The Snow Read online

  What did I do then? Well, I reasoned I was on Clapham High Street, although there were no markers I recognised. I spent the day and the night there, exploring the buildings for what I could find, clambering over snow-clogged roofs and working my way when I could through interconnecting doors. My stomach ached like a sprain, the continual pain of hunger. It was all shops and offices inside, with a few abandoned bedsits in the upper floors. I found a good knife, and some scraps of food frozen by the chill. Much had already been looted. There was nobody around, just the corpse of an old dog, curled in the corner of one brown room.

  That evening, as the light faded, I stood on the roof with my head back, just looking up. I was fascinated, for some reason, with the underbelly of the cloud-cover above me. It was bubbled and pronged like floating coral, corrugated, I thought, like a colossal brain. I found myself thinking silly things. I wondered, for instance, whether the cloud might be sentient – a cloud-brain, stretched over the whole globe. Perhaps it had come to consciousness spontaneously, or (my mind wandering with the cold, the hunger and fatigue) – or been brought to life by cosmic rays, or something B-movie like that. And, looking down godlike upon the corruption beneath, it had decided to bombard us. Not with one cataclysmic A-Bomb (or Ω-Bomb) but with the atomised essence of bombardment, the bomb broken into a continuous rain of atom-sized particles, forever, forever.

  Fanciful thoughts. They say no two snowflakes are alike, but I believe I saw many alike that day.

  Three

  The next day I saw, or thought I saw, an orange light away to the north. The trek after this gleam, which glowed brighter, faded and vanished, glowed orange again depending on the strength of the intervening snow-flurry – the trek after this faery gleam took the rest of the day and much of the night. I ran out of roofs, and it seemed as if there was an impossible stretch to cross with only my boards. But I had become fascinated with the colour, and so I found a way. I cut swathes of pigeon-netting away from the steeple of a church, and laying it out before me with my boards was able to make a painstaking path across naked snow directly towards the light. I was trembly with hunger.

  Closer I could see it was a fire, and closer still I made out the half a dozen figures standing about it. I reached that place long after sunset, but the figures were still there and the fire was still burning. I was utterly exhausted.

  The six figures stood about the fire, their torsos exaggerated by the bulkiness of their coats, their hands giganticised by their mittens, their heads elongated by their hats, giants standing together. There was something alarming about them, an inhuman aspect. The firelight bounced off the creases and contours of their bodies and muffled faces to Gothic effect in the darkness. It occurred to me that it had been, perhaps, rash to come so blithely amongst these people. What if they intended me harm?

  ‘Hello,’ I panted.

  They said nothing, but neither did they prevent me from sitting amongst the slush on the roof by the fire.

  The building on which we were now warming ourselves was topped with a cupola, wooden slats in a metal frame, and with a metal weathervane at the highest point. These people had built their fire inside this structure, feeding it (as I soon discovered) with all the burnable material they could salvage from the building itself and from the buildings around it. For long minutes the sensation of heat was so delicious, the shocking gaudiness of the orange light so refreshing after weeks of grey and white, that I did nothing but sit. The broad stone ledge on which we all were gleamed damp in the firelight.

  ‘We’ve no food for you,’ called one of the figures to me, singsong. He, or she, came and stood over me.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘That’s OK.’ It wasn’t OK, but what else could I say?

  ‘Just so as you should know,’ said the figure. It was a masculine voice.

  Pause. I stood up, feeling at a disadvantage.

  ‘You lot,’ I said, addressing this figure. ‘Are you a group? A band?’

  ‘Just together by chance,’ was the reply. The voice sounded slightly less surly.

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘Jeffreys,’ he said. ‘My name.’

  ‘Tira,’ I replied, unsure whether he had said ‘Jeffreys’ – a surname – or ‘Jeffrey’, a first, and not wanting to strain the mood by asking.

  He ducked down to squat, and I sat down again. We were both facing the fire. A seventh figure had emerged from somewhere, and threw a whole chair and numerous sticks onto the blaze. I watched the blaze swell, and only belatedly noticed that Jeffreys was looking at me.

