A Snow Garden and Other Stories Read online

  Mrs Pike gives a laugh that verges on the deranged.

  Tracey and Christina King pass the time discussing other travellers. It’s a game they always used to play when they were children. Questions like: Where do you think that family is going? Then they move on to other stories. ‘There’s this kid at school,’ says Tracey. ‘He wants to be a girl …’

  ‘What’s that?’ asks Mrs King, passing her daughters the sandwiches she has queued for and also the free bottled water.

  On noticing her mother, Tracey appears to clam up. ‘Nothing,’ she says. Christina opens the packaging on her sandwich. Her nails are pale-blue talons.

  Sometimes Mrs King feels she is searching for something without even knowing what it is. Something that will put things back together with her daughters. She wonders if she’ll ever find it, whether the search will always hurt the way it does, not exactly painful but always there, like an ache in a joint that comes with age. A miracle. That is what she is looking for. Never mind the Northern Lights.

  ‘What’s going on over there?’ says Tracey, pointing to the other side of the departure lounge.

  Johanna puts her arms around Magda and walks her slowly through the crowds. ‘You’re just going to have to let me help,’ she whispers. ‘I know this isn’t how we planned it.’

  Magda grips Johanna’s hand but she can’t do words any more, only guttural sounds that are more like animal cries. She wants to say it doesn’t hurt, not in the sense of pain that comes from the outside, but the baby gives a kick, a really hard one, as if it is thinking of booting its way out through her belly, and she stops still, her shoulders hunched, her face creased, her hands gripped into tight balls.

  ‘Not far, not far,’ murmurs Johanna. She wipes the slick of sweat from Magda’s forehead and kisses her hand.

  Magda closes her eyes as the pain punches through her. When she opens them, she sees a girl with green hair and an older woman, frantically chewing.

  ‘Don’t be frightened,’ calls Johanna.

  Then the voices become distant unconnected noise, like a sound beyond a window. Magda feels the clasp of firm hands beneath her armpits and others taking hold of her legs. Her feet are no longer on the ground. Her face rests on something soft and warm that smells of sweet dung and hay.

  She moves forward and it is like swinging.

  ‘Miss!’ interrupts one of the Stroud Girls’ Choir, clutching her fluffy lamb. ‘There’s a woman on a donkey.’

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ says Shelley.

  It is Hester’s idea that they fetch blankets.

  ‘Why will we need blankets?’ asks Mrs Pike.

  ‘For the blood,’ says Hester. ‘You hold on to the donkey and I will fetch blankets.’

  Mrs Pike has given birth three times herself and has been present at the births of two of her grandchildren, but she has never seen it happen so fast. One minute the girl is on the donkey and making her way towards the animal reception centre, led by Mrs Pike, the next she is yelling, ‘This is it! It’s happening right here!’ The women drag her down from the donkey and she crawls on her hands and knees towards the ladies’ toilets at the back of the departure lounge, gasping and groaning. Someone shouts about fetching a doctor, calling an ambulance, but the girl shakes her head; it’s too late. Mrs Pike follows and hears a soft braying and remembers she is still leading the donkey. An angel with a mop says, ‘You can’t come in here, these facilities are closed for cleaning,’ and Mrs Pike says, ‘Are you kidding? You’re going to need a lot more than a mop in a minute.’ She wedges the door open and the pregnant girl crawls towards the sinks.

  The girl screams for the other woman, the one who is like a painted blue fish with pink hair, and grips hold of her hand. Someone has the kindness to throw a coat over the girl and Mrs Pike shoves the donkey reins into the hands of the angel so that she can help the girl pull off her clothes.

  Hester returns, carrying bundles of blankets, towels, scissors, cotton balls, a bottle of disinfectant and a small cardboard carton. ‘I couldn’t leave the terrapin,’ she says. And instead of asking, ‘Why? Why couldn’t you leave the terrapin?’ Mrs Pike nods and accepts that babies are born on Christmas Day at the airport whilst young women with green hair rescue small illegal reptiles and stow them in boxes. The women take the blankets and tuck them around the pregnant girl as she writhes and pushes with the pain. Her legs are shaking so hard they are flapping against the floor. Her thin pale face shines through a film of sweat.

  ‘Can someone close the door?’ calls Mrs Pike. ‘Let’s give this girl more privacy.’ People are beginning to gather outside.

