Winter Read online

  Oh, I see, Sophia says. That’s why you re-checked my birthdate.

  I’m sorry? the optician says.

  You thought perhaps I was lying about my age. To get a free eye test out of your chainstore, Sophia says.

  Um –, the young optician says.

  She frowns. She looks down, looks suddenly lost and tragic among the chain’s vulgar Christmas decorations. She doesn’t say anything else. She puts the printouts and forms and the notes she’s been making into a little folder which she hugs to her chest. She gestures to Sophia to proceed downstairs.

  You first, please, Sandy, Sophia says.

  The optician’s blonde ponytail ups and downs as she goes and when they reach the ground floor she disappears through the door she first came out of without a goodbye.

  Similarly rudely, without looking up from the screen at the main desk, a girl behind the counter suggests to Sophia that she tweet, post on Facebook or leave a review on TripAdvisor about her experience at the optician’s today as ratings really do make a difference.

  Sophia opens the shop door for herself.

  It’s raining hard in the streets outside now and the optician’s is the kind of place where they have golf umbrellas with the name of the chain on them, and there’s an umbrella stand with some of these in it back by the desk. But the girl is looking at the screen and steadfastly not looking up at Sophia.

  She gets to her car soaked through. She sits in it in the car park under the noise of rain on the roof, in the not unpleasant smell of wet coat and car seat. Drips run down her from her hair. It is liberating. She watches the rain change the windscreen to a moving blur. The streetlights come on and the blur fills with the misshapen shifting spots of many colours, like someone’s thrown little paint-filled missiles at the windscreen; this is because of the municipal strings of coloured Christmas bulbs suspended round the edge of the car park.

  The night is coming down.

  But isn’t it pretty? she says

  and this is the first time she’s spoken to it – the abrasion, degeneration, detachment, floater, which at this point is still fairly small, you can’t yet make out it’s a head, small as a fly floating about in front of her, a tiny sputnik, and when she speaks directly to it like that it’s as if it’s a ball hit by the steel lever at the side of a pinball machine and it ricochets from one side of the car to the other.

  Its movement, at near four o clock in the winter dark on the shortest day of the year, is joyful.

  In the dusk fade, before she turns the key to start the engine and drive home, Sophia watches it under the spill of colour on the glass, moving freely across the dashboard as if the dashboard’s plastic is the surface of an ice rink, bouncing itself off the passenger headrest, tracing the curve of the steering wheel once, then again and again, like it’s trying out its skill then showing off its skill.

  —

  Now she sat at the kitchen table. Now the whatever-it-was was the size of a real child’s head, a smudged dusty child streaked with green, a child come home covered in grass-stains, a summer child in the winter light.

  Would it stay child or become adult, the head? Would it grow up, so to speak, into the floating head of a fully grown human? Would it get even bigger than that? Size of a small bicycle wheel, the kind on folding bikes? Then the size of a full-size bicycle wheel? of an old-fashioned beach ball? of the inflatable globe of the world in the old film The Great Dictator where Chaplin dresses as Hitler and bats the world about in the air above him till it bursts? Last night, as the head had amused itself by bowling itself down the hall runner at the cabinet to see how many of Godfrey’s eighteenth century English pottery figurines it could topple each time by hitting itself off the legs of it, it had looked for the first time like the rolling, falling, cut-off, guillotined, beheaded, very real head of a –

  and this had been the point at which she’d shut it out of the house, which wasn’t hard, because it was very trusting, the head. All she’d needed to do was walk out into the garden in the dark and it had followed her, she’d known it would, bobbing like a helium balloon bought at a county fair, and then, as it floated off ahead (a head) by itself towards the leylandii as if it were actually interested in shrubbery she’d ducked back into the house and shut the door on it, she’d got herself through the house as fast as she could and down into the armchair in the front room, her head down below the back of it so anyone (or thing) looking in the window would think she wasn’t there.

  Nothing, for half a minute, for a full minute.

  Good.

  But then at the window the gentlest tapping. Tap tap tap.

