Winter's Tale
Frosted cobwebs decorate the corners of the window.
Frosted cobwebs decorate the corners of the window. The weeping willow that shaded me last summer hangs in icy stillness. There are no birds out there, no signs of life.
When the snow came last night, Vivienne phoned and read out a description, written a thousand years ago, of snow falling in Kyoto. There are highlands in Japan, mountains too. What amazes me is that houses could ever be made of wood and paper. “That wouldn’t work in Scotland,” I once told her, and she laughed.
Now she sits on my couch, in front of the fire that never warms me. When I sit beside her, she takes my icy hand. She doesn’t flinch at the touch.
I’ve often pondered on the terms warm- and cold-blooded. Cold-blooded creatures have body temperatures that vary according to surroundings. My dictionary also tells me that they are unfeeling and deliberately ruthless. To be warm-blooded on the other hand is to have blood that stays between 36 and 42 degrees centigrade. A doctor once told my mother that, by all accounts, I should be dead. My mother burst into tears. Presumably to be warm-blooded also means to be the opposite of deliberately ruthless, which could just as easily be randomly ruthless, ruthless in a kind of thoughtless way.
It’s the sharp intake of breath, the withdrawn hand, the narrowed-eye look.
It’s the distance between me and the world.
Do I breathe on them like winter and frost them over? Do I turn their blood to ice? Once upon a time, twice upon a time, I did.
I pull up the sleeve of my jumper. “Look at my veins, Vivienne. You could trace every one.”
She smiles. “Is that an invitation?”
“There are things I want you to know.”
“Alright, Helena. I’m listening.”
I’ve been working up to this moment for weeks, months. Now it’s time. So I tell her that I was born like this, with icy blue-white skin, and that everyone thought at first I was dead. But then I began to cry and the doctors whisked me off to an incubator where I lived for months while they performed endless tests.
The world and my mother were held at bay behind the transparent walls of my cocoon. In the end, baffled, the doctors sent me home. There, I became an object of curiosity. Children and adults alike marvelled at my pale skin, but as I grew older the kids refused to take my hand in games, complaining that I felt too cold.
Vivienne sits, softly stroking my wrist. She writes poetry. Beautiful, sparse, perfect words dropped on a snowy white page. She writes them in English, she writes them in Japanese, the language of her father. Her favourite colour is red. Her black hair, her dark eyes, all sit well with that colour. But she wears white too. White, the colour of a clean sheet of paper waiting for the first strokes of an ink-tipped brush, the colour of the dress she wore the first time I met her when she gave a poetry reading at a Glasgow bookshop. Poems about the highlands of Scotland, and the highlands of Japan. Poems about cherry blossoms blowing down a Glasgow street, a shrine she once visited in Kyoto. Poems about a lover’s face in a moonlit garden.
Now I tell her a story my mother once told me, after my nightdress caught fire. I was six years old and I’d tried to sit too close to the fire. I’d wanted my skin to become warm like everyone else’s.
Once upon a time there was a girl made of snow and ice. Her name was Winter. No one knew how she came to be so cold. Some said it was magic. But others with small minds and nasty tongues said mean things to her. They wouldn’t invite her to their homes, nor befriend her. Winter felt very alone. And she thought that if she could be like everyone else, she wouldn’t be alone anymore. So she went south, to the lands of endless summer, where she stood in the hot sun.
Gradually she became warmer. People came to her and she found a great many friends. But everywhere she went she left wet footprints and a small puddle. Winter was melting. She felt warm, she had friends, but in the lands of summer she would melt away to nothing and die. Winter did not want to die. She went north again. But so much had melted away that when she reached the land of ice and snow, there was little left of her. She wept bitterly at her fate and her tears froze. Gradually, she began to grow as more and more of her tears turned to ice. Soon, she was her own true self again.
“When I lay in my bed that night,” I tell Vivienne, “thinking about my mother’s story, I knew there was no one in the world like me. I’d always be alone. Winter didn’t meet anyone like herself in her own lands. I remember the curtains were half open. I could see the moon, a sliver of cold light. And I recalled that the dead were once thought to live up there. And here was I as cold as the dead, as one of my schoolmates had pointed out. So I imagined walking around with the dead up there, with the famous people I’d read about in books. They would be wraithish blue-white, wise and ever watchful of life on earth. Their hands would pass through mine, but our conversations would be long.”
