Susie and the Snow-it-alls

by Dark, Gregory

  The still was chilly and it chilled her. It chilled the others too. And that it chilled them, that chilled Susie yet more.

  Her blood was just at that point which Susie imagined to be absolute zero when it yet again curdled.

  From the depth of a gazillion fathoms, echoed several hundred times in its ascent, came the hushed and scarcely breathed tones of “Help me!”

  Mimimi.

  She was alive.

  And then slowly, a mist melting in a limpid sun, the realisation crept in.

  Chapter 41

  Alive Mimimi may be. She was also unrescuable.

  Which meant her death would be a slow one and a painful one – soooo painful.

  “We can’t just let her die,” Susie said, daring a wisp of a whisper.

  “We have no option,” Nip replied in equal hush and vigour. It wasn’t noticed, but he lost another three ears of corn. “It’s hard, but there it is. Such are the penalties of pioneering. If we don’t go soon, we’ll be joining her. Listen.”

  It was true: The cliffs had stopped their mourning and had now started again to growl.

  “Sure, we can’t – we cannot – just let her die,” said O’Nestly.

  “Bluemerang must organise a search party.” Miss Chief squeezed a hoity-toity out of the most hisspery of whispers.

  “Seriously he must,” O’Nestly agreed.

  “Evidently,” said Nespa.

  “Where’s your man?” O’Nestly asked. “Where’s Bluemerang?”

  “Back went he,” whispered Corniun.

  “He’ll be devising a plan already,” said O’Nestly. “To be sure.”

  “Help me!” came again the fragile, breathless voice of Mimimi.

  “Help is at hand …,” Susie stage-shouted down to her.

  “Are you mad?” hisspered Mr Nip.

  “… We’ll be right there,” Susie continued.

  “Do you want to kill us all?” Mr Nip panicked. And indeed the creaks had again changed pitch, from growl to the kind of snarl that precedes attack.

  The Sufrogs looked around them nervously. Even Corniun looked around her, her sang-froid considerably more chaud than usual.

  A few patches fell from the sheets, splintering into fragments as they fell. A pebble or two bobbled their potentially painful way towards them. They found themselves protecting their heads.

  “I think I’ll just go and find him, your man,” said O’Nestly. “See what the old Australian has in mind.”

  “Tell him to think quickly,” Susie hisspered after him, as he slid and sludged his way past the Sufrogs and between Corniun’s now splayed legs.

  O’Nestly was a great appreciator of the intrepid – but at second-hand. He marvelled at those who swam with sharks or para-glided with handkerchiefs or jumped thirty Gibraltars on a unicycle. But that’s how he enjoyed intrepidness: vicariously. He felt no need to indulge in it himself.

  He was also a great believer that elegance was subordinate to safety. It worried him thus very little that, rather than swanning his way back, he ugly- – and clumsy- – -ducklinged it. His legs contorted, his arms assumed ridiculous positions, his bottom simultaneously protruded and waddled. He didn’t care. Just as long as he didn’t join Mimimi, he didn’t care at all.

  “I’m a fraud, a blueming fraud,” he heard before he even saw Bluemerang. “I’m afraid and a fraud. And afraid I am a fraud. And a-blueming-shamed of it, mate. So ashamed. I’m sorry. I’m so blueming sorry.” There was desolation in his face, and tears in his voice.

  “Now aren’t we all frauds, all of us, now and again?” O’Nestly asked him.

  “Not like me,” Bluemerang countered. “I’m the biggest blueming fraud blueming ever. Backwoodsman? Me?” He looked O’Nestly straight in the eyes. “I’ve never been anyblumeing-where, mate, where there hasn’t been a pavement, that’s the sort of backwoodsman I am.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “You know?”

  “Bragging is always the curse of the wannadoers. Those who have done, they let their deeds speak for themselves – or let their deeds stay quiet. But they stay quiet also for themselves.”

  “What are we going to blueming do, O’Nestly?” Bluemerang waisked, his anxious face pressed into wringing hands, far too absorbed by his own sense of inadequacy to be able to hear words designed to comfort. “If I try to lead a rescue party, I’d end up killing blueming everyone. Probably you included.”

