The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore

by Paul Burman

  “Turn!” she sings, and so I stretch my neck up to the lowest of skies and, on numb feet and across rough ground, begin spinning too.

  Round and round and round.

  I fall to earth first and she follows suit.

  Shimmering.

  Like a child I’m laughing fit to burst, but I’m panting like a middle-aged fart. “Out of condition,” I pant.

  “Me too.” And her voice is different, and her hair’s a shade coarser; less lustrous. She’s different. Something’s changed. She pushes a strand of hair behind one ear, and I see she’s turned into an older Kate – a woman close to my age.

  “Kate. You’re you again.”

  She places a hand against her face to feel her skin, wraps her arms around herself, then begins to stand, but stumbles, and I reach out to steady her.

  “I’ve always been me. This is who I am. But I’m not just Kate.”

  “What do you mean? You keep saying that.”

  “Why are you here, Tom?”

  “I told you. We just talked –”

  “Why are you really here? Now and like this? How did you get here? Do you know how to find your way back?”

  The freezing dampness in the air slides down the neck of my coat, wheedles its way into my socks and licks my ankles, the backs of my legs.

  “Can’t you remember? Where are you going to, Tom? Where are you heading?”

  The trees are leafless and, but for a pinching iciness, the air is momentarily scentless.

  How did I get here?

  This is the place I once camped with Elin, with the spinney I gathered firewood from just fifty metres away; on a day of shadows, stones, trees and earth. At the edge of the spinney I notice a large Norway spruce – Picea abies – which must be about fourteen-years-old. I grew that tree from seed, raised it on the windowsill of our flat in Great Shentonbury, and must have travelled back here one day to plant it, as I told Elin I would.

  “I…”

  She puts a finger to my lips and says: “Ssh.”

  The steely grey of the sky has given way to thicker snow clouds banking up, but through a gap in the clouds there’s a full moon rising – a small, brilliant moon, brighter than any bauble – and we hobble down towards the wood.

  “You’re limping,” I say. “What’s the matter? Are you alright?”

  “You’re limping too,” she points out, but rasps each word.

  “I can’t feel my toes.”

  Her fingers are slips of ice, and she’s sickly pallid in the fading light. Her lips have lost their colour and fullness – less like olives and more like pits – and her eyes are sunken and dull; even her hair hangs limp and dry. “You’re not well,” I say.

  “It’s almost time,” is her reply, but her voice is a husk. “Time to let go. Little is ever entirely lost.”

  “What’s the matter?” I begin, but she winces and I stop.

  She shakes her head and her chin is almost on her chest.

  Twilight is collapsing and evening begins pulling a shroud tighter around us. I figure the trees might offer some protection from the wind that’s picking up. Sanctuary.

  “Please,” she mumbles.

  And though I place an arm round her shoulders, she grows lighter, frailer, more gaunt, more ashen, with each clumsy step, until it’s easier to carry her than prop her. By the time we reach the edge of the spinney, her cheeks are hollow and resemble the gargoyle cragginess of Old Lofty.

  “What’s happening to you? Why?”

  “Don’t,” she rasps. “Don’t be afraid. There’s nothing… to be afraid… It’s nothing. I need to lie… down.”

  “What’s nothing?”

  Dragging a breath, she says: “It’s what… I came for… and…” The sentence peters out, so she gulps another breath. “It’s what… you’re here… for…’

  “No. It’s too soon. I’ve only just found you again. It’s too soon.”

  The moon disappears behind thick cloud and all trace of the twilight that was with us a minute ago vanishes. So absolutely has it fallen dark, it could be any hour of night. Long night. The longest. I’m sitting with my back against the spruce and Kate’s lying against me, her head in my lap, except she’s almost completely a gargoyle now, and I don’t recoil.

  “Remember… what we… said.” And she begins coughing. Each cough rises from her lungs and shakes her entire body; dry, rattling coughs that sound like bark being torn from trees. Her skin has the coarseness of dry leaves. She gasps then. “Don’t… it’s nothing… really.”

  “It’s too soon,” I cry. “Please don’t.”

