Love of Fat Men Read online

  Paula stares out of the kitchen window. There is no wind now, only a quiet shudder of cold in the pine branches. It is grey, a close, tight-knit grey. Is it warmer? Will the sky yellow and thicken and send down the snow? She goes to the window and squints at the outdoor thermometer. It is a couple of degrees warmer. If the temperature went up a few more degrees they might have snow. She hears Kay babbling to Maudie in the living-room. He is telling her how Mom forgot to buy enough batteries, but it was OK because Dad bought a battery charger. Amazing. Brilliant. Brilliant Dad.

  Paula steps quietly to the hallway. She fetches out her ski-trousers as Kay clatters past her, back upstairs to Dad and the Gameboy. He does not stop to ask what she’s doing. Paula puts on ski-trousers and jacket, gloves, cap with ear-flaps. She kneels down and reaches into the rack at the side of the cupboard, and takes out her skates. Just then Maudie stumbles through the door, her eyes glazed with sleep.

  ‘Mom,’ she pipes, ‘where’re you going?’

  ‘Ssh. Nowhere.’

  ‘Why’re you putting on all your stuff?’

  ‘Maudie, go on back to the living-room. D’you want another video?’

  Paula keeps the videos hidden. The children are not allowed more than one each day. Maudie’s face brightens, she nearly fastens on the bribe, then,

  ‘Can I come with you? Please?’

  ‘No, Maudie. It’s too cold.’

  ‘I’ve got my new snowsuit.’ Maudie is already pulling off her slippers. ‘Please, Mom, please.’

  ‘No,’ says Paula, and she picks up her skates. She opens the door to a slice of freezing air and turns her back on Maudie.

  ‘Go on back in the house. Now.’

  The track rings under her boots. Frost seized the ground suddenly, weeks back, leaving steely ripples of mud. Over there, behind the fir trees, is the slim, frozen tongue of the lake. It is shallow here, spread out into fingers on which the cottages sit. Paula walks fast to the shore.

  She sits on a rock and fits on her skates. They have skated most days and the bay is full of blade marks. But they have not gone far. And Kay has been stupid, throwing stones on to the ice. She slapped him for it.

  ‘What if someone broke a leg because of you?’

  Usually they take their broom down to the lake and sweep a small rink for themselves, but this year there is no need. There is no snow on the ice. Paula knows where it is safe to skate. She has been coming here all her life, and even if she hadn’t she would be safe this year. There has never been a frost like it. The whole lake is solid, even by the springs. There are not many people here for Christmas this year, because there is no snow.

  Today the lake is bare. She looks south and sees where it widens, the ice pale and empty, waiting for her. She stands up, staggering a little on her skates, as the wine she drank at dinner sings in her head. It is so cold. Her face is covered but for a strip of flesh around her eyes. She is ready. She bends forward, puts her weight on her right blade, pushes off. The ice is perfect. In a few strokes she shoots out beyond the churned ice. She will do some figures first. She never has time when the kids are there, pestering her to watch them, to admire them. Eric doesn’t like to skate, never has done. She does a T-stop, turns to shore, prepares to skate backwards and then come round in a tight circle, just there – and there’s Maudie, running down the bank, her red cap flapping, her skates in her hand.

  ‘Mom! Mom!’ she screams. ‘Wait for me!’

  Paula stands frozen. There is Maudie in royal blue on the shore, waving frantically. There behind her is the sweep of fir which hides the cottage where Eric and Kay crouch over the Gameboy, and the spare set of batteries recharges in the battery charger Eric has been thoughtful enough to buy and bring all the way up here without telling Paula. Three hisses escape through the fine wool scarf which hides Paula’s lips.

  ‘Batteries. Jesus. Christmas.’

  Something wicked gets into Paula. She turns away and sets her eyes on the glazed horizon where the lake’s mouth spreads. She pretends she has not seen Maudie, has not heard her, has not understood that the child has followed her mother and is struggling with her skate laces, too late and slow and clumsy to catch up. A mean wind cuts across the ice. It’s too cold to stand still, Paula tells herself. Her weight tilts, her skate glides, she begins to move.

