Later, while sawing and chopping chairs into firewood, I wondered what Morgan did all day after he’d finished exercising. The day before he had not returned until dusk. When asked he’d said he had been foraging, but without giving any details – I’d never met anyone so good at not answering questions. He hadn’t brought anything back with him. I decided to find out what he was up to. That evening was the ceilidh. Next morning I’d follow him.
I washed my hair and sat head down in front of the stove scrunch-drying it. Nothing short of a miraculous return to a normal climate would persuade me into a skirt, but I wore a brand new pair of skinny jeans under ski trousers and an Oscar de la Renta lacy silk top under my sweater for when the dancing had warmed me up. I put on makeup, earrings and a necklace and studied myself in the mirror; not bad. It’s reassuring to know I can still look good when I want to.
We all get together once a month on the last Saturday for a party, at a different flat each time; we play games, dance and chat, and do an assortment of turns of varying entertainment value. Each of us brings candles, food and drink. None of us are Scottish, but ceilidh seems to cover the mixed activities of the gathering better than any other word, and one of the most fun things we do is Scottish country dancing. Paul has a wind-up gramophone and some old 78s with Scottish dance tunes, and Archie found a couple of books, Scottish Ceilidh Dancing and The Swinging Sporran. We had a hilarious time teaching ourselves how to dance, and now we’re quite good at it.
This ceilidh was at Claire and Paul’s, to make it easy for them with Toby. It was really my turn to host it. Morgan hadn’t returned by seven-thirty when Greg called to walk over there with me. I wrote him a note:
Yo Morgan,
I’m at the ceilidh at Paul and Claire’s in Shakespeare Tower in the Barbican …
Would he know it?
… it’s one of the three brutalist towers southwest of here, less than a mile away, the one in the middle. If you get back in time, do come if you’d like to. You’ll see the lights from close to. It’s the most fun you’ll have around here with your clothes on.
Tori
I reread this, had second thoughts, and wrote it out again without the final sentence before setting off with Greg across the snow.
I unlaced my mountaineering boots, slipped out of my ski trousers (my skinny jeans were underneath) and into the Balenciaga ankle boots I’d brought with me. The room looked its best in the light of a dozen candles, the cushions’ bright colours glowing cosily. In daylight it looks a bit the worse for wear. It’s difficult to keep a room immaculate when you have a child and no running water. Nina and Archie were on the sofa talking to Gemma, and Greg went to join them.
“Hi Tori,” said Claire. “Morgan not with you? I was looking forward to meeting him. I’m the only one who hasn’t.”
“He’s out, I left him a note. Maybe he’ll come later.” I showed her the two tins of soup I’d brought. “Shall I open these?”
Paul came and took them. Claire poured me a glass of wine. “Will you be godmother to Toby? Archie’s going to christen him.”
“I’d be delighted – as long as you don’t mind me not being very religious.”
“I’m not either, but it’ll please Archie and anyway, the ceremony will be nice.”
“Who are the other godparents?”
“Greg and Archie. It’ll be a little tricky for him conducting the service as well as making the responses as a godfather, but I’m sure he’ll rise to the occasion.”
Claire looked well; she seemed very happy. She told me you could tell Toby was intelligent already by the way he squinted at you and waved his hands. I thought she was joking, but realized in the nick of time she was entirely serious. As I was lighting my candle Gemma came over. She wore a pink tutu over her jeans, and Mickey Mouse ears on a headband.
“My tooth came out.” She opened her mouth and pointed to a gap in her front teeth. “I’m having to lisp till my tongue gets used to it.”
“Then you should be getting your first visit from the Tooth Fairy tonight.”
“That’s what Mummy said. But I want to keep the tooth, it’s my favourite tooth, so I might not put it under my pillow.”
Once Charlie and Sam had arrived and everyone had admired Gemma’s tooth, we settled down to play Monopoly, sitting on the rug between the two big sofas, the board in the middle. We play a fast and ruthless game, cheerfully bankrupting the vulnerable and taking advantage of any inattention to get away without paying rent – something that gets a good deal likelier as the game progresses and we are collecting food from the buffet between moves. When Sam was fetching steak and kidney pie, she missed me landing on her Mayfair with a hotel on it – something I gleefully pointed out once Paul had had a turn and her chance had passed.
