Robert Dinsdale - Gingerbread

He really doesn’t, but he gets under the eiderdown all the same. Soon he can hear the tell-tale wheeze that means Grandfather is asleep. He rolls over, the Russian horse lying rigid in his belly, and dares to close his eyes.

When he wakes, the flames are still dancing and an advancing tide of melt frost runs down the wall. Without clocks or the sounds of the tenement hall he has no way of knowing what time it is, nor how long he has been asleep. He squirms out of the eiderdown, leaving the Russian horse to bask in the hearth’s demonic glow.

In the armchair, Grandfather does not move at all.

The boy steals over. There is a desperate silence in the room. It is the silence of snow, which devours all sound, save for the howling of storybook wolves or a foundling baby’s cries on the doorstep. By the time he has reached Grandfather’s side, that silence is overwhelming.

‘Papa, are you awake?’

He dares himself to touch the thin, unmoving arms. Yet, when he does, it is a strange coldness that he feels. His eyes flit to the dead wood piled by the hearth; Grandfather’s arm feels the same as those branches, brittle and somehow empty.

‘Papa?’

When there is no answer, the boy relents, sits in a nest in the eiderdown and draws the Russian horse back into his lap. He studies his papa’s face for a long time, as fingers of firelight lap at his hanging skin. He should be snoring. His head is thrown back in the way it always was in the tenement, but no sound comes up from his throat. His lips do not tremble, nor twitch; his chest, buried beneath greatcoat and dressing gown, does not move at all.

That must have been how mama looked: open-mouthed and bald, without any breath left in her breast. They wouldn’t let him see her then, but the firelight plays a cruel trick and it is as if he is seeing her now.

He feels a fist of stone rising in his gorge, like a mother bird regurgitating food for her young. He fights it back down, but the stone must burst in his stomach, churning up whatever horrible slime lurks within. Back on his feet, and the room seems to be whirling.

‘Papa!’ he cries. And then, ‘Papa!’ again. But each time he has cried out, the silence is thicker; and, each time he has cried out, the idea that Grandfather is gone is clearer, more defined. Now he is like a storm-fallen tree, lying in the forest; he has the same shape as ever, the same ridges and fingers and branches and eyes, but what made him a living thing has disappeared.

The boy gulps for air. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. His feet want to run, but where he would run to, he has no idea. If only to stop that stone from rising back up his throat, unleashing his terror, he goes to the backdoor, thinking perhaps to ask mama for help. The world is silent. The snow no longer falls. But mama cannot help him now and never will again.

He goes back to Grandfather’s side. ‘I’m sorry, papa … I didn’t mean to make you come. Papa, I have to get help.’

Doctors and ambulances have different kinds of sorceries. There is always a hope that their words can bring life back to Grandfather just like Grandfather’s words bring life back to deadened fires. There is, he tells himself, always the car. If he finds the car, he can find his way to town. To squatting factories and endless streets, to a tenement with its window eyes gouged out. To help.

The boy steals down the passage. When he tugs the front door back, snow pours in, burying him knee-deep. With it comes winter, that relentless marauder. He gazes up the incline to the border of black forest, thinks he can make out the jaws of the trail he and Grandfather followed.

If he is going to do this he will need to be prepared. He retreats to the hearth and wraps himself in the eiderdown, one, two, three times. Now it is too stiff to walk, so he loosens the blanket and tests out his stride.

He is passing Grandfather when he sees the bearskin hat sitting proudly upon the old man’s head. He does not need it now, so the boy lifts it down, awkward only when he has to wrestle it over Grandfather’s ears. His eyes light momentarily on the old man’s jackboots too, but they will not fit, and he does not relish the idea of seeing Grandfather’s feet with their bulbous blue veins now devoid of all blood.

It is time to leave, so leaving is what he does.

Up the dell he goes, through luminescent snow. The woods in dead of night are no different from the woods at dusk, and for this the boy is thankful. The same light is captured in the snowbound canopy, the same ghosts move in the darkness, the same sounds startle and echo and live longer in the boy’s imagination.

There are sounds in the forest, spidery things that scuttle on the very outskirts of his hearing, so that every time he whips his head round all he sees is frigid undergrowth. Every stem is crisped in white, every gnarled root iced with sugar like a wing of the angel. When he exhales, his breath mists, obscuring by degrees the deepening forest. It condenses in the rim of Grandfather’s bearskin hat, so that before long he is wearing a crown of ice itself. Soon it encroaches onto the skin of his forehead. It pierces him and holds fast, binding head to hat.

In this way the boy huddles through the forest. His lashes are heavy, the ice creeping down his face to make a carefully crafted death-mask, but at last he sees the car between the trees. The whole body is draped in ice.

He tries the handle at the driver’s side, but it is stuck. He heaves again, to no avail – and, this time, when he tries to let go, he finds his naked fingers held fast. He tugs and tugs, but the winter has him in its grasp.

Panic takes him. He twists around, but he cannot twist far. Careful that the skin of his other hand should not touch the treacherous ice, he draws it back inside the eiderdown. A moment later he tries to prise his hand free. Cold is surging along his fingers and up his arm. He thinks: what will happen when it touches my heart? I’ll be frozen forever, only to wake up in a hundred years, thawed out by some wanderer of the future.

He has a thought, and spits on his trapped hand. The saliva works a sorcery, thawing the thin ice and letting him work an inch of flesh free. He spits again, and then again – and, in that way, he is able to tear himself away.

At last, he remembers: when Grandfather lifted him out of the car, the door remained ajar behind him. He tramps to the ditch side and sees that door still open by inches. The winter has tried to seal the gap, closing the crevice with barnacles of ice just as skin grows back over a wound, but its work is not yet done. With effort the boy is able to force his way in.

The cold of inside does not have the same clarity as the cold of out. He heaves the door shut, to the satisfying sound of ice crunching against ice, and imagines he can hear the tiny clink of crystals interlocking.

The key is still in the ignition. All Grandfather has to do is turn that key and the car starts rolling. When the car is rolling, its undercarriage rattles and the floor gets hot – but when he puts his fingers around the key he finds it frozen in place, bound to the car by the same ice slowly smothering the forest.

Inside the car he cannot see out; through that icy cocoon all he can see are different shades of grey and black. Perhaps this is what Grandfather’s ghost feels like, if it still lingers inside his corpse. He shrinks back into the eiderdown, holding himself. He thinks: if I sleep, morning will come, and with it the morning thaw.

It is not long after he closes his eyes that his teeth begin to chatter. He concentrates on holding them still, but to do so he must tense every muscle in his body and soon the effort is too great. It is only when he gives up trying that he begins to lose sensation: first his feet, then his legs, his hands and arms. At last, the only parts of him awake are his chattering teeth; then, even they pass out of all thought.