The Snow Read online

  The Snow

  Adam Roberts

  www.sfgateway.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Snow

  So You Want To Be A Food-Miner?

  Interview with Gerard Louis Seidensticker

  Know Your Snow!

  Doc 08–999 [Clouds]

  Confession

  Text Title: [not specified] Text Code: 341–999

  Website

  Also by Adam Roberts

  About the Author

  Appendix

  Coda Tira Bojani Sahai

  Copyright

  He had prepared himself for every possibility. Reality must therefore be something that bears no relationship to possibilities, any more than the stab of a knife in one’s body bears to the gradual movement of the clouds overhead.

  Proust, Du côté de chez Swann

  Snow

  One

  The snow started falling on September 6th, soft noiseless flakes filling the sky like a swarm of white moths, or like static interference on your TV screen – whichever metaphor, nature or technology, you find more evocative. Snow everywhere, all through the air, with that distinctive sense of hurrying that a vigorous snowfall brings with it. Everything in a rush, busy-busy snowflakes. And, simultaneously, paradoxically, everything was hushed, calmed, as quiet as cancer, as white as death.

  And at the beginning people were happy. They balled the snow and threw it at one another, overarm, underarm, laughing and dancing, kicking up blurry clouds with their feet. Picture that. Railway travel was not disrupted. There was no wind, and accordingly no drifts accumulated. Just the snow falling in slow motion, straight down.

  After forty-eight hours of uninterrupted fall there were railway delays, but no cancellations. Traffic reports urged drivers to use caution, but cars still hurtled along the roads, swerved and interwove, poured on and gathered in metal drifts at traffic lights. Snowtrucks kerb-crawled, but the temperature was never worse than minus-seven at night, and during the day was barely below zero. There was little ice on the road, and little call for grit or salt. After three days and nights of constant snowfall, banks of snow began to stack up. Britain, which had some experience of lighter snowfalls and some more experience of frosts and slush, was poorly provided with proper snowploughs, although it had gritters and salters galore. In the United States, I understand, the A-prowed trucks cut through the snow banks, keeping the roads passable for several more days; but in England most of the gritting-trucks themselves became trapped in the snow. Those few snowploughs at the authorities’ disposal were commandeered for Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and London, and for certain military establishments. By September 12th the snow in those places where it had not been cleared away was thirty inches deep. Trains, buses and cars were infrequent. Few people in London frolicked in the white landscape now. Nobody threw snowballs or built globy snowmen with fagends for eyes and an old pen for a nose. Instead they grumbled. The snow kept falling. People whinged about the weather: they blamed ill-luck, government, global warming, God’s wrath. What had been charming, an early presage of Christmas, like the glitter in a toy snowglobe, became tiresome, and then oppressive, and then became something worse, became calamitous.

  I’ll tell you about London, because it is London I know about.

  Everything was white. We had written on the page, London was our writing, and then nature had scattered the myriad fibres of soft paper over it so that the page became white again. A city as big as London depended absolutely on the avenues of supply, food, fuel, everything. For the first month snowploughs kept the bigger roads open, continually scouring the M4, the A2, the A3. Lesser roads quickly clogged with snow. People made their way to the centre to buy potatoes and meat at highly inflated prices, carrying them home again, using makeshift snowshoes of tea-trays or tennis bats, or else moving forward by throwing boards down in front and picking them up from behind to throw down again in front.

  Any attempt to lay paths over the snow proved futile. New snowfall buried them in hours. By the month’s end, paradoxically, passage about the city became easier because the snow had reached the level of the roofs of two-storey buildings and it was possible to make one’s way along guttering, roof-paths and the like, at least for some of the way. But by then the government had long since given up deliveries of food.

  Many people had left the city. Some, old and young, had stayed in their rooms until the chill settled on them forever. A few struggled on. There had been talk – whilst the radios still worked – of a mass evacuation by air, but this had never materialised. After forty days and nights of solid snowfall the sense that there was even a government in charge faded from the mind of those people left in the city. Its authority was lost in the blizzard.

  I was one such person. I thought of going, of leaving London: I had a daughter in Southampton (although I was still only a young woman myself), and I had a mother closer at hand, just west of the city in Slough. Naturally I thought about making my way to be with them. But in the end I stayed in London. Transport had stopped working altogether, so I could only have got out by walking, and I told myself that I wouldn’t have been able to find my way, maps having been rendered irrelevant by the snow. Or so I told myself. Maybe I just didn’t want to go. Why go? The news reports were unambiguous: snow was general, as they put it, all over Europe, all over the western world. What possibilities did the countryside hold for me?

  Like many I was waiting for the snow to stop, for life to return to normal, and whilst I was waiting I tried to roll along the usual grooves of my life. I was working at that time in a building society on Balham High Road, and for the first week I fought my way through the snow flurries and drifts to do my job. On the ninth day of snow the management closed the doors, telling us that they would reopen when the weather improved. A small group of us bickered with the local manager over whether or not we would continue to be paid – it seems bizarre and irrelevant now, but we were worried he was going to gyp us out of our wages. We had little enough money.