Gemma is as merciless as the rest of us, but we go a bit easier on her as she is only six and gets upset if she is first out. She always has the boat as it’s her favourite token. With eight players there are generally early bankruptcies and the game doesn’t string out too long. Greg won. People got to their feet, stretched, helped themselves to drinks and chatted. The room had warmed with people and candles, and I took off my sweater.
Archie topped up my glass. “I hear you’re going to be little Toby’s godmother. I thought we’d have the baptism Sunday week. Claire will be more rested by then and with any luck Toby will sleep through it. Always a good idea to get it over with before they get to the wide-awake wriggly stage. A pleasing choice of name – did you know Tobias means ‘God is good’?”
Charlie produced several sheets of paper, which I hoped was a short story. I prefer these to her poems, as I only like poetry which rhymes and scans. We all settled comfortably on sofas and chairs. A respectful silence fell, and Charlie glanced round the room.
“This poem is called Consummation. It’s one I’ve been working on for some time, but it only really came right yesterday.” She cleared her throat and began, in a droning, emphatic monotone.
“Take me
To the snow
The virgin snow
The sure, pure, candid snow
The snow that cures, kills, fills the planet and my mind … ”
Frankly, I’ve had enough of snow to last a lifetime; I don’t need to hear odes to the darned stuff. Charlie’s delivery, waving a hand in the air for emphasis, intermittently closing her eyes, her voice rising to a shriek and falling again, embarrasses me; to her this is art, and she has no worries about looking or sounding ridiculous. She is in deadly earnest about her poetry. This seemed to be one of her longer pieces. I glanced around the room. Archie and Paul were gazing at their knees. Nina was picking with her nail at a mark on her sleeve. Claire wore an encouraging smile, the sort she has when watching Gemma try to juggle or do magic tricks. Sam fiddled with her hair, but then she’d probably heard it before. Gemma lay on the floor, walking her tooth over her stomach. Greg had his eyes shut tight, concentrating.
A bang on the door; Morgan had arrived, and Paul tiptoed to let him in. They stood by the doorway, waiting for Charlie to finish. Morgan took off his jacket and slouched broodily against the jamb, hair in his eyes, eclipsing Paul, making him look tame and domesticated. I noticed Sam sit up, glance at him and slip off her cardigan, revealing a low-cut top. Maybe he made her nostalgic for one of the disastrous boyfriends in her past. Several more long minutes elapsed, and Charlie’s voice slowed for the final lines.
“Take me to
The earth
The dark earth
The cold, black, waiting earth
That lies forever coupled with the snow.”
She halted, head bowed. A brief silence to be certain that was the end, then an appreciative murmur ran round the room. “Well done, Charlie, one of your best, I think,” Archie said. He could not possibly mean this. He poured her a drink while she talked earnestly to him, no doubt about Consummation’s subtext.
Paul wound up the gramophone and put needle to shellac; the Ink Spots crooning D
o I Worry. Morgan strolled across the room, sat briefly next to Sam eyeing her cleavage and flirting with her until Charlie noticed and stood over him to reclaim her place. He settled beside me on the sofa holding a bottle of Beck’s Claire had given him. He turned my way and his eyes flicked over my new look, lingering here and there.
“I kind of assumed you had a figure somewhere under all those layers, but it’s nice to know for sure.”
“Did you have a good day?”
“So so. You didn’t warn me there’d be poetry.”
“Only Charlie’s. Don’t be worried you’ll be called on to recite a limerick of your own composition. She used to be big in a sort of alternative writer group – she actually had her first novel published by a small press, quite an achievement.” I added sotto voce, “What did you think of the poem?”
“Crap. And lengthy crap, too.”
He didn’t lower his voice. Nina, passing with bowls of soup, overheard him and bristled, though I’ve heard her cast aspersions on Charlie’s poetry more than once. Morgan drained the beer in one go, put the bottle on the floor beside him and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He got a band out and scragged his hair into a short pony tail. Gemma joined us and sat on his other side, barely coming up to his shoulder, feet not touching the floor, big brown eyes fixed on him. Eventually, compelled by the force of her stare, he swivelled to look at her. She fished in her pocket and held up her milk tooth.
