Too Cold for Snow E-Book

Jon Gower

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 244

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A paid assassin called Krink loads up on viper-spit to tackle some uber-thugs; the governor of a prison ship introduces his inmates to haute cuisine; a farmer wakes up after an avalanche in north Wales to find he's the last man alive. The stories in this zany new collection range freely, almost chaotically, from the taiga region of northern Russia to the depths of despair. They are fuelled by a high octane imagination and an uncommon zest for language. A thrilling collection from a stunningly original voice. A journey in stories through a fabulous and fascinating fictional new world.

Leseprobe

Too Cold for Snow

Jon Gower

Contents

Title Page

Bunting

White Out

Shearwater Nights

Too Cold for Snow

TV Land

A Cut Below

Picture Perfect

Taste Bud Alert

The Pit

Disco Christening

Nighthawks

Mission Creep

Marigolds

Estuarine

About the Author

Copyright

Bunting

My, she could whistle! After shedding the trappings of language, my eighty-year-old mother, Alaw, took to whistling, and not any old whistling either. She draped nightingale melodies around the utilitarian, steeped-in-piss furniture at the old people’s home and it was so, well, appropriate. I am here, this is my place, observe me.

Luscinia megarhynchos. The nightingale. ‘A medium sized songbird of shy and secretive habits with a discretely rufous tail.’ A bird that sings so enthusiastically during moonlit hours it’s been known to die in mid-warble.

It rated high as entertainment. If ever Tony Bennett cancelled a gig at Caesar’s Palace you could have booked her in his place, although God only knows what the Las Vegas punters would have made of a fragile and rickety woman creaking her way onto the stage as an augmented orchestra struck up with something brassy. But if they’d been patient for just two minutes while she got her breath and adjusted her sticks – if they’d just sipped their cosmos and margaritas and their industrial-strength rusty nails, and just shut the fuck up, simply offered the old dear that much good grace – they’d have been transported. They’d have actually heard the music of the spheres, leaving the empty husks of their bodies behind to fly as iridescent dragonflies around the chandelier-lit room – swear to God they would – which surely had to be worth the price of admission? Worth five hundred bucks of anyone’s money.

But her melodic brilliance – those glimmering notes, those pitch perfect descants, the rising scales that could be soundtracks for epiphanies – was confined to the tightly hemmed-in quarters of the home, where she was loved by residents and staff alike, but loved especially when she whistled. Whoo-ee-oo. Whoo-ee-oo.

There was never much silence in Noddfa, what with the barkers and shouters and screamers – all the cacophonous soundtrack of the Elderly Mentally Infirm. It was worse at night and worst on moonlit nights. The place sounded like a shearwater colony. In west Wales they call shearwaters cocklollies, to mimic their macabre calls. Someone once described the shearwater’s call as it returns to land under cover of darkness as a rooster in full cry seconds after its throat has been cut. Imagine tens of thousands of seabirds all making that sound and you begin to hear what the caterwauling was like when all the crazies at Noddfa started up. But during a rare lull, when all the shearwaters had flown away, my mother’s aspirated notes could command wonder. Nurses would put down their urine pans. Rapt inmates would listen as if to the sound of a pin dropping.

She had never whistled before, not that I remember. And she hardly sang either, only in chapel, where the only real audience was the woman standing next to you. In Gerazim my mother stood next to a woman called Hetty who was as deaf as a post, which left my mother just singing to God. She did so with gusto – that entire back catalogue of dirgeful Methodist hits – which collectively assembled more Welsh rhymes than you’d countenance for words such as redemption and pity. Imagine trying to find a rhyme for anuwioldeb. Her favourite hymn was ‘Wele’n Sefyll Rhwng y Myrtwydd,’ not least because it had been written by a woman. She liked the emptiness in the tune, the chasmic space between the notes. And she liked the simple language, homilies expressed in a minor key.

