“What the hell do we do with him?” Hayden asked. He was still standing closer to Brand than the rest of us, hugging himself to try to preserve some of the warmth from sleep. “I mean, Boris was all over the place, from what I hear. But Brand… we have to do something. Bury him, or something. It’s Christmas, for God’s sake.”
“The ground’s like iron,” I protested.
“So we take it in turns digging,” Rosalie said quietly.
“It’ll take us — ”
“Then I’ll do it myself.” She walked out into the blooded snow and shattered glass in bare feet, bent over Brand’s body and grabbed under each armpit as if to lift him. She was naked beneath the shirt. Hayden stared in frank fascination. I turned away, embarrassed for myself more than for Rosalie.
“Wait,” Ellie sighed. “Rosalie, wait. Let’s all dress properly, then we’ll come and bury him. Rosalie.” The girl stood and smoothed Brand’s shirt down over her thighs, perhaps realising what she had put on display. She looked up at the sky and caught the morning’s first snowflake on her nose.
“Snowing,” she said. “Just for a fucking change.”
We went inside. Hayden remained in the kitchen with the outside door shut and bolted while the rest of us went upstairs to dress, wake Charley and tell her the grim Yule tidings. Once Rosalie’s door had closed I followed Ellie along to her room. She opened her door for me and invited me in, obviously knowing I needed to talk.
Her place was a mess. Perhaps, I thought, she was so busy being strong and mysterious that she had no time for tidying up. Clothes were strewn across the floor, a false covering like the snow outside. Used plates were piled next to her bed, those at the bottom already blurred with mould, the uppermost still showing the remains of the meal we’d had before Boris had been killed. Spaghetti bolognaise, I recalled, to Hayden’s own recipe, rich and tangy with tinned tomatoes, strong with garlic, the helpings massive. Somewhere out there Boris’s last meal lay frozen in the snow, half digested, torn from his guts -
I snorted and closed my eyes. Another terrible thought that wouldn’t go away.
“Brand really saw things in the snow, didn’t he?” Ellie asked.
“Yes, he was pretty sure. At least,
Ellie walked to the window and opened the curtains. The snowstorm had started in earnest, and although her window faced the Atlantic all we could see was a sea of white. She rested her forehead on the cold glass, her breath misting, fading, misting again. “I’ve seen something too,” she said.
Ellie. Seeing things in the snow. Ellie was the nearest we had to a leader, though none of us had ever wanted one. She was strong, if distant. Intelligent, if a little straight with it. She’d never been much of a laugh, even before things had turned to shit, and her dogged conservatism in someone so young annoyed me no end.
Ellie, seeing things in the snow.
I could not bring myself to believe it. I did not want to. If I did accept it then there really were things out there, because Ellie did not lie, and she was not prone to fanciful journeys of the imagination.
“What something?” I asked at last, fearing it a question I would never wish to be answered. But I could not simply ignore it. I could not sit here and listen to Ellie opening up, then stand and walk away. Not with Boris frozen out there, not with Brand still cooling into the landscape.
She rocked her head against the glass. “Don’t know. Something white. So how did I see it?” She turned from the window, stared at me, crossed her arms. “From this window,” she said. “Two days ago. Just before Charley found Boris. Something flitting across the snow like a bird, except it left faint tracks. As big as a fox, perhaps, but it had more legs. Certainly not a deer.”
“Or one of Boris’s angels?”
She shook her head and smiled, but there was no humour there. There rarely was. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to know. But! We will have to be careful. Take the guns when we try to bury Brand. A couple of us keep a look-out while the others dig. Though I doubt we’ll even get through the snow.”
“You and guns,” I said perplexed. I didn’t know how to word what I was trying to ask.
Ellie smiled wryly. “Me and guns. I hate guns.”
I stared at her, saying nothing, using silence to pose the next question.
“I have a history,” she said. And that was all.
Later, downstairs in the kitchen, Charley told us what she’d managed to read in the paper from the frozen car. In the week since we’d picked up the last TV signal and the paper was printed, things had gone from bad to worse. The illness that had killed my Jayne was claiming millions across the globe. The USA blamed Iraq. Russia blamed China. Blame continued to waste lives. There was civil unrest and shootings in the streets, mass-burials at sea, martial law, air strikes, food shortages… the words melded into one another as Rosalie recited the reports.
Hayden was trying to cook mince pies without the mince. He was using stewed apples instead, and the kitchen stank sickeningly sweet. None of us felt particularly festive.
Outside, in the heavy snow that even now was attempting to drift in and cover Brand, we were all twitchy. Whoever or — now more likely — whatever had done this could still be around. Guns were held at the ready.
We wrapped him in an old sheet and enclosed this in torn black plastic bags until there was no white or red showing. Ellie and I dragged him around the corner of the house to where there were some old flowers beds. We stared to dig where we remembered them to be, but when we got through the snow the ground was too hard. In the end we left him on the surface of the frozen earth and covered the hole back in with snow, mumbling about burying him when the thaw came. The whole process had an unsettling sense of permanence.
As if the snow would never melt.
Later, staring from the dining room window as Hayden brought in a platter of old vegetables as our Christmas feast, I saw something big and white skimming across the surface of the snow. It moved too quickly for me to make it out properly, but I was certain I saw wings.
I turned away from the window, glanced at Ellie and said nothing.
two: the colour of fear
During the final few days of Jayne’s life I had felt completely hemmed in. Not only physically trapped within our home — and more often the bedroom where she lay — but also mentally hindered. It was a feeling I hated, felt guilty about and tried desperately to relieve, but it was always there.
I stayed, holding her hand for hour after terrible hour, our palms fused by sweat, her face pasty and contorted by agonies I could barely imagine. Sometimes she would be conscious and alert, sitting up in bed and listening as I read to her, smiling at the humourous parts, trying to ignore the sad ones. She would ask me questions about how things were in the outside world, and I would lie and tell her they were getting better. There was no need to add to her misery. Other times she would be a shadow of her old self, a grey stain on the bed with liquid limbs and weak bowels, a screaming thing with bloody growths sprouting across her skin and pumping their venom inward with uncontrollable, unstoppable tenacity. At these times I would talk truthfully and tell her the reality of things, that the world was going to shit and she would be much better off when she left it.
Even then I did not tell her the complete truth: that I wished I were going with her. Just in case she could still hear.
Wherever I went during those final few days I was under assault, besieged by images of Jayne, thoughts of her impending death, vague ideas of what would happen after she had gone. I tried to fill the landscape of time laid out before me, but Jayne never figured and so the landscape was bare. She was my whole world; without her I could picture nothing to live for. My mind was never free although sometimes, when a doctor found time to visit our house and tut and sigh over Jayne’s wasting body, I would go for a walk. Mostly she barely knew the doctor was there, for which I was grateful. There was nothing he could. I would not be able to bear even the faintest glimmer of hope in her eyes.
I strolled through the park opposite our house, staying to the paths so that I did not risk stepping on discarded needles or stumbling across suicides decaying slowly back to nature. The trees were as beautiful as ever,