  A cry tears out of Maudie and follows her. This time she doesn’t call for her mother. It is just a scream. Maybe she took off her gloves, thinks Paula. Maybe the metal of the skate blade has stuck to her fingers. She won’t have fastened her cap. Her ears. She’ll get frostbite. She slows, turns as if she’s only been practising a circle, and skates back to Maudie.

  Maudie is crying. Her mouth is open and she has not fastened her new red cap. Her fingers fumble as she sobs. She can’t see to do up her skates. Paula looks at the smeared, teary face and frantic fingers, and a wave of love and hate picks her up and throws her far, farther than it has ever thrown her before. She kneels down in front of Maudie and fixes her laces, and then snaps the cap down over Maudie’s ears. Maudie has taken off her gloves to do up the skates, just as Paula has always told her she must not. Maudie’s fingers get mixed up and slide into the wrong spaces and Paula puts them on.

  ‘Can I – can I come with you?’ hiccups Maudie.

  ‘Yes,’ says Paula. She is not going back to the cottage with this child.

  The two of them step out on to the ice. Maudie is a good skater, like her mother. In the city Paula takes her to classes at the rink. But Maudie shrinks close to her mother at the sight of the huge white lake opening out in front of them.

  ‘Come on,’ says Paula, ‘skate behind me and I’ll keep the wind off you.’

  There is no wind but the wind of their passage. Paula skates fast, leaning into the space that offers itself to her. She hears the child behind her and knows Maudie is following, keeping up with her. The low grey sky is heavier than ever today. Surely it is going to snow.

  They’ve never been so far out. Paula glances back and sees the five inlets, five fingers, disappearing into the woods where the cottages are. They are on the open lake where the ferry runs from shore to shore in summer.

  ‘Mind the branch, Maudie!’ she calls back, and Maudie swerves in her mother’s blade marks. The branch is frozen into the ice, sticking up a fist of wood. Paula skates faster. She is warm now, her legs moving easily, her arms tingling with life. She could skate like this for hours.

  ‘Mother!’ calls Maudie. Paula slows, turns, circles Maudie.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Mother, where are we?’

  ‘Why, we’re on the lake. Out on the lake where we take the boat.’

  Maudie looks round, skating beside her mother now, glancing at the low black line of the shore and the huge nothing between her and home.

  ‘I like it here,’ she offers, looking up at her mother’s face.

  ‘Do you?’ says Paula, but she looks out, way away from Maudie, smiling, and so she doesn’t see the tip of Maudie’s left skate catch on a rough place in the ice, and Maudie hang for a second at awkward half-stretch and then crash down on the ice. But she hears it. She is with Maudie in a second. Maudie is white, cawing from the bottom of her chest. Her breath has been knocked out of her. Paula gets her up, sits her, supports her while Maudie fights to breathe. She mustn’t sit on the ice, thinks Paula, she will freeze. Maudie’s nostrils spread wide, reaching for air. The first breath Maudie gets she uses to cry. Paula holds her, Maudie with her heavy little skates dangling, her red cap twisted sideways, her cheek beginning to ooze reddish purple blood.

  ‘It’s OK, baby,’ says Paula, hoisting Maudie higher. ‘Show me where it hurts now.’ But Maudie cries and scrubs her face against her mother, clinging to her with her legs so the sharp blades dig through Paula’s ski-trousers.

  ‘Come on, birdie,’ says Paula, ‘show me your face. Come on, bird-spice.’ She hasn’t called Maudie that for years. Why did she think of it? The snowsuit is so bulky she can scarcely f
eel Maudie through it. No broken bones, though. She is frightened, not hurt.

  ‘Maudie,’ she says, ‘Maudie. You’ve got to be a big girl now. Look around.’ Maudie puts her head out and peeps over the puffy horizon of Paula’s snowsuit shoulder.

  ‘We have to get back,’ says Paula.

  ‘Carry me,’ says Maudie.

