He looks out of the caravan window. Filthy night. The hour is late; freezing cold bed sheets make sleep impossible. A relentless, suffocating winter and the weight of the snow draws the world down around him.
Three sugars, he thinks.
He strikes a match and lights the little gas stove to make his cup of tea. No dinner tonight, so he’ll have three sugars. Three sugars and, go on, a little milk. At least this time of year it doesn’t go off so quickly.
He whistles an old Christmas carol, one he remembers from long ago.
Lully, lullah, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
When Jade gets here, she’ll have something to say about the sugar. Nothing she loves more than to tell her old Dad off.
Trying to give yourself diabetes?
The memory of her voice echoes in his head. He wills the water to start boiling, muttering through his tobacco-yellow moustache. Yes, he needs something warm to sort him out. Surely a nice cup of tea will make it right, will stop him brooding about the past. It doesn’t do to dwell. Not in his situation. Not at his time of life. He stares at the water in the rusty old pan, does not take his eyes off it. That way he doesn’t have think.
Stay out of my head, he tells the thoughts. Keep it in the soil. In the darkness.
Three sugars, he mutters to himself. Three sugars and two eyes closed.
In winter, things change.
Common objects become painful to touch. The low winter sun blinds. Snow chokes husks of summer buddleia, turning purple flowers to desiccated brown. Frost wraps the world in a thick white jacket, drawing tighter and tighter with each day that passes. It is the white of oblivion. Everything is static and yet somehow thin.
Things go missing. Like his old padlock. The caravan door hangs on one rusty hinge, patched up with some old plywood he found at the tip.
Closer to the city, he’d heard of caravans being raided or set on fire just for a laugh. Those kids don’t come out here though. Not to the place where the snow is blackened with factory soot. Too easy to get lost, or taken. Out here, the cracks in the tarmac form unnatural angles. He has seen creatures devoured by them. This isn’t a place for small things. Bunches of memorial flowers are tied to eternally unlit lampposts. Everywhere he sees reminders of death.
He wraps his arms around himself, stringy muscles ache in the cold. He’s thin, morbidly so, but still tall, still broad shouldered. He’d been a decent boxer in his day and the outline of his former figure is still present under his ratty old puffer jacket, patched up, time and time again with electric tape.
Well, say what you like about his jacket, but a good cup of tea will fix him.
A slight adjustment of the pan on the stove causes tiny bubbles to form, he watches as they quaver ever so slowly to the surface.
He thinks about the flat, wonders if the new people living there had swapped out the old prepaid meter for the gas, the one he never could remember to top up. Or that’s what he told Jade anything. She tried to help him. Wrote out all kinds of instructions. Did his shopping list every week. Phoned him on the last day of the month to remind him to go to the post office to collect his pension.
Don’t want my old Dad to freeze, do I?
The pain of her absence is worse than any hunger or cold he has suffered. It lances him, upward through the belly and snatches his breath. She is Leo in the Tenth House, born under Andromeda. All passion and warmth, as bright as a field of marigolds.
And she was a smart one. Yes, he’d admit that. But there were things she didn’t know.
The kitchen cupboard, for example, which housed the gas meter he was supposed to keep topped up. That cupboard was off limits to him. Inside he had heard things scuttling around in the darkness. He’d tried to confront them, told them what Jade had said about the meter.
Don’t want me to freeze, do you?
But they never listened. They looked right through the door and straight at him.
That’s when he realised they knew his name.
There are horrors coming. There are horrors coming that three sugars can’t prevent, maybe not even four.
In winter, the strangest things are born.
Creatures with swollen heads push through the soil, deformed children born of cinders and smoke. A terrible and aberrant fire as white as phosphorus. Jade had said that it was all in his head, his silly superstitions, like he couldn’t discern fact from fiction. It was the drink, she said, and the rest. And yes, ok Jade, you’re right. Those things do amplify it all. Pills and booze make him feel strange, violent. The doctor told him too, that he’d got to pack it all in. But take them away and he would still be cursed. You can’t just abstain from a curse.
He is the spectre’s head. The star in the gorgon’s eye. The curved sword of Perseus pressing against his neck.
The little stove has seen better days. He knows the feeling. Just last week it had packed up, gas canisters were empty. He tried to refill it with a half can of lighter fluid he found out by the car stacks, but his hands seize up in the cold and it took him best part of an hour. Now every time he fires it up, his head goes all woozy and the astringent scent fills his nostrils. Tonight, it’s worse somehow, he feels weak and breathless, like he’s just stepped out of a too-hot bath. A bath though, that wouldn’t be half-bad. He craves the sensation of muscles relaxing, the heat moving throughout his body and before he knows it, his mind is floating away to some other place where he is suspended in the quiet solitude of nothingness.
