The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  So many people buried down there. I thought of Minnie’s beautiful little hands, the way they had been when she was a baby. I remembered the first time I had tried to cut her nails, when she was very small indeed. Her nails had grown so sharp, and she was scratching herself in the face, marking her eyelids with little red ticks, when she rubbed her eyes. So I had taken the nail-clippers and grasped her left hand in my big adult fingers, her little baby hand with its chubby dimpled palm and its tiny golf-tee fingers. Of course she had wriggled and squirmed, and I had tried to slip the blade of the nail-clipper under the little pale fingernail of her forefinger whilst she jerked the hand and tried to wrench it free. It was hard to see what I was doing, and the blade seemed too clumsy, too thick, to go under the nail, and she wriggled some more, and finally I pressed the handles together to cut the nail and Minnie piped a little cry of pain. I had cut the delicate skin at the end of her finger. A tiny bead of blood, red like claret, swelled on the finger. She cried and cried. It was terrible. I felt a huge sense of horror swell inside me. I suppose it was only a little thing, but I felt so terrible about it. She cried, and I hugged her and hugged her and told her how sorry I was. She stopped crying eventually, of course. I did eventually learn how to cut her nails: first by biting them with my own teeth, and later by quelling my fears and acting decisively and holding her hand firmly so that it was still.

  After the hospital bomb there was a palpable increase in the amount of hurrying about the military were involved in. More helicopters in the sky, flying low or buzzing away to the horizon and vanishing over it. Where did they go to? I asked Crow. Where did those ’copters fly off to, away over the horizon?

  ‘Reconnaissance,’ he said, gruffly. ‘I’m not supposed to talk about it.’

  What was over the horizon?

  It was a foolish task to try and persuade Crow to talk if he had been ordered not to talk. But I persevered. ‘Does that mean that we’re under attack from outside?’

  ‘Tira,’ he said, weary. ‘I’m really not supposed to talk about it.’

  The new bomb, and the many casualties, stoked up the gossip again, and rekindled the outrage and Liberty-patriotism. [Blank], the red-haired woman who sat on the service committee with me, had an almost boasting tone. ‘My husband knows a guy,’ she said, ‘whose wife was killed in the blast. They’re best buddies, and his wife was in hospital with frostbite in her feet, and she was killed.’

  How terrible! I said. How terrible!

  ‘I hurried over there as soon as I heard the blast,’ said [Blank], an eager middle-aged man of small stature also on the committee. ‘I ran straight down there!’ He was so happy to have been one of the first on the scene. I remember this guy, I suppose, because he died in one of the subsequent attacks; a man in his forties, I’d guess, his face whittled by hunger to a desperate thinness, but with this large, aquiline, harp-shaped nose. I remember his eyebrows, complex tangles of brown and grey hairs. Why would I have such a precise memory of this dead man’s eyebrows, I wonder? He wasn’t a friend. I can barely remember his name. ‘I ran straight down there and the fire was still burning through the windows. There was this great balloon-shaped cloud of black smoke rising over the building.’

  People shook their heads, cooed ‘terrible’; but their eyes were bright and alive. I was the same. I made the same social noises, shook my heads and mimicked outrage like everybody else. But I thought to myself: black clouds over the city. The first black clouds for many years. But they presaged no rain, except possibly a rain of shards of glass. I was not moved, that’s the truth of it. I think, in fact, if I look back on the occasion, that – in my own head – I set great store by my not being moved. I accepted that it was probably a result of the antidepressant chemicals marinating my brain, but that wasn’t important. What was important to me then, I think, was that my detachment gave me a sense of myself as a superior person, somebody immune to the disagreeable hiccoughs and bumps of everyday life. Smooth, like a plastinated body, with the quick-hurtling flakes of glass just bouncing off my skin. That’s how I liked to think of myself, at any rate.

