A Snow Garden and Other Stories

  The baby is due in six weeks. Magda is not supposed to fly, not at this stage, but the tickets were cheap last-minute ones so they kept quiet about her pregnancy. There are legal documents that Johanna needs to sign, relating to the sale of her mother’s house in Bucharest. She is walking fast, past the rows of shops. It’s hard to keep her mind focussed when there are so many people and so many things to buy. She wants to know what is happening to Magda and whether it’s normal, but she has no idea who to ask. She isn’t even sure she has the right words. ‘Watch where you’re going!’ someone shouts. She looks to her left and realizes it’s Father Christmas.

  Six of them, actually. They are drinking cans of Coke outside Duty-Free.

  ‘Have you seen any kids?’ asks another of the Father Christmases.

  ‘Kids?’ repeats Johanna.

  ‘We’re looking for kids. We’re the entertainment. We’ve been laid on by the airport authority. Until things get sorted in this place.’

  One of the Father Christmases has lost his white beard, or maybe he has chosen not to wear it. His skin is dark and soft and he looks all of eighteen.

  Johanna points in the direction of the seats. ‘Lots of children there,’ she says.

  The Father Christmases give her a thumbs-up and swagger away, ringing sleigh bells and shouting, ‘HO, HO, HO!’ They sound more like a bunch of hungry football fans than bringers of gifts and good tidings. Briefly she wonders about the father of Magda’s baby. It’s a painful question and it still hurts like a spike every time it sneaks up on her.

  Let’s face it, he could be anyone. Magda was already pregnant when she and Johanna first met. The father of her baby could be anywhere. He could be right here at the airport, for all Johanna knows. ‘What do you mean, you don’t remember?’ she had asked, over and over. Sometimes the question seemed to ask itself. All Magda remembered was that she’d been at a party. She’d been given a drink. That was all. When she came round she was in a garden, she didn’t even know whose, and she was half-dressed with a punched-up eye.

  For a while Johanna had felt betrayed. Eaten up with jealousy. She knew she had no reason to feel either of these things – the two women hadn’t even known each other when Magda had gone to the party – but it was the thought of someone else, a man, fetching her a drink, leading her to the door, kissing her mouth. (‘You must remember something, Magda!’ ‘I don’t. I don’t.’) If only Magda would show some anger, but she never did. ‘You don’t have to have this baby,’ Johanna had told her. It wasn’t the sixties. What happened was rape. ‘And you know,’ she’d shouted, hurting with the memory of other children she had known, half-starved, beaten up regularly, some of them, ‘it’s wrong to have a baby you don’t want.’

  And Magda had looked back at her with soft grey eyes and said, ‘But I do, Jo. I want this baby with you.’ Johanna had asked Magda to marry her. She knew, even then, that she would never love anyone else.

  Johanna feels a pang of sickness, then realizes it’s hunger. She should buy Magda a drink and some food. Maybe that’s the problem; they haven’t eaten since last night. Johanna had assumed they’d be in the air by now. She heads towards Duty-Free.

  ‘No,’ the assistant tells her, ‘you can’t buy just one bar of chocolate. You can only purchase dis special Christmas bumper pack.’ It is about the length and thickness of Johanna’s arm. Johanna buys bottled water and the chocolate. It’s cripplingly expensive; normally they would spend the same amount on a week’s groceries.

  ‘Do you want da fluffy toy?’ asks the assistant. She seems to be dressed as an angel with a tinsel halo and she has such a bad cold she has lost the use of her nose.

  ‘What fluffy toy?’

  ‘Da penguins are all sold out,’ says the assistant. ‘We’ve only got lambs left. You get da fluffy toy free with da chocolate. It’s a bargain.’

  ‘Could I leave the fluffy toy and pay not so much money for the chocolate?’

  The assistant scowls as if Johanna has just done something offensive, like breaking into her native tongue. A woman behind her, who is dressed from head to toe in brand-new snow gear, gives an impatient huff. It is only once she has paid that it occurs to Johanna that half an hour has passed since she left Magda. What has she been doing talking to Father Christmases and staring at duty-free items? It’s this place. It robs everything of its context. All she wants is to be with Magda. It’s so strong, her desire to care for her, her need, her love, it’s almost violent.