  The angel says she can’t close the door, on account of the donkey.

  ‘There, there,’ says Hester, grabbing the free hand of the pregnant girl. ‘I’ve got my sister on my phone. She’s a nurse. She’s gonna tell me how to help and we are gonna deliver this baby of yours. All right?’

  ‘Yes,’ moans Magda.

  ‘Yes,’ moans Johanna.

  ‘My sister says I gotta take a look down there. Is that all right?’ She dips her head beneath the coat and shrieks. ‘Oh my God, I can see a fucking head. Everybody wash your hands. Quick! Breathe, darlin’. My sister says you gotta breathe!’

  Magda is aware of Johanna’s voice telling her to breathe. She is being ripped open, but she must breathe.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ says some green hair.

  Magda nods to show she can.

  ‘My sister says you gotta focus on one thing,’ says the green hair. ‘OK? Can you do that? ’Cos in a second I’m gonna ask you to give a really big push. And don’t forget those big deep breaths. That’s my girl.’

  ‘Breathe!’ shout Mrs Pike and the angel in unison.

  ‘Ooof!’ Johanna gives a huge expulsion of air. She looks ready to pass out.

  Magda opens her eyes. All around her she sees a blur of women’s faces. But beyond them something catches her attention, a stab of red. It is the advert with the young woman in the snow. And so Magda thinks of the girl out there, like the deer she once saw, all alone and not knowing what will happen next. As the pain comes and goes, the red coat swells in and out of focus, as if the two things have joined up in time. She hears the young woman with her red coat call her name: Magda! Magda! You can do this, Magda! She hears other voices, girls’ voices, laughter, and carol-singing, and she doesn’t know any more if it is the red coat or the people around her, or something altogether more ancient. Ghosts from another time. The young woman with her red coat steps into Magda’s imagination and Magda follows her through snow. As something pushes its way through her body and between her legs, Magda hears the calls from the friends the girl has left behind, she sees torches, she smells the flinty coldness of snow, the way it pads the world in stillness.

  ‘Push!’ yells the green hair. And Push! shouts the girl in her red coat. ‘PUSH!’ choruses the assembled crowd.

  ‘It’s coming! It’s coming!’ someone shouts.

  ‘Our baby,’ cries Johanna.

  ‘Oh my God,’ sobs the green hair. ‘It’s a girl!’

  ‘Due to un-chore-cheen chirchirmshtanches,’ announces the public announcement. And then she splutters to another halt.

  A baby? A birth in the departure lounge? Yes, people are saying. A baby. But where? Where?

  Fifteen singing choir girls clutching duty-free lambs fly past Mrs King and her daughters. They are followed by the same tired-looking woman Mrs King saw earlier and the boy with his head in a turban. They in turn are followed by airport staff dressed as angels and six Father Christmases.

  ‘Which is the way to the new baby?’ calls Mrs King.

  ‘Hallelujah,’ sing the girls. ‘Follow a star …’

  A dull light leaks from the sky. The day is like any other, so weak it has no colour. But there is no freak weather. No snow storm. There is just a mass of cloud between the earth and the firmament that hangs flat and still. Then an easterly wind picks up, whipping the cloud, sending it scurrying
and boiling, until a hole is ripped right through its centre and, without warning, sunlight pours down in a thick, flowing golden shaft. It’s as though someone has just hit a giant flash bulb. In an instant, everything inside the airport is illuminated, caught in this tremor of pure sunlight. The light lands inside the opened door of the ladies’ toilets. It shines.

  There is Magda with her baby, and Johanna; Shelley, Winston and the Stroud Girls’ Choir with their lambs; Mrs Pike and the donkey, Hester and her terrapin; Mrs King and her daughters bearing bags from Duty-Free, along with six Father Christmases, shop assistants dressed as angels, several women from Security and a band of air hostesses who have heard the news and come to investigate. All around them the air shimmers in a shower of dust.

  ‘Wait for me!’ calls a little boy, running to join the scene. He is dressed in some sort of space-hero suit.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asks Mrs Pike.

  ‘Oh, he’s Buzz Lightyear,’ replies Hester, scooping up towels. For the first time all morning the two women seem to pause and see each other.

  ‘Merry Christmas, Hester,’ says Mrs Pike.