  Ten

  For several days after this last bomb there was a sense of hiatus in the city. I doubt that Liberty had quite digested what happened. Then troops arrived from NNY: a troop-plane arrived, with military reinforcements, twenty or so new men. Truth announced that troop barges had started their hovering passage from the cluster of Confederacy of Free People cities in the east over-States. I had never seen one of these devices, but had heard of them. Some people, with nostalgic turn of phrase, called them ice schooners: but this gives the wrong impression. Sled-based devices, wind-powered or otherwise, proved inefficient means of travel over the rasping, cracked surface that day and night, wind and chill had made of the snow. The barges were developed from hovercraft technology, I think: old barges with flattened bottoms. Two small jets mounted at the front shoulders, as it were, of the craft blew air hard underneath providing a tiny cushion of air, and also provided a forward momentum. Once the craft had been put in motion (shoved by trucks down an specially smoothed ice path) they plunged forward with increasing momentum, riding over smaller cracks and ripples in the surface of the snow. ‘Three hundred of the best troops in the confederated cities of free peoples,’ said the radio’s comfortable voice, ‘are on their way to help Liberty combat this terrible menace.’

  ‘Why,’ I said, almost absently, ‘don’t they just say NUSA? Confederated cities of free peoples. For crying out loud.’

  I was at home with Crow when I said this. We were listening to the radio together in the front room, and I was making fists and pushing them slowly into my stomach to try and distract my guts from their hunger-gripes.

  ‘I guess you’re right,’ said Crow. His instinct for following the rules didn’t extend so far as to endorse the official mouthful-of-marbles name for our nation. ‘Everybody says noose-ah,’ he conceded. ‘I don’t see what’s wrong with it.’

  ‘I guess somebody up there thinks that New USA makes it sound like the old USA is dead and gone.’ I was going to add which of course it is, but held myself back, because that was the sort of comment that would send Crow into a bad mood. ‘When you’re IP,’ I said, trying to sound more chirpy, ‘you can dispense with that whole confederated cities nonsense.’

  Crow grunted. He didn’t like talking about his possible political future.

  The first new troops arrived in a conventional plane, and unloaded at the airstrip outside the city at sevenville. People huddled all along the pavements to watch them march in.

  Later that same day I saw [Blank] again; so he obviously hadn’t been arrested, for all his bravura talk of terrorism. It wasn’t, of course, smart to associate with him, especially at that time. But I just bumped into him, I could not avoid him. ‘Tira!’ he called out, from the doorway alcove of a boarded-up shop. ‘Tira!’

  I stopped, and talked with him.

  There was a fury, a controlled fury, in his manner. His arms and legs moved with an almost marionettish jerkiness. His carotid arteries stood visibly proud of the neck. His face had become a glaring mask, eyes opened a little too widely, lips parted just a sliver to show the closed teeth inside. He kept twitching his head round, to look up and down the street, constantly on the alert for pursuers. ‘You look like you’ve been electrocuted,’ I told him, which wasn’t quite accurate, but which expressed something of his charged, powered aura.

  ‘We used to have a Bill of Rights,’ he said, and I realised that we weren’t to begin with niceties, or even with accusations (‘those bombs were your doing!’ and so on), that we could take those as read. [Blank] was launching directly into the ideological discussion, the justificatory dialectic. Perhaps he had been rehearsing my lines, or the lines that would be spoken by an accuser like me, in his head, and felt that he had disposed of them. I, I’m afraid, was not so quick.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘The old USA, Bill of Rights,’ he said, twitching his legs in
a funny little shuffling stomp in front of me, like a condemned man pacing his cell. ‘But the New United States, as we’re not even supposed to call it – nothing, no rights, no citizens’ rights. Do you wonder why we’re supposed to talk about confederation of freedom and all that [expletive deleted]? Because they want to forget that there ever was an old USA, with its old constitution and its old Bill of Rights.’

  ‘Hey,’ I said, with the palm of my left hand up. ‘You picked the wrong woman with whom to have a constitutional discussion.’ I remember, particularly, that I used that over-precise locution; with whom to have. I don’t know why. Odd mannerisms of speech pop out at stressed moments. [Blank] didn’t notice. He wasn’t paying attention to what I said.

  ‘Freedom of speech,’ he said, snarly-sarcastic. ‘That used to be a right. Yeah? You going to tell me we still got that right? No you’re not.’