  ‘Pretty,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pretty – pretty eyes.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Tie-ra,’ he said. ‘Kind of name is that?’

  ‘Indian.’

  ‘Ah.’ He nodded. Looking closer I could see that his face was that of an oldish man, creased and lined like fractured ice, pressure cracks spinning out from the corners of his eyes, from the wingtips of his mouth. I later learned that he was fifty-nine years old. He smoked with the focused avidity of a man habituated to four packs a day who was now forced to husband each cigarette, not sure where the next pack was coming from. He smoked each fag right down to the filter.

  Later, others of the group gathered round. I told them how I had traversed the open snow with the pigeon-netting and planks. They were impressed. As the night wore on I slept, but woke again before dawn. Then I joined a foraging party, following two people down into the building to scavenge fuel for the fire. We went all the way down the stairs to the ground, the way lit with a hand torch. On the ground floor I saw they had dug tunnels through the now compacted snow to buildings over the road. ‘How did you do all this?’ I asked, amazed.

  ‘Jeffreys,’ they said.

  We fetched furniture, paper, cardboard, anything. It was hard work keeping the fire going. Snow spiralled constantly into the blaze, fizzing and spitting. Metal spars running round the frame, and the metal sheet at the top, still supporting its hen-shaped vane, helped keep some of the snowfall out, but the outer portions of the fire dampened and kept fizzling out.

  Despite Jeffreys’ insistence that there was no food to spare, the eight of us ate together in the morning, wrapping a large ham in foil and cooking it in the body of the fire. We dug the scorching meat from the bone with our bare fingers; I can’t think anything ever tasted so good to me before. Or since.

  ‘Where’s all this snow coming from anyway?’ I said, after this breakfast. We were all of us sitting around, some of us looking into the flake-filled sky. ‘Why is it snowing so completely?’

  One of my companions grunted. ‘Wrath of God,’ said another.

  ‘You really think so?’ It seemed a rather fatuous explanation to me, but perhaps it was as good as any.

  ‘Sure.’ It was a man called Peter. ‘Sure. You know about the rainbow sign?’

  I said: ‘Greenpeace, is it?’

  ‘Na-aa-ah – in the Bible, yeah? God saw the world in its wickedness, in the Old Testament time. Right?’

  ‘Noah,’ I said.

  ‘Right – Noah. So, God sent the flood, and everybody drowned ’cept Noah. Then when the waters drained away, God sent the rainbow sign, you know, like, yeah an actual rainbow in the sky, which was his promise that he ain’t sending another flood. But the wickedness didn’t end, did it? Humanity.’ Peter drew the word out like a sort of obscenity. ‘This,’ he added, holding his arms up, ‘this don’t break the promise, you see? It’s God’s wrath, alright, but it don’t break the promise.’

  ‘Frozen Noah,’ said somebody else, and laughed briefly.

  ‘My old Nan,’ Peter mused, ‘she used to sing: God send Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time. But this is one weird fucking fire.’

  ‘Ice,’ said Jeffreys. ‘Burns. Sort of.’

  ‘You agree with that?’ I asked him. ‘This all God’s wrath?’

  ‘Me, no, not me,’ Jeffreys said. ‘I’m an atheist, thank God.’ He
stopped, turned his head, and added, ‘You get the joke there?’

  They had built the fire on the roof because none of the buildings round about had fireplaces, and what Jeffreys called ‘a proper fire’ wasn’t practicable in an unventilated room. But it was hard keeping it going, and another day and night saw the snow finally dampen it down. The party broke up.

  Four

  I went with Jeffreys. He seemed to have taken a bit of a shine to me, and I had nobody else to go with. Besides, he was likeable in an ornery sort of way. And more importantly he could tunnel.

  ‘Is that true?’ I pressed. ‘Can you tunnel?’

  ‘I’m one human mole, sure,’ he said. ‘One human ice-mole.’

  We went down to ground-level in the building, and Jeffreys opened a cupboard and brought out a potholer’s helmet, with the miner’s lamp over its peak. Then we set off. We hurried down the ice-tunnel I had been in before, with several of the others following behind. Into the buried shops opposite, and through to the back, where two tunnels led away through the snow. We took the right-hand one and hurried on. It felt very much hi-ho, hi-ho. Light slid over the ruffled white of the tunnel walls in slippery parabolas.

