She was walking toward me now. Dark curls bouncing, woollen scarf swaying to the rhythm of her hips. Breasts struggling to work the top button of her jacket loose with each confident stride. The blood began to race through my veins, the noise of the mechanical diggers and pneumatic drills fading to a low hum. “Yeah, do you know where she is? She’s not answering the door.” Close enough now that I could hear the rub of the denim between her thighs. I could take this one of two ways, probably avoid a scene by way of swift, decisive action, but as so often happens in the face of outstanding natural beauty, my honesty beat me to the punch.
“Yes,” I said. “She’s in the garden.”
My insurance company impressed me. First, they managed to answer the phone without dumping me in a queue and torturing me with a scratchy looped recording of “Greensleeves,” or whatever it is they play nowadays. Second, the operator, who spoke with an Indian accent but insisted his name was Bruce Jackson, was sympathetic to the plight of the freezing man and directed me to the local branch of Auto Windscreens, who not only had my window in stock but also fitted it while I waited. They even gave me a cup of tea, although I have to say that’s a loose description. Tea should not be served in a plastic cup from a sticky push-button machine, and should never contain coffee whitener. But since I wasn’t offered an alternative, and it was at least warm, I feigned gratitude and drank it.
Repairs completed and schedule abandoned, I stopped off at B&Q for a pack of saw blades and some lye, and somehow also left with a cordless electric sander. Might come in handy. Next I popped into CarpetRight and was able to pick up half a dozen large offcuts, which matched almost perfectly the sample I carry in my glovebox. You can never have too much carpet, believe me.
Hypnotized by the siren call of beef on the breeze, I then drove over to the adjacent McDonald’s where a pretty blonde girl with four gold stars but no name provided me with what she claimed was a cheeseburger, but which upon closer inspection revealed itself to be a cheap imitation of one. Eating it was only marginally more fulfilling than getting stuck in the pitifully narrow drive-thru lane. This was a disappointment, since Miss Gold Stars looked as though she had the potential to make great burgers.
The snow had returned by the time I was back on the road. It came down in a dense flurry, blanketing the ground in minutes and forming a bright, focus-bothering tunnel as I drove.
The road through the forest was unusually quiet, even accounting for the weather; I was making my own tracks and hadn’t passed another vehicle since leaving town. At times like this, unlikely as it seems, it’s perfectly possible to feel at one with nature from inside a heated van.
Two miles after the trees moved in to hug the road, I pulled onto the unmade Forestry Commission trail that follows the main railway line. It’s used in fair weather by dog walkers and cyclists and is inaccessible to motor vehicles, thanks to a steel pole secured to its trestles by a chain and padlock. Fortunately, I have a key.
I locked the gate behind me and, swallowing my regret at disturbing the virgin snow, guided the van along the rutted track for the half mile that would take me out of sight of the main road.
This is what winters were like when I was a child. The snow shin-deep on the ground. Soft, delicate flakes falling around me in their thousands, settling in my hair and gently tickling my face. The air so crisp and still as to dull the cold. Breath rising in front of my eyes, floating up toward a pure, white sky. The soft crunching underfoot with each deliberate step. The blissful, unbreakable silence.
Back then, winters were long and filled with all kinds of mystery. There were the treacherous road trips with my father to far-flung outposts in rented cars. The old stables along the driveway became an arctic shipwreck; discarded junk on high shelves was pirate treasure. And then there was the birch wood beyond the garden, where the ground stayed dry enough to sit and read under a canopy of blankets, and where the shouts and screams from the house could never reach.
Today, though, I had little time to reflect. I’d parked the van where the track meets a swathe of open heathland cut through the forest. From here the ground slopes away toward the railway line, beyond which is a steep drop into a wooded marsh, which lies alongside the river. Where I was standing, the ground falls sharply into a tree-lined crater, about a hundred yards across; at the bottom is a shallow pond fed by a tributary of the river, which winds its way through the marsh and under the railway. Down here the line is supported by a brick tunnel, built when the railway was laid in the 1840s to allow the passage of boats into what was then a working flint pit. Repeatedly pinned and reinforced over the years in a valiant yet inevitably vain struggle against gravity and decay, it shudders and wails with the passing of every train.
Reaching this place requires care even in ideal conditions. In deep snow, carrying a dead weight, it’s a pain in the arse. I had to make two trips, leaving the heavy rubble sack beneath the bridge and returning for the smaller bags and shovel. This time of year, unfortunately, calls for something of a compromise. There’s plenty of good ground out here, firm enough not to be turned over by the occasional trampling; after all, what’s accessible to me is accessible to you, too. However, in these temperatures it’s impossible to dig a hole in it. Any ground soft enough to dig in the depths of winter will be all but impassable in the summer, and therefore, almost inevitably remote and overgrown and generally no place to be carrying luggage.
The error giving rise to the term “shallow grave” is a classic one made time and again by panicked first-timers. It’s common for them to underestimate the time and effort involved in digging up a forest floor; the net result of this is, generally, a very small hole. In order to adequately cover the body, they are forced to build up a sizeable mound of earth from the surrounding area. Since this looks just like a shallow grave, they will then attempt to disguise it with a layer of bracken and moss. And of course, at the first sign of a stiff breeze, the toes are poking out.
Today, I’d be going five feet deep. This could take all winter.
In death, my father finally smiled. He was still warm when I left him the first time, his skin still soft, cheeks flushed. The blood pooled in the sawdust under his neck, tiny woodchips floating, dancing with one another, drawn together into little snowflake patterns that mimicked the ones still melting into my coat.
I knelt over him, searching his eyes for a flicker of life. The first and only time this strong, proud man would look up at me—his last chance to look at me at all—and yet still unable to truly look at me.
In those few moments, I saw the full range of his emotions pass across his face. The pain of betrayal. The regret of self-inflicted failure. Perplexity at the fascinations of a small boy. Frustration at the demands for attention. Disappointment, anger and loathing. Fear.
After breakfast, I returned and sat beside him, shivering for hours on end, watching the blood congeal and his face wax over. Around midday, the snow on the roof became top-heavy and slid to the ground, startling me. Every now and then a curious vulpine nose snuffled along the gap beneath the door. Otherwise, I had only the silence and the cold for company.
By nightfall he was cool to the touch, his fingers curled into rigid claws, and my hunger got the better of me.
I stumbled back through the garden to the warmth of the house, praying all the way that I’d find my dinner in the oven, my mother there to make sure I ate my vegetables before she tucked me into bed with the promise that tomorrow, everything would be just fine. But I’d seen the look in her eyes when she’d kissed me goodbye that morning, a life and sparkle that I’d never seen there before. Deep down, as I’d watched her grab her bags and sail out of the house, leaving me alone with my porridge, I’d known this exit was different from all the others. This one felt final.
I did the only thing I knew how. I gorged