Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

He’s still never told me what really happened. The newspaper stories were such junk.

‘How can you bear not knowing?’ That’s Madonna, shrieking, clutching her forehead. She’s in a lather of anticipation. She wants me to get him here at once so she can give her hero the fourth degree.

Dad a hero!

Dad was never a hero.

He and Alexandra and their hammy old love story. (But how could she write and never mention Dad?)

She knows what happened on the day of the killing. She was there, and I’m positive she drove him to it — and now she’s living another novel with another man in South America, and Dad’s still mourning her in Venice… I bet he’s faithful to her memory.

I wish he would tell me what really happened.

Middle of the night. I’ve never liked night. Night-life, yes, parties, dancing, black satin and candlelight…

But in the wilds of Brazil. After they put out the lights. After the clothes come off. And my companion goes to sleep… (why do other people sleep more than me, better than me, dreamlessly?)… I feel so terribly alone. And the past comes back. The past claws back. By day I am alight with the glorious future, but at night there is only… what I have done.

I no longer know what these thoughts mean, these phrases that come like tiny stones tossed across the floor of my aching brain. What I have done, what I have done. It means nothing to me, for I’ve done nothing — nothing, that is, to agonise over, but the words mutter on of their own accord, and at night there is nothing to drive them away.

At night the child seems unreal. I can’t believe she will ever be there, with us, near us, a breathing presence, a little body entrusted to us. Do they wake at night, at three years old? Will she call for me? Shall we hear her calling? What a mercy it will be to hear the voice of a child instead of these crazy, meaningless echoes.

What have you done… what have you done?…

What I have done… what I have done…

— God in heaven! It’s the end of the world! Benjamin, wake up, save me, they’re shooting, it’s a revolution, we’ll be killed in our beds…

The pig. He turns over, scratches himself, grunts like an animal, snores again. I’d better go and look. I’m not a coward.

— Firecrackers. How stupid of me. Of course they are always playing with fireworks, there’s always a santo to celebrate or some primitive ritual like christening a lorry… lots of black shapes, stamping, dancing, a fire, firecrackers — nothing special. I must be nervous. It’s the strain of waiting.

For a second I went back five years. I was sure it was gunfire, I was sure I’d be killed, I could almost smell that peculiar singed metallic smell that hung on the air. In that shabby little room in New York City where I’d tried to be happy, where we were happy…

Christopher. Christopher, my love. Why did you do it? Why didn’t you wait? I would have got bored with him if you had waited. I’m bored with him now, bored to death. What you did only forced us together…

I don’t really know what’s true any more.

What did I do… what have I done?

Isaac rallied and relapsed innumerable times. He’d had every bit of medical help that could be bought with his money, or with ours, he had taken up cycling when he could hardly walk, he’d gone on working, slumped in his office, then moved all the computers up into his flat, where there were always paintings coming and going, and Isaac dragging round, always tired, but still eager, turning up one, dismissing another.

I was amazed to see how many friends he had. Perhaps it was just us who made him truculent and vengeful; perhaps he had never been like that with his friends. They embraced freely; they laughed a lot, often at jokes I didn’t understand. Some of them wore peculiar clothes and some of them did not look well, but they really seemed to care for Isaac. Sometimes I almost felt envious. Perhaps it was friendship that kept him alive.

When he was finally bedridden, when he was too thin and weak to get up, he went on talking, talking, to them, a torrent of life from the propped-up death’s-head.

I liked to buy presents for the children. It made it easy when they asked for things. But when someone’s dying, there’s nothing, nothing. Or nothing you can know about. Perhaps there was something, but I never found it.

One day I realised he had changed so much he no longer looked like Isaac at all. No link to the solid boy we once knew in the face pared down to the form of a skull, the lids and lips pulled tightly back, grinning and staring as his voice ground on, the painfully naked, sinewed neck which poked like a wrist from his dressing-gown. Life had its bit between his teeth; will and adrenalin were driving him on down the final strait towards the year 2000.

As Isaac neared death, in some geometrical but entirely unjustifiable way, so did my hopes of his father.

We didn’t talk about conceiving any more, but then, there were so many things we didn’t talk about. Chief among them, love and death had slipped off the agenda. I thought about it all the time, but so differently from how I did at first, when everything seemed so miraculously hopeful… I remember with astonishment now how at first when we started to fuck for a baby I used to imagine I could feel Chris’s sperm swimming up inside me, tiny explosive presences, small stars electric with future life, sweeping up through my welcoming body… except that the welcome didn’t come off. Now I no longer expected it.

Yet I couldn’t stop hoping entirely; those were unusual times, crazy times, in the frenetic run-up to the millennium everything seemed fluid, fantastic, there were prophecies of apocalypse, promises of the Second Coming, technological miracles in view as the first group of rocket-borne sightseers paid in advance to shuttle round the earth and look down on us… in the best private laboratory they tried with our dreams for over two years, they took my eggs, they took his sperm, they tried to perform the most mundane of tricks that street children manage at the age of thirteen and they failed, they failed, and we failed too. Each month the bleeding still made me sad, I walked round too fast, clumsy and furious, knocking things over, growling at servants; roses spilled, doors banged, I wept. At those times Chris was always kind.

But one month he snapped when I shouted at him, perhaps because Isaac had just given up work. ‘You’re not the only one in the world with problems. You shut me out of everything. Have you forgotten I wanted us to have a child over twenty years ago, when you really could have got pregnant…? Not just this bloody… nonsense … and misery. ’

So he thought the whole enterprise nonsensical. That hurt, hurt. That was dangerous. Christopher was fifteen years older than me. I had started to think about that a lot. His energy was flagging, clearly. Was it fair for a baby to have a father in his sixties, even if Chris could manage it?

I clung on to my hope of a child with Chris, but there were two of me, and the other one was making alternative plans. I admit I’m nearly fifty, but that’s not old, especially if the father were younger than me… I would be giving myself the best chance, that’s all. A lovely young man, it wouldn’t be impossible … The second self started to look around her.

— Meanwhile, Chris was planning, and I was applauding, a spectacular millennial celebration. We would greet the year 2000 together. By then we’d have managed a quarter of a century! It would be a monument to our love! So he told me, a little uncertainly, and I agreed, the first self agreed.