  The sky is streaked with bands of orange and gold and flaming red. Then, just as suddenly as the light came, a low nimbostratus cloud moves in and everything is grey once more.

  Already there are announcements that the technical problems have been resolved; all flights will be resumed; please report to Check-in. Men with clipboards and walkie-talkies have begun to appear, as well as a doctor, several policemen and a team from Immigration.

  Mrs King holds out her arms and pulls her daughters close. At moments such as these we understand instinctively what it means to exist. It doesn’t matter where a birth happens, she thinks – in a stable, in an airport, or even in the more conventional settings, such as the maternity ward at the hospital – it is a miracle each time. And there are other miracles, too, that take place throughout every human life: when a child takes those first steps and does not fall, or when we realize our children are steady now and we let go.

  ‘Girls,’ whispers Mrs King. ‘Shall we …?’

  She has said all that she needs to say. The three Kings place their gifts at the feet of the mother and her newborn child.

  The Boxing Day Ball

  It was too muddy to cross the fields and the girls hadn’t a car between them. They had no choice but to make their way along the lanes, though it would add almost an hour to the journey. The land shone icy blue in the moonlight as if the colour had been chilled out of it. Sometimes the girls saw a light in the distance, but mostly it was just dark and cold.

  There were ten girls, including the twins, and they moved in a weaving column of ones and twos. A few carried paraffin lamps. Patty Driscoll had a torch. Now and then someone would holler out a song to keep the rhythm going, something like the Christmas number one that year, ‘Return To Sender!’, and the others would pitch in with the chorus. Their breath hung in front of them. They carried their dance shoes in bags and gripped their collars to their throats.

  Maureen kept to the back in her short red coat. Her fingers stung with the loneliness of the cold and so did her feet, but it was not a sad loneliness. There was something in the air. She could feel it.

  ‘Ain’t we there yet?’ That was Patty Driscoll.

  ‘Not yet,’ shouted Esther Hughes. Like Patty, she spoke without sounding her ts. Maureen had lived in the village all her life and she still couldn’t get the accent. No matter how hard she tried, she still sounded like a stranger.

  ‘Si-i-lent night,’ sang the girls until one of them shouted, ‘Blinkin’-cold night,’ and they sang that instead.

  It was cold, all right. 1962 was the worst winter anyone could remember. Clouds were no more than single ribbons beneath the silver-gleaming halo of the moon and stars were shot points in the sky. Sheep stood pale as stones in the fields and birds sat pegged on the black branches of the trees. Everything was apart and waiting, as still as a held breath. Maureen imagined mice, half-frozen, poked down underground holes; there would be rats, voles, shrews, worms, spiders, rabbits and badgers. Foxes, even. Just beneath her feet. Right where she couldn’t see. All poised, all waiting.

  Patty Driscoll shouted it ’ud half-kill her, the blinkin’ walking, and Maureen smiled, but only to herself, because even if she was like a stranger she knew you didn’t laugh at Patty Driscoll. She felt a swell of love for them all that night, even Patty. The factory girls had watched her every morning on her way to school. She had not been allowed to mix with them, not even as a child, though she knew some of them by sight – the twins, for instance, along with Esther, because the twins went everywhere hand in hand and Esther was so pale and elongated, almost starved-looking, you couldn’t forget her. Patty Driscoll, too; she was another one you wouldn’t forget, always with a beaten-up look. Maureen had sensed their eyes raking her up and down as she passed their bus stop in the mornings and she had shrunk inside her coat. Then one morning they had called, ‘Hey, you!’, and asked if she wanted a ticket for the Boxing Day Ball. She had assumed it was a joke. She had assumed they were laughing at her.

  ‘Everyone goes,’ one of the twins had said. ‘It’s the best night of the year.’

  ‘No,’ she had told them. ‘No, thank you.’ But once the idea was in her head she had not been able to get rid of it. Her parents would not approve. ‘I think not,’ her mother would say; ‘I think not.’ When the girls called out and asked her again, a week later, she had said yes. Yes, she would like a ticket. The words were out of her mouth before her head could stop them.

  ‘Thass it, then,’ they had said. ‘We’ll go together, Maureen.’ So they knew her name. They were not laughing at her, after all.

  She had kept the ticket hidden in her coat pocket. She would not go. Girls like Maureen did not go to the Boxing Day Ball.