  As Johanna pushes her way through the crowds back to Magda with the drink and the chocolate and the fluffy toy under her arm, she passes a band of girls in blue sweatshirts singing Christmas songs, along with a small frightened young lad in a turban. A group of onlookers has assembled to watch. Several people are dancing, including one of the Father Christmases and some more shop assistants dressed as angels.

  ‘Aww, cute!’ shout some of the singing girls on spotting Johanna.

  She assumes they’re referring to her lamb.

  ‘We will have to put out a plea for help,’ says Mrs Pike, chewing two Nicorettes, one at each side of her mouth. She’s forgotten the name of the girl with green hair again. She squints at her identity tag.

  ‘Hester,’ says the girl.

  ‘I want you to ring the local radio station, Hester. Ask if anyone is looking to adopt a pet for Christmas.’

  ‘There is another problem,’ says Hester, twisting her hair. ‘The donkey.’

  ‘What about the donkey?’

  ‘We are going to have to move her. She keeps trying to kick the cage with the cheetahs. It’s upsetting them.’

  ‘And where exactly are we going to put the donkey?’

  ‘Maybe we could take her for a walk?’ says Hester. ‘It’s not as if there are any planes taking off. Besides, it’s getting awfully smelly out there.’

  ‘You are suggesting we walk the donkey through the airport?’

  Hester shrugs, as if to say she’s seen worse. ‘There’s going to be a public-information announcement soon,’ she adds. ‘About what’s going on.’

  ‘Do you mean in the world generally,’ asks Mrs Pike, ‘or just inside my head?’

  When the public-information announcement comes it is not very informative and not very public. It can only be heard in the duty-free shop and the women’s toilets at the back of the departure lounge. It is also delivered by a woman who sounds as if she has clipped her nose with a peg and placed some sort of splint between her teeth.

  ‘Due to un-chore-cheen chirchirmshtanches—’

  Then she conks out.

  ‘What did she say?’ asks Mrs King.

  And everyone around her in the duty-free shop repeats, ‘What? What? What?’

  Her daughters shrug. They are forty-two and forty-three respectively, both freshly single, and they are worse than teenagers. At least with teenagers, you know that spots and hormones and sulking are not permanent; but when they start all that at forty the outlook is less rosy. Why did Mrs King think it was a good idea to go on holiday with her daughters? She had been planning to get away from it all, the stress, the Christmas hoo-ha. Since the death of her husband a year ago, she has been finding it hard to do the simplest things. Every day she feels his absence, and as the seasons turn she says to herself, ‘A year ago it was his birthday … A year ago it was our wedding anniversary … A year ago we went on holiday.’ With the passing of each week, she feels a little more pulled away from her husband, a little more alone. Two of her oldest friends have died in the last few months; sometimes she feels she is looking out over a field that is becoming thinner and thinner as she stands there. So she’d said to both Christina and Tracey on the phone, ‘This year I want to get out of the country on Christmas Day.’ She’d always had a thing about the Northern Lights, she’d told her daughters; in reality she was planning to close the front door and turn off the lights and sleep on and off until January. Only, would you believe it, her daughters must have picked up the phone to one another and discover
ed they, too, had a thing about the Northern Lights – a real thing, not a made-up one – and would be available to join her. She even had to pay for their tickets.

  ‘Maybe we should go home,’ says Mrs King. ‘Maybe we should cut our losses.’

  Christina glances up from her book. It is some sort of complicated guide to astrology. Her face is grim. And Tracey – who has bought herself an entire new snow outfit and is overheating by the second – says something she fails to hear. Mrs King is about to ask Tracey to repeat herself, but thinks better of it. Besides, she has other things to distract her. Fifteen buxom teenage girls in blue sweatshirts have just rushed into Duty-Free, followed by an exhausted-looking woman and a boy with a turban.

  ‘Lambs!’ croon the girls. ‘Aww! Look at the ickle fluffy lambs! Miss! Miss! Can I get one, Miss?’