  By the second week of snow the local stores were exhausted of necessary provisions, and the radio told us that our nearest food-aid distribution point was Clapham Northside, two miles away. For several days I undertook the wearying trudge to this temporary depot to collect food. I had got hold of proper winter clothes: a massively padded and hooded ski-jacket, snow-trousers, walking boots and overshoes, mittens. But the drifts were so high now that although this gear kept me warm it did not make it much easier to travel through the new white landscape, the whipped-cream of it, the feathery piles, snow in the air all around me all the time as I struggled on. I gave up making this journey.

  For a while after that I stayed in my home, my flat on the fourth floor of my ex-council block. I ate what stores I had, I watched the scratchy TV pictures, I stood at my window. TV transmissions ended, although the electricity supply continued for a surprisingly long time. The water pipes froze, but it was easy enough (for a while) to scoop snow with cooking pans like giant spoons, and heat it on the cooker. From the window I watched the undulating surface of the snow rise day-by-day to the first floor of my block, then to the second, and only then did it occur to me that perhaps the snowfall wasn’t going to stop any time soon. Or any time at all.

  The phone lines were still working. I called my sister in Scotland and we talked. She said she had been unable to reach our mother. She was worried. I agreed with her that it was worrying. Neither of us could bring ourselves to say openly what it was that worried us. I tried phoning my mother but she didn’t answer.

  Shortly after that the phone lines stopped working.

  The flat across the hall from me was occupied by a retired fellow, a gent in his eighties called Mr Martland. I had been in
the habit of visiting him from time to time. One day I knocked, let myself in (he had given me a spare key in case of emergency) and found him dead in his easy chair, sitting facing the blue light of the window. It moved me hardly at all. I left him there and found a surprisingly large cache of tinned food in his cupboards which I took for myself. This I ate, cooked first and then, when the electricity finally ceased, uncooked. The snow rose to the third floor, and then rose further to the bottom of my window.

  I had existed, up to that time, in a kind of blank state, a sort of nerveless stasis. Snow fell constantly in my brain. Drifts of it heaped up to my eyeballs. But, finally, it occurred to me now that if I stayed where I was I might as well sit in my chair and fall asleep and not wake up, like Mr Martland opposite. This was not a prospect that alarmed me especially. My overwhelming sense (I might even describe it as the chief tenor of my life) was of the slow accretion of inaction, an erosion of the heat of being, the fluttery disruption of the view of the future, of where I was going.

  The vista from my window was of luxuriances of snow on every surface, in every direction. Isn’t it curious how snowfall looks so cosy, so warm, though we know that it is so very cold? It is a visual pun on quilts, white duvets, blankets, I suppose. I stood at my window for hours. The street had been wholly filled in. My eye settled on that portion of the block opposite that still protruded from the snow, its slant roof, covered over by a nightcap of snow, slugs of white on every ledge and windowsill. Behind it the roofs of Balham High Road, all similarly capped with white, could just be seen. The view was being continually scrabbled over with the interference pattern of snow falling.

  Two

  I decided I should leave, get out, get away. I think, in fact, that I had some romantic notion of trekking out in the snow-desert to die, like the heroic British polar explorers, the sort of men my father had always revered as types of self-sacrificing duty and strength (‘I know it is unfashionable,’ he would say, ‘I know the young generations laugh at it, but these are qualities worth celebrating’). So I ripped up a stretch of my carpet and laid it on the treacherous surface of the snow outside my window. It sank six inches. I gathered another piece and clambered out to lie on the first piece, which sagged and U-ed around my kneeling form. When it had settled I threw the second piece forward and made my way onto that. It sank further, V-ed rather than U-ed around me. I began to be frightened. I was convinced that I would drown in the drift unless I could stay on the top of it. By tossing my fragments of carpet I made a precarious passage to the roof of the building opposite, leaving a channel in the surface of the snow behind me. I had to haul myself onto the guttering.

  I headed north, along the roofs, still passable, that lined the road. It took me all day to travel perhaps two miles, with various painstaking manoeuvres and elaborate shifts. Where buildings were joined in a terrace the going was easier. Where they were interrupted, or were less than four storeys high, it was harder going. Towards the top of Balham High Road I met a woman coming south, heading, she said, for Balham Tube. She was the first person I had seen. ‘I thought,’ she told me, her breath steaming around us both, ‘that I’d dig down into the Tube. Y’know? It’s got to be clear down there … don’t you think? I figured I’d wait down there ’til all this washes away.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. I lived round the corner from the tube, and it hadn’t occurred to me to seek shelter there. ‘It’s pretty snowed over. How do you know how you’d get down to it?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Besides,’ I said, pulling my hand free from my mitten to scratch my face inside my hood. ‘What makes you think the tunnels are going to be safe? They may be full of water, for all we know. Maybe all iced up. And there won’t be any food down there.’

  ‘No food up here,’ she said.

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘I figured I could go anywhere in the Underground,’ she said. ‘Anywhere in London. It’s hellish travelling above ground, but I could wander the tunnels under the city and go where I liked. Is it far from here?’

