Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

— The mistakes we made, we made together.

I should like to live to see the twenty-first century. I know it’s arbitrary, even cute, but I’ve started to focus on that wish.

Once I took it for granted, of course. I’ll only be thirty-three, after all.

Eighteen months ago I was more ambitious. I wanted to outlive my bastard father. I wanted to see that motherfucker dead. Then I got hep, and pneumonia, and had to give up my acupuncture, my positive imaging, my homeopathy, lie flat on my back and accept heavy drugs. They said I would die without the cocktail. And it worked, I rallied. But I know I’m weaker. I know from looking in the mirror that I haven’t got so long to go.

The year 2000 is like a beacon. Blazing figures on the grey horizon. I know there will be amazing parties, vast carnivals where the healthy and lucky ones will take possession of the future. Too bad, because the dying will go too. Millions of the dying will attend. They try to forget the dying, but we’ll go on dying across their future, men and women dying together… now the women know they haven’t escaped.

My father and Alex will probably already have booked themselves into some fabulous event. On a plane or a yacht or the top of a mountain; Dad always had a thing about mountains. Something romantic for the two of them. There were only two people in their world. There wasn’t any space for anyone else. They didn’t care whether I lived or died; sometimes I think that’s why I grew ill. They didn’t leave any room for me. They didn’t see that I was different. They didn’t see any need for difference.

Love meant love between a man and a woman. There were only crumbs for their kids and their friends. Sometimes I feel so angry with them I wish Alex had HIV as well.

My analyst thinks I must go beyond this if I am ever to get well. He doesn’t mean that I won’t die. No one will tell me I won’t die. Perhaps he means die well. Not such a bad idea, to die well. With a life as short as mine will be, a lot of emphasis falls at the end.

Analysts won’t tell you what they mean. I feel that he wants me to go beyond anger, but he only asks me if that’s what I want. I think I need my anger. I think my anger keeps me alive.

And yet, if I could be bigger than my anger, perhaps I should not feel so small, perhaps I should not shrink so much, for the frightening fact is, I’m shrinking.

And I feel the cold now I’ve got so thin, I get tired in the street and puffed on stairs. So I’m spending too much time up here, in the penthouse flat I was so proud of affording (I’ve done fucking well: no thanks to anyone, no use to anyone now). I look out over New York through the veil of fumes and pick out crawling files of cars two hundred feet below the sunlight. They don’t know I’m up here watching them. They haven’t a clue that I’m still here, up in the sky with the skyscrapers, staring across a solid mosaic of dirty streets to the distant horizon, with the oily glitter of the sea to the right and those bloody great waste barges floating and stinking… it makes me see I’m not alone, though I’ve always felt terribly alone, and I blame my parents for my loneliness, I blame them for not loving me — but at last I don’t have to feel so lonely, since it’s clear the world is dying with me.

Melodramatic, isn’t it. The first time I read it I was furious, naturally enough, about the reference to me, then I realised he didn’t mean it. I read it again and felt depressed. Today I’m just impatient for my child, impatient for Anna Maria to come, and it makes me impatient with Isaac’s moaning. He was just the same as a teenager, attracted to James Dean and Jim Morrison and all those beautiful self-destroyers… It’s dated so quickly, hasn’t it, all that doom-ridden apocalyptic stuff. They churned it out by the cubic tonne in the run-up to the millennium. Before we pulled our socks up… (we have to be hopeful. There must be a future.)

I stick to what my own eyes can see, and the world hasn’t changed much since I was twenty. Somewhat hotter, I admit, but two degrees doesn’t sound very much. Africa has suffered terribly, but Africa has always suffered… and I suppose there have been more famines and fires and hurricanes and droughts in some parts of the world, but of course you can avoid them if you’re halfway intelligent. And there was no occasion for breast-beating on our part, which Chris would have engaged in if I had gone along with it. I could never see that it was our fault; we didn’t cut down any rain-forests or kill any whales or pollute any rivers, we didn’t even have a car of our own for the twenty years we were away, so Christopher was wasting his time feeling guilty. All we did was to go on holiday. Was it so wicked to go on holiday? We saw a few sights, we ate a few meals, but we paid our bills.

Of course. We were rich.

I was never susceptible to all that preaching. Christopher, poor darling, read too many books which thundered on about the state of the world (I read books as well, but mainly novels, which don’t waste pages on tosh like that).

— I’m sorry for Isaac. Oh, I’m sorry for him. I’m wracked with grief when I remember that diary. And I’m frightened, sometimes, about the earth. All the things I love. All the beautiful things. What if it just gets hotter and hotter?

If only Benjamin had hidden that diary. He should have guessed it would be painful for me. But there you are, the young haven’t suffered, they can’t understand what they haven’t lived.

Even my joy over Anna Maria seems excessive to Benjamin. He’s busy being cautions and nervous, in some ways he’s just like Christopher was, always warning me against getting too excited in case I’m disappointed again, and as they start carping my joy leaks away, I imagine disappointment, I’m disappointed.

Not this time. This time nothing can stop me. This time my certainty is too great. This time I’m ready; I have suffered; I have paid. And the child is real, not a hope in the dark. This one won’t die or slip away. As I looked at the child yesterday the sun came out and displayed the blue-black silks of her hair and I knew she was meant to be my daughter, the sun reached out and linked us together, my past and my future, a life in the sun, and the little girl with the marigold. She’s a child of the sun; she’s meant for me.

The sun is our friend. It wouldn’t burn us up.

I don’t think I can bear to wait much longer. After all, I’ve been waiting half my life. I’ve been trying for a child since the twentieth century.

Perhaps it’s a mercy I didn’t conceive, so the child didn’t suffer the millennium with all its terrifying grand guignol.

But if I’d conceived… if we could have managed it, by one of the ordinary little miracles that happen to other women all the time… None of the rest would have happened, of course. Benjamin and I would have remained just friends, or perhaps I’d have fucked him once or twice and nobody would have known anything about it. Christopher would never have wrecked his life. Christopher and I would still have been together. He wasn’t a bad man. He was the best.

It would be five minutes’ work to find out where he is; a simple phone call; the bank always knows. Maybe, perhaps, just to tell him my news…

But of course it would hurt him. He’d be jealous. He would wish she was ours, little Anna Maria. I can never face him. Over, finished.

This aching desire to tell someone. The stupid wish that there was someone to tell, for at last I am going to be happy again. Life should be happy; I was meant to be happy.