“They can’t have done the gritting. The snow is settling,” says Justin, reflectively, looking at the road.
Then suddenly he is clutching her wrist, as he has pulled at Mary a thousand times before, pulled at her skirt, her sleeve, her arm—“Watch out, Mary. We have to slow down.” They are shooting down the slip road to their second motorway, and Mary once again shows no signs of braking to dovetail into the slipstream of the traffic—“Mary, honestly, it’s dangerous!” He has spotted, lying on its side like a beetle, a gritting lorry on the hard shoulder, with flashing lights and three hunched men.
And all his life he has been tugging at Mary (she feels as she screams across the shuddering lanes and, as if by magic, other cars avoid her) and she’s never minded, it was only Justin, her second baby, Jamil’s little brother — but now he is so much bigger than her, and he is still tugging and begging and ordering, and thinking it is funny to call her ‘my driver’, and Jamie can no longer make everything right.
“Justin, be quiet. I am a good driver. I have driven you ever since you were a baby. Now will you please stop bothering me.”
Her authoritative voice works on him. He falls silent, and then he dozes. Sleep has always been his way out. He only wakes up when he feels the car slowing to a standstill, and his first thought is, “Thank God, we’re here.”
But he looks out of the window, and sees motionless traffic, just visible through endlessly cascading snow, and he looks upwards, and it comes forever, falling from roofless grey halls of snow, and suddenly it fills him with vertigo, the blind gyres of snowflakes bearing down on him, rushing so fast the car can never escape them, the sky has pressed the whole world to a standstill, and it keeps on coming: the snow, the snow.
“What’s happening, Mary?”
“I don’t know. We have been standing here for half an hour. Maybe there is an accident.”
Mary is writing in a small green notebook. “What are you doing, Mary? Shall we play Hangman?” When he was a boy, Justin taught Mary Hangman, and the two of them used to play it for hours.
“Perhaps later, Justin. I am writing something.”
“Is it a shopping list?” It makes him smile. How many times, when he was smaller, has he helped Mary write the shopping list? And she always added the things he asked for, the sausages and beans, the crisps and jelly, though she kept them in the cupboard with her cleaning things, where he knew his mother never looked, and it was one of their special secrets, and Justin remembers how much he loves her, and she is here with him now, in the snow, and they’ll save each other, of course they will, and it will all be a great adventure (his mother is miles away, as usual).
And then he remembers, no, it is Christmas, it’s much too late for shopping lists.
And Mary seems a little distant. “No, Justin. It is something different.”
He takes her hand, playfully, and tries to stop the pen. She snatches it back with surprising force. He looks at her, hurt: “Don’t be cross with me.”
“I am writing my Autobiography.”
“Oh yes, that thing you were doing in your room, and Dad had to help you with the computer. Did you keep it up, then? How is it going?”
She imagines she hears a note of lordly indifference. “I will soon finish it, and publish it. That is why I work when I get the chance. When it is published, you can buy a copy.”
It is starting to get a little cold in the car. Outside, there are desultory outbreaks of hooting. People switch their engines on and off. One man has got out of his car, and peers forwards, but the snow is too thick for him to see anything.
“What if the Jag won’t start again?” Justin asks her. He just wants reassurance.
And Mary runs the engine for a bit, so the heater comes on, and the minutes pass, and her pen whispers over the lined paper, and Justin drums his fingers on the dashboard and wishes the tape deck were not broken, and the snow shushes, shushes outside the window, and the wind moans dog-like down the white blocked lanes. And Justin thinks, we could sit here forever, and it isn’t entirely an unpleasant thought, because he’s always found Mary’s presence so soothing; but today there is something different about her.
She is preoccupied, almost impatient, as if she has better things to do, but he knows he can tease her out of this mood; he has always been the centre of Mary’s world. She went back to Uganda but she never forgot him. She came back and loved him the same as before. Secretly, he thinks she loves him more than Jamil. Of course Jamil grew in Mary’s belly, but Mary was always there for Justin’s bedtime, and Justin’s birthdays, and Justin’s illnesses — which means she can rarely have been at Jamil’s. Jamil has always been his ghostly rival — he has only met him on five or six occasions — but Justin is pretty sure he’s still ahead. Mary has mentioned Jamil less this time.
“Are you going to write about me and Jamie?”
Her pen stops writing. She stares at the dashboard as if it is a television. “Yes, Justin. I shall write about you.”
“Have you bought Jamie a Christmas present?”
“Yes, I am always buying him presents.”
“Have you bought me a Christmas present?”
But Mary will not answer him.
Suddenly there’s movement, way up in the distance, and other engines fire into life, and under the shimmering scythings of snow, the whole scene shudders into motion again, but this time it’s a halting, wounded motion; the whole herd knows that for now, life has changed, survival has become part of the challenge.
“I need the bathroom,” Mary says, primly. “We’ll have to stop at a Services.”
Their progress is, to Justin, reassuringly slow. There is no more possibility of Mary speeding. The traffic flow moves in stops and starts, at 10 or 20 miles an hour, a great suffering, disintegrating caterpillar, assaulted from above by hordes of tiny white predators, and Mary and Justin desert the jerky caravan and move with a relative turn of speed down the road towards the blankness of the Services’ carpark. A field of churned snow, with a few white-fleeced cars crouched at random angles in the emptiness. The town is reverting to countryside. The world of machines is losing its grip.
Inside, the Services seem ghostly. The personnel have a haunted look that goes oddly with their coronets of tinsel, their fluffy reindeer ears, their enormous necklaces of glittery red and green Christmas balls. They stand and stare out of the plate-glass windows. “I’m only supposed to be on duty till nine,” a harassed-looking teenager confides in Mary. “But nobody’s thought about how I get home. I’ve got a baby waiting for me, you see.” She looks far too young to have a baby. “Where are you making for, anyway?”
Mary tells her, and the girl looks self-important. “Forecast’s like really crap,” she says. “Excuse my language. They’re saying, like, nobody oughtn’t to be driving tonight.”
“We shall be fine,” Mary says.
“Good luck,” the child calls after her.
But part of Mary is not sure she is fine. She sits in the ladies’ using her mobile. Mary has several people to contact, and does not want to do it in front of Justin. She needs to call Omar, though her heart is heavy. The phone calls to Libya have never been easy, hard to get a connection, hard to talk to Omar, but now there is the nagging fear of bad news. She needs to call her friend the accountant, to tell him where she is, and what is happening. She wants to tell him that she loves him, since she has never told him that she loves him, and perhaps she will never escape this place, this endless journey through corridors of ice, this long middle passage between two strangenesses, and even when she arrives, she will be far from home.