  ‘These are,’ I said, awkward that I be seen to be defending the government, but feeling that somebody had to bring his paranoia a little back to earth, ‘these are unusual times. There are – just maybe, is all I’m saying – more important things than freedom of speech at a time like this?’

  He glowered at me. ‘The Truth, the newspaper. That’s some sick joke, that name. You know the editor?’

  ‘I’m just saying,’ I said, ‘that maybe the freedom-of-speech thing would go over better if we weren’t all a month away from starving to death …’

  ‘[Blank],’ he said, naming the editor of Truth. ‘Same surname as [Blank], our Senator-Mayor. Yeah? Same surname, because he’s his brother. The assistant editor is [Blank], different surname but same family, cousin. News editor? [Blank]. Sister-in-law. This is free press?’

  ‘Look,’ I said, but he cut me off.

  ‘You know what [Blank] said? You know what he said in his Senatorial-Mayoral-[expletive deleted]-dictatorial capacity? He said he was in favour of a relatively controlled press. A relatively controlled press! He meant a controlled press run by his relatives.’

  I’d heard this joke before. It was an old joke. For some reason it annoyed me to hear it from [Blank], it ired me up.

  ‘This does not persuade me,’ I said to him fiercely, ‘that you’re justified in killing people – in bombing the hospital, for Christ’s sake. The hospital? I mean, I guess I can see the greenhouses, though you killed five there, ordinary people not government high-fliers, not assistant editors on Truth. But OK, you bomb the greenhouses, you make your point. Don’t agree with you, but I can understand it. But the hospital?’

  [Blank] growled, looked away. ‘We didn’t hit the hospitals,’ he said.

  I didn’t think I’d heard him right. ‘What?’

  ‘I said we didn’t hit the hospitals. We’re not monsters, for crying out loud.’

  ‘You bombed the greenhouses,’ I said. ‘That’s not under question. You bombed the repair yard. You don’t deny that. But the hospitals. The hospitals you didn’t do.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Somebody else did the hospitals?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re insane. You can’t pick and choose which atrocities you want attached to your name.’

  ‘We can,’ he cried, ‘if we didn’t [expletive deleted] do it.’

  There was a silence. I thought I could smell cordite, gunpowder, just the faintest whiff of it, and looked past [Blank] at the street, wondering if there was a bomb. But then I realised that it must be coming from [Blank] himself. That he must have picked up the odour in proximity to one of the bombs.

  ‘You’re insane,’ I said, again.

  He pulled off his glove and rubbed his eyes. Suddenly his whole body language underwent some subtle slump, as if the power had run out of limbs and spine. ‘It don’t really matter whether you believe me or not,’ he said, slipping his hand back in its glove. ‘It happens to be the truth, that’s all. Why would I lie about it? Why would I lie about it?’

  ‘You’re insane,’ I repeated.

  ‘Terror is a means to an end,’ he said, ‘not an end in itself. Bombing the hospital puts our cause back, it doesn’t advance it. It hurts us, it doesn’t help us.’

  ‘The greenhouse, the repair shop, they didn’t hurt you?’

  ‘We know what we’re doing,’ he said, fiercely. ‘We didn’t do the hospital. That would be counterproductive, you understand? So somebody else did it, not us. Somebody else. Who might that be? Who might have the motive to do something that would damage our cause?’

  I shook my head slowly. ‘Listen,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’ he pressed. He wanted me to say it. ‘Who?’

  ‘Listen, believe me, you hurt your cause with the first bomb. Bombs aren’t the way to do it.’

  ‘Who?’ he asked again, desperately insistent. ‘Who would have that motive?’ And then, because I evidently wasn’t going to play his game, he answered his own question. ‘The government, that’s who – that’s who bombed the hospital.’

  I let out what I intended to be a dismissive ‘hah!’ but it came out under greater pressure than I anticipated, more of a howl, or a shriek. Momentarily [Blank] looked genuinely startled.

  ‘You really really need,’ I said, insistent now myself, ‘to step back from yourself, to listen to yourself. You kill all these people with bombs, and now you’re saying that it was actually the government who planted the bombs?’

  ‘Just the hospital,’ he said, loudly. ‘We didn’t do the hospital, that’s all I’m saying. Why would we bomb a hospital?’

