Snow

Inside our bedroom my teeth chatter and lips tighten in preparation for getting up out of the warm slab of my bed. In the middle bed, close to mine,lulls soft regular breathing and the blankets loop and cowl up over Bryan’s hidden head. Stephen’s bed is closest to the window. His heavy bedspread is corrugated and pushed aside onto an isolated island. His blankets are slashed open, but the farting lump of his white back and bushy brown hair lies within the debris. Through the wall Mum and Da talk to each other, but it seems too far away and the knocks and bangs of them getting up adds to the sense of them being in a different dimension, perhaps underwater. I get up slowly, testing my feet with the sudden chill of scuffed linoleum, standing beside the foot of my bed. My hand rests on the door handle. I’m ready to roar up the hall and into the Da’s seat beside the electrical fire to warm my feet and watch telly. An absence holds me; a muffling of sound from outside draws my feet a few steps along the linoleum corridor between the beds’ backboards and dividing wall to the girls’ room. Standing at the window my heart pitter-patters with the thrill of discovery, as my index finger nudges up one of the thin overlapping strips of the Venetian blinds. Ice has formed in the inside of the metal frame so that the room has double glazing on the two bottom panes. The largest of windows are clear of such a crust. Outside snow lazily drifts down, clears my eyes, and begins the world anew. Snow is a forgiving light. Every street is a garden. Every lamppost is a tree. I breathe out and my breath fogs up the window. I want to be first outside to create tracks in the snow and create my own domain.

My clothes lie on the chair beside the window. I pull on my cardboard brown cords and pull the snake-belt tight against my waist. A t-shirt slips easily over my head and a brown jumper with yellow triangle patterns, is a noose, which itches for a few minutes until my skin grows used to it. My heavy knit greenish socks are in my shoes. I slip them on, keen to make my getaway. I race up the hall and into the toilet, scared that the snow will disappear before I can get at it.

Da looks through the kitchen door as I come into the living room. He doesn’t believe in it being cold enough to put on electric fires, but Mum does. She’s put one bar of the electric fire on, but I can still see my breath He’s sitting at the kitchen table in the blue convict stripes of his pyjama bottoms, wearing a white vest, slurping from a pot. Mum’s already dressed. She is at the kitchen sink doing the dishes; a brown glazed ashtray like a half cut honeypot sits on the window sill holding her lit cigarette until her hands are dry enough to take a puff.

‘Do you want porridge?’ Da barks.

His question pins me to the present and the plans in my head go higgledy-piggledy.

‘No.’ I squirm in case he makes me some. Anything he cooks is like forcing sand down my throat.

‘Can I go out and play?’ I’ve edged forward and stand at the door to the kitchen and living room looking at Mum.

‘It’s too early.’ She laughs and coughs at the same time. A morning cough. She takes a draw of her fag. ‘Have some Cornflakes?’ She smiles at me, inviting me into her company. ‘With hot milk,’ she adds as an enticement.

I nod, step over the threshold, suddenly starving, and squeeze into the chair behind the kitchen door. The room seems smaller to have all the air sucked out of it when Da’s in the kitchen scraping at his porridge with a spoon. I say to mum, ‘I’ll get the milk.’

I half-circle round Da’s chair, but he’s too busy eating to look at me. The kettle is boiling on the ring and Mum nips into the cupboard at the sink for the tea-caddy. She puts her hand on my shoulder as I squeeze past her and out into the back hall. The lock in the back door is sticky, so that I have to fiddle with the key. Brightness from outside gleans through the reinforced glass so that when I haul open the back door snow light crowns light. Our two pints of milk sit on the back doorstep, the silver caps topped with snow. A black crow caws and claims the sky, below it the bustling world is slowed down to weather. Its glacial weight finds form in the sculpture of bent over bare branches in the tree below our garden. A blackbird chirp-chirrups at me trying to find its feet on its icy bowers. I leave one bottle of milk at the door, mindful of the stories of robin-redbreasts that had learned how to peck at the tops and drink the cream, because, in shivering cold, it’s something only Da would grudge them.

Breakfast over, I rush outside with balaclava, brown duffle coat and have switched shoes for wellies. I fling myself out the back door into our back garden to claim the new world. I treck and track and stomp my feet from back garden to front and make shallow graves of my footsteps which the snow fills in for me. Cars overnight have grown judge’s wigs on their roofs, but a Hillman noses up the hill slow as a tortoise creating ruts on the bend that show where the road starts and pavement ends. But it’s an unforgiving world. I pick up snow, pack it tight in my hand and make a few snowballs which I pelt off Daft Rab’s hut. Even such sins are muffled and make no splash. With nobody about I start making the most gigantic snowball in the world rolling it and lifting the snow from the grass in the front garden, so there is a flash of green. I leave the job unfinished. My arms are too weak and my hands are on fire with the cold. I try and try to get them warm by shaking my red and chapped stick fingers and holding them briefly inside my coat, underneath my oxters, but can’t and won’t ever get them warm again and as the unforgiving snow buries my feet, begin to howl and cry.