  “There’s plan ‘b’,” said O’Nestly, who saw scant appeal in the option just presented.

  “What’s plan ‘b’?”

  “There’s always a plan ‘b’.”

  “I haven’t even got a plan blueming ‘a’,” Bluemerang despaired.

  “The perfect reason then for going straight to plan ‘b’.”

  “Please, please,” mewed Mimimi’s pathetic voice gurgling up at them from the depth of the chasm.

  “I’ve got to save her,” said Bluemerang.

  “We can only do, Bluemerang, what we can do.”

  “I have to blueming save her, O’Nestly,” Bluemerang repeated more stressfully.

  “Clear heads,” O’Nestly sought gently to contradict him. “It’s clear heads that are needed just now. I’ll lead the way.”

  “Where to?”

  “Back to the others, ‘course, where else? Devise a stratagem.”

  “Help me, please help me!” Again the plaintive cry warbled its sad way towards them.

  “Come on,” said O’Nestly and he started to slither his inelegant way back to the group.

  “Right be-blueming-hind you,” said Bluemerang.

  O’Nestly continued to claw and bottom his way round the hairpin and icy bend. Out of the corner of his anxious eyes he saw a flash of blue streak towards the precipice’s edge: Bluemerang.

  “Don’t …” O’Nestly started to shout. But it was too late.

  Chapter 42

  Bluemerang hurtled himself over the precipice’s edge. “Aaaaah!” he yelled as he started to frogalanche downwards. “Aaaaa-blueming-aaaaah!” O’Nestly was convinced he heard. Bluemerang’s “aah”, though, was quite different to Mimimi’s. Hers had been the “aah” of shock and alarm and pain; Bluemerang’s had been the “Geronimo” screamed by parachutists as they leap from the plane.

  “Oh no!” the Irish sponge said to an audience which was only himself. Having nowhere else to go, he continued to scrabble his way back to the group.

  Bluemerang meantime was “aah”-ing and bouldering his way down the ravine’s slithering edge. Behind him and around him crashed a similar slide of detritus to that which had escorted Mimimi.

  “What is going on?” Susie hisspered at O’Nestly, whilst above them the ice continued to snarl its threat to crash down on them.

  “Bluemerang’s gone to rescue Mimimi,” O’Nestly replied as if it were the most obvious and natural thing in the world.

  Susie was lost for words. “Oh?” she therefore said.

  “Alors, now,” suggested Nespa, “we have not one to rescue, but two. Magnifique!”

  “Nespa’s got a point, O’Nestly,” Susie started to say. Further words, though, were interrupted by a huge

  ROAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAR!

  The polo-bears.

  And at the bottom of the canyon. Roaring, yes, but roaring with a caution which showed they too had a respect for the ice packed hundreds of feet above them.

  “All we needed!” exasperated Nip. “I’m off,” he told Susie.

  “Where to?”

  “Warn Dremo you’re arriving. There’s no point, is there, making a speech to the Emos if there are no Emos there to hear it? I’ll be back to show you the way. The polo-bears can show you the way out of here.”

  “There’s never anyone there to hear our speeches,” boasted Miss Chief, smugly gazing around from the relatively safe confines of Susie’s pocket. With an almost theatrical gesture she wound the red scarf once more about her neck.

  Susie heard Miss Chief’s words. She and
Mr Nip exchanged a look which contained a whole conversation. “You’d better go,” Susie told him.

  Beneath them the mayhem was beginning to settle. The snow rearranged itself on fresh purchases, causing further small scuttles as weight was redistributed. They could hear the muted roars of the polo-bears, but the air was still too full of snow dust and ice fragments for them actually to be able to see them.

  When they did, it was as if they were lumbering up the side of the cliff. They seemed to solidify out of a kind of ether. Ox bore in his mighty paw the bruised figure of Mimimi, Cam that of Bluemerang. Bluemerang was bloody, certainly, and where he’d been bruised his blue skin had turned orange. But he wore a grin of such teeth-stretching enormity that this swathed his injuries into nothingness.