  She mutters something I can’t make out, and manages to smile, but the smile freezes and the light disappears from her eyes to leave a deeper darkness.

  This is why night is the colour of death.

  If I keep her warm, maybe she’ll revive, so I cradle her in my arms. But her coldness seeps into me: brittle crystals of ice.

  Letting her head loll on my knees, I reach wide to scoop armfuls of leaf litter and fallen pine needles until I’ve created half a nest for her to lie in, but it isn’t enough. Shuffling backwards, I ease her head off my knees and draw in more leaf litter until I’ve fashioned a soft pillow for her, and then begin crawling round in the dirt, heaping forward whatever I can find, until the nest is complete and I’ve tucked in her legs and feet.

  I lie with her then, whispering her name, but the bitter crystals grow. I touch her lips with my fingers, let them lie there, but there’s no tremor and no warmth.

  “Kate, Kate. Come back, Kate. Wake up. Don’t go.”

  She’s still too cold. It isn’t enough. Struggling to stand, I begin stripping thin branches of smooth-barked rowan to blanket her with, start layering young branches of spruce into a thick coverlet, until only her face is visible.

  At the very least I might believe she looks peaceful, as if she’s sleeping, but she doesn’t; she looks withered. Her eyes are sunken beneath dark, knotted shadows; her cracked and pinched lips reveal a mouth of broken flint.

  Raising my arms to the canopy of branches above and beyond to the night sky and the universe and infinity and the vast permanence of death, my shout should shatter the fucking lot, and bring it crashing down like breaking glass to become ashes and dust on this miserable patch of dirt.

  “NO!”

  But nothing moves and nothing will move, even when I stumble in circles, so I slam a fist into the trunk of a tree – oak or rowan, spruce, birch, beech, chestnut, ash, hazel or almond – and then the other into another. Falling to the ground, I crawl snivelling to Kate. There’s bark and blood in the air, pain bursting out my knuckles.

  Face-to-face; she’s lying on her bier in front of me.

  There are seeds of death in all of us, as well as seeds of life. Have I never realised this before?

  To begin, the moaning grows from gusts of wind working the boughs of trees, backwards and forwards, to and fro, until I realise it’s me – draining from the pit of my aching guts. Even so, the winter wind joins in, cutting down from Grennard Hill, nosing at the edge of the spinney to start with, but soon slicing between the trees and splitting the air in half. Branches sway, creak, complain, and an icy rain sweeps down on the heels of the wind and begins its stabbing. I’m howling and sleeting, and the night is blacker than ever before, and the knives of ice multiply into a torrential onslaught.

  If I could become the night, I’d rewind each of these last moments until we were meeting on the track – or further back – and nothing need ever change again. Backwards, backwards, to keep everything the way it was and always should be. But I’m frozen small and shrivelling to the seed of who I once was, and every icy dart I pluck from my eyes to hurl across the landscape drains the me-that-was-I smaller and smaller, even though the I-that’s-become-me rages and howls bigger and bigger.

  Rage and howl.

  My eyes spit ice daggers, and when I open my mouth to swallow the night with a roar, flurries of snowflakes bellow out. Some fal
l on her face and my fingers brush them clear while every other part of me storms. Blizzards of snow, stones of hail, knives of ice…

  For hour-upon-hour, if time exists; age-upon-age. A thousand years, or the blink of an eye. From rock to sand; from earth to rock. Time to learn how mountains are born, how beaches sift into shape, and how it all begins again. Turn, turn.

  Until… until something in me pauses, or ends, and sees the gathering drifts and hollows and ledges of snow are lightening the dark, stealing its edge, softening the wounds. Beyond Grennard Hill, the motorways and pylons and housing estates and shopping malls will all be smothered in a sea of snow. And the dampness in the concrete and bitumen will freeze and expand and prise apart, and someday weeds will be harboured there to root and grow and prise some more. These things are clear.

  But my eyes, nose, mouth, throat and ears are burnt raw from spewing this storm, and my icicle fingers are bone-numb and colder than claws. There’s nothing left to vent, nothing left to give, except nothingness. There may be seeds of death and life in all of us, but I’m sapped to a husk and all choice is gone.