  I am a small woman, but even I had to bend forward; that’s how low the tunnels were. Jeffreys was bent nearly double. But he moved quickly, and I had to hurry to keep up with his light. It cast a spectral blue-white halo off the white walls. ‘How do you make these?’ I called.

  ‘Heat,’ he said. ‘Come on,’ he added. ‘I got a hideaway.’

  ‘You got several, I’m sure,’ I called back.

  He didn’t answer.

  We cut in and out of buildings, through short tunnels and lengthy ones. The strange tunnelly environment started to become almost familiar. At one stage we came out into a huge roofed space, dark and echoing, in which Jeffreys’ helmet-light was swallowed after a few yards. ‘New Covent Garden Market,’ he said, panting. He stopped, leaning against a rail, to light up another cigarette.

  ‘Covent Garden?’ I said, amazed that we were so far north.

  ‘The market, no, the market. New Covent Garden. Not Covent Garden, not the tourist place. You know? The real market, meat and flowers. South of the river.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, looking around me, although nothing could be seen in the dark except the shine of Jeffreys’ helmet and the bullet-point of orange at the end of his cigarette. ‘Any meat here now?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Or flowers.’

  He coughed, coughed again, paused, and took a longer drag on his cigarette. The end glowed brighter.

  ‘You got one of those for me?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ he said, deadpan.

  We went further north.

  Five

  Jeffreys had used to work for the Underground, on track and tunnel maintenance. There was a machine, he told me, that was used to heat the ground if digging was required in icy weather. ‘In winter that ground will be hard as steel,’ he said. ‘Hard as nickel. This device, it’s a sort of trolley with an electric coil at its front, which we used to soften the soil for digging. But, come this snow, I used it to push right through the snow. It cuts through pretty easily, the snow melting and running away as water. About a fortnight after the first snowfall I revved it up and digged some tunnels. Dug,’ he added, fumbling for another cigarette.

  There were parts of his story I never learnt, and he didn’t respond well to my interrogating him. After a while I gave up trying to get the information from him.

  ‘Why not just use the Underground tunnels themselves?’ I said. ‘Why dig your own?’

  ‘Rats,’ he said, in a dark voice. ‘Millions of rats. They get cold, get hungry, you don’t want to be in the brick tunnels with them.’ When he said that I thought of the woman I had met on her way to Balham Tube, and wondered what had become of her. ‘Better,’ he went on, ‘to dig your own tunnels. There’s nothing alive above ground now but a few hardy people, like me.’

  Later he said, ‘I was based up on the Charing Cross Road.’ But he can’t have meant that he lived there – it’s not a place an Underground worker could afford to live. Perhaps he meant he was based at Charing Cross Tube for his work. ‘I dug south,’ he told me, as the two of us crossed the emptiness of New Covent Garden Market together. ‘I had the notion to go to Buck House, I’m not sure why. Never went before the snow came. Too touristy. I think I figured, the Queen, she’ll have supplies and such. So I dug in that direction, but it seemed futile. Halfway there I thought of walls and gates and locked doors and swung about, dug to Parliament Square. Thought I’d check out the Houses of Parliament. God knows what I thought I’d find there.’

  ‘How did you power the heater?’ I asked.

  ‘Batteries,’ he said, laconically, and said no more. We reached the far side and ducked down into the tunnel again. ‘They’re not going to last long,’ he said, as we scurried on. ‘You can be sure of that.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘’S true. The heater melts a path, and leaves the tunnel with a sort of sheath of ice on the inside, and that holds it up to a point. But once the snow’s built up a bit further it’ll collapse these little rabbit-holes. Wouldn’t want to be in them when that happens.’

  I hurried my step. ‘You think that’s going to happen?’

  ‘What?’ he grunted.

  ‘You think the snow is just going to keep on falling, building up, falling?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘It can’t fall forever, surely.’ I said. ‘Can it?’

  He sniffed. ‘Fall a while yet, I reckon.’

