‘So this is Colditz,’ said Alex.
The walls of the house were tinged green with moss. Drain pipes. Windows the colour of slate. A bird cawed across the sky. It was cold but this cold was less a reflection of the temperature as it existed than a premonition of the cold which would come at night. Puddles were tense, preparing to freeze.
They walked round to the back of the house. Following her uncle’s instructions Sahra took ten paces to the left, walked towards a tree and then looked for a large rock, beneath which the key was hidden. Allegedly. There were several rocks, none of them particularly big – and no key under any of them. All the ground floor windows were shuttered so Luke and Alex searched for ways of climbing up to the first floor where there were a couple without shutters. The only possibility was to get on to the porch round the side of the house, go up one of the drain pipes – risky – and move along a ledge – even riskier – to a window that might or might not be locked. They decided to attempt it. Alex was standing on Luke’s shoulders when Sahra came and asked what the fuck they were doing.
‘Going up to that window there,’ grunted Alex as he clambered on to the roof of the porch.
‘Oh OK. But you could come in through the door if you like. It wasn’t even locked.’
‘See you inside, Alex,’ said Luke, following Sahra.
It was dark and cold in the house, colder than outside. Sahra lit a couple of candles and got the paraffin lamps working. Luke began laying a fire in the huge grate in the living room. Fortunately there were some large logs and pieces of kindling by the fireside. The problem was that there were few small pieces of wood, nothing to bridge the gap between kindling and logs. Luke was secretly glad of the challenge. There were few tasks that he could perform well and he took great pride in his ability to lay fires. He placed sheets of newspaper in the grate and scattered kindling over the top. Then he rolled up pages of newspaper and tied them in knots, threw in more kindling and the few small pieces of wood that were around. Nicole began carrying things from the car while Alex, having scrambled down from the porch, went out to the woodshed in search of small logs. It was dark now.
Luke put a match to the fire. The paper blued into flame, then the kindling crackled and blazed. The heat was sudden, tremendous. A few minutes later the smaller blocks smouldered into life. Alex brought in some medium-sized logs, ‘almost dry’. Luke chucked them on and very soon the flames were replaced by smoke. Alex looked alarmed.
‘It’ll take,’ said Luke, unsure if it would.
Sahra, meanwhile, had turned on the water and electricity. The wiring in the house, her uncle had said, was ‘uncertain’ and should only be used for lights (as far as she could make out there were no heaters anyway). This was not a problem, he claimed, because once the fire was going the back boiler would generate plenty of hot water (‘enough at any rate’). In the kitchen there was a gas canister and a cooker with a kettle which she began to heat. Alex kept bringing in logs. Nicole had transferred everything from the car to the kitchen. By now the fire looked like it
was
going to stay lit though the living room was still chilly. The bedrooms were freezing, damp.
When the fire was blazing – ‘as I never doubted it would,’ said Alex – Luke took some logs from it and started fires in the kitchen and the two bedrooms. Soon these too were burning brightly and in each bedroom a mattress was propped against chairs to dry out near the fire, even though it was not clear whether the mattresses were damp or just cold. It seemed likely that in a few minutes the house would go up in flames but it seemed more important to generate as much heat as possible.
Luke began cooking while Nicole and Sahra sat drinking or dashed upstairs to check that the mattresses weren’t on fire. The fire in the living room was roaring. The water began running hot. Alex rolled a joint and then he and Sahra took a bath.
After dinner they checked the mattresses, decided they were dry and made the beds. Sahra put hot-water bottles in both beds and then they sat in the living room not speaking: sleepy, enjoying being by the fire which Luke prodded and rearranged constantly even though the thick bed of red embers meant that it was self-generating. A new log – part of a fence post – gave off a tiny jet of deep green flame: ‘because of the wire at the top there,’ said Luke, tapping it with the poker.
Apart from the track leading up to it to they had no idea what lay beyond the house.
What lay beyond the house turned out to be fog. When Nicole got out of bed in the morning and pulled back the curtain she found that the window was blurred with condensation. The view did not improve when she wiped it. The condensation was outside as well: fog. Alex disputed this at breakfast. Fog, he claimed, was not condensation, but since he was unsure
what
fog was they settled for Nicole’s definition.
Luke had become obsessed with the fire, with keeping it burning at all times. He spent the morning bringing in logs and piling them by the side of the fire so that they would dry out and catch as soon as they were thrown on.