  She’d stretched out low and got the remote off the side table, switched on the television and turned it up.

  The news rolled round in its usual comforting hysteria.

  But there underneath it again, tap tap tap.

  So she’d gone through to the kitchen and put the radio on, someone on The Archers trying to find room in a fridge for a turkey, and behind the radio voices, on the sliding door out to the darkness of the garden, the tap tap tap.

  Then at the little glass slot in the back door too, tap tap tappity.

  So she’d gone upstairs in the dark, then upstairs again, then finally up the ladder through the hatch into the loft, across the loft room through the low door to the very back of the ensuite where she’d tucked herself under the handbasin.

  Nothing.

  The winter noise of wind in branches.

  Then at the skylight a glow, like those nightlights for children afraid of the dark.

  Tap tap tap.

  It was there like a lit city clockface, winter moon on a Christmas card.

  She came out from under the sink and opened the skylight and it came in.

  First it floated level with her own head. Then it lowered itself to where the real head of a child would be and looked up at her with round hurt eyes. But immediately after this, as if it knew she’d despise it being pathetic or manipulative, it levitated level with her own head again.

  It had a sprig of, was that holly in its mouth? It held it out to her like it was holding out a rose. She took the sprig. When she did, the head did a little air-shift and gave her a look.

  What was it about that look that meant she carried the piece of holly down through all the floors of the old house, opened the front door and wove it through the doorknocker?

  This year’s Christmas wreath.

  —

  It is a Tuesday in the month of February in 1961, she is fourteen years old and when she comes down to breakfast Iris is up early – unbelievable, Iris out of bed on a day off – making toast for herself and being shouted at by their mother for getting ash in the butter, and then, like she just fancies a walk at eight fifteen in the morning Iris chums her to school and when they get to the gate just before she goes in, says, listen Philo, what time’s your morning break? Ten past eleven, she says. Right, Iris says, tell some pal you’re not feeling well, I mean choose a hypochondriac one and tell them you’re feeling queasy today and I’ll be waiting over there at twenty past. She points across the road. See you! and she flips her hand in a wave before Sophia can ask anything, and two 4th year boys going past stop and watch Iris walking away, one of them has his mouth open, that really your sister, Cleves? the other one says.

  She bends over Barbara’s desk at Maths.

  You know, I feel quite sick today.

  Oh dear, Barbara says and shifts well away from her.

  Iris, brilliant.

  Iris, trouble. Sophia is not trouble, never trouble, she is not a girl who ever does anything wrong, she is pristine, correct, a girl clearly headed for head girl (and head office, then head of her own business ahead of the pack at a time when girls aren’t meant to be ahead or a head of anything, which will be the first time in her life she finds herself quite so in the wrong, and about which she’ll inherit a fair level, no, an unfair level, of guilt) and she’s just barefacedly lied, which has had the effect of making her feel a
s queasy as she said she did, so it was no lie after all then, and now she is about to do something surely even more unallowed and wrong, whatever it turns out to be, which makes her heart beat so hard all through logarithms that she thinks her whole self must be visibly beating, please Sir, Sophia Cleves seems to be throbbing, but the break bell goes and no one’s said anything and she slips to the girls’ cloakroom and gets her coat off the hook, puts it on, does up the buttons as if she’s going out into the cold though truly it’s very warm today.

  She stands near the Girls gate like she just happens to be standing there having a think about something, and she can see Iris over outside Melv’s, the old tin Colman’s Mustard sign up on the wall matching the yellow of Iris’s coat as if Iris knew it would, wants it to.

  Nobody is looking. Sophia crosses the road.

  Outside the shop Iris stands guard between her and any passing housewifery who might report back to their mother, and she does as she’s told, loosens her tie and rolls it into her pocket. Then Iris takes off her bright yellow coat and underneath it she’s got on the butcher-boy leather jacket. She shoulders it off too and holds it out.

  You can wear it till midnight tonight, Iris says, then you have to give it back or it turns to ashes and dust. Happy St Valentine’s. Or call it an early Christmas present. Come on, try it on. Go on. There. God, Soph, you look a dream. Give’s your coat.