  We came out of the snow into a brick railway tunnel, fifty yards long, with snow packed at either end and piled a long way in. Jeffreys sat on one of the rails running along the ground and pulled off his mittens. It was an extended BR arch, probably on the run-in to Waterloo, but I wasn’t happy being there; I hadn’t been able to get what Jeffreys had said about rats out of my head. I sat beside him.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. ‘Any way?’

  ‘Like I said, I got a hideaway.’

  ‘Inside a house.’

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Once the snow really builds up one storey, two storeys, that won’t prevent the pressure from above squashing it down. Tall buildings are the best. What you want is a really tall building. The weight of a thousand feet of snow is greater than the weight of a thousand feet of building – building is largely open air, you see, where the people were supposed to go. Snow is water, that’s heavy. So,’ he said, chafing his hands, making an egg of them and blowing into it, as if his thumbs were the mouthpiece of some strange musical instrument. ‘So, a skyscraper, acts like a sort of funnel up the snow. A one-storey building, now if that gets a thousand metres of snow on top of it – that roof’ll probably cave in. But the lower stories of a skyscraper …’

  He trailed off, and pulled out another cigarette. I pushed myself closer to him to breathe up as much secondary smoke as I could. It had been a long time since I had had a cigarette.

  We hurried on, and into another dug-out ice tunnel. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I came south. Found the north side of Vauxhall Bridge, tunnelled over it. Came further south still, found those guys making the fire. Thought I’d hang out with them.’

  ‘Where’s the tunnelling machine now?’

  ‘Stockwell,’ he said. ‘Batteries ran out.’

  ‘Couldn’t you get some more?’ I was thinking of the sort of batteries that go in the back of a cassette-player.

  ‘I could fetch some from the depot,’ said Jeffreys. ‘I suppose. But they’re heavy buggers, heavy. Anyway, I’m not sure I’d want to be in these tunnels too much longer, they’re not properly propped. Like I said. Snow’s falling all the time. Pressure’s building up over our heads all the time.’

  We walked for hours, bent over, a pain growing in the small of my back all the time. The tunnel swung to the right, and started creeping up at a gentle angle. It swung down into a dip and
up again. The bottom of this slight indent was covered with ice. Finally it seemed to end in a tiny hollowed out ice-chamber, like inside an igloo. On one side of this cell the walls were smooth, but the other side seemed to have been loosely packed with snow. There was a single exit.

  ‘Nearly there,’ said Jeffreys. ‘This bit I dug out with a shovel.’ He pointed to a sharply upward-sloping pipe, not much wider than a human torso. ‘Up we go.’ He put his head up this snow-orifice, wriggled and disappeared, taking the light with him.

  There was nothing for me to do but follow. I bent down before the white, gleaming circle, the only light in my now darkened environment, and squeezed myself inside. It wasn’t too hard going, actually; I could dig my fists into the snow and haul myself up. After a while it levelled out. I crawled horizontally along behind Jeffreys. I could see ahead that this mini-tunnel terminated in concrete, but Jeffreys had squirrelled down and to the left. I followed him down into a pocket where he had previously cleared out a space outside a window and smashed his way in. I followed him. He had picked the snags and triangles of glass neatly out of the frame, placing all the shards in a concise heap against the wall. Evidence of a tidy mind.

  Inside was an open-plan office space: desks still piled with paper, dead computer terminals stickered on their sides with images of film stars. It was grey and murky until Jeffreys lit a campingaz light. The hissing bulb grew bright slowly: it gave the impression of light filling the space as if with effort, inch by inch, pushing out against the dark. Through an open door a side-room was visible, filled with crates and loose cans and various paraphernalia. What sort of office had this been before the snow came? It was difficult to say.

  There were dozens and dozens of pot plants, from little bushy things in bowls to large Swiss cheese plants in big tubs. I later discovered that most of these had been in place when Jeffreys found the place, that indeed he’d chosen this office amongst all the thousands in London because its former occupants had filled it with so many plants. He was thinking ahead, you see: plants soaking up the carbon dioxide and breathing out the oxygen that we needed. Living off the light of our artificial lamps.