Before the whistling started there’d been a severe decline in her ability to express herself through words. Syntax splintered. Grammar was wrestled out of shape. Order dismantled. Day by day she lost the world. And she was also spatially confused. When my aunt went to see her she alleged she was in Russia and her descriptions of St. Petersburg’s Nevski Prospekt – that grand thoroughfare’s busy acts of caretaking and commerce – were as vivid as a marionette show, until you remembered that the old woman had never been there. She had been to Bulgaria once, on a package holiday, but that would only explain a certain foreignness of vision.

When does a person die in your mind? When his or her name is finally forgotten, flashing away like a trout upriver or when you have no recall of a single moment you shared together? No single moment. I cannot pinpoint when things really started to go awry for her, when her world was cut loose like a balloon. Maybe the notes in loose scrawl reminding her of things she had to do. Pay gas. Bring keys. Empty cupboard.

I wanted her to find herself a bower, a shaded settlement among dark leaves where she could build a nest of comfort about her, but that wasn’t to be.

On the January day I spotted a glaucous gull near the Cardiff heliport, one of the staff from Noddfa phoned me up to tell me that she’d been fighting. It’s not a call you expect to have, ever, let me tell you. About your mother, fighting! Some old collier had taken a pop at her in the dining room – an altercation about digestive biscuits apparently – and she had slugged him one on the nose in return. My mother – the biffer, the bopper, the old scrapper. At least she won the bout. That’s a new species of pride. The octogenarian pugilist. The woman who nursed me.

If only she could build a nest for herself. If only those chicken bone fingers could gain enough dexterity to start to weave again. She could then gather spiders’ webs, from the undusted nooks and arachnid corners of Noddfa and with that gossamer – strong enough to strangulate bluebottles, delicate enough to trap wisps of dew – she could knit-one-purl-one, give shape to her bower. She could line it with the fine grey hair that candy flosses out of her yellowing skull.

A strong nest, that’s what she needs. Consider the long-tailed tit, that busy grey and pink denizen of the willow world. It builds a nest made of moss, hair feathers and silvery threads of gossamer which it shapes into a gourd, strong enough to hold the weight of two birds, and then more eggs, in fact as many as sixteen eggs, and then the rapidly growing chicks and finally the fledgling birds. The whole extraordinary architecture – shaped using as many as two thousand feathers – lasts just the length of a season and then falls apart as if it’s never been. So my mother’s nest could be one of gossamer, and she could sit contentedly within its silvery threads. Snug as eggs. Her eyes are meshed with red flecks, like a jackdaw’s egg.

It took me until I was a fully-grown man, somewhere in my early forties, before I could tell my mother I loved her. I’d visit her every week, without fail, and would take her shopping to the Carmarthen Safeway before it became Morrisons where she would display all the parsimonious skills of someone who lived through a World War, finding every discount sticker and always taking the newest yoghurt pots from the back of the display. We’d always stop for lunch on the way back home in a village so off the beaten track it probably had werewolves scouting round the refuse bins at night. It was in a sharp sided cwm, which never saw daylight, exacerbated by swathes of Sitka spruce that had been planted twenty years ago and now seemed to lay siege to the place. The old lady would eat an enormous mixed grill of chops, eggs and kidneys with all the avidity of a gannet downing mackerel.

The next time I visit Noddfa someone has installed double-glazing over her eyes, and poured liquid cement down her ear canal. She is a shop window dummy and a very sad display at that. Like a down-at-heel florists’ showing a wilted tulip in a vase of green water. Zombification doesn’t suit her one jot. It’s all a matter of meds. You’d have thought that the mighty pharmaceutical industry with its concrete acres of laboratories and infinite profit horizons could devise something to take an old gal’s anxiety away without buggering up her locomotive functions. But there doesn’t seem to be a magic pill to stop her fretting, to control her hallucinations. One experimental concoction, a mix of chemical stun gun and elephant tranquilliser, knocked her clean into a mini-coma for five days.