When Jade was a baby, just a red thing with the hospital tag still around her tiny wrist, she would never open her eyes when he held her. She was always bawling, face screwed up like a used napkin. It wasn’t until he’d learned the song, her song, that she stopped crying. He’d sing it over and over again until her screams turned into whimpers and then finally, blissful silence.
These poor younglings for whom we sing,
Bye bye, lully, lullay
It was only then that she looked at him, really looked at him, that he realised her eyes were not eyes at all, but tiny suns. Where had she got those from? Not him.
Person of interest, that’s what they’d called him.
The indigo flame of the gas stove flickers. Time is moving so slowly. He worries a festering scab on his arm that never seems to heal. Surely she won’t be long now? It’s getting late. She didn’t mention anything about wanting to stay the night. Where would she sleep anyway, if she did? He couldn’t let his Jade stay in this shit heap. Shame surges through him.
He takes a tea bag out of his tin and drops it into the chipped mug. Shouldn’t he be making two cups? He can’t remember now if Jade even drinks tea.
Just stop thinking.
He rubs his temples, a weak slow pulse under his blueblack fingers.
Keep her in the soil.
In winter, things stay hidden.
He’d seen a thing on the TV once, about how the corpses of men, those who had lived thousands of years ago, had emerged through the melting ice in the mountains. Without this great thawing, they might have stayed buried forever. The sun had revealed the secrets of the past. What if they wanted to stay buried in the ice? Perhaps it was safer there. The sun was unforgiving; its wretched light exposed everything.
Will his body be found when the days lengthen? For he is sure he will not be here to see the hydra shining bright in the low April skies. Nor the bindweed that blooms so prettily, though it knows not that the ground it grows is shallow and cracked.
Three sugars, he thinks. Maybe these will be my last.
December 10th, 199X
Everywhere maudlin decorations of silver and gold were strung without consideration for the fact there was nothing to celebrate. He was half-cut, swigging from a bottle of whiskey. A drunk office worker, stumbling home from the office Christmas party, had thrust it into his hands on his way out of the corner shop. He’d only gone in to buy a paper.
BRING HER HOME FOR CHRISTMAS, the headline read in bold font. There was a full-page photograph of the missing woman. Lightning crackled in his brain. She was smiling, no, more than that, she was laughing, straw blonde hair falling over her face. It was like he could hear it. Peals of breathless giggling. Bile rose into his mouth. He carefully cut the photo out with a pair of nail scissors and taped it to the wall. The longer he looked at the photo, the more convinced he was.
He couldn’t explain it, but she both was and wasn’t Jade.
He both was and wasn’t himself. And now they knew his name.
In winter, Orion the hunter dominates the darkness and the line from Alnilam to Mintaka to Alnitak can be drawn.
How he ran. Took nothing. Moved from city to city, rat-like and invisible in the stink of derelict vagrant camps, past slag heaps and cooling towers into the silent darkness of the junkyard. There he could be forgotten, like some discarded refrigerator that had been left to rust. But in the torturous landscape of one’s own mind, who can ever be free? No human should have to bear that punishment. Even the briefest glimpse of the winter sun is enough to blind.
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
A shrill ring pierces the silence and makes him jump. He’d fallen asleep, just briefly. Surely it couldn’t be Jade, calling to tell him she was going to be late? He roots through piles of old newspapers and Tesco grocery bags peppered with dried mouse shit. The ringing of the telephone is insistent. Breath after breath, each more ragged than the last. Finally, he extracts the chunky receiver out of his detritus, pulls his woollen cap up and presses the cold plastic to his ear.
In winter, people die.
It is the natural order of things. The temperature plummets; it sifts out the healthy from the weak.
When did he get a telephone anyway? He knows that the can trace calls, even out here. He shouldn’t have picked up the receiver. Bloody idiot. He only answered because he thought it might be Jade, calling to tell him that she would be late. That she was held up, that the guy who was covering her shift hadn’t showed and she’d had to stay late. Not to worry, she was on her way now.
Nearly forgot your Christmas present didn’t I?
Jade would know not to call, though. She’s a smart one, that Jade.
But who else would be calling him? On this very night, when he is going to see Jade for the first time in years.
A crackling on the line like logs on the fire. Faintly he hears the sound of a young woman screaming. She begs for mercy, for her life.
He drops the receiver. His knees buckle.
In winter, the night never leaves.
Darkness embeds itself into every furrow. Only the light of summer can banish it. The water on the hob has burned dry; the little rusty pan pops and fizzes. A flurry of cinders falls around him, like black snowflakes.
A curse cannot be broken.
He cries for mercy into the dead silence of the winter night. And as he submits, as he climbs into her mouth of flames, he is at last warm.
