Twisted Winter (6 page)

“Yes,” I said. “I'd like it if all the spoiling and breaking just
stopped
.”

“Then bring him here,” she said.

And I did. I walked over to Dill, my face burning, and a terrible warmth in my chest. I called him over. I picked him up. I walked back to the woman at the fence.

I didn't know what would happen. I would love to tell you that I thought it would be nothing terrible. But deep down I think I knew.

“What's his name?” she asked, giving him a smile bright as dewdrops.

“Dill.”

“Hello, Dill.” She leant over the fence, and kissed him on the forehead.

Dill's blue eyes widened, and he screamed. When the woman straightened, I almost expected to see her kiss seared into his forehead, but there was no mark. I set him down, and watched him stumble away with a feeling of shock and growing guilt.

I turned back to the woman, just in time to see her gloved fingers delicately plucking a small black bead from her mouth, as if she were discreetly spitting out a cherry stone.

“What did you do?” I demanded.

She did not answer. Instead, she touched the bead to a bracelet of similar beads on her wrist, where it joined their ranks, smoothly and impossibly. Then she turned and strode away, down the path towards Creve.

Watching Dill blunder towards the front door, I felt my heart lurch. His stubby feet were not sinking into the snow. He left no prints behind him.

* * *

I have guilt dreams sometimes. Dreams where I've killed somebody. I can't remember who or why, but I know that I've done this terrible thing I can't undo, and I just can't believe it. When I wake up, the relief is indescribable.

Walking into the house after Dill, I was filled with the guilt dream feeling. But this time I knew I really
had
done something terrible, and I wasn't going to wake.

Mum was on a ladder mending lights, her brown-and-grey curls scrunchied back. She grimaced when Dill ran wailing to the base of the ladder.

“Chloe, can you take him? Give him his colouring books.”

Dill thumped my shoulders while I carried him to his play room, but he settled when I laid out his crayons and Disney colouring book. He loves colouring. It's the only time he's quiet. It's like a drug. He loves vivid shades, particularly reds and blues. He can't keep his scribbles inside the lines, but he tries. Mum says he's artistic.

And sometimes when I watch him colour, my mind is quiet too. I start to think that maybe he's just a fat little bottle bursting with…
stuff
. Energy and craziness that comes out in screaming and breaking, except when it can come out in red and blue.

Today was different, however. Dillon curled his fist around a red crayon, and drew it hard across Goofy's muzzle. Nothing happened. No colour, no mark, not even a dent from the pressure. He scratched it desperately to and fro, so hard that the
page should have torn. It didn't. Goofy smiled back unblemished.

For a few seconds Dill could only croak, his mouth making rubbery, trembling shapes. Then his scream was like an earful of molten lead. I hushed him in vain, bounced him on my knee, and sang him songs. Big sister of the year. I felt like such a hypocrite.

As lunchtime approached, a new dread seized me.
What if he can't touch anything, including food? What if he can't eat?
Mum was too busy to fix Dill's lunch, so I took care of it, my heart hammering.

As it turned out, he
could
eat. Or at least, he could eat things I'd chopped, mashed or broken up for him. But he couldn't cut or chew things that were intact. His teeth couldn't dent biscuits. Grapes went into his mouth, then came out whole and glossy with spit.

I started to understand. The woman in the snow had promised that Dill could never spoil anything pristine again. So he couldn't affect anything pure, clean or whole.

He isn't going to die
, I told myself.
It could be worse.

But as I struggled through my lasagne, his future existence unrolled before me. What kind of life could he have if he could only eat food broken
up by someone else? What would happen when he went to school? He would never be able to write, draw, sign his name – maybe not even type into a keyboard. He would never be able to open envelopes, jars, tins, packets. He would be a freak forever, sliding off the surface of the world like raindrops off waxed cloth.

* * *

By mid-afternoon the sky was dim as twilight, and more flakes were flurrying down.

