Moira Hates Winter

The summer of '76 did it for me, back when everyone was still imperfectly alive. My father, an infrequent visitor, chose that year of all years to convert the loft into a living space. The image of him lying prone, slick with sweat while unravelling a bale of fibreglass for the lower rafters is sharper than other memories I have of him.

It was also the year I went on a class trip to the Welsh borders. It was the last act of our primary school days before we had to grow up in September. Some of my friends fainted on a walk we took on the second day. Dead Boy’s Grave, it was called. I bet they don’t call it that anymore. I don’t much care for poetry, but I wish they would stop stripping it from our prose.

So it was '76, the endless, boiling, shitty glare of it, that put me off summer for life.

Today it is snowing.

I have lost interest in life of late. It is not that I wish to die, but it’s the whole process of living; paying bills, taking showers, cooking, being nice to people, that is really starting to grind my gears. And for this reason, I have not been looking at the weather forecasts of late. Even so, I can usually tell when snow is coming. There is a particular smell to the ozone and the sky takes on a classic hue, like a Michelangelo statue or a Rembrandt face.

There was no such warning yesterday. Yesterday the sky was blue and the sun, although winter-weak, was striving. The temperature, as much as I thought about it, was mild. Besides which, snow is rare around here. Never at the forefront of your mind. It is rarer still when it settles. And yet I, poorly appareled and richly surprised, found myself outdoors, like a child, savouring the cornflake crunch underfoot. The real children, quieter than my noisy generation, were out in force, their parents wearing the smiles of people whose entertainment budget had dropped freely from the sky.

My neighbours, Grant and Craig, were snowballing. They are in their fifties and were wearing T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops. This is their casual wear whatever the weather, unless they’re going to work. The weather has no opinion of them at all. I was invited to their wedding a couple of years ago, and I suppose I nonplussed myself by accepting. I got completely bladdered and ate half the pig roast. They’ve never mentioned it. I’m sure everyone else was just as pissed as me but maybe not quite so hungry. I don’t even remember how I got home, so God bless the angels, I say. They asked me if I wanted to go to theirs tonight for some food and drinks. They don’t pity me, to be clear. They think I’m funny ha-ha and I suppose I am, but if I went over there I’d have to shower and find something to wear and I’d miss all those programmes I’ve already seen a thousand times before. So I declined and said maybe another time, and Grant pitched the perfect snowball at the back of my head by way of response.

Just before the entrance to the park is an evergreen arch. In the summer I do not appreciate the dusty parched leaves, whose general lack of substance suggests they hate the season as much as I do. But in the highlighting frost of the chill, the cobwebs in the privets, their symmetry, remind me of the snowflakes, expressing a grand plan of which I am presumably a part.

Summer is telescopic. Winter is microscopic.

Summer is essentially dull, like empty palaces whose glory has been stripped and left to the bluebottles. By contrast, winter is an honest examiner. It is solace for your losses. Winter is closing your curtains and congratulating yourself, so much sooner, for getting through the day.

It is the season, beyond all others, that comforts both the lonely and the lazy. And I am both of those things.

I was going to the shop for wine and something satisfying, something meaty to eat. In the park, in the valley of short but steep inclines, children slid past me on bum boards and toboggans. Clearly there is a parental gene which elects to buy these things despite no evidence that they might ever be used. It is like building flood defences on a mountain top, or stocking beans and spaghetti hoops in the garage in case of unlikely famine.

Today it had paid off and I was glad of it. Children don’t really change so much. Nor do parents, so it seems.

They always keep rows of bananas right by the door of the shop. Today, the petrichor from outside and the smell of damp clothing from within had overruled their sickly gum-bubble smell. I was glad of that too, because in the list of things I dislike, bananas are on there somewhere. Moira is on there too, which was unfortunate because she was in the wine aisle and she saw me before I had a chance to escape in pasta.

Moira is congenitally miserable. Her children no longer speak to her, which I suspect is a tragedy for her but a necessity for them. Her voice was the usual monotone. She wasn’t pleased to see me. She doesn’t like my politics but it was she, after all, who brought the subject up. Worse, I think, is that I told her I hated summer. It was a long time ago, but she has never forgiven me. She behaves as if my objection to the season might single-handedly bring about another ice age. True to form, she gave me the side-eye and said, I suppose you’re loving this weather. The tone implied that I was the sort of person who might applaud if a serial killer was released on license.

I always upgrade my inherent cheerfulness when Moira is in my purview. I do it out of spite because I know it annoys her. Thinking of her estranged adult children, I asked her if she had a toboggan in the garage. She snorted. Moira does do that.

I said, ’Well, wouldn’t it be fun, later? You and the dog, sliding down the park in the dark, when all the kids have gone?’

‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Jesus Christ!’ She slipped away from me with her brandy and her wine. I bought peanut butter cupcakes, steak, frozen chips and a bottle of red. I waited until she had gone. The snow was falling heavy when I got outside and lifted my face to the opal sky. The whole smell of it makes my heart sing. All of this does, the whole shebang. The cracked window with the heating on full, the intake of breath, the cold comfort of the low electric light and the old shows on TV, the absence of buzzing creatures and the silent, swarming fruit flies. No barbecues to remind me that I am nobody’s guest.

Well, apart from Grant and Craig, but they’re sluts when it comes to company. Most people are more discerning.

The store closes at ten. At nine thirty I think I need another bottle of wine. I took the same path through the evergreen arch, and when I exited, there was Moira hurtling down the slope on a toboggan, with her dog at the helm. His ears were pinned back by the velocity and he was smiling in that gummy, goofy canine way. She had a tartan Tam O’ Shanter stuck to her head. She is of Scottish heritage, which might explain things. A lot of things, in fact. Her lacquered grey curls didn’t move so much as Buddy’s ears. She was also smiling, and I have never seen her smile unless it could be mistaken for a grimace.

I hid behind a tree to watch her fat arse trudging up the hill again until I realised that buying more wine before the shop closed was a far stronger imperative than watching Moira enjoying herself.

I won’t mention it. She is hardly the gushing type who would tap me on the shoulder in soup and say, You know, I thought about what you said … In fact, I’m pretty sure she would hate me all the more for it if she knew.

To me, it is a miracle, like the settled snow, like the forecast that says the schools will be closed on Monday and I heard all the kids in my street whooping at the news, like when the Germans bombed the schools in the war and they all shouted, ‘Thank you, Mr Hitler!’

I will confess that my life is not much of a life, but it makes the small things big, like the sugar-coated cobwebs and the robin, asleep now, who never leaves for warmer climes but choses to stay, and spends the season in kingship.

I took the longer route on the way home from the shop because, when all is said I'm done, I'm quite nice like that.