“This is my tooth, it came out today.”
Morgan eyed her warily. “It happens.”
Gemma waited, not realizing that was the sum total of his reaction.
“Some people just don’t appreciate teeth, Gems,” I said. She got up and went to find a more receptive audience. The Ink Spots finished on a falsetto wail, the needle crackling repeatedly until Paul lifted it off the record. I was pleased he didn’t turn it over – a little of the Ink Spots goes a long way, in my opinion. I was about to suggest Morgan fetched himself some food before something else started, when Paul moved to the centre of the floor, unfolded a spindly music stand and got out sheet music. He looked around the room, screwing his flute together, and the chatter faded.
“If you’ll bear with me, I’m going to try your patience with a few extracts I’ve been working on from Mozart’s Flute Concerto in G Major. It’s a bit of a work in progress, but at least it’s brief, you’ll be pleased to hear.”
I couldn’t help darting a look at Charlie to see if she took this personally as a comment on her interminable poem, but she was smiling and opening a can of beer, chatting to Sam and Gemma. I like the flute (Paul has a Bach Partita in his repertoire I love) but Mozart is not a favourite of mine; I find him twiddly and repetitive. Paul’s rendition was surprisingly piercing, and a bit breathy. No wrong notes though, as far as I could tell. Towards the end, little Toby woke and started yelling, drowning the last bars and ensuing scattered applause. Perhaps he doesn’t like Mozart either. Claire took him into a corner to feed him.
As Paul folded the stand, Morgan muttered, “Are we done now?”
“Sam sometimes sings … karaoke was one of her favourite things, apparently.”
“Jesus.” Morgan shifted his weight and picked up the book he’d been inadvertently sitting on, Giles Brandreth’s Great Party Games: Over Two Hundred Games for Adults of All Ages. He shook his head. “You’re all a bunch of weirdos, you know that?”
Greg approached holding a pack of cards. He’s been teaching himself conjuring tricks from a book. Some of them are quite impressive when he gets them right.
“I’ve got a new trick.”
“Go on then. Show us.”
He fanned the cards and riffled through them, frowning with concentration. “Tori, can you pick a card from anywhere in the pack, anywhere you like. Tell me when to stop.”
I said, “Stop,” and took one. The card was the four of diamonds.
“Now Morgan, you do it.”
Morgan said stop and took a card.
“Look at your cards, but don’t say what it is and don’t show each other, then put it back in the middle of the pack.” We did this. He shuffled the cards and fanned them, carefully. “Tori, you pick a card and show it.” I did. “Now, that’s not the one you chose before?”
“No.” It was the Jack of Clubs.
Greg turned to Morgan. “But is it the one you picked?”
“No.”
Greg paused, disconcerted. “Are you sure?” Morgan nodded, gravely. “Oh. Then in that case something’s gone wrong …” Greg took back our cards, walked across the room and sat on an out-of-the-way chair to work out what had happened.
I was suddenly suspicious. “Was it the one you picked?” Morgan’s expression was non-committal, but his blue eyes glinted at mine. He was laughing. “You bastard! That’s not very nice.”
“Like Sam said, you have to make your own entertainment round here.”
I fixed him with a cold eye. “Listen to me, Morgan. Never do that again. I don’t care who else you take the piss out of, but lay off Greg. Is that understood?”
He stared at me for a moment. “Okay.”
I got up and helped the others move the furniture ready for the Scottish country dancing. Morgan didn’t stay for it. He sloped off alone to the flat in Bézier. Nina said, “Of course I can see you had to take him in, Tori, and naturally we’ll all do our bit to help him, but I can’t say he’s much of an addition to our community. I for one won’t be sorry when he goes.”
When I got back a couple of hours later feeling warm all over, relaxed and cheerful – country dancing always has this effect on me – he’d drawn the curtains. I slid open the patio door. Morgan said, “Hi,” and turned away again. He was lounging on the sofa in the glow of a lantern. Several empty beer bottles stood beside him on the floor. He did not look like a man who’d remembered to minister to the stove.
