Snow Garden by Rachel Joyce Page B

left the stage and the band began to play ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and once again the floor began to fill. Maybe-Howard and the coral-dress girl were shuffling in a stiff wooden circle, her hands perched like claws on his shoulders. Pauline and Paulette Gordon swayed in a threesome with Peter Green. Patty Driscoll was slow-dancing with Esther Hughes, her chin heavy on Esther’s bone-thin shoulder, the halo of her orange hair touching Esther’s lips, her large hands around Esther’s scrawny fingers. And there was the singer, his mouth open wide over Charleen’s, as if he were emptying every song he knew straight inside her.
    Maureen watched them all. This was how it was, she thought. People would find one another, and sometimes it would last moments and sometimes it would last years. You could spend your life with a person and not understand them and then you could meet a boy across a dance floor and feel you knew him like a part of yourself. Maybe it was the same out there in the fields. Maybe the sheep were sitting two by two with the foxes and so were the rats and worms.
    She thought of her mother, the way she had gazed out from the upstairs window as Maureen walked away, not waving or smiling, as if willing her daughter not to come back.
    ‘You look in a world of your own,’ said the boy.
    She smiled. ‘I was.’
    ‘They were saying at the bar there’s snow.’
    ‘There can’t be.’
    ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Still. That’s what they’re saying. So you and I could stay here, wondering about it. Or we could go outside and look.’
    Without another word he turned his back on her and moved towards the door. This time she followed. She did not think. He reached his hand backwards as if, even without looking, he knew she would be there. His fingers curled in a perfect fit around hers.
    And if anyone had said to her that night as they made their way past the embracing couples, across the parish hall with the floor all sticky now, the evergreen garlands unhooked and hanging like limbs, the paper chains in torn-up fragments on the dancers’ shoulders, if anyone had said that this was the man she would soon marry, abandoning all thought of university, that they would share a child and one day lose him, that they would move into separate bedrooms and talk over breakfast about nothing because silence, or something close to it, would be easier than words, that they would forget the Boxing Day Ball and the things that had seemed so funny, she would have hung her head so that her long hair lapped her cheeks. ‘No, no,’ she would have said, and then perhaps, ‘I think—’
    But this was all to come. For now, the boy helped her into her red coat and pulled open the door. The sting of the cold almost pushed her backwards.
    ‘Well, look at that.’ He laughed.
    The moon was gone, the land an even paler blue. All around them swirled the Boxing Day snow, like melting stars. It seemed to be both lifting out of the ground and tipping from the sky. Her life was her own. It wasn’t her mother’s and it wasn’t Patty Driscoll’s or any of those other girls’. She thought of the boy dancing, the question he had posted into her ear. The answer was so simple, so clear, there was nothing to do but laugh, as if to laugh and feel happiness was the most serious thing in the world. Almost unbearable.
    She said, ‘Yes.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Yes.’ She did not turn her head to face him. She did not need to. She would see him now, everywhere she looked. He would be a part of everything and she did not even know his name. It was no less than a small miracle.
    She stood in silence and looked up at the falling snow.

A Snow Garden

The boys kept asking if there would be snow at the new flat. ‘Yes,’ he told them. It began as a joke but then it got serious. ‘Yes, Yes, YES!’ ‘I don’t know why you keep promising there will be snow,’ his sister said when she rang. ‘It only happens in films and that bloody advert.’ ‘Because