The Snow Angel

by Lulu Taylor

Emily stared at her, wondering if she could ever tell Diana the truth. Will was her adored only son, unable to do wrong in her eyes. She just wouldn’t believe me, that’s all there is to it. And besides, she’s all Will has now.

  But there was still the matter of whatever lay in those envelopes in the hall.

  Two days later, they were still unopened. Tom had put them all by her plate at breakfast, and she’d opened the cards – around two dozen of them, some from people she’d not thought of in years – and put them up around the kitchen, even though she had no interest in looking at them. She even opened all the junk mail almost as reverently as the cards, reading all the offers of credit cards and broadband deals, leafing slowly through the catalogues as though she really were considering buying a heritage-style kilt, fake flowers or the latest cashmere collections. The rest – the official-looking ones – stayed unopened on the table. They moved to the windowsill and sat there ignored, each postal delivery bringing a few more to add to the pile.

  When Polly came round, her eagle eyes spotted them at once. ‘That’s a lot of post,’ she said, holding her struggling toddler on her lap and trying to wrestle a biscuit off her. ‘No, darling, you’ve had enough, you really have. Give it to me.’

  Ruby squealed and screwed up her eyes with the effort of holding on to her prize. Joe was heavy on Emily’s lap, lying back against her, his head on her arm and his feet resting on her cast. He wanted to be close to her all the time, was constantly climbing on her or begging to be held. Then he would nuzzle in to her the way he had when he was a newborn, and stay still, as though he was drawing something vital from her closeness. Polly’s baby lay asleep in the pram in the hall.

  ‘Yes, it is a lot,’ Emily said, stroking a hand over Joe’s soft head. She longed to tell Polly what had happened but she was afraid to. As soon as she voiced the truth, things would start to happen in earnest. She’d be made to face the situation. Someone would make her find out what was going on and then her world – the one she felt she was sustaining by the force of her imagination alone – would start to implode. As it was, she knew she was living on borrowed time. She’d had to order a supermarket shop online and as she’d pressed ‘Pay now’, she’d felt almost like vomiting with fear at the thought that her payment card might be rejected. But after a couple of sickening seconds, the message had flashed up that her order had been confirmed. The relief had been almost overwhelming.

  Polly eyed the envelopes again. ‘I suppose it’s been building up the whole time you’ve been in hospital.’

  Emily nodded. ‘Weeks’ worth. I’ve got to start working through it. I’m not sure I can face it.’

  Ruby yelled again, and Polly gave up her struggle for the biscuit. ‘All right, have it then. You’ll only wake Bert if you scream like that. Off you go.’ She released her writhing child onto the floor and leaned in towards Emily. ‘Is everything okay, Em? I mean, with Will in hospital and not working. What about his job? What’s happening?’

  ‘They’ve been very understanding,’ Emily lied. She felt like a lowlife. How can I lie to her? She’s been nothing but a friend to me. They’d been close ever since they’d met in the local antenatal classes when they’d been pregnant with their first babies. Polly cares, I know that. She’d only want to help me. And yet the truth stubbornly refused to come out. It would show everyone what a sham it had all been. They would know things Emily could hardly bear to acknowledge to herself, even now. ‘They’ve said they’ll keep his job for him until we know more.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Polly smiled but she still looked concerned. ‘But his wage . . . I mean, are they paying him?’

  ‘The first three months,’ Emily said, wondering how the lies came so smoothly. ‘But after that, I’m not sure. I think Will has some kind of insurance in case he gets ill. I’ll have to look it out. But there’s no need to worry.’

  Polly looked reassured. ‘Will strikes me as the kind of guy who’s been very careful. He’s probably saved a lot too.’

  Emily nodded. It was easy to talk about this Will – the Will everybody else knew. The decent family man. The prudent investor. The perfect husband. ‘Oh yes. He’s a cautious type. We’re going to be perfectly all right.’

  ‘And there’s the money your parents left you,’ Polly reminded her. ‘You’ve kept that, haven’t you?’

  ‘I was going to use it for school fees,’ Emily said vaguely, remembering that once, in a different life, she’d had hopes and expectations that had now utterly vanished. ‘If Will couldn’t cover it. I suppose I might need the money for something else now.’

