Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

I put it all in. There were pages of ash.

There was a fictional version of the terrible birthday — was I twenty-two? — I think I was — when my brother travelled from Ireland to see me. They’d all gone back over when my father died, but I chose to stay in London: I was barely Catholic, I’d never felt Irish, even my name was chosen by Dad, not Mum. Seamus was a strange, heavy, sulky, loving boy, five years older than me. I was his favourite, not Brigid, who was the spitting image of Mum.

He came to see me as a birthday surprise. The flat I shared with another girl was too full of the evidence of how I lived. His watery grey eyes darted about him. He made me nervous; I started to drink, not beer or whisky which he’d have understood but vodka martinis in a steady chain. The phone rang too often. The doorbell rang twice, both times men I have now forgotten.

Seamus got into a steady rage. There was a dreadful row, muddied with drink. He called me a whore, I called him a moron.

His face was beetroot when he got angry. I suppose one day he will die of a stroke… perhaps poor Seamus is dead already, for since then I have only seen him once. He and Brigid, appalled and vengeful, came to the hospital later that year when I gave birth to a daughter and caught some stinking post-natal infection. The doctors insisted on next-of-kin, and my mother’s legs were too bad to travel. My daughter lay silenced by the glass of the nursery. I’d decided long before to have her adopted, but the hospital hadn’t explained to them. Perhaps they’d come hoping to reclaim us both, and shower love on their new little niece…

She wasn’t their niece. She wasn’t mine, either, she was dark and minute with a face like any of the Arab men who might have been her father.

I was very weak, but I stood up to Seamus. I’ve always known how to stand up to men. I told him I didn’t need my past, I didn’t need my family, or the Church, or guilt, or a future as the mother of a fatherless daughter. He called me a devil, and they cast me off. I was hardly out of the hospital when the letter arrived from my mother in Ireland, in her raging, ignorant round hand.

Perhaps they thought I would beg for forgiveness. But I’d never felt like one of them. I was quicker, thinner, more intelligent; they were stew and potatoes and sweet strong tea whereas I had been mad for prawns and champagne since I had them at a wedding when I was fourteen. I didn’t look like them or talk like them or dress like them. Only my flaming red hair came from my mother. I loved my father, the sweet shabby man who had fallen in love with Mum’s Irishness; from him came the stories and my eyes and mouth and my hunger for things he never had. After he died they didn’t seem like my family.

I didn’t miss them for nearly a decade, and then I noticed an emptiness. No guilt of course; why should I feel guilt? I did nothing wrong, but they cast me off. All the same, their absence left a tiny chill which even Christopher couldn’t stop growing… for a while he was my father, my mother, my brother… Now he’s gone, like nearly everyone else.

I wonder if my mother ever read my novels. I wonder if Brigid ever saw me on Hot Frox. I wonder if Seamus squirmed with horror as he read the sex scenes in Red Gold. I wonder if he recognised me in Gold Cards; I wonder if he remembered the row.

At least I made use of my dreary family. At least they helped to make me rich. I wrote the truth, not the sparky inventions I’d promised Poppy when they drew up the contract.

The public were surprised and offended, the public didn’t like truth in their books, and Gold Cards sold less well than Red Gold … what did it matter? I’d banked the advance. I had the money. What did any of it matter…

I quit my family, I quit writing novels. Why should it seem to matter more now?

Why do I drink when I think of my family? I made my fortune, I made myself free…

Take the money and run.

That phrase used to echo in my brain when Chris and I were nerving ourselves to get out of England. We were both what Mary Brown would call quitters I suppose if she hadn’t been too fond of us to make judgements. Too fond of Christopher at any rate, I was never quite sure what she felt about me. Mary and Matthew; they were our best friends. Now Matthew is ill, and I haven’t written… It’s been two years. He might be dead.

I don’t like illness, I don’t like to be near it, I’ve been allergic to illness since the horrible millennium when half my days passed in a stinking sickroom… it was one of the reasons why I wanted Benjy, his firm young body gleaming with health. I’ve never gone in for illness myself, though in this wretched place it’s a miracle we’re not dead of the heat or the disgusting food… can I ever have thought fried plantain exotic?

I’d always wanted to go to South America, but Christopher always made excuses. I imagined the jungle as flamboyant and brilliant; I hadn’t quite imagined the killing heat or the red mud after the rain falls, sucking at your shoes, sucking at your ankles, turning to choking dust when it dries. No one who hasn’t actually been here could imagine the number of biting things or the utter poverty of the villages. Not that there are many villages; even Bolivians disdain these lowlands. That’s why we’ve come here, because they’re poor. Because poor people will do things for money, though so far nothing’s gone right for us.

The servicio higienico … nothing was ever more misnamed. We’ve been here for months but I still can’t believe that the lavatories can’t cope with toilet paper. If you’re lucky there’s a wastebin to drop it in. In our first hotel I complained to the manager that our wastebin was nearly always full. ‘Tiralo al suelo pues señora,’ he said. Drop it on the floor! And that’s what they do! They’re animals, and besides, they thwart me. We brought them our dreams, Benjamin and I. Our dreams and our money, but they make us wait. I’ve never liked waiting. It makes me angry.

Luckily the local booze is good. I like my drink, I need it here. I don’t get drunk, I despise drunkenness, but I drink a little more than I used to, when life was easier, when I was… younger.

I don’t want to say when I was young, because I’m not old yet, I don’t look old… why doesn’t Benjamin come back? Why is there never any ice for my drinks? If I think about ice I can almost come, imagining it sliding down my forearm, imagining it sliding between my hot breasts and over my nipples which ache with heat…

If Benjamin was here we might make love. This rat-hole’s unbearable on my own, if nothing is settled within the week we shall have to get out, I’ll have to get out, I’m a quitter, you see, a fly-by-night.

Why does everyone think it’s weak to escape? I’ve always thought it took tremendous daring. Christopher and I escaped. The pisco is making me sentimental, but it’s not just the drink, we were of one mind, we were travellers, we loved to move, we were in love with the world as well as each other, I haven’t forgotten, I merely pretend…

And we did escape, it was glorious.

Burning thirst in the middle of the night oh God I need water horribly alone…

Three in the morning; the most hopeless time. No more sleep for me tonight. Yet I fell asleep so happily, big with alcohol and sentiment. Now I am worthless, shrivelled, small. Now no woman would look at me.

If I could have two minutes with Alex. If I could see her face to face — (I hope it is lined, and sunken. I hope South America has yellowed it. I hope that no one else would want her, no, I am mad, she is beautiful, of course she is, she could not change) — I should make her answer me.