  Iris goes into Melv’s with the school coat. She comes out without it. Melv says he’ll keep it through the back for you till tomorrow, she says. But you’ll have to get out of the house first thing without mother seeing you’ve no coat, so. Have an excuse ready.

  What kind of excuse? she says. I can’t lie to her like you can.

  Me? a liar? Iris says. Tell her you left it at school. Too warm to wear it. Well! It’s true.

  It is true – it’s meant to be winter still, February, but it’s so warm, today it’s shockingly warm, not just like in spring, more like summer. But she keeps the jacket on anyway all the way there, even on the Underground. Iris takes her to a coffee bar then to a place called Stock Pot for stew and potatoes, and then walks her round a corner and they’re standing outside an Odeon. The poster outside is G.I. Blues. Really?

  Iris laughs at the look on her face.

  You’re a picture, Soph.

  Iris is a ban the bomb-er. No ‘H’ Bombs. No to Nuclear Suicide. From Fear To Sanity. Would You Drop an ‘H’ Bomb. Iris bought a duffel coat especially for the march, and the fight that started about the duffel coat became the biggest fight ever about anything, father furious with her, mother mortally embarrassed when she shocked the visitors at tea not just by holding forth, which in itself isn’t on for girls to do, but by doing it about the poisonous dust in the air and in all the food now too then telling the people who came to the house from father’s work about the two hundred thousand people condemned to death in our name, father hit her later when she shouted thou shalt not kill at him in the front room, and father never hits anyone. Iris has been saying for months that she’ll never pay money to go to a film with Elvis playing a soldier in it. But she’s even bought the good seats, balcony, as near the front as they can get.

  In it Elvis is a soldier called Tulsa, an occupation GI out for the day with a dancer in Germany. The dancer is an actual German. If their father knew they were watching something in which Germans are seen as people he’d be as furious as when he stamped on the Springfields record and threw the pieces into the dustbin because of the where have all the flowers gone song in German on it. Elvis and the German dancer are on a ferryboat on the Rhine, a river which, she whispers to Iris, unusually happens to have its own private unit of measurement. (Iris sighs, rolls her eyes. Iris sighs too throughout Elvis singing to a baby in a basket a song about how the baby is already a little soldier, and Iris laughs out loud – the only person in the whole cinema who laughs – at the beginning of the film when Elvis, in a tank with a long protruding missile-firer, fires a missile that blows up a wooden shack, though Sophia can’t see how or why this is funny, and at the end when they come out into the London streets Iris is shaking her head and laughing, a man like a melting candle, Iris says, melting candle of a man. How do you mean, Elvis is like a candle? she says. Iris laughs again and puts her arm round her. Come on, you. Coffee bar then home?)

  There are so many songs in G.I. Blues that there is hardly a moment when Elvis is not singing something. But the best song happens when he and the German go to a park where there’s a puppet theatre, like a Punch and Judy, in which a father puppet, a soldier puppet and a girl puppet are playing a scene to an audience of children. The girl puppet is in love with the soldier puppet and vice versa, but the father puppet says something like not a hope in German. So the soldier hits the father with a stick till the father’s obliterated. The soldier puppet starts singing a German song to the girl puppet. But it goes wrong because the old man who runs the puppet theatre’s record player starts playing the song wonky, too fast then too slow. So Elvis says maybe I can get that thing going for him.

  Next thing that happens is, the whole cinema screen – and it’s one of the widest she’s ever seen, so much wider than the screens in town at home that it feels unfair – becomes nothing but the stage of the puppet theatre with Elvis in there visible from the chest up, a visiting giant from another world, next to him the puppet girl whole and tiny making him look like a kind of god. He starts to sing to the puppet and it becomes the most powerful, beautiful thing Sophia has ever seen; he is somehow even more beautiful and astounding than he was at the start of the film when he was in a shower with the other soldiers and soaping himself with no shirt on.