  ‘Well, it’s terrific that it’s there for you,’ Polly said comfortingly. ‘We never know what life is going to throw at us, do we? Thank goodness your parents were able to leave something.’

  Emily stared at the floor, noticing how the lines between the floorboards were melting and bending in her vision. She felt very calm, as though everything she’d said to Polly was true, and her legacy was still sitting there in the bank, a little pile of security.

  ‘If you needed help, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?’ Polly asked earnestly.

  ‘Of course. But we’re going to be fine.’ She smiled. ‘More coffee?’

  But on the windowsill, the pile of letters seemed to emit a hum of malevolence: Open us, open us, open us . . .

  She woke, almost choking, from another nightmare. They plagued her sleep, not letting her get more than a few undisturbed hours at a time. Now that she was home, they seemed worse than ever. Perhaps it was not helped by her fear of returning to the hospital tomorrow and whatever news was waiting for her there.

  In this dream, she’d been in the intensive care room where Will was lying comatose, with only the hiss of the ventilator and the beeps of the machines making any sound. She’d gone over to his bed, feeling herself pulled towards him despite her revulsion. Standing next to him, she’d stared down at his inert body and his closed eyes, wondering what was going on inside his head and whether he could hear or sense her, when suddenly his eyes had flicked open and his hand had reached up lightning fast to grasp her round the throat and start to choke her. She’d fought desperately to make him release his grip but it was like an iron vice, squeezing her breath out, killing her, separating her forever from the children . . .

  ‘Oh Christ,’ she said out loud, panting and recovering herself. It never got easier, no matter that she was beginning to realise inside her dream that she was dreaming. It didn’t make the experience less vivid. She turned over to get back to sleep and realised that she could hear a noise coming from downstairs. After listening for a moment, she manoeuvred herself out of bed, grabbing her crutches, and went down the stairs as quietly as she could, the carpet muffling her steps. In the hall, she wondered if Tom was watching television, then realised that the sound was coming from the kitchen. She went cautiously down the corridor, her stomach fluttering with nerves but nothing like the desperate terror she felt in her dreams.

  Perhaps, in a strange way, I’m getting braver.

  She went to where the kitchen door stood ajar, and looked through. Tom was at the kitchen table with his back to her, sitting in front of his open laptop in the darkness, the room lit only by the glow from the screen. He was watching some kind of film – for a moment she wondered if it might be pornography but the images were not of people – with the volume turned down low. In a saucer to the side sat a burning roll-up cigarette, the smoke curling prettily in the light from the computer. There was a strong aroma of cannabis.

  ‘Tom?’

  He jumped violently and turned round. ‘Oh! Em, hi. Sorry, I thought you were asleep.’ He turned back hurriedly to his screen and froze the images, then picked up the roll-up and squashed it out on the plate. He looked back, sheepish. ‘Sorry. I know I shouldn’t smoke inside. I was going to go out into the garden but it’s raining. I thought the smell would be gone by morning.’

  She went in, limping over the wooden floor, and sat down in the chair nearest to h
im. ‘What is it?’

  He shrugged. ‘Just a joint.’

  ‘I didn’t know you still smoked this stuff.’ She looked at the bent dead roll-up in the saucer. Tom had been a big cannabis smoker in his twenties but he’d become clean-living since then, turning vegetarian and hardly touching alcohol. She’d imagined that smoking joints had gone the same way, but clearly not.

  ‘Occasionally,’ he said. He stared at the ceiling and blinked hard. ‘When I’m stressed, I guess.’

  ‘Are you stressed now?’

  ‘Of course. Your accident. All of this. I’m worried about you. This helps me calm down.’

  She looked at him, feeling suddenly selfish. She hadn’t really thought of much beyond her own world for so long now, she’d almost forgotten that life went on as normal for other people. She’d taken everything Tom had to offer without really thinking about him. ‘How are you? How’s work?’

  He smiled at her. ‘Stressful. When isn’t it?’

  ‘Deadlines?’

  ‘Of course. I’ve got to finish a commission for that company in Shoreditch, and I’m trying to win a pitch for the autumn. I need to get the preliminary designs sent over so that they can decide if they want to invite me to apply for the final stages.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here looking after us,’ she said, worried. She remembered that Tom had been working for a small company too, using their space for his own work as well as theirs. ‘You should be working in the studio. Doesn’t Shelley mind that you’re not there?’

