Ice Diaries (8 page)

“My tooth came out.” She
opened her mouth and pointed to a gap in her front teeth. “I’m
having to lisp till my tongue gets used to it.”

“Then you should be getting your
first visit from the Tooth Fairy tonight.”

“That’s what Mummy said.
But I want to keep the tooth, it’s my favourite tooth, so I
might not put it under my pillow.”

Once Charlie and Sam had arrived and
everyone had admired Gemma’s tooth, we settled down to play
Monopoly, sitting on the rug between the two big sofas, the board in
the middle. We play a fast and ruthless game, cheerfully bankrupting
the vulnerable and taking advantage of any inattention to get away
without paying rent – something that gets a good deal likelier
as the game progresses and we are collecting food from the buffet
between moves. When Sam was fetching steak and kidney pie, she missed
me landing on her Mayfair with a hotel on it – something I
gleefully pointed out once Paul had had a turn and her chance had
passed.

Gemma is as merciless as the rest of
us, but we go a bit easier on her as she is only six and gets upset
if she is first out. She always has the boat as it’s her
favourite token. With eight players there are generally early
bankruptcies and the game doesn’t string out too long. Greg
won. People got to their feet, stretched, helped themselves to drinks
and chatted. The room had warmed with people and candles, and I took
off my sweater.

Archie topped up my glass. “I
hear you’re going to be little Toby’s godmother. I
thought we’d have the baptism Sunday week. Claire will be more
rested by then and with any luck Toby will sleep through it. Always a
good idea to get it over with before they get to the wide-awake
wriggly stage. A pleasing choice of name – did you know Tobias
means ‘God is good’?”

Charlie produced several sheets of
paper, which I hoped was a short story. I prefer these to her poems,
as I only like poetry which rhymes and scans. We all settled
comfortably on sofas and chairs. A respectful silence fell, and
Charlie glanced round the room.

“This poem is called
Consummation
. It’s one I’ve been working on for
some time, but it only really came right yesterday.” She
cleared her throat and began, in a droning, emphatic monotone.

“
Take me

To the snow

The virgin snow

The sure, pure, candid snow

The snow that cures, kills, fills
the planet and my mind …
”

Frankly, I’ve had enough of snow
to last a lifetime; I don’t need to hear odes to the darned
stuff. Charlie’s delivery, waving a hand in the air for
emphasis, intermittently closing her eyes, her voice rising to a
shriek and falling again, embarrasses me; to her this is art, and she
has no worries about looking or sounding ridiculous. She is in deadly
earnest about her poetry. This seemed to be one of her longer pieces.
I glanced around the room. Archie and Paul were gazing at their
knees. Nina was picking with her nail at a mark on her sleeve. Claire
wore an encouraging smile, the sort she has when watching Gemma try
to juggle or do magic tricks. Sam fiddled with her hair, but then
she’d probably heard it before. Gemma lay on the floor, walking
her tooth over her stomach. Greg had his eyes shut tight,
concentrating.

A bang on the door; Morgan had arrived,
and Paul tiptoed to let him in. They stood by the doorway, waiting
for Charlie to finish. Morgan took off his jacket and slouched
broodily against the jamb, hair in his eyes, eclipsing Paul, making
him look tame and domesticated. I noticed Sam sit up, glance at him
and slip off her cardigan, revealing a low-cut top. Maybe he made her
nostalgic for one of the disastrous boyfriends in her past. Several
more long minutes elapsed, and Charlie’s voice slowed for the
final lines.

“
Take me to

The earth

The dark earth

The cold, black, waiting earth

That lies forever coupled with the
snow.
”

She halted, head bowed. A brief silence
to be certain that was the end, then an appreciative murmur ran round
the room. “Well done, Charlie, one of your best, I think,”
Archie said. He could not possibly mean this. He poured her a drink
while she talked earnestly to him, no doubt about
Consummation
’s
subtext.

Paul wound up the gramophone and put
needle to shellac; the Ink Spots crooning
Do I Worry
. Morgan
strolled across the room, sat briefly next to Sam eyeing her cleavage
and flirting with her until Charlie noticed and stood over him to
reclaim her place. He settled beside me on the sofa holding a bottle
of Beck’s Claire had given him. He turned my way and his eyes
flicked over my new look, lingering here and there.