  Johanna scans the waiting area but she can’t find Magda anywhere. There is so much to see it is hard to keep remembering that all she is searching for is a plain young woman in a grey hoodie. The Father Christmases have found a group of children and are performing some sort of juggling act. A makeshift tent has been set up, offering hot drinks and (cold) toasted sandwiches for breakfast. You can barely move without treading on a sleeping body. Johanna tries to remember exactly where she left Magda, she tries to spot the man and woman in their linen travel suits, but she can’t see anything she recognizes. She rings Magda’s mobile phone. No answer.

  She doesn’t know whether to run, to walk, where to look. She has no idea how to do anything. She searches the women’s toilets, the café, she scans the rows of seating, but there is no sign of Magda.

  A boy begins to cry. ‘I want my Buzz Lightyear outfit. I want it now!’

  Johanna hears the boy’s parents shouting and telling him he has to wait until Christmas, and then she hears the boy crying that it is Christmas, and his parents’ confusing reply that yes, it is Christmas, but it is not real Christmas until they get on holiday. ‘Why? Why?’ cries the boy. ‘Because, because,’ they say. The boy’s sobs hack straight through Johanna as if a part of her is crying too. And then, for the first time, the truth hits her and she reels. I am going to be a parent. I am going to share a child. A child who will want the impossible, whose needs will constantly bamboozle me, and who will cause me to say things I don’t fully understand. I must find my partner. I must find Magda.

  ‘But I don’t need perfume,’ says Mrs King.

  ‘It’s duty-free,’ replies Christina. ‘It’s cheaper than in the shops. It can be your Christmas present.’

  ‘Don’t buy me a present,’ says Mrs King. ‘We agreed. No presents. If you buy me a present, I will have to buy one for you.’

  ‘You haven’t bought us a Christmas present?’ gasps Tracey. She stumbles backwards like a snowy Michelin man.

  Mrs King glances from one daughter to the other. They couldn’t look less forgiving. ‘But we said we wouldn’t buy presents this year,’ she says weakly.

  ‘We didn’t mean nothing at all,’ says Christina. ‘You’re our mother. You’re supposed to give us presents.’

  ‘But you’re grown-up,’ says Mrs King, feeling her words lose confidence even as they leave her mouth.

  ‘This is typical,’ says Tracey. Despite her anger, her eyes fill with tears. She has to pretend she is blowing her nose.

  ‘What is typical, Tracey?’

  ‘Since Dad died, you only think of yourself.’

  Now it is Mrs King who wants to stagger backwards, but she doesn’t. She has noticed a change in her daughters. There was a time when they shared everything with their mother. Tracey would always ask for her advice about how to deal with problems at the school where she taught, and barely a day passed without Christina phoning, not to say anything in particular, just to check that her mother was still there, still listening. Mrs King used to hear the way her friends complained about their children, how difficult things were, and feel a touch of complacency. Even when the girls were teenagers, their mood swings had been short-lived. But since the death of their father, they’ve become formal, more removed. Spiteful, actually. As if it is their mother’s fault they have no father. As if she could have done more to save him if only she’d made the effort.

  ‘How about this for a plan?’ she asks. ‘We’ll each choose our own gift.’

  They emerge fifteen minutes later with perfume, a golden chocolate bar and a gift box of anti-ageing cream.

  ‘Happy now?’ asks Christina, and even the word ‘happy’ sounds like something she has trodden in.

  Magda has to hold on to the sink in order to keep standing. She remains very still, hoping the pain won’t find her again. She holds her breath.

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ says a woman in a white overall. She holds a mop, but confusingly is also wearing a tinsel halo and a pair of large fluffy wings. ‘These facilities are officially shut for cleaning purposes.’

  ‘Can I lie down?’ asks Magda. ‘I don’t feel very good.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ says the angel. ‘Have you looked at the state of the floor? If you’re ill you need to report to the medical centre.’

  ‘Where is the medical centre?’

  ‘You have to ask at the information desk.’

