Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

(Nothing could be that simple, surely? Of course it can, of course it was.)

Now the world seems suddenly all too real. Dirt and squalor and flies and disease. The desperate need that drives me on. My changing body, my lessening blood. Things going wrong, things that have gone.

Why must things change? I ask myself, lying in the dark beside my lover, the smooth-skinned lamb I no longer love, and he moans gently and turns towards me, dumbly trying to clutch my hand, and I ease away, trying not to wake him, because if he wakes he’ll want to talk and there’s nothing left to talk about.

I no longer want him here, and that’s that.

— In the morning I’ll have to see us in the mirror, another mirror, another hotel, I’ll be fifty-five, he’ll be thirty and eager, nothing we’ve said can be erased, the sun will photograph the skin of my arm, a map of microscopic rifts and valleys, and we’ll quarrel mildly and go down to breakfast, an older woman and her sulky young lover…

But tonight, in the dark, I can lie and dream.

I can fly back through time.

That first departure. The true beginning.

Try to remember, Alexandra.

I loved to make her come with my mouth. I loved to make her come in any of the dozen ways I made her come, but with my mouth, with my mouth, oh god… my lips are dry at the thought of it.

I loved her smell. She was never shy, whether she had washed or not, because she knew I loved her smell, because I loved her completely, her piss, her shit, when we shared a bathroom, the rank smell of her sex when I knelt above her in the hot countries we travelled through. Her sweat was delicious, a red-head’s sweat, peppery, musky, animal. She gave herself to me, when we were together, completely, totally. You must understand, it was why I loved her, the way she melted when we made love, she no longer talked, she no longer bullied, she opened herself and became a life where I could be entirely happy, she opened herself and took me in.

— I loved to make her come with my mouth. That seaweed smell and her skin on my face, I can feel it still, her silky skin, the salt-wet smoothness so carefully folded between the rough curls of her long lips which I teased her she’d played with too much as a girl, and the landscape would change as my tongue glanced over it, the little peak would grow and yearn and harden under my gentle tongue, but she always wanted me inside as well, I loved the way she’d cry ‘Please, inside ’, my tongue always had to push deep inside her, deep inside and then back again to the swollen ridge which probed for me like an answering tongue… and then less gentle, firmer, surer, now I could feel she was moving with me as the trembling began in her inner thighs and her buttocks tightened under my fingers and then her hands would be clutching my hair, pulling my head against her need, and all of her would tense like a bow as she started to sigh and hold her breath and her body suddenly went haywire as small electric shocks shot everywhere, convulsing, shuddering across her, and the deep cries came, those wonderful cries which were wrenched from her as her thighs locked round me and I held her, I had her, we held each other, loud rough cries, she had lost herself.

Till the cries became purts and sighs again. Deep soft childish sighs of release. And sometimes she would fall dead asleep, so deep that she’d wake and remember nothing… so I’d have to make her come again. I thought it would always happen again.

I loved it so.

Oh we loved each other.

Travel meant sex, for us. We went away so we could make love.

It was problematic at home with the children; we weren’t naturally quiet lovers, and though the house was big the kids got everywhere. Feet would come padding up the stairs just when we had slipped away together and her cool fingertips slid under my balls.

‘Dad? Do you know where the dictionary is?’

‘Alex! Have you moved my red shoes?’

It was as if they knew. And although it’s stupid, for we were married, after all, we’d freeze, and I at least felt guilty — Alex was never a great one for guilt. I wonder if she ever feels guilty now, when she thinks of the ruin of so many lives?

‘It’s your dictionary, you find it.’

‘I put your bloody shoes away!’

I didn’t want to upset the children, I never wanted to upset the children. We’d wait till bedtime, watching each other. But in the middle of the night, when we were finally alone, the house seemed nerve-wrackingly quiet, as if it and the kids were listening; the bed creaked; the clock ticked. I could manage to come with the quietest of sighs but Alex was never very piano and I used to clamp my mouth over hers, those beautiful, dark, exaggerated lips with the full lower curve which seemed so right for the thrilling low octaves her voice did best. She came contralto too — on the rare occasions when I didn’t muffle her, or when our chaperones could be bribed to go out.

She wouldn’t put up with this all the time, of course. Her condition for taking on me and the kids was that we’d go away together on our own every summer. The kids made a fuss but accepted it. Susy complained that everyone she knew had a real holiday with their mothers and fathers.

We tried a ‘real holiday’ at Easter and Christmas. The children became suddenly intensely competitive, it rained or snowed, they got tummy bugs, they disliked the hotel and each other and us; Susy obsessively posed us for photos, especially when we were rushing for planes, family photos that proved we were a family and made even Alexandra look ugly; Isaac unerringly left his glasses, his wallet or his dental brace in foreign hotels…

Family life remains as vivid as school, with its endless power to generate dreams. I’m an old man now but I still dream of school assembly, rushing down the corridor, always late. And I dream I’m back with Susy and Isaac, but they’re still adolescent, sometimes even younger, I’m tying shoes or packing lunches… Those routines lived out day after day. They were my family; they’re still in my head. I don’t understand how I finally left them. Only bad men leave their children, and I’m not a bad man, I loved my kids… she must have bewitched me. She is a witch. Red hair, white face, black heart.

She hated those family holidays. In the end she decided to stay at home.

‘But the children will miss you —’

‘— Liar.’

‘— and you love travelling, in any case.’

‘It’s not travelling, is it, if the children go.’

Travel meant sex, love, freedom. Every summer we sent the kids to relatives or friends and skipped off on our own. We did almost a decade of summer holidays before we decided it wasn’t enough.

They were nice, those holidays. Small-scale, innocent. Guilt (my guilt) kept us close to home so we could fly back easily if Isaac broke a leg (Isaac was always breaking things) or if Susy’s cold turned to pneumonia, as she always threatened it would. We sent frequent postcards and brought back large presents, we had no reason to feel guilty then.

I’m talking about twenty-odd years ago. From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. The Portuguese coast had only just been discovered, and nobody thought about skin cancer then. It became the place we went to be happy. And that’s what we were, perfectly happy.

We went and lay on the blazing white beaches.

We went and ate fish in the little beach bars.

There was so much light. I remember no shadow, except the eventual need to go home. We loved those beaches, the long low dunes, the waves with the width and force of the great Atlantic stretching away behind them, dazzling. Alex always got drunk on light, her metabolism was hungry for it, and Portugal made her feel twice as alive, despite the knockout heat of noon.