Snow Garden (7 page)

The girl scans the lists of destinations – places she has never visited: Palma, Reus, Enfidha – and they are each coupled with the words ‘DELAYED. Awaiting Information’.

‘There’s freak weather coming,’ a middle-aged man says to his wife. They both wear linen suits, white with a crease in them, and straw hats, and they speak very loudly, the way Magda has noticed that some English people do, as if no one else is present. ‘Nothing taking off. Nothing landing. We could be here for hours. Merry bloody Christmas.’

Someone says there’s been a terrorist attack and someone else says there hasn’t, it’s just a problem with the computers at air-traffic control.

‘Whatever it is, we’re not going anywhere,’ repeats the man in his linen suit. He tears his straw hat off his head as if to show that is the end of his holiday.

‘You sure you’re OK, Mags?’ asks the older woman.

‘I think so,’ says Magda.

‘You don’t look it.’

‘I am OK.’

Later, Magda overhears some people talking about snow and others about flash floods, but they are still there, all of them waiting in the departure lounge. If anything, there are more people now; this is not a huge airport.

‘You want anything?’ asks the older woman. They use simple English words because the older woman knows no Latvian and Magda knows no Romanian.

Magda shakes her head. ‘Something’s happening.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know.’

She thinks again of that deer and the way every muscle of it was waiting.

Not all the passengers at the airport are people. The animal reception centre is a white building situated a stone’s throw from the departure lounge where pets are held until they can be collected by their owners. The staff take care of animal welfare during shipment, help to stop smuggling, and X-ray animals to check for drugs and bombs.

This morning there is a lively smell of farmyard mixed with the more familiar one of detergent. You get it as soon as you pass Security. Manure and bleach, thinks Mrs Pike, deputy manager, arriving for the first shift of Christmas Day. She says to one of the girls (she can never tell them apart, and when she does, the girls only go and dye their hair blue or purple or pink, and Mrs Pike is confused all over again), she says, ‘I am certain I can smell manure.’ Hester. That is her name. Or at least that is what it says on the plastic identity badge hanging from a ribbon around her neck.

‘Oh, that will be the donkey,’ says Hester. She seems to have green hair.

‘What donkey?’ says Mrs Pike.

‘The donkey that came in the night,’ says Hester. ‘It has no paperwork.’

‘A donkey?’

Hester makes an infuriating ‘Uh-huh’ noise at her mobile phone. She doesn’t even glance up.

‘Why did no one mention a donkey before?’

‘I guess they thought you’d notice. There’s a goat and four cheetahs as well.’

Mrs Pike gropes for the edge of the desk. ‘A goat?
Cheetahs?
We’re only supposed to have cats and dogs.’

‘And fish,’ points out Hester. Her hair hangs like grass.

‘And fish,’ concedes Mrs Pike, reaching for her handbag and tugging out her Nicorettes.

‘The cheetahs don’t have their microchips. We are holding them until a convenient alternative can be found. Nobody has a clue about the goat. It’s a total nightmare.’

Christmas Morning. A strange weather front is apparently heading in the direction of the airport. The computers have gone down in air-traffic control. Cars are at a standstill on the two-mile stretch from the motorway. Nobody can move; Mrs Pike had to abandon her Polo and walk. At home she still has the turkey to stuff, along with a vegan alternative, because at six p.m. her three daughters will arrive, along with her two sons-in-law and her six Pikelet grandchildren. The last thing Mrs Pike needs or wants is a grassy-haired girl telling her about four cheetahs without microchips, an unexplained goat and a donkey.

‘Also a terrapin,’ says Hester. ‘A guy was trying to smuggle it through in his underpants.’

‘All I need really is to lie down,’ says Magda. Her friend watches her with as much fear in her eyes as Magda has ever seen.

‘It’s not coming, is it?’

‘I don’t think so, Jo.’

Magda isn’t in pain, not as such, but she can feel the baby inside her, and for the first time she doesn’t seem big enough to hold it. There is a small person bundled like a stowaway in her belly, poking and fidgeting, growing. ‘I’m OK,’ she says, because the older woman is standing with her body stooped and her big, thick arms outstretched, as if bracing herself to catch a rugby ball.

‘I’ll ask someone to move, Mags,’ she says. ‘So you can lie down.’