“I kind of assumed you had a
figure somewhere under all those layers, but it’s nice to know
for sure.”

“Did you have a good day?”

“So so. You didn’t warn me
there’d be poetry.”

“Only Charlie’s. Don’t
be worried you’ll be called on to recite a limerick of your own
composition. She used to be big in a sort of alternative writer group
– she actually had her first novel published by a small press,
quite an achievement.” I added sotto voce, “What did you
think of the poem?”

“Crap. And lengthy crap, too.”

He didn’t lower his voice. Nina,
passing with bowls of soup, overheard him and bristled, though I’ve
heard her cast aspersions on Charlie’s poetry more than once.
Morgan drained the beer in one go, put the bottle on the floor beside
him and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He got a band out
and scragged his hair into a short pony tail. Gemma joined us and sat
on his other side, barely coming up to his shoulder, feet not
touching the floor, big brown eyes fixed on him. Eventually,
compelled by the force of her stare, he swivelled to look at her. She
fished in her pocket and held up her milk tooth.

“This is my tooth, it came out
today.”

Morgan eyed her warily. “It
happens.”

Gemma waited, not realizing that was
the sum total of his reaction.

“Some people just don’t
appreciate teeth, Gems,” I said. She got up and went to find a
more receptive audience. The Ink Spots finished on a falsetto wail,
the needle crackling repeatedly until Paul lifted it off the record.
I was pleased he didn’t turn it over – a little of the
Ink Spots goes a long way, in my opinion. I was about to suggest
Morgan fetched himself some food before something else started, when
Paul moved to the centre of the floor, unfolded a spindly music stand
and got out sheet music. He looked around the room, screwing his
flute together, and the chatter faded.

“If you’ll bear with me,
I’m going to try your patience with a few extracts I’ve
been working on from Mozart’s Flute Concerto in G Major. It’s
a bit of a work in progress, but at least it’s brief, you’ll
be pleased to hear.”

I couldn’t help darting a look at
Charlie to see if she took this personally as a comment on her
interminable poem, but she was smiling and opening a can of beer,
chatting to Sam and Gemma. I like the flute (Paul has a Bach Partita
in his repertoire I love) but Mozart is not a favourite of mine; I
find him twiddly and repetitive. Paul’s rendition was
surprisingly piercing, and a bit breathy. No wrong notes though, as
far as I could tell. Towards the end, little Toby woke and started
yelling, drowning the last bars and ensuing scattered applause.
Perhaps he doesn’t like Mozart either. Claire took him into a
corner to feed him.

As Paul folded the stand, Morgan
muttered, “Are we done now?”

“Sam sometimes sings … karaoke
was one of her favourite things, apparently.”

“Jesus.” Morgan shifted his
weight and picked up the book he’d been inadvertently sitting
on, Giles Brandreth’s
Great Party Games: Over Two Hundred
Games for Adults of All Ages
. He shook his head. “You’re
all a bunch of weirdos, you know that?”

Greg approached holding a pack of
cards. He’s been teaching himself conjuring tricks from a book.
Some of them are quite impressive when he gets them right.

“I’ve got a new trick.”

“Go on then. Show us.”

He fanned the cards and riffled through
them, frowning with concentration. “Tori, can you pick a card
from anywhere in the pack, anywhere you like. Tell me when to stop.”

I said, “Stop,” and took
one. The card was the four of diamonds.

“Now Morgan, you do it.”

Morgan said stop and took a card.

“Look at your cards, but don’t
say what it is and don’t show each other, then put it back in
the middle of the pack.” We did this. He shuffled the cards and
fanned them, carefully. “Tori, you pick a card and show it.”
I did. “Now, that’s not the one you chose before?”

“No.” It was the Jack of
Clubs.

Greg turned to Morgan. “But is it
the one
you
picked?”

“No.”

Greg paused, disconcerted. “Are
you sure?” Morgan nodded, gravely. “Oh. Then in that case
something’s gone wrong …” Greg took back our cards,
walked across the room and sat on an out-of-the-way chair to work out
what had happened.

I was suddenly suspicious. “
Was
it the one you picked?” Morgan’s expression was
non-committal, but his blue eyes glinted at mine. He was laughing.
“You bastard! That’s not very nice.”