  And now here it was again. That little throb of excitement, as if something were about to change. Maybe it was the nip of gin Esther Hughes had offered from a bottle at the start. Maureen had not tasted gin before and she could feel the sting of it still, like a hot hole at the back of her throat. Then a sudden wind lifted the girls’ coats like a dirty old man and they all shrieked, ‘Aghh, get off, will ya!’

  ‘My hair will be a blinkin’ mess by the time we get there,’ said Patty Driscoll. This time it was safe to laugh because Patty was shining her torch to her face and squishing up her mouth, showing a bruise under her left eye like a purple flower. She was right about her hair, though. It had sprung from its clips and fizzed out in a copper mane. Some of the girls had fixed their curls with tape. Esther Hughes wore her rollers pinned to her scalp under a scarf. She was going to leave them to the last minute. She had Elnett hairspray in her handbag and also a bottle of that Black Rose perfume. She got it for Christmas, she said.

  ‘You don’t wanna know what I got for Christmas,’ said Patty Driscoll.

  Maureen had received a book about deportment and a set of silver-backed hairbrushes. She had eaten Christmas lunch with her parents in the chill of the dining room, none of them speaking, wearing paper hats like crowns. Afterwards her mother had washed and put away the china tureens and best glasses, as if she were tidying away Christmas, and her father had taken his nap in front of the fire. She wanted to grab hold of her childhood home – the matching curtains, the cross-stitched tea towels, the embroidered covers for armchairs in case of stains, the needlework samplers that said A Woman’s Work is Never Done and One is Nearer God’s Heart in the Garden than Anywhere Else on Earth – and ditch the lot. Instead she had fetched the ball ticket from her coat pocket.

  ‘What is that?’ her mother had asked.

  ‘You should put your hair up,’ said one of the girls. It took Maureen a moment to realize the girl was talking to her. Her name was Charleen Williams. That was it. There were so many to remember. Her father had been a GI in the war.

  ‘I am not very good at doing my hair,’ said Maureen. She could feel herself blush. Her hair was dark an
d very fine and it never seemed to do anything except hang on either side of her head.

  ‘You’d look like that film star. Whass her name?’

  ‘Audrey Hepburm,’ piped up Patty Driscoll.

  ‘Thass the one. You shoulda let me do your hair. Wanna ciggie, Maureen?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Maureen did not smoke. She hadn’t even tried.

  ‘Give us a ciggie!’ squawked Esther Hughes, and so did Patty Driscoll.

  ‘I only got one packet,’ complained Charleen, but she offered them around and struck matches between the girls’ cupped hands and their faces were briefly illuminated like ghosts in the dark. ‘So why do you still go to school, Maureen?’

  She said, ‘I am going to secretarial college.’ That sounded better than university.

  ‘Maureen’s clever, see,’ laughed one of the twins, either Pauline or Paulette Gordon, it was impossible to tell which because they wore matching coats and boots and hair ribbons. ‘She’s got more brains than the rest of us put together.’

  ‘Better get a move on,’ said Esther, checking her hair rollers and stepping forward. Someone began to yell ‘Ding dong merrily on high’ and they all sang along. When they got to the high notes of ‘Gloria’ they cackled and screeched like witches.

  The Boxing Day Ball took place every winter. Maureen knew that much. People came from miles around. All sorts of people, not just the factory workers and the farm hands, but also the university boys home for Christmas, and even the young professionals if they weren’t yet attached. Charleen said she was going to land herself a nice office lad this year. She was fed up with them good-for-nothing tinkers and farm boys.

  The only parties that Maureen had attended were those of her mother’s friends. She had met their sons, all stiff partings and knitted pullovers, and she had tried on more than one occasion to fall in love, as required, over Viennese fingers and pots of tea. The women spoke about their husbands, what they did for a living, and Maureen’s mother would go quiet, studying her hands, because her husband had retired early on account of his heart. He hadn’t even gone to war like the rest of the men, he had worked in the munitions factory, although Maureen’s mother referred to it as undercover work. The war had been twenty years ago, but people still talked about it. ‘Do try to look interested,’ her mother would whisper. ‘I am trying to look interested,’ Maureen would answer. Her mother would draw up her chest as if she intended to self-inflate and say, ‘You are yawning.’ And when Maureen replied that she only wanted to laugh, was that too much? her mother would lift her eyebrows and say, ‘I think not. I think not.’