‘Don’t worry, Jo.’ The girl doesn’t want to go drawing attention to herself. Besides, everyone looks so cross and miserable, there is no point asking. She just wants to be alone, just her and the baby. She doesn’t even need Johanna. Not right now.

‘I will ask, though,’ Johanna says, and then Magda doesn’t hear any more because here is that wrenching feeling and she has to breathe into it, right into the eye of it, so that it doesn’t split her open. She notices Johanna has gone and then she feels another wave of wrenching and she forgets Johanna. She forgets everything. She is just a tiny body with a huge hollowing punch inside. By the time it’s over, Jo is back.

‘You were right,’ Johanna says. ‘No one wants to give up their seat. We need to find you somewhere else.’ Fear makes her voice sound younger and smaller than the rest of her. Magda wants to hold her, like she does at home, Johanna’s head in her lap while she strokes her pink cropped hair and feels how soft it is beneath her fingertips, but people will look and so she can’t.

The baby is still, but soon it will be pushing her again. The moment of calm is even more precious because already it has an end. ‘I only need to be somewhere quiet,’ she says. She thinks she can hear choral music, but how can that be? It must be in her head.

There is nothing for it but to sing. ‘O Come All Ye Faithful.’ What else can you do if you are the Stroud Girls’ Choir and you are wearing embroidered blue sweatshirts that tell everybody you are the Stroud Girls’ Choir and you are stuck at the airport, with no room to swing a cat?

‘Come along, girls,’ interrupts Shelley. ‘Chins up.’

‘What about Winston, Miss?’

‘What about him?’ says Shelley. Winston, her sixteen-year-old son, is sitting on his travelling bag with his face in his hands and his blue sweatshirt wrapped like a turban around his scalp. He has a headache.

‘Does Winston have to put his chin up an’ all?’

‘Yes,’ says Shelley. ‘Winston?’

Winston staggers to his feet and puts up his chin. The girls are all a good year younger than him but he barely reaches their shoulders. Shelley lifts her hands for silence.

She hasn’t slept for worry. Her head is hammering. Last time she took the choir on tour, it was supposed to be lights-out at nine-thirty. Instead she spent every night trying to barricade all fifteen members of the Stroud Girls’ Choir into the fourth floor of their motel. She put Winston in charge so that she could grab a bite to eat and later found him tied to a chair whilst all fifteen choir members knocked back vodka and pineapple juice in the bar. After the tour there was an additional bill for broken toilets, a jammed sink, the dismantling of a Teasmade and the theft of fifteen waitress uniforms. She had sworn never to take the Stroud Girls’ Choir anywhere ever again, not even down to the shopping mall for a lunchtime sing-song, and then they went and won both the local and national heats for Girls’ Choir of the Year. It was hard to believe they had been invited to battle it out on the banks of Lake Geneva in the European finals just after Christmas. But they had. The competition would open with a gala performance by all finalists on Boxing Day.

Johanna asks everyone. The answer is always the same. No, they will not give up their seat. ‘But my wife,’ she says in her broken English. ‘She is pregnant.’ Well, that only makes it worse. People won’t even catch her eye when they hear that.

‘You should go home,’ someone tells her, and she doesn’t know whether he means back to the flat or Eastern Europe.

The baby is due in six weeks. Magda is not supposed to fly, not at this stage, but the tickets were cheap last-minute ones so they kept quiet about her pregnancy. There are legal documents that Johanna needs to sign, relating to the sale of her mother’s house in Bucharest. She is walking fast, past the rows of shops. It’s hard to keep her mind focussed when there are so many people and so many things to buy. She wants to know what is happening to Magda and whether it’s normal, but she has no idea who to ask. She isn’t even sure she has the right words. ‘Watch where you’re going!’ someone shouts. She looks to her left and realizes it’s Father Christmas.

Six of them, actually. They are drinking cans of Coke outside Duty-Free.

‘Have you seen any kids?’ asks another of the Father Christmases.

‘Kids?’ repeats Johanna.

‘We’re looking for kids. We’re the entertainment. We’ve been laid on by the airport authority. Until things get sorted in this place.’

One of the Father Christmases has lost his white beard, or maybe he has chosen not to wear it. His skin is dark and soft and he looks all of eighteen.

Johanna points in the direction of the seats. ‘Lots of children there,’ she says.