  But there is a queue for the information desk and there is so much noise, there are so many travellers shouting at the two officials (also dressed as angels but looking on the verge of tears) that Magda feels dizzy. She waits patiently in the queue, but the queue keeps spilling outwards and sideways as more people join it, all shouting questions at the angels. Instead she spots a floor plan and discovers that the medical centre is only at the other side of the departure lounge.

  The pain is more frequent now, her stomach making a tight fist and growing rock hard. She has to walk very slowly, almost in and around the pain, as if it is lying in wait for her and one foot in the wrong place will set it off. The medical centre is locked. Seasons Greetings! says the sign.

  Then she remembers Johanna – all she wants is Johanna – and with that thought comes the realization that she has lost her bag. She must make her way back to where she was waiting before, only she can’t think where that was because it all looks the same. Her breathing is fast and high in her chest. She has to go very slowly because she is about to drop something, she can’t carry it any more. She has never felt so alone. People push past, not noticing her distress. Someone even jabs her in the stomach with a rucksack.

  An arm shoots out and pulls her close and Magda is about to fight it off until she realizes it is Johanna’s.

  ‘You look awful. What’s happening?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she moans. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you need a doctor?’

  ‘There isn’t one.’

  ‘We need to get you away from all these people.’

  But it’s too late. Water – a tide of water is rising. Magda had no idea there could be so much of it. She can’t move. She can’t even get back to the toilets. She experiences a pressure mounting inside her and then a kind of pop. Her legs are wet, as if someone has thrown a bucket of warm water at her.

  ‘Oh my God,’ says Johanna, noticing Magda’s jogging pants.

  Magda moans. ‘It’s happening.’

  ‘Now? Here? It can’t—’

  Magda’s neck flips backwards as a new wave of contractions passes through her. Her eyes are closed and her skin is clammy and grey. She grips her fingers tightly around Johanna’s arm as if she is afraid of being pulled away by the pain.

  ‘I’ll ring for an ambulance,’ shouts Johanna. And then she remembers the gridlocked traffic surrounding the airport. How will an ambulance get through?

  ‘It’s too late,’ moans Magda again. ‘No.’ The ‘no’ becomes more of a low, like a cow groaning. Magda rocks from one foot to the other, trying to contain the pain. Johanna forgets all about the ambulance. People are beginning to turn and look. ‘I can’t walk any more. Jo, I am going to have our baby here. Find a trolley. Get me
somewhere quiet.’

  ‘I can’t leave you. I’ll carry you.’ Johanna tries to put her arms around Magda, but Magda shrieks as if her touch is a vice around her stomach. Several more people turn to look.

  Magda whispers through clenched teeth, ‘I’ll be OK. I’ll wait. I won’t move from here. I promise.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes. It’s OK so long as I don’t walk. Find me a trolley.’

  There is no sign of anyone in the departure lounge who looks vaguely official, let alone a person with a trolley. Maybe the staff are all involved in trying to sort out the unforeseen circumstances. Or maybe they are in hiding, afraid that if they go out and try to explain the situation they will be torn apart with questions and complaints. The only staff to be seen are the two at the information desk dressed as Christmas angels, as if to say, No, no, don’t ask us for help, we are only jokes! The six Father Christmases are now disco-dancing as the Stroud Girls’ Choir performs its entire Christmas medley.

  Johanna asks the girl in Duty-Free, and the angel-woman cleaning the toilets; she asks families, women who look like mothers and should surely understand, but no one can offer her a trolley on which to transport Magda somewhere more private.

  She spots a small building at the other side of the concourse. Before anyone can stop her, Johanna blunders through a door clearly marked No Entry and finds herself outside. The door slams behind her.

  ‘Apparently a little girl has rung. About the goat.’

  ‘The what?’ says Mrs Pike. She is trying to work out where to put the donkey. She has taken it for a walk around the concourse, and now that she wants to put it back inside its cage it keeps baring its teeth. It is definitely upsetting the four cheetahs. They whip round and round their cage, snarling.

  ‘The goat.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ says Mrs Pike.

  ‘The little girl says she wants to adopt it. But not the terrapin. Her mum has a van. Also there’s a woman in reception. She’s looking for a stretcher. Her wife is having a baby.’