Maggie Gee: Where are the Snows

But something in the gin didn’t suit the ketamine, or else the ketamine didn’t suit the gin. The air began to drain from the bubble. A very slow quiet headache began, far away at first, in someone else’s brain, but then it began to knock, very gently, the head it was knocking to enter was mine.

Alexandra’s face. Alexandra.

‘How much ketamine can you take?’ I asked Madonna.

‘No more,’ she said. ‘It’s not always nice. And this isn’t the place. Are you feeling dreadful?’ She kissed my cheek, but absently, automatically. Perhaps her own head was hurting too. ‘I’ve got something you can have on the plane. An hour after drinking, minimum.’

My feet began to move on their own. My hands were itchy too. I looked at my watch, and the indicators. ‘Why are they late?’ I asked Madonna, accusingly, as if it was her fault.

‘Don’t ask. They’re always late.’ She had put on headphones; she had gone away. She left one hand on my arm, in casual possession. I couldn’t stand it, I shook it off, as unobtrusively as possible. I started to pace around the room, trying to quiet the dreadful panic. Why didn’t the plane come? Now, at once? If it didn’t come soon it would be too late. I would be too late, I would be stuck for ever, I wanted to vanish into the sky but they would not let me, they kept me here, if I stayed I would die, and be still for ever, lie and be still… still for ever –

I suddenly realised I wanted that, we didn’t have to keep travelling, but the drug in my blood stream twitched, insisted.

I walked round the lounge some twenty times. The call came at last; we all lurched to our feet. Madonna had put on dark glasses. She was definitely wan, and she smiled at me, the smile of a fellow-sufferer. I wondered what I was doing here.

We were walking rather fast towards the plane. I was part of a caravan of travellers, all of them looking tired and jaded, carried along by their travel habits. I wondered how many of them wanted to go home.

We passed the last line of little perspex phone-booths at the end of the tunnel leading down to the tarmac. Suddenly one of them began to ring. The phone rang furiously, a dentist’s drill, straight to the nerve, it could not stop, and all of us jumped, in our docile queue, all of us somehow knew we should answer, for whatever guilt we were leaving behind was taking its very last chance to reach us. But we all filed past the ringing phone, and as more and more of us abandoned it it no longer sounded peremptory, it sounded frantic, lost, pathetic. I was twenty yards out across the tarmac when it stopped. The plane gleamed snowy-white in the twilight.

But I turned to Madonna, touched her arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, but I wasn’t sorry, I was transfused with absolute certainty. One single person, one suffering person… I heard what my father had once said to me. And I saw her face. Alexandra’s face. Her beautiful, withered, sorrowful face. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t. I can’t leave her.’

Madonna’s face was contorted with violent emotion, and then it smoothed out, as smooth as water. ‘You’re a fool,’ she said, and made herself smile, put down her case, put on her earphones, plugged into a world where she needed nobody, where she could no longer hear my words.

I said, but I knew she couldn’t hear me, ‘I know I’m a fool. But not for this reason.’

— She was already gone, padding on across the tarmac like a beast of burden in perpetual motion, a little bowed under her electronic yoke.

I walked back inside and booked a ticket to Alex.

I asked him to take me to the snows at last. He promised me that when we were first together, that he’d take me back to the Himalayas where he made his film a lifetime ago. There’s still snow there. It might be peaceful there.

I won’t be alive when he takes me, of course. It’s all a matter of time, and perception. Christopher never leaves me now. We left the children and we left each other; we abandoned the world, and the snows melted. We used the world until it grew tired. Now I want to be given back to it.

We travelled to escape ourselves, I think. We travelled to escape our littleness. If we kept moving we would never die. We left the world to die instead. Susy’s generation will be more careful.

I’ve seen Becky, and she’s lovely, alas. I pitied Susy, now she pities me. I’m glad for her. She’s done better than me. Her generation will have to do better.

They offered me a thirty per cent chance. Massive chemotherapy, thirty per cent. I think that must mean twenty per cent. And I don’t want to fight; it’s time to die. I’m so tired now, it’s time to sleep. No more chemo. My own tired body.

I want to die into this dream. It’s dreamed me two nights running; both times I woke up, but tonight I don’t think so.

Christopher is taking me into the mountains. We come to a hut. It’s small from the outside, but we go inside and I feel lost, it’s rough and medieval and very cold, and enormous hall of many chambers. None of the shadowy figures sees me. I stumble through to the opposite side, and I find a room with a low window, a long low slit along the wall. I look through into another world, a world in miniature, but it’s our world, not an icy world but a green garden, green and blue and multiform; everything is here, but hidden; all possibilities are folded here; all we have to do is see, feel, and I want to stay, it’s so beautiful, I’m happy at last to understand, but it’s too late, I am swept on past it, and outside the walls I see them coming, pouring up the mountainside like a river, their vivid life carrying them up against gravity a certain distance before they sink down, and then the others carry them on or they fall and melt into the fluid chain, a great skein of people, dancing, touching, Christopher and I and all the others, and all the strangers are no longer strangers, here are all the faces I failed to see, all the lives I failed to notice, stretching back as far as my vision reaches — the snow is blinding; we hand in the light; we stream uphill towards the light, and I clutch Chris’s hand, I say I’m not ready, I want to slip back and see the green garden, if only we weren’t old, if we had another chance — but he tells me Alexandra, go towards the light, and we move over the snows towards the light.

‘So rich that it is almost aromatic… an impressive and important novel. I can’t think there’ll be another this year to rival it.’

Nigella Lawson,

The Evening Standard

‘Compulsive reading… an enthralling novel, demanding to be read at one sitting.’

The Sunday Times

‘A rich story of the heart told through a harlequin pattern of alternating voices, each of which is a work of real imaginative insight.’

Marie Claire

‘Maggie Gee’s immense talent catches passion on the wing… a romance of a truth and depth that’s never without humour… More erotic than a thousand blockbusters.’

Mail on Sunday

‘A remarkable and ambitious book, a tribute to Maggie Gee’s imaginative power.’

Literary Review

‘An entertaining, shocking and moral comment about self-delusion.’

Irish Times

‘The most exhilarating novel I’ve read all year.’

Scotland on Sunday