  In particular there is a fraction of a second which later Sophia keeps trying to replay in her head but at the same time isn’t completely sure she hasn’t just imagined. But she can’t have. Because it pierced her.

  It comes when Elvis persuades the girl puppet, who is after all just a puppet but is somehow still also really funny and cheeky, to give in, lean herself back against his shoulder and chest for a moment. When she does this, he throws a look so small it’s nearly not there to the girl he loves in the audience – and to the people watching the puppet show and also the people watching the film, which includes Sophia – the slightest gesture of his beautiful head as if to say, well, a great many things, among them: hey, look at this, look at me, look at her, who’d have thought? imagine that, see that?

  —

  Christmas Eve morning, 10am, and the disembodied head was dozing. Lacy green growth, leafy looking, a tangle of minuscule leaves and fronds, had thickened and crisped round its nostrils and upper lip like dried nasal mucus and the head was making the sounds of inhalation and exhalation in such a lifelike way that if anyone standing outside this room heard it he or she’d have been convinced that a real whole child, albeit one with a bad cold, was having a nap in here.

  Would that stuff, Calpol, she could get some from the chemist’s, maybe help?

  But the same growth seemed to be coming out of its ears too.

  How could it breathe anyway, the head, with no other breathing apparatus to speak of?

  Where were its lungs?

  Where was the rest of it?

  Was there maybe someone else somewhere else with a small torso, a couple of arms, a leg, following him or her about? Was a small torso manoeuvring itself up and down the aisles of a supermarket? Or on a park bench, or on a chair by a radiator in someone’s kitchen? Like the old song, Sophia sings it under her breath so as not to wake it, I’m nobody’s child. I’m no body’s child. Just like a flower. I’m growing wild.

  What had happened to it?

  Had what had happened to it hurt it very much?

  It hurt her to think it. The hurt was surprising in itself. Sophia had been feeling nothing for some time now. Refugees in the sea. Children in ambulances. Blood-soaked men running to hospitals or away from burning hospitals carrying blood-covered children. Dust-covered dead people by the sides of roads. At
rocities. People beaten up and tortured in cells.

  Nothing.

  Also, just, you know, ordinary everyday terribleness, ordinary people just walking around on the streets of the country she’d grown up in, who looked ruined, Dickensian, like poverty ghosts from a hundred and fifty years ago.

  Nothing.

  But now she sat at her table on Christmas Eve and felt pain play through her like a fine-tuned many-stringed music and her the instrument.

  Because how could losing so much of a self not hurt?

  What can I give it? Poor as I am?

  Ah. That reminded her.

  She checked the time on the cooker.

  There’d be Christmas closing times at the bank.

  The bank.

  Well. That did it

  (money always does, always will)

  and here instead’s another version of what was happening that morning, as if from a novel in which Sophia is the kind of character she’d choose to be, prefer to be, a character in a much more classic sort of story, perfectly honed and comforting, about how sombre yet bright the major-symphony of winter is and how beautiful everything looks under a high frost, how every grassblade is enhanced and silvered into individual beauty by it, how even the dull tarmac of the roads, the paving under our feet, shines when the weather’s been cold enough and how something at the heart of us, at the heart of all our cold and frozen states, melts when we encounter a time of peace on earth, goodwill to all men; a story in which there’s no room for severed heads; a work in which Sophia’s perfectly honed minor-symphony modesty and narrative decorum complement the story she’s in with the right kind of quiet wisdom-from-experience ageing-female status, making it a story that’s thoughtful, dignified, conventional in structure thank God, the kind of quality literary fiction where the slow drift of snow across the landscape is merciful, has a perfect muffling decorum of its own, snow falling to whiten, soften, blur and prettify even further a landscape where there are no heads divided from bodies hanging around in the air or anywhere, either new ones, from new atrocities or murders or terrorisms, or old ones, left over from old historic atrocities and murders and terrorisms and bequeathed to the future as if in old French Revolution baskets, their wickerwork brown with the old dried blood, placed on the doorsteps of the neat and central-heating-interactive houses of now with notes tied to the handles saying please look after this head thank you,