The Father Christmases give her a thumbs-up and swagger away, ringing sleigh bells and shouting, ‘HO, HO, HO!’ They sound more like a bunch of hungry football fans than bringers of gifts and good tidings. Briefly she wonders about the father of Magda’s baby. It’s a painful question and it still hurts like a spike every time it sneaks up on her.

Let’s face it, he could be anyone. Magda was already pregnant when she and Johanna first met. The father of her baby could be anywhere. He could be right here at the airport, for all Johanna knows. ‘What do you mean, you don’t remember?’ she had asked, over and over. Sometimes the question seemed to ask itself. All Magda remembered was that she’d been at a party. She’d been given a drink. That was all. When she came round she was in a garden, she didn’t even know whose, and she was half-dressed with a punched-up eye.

For a while Johanna had felt betrayed. Eaten up with jealousy. She knew she had no reason to feel either of these things – the two women hadn’t even known each other when Magda had gone to the party – but it was the thought of someone else, a man, fetching her a drink, leading her to the door, kissing her mouth. (‘You
must
remember something, Magda!’ ‘I don’t. I don’t.’) If only Magda would show some anger, but she never did. ‘You don’t have to have this baby,’ Johanna had told her. It wasn’t the sixties. What happened was rape. ‘And you know,’ she’d shouted, hurting with the memory of other children she had known, half-starved, beaten up regularly, some of them, ‘it’s
wrong
to have a baby you don’t want.’

And Magda had looked back at her with soft grey eyes and said, ‘But I do, Jo. I want this baby with you.’ Johanna had asked Magda to marry her. She knew, even then, that she would never love anyone else.

Johanna feels a pang of sickness, then realizes it’s hunger. She should buy Magda a drink and some food. Maybe that’s the problem; they haven’t eaten since last night. Johanna had assumed they’d be in the air by now. She heads towards Duty-Free.

‘No,’ the assistant tells her, ‘you can’t buy just one bar of chocolate. You can only purchase dis special Christmas bumper pack.’ It is about the length and thickness of Johanna’s arm. Johanna buys bottled water and the chocolate. It’s cripplingly expensive; normally they would spend the same amount on a week’s groceries.

‘Do you want da fluffy toy?’ asks the assistant. She seems to be dressed as an angel with a tinsel halo and she has such a bad cold she has lost the use of her nose.

‘What fluffy toy?’

‘Da penguins are all sold out,’ says the assistant. ‘We’ve only got lambs left. You get da fluffy toy free with da chocolate. It’s a bargain.’

‘Could I leave the fluffy toy and pay not so much money for the chocolate?’

The assistant scowls as if Johanna has just done something offensive, like breaking into her native tongue. A woman behind her, who is dressed from head to toe in brand-new snow gear, gives an impatient huff. It is only once she has paid that it occurs to Johanna that half an hour has passed since she left Magda. What has she been doing talking to Father Christmases and staring at duty-free items? It’s this place. It robs everything of its context. All she wants is to be with Magda. It’s so strong, her desire to care for her, her need, her love, it’s almost violent.

As Johanna pushes her way through the crowds back to Magda with the drink and the chocolate and the fluffy toy under her arm, she passes a band of girls in blue sweatshirts singing Christmas songs, along with a small frightened young lad in a turban. A group of onlookers has assembled to watch. Several people are dancing, including one of the Father Christmases and some more shop assistants dressed as angels.

‘Aww, cute!’ shout some of the singing girls on spotting Johanna.

She assumes they’re referring to her lamb.

‘We will have to put out a plea for help,’ says Mrs Pike, chewing two Nicorettes, one at each side of her mouth. She’s forgotten the name of the girl with green hair again. She squints at her identity tag.

‘Hester,’ says the girl.

‘I want you to ring the local radio station, Hester. Ask if anyone is looking to adopt a pet for Christmas.’

‘There is another problem,’ says Hester, twisting her hair. ‘The donkey.’

‘What about the donkey?’

‘We are going to have to move her. She keeps trying to kick the cage with the cheetahs. It’s upsetting them.’

‘And where exactly are we going to put the donkey?’

‘Maybe we could take her for a walk?’ says Hester. ‘It’s not as if there are any planes taking off. Besides, it’s getting awfully smelly out there.’

‘You are suggesting we walk the donkey through the airport?’

Hester shrugs, as if to say she’s seen worse. ‘There’s going to be a public-information announcement soon,’ she adds. ‘About what’s going on.’