  On my knees with the body of Kate, it should be easy to collapse forward and embrace her one last time, except my knees are locked and something rough in my pocket presses through my shirt and pierces my numbness: the corn dolly. Kneeling back, with fingers too frozen raw to manage buttons, and my coat too caked in snow to grip, I fumble and wedge my fist between the overlapping fabric until a button snaps off. My fingers won’t straighten, but I manage to hook them through the loop of the figure eight and drag the thing out.

  “Two rings,” my lips begin, except they’re bark-dry and split.

  Cupping it against my chest with one hand, the torn knuckles of my other clear a circle of snow and leaf litter and try scooping out the frozen topsoil until there’s a shallow bowl of sorts to welcome back the plaited dolly. However, before interring it, and though my hands no longer fully belong to me, a sharp, scalloped edge of stone buried in the dirt slices a loose flap of skin off one knuckle.

  Here’s the polished glint of chiselled flint waiting to be noticed and picked up. Here’s a Neolithic point that I’d turn in the palm of my hand, if I could. And, if I could, I’d draw its sharp edge across the fleshy heel of my thumb and let the blood drip like pæony petals between Kate’s lips until she breathed again, if only my blood wasn’t frozen.

  Scraping deeper to dig the flint free, I force a claw beneath to prise it out, but it crumbles like old bone.

  There are two more in a tin on a shelf…

  Gazza and I broke into the building site on a dead dull Sunday afternoon… but I can’t go there now. It’s too late

  Gazza might have said: “When you die your whole life flashes before your eyes. In the time it takes for your brain to shut down, you’ve relived everything.” It might have been Gazza, or it might have been Kate or Daniel or Elin, but there’s nothing more to give, no strength left to grieve. There’s nothing – absolutely nothing – beyond the simple recognition of who I really am.

  Death becomes me.

  *

  My lips are shredded paper-bark, glued together with dried blood; my eyes are swollen and sealed with the grit of soil and dried tears and torn wafers of old leaf, and someone is dabbing them, licking at them with a warm, moist tongue.

  Something’s happened to the me-that-was-I. If only I could remember who I was.

  “Can you hear me, Tom?” the voice says, like a shell against my ear. “I have to believe you can.”

  I try opening my eyes against a blinding light, which is beyond all brightness and which creases them shut again.

  “Wake up, my love,” she says. “Try and wake up. When you’re ready. We’re waiting for you.” The voice is not fully Kate’s and not fully Elin’s; it belongs to neither of them and to both of them.

  “Who are you?” I say, squinting at the woman looking down at me. “Are you Kate or are you Elin?”

  She smiles and the day is a fraction warmer for a moment. There’s a faint smell of ozone and the crash of surf. Enough to wake me further.

  “Elin,” I say.

  And she plucks a polished olive from her mouth and rubs my lips with the moist warmth of it.

  “Kate,” I say.

  She smiles.

  “Or both?”

  She smiles. She’s leaning with her back against an oak tree, with my head in her lap; the softness of leaf litter is my bed. I know it’s an oak tree because a twig with a couple of last year’s acorns is caught in her hair. Or it could be a eucalypt with a twig of gum nuts. Or a spruce laden with young cones.

  “What can I call you?”

  She smiles. Her eyes are hazel. They are the burnt umber of Kate’s, blended with the blue of Elin’s, to become somehow hazel. Her hair is that reddish auburn which lies between the chestnut brown of Kate’s and the corn blonde of Elin. Her features have something in common with both, although neither shares the slightest resemblance.

  “Katelin,” I say. “Of course. Why didn’t I realise?”

  Katelin says: “Sometimes the simplest truths are the hardest to recognise.”

  I remember the storm and, attempting to sit up, find that every sinew, muscle, bone and organ in my body aches beyond all aching. As she puts her arms behind my back and eases me upright, I feel the air sink out my lungs, then hear the crackle and wheeze as they half-fill again. I’m wrecked.

  “Shit. That hurts,” I say.

  “Ssh, it’ll be okay. We’re with you now.”

  “I thought I’d lost you.”