  Tom picked up the dead joint and started shredding it into the saucer, releasing more of its pungent aroma. ‘I’ll get it done, don’t worry. When I’m sure you’re all right, I’ll be able to get to the studio and get some work under my belt. Shelley knows what’s happened, she doesn’t mind a bit of a delay. And I also need to relax’ – he indicated the scattered weed in the saucer – ‘and this helps.’

  ‘Does it?’ She looked at it suspiciously. She’d always felt that the relaxing nature of drugs was mythical. Those claims were deceptive: they were stimulants or depressants masquerading as something else and rarely designed to create states of true calm.

  ‘Yes.’ Tom sounded defensive. ‘It helps me. Look, I won’t smoke here, okay? I shouldn’t have done, it was stupid.’

  Emily bit her lip. Maybe he was right, and he did find smoking calming. I don’t want to act like some kind of sanctimonious older sister. ‘Okay. You can smoke outside, I suppose . . .’

  ‘No, don’t worry. I won’t.’

  She looked over to the frozen image on the screen, seeing buildings and fuzzy objects in the sky above them. As Tom noticed where she was gazing, he closed the page with a quick movement.

  ‘What were you watching?’ she asked, interested.

  ‘Just YouTube. A documentary.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ He looked vague. ‘About what’s really going on in the world. You know.’

  ‘No.’ She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  He paused as though wondering what to reveal, blinking fast in the way he did when considering things. ‘Well . . .’ He laughed lightly. ‘Just stuff. The kind of things you’ll laugh at. You won’t believe it, that’s all.’

  ‘Believe what?’ She smiled, glad to hear him laugh. ‘Try me. Go on.’

  He fixed her with his blue stare. ‘That the world is under attack.’

  She laughed uncertainly. ‘Under attack?’

  ‘Yeah. From within.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean . . . there are powerful and dangerous forces at work in the world, ones that want to control us all and prevent us from having access to the great knowledge there is out there, the knowledge that will transform mankind and save us.’

  She stared back at him, wondering if he was joking or playing a part, pretending to be paranoid. ‘What are you talking about? What kind of forces?’

  He shrugged. ‘The people at the top of governments. Cabals of the industrialists, arms dealers, oil tycoons, media barons – everyone with a vested interested in keeping us all in a state of unknowing stupidity, addicting us to material things and stupid gossip to keep us all in our place. While they destroy the planet in the pursuit of power and money.’ She was startled at the strength of his tone. She’d never heard him express ideas like this before. Perhaps it was the cannabis talking. How much of it had he smoked?

  ‘Oh. Right.’ She sounded uncertain, she could hear it in her voice. ‘You mean . . . like . . . the American government?’

  ‘The entire capitalist right-wing world power,’ he retorted, then seemed to catch himself up. He sighed. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘I’ve been really worried about you, Em. For a long time. From the time you married Will, if I’m completely honest.’ He looked over at her with sudden intensity. ‘This accident has brought it all to the surface, hasn’t it? Now your life has changed course so radically.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ Emily said. She didn’t want to talk about the accident. ‘You’re my little brother. I should be worried about you.’

  Tom smiled wryly. ‘We worry about each other, right? After all, right now, we’re all we’ve got. We’d better stick together.’

  Emily nodded, glad that his smile seemed to restore him to the Tom she knew and loved, the straightforward one with his design work, his devotion to martial arts and his love of country music. She wasn’t sure if she could cope with anything more complicated at the moment.

  But it isn’t that simple. It never is.

  Limping through the sliding glass doors into the hospital, Emily felt instantly sick and panicked. Every step she took inside this place brought her closer to Will, and that knowledge conjured up the powerful feelings she had been experiencing in her nightmares: panic, fear and dread.

  Once I loved him. The thought floated into her mind, bringing with it the same mild surprise that came when she remembered a band she’d once revered, or a fashion she’d yearned to wear. The woman who’d loved Will, longed to hear him walk through the door in the evening, pressed up against his warm body at night, leaned in for kisses and desired him to make love to her, was gone – that Emily was another creature from a different life. Now whenever she thought of him, she was possessed by the instincts of an animal in danger: alert, with adrenalin surging through her, teeth bared, ready to fight.

