Jasper Fforde: Early Riser

Mrs Tiffen could play the bouzouki. Not well, and only one tune: ‘Help Yourself’ by Tom Jones. She plucked the strings expertly but without emotion while staring blankly out of the train window at the ice and snow. She and I had not exchanged an intelligent word since we first met five hours before, and the reason was readily explained: Mrs Tiffen was dead, and had been for several years.

‘It’s going to be a mild winter,’ said the grey-haired woman sitting opposite Mrs Tiffen and me as the train pulled out of Cardiff Central. ‘Average low of only minus forty is my guess.’

‘Almost balmy,’ I replied, and we both laughed, even though it wasn’t funny, not really, not at all.

After some thought, I had concluded that the woman was most likely an actor, part of the extensive Winter Thespian Tradition. Audiences were small, but highly appreciative. Summer players had to make do with the diluted respect of the many whilst Winter Players commanded the adoration of the few.

The train stopped briefly at Queen Street, then rumbled slowly north. It could have gone faster, but Wales has a 75 dB sound limit in operation eight days either side of the Winter. [1] No one knows quite why. Something to do with St David’s Day.

‘Have you been overwintering long?’ I asked, by way of conversation.

‘I’ve not seen a Summer for almost three decades,’ she said with a smile. ‘I remember my first venue: Hartlepool, Winter of ’76, the Don Hector Playhouse. We were performing King Lear as the support act to the Chuckle Brothers during their one and only Winter tour. Their gig was packed – almost three hundred people. Never seen that happen before except with the Bonzo Dog Band or Val Doonican, but then they made the Winter season a kind of trademark, like Mott the Hoople and Richard Stilgoe in the old days and Paul Daniels and Take That today.’

Few Summer acts chose to brave the cold – the Winter could be a hard taskmaster. The 1974 Showaddywaddy Welsh tour was a good case in point: the band were first trapped by Hunger-crazed nightwalkers in their Aberystwyth hotel, then lost half their number to an ice storm. Over the next two months their manager was kidnapped and ransomed by ‘Lucky’ Ned Farnesworth, three roadies lost their feet to frostbite, and their bassist was allegedly taken by Wintervolk. Aside from that, the surviving members thought it was one of their most successful tours ever.

‘Never realised how strongly the silence could drag upon one’s psyche,’ said my companion, breaking into my thoughts, ‘and how the solitude can become physically painful. I once went seven weeks without seeing a single soul, stranded in the Ledbury Playhouse during a protracted coldsnap in ’78. Colder than the Gronk’s tit and for four weeks a blizzard. Even the Villains hunkered down, and nightwalkers froze on their feet. Come the melt the rigor kept them upright – they didn’t start falling until they’d thawed down to their shins. For those not with the calling, the absence of humanity can be debilitating.’ She paused for a moment before continuing. ‘But y’know, in some strange way, I love it. Good for achieving a sense of… clarity .’

Long-time Winterers were well known for expressing their views in this manner – a dark love of the bleakness, and how conducive the solitude was to deep philosophical thought. More often than not, those that extolled the Winter virtues so fulsomely did so right up until the moment they left an overly apologetic note, stripped themselves naked and walked outside into the sub-zero. It was called ‘The Cold Way Out’.

‘Lobster,’ said Mrs Tiffen without relevance to anything, still playing the bouzouki. ‘Help Yourself’, again, for perhaps the two hundredth time.

Returning from the depths of hibernation was never without risk. If the minimal synaptic tick-over that took care of nominal life functions was halted, you’d suffer a neural collapse and be Dead in Sleep. If you ran out of fats to metabolise into usable sugars, you’d be Dead in Sleep. If the temperature fell too far too quickly, you’d be Dead in Sleep. Vermin predation, CO 2build-up, calcitic migration, pre-existing medical condition or a dozen or so other complications – Dead in Sleep.

But not all neural collapses led to death. Some, like Mrs Tiffen who was on Morphenox – it was always the ones on Morphenox – awoke with just enough vestigial memory to walk and eat. And while most people saw nightwalkers as creepy brain-dead denizens of the Winter whose hobbies revolved around mumbling and cannibalism, we saw them as creatures who had returned from the dark abyss of hibernation with most of everything left behind. They were normally rounded up before everyone woke, usually to be redeployed and then parted out, but stragglers that slipped the net could sometimes be found. Billy DeFroid discovered one snagged on some barbed wire in the orchard behind St Granata’s three weeks after Springrise. He reported it to the authorities but not before taking its wristwatch, something he was still wearing when he died.

‘Seven down,’ said the actor, having to raise her voice to be heard above Mrs Tiffen’s bouzouki, ‘slow to pen a plumber’s handbook?’

‘I’m not good with crosswords,’ I shouted back, then added: ‘I hope the bouzouki playing isn’t troubling you unduly?’

The thespian smiled.

‘Not really,’ she said, ‘at least it keeps numbskulls out of the carriage.’

She was right. Today was Slumberdown Minus One, the last full day before the Winter officially began. The train was busy with Mothballers and overwinterers, trying to get to their relevant Dormitoria or work as status dictated. Several passengers had tried to join us in our compartment but after taking one look at Mrs Tiffen’s glassy nightwalker stare they hurried on past.

‘To be honest I rather like Tom Jones,’ she added. ‘Does she play “Delilah” or “She’s a Lady”?’

‘It would help,’ I said, ‘for variety’s sake. But no.’

The train followed the frozen river up north past Castell Coch, and through the billowy clouds of white vapour from the locomotive that drifted past the window I could see that Winter shutdown was very much in evidence – shutters were closed and barred, vehicles swaddled in layers of waxed hessian, flood sluices greased and set to auto. It was all quite exciting in a dangerously thrilling kind of way. My initial trepidation regarding overwintering had soon changed to adventurous curiosity. Enthusiasm might come, in time, but my sights were set on a loftier goal: survival. A third of first-time novices in the Winter Consul Services never saw the Spring.

‘So,’ said the actor, nodding towards what had once been Mrs Tiffen, ‘harboured?’ [2] Legally speaking: ‘The non-surrender or retention for whatever reason of any person in a Pseudosentient Mobile Vegetative State’.