I could still hear Dill's desolate wailing while I scrubbed floors, bleached toilets and scraped the lime off shower screens. Nothing I did was undone. No thrown orange juice beakers left sticky patches on the carpets. No jam murals appeared in the corridors.

I was tense all the while, knowing that any moment Mum would hurry to Dill to see what was wrong. She would take one look at him and
know
, using her extra-terrestrial mother-powers. And then I would hear her accusing voice calling for me…

But the hours passed, and she didn't go to him. After a while it started to creep me out.

She just went on working. His loudest screams made her frown, but in a distant, distracted kind of way.

When I brought him to the kitchen for dinner, I found that she had laid two places at the table, but hadn't brought out Dill's high chair. Dill ran over to her, yanking with desperation at her skirt, but she just stared down at him, as if trying to remember who he was. Then she walked away to the fridge, leaving him to topple and sprawl in her wake.

My blood ran cold. I went over and picked him up.

Dill. Dill, her angel. Her favourite boy. The one who had left a thousand marks upon her heart and memory – bruises and jam smears, tiredness creases and crayon hearts. Before my eyes, those marks were fading, like footprints covered by falling snow.

She was ceasing to care about him. Soon she would not remember him at all.

* * *

Dill's screaming stopped eventually, his voice worn down to a miserable, quavering croak. Mum's coldness seemed to break his world in two.

For once he
did
have a reason to cry, a reason I understood. Dill was finding out how it felt when your pain didn't count. Dill had fallen into my world, but he had plunged past me into the darkness and was still plummeting.

I spent what time I could with him, but disasters kept dragging me away. A pipe burst, flooding the cellar, and I had hardly finished dealing with that when I had to go out and shovel snow off the ornamental bridge so it didn't give. I brought Dill his truck and left him to play in the hall.

While I was shovelling, my mind spiralled through nightmares. What would happen to Dill when I was at school, if Mum forgot he existed? What if nobody ever cared if he lived or died? What if all the crazy
stuff
inside him could never get out through colouring or breaking or getting attention? Would he go mad? I thought he would go mad.

As those thoughts were going through my head, I looked up and saw the woman of the snows standing between our two pines, staring at me with a face like carved ice.

She wore a dress of furs, so white it merged into the surrounding snow. Her shoulders and long neck
were bare, and her hair was loose. She was glaring at my shovel blade, embedded in her sweet, luminous snow. Somehow she seemed taller than before.

Dropping the shovel I ran towards her, but she melted amid the flurry of flakes, became a pattern of shadows amid the smooth snow hummocks. I stumbled around for a while, calling out, but she had vanished.

I came back to find Mum sweeping the step and the front door ajar. Dill's truck lay abandoned on the threshold. There was no sign of him.

“Mum – where's Dill?” I stared around at the thickening blizzard. “Did Dill come out here?”

Mum did not seem to hear.

“Come on in, Chloe,” she said. “I'll go make us some cocoa.”

I sprinted around the house, flinging open doors, but Dill was nowhere to be found. He must have wandered out past Mum, without her giving him a second glance. Now he was somewhere on the icy cliff paths, and there weren't even any tracks for me to follow.

* * *

I didn't try to reason with Mum, or call the rescue services. Even if they started searching for Dill, within minutes they would forget what they were doing, or stop caring. Instead I wrapped up warm, grabbed a torch and ran out.

For an hour I scrambled along the cliff paths, yelling Dill's name. Every shadow or half-buried stump looked like his sprawled shape. Every note in the wind sounded like his wail. Soon my feet and hands were aching with the cold.

The dangerous thing about despair is that it's the
kind
voice in your head. It's the one that says,
oh well, you tried your best. There wasn't anything you could have done. Time to give up.

I couldn't give in. The voice was right, though, I wasn't going to find Dill this way. So I changed tack and went in search of
her
.

I knew where she would be. There's a broad, high headland where the ground is smooth and unbroken, a perfect laying ground for snow. It has fine views of the other heads as well, just the place for somebody who wants to admire their white, velvet-smooth domain.