A lock of Vivienne’s long black hair brushes across my lap, distracting me. I remember our first meeting.
“A poem,” she told me at the bookshop in town, after the audience had departed, “is like a loch reflecting a mountain. The mountain is the concept, the idea, the theme. The snow-capped peaks are the poem’s purest moments, like a note perfectly pitched. But the mountain is reflected in the water of the loch. Which ripples. Because language ripples. The words are the surface of the water, reflecting the themes. But below that, below the surface, are the symbols, the myths, things beyond words. Sometimes they break the surface, sometimes they’re just below, just visible in the language. Other times they lie deep and you have to dive deep to find them. That is a poem.” She paused. It was then that she asked me if I’d like to go out for a drink sometime.
That was back in the summer. For months I’ve circled her like the moon around the earth, never touching. Even when she tries hard to reach me.
Some years ago, I had a partner called Peter. Not just someone passing through, briefly attracted to my difference. He was the real thing. And he’d arrange for us to spend occasional weekends at a friend’s lochside chalet where a spa and sauna were to be procured. The loch was always cold, even in summer. In that respect it was like me. One afternoon, I went swimming in it. When I walked out, he laid me down and held up my limbs to the blazing sun, drying them one by one.
Vivienne knows that I lived with someone, a man, for almost two years. The only time I ever lived with anyone. She knows it came to a sudden end. She doesn’t know why. It’s all very simple.
I put my hand to his neck one night. And then it was over.
So I tell her now about Peter. I met him seven years ago at a New Year fancy dress do at a nightclub. He stood out from the rest of the crowd, a perverse party pooper, in a rather stylish suit and white shirt.
“And who are you meant to be?” he shouted over the music when I went over and asked him to dance.
I wore a dress of blue and silver brocade, trailing to the floor.
“Winter,” I said.
He laughed. It was a laugh he threw himself into, his head tipping backwards. His hair for a moment was a halo of light. Heat radiated from him.
I put my palm on his cheek.
He jumped away in shock.
He thought I’d been holding ice cubes and I let him think that for a time. When I told him the truth, it took him a while to believe it.
“For me, there are two kinds of people in the world,” I said to him in the taxi home. “Those who are put off at the start, and those who are put off later. Don’t bother with excuses when the time comes. I’ve heard them all before.”
“Is that what you tell everyone?” Vivienne asks now.
Since Peter there’s been no one in my life. All the same, I say, “Yes.”
“What about those who aren’t put off, ever?”
“That’s what he said.”
Telling it is like reliving it. I don’t want to relive it. But I want her to know. “All my life I’ve craved heat. I miss it, though I never had it. Except, I think, in the womb. It’s become an obsession. I lie for hours in steaming baths, emptying out water and replacing it with more from the hot tap. I’ve stood beneath countless showers, turning the dial evermore towards red. Hot water is the one thing that warms me, if only for a while. If there was a shrine to hot water, I’d worship there.”
Vivienne laughs.
“Hot water from the shower made me warm for him that night. With male lovers in particular, there are small practical matters like that to take care of. Before we fell asleep, I wrapped the duvet around him, to keep him snug. When I woke in the morning, the winter sun lit up his hair.
“There are particular memories that stand out. One morning, after a fall of snow, we decided to go out. I lived in a flat on the Southside, near the Country Park. We walked under the arched entrance and trees stretched their frosted branches across the river. I remember a fox pausing, and the Highland cattle that came over to us when Peter called them. And the snow-covered fields sweeping up towards a bank of trees on a hill. He wrote my name on the snow with a broken branch. It was easy to forget we were still in the city, that beyond the walls of this place, Glasgow still stood. In the museum, stone cold statues of ancient goddesses and gods looked on us blindly. Staring out of the past, or into it. He claimed to know all their names and made up stories about them. Mostly rude. I laughed a lot that day. It was a happy day. But the glass walls of the museum revealed the woods beyond. A frozen, still world.
“It was a long time before I trusted him. I kept thinking he’d tire of me, of the coldness of my skin. Others had. But he took to the hot water thing with great enthusiasm. We spent a lot of time in the bath.”
“I love a long hot bath,” Vivienne says.
For a moment the past is wiped out by the image of Vivienne naked, something I’ve never seen, stepping into a tub. I shake my head to rid myself of the thought.