I know this guy, Billy Wired down in Burry Port, who claims to have tried every drug in the world: injected ketamine between his toes, snorted peyote in such quantity that he became a pterodactyl for four days and subsisted on nothing more than the occasional Mesozoic fish. He once tried a narcotic from New Guinea that turned his skin permanently green. Even now his skin has a sickly hue. So my guess is that Billy would be able to rustle up something to banish all her anxiety. But at the moment she’s at the mercy of the rattling pill trolley in the care home, doomed to a whirling world of hallucinations so powerful that, were I still a drug-hungry student with a penchant for nightly brain alterations, I’d be more than mildly envious of her – someone who could conjure up visions at will, like a starving saint in a cave.

One day Alaw believed a gang had kidnapped her two sons. They had them gagged and bound in the coalhouse and there was dark muttering about being inventive about the torture. Another day she took a sled out over the pack ice to where prowling polar bears scouted for seal cubs, but she could explain little of this, only rounding her lips into a perfect ‘O’ and making the sound of a tiny hiss. Then, one day, her mind was just one enormous rapture, as colours danced in kaleidoscopic choreography: lilac, diesel blue, mango-green shimmying with powder grey, pea green melding with black of night, aquamarine melting into sunflower and milky cream, and, more luminous than the others, queen of the dance, a shimmering titanium white, executing some dazzling disco to the strobe of her own liquid skin. Billy Wired would have envied her the brain-cinema.

The day we met the consultant at Brynmeillion hospital was a day of cheery weather, with a pearl sun in a Mediterranean blue sky. When he showed us the scan results I thought immediately of tetrads, those kilometer squares I used when mapping breeding birds, from greenshank, spotted by satellite in the Flow Country, to buzzards pinpointed in the Cornish countryside. Spots on the charts marked strokes she’s had. The consultant held the sheets as if they were on fire.

‘Do you understand?’ he asked her.

‘Does she understand?’ he asked me, noting the vacancy of her stare.

I looked at her head – the fine nose and the blood flecked eyes. Despite her growing confusion these past months there had been nothing to intimate this moment. This demented moment. What goes through that imploding mind?

On a willow wand, serenading the settling dusk, the nightingale pens its solitary symphony. Its liquid voice is a rivulet of delight. But in her nun’s room, stripped of decoration, Mam’s eyes are wide with fear. They are coming for her. They will get her for certain. She knows. Her birdlike body is a cocoon of tightening feathers, as invisible wires pull her ribcage together, close to bursting point.

In a country she has never seen, the cancer-sickened President has ordered a meal for his penultimate night at the helm. He wants to taste guilt, and it comes in the shape of l’ortolan, the bright little bunting. Emberiza hortulana, to give it its Latin name.

The birds have been trapped deep in the south of this cruel country by men with lime sticks and nearinvisible nets made of horsehair string. They were then blinded in keeping with centuries of tradition and kept in a small bamboo box for a month where they were fed a steady supply of figs, millet and grapes. The ortolan. The fig pecker. When the fig pecker has grown to four times its normal size it is drowned in Armagnac. Steeped to death.

The gluttonous President is also having oysters, foie gras and capons but the tongue’s great prize is the tiny bird. The erstwhile President tucks his bib into his tight collar, and despite his illness he begins to salivate like a puppy. He then covers his head with a white cloth as the small birds are placed in the oven. A priest with a penchant for finches and catamites started this gourmet tradition long centuries ago as a way of masking his disgusting gluttony from God, away from divine reprimand.

‘Father, forgive me for I have eaten everything in the Ark apart from the tortoiseshell…’

The cook, called Fabien, busies himself with the diminutive main course. He reads his notes, because this is an uncommon meal and it is for the President. ‘Place in oven at incinerating temperature for four or five minutes. L’ortolan should be served immediately; it is meant to be so hot that you must rest it on your tongue while inhaling rapidly through your mouth. This cools the bird, but its real purpose is to force you to release the tiny cascade of ambrosial fat.’ Sounds tricky, thinks Fabien, who likes Indian food himself. Especially chicken vindaloo.

Under his shroud Francois Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand, the first socialist president of the Fifth Republic, places the entire four-ounce bird into his mouth, its head jutting pathetically between his lips. He bites off the marble-sized head and discards it on the salver provided. It will amuse the cat. He tries to savour his memory of an historic role as the first president for two full terms, his mouth full of bird-body. He knows the rules of history: how they will try to besmirch his name. Not that he thought of that when it came to Rwanda, or blowing up the Rainbow Warrior, or dealing arms to Iran, or running wiretaps or keeping his fig-pecker in his pants.

