snow inside her head. It was warm in the room, unusually warm. Under pressure snow which has melted can recrystallise into dense, granular, intractable firn; the stuff of crushing glaciers.
*****
'I'm sorry I can't offer you a bed for the night.'
She roused slowly, reluctantly, then wondered if she'd been dozing with her mouth agape. What had he asked? Pushing a hand through her hair, she sat up and adjusted her jumper. From a tray on the coffee table he passed her a large mug, to which she added two heaping teaspoons of sugar. She'd swallowed half the coffee and several bites of a cheese sandwich before registering there was only one mug, one plate.
'Aren't you eating?'
'Most men have a bad habit of grazing when they're in the kitchen,' he said with a smile.
She finished the sandwich, ate another, and sipped a refill while he sprawled in an armchair, his hair screening part of his face. She not-watched him through the steam from the coffee till her eyes began to prickle. Why, after all these years of arid silence, had Piers chosen to ring? 'Your mother gave me the number.' She'd heard the rasp of the veldt in his voice, the droughts. A cloudless summer day never failed to conjure up the sun-bleached colour of his eyes. There must be creases round them now.
'Have you got any idea when they'll clear the road? Probably I still have a few hours ahead of me.'
'Let's go find out.'
He showed her the guest toilet, then led her through a complicated twist of passages to a set of sliding glass doors, behind which thronged a mass of tropical vegetation.
'The conservatory,' he explained.
The air beyond the doors was warm and humid, yet devoid of the cloying smell which prevails in so many hothouses; devoid, in fact, of much smell at all. They sidled round fleshy plants tapping the roof as though in search of an escape route. Helen ducked under a low-hanging limb with leathery, red-veined leaves and glistening crimson berries, narrowly avoiding the outstretched talons of a thorn bush. With one hand her host parted the fronds of a palm for her to step through.
The glass wall in front of them gave onto an outdoor pond, as large as a small lake. Someone had swept the ice clean of snow, which shone like pewter in the moonlight. Scratched pewter: she could see where the blades of the skaters had scored its finish. Several kids were still larking near the banks, and one intrepid lad was zigzagging backwards, practising camels and camel-sits, as well as the odd lutz. It all came back to her then, Ian's obsession with skating – the lessons, the competitions, the endless talk. She hadn't been on skates since the accident, nor would she allow Cait and Phil to learn, despite Cait's repeated pleas. 'It's not fair, it's not. All my friends go skating.' And to her father, 'Why are you letting her decide?' There weren't many domains in their marriage where she, Helen, prevailed, but this was one of them.
'Look,' she said, 'it's stopped snowing.'
'Not exactly.'
Puzzled, she glanced at him, then back outdoors. 'But –' One hand shielding her eyes, she stepped up close and pressed her face against the glass, which felt slightly clammy. 'I can see perfectly well it's stopped. The moon's even out.' She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, then rubbed the condensation from the window, recalling her doodles and stick figures drawn with a fingertip, Ian's outlandish beasts; their countless games of noughts and crosses. 'Is that your family?'
'Watch for a moment longer while I see about the road.'
As the boy attempted a double axel jump, his cap flew off and skittered across the ice towards the centre of the lake. He landed awkwardly, though without falling, then stamped one foot in obvious frustration. How well she remembered Ian's bursts of fury! He could never stand the slightest shortcoming in himself, the slightest blunder. For a few seconds he rested his hands on bent knees to catch his breath before heading for the wayward cap, his dandelion-clock hair freewheeling in the wind. A tall figure detached herself from the others at the shore and skated towards him, waving her arms so wildly that she lost her balance after only a short distance and sprawled onto the ice. At the sound of her cry a flock of crows rose in a single mass from the tree in which they'd been roosting, huddled together against the cold. The crows fluttered and flapped their wings in unison, flapped and fluttered and cawed as they passed like a black cloud across the face of the clairvoyant moon. Then their eerie caws died away, leaving behind a silence which the ice cleaved to fill. Winded, knees throbbing, and one ankle twisted painfully beneath her, she was unable to get to her feet. Always the clumsy one, she should have known to be more heedful.
'No,' Helen whispered.
'Go back,' she said. 'It's only a hat.'
'I promise I'll never tell another lie,' she said.
A touch on her arm. She turned round, but recognition didn't come at once. He'd tied back his hair, which accentuated the planes of his face so that he looked older again; aloof, with the patrician sombreness of a time-darkened portrait. He held up a mobile. 'It's working now.' Ian had hated it when humidity made his hair go all kinky. 'The road's clear. But going back is still an option. Think about it, will you.'
'Back?' she asked, glancing involuntarily towards the window. Then numbly, 'It's snowing again.'
Without so much as a pondward flicker of his eyes, he went past her to a ceiling-high lemon tree laden with fruit, extended an arm, and uttered something in a guttural language, half speech and half croak: a string of incomprehensible words, followed by what sounded like, 'Come, Mooning.' To her astonishment, a glossy black bird flew down from amongst the dark leaves and landed on his forearm, then strutted to his shoulder with an air of self-possession. She studied the bird, who, as though chancing upon a particularly droll specimen of scarecrow, maybe with uncharacteristically bulbous frontage and shocks of strawlike hair, turned to study her, its undisguised curiosity trumped by a disconcerting intelligence. Mack would call it a bird with attitude.
'A family pet?' she asked.
'Something like that.'
After a brief silence, she indicated the window, and its ghostly reflections. 'They won't be able to skate now. And they ought to be careful, people have got lost only a few metres from shelter.'
'Snow insulates surprisingly well. The Inuit burrow into a snowdrift if caught in a blizzard. They can survive for quite a while. But of course there are human limits.'
'You mean –'
He smiled then, the sort of boyish smile Ian used to flash when keen for her to coax a secret from him. 'It's up to you, but the road back might not be open for long.'
*****
As she drove along the track to the main road, the hard-packed surface was beginning to snow over. To the left she could see drifts mounding against the underbrush and tree trunks, and despite the dense woodland, a heckling wind jabbed and jeered at her car. Bypassing a concert of contemporary music and a dull report from the Middle East, she tuned in to a discussion about children and bereavement, the volume loud enough to drown out the voice of the storm. Any sense of travelling through a glass tunnel had vanished, and falling snow soon obliterated all trace of the house in her rearview mirror.
-end-
From the same author on Feedbooks
Mortal Ghost (2007)
It's a fiery hot summer, and sixteen-year-old Jesse Wright is on the run. An oddly gifted boy, he arrives in a new city where the direction of his life is about to change. He's hungry and lonely and desperate - and beset by visions of a stranger who is being brutally tortured. And then there are Jesse's own memories of a fire ...
Further information: http://mortalghost.blogspot.com/
Podcasts (audiobook) of the novel: http://lleelowe.com
Corvus (2009)
In a slightly alternate world the minds of teen offenders are uploaded into computers for rehabilitation—a form of virtual wilderness therapy. Zach is a homo cognoscens, one of the new humans who can enter the virtual Fulgrid. Though still a high school student, he is indentured to the Fulgur Corporation as a counsellor. Laura is a homo sapiens. Their story is part odyssey, part tragedy, part riff on the nature of consciousness.
Corvus is currently being serialised online in weekly instalments, a chapter each Friday. Further information and podcasts (audiobook) are available at http://www.lleelowe.com
Serialisation will last for 48 weeks. Too long for you? A paperback edition of the novel will soon be available.
Noise (2010)
A short story which is also currently being filmed. Visit the film website for more details:
Noise: the Film
www.feedbooks.com
Food for the mind
L. Lee Lowe, Snowstorm