  ‘I can’t,’ says Paula. ‘Not that far.’ She feels Maudie let her body go floppy in her mother’s arms. She looks down. Maudie has shut her eyes tight, the way she does when she wants to be carried upstairs to bed. Eric always carries her in the end, after Maudie’s begged and pleaded and pretended to be asleep.

  ‘No,’ says Paula quietly, ‘this is real, Maudie. You have to skate.’

  Maudie doesn’t understand, she knows. She is a city child, not like Paula, who grew up here and always knew that winter was hungry, just waiting for you to make a mistake. It got someone every year. Hunting accidents, frostbite, a boy skating too late into the spring. Maudie doesn’t know about any of that. Why should she? They’re summer and Christmas visitors with a car-full of things from the city.

  But Maudie understands a certain tone in her mother’s voice. She lets Paula put her down on the ice and brush off her snowsuit.

  ‘Take my hand,’ says Paula.

  They skate slowly, side by side. Maudie is pale. She puts her head down against the bitter air which cuts into her face.

  ‘I’ll look out for both of us,’ promises Paula. She scans the ice for branches, stones, rough places which might catch Maudie’s skates. They have come a long way out, much farther than she thought. She sees something dark on the ice, swerves, stops.

  ‘It’s a bird,’ says Maudie. ‘What’s the matter with it?’

  The bird is dead, lying on its back, its claws hooked. It is perfect. Nothing has touched it.

  ‘It must have just fallen,’ says Paula. ‘It wasn’t here before. Look, this is the way we came, you can see our skate marks.’

  ‘Why did it die?’ asks Maudie.

  ‘I don’t know. I expect it just froze. You know what Mrs Svendson said, about the birds in her yard?’

  Maudie puts out her hand and touches the bird. It is already hard, its eyes open but shrouded. She picks it up and holds it flat on the palm of her glove. Wind ruffles back its feathers.

  ‘It’s a redwing,’ says Paula, ‘see,’ and she shows Maudie the markings.

  ‘It just fell out of the air,’ says Maudie. She has forgotten her own fall.

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘How fast did it fall?’

  ‘Not very fast. It isn’t hurt.’

  Maudie looks up, as if to see a sky drifting with the slow fall of birds. She pats the redwing again.

  ‘Can we bury it? Can we make it a little grave?’

  ‘No, Maudie. We can’t skate all that way back carrying it.’

  ‘But if we leave it here, an animal’s going to eat it.’

  ‘That’s OK, Maudie. It’ll just stay here in the quiet. That’s what happens to birds when they die. And when it snows it’ll cover up the bird like a blanket all winter.’

  Maudie puts her face close to the bird’s beak and frozen eyes.

  ‘He wants to stay here,’ she says finally, and she lays it down on the ice.

  ‘Good girl,’ says Paula. ‘Now let’s go.’

  When they reach the shore Maudie is too stiff even to sit and have her skates taken off. Paula lifts her, skates and all, and lugs her up the slope through the trees to the cottage. The lights are on. Suddenly they spring out, marking the ground and making it dark where Paula and Maudie come up the track.

  ‘I bet they’re still playing with Kay’s Gameboy,’ says Maudie. ‘He won’t ever let me play.’

  ‘Oh well,’ says Paula, ‘he only had it today.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Maudie. ‘Anyway, Kay didn’t go out on the ice. None of us’ve ever been that far before, have we?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You and me are the only ones who got to do it,’ says Maudie. ‘Next Christmas I won’t fall over. We’ll skate all the way. Right down the lake. Can we?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Paula, ‘if you still want to.’

  They go in and shut the door. That night, in the dark when Maudie and Paula are asleep, it starts to snow.

  Short Days, Long Nights

  By her right ear an accordion gnaws at the first bars of a song. A voice comes in singing nasally and complacently to itself, so faraway, so sad and so saleable that her eyes fill at once with responsive tears:

  I build a house for my love

  in the dark forest,

  I take her away

  when winter comes,

  we sleep together

  while the snow falls on us

  and when the snow melts

  no one will find us …

  She must have left the radio on all night. It sounds terrible. She’ll have to get new batteries at the kiosk, first thing. She rolls over, humping the sheet and the quilt. Above the bed there’s a notice-board with lists pinned to it. She scribbles BATTERIES under MORE THINGS TO DO.