  ‘Why would you bomb a greenhouse?’ I demanded.

  He spluttered, made scoffing noises, and then was quiet. After a pause he spoke to me in a subdued voice. ‘I had hoped you could understand it a little more, Tira. I had hoped that.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said, because my blood was up, ‘that you’re insane. That’s what I understand.’

  In an instant he was no longer haranguing me, and instead was clinging to my arms like a needy child. His voice changed from ranty and insistent to whiny and tearful. ‘You got to help me Tira, you got to help me, they’re after me, I haven’t slept in days, in days, you can help me, you got to help me.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, in disgust.

  ‘They’re after me,’ he said. ‘I don’t – like to think what they’ll do to me if they get me in a small room. Feelings are running high, at the moment.’

  ‘You didn’t think of that before you planned the bombs?’

  His eyes were as perfectly circular as Polo Mints. ‘I didn’t see how much slippage there would be in the cadre,’ he said. ‘People can be so untrustworthy – [Blank] has already vanished. I think he’s gone to the government, he’s probably telling them everything, probably he’s put the MPs on to where I live. So much for loyalty to the cause, that [expletive deleted] miserable traitor. So much for loyalty!’

  ‘You sure he’s gone to the police?’

  ‘He’s disappeared,’ said [Blank].

  ‘Unless,’ I said sourly, ‘he died in the hospital blast.’

  For one pathetic, terrible moment I saw the flickers of hope pass over [Blank]’s face: hope, I suppose, that his coconspirator, colleague and friend was dead so that he himself would not have to face police interrogation. But this morbid hope faded as soon as it came. ‘Why would he go to the hospital? He wasn’t sick. He was strong as an ox.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, impatient, ‘maybe he went to plant a bomb?’ As I said this I momently forgot that the hospital had been destroyed by a mortar rather than a bomb, despite the fact that the news reports had been very precise about that. [Blank] clearly forgot it too, because he replied with a doggy eagerness.

  ‘And blew himself up by mistake? Yeah, that would explain why we haven’t heard from him. But, no,’ he added, his face falling, ‘that can’t be right. The hospital was hit by a mortar, that’s what the news said. Oh Tira,’ he pleaded again with a sobbing catch in his throat, ‘you got to help me.’

  ‘I don’t see what I can do,’ I said, striving for forma
lity, and unfastening his mittens from my arms.

  ‘Talk to your husband – tell him I’ve got names, if he’ll grant me anonymity. I’ll tell them everything if they get me a deal.’

  ‘What about loyalty to the cause?’

  ‘Come on, Tira, don’t—’

  ‘Don’t?’

  ‘Just don’t, OK? Come on.’

  ‘It’d do no good, talking to my husband,’ I said. ‘For one thing, he’s only an army officer. He’s got no official political standing …’

  ‘Don’t give me that!’ [Blank] shrieked. ‘People talk about him as a future candidate for IP, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘For another thing,’ I went on, keeping my voice steady, ‘he’s not too level-headed about the bombings. He’d shoot you himself, I reckon. For a third, I’m not in a position to sway him on this sort of thing. You should know, better than any, that we’re not what you’d strictly call man-and-wife.’

  [Blank] was actually crying now, little mucusy tears coming out of the corner of his eyes. ‘Jesus, Tira, don’t you want to help me? Isn’t there any tenderness in your heart for me? Didn’t we have something? Didn’t I once mean something to you?’

  I looked at him. ‘Ish,’ I said.

  ‘Ish?’ he replied, with a sucking noise in his throat. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean yes and no,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you also mean something to [Blank]? Why don’t you go whinge at her.’

  ‘[Blank]?’ he repeated, his eyes glinting and drooping down, guilty-afraid. ‘What – what about her? I barely know her.’

  ‘You’re pathetic,’ I said. ‘You [expletive deleted] her. You did, didn’t you?’

  ‘Tira, listen to me, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick.’

  I said: ‘I’m going.’

  I didn’t move, but he turned away from me, hiding his face by shuffling up against the wall. ‘Go,’ he said, forlornly. ‘Go on. Go.’