‘It’s the caveman thing,’ explained Alex. ‘He’s got back in touch with the prehistoric origins of his desire to regulate temperature. Vulcan, that’s what we should call him.’
Sahra and Nicole decorated the house with streamers and silver and red tinsel. The living room looked so nice that Alex went out and chopped down a Christmas tree. They wedged it upright in a pot of earth, decorated it with the fairy lights and angel-hair.
It was not until midday that they were ready for a walk in the forest. Quite a production: sweaters, boots, scarves, hats . . . Alex had forgotten his gloves and had to unwrap one of his presents early. Then he rolled and lit a joint. At last they were ready to set out. The stillness was primeval, as if history had never happened. The fog was so thick that even nearby trees were indistinct. Nicole was wearing a red embroidered hat with ear flaps that made her look like a Mongol invader. Blurred and mossy against the grey, it was by far the brightest thing in the forest. No animals were straying. The calls of birds were eerie-sounding. Sahra shook the branch of a small tree. There was a long pause and then a few drips fell to the ground. Nicole could see Luke walking ahead. She turned to speak to Sahra and when she looked back he could no longer be seen. She called to him – ‘Vulcan! Vulcan!’ – and he walked back towards the others through the fog that had engulfed him.
‘We should stick together,’ Nicole said, surprised by how quickly she had lost sight of Luke. They walked on, had a sense, sometimes, of moving up or down a slope but apart from gradient nothing changed: just the greyness and the darker greyness of the trees. Luke had been hoping vaguely that they would become lost. Until they became lost, it seemed to him, they had not really given themselves to the fog; until it obliterated everything it was still only a species of mist. And then, gradually (even the speed of realization was in keeping with the blurred, indefiniteness of the fog) they did become lost.
‘Does anyone know where we are?’ said Nicole.
‘No idea.’
‘Nor me.’
‘Nor me,’ said Luke, understanding now that everyone had been slightly hoping that they would lose their bearings. Each of them had been content to give themselves to the directionlessness of the fog because they had all assumed that someone else in the group would not have done so and would be able to steer them back to safety. The idea of being lost was nice but now they were faced with the need to become unlost. Being so stoned did not help. Sahra was conscious of her damp feet. Soon it would grow dark.
‘What shall we do?’
‘I’m not sure. Panic?’
‘My impulse, of course, is to start blaming someone,’ said Luke. ‘Nicole!’
‘The problem,’ she said, ‘is that the fog is not thick enough.’
‘Not thick
enough
?’
‘In Siberia the fog is so solid that as you walk through it your body makes a tunnel. It remains intact for hours, long enough to trace your way back home.’
‘If we had anything to tie we could tie it to trees to avoid going through the same place twice.’
‘If we had a ball of string we could unravel it.’
‘If we had a compass we could look at it and be none the wiser.’
‘If we had a bar of chocolate we could divide it into four and eat it. For energy.’
‘I have chocolate,’ said Nicole. ‘Who would like a square? Except for Luke, I mean.’
They decided to keep on walking even though they had no idea of where the house was or which way to go. After half an hour nothing had changed. It was growing dark. Usually when it gets dark the light changes, deepens, but here the descent into darkness was marked by a gradual dimming of the already dim light. It seemed possible that they would have to spend the night outside and wait for the fog to clear. They walked silently, anxiously. Earlier in the day they had wanted the fog to press in on them, to shroud their vision still further; now they were trying to peer through it, hoping it would suddenly disperse.
They continued walking – ‘What else can we do?’ said Luke – and then, when they had almost lost hope, Nicole saw a light in the distance. Hardly enough to be seen, just a faint square of yellow. And it was not even ‘in the distance’: it turned out to be less than fifty yards away. Within minutes they were home. The timing was perfect: they were getting near to temper loss, recrimination and tears but, like this, the afternoon took on the exhilarating cast of a catastrophe narrowly averted.
Luke threw more logs on the fire and started the fires in the bedrooms. He and Nicole took a bath and then, by a tacit understanding, both couples went off to their bedrooms and made love. The house was silent. Nicole and Luke lay under the heavy duvet, watching shadow-flames writhe around the room. Across the corridor Sahra lay in the crook of Alex’s arms and then they fell asleep. When they woke Alex’s arm was numb, dead. Luke got up and made tea and turned on the Christmas-tree lights. The angel-hair made the lights glow soft and wispy. Alex came down. They heard the bath running, footsteps, Sahra and Nicole’s voices, splashing. Nicole lay in the bath, Sahra sat on the toilet, chatting, laughing. The two women thought nothing about being naked together but neither appeared naked in front of the other’s boyfriend; the two men – who were sitting at the kitchen table, chatting, laughing – never appeared naked in front of each other.
