January 2003

When it started snowing again, Natalie finally admitted to herself that the bus wasn’t going to come.  She decided to walk.

She should have been a lot more annoyed.  It was freezing.  She’d been waiting at that bus stop for twenty minutes.  She was going to have to walk for another twenty minutes, and then she was still going to be late for school.  But as she looked around, all she could feel was a kind of awe.

It had been seven or eight years since it had snowed around here.  Natalie had forgotten how much it changed things.

Most days, this road made your heart sink just to look at it.  Dull brown pavements covered in chewing gum and dog crap, surrounded by ugly houses and grey, withered trees, full of people who yelled in your ear or elbowed you out of the way.  Today, Natalie had most of it to herself.  Every so often she saw a trail of footprints, either tread marks from somebody’s shoes or a little impression of a cat or dog’s paw, but mostly there was just one quiet drift of white, with little flakes blowing up around her feet like miniature blizzards.

The air tasted cleaner today.  Natalie didn’t know why, but it did.

A few streets away from school, Natalie saw some people up ahead, crouching down in the pavement.  As she approached, one of them stood up, and Natalie recognised her- Abbie Chamberlain, a girl from her RE class.  Abbie caught her eye and grinned.  “I walked up to meet Amelia, and it turned out she was doing this,” she explained.

“What is it?” asked Natalie.

“Er…  I think David said it was going to be an alligator?”  Abbie looked back at the other two for confirmation.

“It’s an optical illusion,” said one of them.  She was in their year at school, but Natalie wouldn’t have remembered that her name was Amelia if Abbie hadn’t said.  “It’s going to drive people crazy.”

Abbie nodded.  “So that’s our good deed for the day.”

Natalie laughed.  Part of her- the anal retentive part- wanted to remind them that they were already late for school and should hurry up, but the rest of her overruled it.  She had a feeling that, if she said something as stupid as that, an opportunity for something beautiful and worthwhile would disappear forever.  “Why an alligator, though?”

Amelia tossed her hair like a girl in a book.  “We like to ask, ‘why not?’”

A third person, who’d been gathering snow a little way off, wandered over and gave Natalie a wave.  She couldn’t see much of him- besides his face, most of him was wrapped in layers and layers of wool- but she saw a pair of bright blue eyes and a reassuring smile.  She smiled back.

Amelia straightened up and made a show of brushing the snow off her gloves.  “Time to go, Abbie,” she announced, “It was fun while it lasted, but they’ll be expecting us over at the old schoolhouse soon.”

Natalie held up her hands.  “Oh, don’t stop just because…”

“No, no, it’s time we were heading in.  David can put on the finishing touches.”  Amelia nodded towards the boy in all the woollens.  He was crouching down over the alligator, but Natalie could still tell how tall he was from here.  He looked a couple of years older than the rest of them.

“Mind if we walk with you?” asked Abbie, picking up her bag.

“Sure,” said Natalie.  Her heart had done a weird somersault when Abbie had asked that, but she didn’t think it showed in her voice.

“Excellent,” said Amelia.  She stepped out ahead of Natalie and Abbie, leading them on.  “Come along.  We’re on a polar expedition here.”

*

Natalie, Abbie and Amelia were half an hour late.  Most of the other Year Elevens were even later than that.  There was a group coming in on a bus that had got stuck on the motorway, and they weren’t expected to be here for another hour.  The teachers didn’t see the point of setting any important work while half of their students weren’t even there to do it, so most of the lessons were whiled away with stories of everyone’s morning, as they all tried to work out who’d had the hardest journey.  The classrooms were emptier, the hours were freer, and every time you looked out of the window, you saw a new world.  Natalie couldn’t remember any other school day like this.

“It’s sheer anarchy,” said Amelia’s friend Johnny.  The four of them had ended up sat together near the front of their Science classroom.  Their usual seats were a lot further apart, but today Mrs Sugarman had told them she didn’t want everyone sitting on opposite sides of the room, and they’d been happy to oblige.  “One thing goes wrong, and every single system of power breaks down.”

“Yes,” said Abbie happily, “and then we get to make snow alligators.”

Johnny laughed.  “Actually, have you seen all those snowmen the Year Sevens made around the entrance?  It’s practically an army.  Like something out of Calvin and Hobbes.”

“Homicidal killer snow goons,” said Natalie, sitting back in her chair, “I think that’s it, anyway.”  She had a warm, contented feeling in her stomach, as if she was a cat curling up by the fireplace.  She didn’t know why she’d never hung out with these three before.  They’d been talking all morning, and there hadn’t been an awkward silence once.  In Natalie’s experience, that was pretty rare once you got to secondary school.

Johnny grinned back at her.  “Snow goons are bad news,” he quoted.

“I can’t believe Miss Rivers broke up that snowball fight at break, though,” said Abbie, scratching her knee, “It’s as if she hates joy.”

“Pretty sure it was Mischa Lewis who told her,” replied Johnny, “She was telling everyone to stop earlier.  Haven’t you got anything better to do?” he added, imitating Mischa’s high-pitched whine.

“Mischa Lewis!” declared Amelia, “I can’t stand her!  She thinks she’s some sort of wise, mature… oracle, but as soon as she opens her mouth I want to punch her in it!”

Natalie listened with interest.  Mischa Lewis was the kind of person who made your heart sink every time you saw her.  Nine times out of ten, you’d have a perfectly nice, normal conversation with her, but the tenth time, she’d decide you needed a lecture on how to improve yourself before you drove everyone around you away with your terrible behaviour.  Natalie wasn’t sure if she wanted to punch her for that, exactly, but it was nice to hear someone else being annoyed, too.

Amelia made an irritated noise, like a kettle letting off steam.  “It’s the mouth, with that underbite, and that accent, and that… smugness, for want of a better word.”

Johnny held up his hands, as if in surrender.  “OK, I admit that I do find Mischa the slightest bit attractive…”  Amelia whacked him on the arm, and he laughed.  “Hey, she’s a goddess compared to that beast Frankie Vernon!”

“Ha!  True!”  Amelia settled back down.

“But the intellectual side…  Yeah, that raises alarm bells.”

“What I want to know is, how come boys think she’s so great when she’s got no boobs?”  Amelia straightened up and waved her arms.  “They all say they want big boobs and then they go out with stick insects!”

The others laughed, and Natalie sat back a little.  If she hadn’t moved her head in exactly the right way, she wouldn’t have been the one to see it.

Just beyond the playing fields, in one of the roads outside school, a white alligator reared its head up from the snow, baring its fangs at an unsuspecting populace.  It would have been impossible yesterday, when the pavements were bare and grimy.  It should have been impossible today, but Amelia, Abbie, and that older guy, David, had come together to bring it into the world.  The idea and the execution couldn’t have taken more than an hour, but it was one of the most beautiful things Natalie had ever seen.

When you met people who could do something like that, you wanted to keep them around for as long as possible.

(To be continued)