  There was about Mimimi also something different. It took Susie a few moments to figure out what that was: stillness. Not a physical, but an emotional stillness. It was a stillness which had previously been lacking. It is a stillness coveted by the selfish, one from which their very selfishness precludes them.

  As the two bears neared the ridge where Susie and her party were waiting, she made to rush towards them. She was restrained both by one of Corniun’s hind-legs, which suddenly extended like a car-park barrier, and by looks from the polo-bears which reminded her that extreme danger was still all around them – extremely all around them.

  As if to emphasise which, just a few feet from them, a great slab of ice crashed into a zillion pieces, and the packed ice above them howled in protest.

  The ridge was about a quarter the width it would have needed to have supported the polo-bears. Rather than trying to walk along it, therefore, the polo-bears used it as a handrail whilst they negotiated a path on the impossibly steep slope. Ox indicated to Susie that she should climb on his shoulders. She grabbed Nespa, slid her alongside Miss Chief in her bib pocket, and climbed on the bear’s shoulders. O’Nestly joined Mimimi in the king-sized bed of Cam’s huge paw.

  Corniun, as Corniun always did, fended for herself.

  With the polo-bears’ help, Beelzebub’s boiler-house sizzled steamlessly into a cherub’s wendy-house.

  Chapter 43

  The view when they left the chasmed cavern was mouth-watering. Snow undulated in a hundred different rolls and ripples. Beelzebub’s boiler-house had been savage and primeval – a tyrannosaurus of a spectacle. This, though, was an elephant. Large and serene, endowed with an ancient wisdom. A bit clod-hoppy, perhaps; perhaps a bit obvious. But strong and sure of itself.

  The sun beat down so strongly it almost bongo’d down. There was a certain rhythm to its shining, an undefined resonance echoing up from where sun struck snow. A snow which Susie had so often looked at and which she had never, before that moment, seen. A snow which she had incuriously imagined to be white. Now that she saw the snow, however, she saw that it was not white – not, anyway, only white. There were speckles, Susie now saw, of dark blue and light blue, of a bronzy yellow, and of an orangey-red. There were even flecks within it of black. And it was precisely that black which brought whiteness to the white.

  Such moments are moments where our humanness is most exposed and most absorbent. Angels whisper to us at such moments. An angel whispered to Susie at that moment that contradiction is not a part of life, but it is integral to life. Paradox, the angel whispered, is an essential of life, just as much as oxygen or food. We need black for white to be white, we need sickness for health … and for life, we need death.

  She gazed over the white expanse and allowed herself to wallow in the pleasure of beauty. Which is also – because paradox is essential – the pain of beauty. She was stunned by how alive this made her feel, by the way that all her zillion nerve-ends were aglow with a zillion separate sensations – an unbelievably subtle cocktail of as many ingredients as there had been snowflakes, culminating in the sensation of glory at being alive and being-aliveness, of living and of life.

  The going here was as hard as anywhere else where they had trudged, and yet Susie felt no hardness in the walk. It was a tiptoe through cotton-wool tulips.

  It was beautiful, and, as she allowed it to cascade over all of her, Susie trembled with the beauty of it all. She wanted to share this beauty with someone. She wanted to talk about it and exclaim about it. She realised again that her parents were not with her. And she realised that she missed them. That it was with them – precisely – that she wanted to share the experience of this beauty.

  Soon the summit of Mount Neverrest became visible above the roller-coaster horizon. Again Susie noticed the mountain’s black scar.

  It was at this point that the polo-bears considered their presence no longer required. Provided, so they told Susie, she kept making for the mountain, she would come to The Ughloos. There was simply nowhere else she could go.

  Susie was not aware of any angels whispering to her. Few of us are so aware. We therefore don’t realise it is for that reason that sometimes we feel invincible. Susie didn’t know either why it was she felt so. But invincible she did feel. If someone had told her … well, even to climb Mount Neverrest, she’d have been able to do it. It was thus not even fivetatively that she bade the polo-bears ‘au revoir’.

  These lumbered off, in their curious pigeon-toed lollop, singing their favourite song.

  ‘…

  We are the polo-bears,

  Fair-and-squarely polo-bears.’