It was Christmas Eve.
In his Christmas stocking the next day Luke found underpants, socks and a purple baseball cap.
‘Do you like your presents?’
‘Yes,’ said Luke.
‘They’re intimate presents.’
‘They’re lovely.’
‘The underpants are intimate because you’ll wear them against your bottom. The socks are intimate because you’ll wear them against your feet.’
‘Right. And the hat is intimate because I’ll wear it against my better judgement.’
‘You don’t like them do you?’
‘I do. I promise. Here’s your stocking,’ he said, handing it to her. She unwrapped a pair of ear rings, a tube of the chocolates she loved, and the skimpiest pair of white knickers imaginable.
‘You must be joking.’
‘Are they too big?’
‘If they were any smaller they wouldn’t exist.’
‘You’d be surprised how hard it is to get very skimpy knickers made of cotton. Once you get into that degree of minimalism you’re into porno, a world where natural fibres cease to exist. Speaking of porno, there’s one present you’ve still not unwrapped.’
Nicole unwrapped it gingerly: a vibrator: in special seasonal packaging.
‘Oh how lovely. An electronic toothbrush. Thank you.’
‘Merry Christmas.’
‘Luke, you are too much.’
‘You’ve no idea how embarrassed I was buying that. If it hadn’t been for the holly on the box I don’t think I could have gone through with it.’
‘Have you bought me anything that isn’t totally perverted?’
‘That depends,’ said Luke.
The rest of the morning was spent cooking and wrapping up the ‘offcial’ gifts. An atmosphere of benevolent conspiracy prevailed as the four friends arranged themselves in different rooms to wrap each other’s presents. In order to increase the sense of overflow and abundance Nicole and Sahra began wrapping up bottles of wine from the communal hoard. Alex and Luke joined in by wrapping up a selection of other communal items.
They pulled the crackers (which were useless) and ate lunch wearing coloured paper hats, always on the look-out for the chance to say, ‘Are you still with us, Trevor?’ The presents were unwrapped after lunch, between the roast and the pudding no one felt like eating. Nicole had bought Luke a sweater that he had seen in a shop but which, at the time, he could not face trying on. She unwrapped the present Luke had bought her and found a Polaroid camera. From Alex, Sahra got exactly what she wanted: a leopardskin jacket that was not made out of leopardskin at all. Sahra gave Nicole a pair of socks with toes on. Sahra and Alex had bought Luke a Walkman. Surprised and somewhat disappointed that Luke and Nicole had bought them nothing, Alex and Sahra moved on to the small items that the men had wrapped up. Expecting to find another pair of ear rings, Sahra found a tiny sachet of cocaine; Nicole unwrapped a chunk of hash; then Alex himself tore open the stash of grass he had wrapped up a few hours previously.
‘Look,’ said Sahra suddenly. It had started to snow outside, swirling silently beyond the window. Luke arranged four lines on a mirror like thin streaks of snow and they took it in turns to sniff them up with a red Christmas straw.
By now Nicole had loaded the Polaroid. They started with straightforward group shots, crowding round to watch the first pale smears appear, smudges of pink that traced the ghostly blank of a face. Background blurs became walls and shelves. Hair and eyes emerged, colours. After taking a few of these Nicole began running a fork through the wet prints so that the images, when they emerged, were patterned with luminescent streaks. Alex could not wait to have a go himself and proceeded to score a picture of Luke in such a way that red and gold antlers emerged from his head, like an extreme form of tribal head-dress, some trace of the spirit world, of his animal soul which the Polaroid had picked up. Luke loved these Polaroids, loved the way the present became a memory as soon as it occurred: an instant memory. When they had finished the first film Luke, feeling jittery after a second line of coke, immediately loaded another. He had bought the camera for Nicole but now refused to relinquish it. He wanted, he said to push the form forward, towards more abstract, less representational work in which the image was more severely distressed (‘i.e. ruined,’ said Alex on seeing the results). Many mistakes were made, and not only by Luke. Nicole wrestled the camera away from him, taking an unintended shot of the ceiling as she did so. They were all feeling jittery; Alex rolled a joint to take the edge off the coke. Nicole claimed that she knew how to do multiple exposures but nothing came of her portrait of Sahra except the vague trace of hair and the black dot of an eye, like a fresco worn away over hundreds of years to almost nothing.