Sure enough, when I huffed my way up the slope, there she was, standing at the highest point. Star-pure. Gleaming. All disguises cast aside. Something inside me quailed and bowed when I saw her. She made the snow looked dingy in comparison, and for a crazy moment I wanted to throw myself down and polish it, so that it was fit for her to tread.

She looked at me and smiled. I felt like a scuff mark on the world

“No,” she said. The question I had not asked soured in my mouth. “No, I will not give him back his power to spoil. I am disappointed that you would ask it.”

I swallowed hard. I stared around me at the lifeless purity of the scene. I thought of Dill and Mum. I found the smile I used in reception and spent a moment straightening it on my face.

“That's not why I'm here,” I said.

She looked at me for a long moment. One of her eyebrows rose slowly. Perhaps she didn't believe me. Or perhaps I had her interest.

“You're beautiful,” I said. “You're…
flawless
. I try so hard to be one of the people who make the world spotless. But… when I look at you, I see how
grubby and clumsy I am. I want to be more like you. Whatever you took from Dill, can you take it away from me too?”

Her gaze felt cold as it touched my scruffy hair, red nose, frayed gloves. She smiled again.

“Very well,” she said, and moved towards me.

As she drew closer, I kept my head bowed, breathing hard and forcing myself to stay still. She was two steps away, then one, and my skin was stinging with a terrible, blistering cold. Even with my gaze lowered, I could see her stooping to plant a kiss on my forehead…

… and at the last moment I ducked my head, and snatched at the bracelet of black beads around her wrist.

I yanked at the bracelet, and it gave. The beads sprang loose, but they did not tumble to the ground. Instead they whirled into the air and surrounded me, a swarm of wheeling black blobs.

The woman gave a thin sound of rage like a rising wind. It rose until the air shook, and I fled, half-blinded by the flurry of white flakes and black motes. As I ran, the beads pelted me, seeking exposed flesh. When they found it they clung and stung, burying
their way into my skin. The more they did so, the less my limbs felt like my own.

I tumbled repeatedly, crushing shrubs. I put my foot through the bridge outside the hotel, and flung the front door open so hard its windows shattered. Then I blundered through the hallways and corridors, leaving mud, snow and blood from a cut hand everywhere I went.

Mum had no patience with me. Five minutes before, she had noticed that Dill was missing, and she had been searching for him frantically ever since. She was sure I must have left the front door open when I went out for my ‘walk'. Fortunately we found his tracks in the snow, and followed them to his huddled, whimpering shape behind the shed.

Mum was so angry that she barely spoke a word to me for the rest of the night.

* * *

No. Things aren't back to normal. Not for me, anyway. Oh, Dill is much the way he used to be, and Mum's even more protective now after ‘what nearly happened'.

But me? I'm hopeless.

I spoil everything. I can't make a bed without ripping sheets. I can't clean a window without breaking it. I can't join a conversation without dropping a big, fat spiked truth into it, like an anchor through the bottom of a rowing boat.

And when I sit down in front of a blank page or an unsullied screen, the words pour out. Thousands of them. All my fears and feelings and dreams and rage. I can't stop them.

I don't think I have a future in hotel cleaning. I don't think I'm a servant of the flawless any more. Some day perhaps I can return to something like my old self, but for now I can't.

For now I've got a lot of spoiling to do.

Frances Thomas

The best part of the day, Brad thought. The light was growing dull, and the school bus in its fug of misted windows slowly wove its way through narrow lanes, spiny bare hedges scraping against the window, everything cold and bleak outside, and waiting for him at home, hot tea and maybe a big peanut butter sandwich, or a wedge of homemade cake, the Rayburn stove filling the kitchen with warmth and the old dogs barking in the yard. English homework tonight, but he wasn't going to do that if he could help it, silly cow. Waste of time, school, his
dad always said. It wasn't school learning that had got
him
the biggest farm in the valley, money stashed away, and the respect of all his neighbours. Teachers, said his dad, were losers, just like those daft folk in the cottage at the bend.