  Susie and her friends continued to head for the mountain. They came again to a crest of snow. And this too revealed beyond it another lyrical and sumptuous view.

  More abstract ice sculptures, this time scattered with copses of firmament trees, veined again by rivulets streaming with an acid blue.

  Susie was riding Corniun. She turned around so that she was facing away from the view ahead, but sharing Corniun’s. The view looked back on was different to what it was, seen ahead. It too was heart-melting in its beauty.

  She had hold of the unicorn’s ears. She was about to whisper into them to look at the view, to enjoy it, to relish the view. Before Susie had said anything, however, Corniun said, “Agree I.” Susie was vaguely surprised, but let it pass. Corniun was also surprised. And there was nothing vague about Corniun’s surprise. It was big and it was tangible. Like Susie, though, she chose to hide it.

  “Isn’t it just beautiful?” Susie sighed, and threw her arms around the unicorn’s neck.

  “Beautiful,” Corniun agreed. She wasn’t referring only to the view.

  The Sufrogs sat facing Corniun’s tail. Susie, on the other hand, chose to face backwards so that she could talk to her new friend.

  She wanted to know Corniun a bit better. She sensed that, beneath the silky but sulky veneer, there was a warm and sensitive heart. No fire can constantly re-ignite if, each time it does so, it is doused with water. Hearts struggle to retain their warmth if they are thrown in the freezer. Earth’s grown-ups are sometimes so clever they forget things which are obvious.

  And Earth’s grown-ups, she confided to that new friend, were worrying her. Perhaps not all of them, certainly her mother. And Phil.

  “I know what Mr E said,” Susie told Corniun, “about Grammarcloud time being completely different to Earth time … I don’t mean to be rude or anything and it’s not that I’m doubting his word – not exactly – Mr E’s word, that is, but … it would just be nice to know that. For a fact, I mean. Not have to take someone else’s word for it.”

  Corniun suggested they try an experiment. She told Susie to grab hold of her ears, and then close her eyes. She, Corniun, would then use her x-ray eyes to home in on Susie’s home. Maybe, just maybe, they had enough extra-sensory compatibility flowing between the two of them for Susie to be able to receive the images that would be surging through Corniun’s eyes.

  Susie got excited by the idea. She said, “Why on earth not?” a few times, as if to still some nagging ghost or other, but, in short order, did indeed grab the unicorn’s ears and then closed her eyes.

  To begin with, sh
e had to concentrate hard on not getting sick. Corniun’s eyes raked great swooshes as she cut through the surrounding mountains and out into the space beyond. Thence to the outline of Britain, and from there – at giddying speed – to the North, to the nearby town, the surrounding forest, her house, her front door, the hall … her kitchen.

  Where her mother and Phil were indeed still watching television. Still indeed the same programme. Strain as she might, Susie could not see the clock. But she also knew she had no real need to. It was obvious that Mr E had been telling the truth; that, for however many aeons had passed on Grammarcloud, on Earth only seconds had elapsed.

  Any thoughts she may have had about dawdling over the picture were, however, rudely shattered by a familiar voice telling them, “Look sharp. The Emos are waiting.”

  Susie opened her eyes rather too quickly, and a Milky Way of stars hurtled through them. This was followed by a bout of giddiness, which had her clutching onto Corniun’s mane in order to stop herself falling off. She closed her eyes again, and this time opened them with a demureness more comely to a tender maiden of tender years.

  “Susie,” said Dremo, who had come round to the back/front of the unicorn. “Nice to see you again.” There was a certain stiffness to his address that Susie thought was probably the unfamiliarity of seeing her outside a dungeon.

  She was still blinking away the curd of the Milky Way. She decided to emulate his tone. “And you,” she said starchly.

  “To be honest, I didn’t expect to.”

  “I gave my word,” Susie said, trying to mask her embarrassment with self-righteous indignation.

  “Words aren’t what they used to be,” Dremo smiled at her sadly.

  “Come on, Miss Chief,” Nip encouraged her. “No shillyshalleying. The Emos are waiting.”

  He and Dremo stomped almost militarily off, using the same footprints they’d made on their outward bound journey, back in the direction of The Ughloos.