  ‘Balham Tube? Not far,’ I said. ‘Clapham South is about as far, up in that direction.’ I think I was hoping she would agree to travel with me, thinking that the two of us together would make better progress than I could by myself.

  She looked over her shoulder. ‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll press on.’

  I left her and carried on north. By the evening I had reached the general vicinity of Clapham South. I think (I can’t be sure) that I was perched on the roof of the derelict building opposite the Tube entrance – you know the one? The snow was still falling steadily, softly. To my left was a huge sheet of white, sloping slowly away from me, and pitted with tiny dots. Not a roof, steeple or pole broke the expanse: Clapham Common.

  There was no wildlife of any kind, not a dog, not a bird. All dead, I supposed. Nor had I met any more human beings since the woman bound for Balham Tube. The sense of loneliness was growing around me.

  I spent the last of the light that day getting across the road junction: forty feet of blank snow with nothing underneath it all the way down to the tarmac. I won’t labour the narrative: I used boards ripped from that portion of the building still above the snow. I did think of spending the night inside the derelict place, but pulling the boards free of the old window holes revealed an eerie coldness and blackness inside, and I hurried on. It took three boards, and me wriggling more or less on my belly, but I reached the top floor and trapezoid roof of the terrace over the way. I cleared the snow where it had gathered in a five-foot peak all along the central portion of this roof and found a skylight. It wouldn’t open, but the glass was so chilled it broke easily beneath my foot. The glass, with a wire-grid running through it like graph paper, came out of the frame in one bent piece.

  Below, inside, was a storeroom; through the door and down the stairs a bar. The place had been wrecked previously, and almost all the drink taken, but I found a crate of peanuts and some unbroken bottles of vodka and whisky. It had been a week since I last drank, and I drank too much and fell into a stupor – stupid of me, for I was helpless had anybody chanced across me. But I woke, unmolested, in the morning with a miserable hangover. I was sick on the floor where I lay, and it took me half a day to gather myself.

  I decided then to wait another day in that place, with its dismal half-light, the great slabs of its bars, the upturned chairs and tables. I crouched in the corner and finished the peanuts. In one unbroken glass I mixed snow from through the letter box, drizzling it with vodka.

  The next morning, or what I thought was morning, I made my way back upstairs. The snow had fallen through the broken skylight, and had gathered around the rim of the hole I had made. I was able, just, to clamber back out, but wasted nearly an hour trying to find my boards – foolishly I had left them on the roof instead of taking them into the building with me, and they were snowed under. Eventually I dug them out, and dragged them on.

  I made my way up the Common’s south side, heading north towards Clapham High Street. A tall terrace of Victorian residential housing ran almost the whole length of it, and I picked my way rather quickly. Sometimes I was striding hip-high through the snow (I am not a tall woman); sometimes I was able to walk along gutters or roof-spines. I was, I suppose, quite the daredevil, strolling at some speed along a gutter: had I fallen from it, or had the gutter given way, I would have tumbled into the snow. There was no doubt in my mind that I would then drown in the drift. Using the boards I crossed where roads left spaces, and by nightfall I was near the top of Clapham High Street. Or thereabouts. Or so I supposed.

  To my right, looming through the snow, were the distant obelisks of tower blocks. I thought about making my way over to them, assuming that people would be crowded into the upper floors: but on reflection I decided against it. What manner of society I would have found, had I done so, I can only guess at. Food was very scarce everywhere now.

  That night I went instead down the snow-clogged metal st
airs of a fire escape and into a building. Inside, checking room to room in the almost-darkness, I found half a packet of biscuits, old and stale, under the sink in a small kitchenette. I ate them immediately. I slept in a room at the back. The windows were still half clear, the view out over the fire escape, so I could see whether it was day or night.

  I awoke to darkness. The snow had covered the windows completely. I had no idea how long I had slept. I stood by the icy glass and contemplated heaving it open and clawing my way up through the snow to the surface – the fire escape must still have been there, after all. But I felt a weary sense of horror at the prospect of voluntarily entombing myself in the snow. I learnt later that, deeper down, the snow was firmed by compression such that it could be hollowed out into tunnels or cells; but the topmost layers of the snowfall, the layers that I had had dealings with, were soft like granular water: snow-quicksand.

  Instead I went through the building, room by room, until I found an internal stairwell that went from top to bottom. I climbed to the very top, where I found a ‘Push Latch For Exit – Emergency Only’ door. This took several shoves to open, clearing away the snow from the ledge beyond it, but soon I was in the open air, panting great ectoplasmic breaths into the chill air with the exertion. The door led onto a narrow roof-pathway that was stacked with snow to my left and right; but in front of me the slant of the roof had prevented too massy a build-up.

  I had a splendid view of south London, covered with snow, and I stood just staring at it for a long time. I don’t know how long a time. Hours, probably. It came to me then, belatedly I acknowledge, standing in that doorway, that the world had ended, and ended blankly. Ended blankly after all. It is curious, looking back, how blithely I accepted this fact. Are we pre-programmed to accept world apocalypse? The shadow cast by our own life against the wall of the world? We each know we’ll die, individually; it is the easiest thing to extrapolate that fate out onto the cosmos as a whole.