“With Peter, I took precautions, though I always assumed that I couldn’t get pregnant. Because I wasn’t normal. Then, a year and five months after we first met, something changed. I began to feel warmth, heat, deep within myself. At first I ignored the signs. It seemed so unlikely. And yet it was true. My skin was warmer to the touch and there was colour in my cheeks. When I finally realised, I worried the baby wouldn’t survive in me.
“Peter was overjoyed at the news, but the doctors weren’t confident I’d carry the child to term. My body defied them. We made plans, discussed names for the baby. The usual stuff. I remember one night we were bathing together. I could see the full moon through the bathroom window.
“‘Do you know that people used to believe that the dead lived on the moon?’ I asked him. ‘I used to believe it too. Sometimes I still do.’ I reached up, curving my hands around the ghostly disc.
“‘I’ll know where to look for you if you die before me then,’ he said.
“‘Maybe I’d be on the dark side,’ I told him. ‘Where it’s always cold.’
“‘But you’re not cold anymore.’
“‘What if I change back?’ I asked.
“I was sitting with my back to his chest, and he pulled me against him and told me it wouldn’t matter. That it hadn’t mattered before. ‘Stop worrying about the future, Hel.’
“That night I had a dream about my parents who were both dead. They sat on a rock and behind them were the star fields of space. My mother cradled something in her arms. A baby wrapped in a blanket. ‘Don’t worry, Helena,’ she told me. ‘We’ll take care of her.’
“I woke up. I felt sick, panicked, and terribly cold. My hands swept over my swollen belly, but the heat was gone. It was winter again, winter in me, winter outside too. It was dark, and the roads were icy. Peter drove me to the hospital, all the time trying to reassure me, but I knew the truth. My baby was dead. My body had killed it.
“‘We don’t know that, Helena,’ he said.
“To make him understand, I put my hand on his neck, above the collar of his hastily buttoned shirt. It must have been a shock. That icy touch he hadn’t felt in months. Because for the first time he pulled away. Or rather, he jerked out my reach. Suddenly we were skidding across the road. He lost control of the wheel. There was a wall. I was wearing my seat belt. We both were. Everything went black. When I woke up, I was in hospital.”
Vivienne squeezes my hand tighter. “And Peter?”
I shake my head. “The staff said it was a miracle I was alive. But I’d lost both of them. Peter and the baby. What did I care about miracles?”
I can still hear my screams in the hospital when they told me the news, then a pinprick in my arm that brought on dreams. And in those dreams he was still alive, so I knew it was all a lie. I could see him through clouds of billowing mists, like on that dance floor the first time we met.
“And who are you meant to be?” he asked me.
“Winter,” I said. I put my hand on his cheek and his skin slowly began to turn blue until suddenly he was lying in a mortuary drawer. I called his name but he didn’t answer. I took a knife and slit open his stomach. And then I crawled inside, pulling his skin over me. I wanted his warmth, but it was gone. He was dead.
Vivienne breaks the long silence.
“You think it was your fault. That you killed him. That you killed them both,” she says. “But it’s not true.”
I take my hand from hers. “I know I did.”
She turns to face me properly, drawing her legs up under her on the couch. “What do you think I’ll do now that you’ve told me? Get up and leave? Is that what you expected?”
I could tell her that Peter came to me recently in a dream. We walked on the sunlit face of the moon, talking. He showed me the child running around, her footprints preceding us across the dusty valley. He told me he missed me but that I should move on. Ahead of us, the earth hung in space. I’d raised my arms and cupped it in my palms. A different globe this time.
Now I take a breath. “It’s a long time since I’ve been with anyone. Not since Peter.”
Her warm fingers sweep the moisture from beneath my eyes. “You’re frightened,” she says, moving closer, her long black hair falling over my hands. “Because your heart isn’t cold. Not at all.” She pauses. Her breath bathes my cheek in heat. “This is what we’ll do,” she says. “I’ll write poems on your skin, not in ink, but in heat, with the tips of my fingers or my tongue. If there’s a word that isn’t just right, or a phrase, I’ll breathe on them, blow them away and start again. I’ll use your veins to map out the verses.”
“And then what?”
“And then? When you wake up in the morning, I’ll write some more.”
Art by Aleksandra at Fusion Dreams. This story originally appeared on Laura Hird’s showcase site many years ago.