‘When cool, begin to chew. It should take about fifteen minutes to work your way through the breast and wings, the delicately crackling bones, and on to the inner organs.’

Tonight this is the loneliest table in the world, even though there are guests aplenty and an animated chatter resounding throughout the dining room. But at the head of the table is the President, marooned on a glacier of self pity.

He can taste the bird’s entire life as he chews in the clouded light: the sibilant wheat fields in the shadows of the Atlas mountains, the salt ‘n’ seaweed tang of the Mediterranean air, the warm draughts of lavender and pear scent blown by a mistral over Provence and on to the Loire. The pulpy lips and time-stained teeth crunch down with a guillotine certainty toward the pea-sized lungs and heart, thoroughly saturated with liqueur. The tiny organs burst with a sherbet fizz. Quiet, the President is masticating! Listen to the crunch of bird bone. Listen to his loneliness.

Tomorrow is his last night as tour guide of the lost republic and tomorrow he will taste nightingale. Fabien has been given this special request. His men, slinky hunters, assured of success, are already deep in the green woods. They will bring him one, trussed in a net. With this much notice they were lucky to get one.

Fabien, brilliant in his kitchen habitat, will know what to do. He remembers his grandmother and her macabre lullabies:

‘Lark’s tongue in aspic, thrush in a pie, all the birds that ever sang, sing better as they die…’

The songbird’s last serenade will be as short as a gasp. In the kitchen, a man will strop his knife on the whetstone. It will glint, as if alive. He will enjoin his sous chef to start a suitable sauce, let it simmer overnight. Let the flavours meld and intensify.

Wild eyed on a twig, the songbird cannot so much as blow a thin note, such is its fear. The hunters’ boots crackle like fire through the dry understory. They are pacing out what remains of her terrified life. She knew they were coming, with all of her heart.

White Out

It was the time when an avalanche tore through Rhydycu and Arllen-Fawr, scattering winter hares before it, their fleeing muscles turning missiles, thrown snowballs of terror. They raced to escape the white waves that came pounding down behind them. It went razing Golfa and Ysgwennant, tearing down the walls of farms – Cyrchynan and Bedwan, Cwrt Hir and Tan-y-Ffridd as if they were made of papier maché. It licked cleanly over the land with a Serbian ferocity, gathering impetus from the banks of wind-packed snow ledges behind the sheep folds. Tearing apart Y Gloig, Merllwyn Gwyn and Pentre Llawen with all the certainty of daisy cutter bombs.

What had been snug homes, with dogs at the hearth and Aga, roosters fluffing up feathers in outhouses and babies gurgling, now lay as a fractured syntax of slates and dislocated stones at the valley bottom.

It would take months to tally the death toll as emergency services were stretched to capacity. The Berwyn avalanche was only one incident among thousands. Towns and cities were denied water as reservoirs turned into plate ice and roads were buried under drifts a couple of storeys deep. Some families suffocated in picture postcard settings.

It was a winter beyond imagination.

Pearce lived above the avalanche line. His house stood in the lee of five Scots pines which broke the wind into skeetering channels of air. He had been gathering up the last sheep he could find – maybe a third of the seven hundred odd he had taken up from the hafod only three months before. He fashioned makeshift pens by running lengths of plastic fence between two rocky outcrops. He almost had to mine his way towards them to get them out from the snow and into the gulley where they could be fed cake. He was a sapper again, using trenching tools to excavate his way towards his Passchendaele brethren. The resigned animals waited, freezing. As Pearce burrowed in towards a paralysed ewe, he heard a fantastic cracking sound as the weight of snow half a mile away broke loose from the stratum that cocooned so much of the high hills. It sounded like an overture to apocalypse.

On one of his rare visits to the south – on one of his rare visits anywhere – the old farmer had visited an open cast mine, seen the determined ballet of hundred-ton trucks as they climbed the snail’s horn route out of the big hole. Explosives ripped the skin off the earth – the farmed land resembling a Bolivian tin mine. But this was a sound that made industrial explosives dwindle to firecrackers. He imagined the worst.