  He’s my deadly enemy now.

  Diana was waiting for her just inside, sitting on one of the orange plastic chairs in the lobby, looking as though she was on her way to a smart luncheon party in a silk pleated skirt, navy jacket, strings of pearls, and patent court shoes. A neat handbag in navy crocodile leather hung over one arm.

  This will be part of her way of coping, Emily thought. Keeping up her appearances, as though she’s the kind of person that nasty things like this simply don’t happen to.

  Diana got up when she saw Emily and waved to attract her attention, as though she wasn’t immediately noticeable among the tracksuits and dressing gowns around her. ‘Hello! Emily! Over here!’

  ‘Hi, Diana.’ When she got close enough, she leaned in to kiss her mother-in-law’s cheek, inhaling the powdery rose scent of her skin. ‘Have you been here long?’

  ‘I just arrived. Shall we go straight up? It’s nearly time for the meeting.’

  The lift, broad and long enough to contain hospital beds, took them up to the sixth floor and the Gerratt wing. ‘I’m going to sit with him for a while afterwards,’ Diana said as the lift ascended. ‘Will you join me?’

  Emily imagined sitting by Will’s bed, sick and shaking, prepared to strike if he moved a muscle, while his mother sat placidly beside her, not noticing anything was wrong, her attention focused on the one person who was entirely oblivious of her. ‘No, I need to get back home. The children hated me coming out as it is.’

  Diana fixed her with an earnest look. ‘Have you thought about bringing the children here? Don’t you think
they ought to see their father?’

  Emily pulled in a sharp breath, filled with horror at the thought of bringing Carrie and Joe anywhere near this place or the man lying upstairs, who’d been happy to orphan them. ‘No,’ she said sharply.

  Diana blinked in mild surprise at the strength of her retort. ‘But it might help him. It might help bring Will back if he can hear their voices.’

  ‘We don’t know what he can hear,’ Emily replied, trying to sound calmer. ‘And I think it would be terrible for the children to see their father in that state. They’ll never believe he can get better – it would be traumatic to see him unable to wake up or speak.’

  Diana sighed. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she said sadly. ‘But wouldn’t it be worth it, if it brings him back?’

  Emily was prevented from having to answer by the lift doors opening and the two of them having to squeeze out past the people on their way to other floors. Diana led the way, knowing the route to the unit very well, and they reported to the reception desk. After a short spell in the busy waiting area, where televisions were showing a daytime home improvement show, they were called to the consultant’s rooms.

  Mr Theodoropulous was sitting behind his desk, casual in rolled shirtsleeves and open collar. He got up as the women came in and emerged to shake their hands, before returning to his seat and picking up a black fountain pen. He began to doodle on a pad, looking up at them only occasionally, as though he was shy of meeting their gaze. Emily wondered if this was a habit he had when delivering bad news, or if he did it all the time.

  He gave them a fast preamble, recapping what they already knew: Will’s severe traumatic brain injury; the miracle that he was alive at all; the preliminary scans and imaging that were determining the extent of the damage he’d suffered.

  ‘The brain, you see,’ Mr Theodoropulous said, ‘is extremely fragile, which is why it’s encased in the very hard structure of our skull. We can injure it in a variety of ways: the most common is non-traumatic, usually through infection, stroke or chemical overdose. Most comas are brought on by drug overdose of some sort. But the other way we can hurt it is by trauma – a violent blow to the head. And that’s of course what Will suffered in the car accident. He took a big impact that’s caused a lot of injury through bruising and internal haemorrhage. As you know, we had to operate at once to release the pressure on his brain and drain off the fluid, and we made the decision to keep him in an artificial coma while we assessed what the damage is. Often the secondary injury, which takes place after the actual impact, can cause more damage than the first. So the impact might not be terrible, but the fluid released into the brain, for example, can start the real problems. We still don’t understand exactly how or why this happens – it’s a complex process of biochemical cascades that can cause ischaemia, cerebral hypoxia, cerebral oedema or intracranial pressure . . .’ He had begun to talk more rapidly, as if finding a kind of retreat in the medical terms falling from his lips.