  She shakes her head. “I’ll always be here.”

  We’re at the edge of the spinney by Grennard Hill, and the sun is a brighter disc at the back of a frosted sky and the earth a barren down. It’s a landscape of watery greys and bleached browns.

  She is naked and her skin is streaked with soil and the juices of berries and the verdigris smear of crushed grass. I am naked and withered.

  “So cold,” I say, but the coldness is in me, more than around me. My mouth is ulcerated, my skin is sore.

  “Don’t give up,” the voice says, sounding momentarily like my mother. “I’ve always loved you, you know.”

  The snow has vanished, and I ask: “How long?”

  “It doesn’t matter how long. When you’re ready.”

  There are two conversations happening here, and they almost meet.

  “This isn’t real, is it? Is any of this real?”

  “We thought we’d lost you.”

  Katelin reaches into her hair and unsnags the twig. Her hair straggles loose and leaves drop out. An insect falls onto her shoulder, walks along the valley formed by the prominence of her collarbone, and then flies free. She smells of peat and earth, rain and sunshine; she smells of moss and wood. Tugging at the twig, she snaps off the two nuts and, holding one to my mouth, says, “Suck on this. It’ll keep you warm.”

  Up close, it’s neither acorn nor gum-nut nor cone, and is like no fruit or seed I’ve seen before. It has whorls like a shell, but as she turns it in her hand there’s no beginning and no end to the whorl.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s alright.” And she pops it inside my mouth, then places the other inside her own.

  The effect is immediate. A warmth diffuses through my body, but it’s more than warmth. It’s a delicious energy streaming through my veins, pushing away the cold and the hurt, and makes me feel as though I’m growing an extra layer… which, when I drag my arms up, I see I am.

  From my knuckles and the tips of my fingers, where the warmth is strongest to begin, nodules grow; firm, bud-like calluses, each with a faint whorl of their own. With a prickle of heat, they rise to the surface of my entire body, and with their rising I need to rise too.

  “That’s it,” Katelin says, helping me to my feet and drawing me a few shuffled paces forward. “From head to toe. You’ll feel better now.”

  We’re standing facing one another and I hold my hands up to
see what’s happening. Each node has grown into a green bud, and each bud begins to unfurl, presenting the tips of two tender leaves. I would tremble with the warmth of it and the energy driving through my veins, but she holds me by the shoulders and I’m rooted to the spot.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she says, and is all smile.

  “I’m not. This is…” But there’s no word to describe it. Beautiful, magnificent, glorious, miraculous, orgasmic – no word could do justice.

  “Life?” she suggests.

  “Yes,” but it’s bigger than that.

  “Green?” she suggests, and is laughing now. “Leafy?”

  I nod.

  The sun has brightened and reclaimed its ocean of sky. Asea of grass is rising and a wave of vegetation laps at our feet. An almond tree flowers and leaves unfurl and fruit buds swell; rowans and oaks, hawthorn, chestnuts, beeches, birches, spruce and ash follow suit. Honeysuckle climbs and mistletoe fruits and masses of pæonies flower – out of all season. And as each leaf unfurls, I hear a frenzy of leafy whispers, and behind the whispers are words that might be greetings or might be the retelling of old stories that I’d have understood from years back if only I’d known how to listen.

  Looking past Katelin at the mass of foliage in the spinney, I notice what might be the outline of a face, and when I look harder I see a number of faces. I can’t be sure, but one looks like the memory of my father, and one has an expression that reminds me of Gazza, and maybe Jo’s there too, and even Brian, and everything’s okay and everything’s falling into place now.

  “But why aren’t you…?” I begin to ask Katelin, until two leaves sprout from each side of my mouth, from my nostrils and my ears and the corners of my eyes. It’s no worse than growing whiskers for a beard, with each pair of leaves followed by a slender tendril, and each tender stem budding into more leaves.

  Katelin steps closer to me then; face-to-face. She pushes her arms carefully through my foliage to embrace me, noses through the leaves until her nose is touching mine, her tongue stroking my lips, the softness of her breasts and the tickle of her berry-nipples against my chest, and her toes resting on mine.