He made rude snowshoes by tying wood from old orange boxes onto his boots and walked towards the lip of the land, where the drifts had fallen away into space. He edged his toes forward, a clown on a rope, foolhardy. He was as a child with fire, impossibly magnetised.

It was all gone – six or seven farms – all the livestock, the hawthorn hedges; the very surface of the land had been swept away, the avalanche having stripped bracken and subsoil, ledge and crevice, road and ffridd with it – leaving a landscape bare as the moon. His heart juddered, as if some animal was trapped in his ribcage. There he was, with his ridiculous shoes on his feet and a lamentation forming on his lips as he mouthed the names of all his neighbours. The light was fading. Half past three on a December day. Pearce shuffled back to the farm, his breath laboured as it strained to take in air. Tomorrow he would go down there.

His sleep that night was punctuated by vivid dreams. Etched faces from chance meetings, high on the hills. Pryderi with his nonsense and love of foxes, or the dribble of a congregation at Gerazim, when maybe five or six souls would dust off some flakes of melody as they offered up hymns of supplication to a God that only one of them believed in for sure. And that was Pearce, who in the time left to him would ruminate about the why and wherefore of his being spared. He had nights of visitations – the dead coming to chide him and share a story just as they would on mart day: Old Bess with her dust cloth cap and her eyes pinched into sharpness above a ferret face, Howard One-Eye and Mog, the wondrous old fellow who still had a horse as a bedfellow in his stable loft bed and a way with his Welsh words that lit up as extraordinary poetry.

By morning a veritable procession of the dead had passed through the cold cell of Pearce’s bedroom, a ghastly gang who had elbowed their way into his mind. It was also an inventory, the ones he had to look for in the aftermath.

Pearce pushed open the door of Blaen-helfa to clamber up onto the snowfield and teeter his way for a few yards. The smooth surface was surprisingly easy to walk on, compacted now by the settling and sculpting action of whipping gales. He felt like a giant, striding across the asthmatic land on platform soles. He skirted the path of the avalanche and headed for the bank of birches where the snow was only a few feet deep, deflected by the trees into the corries underneath. The day was gagged by the cold.

Pearce got beneath the tree line and walked on, his legs like insect-stalks as he relearned yesterday’s trick of walking on the crystalline surface. He emptied some wizened crab apples from his pocket and set them as bait next to some fishing-line snares.

It took him over an hour to get to Bess’ farm, feeling the animal pulse inside him again. Only half of the house was still standing, sectioned like one of those dolls’ houses that reveal their interiors. He took off his clumsy snow-shoes, and still went through the front door even though the front wall had collapsed. It was an act of stupid propriety.

Overnight frost had mummified the room, like sugar dusting the old settle and the cases of stuffed animals. He barked out the woman’s name, willing her to appear but his voice broke against the shell of the house. Bess? Bess!

Pearce climbed up the staircase, which in places ran alongside the breach in the wall and called out again, but there was nothing. He felt useless, a stupid old man looking for a body. In her bedroom, with its petrified quilt and enormous leather-bound Bible, he sat down, his breath smoking. He remembered how he had hated this woman. A visceral hatred.

Her father, who everyone called Mistar, had been Pearce’s childhood joy – a man who would sit him down on the settle next to the fire and tell him outrageous stories – some true, some fanciful. Pearce loved nothing more than looking deep into the flames, to where the blue gas crept over the coal to ignite percussively and set off fanciful wonders. The old man’s voice could quieten to a murmur when he told his tales.

When he was fourteen Mistar had run away to sea, had gone all the way to Kamchatka in Siberia, and when he returned he had run his own one-man coal-mine, with a tunnel that went under the estuary. Mistar told tales of outsmarting the keepers on Maenllwyd estate, bringing home braces of pheasants, woodcock and entire coveys of partridge tied onto his belt. As the old man grew older so Pearce took to looking after him, even after the onset of incontinence which robbed the old man of dignity. And then one day Pearce came to visit him and he had again soiled himself, but this time his wife had smeared the shit across the old man’s face and he was sitting there, too weak to move, too weak to remove the yellow smears of runny excrement. Pearce went to get a knife from the kitchen and he would have killed her, there and then, he really would, but morality bound his hands together, held him back.