  She flops back, but not without seeing that there is someone else in the bed. Someone else in the bed. Well. She’ll just let her thoughts take a walk, she thinks. Grey light drips round the blinds, not getting far. But it was worth spending so much money on this hand-made, low, slatted pine bed with its thick mattress which is so well sprung that you can’t tell by the give in it that there is anybody else in the bed. In her old bed they’d have bumped into one another long before morning.

  – A man, she supposes cautiously. The quilt is flounced up round his ears so you can’t tell. It could be one of her women friends who didn’t have enough money for a taxi?

  ‘No, you mustn’t walk back on your own. Come and sleep at my place. I’ve got an enormous bed now.’

  Can she remember any conversation like that? She sifts and searches but there’s nothing there at all. A white-out. And yet she doesn’t feel bad. In fact she feels wonderful: light and warm and energetic as if a secret fuel has been streaming into her all through the hours of her sleep. This is the kind of mood when she’ll do half-forgotten ballet exercises for forty minutes before slicing herself a plateful of black bread and Swiss cheese and eating it in the bath.

  She shifts her head from side to side. Not a trace of headache, and no nausea. And she knows this is not the fragile, hallucinatory absence of hangover which comes when you’re still actually drunk from the night before: the sort which throws you to the ground, gasping for Vichy water and aspirin, as soon as you bend over to pull up your tights.

  He’s having a terrific sleep, that’s for sure. He’s on his stomach, and his heels make a bump in the quilt way down the bed. He’s tall. She stretches her body down, comparing their heights. He has black hair pushed up at the back by the quilt. Little damp sweaty feathers of it stick up at the crown of his head. She takes a pinch of hair and rubs it between her finger and thumb. Its soft sooty black ought to come off on her hand. She eases the quilt away from the back of his neck very gently, so that the colder air won’t wake him, and peers down the tunnel at his body. His shoulders are still brown, although it’s January. Perhaps he’s just come back from a winter holiday in Tunisia. His skin has a light cereal smell – nice. She lifts the quilt higher and sights the moony glow of his buttocks. He twitches and she drops the quilt back on him with a slight hoosh of escaping air.

  From the back at least, he looks fine. She moves her own body about in the bed, listening for anything it can tell her. Stickiness, aches, chafings? It would be as well to sort out what’s been going on before he wakes up. But she isn’t getting any signals. Her body feels dry and whole and sweet-tempered. Her foot brushes a piece of cloth and she draws it up, clenched between her toes. A neat, clean pair of French navy Y-fronts. Not a style she likes, but expensive. With three brothers, she’s an expert on men’s underpants. They used to leave them lying all over the house, dirty ones with skids on
them lying on the top of the stairs when her father and mother had friends in to supper.

  She gets out of bed without sending the slightest tremor through the body on her left side, and pads over the matting to the window. Thick whirling funnels of snow come at her. The outer window is furred. She smiles. She must have slept for hours – no wonder she feels so good. It’s ten to eleven. The kiosk opposite is lit up and the doughnut stall down the road is wreathed in steam. Nobody much about, though, on a Sunday morning like this. The snow plough tramps steadily down to the Kauppatori and back, banking soft fresh new snow over the dirty packed ice of last week’s fall. There’s so much that there’ll be lorries coming soon to cart it away, on to the wasteland.

  The thought of an apple doughnut makes her mouth tingle. A long satchel of sugary dough, a tongueful of apple. She could dive out now and bring back one for each of them. Or perhaps he’s one of those men who’d eat sausage first thing in the morning, with plenty of sharp, watery pickles on it? She could get the batteries, and some cigarettes, too.

  She pulls on a long warm vest that’s been flung down on a chair. It smells slightly of yesterday. She finds clean pants and a pair of jeans and puts them on, then she combs out her hair and plaits it tightly so that it won’t blow out across her face in the snowstorm. She shakes an empty cigarette pack out of her leather jacket, and puts the jacket on.