As I riddled, emptied the ash pan and added wood I said over my shoulder, “You should have stayed. It was fun. You missed the best part of the evening.” I adjusted the air intake and straightened up, brushing off my hands, ready for bed.
“Not necessarily.”
He stood, reached out and grasped my hand. His hand felt warm, dry and strong. My body overreacted to his touch after its year of celibacy; a shiver shot up my arm and fizzed through my blood like electricity. He drew me gently towards him, staring into my eyes, his other hand sliding across my shoulder and beneath my hair on the back of my neck, giving me goosebumps. He smiled a lazy smile at me that took years off him.
“Hey, Tori …” he murmured. His head bent towards mine.
A sudden unbearably vivid vision of David made me want to cry. I couldn’t speak, just shook my head.
He let go of me.
I went to bed.
Ice Diaries ~ Lexi Revellian
CHAPTER 8
Trails
I woke early the next morning to a pale grey sky and the sound of Morgan moving stealthily about. One way and another I didn’t want to talk to him. I lay doggo until I heard the patio door slide open and shut again, then leapt out of bed and flung on my clothes. Today I would follow him and discover what he was up to. No time for breakfast, so I put a tin of baked beans and a spoon in my pocket and gulped some water before leaving the flat.
There had been a blizzard overnight, the first snowfall for days. I’d woken in the small hours and heard the wind howling, sculpting the snowscape into new undulations. As I stepped outside, a stiff breeze, brilliant sun and icy air made my eyes water. I hitched my scarf over my nose and put on my dark glasses. Morgan had headed left, following the balconies round. I stayed well back. He glanced over his shoulder two or three times, and I shrank against the building. He didn’t see me. Then he turned to his right and set off across the snowy waste in a straight line south. For the best part of a mile in that direction not much is tall enough to show above the snow, then you come to a group of City high rise office buildings rising from a scurf of roofs, as monolithic a
nd functionless as Stonehenge, casting enormous shadows on the snow. Taller still, the Shard arrogantly spikes the sky, but that’s beyond the frozen Thames. Morgan was making a bee line for the Gherkin. If I went after, he’d see me in that wide open space when he checked behind him. Better to follow his tracks later. I wanted to surprise him.
I walked back home and made myself porridge and had a wash. I realized virtually nothing of Morgan’s was in the flat; not his backpack, no spare clothes, none of the things he’d scavenged – just a toothbrush and a few tee shirts and boxers. Half an hour later, I set off again toiling through the soft new snow which made the going hard, keeping far to the left of his trail. From where I was, the Gherkin peeks out from behind two taller rectangular buildings on the left; my approach would be hidden by the office block next door. I wanted to sneak as close as I could before coming out from cover.
The Gherkin is enormous. I hadn’t really appreciated the fact, having only ever seen it on the skyline back in normal times; you didn’t get a clear view from the streets. Since the snow, it stands like a monument to a lost civilization, but I’d never had occasion to go near. Close to, the diamond glass panes and criss-cross girders are massive, overwhelming, on a giant scale. Eat your heart out, Ozymandias.
I have a natural affinity for facts and figures, and they stick in my mind; I miss the ability to satisfy my curiosity on Google more than is rational. (I’ve brought encyclopaedias home, but it’s not the same.) I know that the Gherkin is 180 metres tall, so most of it – 160 metres – still sticks out of the snow. It made me feel puny and ant-like as I trudged nearer, abandoning thoughts of concealment as I followed Morgan’s footprints. One triangular window at snow level was not reflecting light like the others. As I got closer I saw the glass was missing. I stepped into the building and through another inner window, this time rectangular and floor-to-ceiling, but also glassless. A vast empty floorspace, a hushed secular cathedral, light because of its white floor and ceiling and the huge windows; the air surprisingly temperate; a faint smell I identified as petrol. To the right, a lobby with a steel staircase. Sunlight slanted in from the east. Occupying only a tiny part of this grandiose space was a modest pile of human clutter; a neat yellow generator, a few boxes of tins, toilet rolls, a compact tent and sleeping bag, a typist’s chair and several twenty-five litre water cans, the type from Argos we all use.
Ice Diaries Page 6