Later that evening, as he carried the old man’s frail frame to bed in the next room, he took hold of the pillow and would have smothered him, put him out of his misery and humiliation, and he would have done it but the wires bit into his flesh again, telling him it wasn’t right. That night he learned all he would ever need to know about love and hatred and from that day on he began to see things in black and white, so that he either loved something or hated it and there was no grey place in between. Life was clearer that way.

Having checked every remnant of a room, Pearce had to conclude that the old lady was buried under the rubble. Leaving behind the shambles of stone he felt the old lady walking behind him, an after-breath of life. He reached the farms along the ridges, some under heavy blankets of snow, all ruckled now into jagged sheets that were unreachable. The ravens would have their first brood before the men came up from the town, a dozen of them, on a JCB, the yellow machine groaning as it tried to bank the snow onto the sides of the main road.

At the next farm there was nothing other than a cloying silence, and around him the dead shapes of perished stock. The father, Steve, lay with his head mulched by a falling beam, a dark stain around the eye that faced Pearce. The other three bodies were corralled on the floor around Steve, as if they had moved towards him as a place of safety. His wife, Florence, was frozen in an impossible position, with both hands pulled far behind her back. The children lay at the base of Steve’s chair, one hugging each foot. ‘Bring your little children unto me’ was what it said in the Bible, but Pearce now knew that Jesus didn’t love them. The poor children had pain-wracked faces, taken aback by the absence of angels they’d been promised.

Pearce decided to sleep that night in the barn. The outbuilding seemed to have deflected the ferocity of snow. When he pushed open the door he heard a little whimper, almost human in the way it affected him.

‘Who’s there?’ he asked, peering into the darkness. He could hear the creature holding its breath, willing the very bellows of its lungs to miss a few beats.

‘Is there anybody there?’ A wounded whimper.

Pearce could make out a pair of eyes, which blinked shut as he strained to make out what framed them. Then he heard a voice.

‘Gawje?’

A word which triggered very old memories.

‘Y-y-yes,’ he said. ‘I am gawje.’ Not gipsy. He hadn’t spoken Romany for half a century. He never heard it since the horse fairs stopped.

‘My name is Pearce,’ he said, stretching out a hand.

‘Eiza.’ A thin voice.

Pearce remembered that he had some biscuits in his pocket. Reaching into his coat for them caused the girl to cower back into the corner.

‘It’s alright,’ said Pearce, his voice dropping down through the registers until it reached the pitch he used when reassuring trapped lambs. He showed her the packet. She moved slowly towards him. She took the biscuits and began to pulverise them between her teeth. Pearce hunkered down and rolled a cigarette. The lighter flame shed light on the child.

She was fourteen or fifteen and dressed in two or three coats which had seen much better days. But she was luminously beautiful and even though she was cold and scared she had a haughtiness about her, the eyes of an Andalucian flamenco dancer. The girl was mad with the business of the biscuits.

‘Is that better?’ he asked as she wiped her mouth with her sleeve. Her eyes sparkled with hunger.

‘How long have you been here?’

And then she told him all about her wanderings, ever since her mother and father had been taken away from her and she had found herself travelling byways and green lanes, crossing moors under moonlight, learning to live off her wits and a flair for spotting nature’s gifts. Autumn had been a feast of chestnuts, hazelnuts and berries beyond measure. She had gathered baskets of fungi and sold some of them at farms on the high hills. But the weather, when it turned, had been her undoing.

Peace was amazed that he could understand her. He’d heard Romany many times as a child but had no idea he carried so much with him.

‘What happened to your parents?’

She turned her head away, scrutinising the wall as if it told secrets. He let the subject drop and suggested they should start walking back to his farm where she could spend the night, and have some soup. She fixed him with an accipitrine stare.