“Like Sam said, you have to make
your own entertainment round here.”

I fixed him with a cold eye. “Listen
to me, Morgan. Never do that again. I don’t care who else you
take the piss out of, but lay off Greg. Is that understood?”

He stared at me for a moment. “Okay.”

I got up and helped the others move the
furniture ready for the Scottish country dancing. Morgan didn’t
stay for it. He sloped off alone to the flat in Bézier. Nina
said, “Of course I can see you had to take him in, Tori, and
naturally we’ll all do our bit to help him, but I can’t
say he’s much of an addition to our community. I for one won’t
be sorry when he goes.”

When I got back a couple of hours later
feeling warm all over, relaxed and cheerful – country dancing
always has this effect on me – he’d drawn the curtains. I
slid open the patio door. Morgan said, “Hi,” and turned
away again. He was lounging on the sofa in the glow of a lantern.
Several empty beer bottles stood beside him on the floor. He did not
look like a man who’d remembered to minister to the stove.

As I riddled, emptied the ash pan and
added wood I said over my shoulder, “You should have stayed. It
was fun. You missed the best part of the evening.” I adjusted
the air intake and straightened up, brushing off my hands, ready for
bed.

“Not necessarily.”

He stood, reached out and grasped my
hand. His hand felt warm, dry and strong. My body overreacted to his
touch after its year of celibacy; a shiver shot up my arm and fizzed
through my blood like electricity. He drew me gently towards him,
staring into my eyes, his other hand sliding across my shoulder and
beneath my hair on the back of my neck, giving me goosebumps. He
smiled a lazy smile at me that took years off him.

“Hey, Tori …” he
murmured. His head bent towards mine.

A sudden unbearably vivid vision of
David made me want to cry. I couldn’t speak, just shook my
head.

He let go of me.

I went to bed.

Ice Diaries ~ Lexi Revellian

I woke early the next morning to a pale
grey sky and the sound of Morgan moving stealthily about. One way and
another I didn’t want to talk to him. I lay doggo until I heard
the patio door slide open and shut again, then leapt out of bed and
flung on my clothes. Today I would follow him and discover what he
was up to. No time for breakfast, so I put a tin of baked beans and a
spoon in my pocket and gulped some water before leaving the flat.

There had been a blizzard overnight,
the first snowfall for days. I’d woken in the small hours and
heard the wind howling, sculpting the snowscape into new undulations.
As I stepped outside, a stiff breeze, brilliant sun and icy air made
my eyes water. I hitched my scarf over my nose and put on my dark
glasses. Morgan had headed left, following the balconies round. I
stayed well back. He glanced over his shoulder two or three times,
and I shrank against the building. He didn’t see me. Then he
turned to his right and set off across the snowy waste in a straight
line south. For the best part of a mile in that direction not much is
tall enough to show above the snow, then you come to a group of City
high rise office buildings rising from a scurf of roofs, as
monolithic and functionless as Stonehenge, casting enormous shadows
on the snow. Taller still, the Shard arrogantly spikes the sky, but
that’s beyond the frozen Thames. Morgan was making a bee line
for the Gherkin. If I went after, he’d see me in that wide open
space when he checked behind him. Better to follow his tracks later.
I wanted to surprise him.

I walked back home and made myself
porridge and had a wash. I realized virtually nothing of Morgan’s
was in the flat; not his backpack, no spare clothes, none of the
things he’d scavenged – just a toothbrush and a few tee
shirts and boxers. Half an hour later, I set off again toiling
through the soft new snow which made the going hard, keeping far to
the left of his trail. From where I was, the Gherkin peeks out from
behind two taller rectangular buildings on the left; my approach
would be hidden by the office block next door. I wanted to sneak as
close as I could before coming out from cover.

The Gherkin is enormous. I hadn’t
really appreciated the fact, having only ever seen it on the skyline
back in normal times; you didn’t get a clear view from the
streets. Since the snow, it stands like a monument to a lost
civilization, but I’d never had occasion to go near. Close to,
the diamond glass panes and criss-cross girders are massive,
overwhelming, on a giant scale. Eat your heart out, Ozymandias.