The binmen haven’t come yet today. She is conscious of the silence outside and the lack of a Saturday morning alarm, but the silence seems louder. Snow. Must be snow. The baby is sleeping soundly in his cradle beside her, contained in his sleeping bag that always makes her think of a crisp packet.
She nudges the girl, who is curled in a ball at the foot of the bed. Tells her to peep out of the curtains. It’s still dark but she can tell from the reflection there has been a thick fall overnight. The girl murmurs ‘snow’ and then goes back to sleep in her spot, like a small, not-quite-tame animal.
When she was a child, she loved snow, found it so exciting. She once wet herself, when she was far too old for accidents, because she was so desperate not to come in from a particularly good sledging hill. She told her friends that a dog must have peed in the yellow slush. They probably knew.
Today will be that bit harder though, that’s her first thought. The locals here can’t drive in the snow. She won’t take her car out in it. He is due home from his night shift any moment now but is probably mired on the motorway, staring at red lights and trying not to crash.
One of the cats starts mithering at her ear, purring urgently. She’d usually have been fed by now.
It is the second to last day of the year. She always calls it the fag end of the year, unsure why. She’s never smoked, not once in her life. It’s the sort of thing her dad or granny would have said when she was a child. She does this a lot, phrases like touchstones anchoring her to her past, where she’s really from. She doesn’t feel anchored to this place. They are not far from the city, really. Five houses surrounded by trees at the foot of a Marylin. But in a five minute drive they could be in the ‘village’, which really is a suburb with a high street. In half an hour, the city centre. The people here are kind in the way wealthy people can be. But they are guarded. Clothes are understated, people drive Volvos, they communicate with glances and the flaring of nostrils. The place the woman comes from is wild. There is the wind and the sea and little else. People here go on holiday there, but usually only once. Home for the woman is an empty beach, sea the grey of her eyes and unforgiving. Hard blue skies and air that catches the back of your throat like a razor. Seals eyeing you from the surf.
Here, there is no sea.
It’s the woman’s third month of maternity leave. The baby elbowed his way into their life, hers and the girl’s, arriving urgently and angrily on Halloween night. She can’t think directly about what happened, but she knows that if one more person says ‘at least he made it here safely’ she will scream. But what about me, she wants to say? Me, me, me. There is no me. Only us, the ‘dyad’, the woman at her breastfeeding group calls it. I already had a dyad, thanks very much, she wants to say. The girl and I were perfectly fine. We made bracelets and played with Sylvanians and went to Nandos where we pretended the broccoli was trees and frustrated the waiter with our refusal to give up the metal chicken from the table, the one they’re meant to take away to confirm they’ve checked on you, because the girl liked making it dance across the table while they ate. She can’t say that though, so she sips tea and allows a woman wearing yellow dungarees to check her latch.
She takes the opportunity of both children sleeping to have a hot, private shower, quietly gets dressed, then wakes the girl and tells her to get her ski suit on. We have to go out, she thinks. She puts the boy in the over-engineered sling, wrapped in a star shaped blanket and warm against her chest. Over it, she puts on her fur-lined coat. Her mum bought her this for Christmas. It has a section so she can wear the baby, both of them wrapped in fur and only his head peeping out of the top. It makes her feel like a wild animal, a monkey or a polar bear with a cub clinging to her.
They leave the house. She pulls the girl on the sledge, in search of the hill. There is snow, so it must be enjoyed. She isn’t sure who she’s doing this for but it has to be done. They walk too far for the girl, she sits down in a drift, tears forming in her eyes. Usually it would be her on her mum’s back, or better, both of them running, rather than this grim march. The woman is gentle, ‘hey, how about you build a snowman just now? There’s plenty of time to sledge.’ The girl nods seriously, gets to work. The sky is heavy and it will snow again today.
The woman watches her daughter’s creation form. Lots of sticks need to be found, to give it a spiky hairstyle like that photo from the seventies of the girl’s grandfather. She feels the boy stirring against her chest. Flakes of snow are catching as his eyelashes flutter. Then a sound, one she hasn’t heard him make before. The girl’s head jerks up. ‘Mum, the baby!’ She looks again, craning her neck to see him properly. One tiny hand is stretched out of the coat cocoon towards his sister. His toothless mouth is upturned at the sides and she realises he is watching and laughing. The girl trots over, takes her brother’s hand and laughs with him as the snow swirls.
Maybe, the woman thinks, this is all going to be alright.