In the snow

I don't know if it was my fault or not. I'm not denying that I decided myself what to do, but sometimes you have no other choice. Sometimes your life is like a chess game, and you can position your pieces here, and here, and strike a blow here; at other times it's more like white-water rafting, stuck in the middle of the rapids, not being able to plan the tactics of your opponent - the river, or God, or the Devil, or Death, or the Fates - several moves ahead. Meeting John was a bit like extreme sports for the head and heart. It was like the ground disappeared underneath my feet, and my heart began walloping away in my chest like a drummer convention.

Poor John. Blame his parents, of course. Who would call their child John Wayne Leventhal? Jay Dubya, John, Jay Wayne to his university friends. A running joke I only partly understand, that surfaces every now and again with someone (usually drunk) hollering at him: "Hey, Wayne!" I can't say I find it funny. It reeks of twenty-four packs of cheap beer and parties in bedsits and smoking dope at 2am. Although John was a rower (he still has the tone and muscle) so perhaps there was no dope, just lots more beer. Every time he heard the holler he'd grin, and although I often saw fatigue in that grin I'm sure he never let on to his friends. If he was in an especially good mood he'd drawl out the response "That's Jay Wayne!"

His friends all accepted me - us - with surprisingly good grace, considering.

I can't say I ever got on with any of them. They were loose ties to his old, carefree life, and I found that threatening: to us, as a couple. After John's graduation he found a job quickly, which was what I wanted. We weren't thinking of setting up home together any time soon or anything. I just liked it that he was settling down. I'd never gone to uni' and couldn't see the attraction of student life. John - Wayne, I suppose - had spent three years in that limbo of no responsibility and no security, and now that he had nothing better to do Wayne sat on John's shoulder, prompting him every now and then. When John planned a drinking session for our six-month anniversary, not neglectful but forgetful, that was Wayne whispering in his ear and telling him to do that. Mostly, though, John has left Wayne behind and I'm very glad. Wayne and Mel are sat around in 2001 and it's like I can see them out of the back of a car as we drive away and they recede, getting smaller, their accusing looks fading into petulance.

I suppose I did steal him from Mel. But she was Mel He Wasn't Happy With, Mel Who Is Hard Work, Mel The Psycho Bitch.... all those native American names for her, the shorthand everyone used when talking about John and not to John. So I forgot what a bad thing it was. But, you see, you turn a corner and you're heading downstream, and you have to forget and think about the next bend. Mel was always around lots of bends, all at once. You had no idea what she would do next.

It was all going great on the snowy December Saturday. John had said he had finally convinced his parents that I wasn't some sort of hussy or heart-breaker (I know the words they really used about me, even though John wouldn't tell me, and "hussy" and "hearbreaker" are compliments in comparison, trust me). We were to spend Christmas at their house. Last Christmas we spent apart, and it had been rotten. Compared to previous Christmases alone it had been like someone had taken all the tinsel down. But his parents had realised John and I were each other's for keeps, and were going to write to me to invite me down to stay. That's how old-fashioned they were: invitations by post and RSVP. I imagined that the invite would be a piece of crimp-cut card, embossed with information about what we would be expected to wear on Christmas day. I was scared stiff but so happy. John suggested we go out to the park, fool around in the snow and look over at the city, made pretty by the white icing. "A chance to see the centre not looking like a pile of crap," he said. "How can you refuse?" I couldn't ever refuse.

We climbed up the hill together, holding hands. I thought briefly that we should've been pulling a sled behind us, to complete the scene. At the top we looked out at the view. It may have been office blocks and concrete carbuncles but John was right, it was beautiful. Greetings-card perfect in this weather. We got our breath back, and I listened to the silence, not even a bird, a few other walkers far below muffled by the snow-

A snowball hit me on the shoulder. John sniggered and ran a few more yards distant. I stared open-mouthed for a few seconds, then reached down for some snow. As soon as he saw this he started doing the same, but I got there first, and a powdery splat turned his hair salt-and-pepper, like an old man. Making threatening noises he started running towards me with another snowball, and I backed away. When we were close enough to touch he shoved the snow down my collar and I shouted and ran off.

Ten minutes later we were still fooling around. We'd both hit each other several times, and had blobs of compacted snow stuck to our jackets like exploded paintballs. I hid behind a tree and started piling snow on snow, as if I were beginning to make a snowman. I rolled the lump around a bit to pick up even more snow, and by now it was almost as big as a basketball. With a whoop I lifted it over my head and started towards John. When I thought I was close enough, and early enough that he still looked surprised and wasn't going to react in time, I threw it at his head, two-handed and with all my strength.

John ducked and the monster floated lazily over his shoulder and down the brow of the hill. Carl was running up to meet us, his fat legs sweating and pumping, and instead met a lump of snow the size of his head, hitting him square in the chest. The impact bowled him over backwards in a fluff of snow dust and escaping breath. He landed on his rear and almost before he struck the floor we were running down to meet him, full of apologies. Especially me. It had to be me that had floored one of John's old friends.

"Jesus... Fucking... Christ. Wayne, why don't you have your... mobile switched on...? I've been trying to ring you for two hours." With the last couple of words his voice became strained and falsetto with the suppressed desire to breathe in again. Then he did, pulling air in and pushing it out. God knows how he found us. He must have run all the way from his house, somewhere down there towards the city, lost now in the snow.

John fumbled for the phone in his kagool pocket. One of my snowballs - despite my characteristic non-aim - had smacked onto its open zipper. The phone was sprinkled with snow, and had hurriedly powered itself down at the first hint of moisture. It played possum, hoping to wake up somewhere drier.

"It's switched itself off, Carl. What's the problem?"

"It's Mel."

John didn't want me to come to the hospital with him in the first place. I don't blame him, but I worry. It wasn't as though he weighed up all the facts and knew that he had to leave me behind, that no good could come of Mel seeing me in her state (and my state, come to that). No. It was his instinctive reaction, to push me away from him and the whole situation. Maybe he was doing it for my own good, protecting me from the explosion, shoulder-barging me from under the wheels of the car bearing down on him.... But after two days, and after John said that she was stable - well, sort of - I wanted to see her. I don't know what my plan was. I still wasn't planning. We weren't out of dangerous currents and half-exposed rocks yet, and I was still making decisions as they came to me. I wanted to see her. Understand. Connect. Empathise. Repair. Make whole again.

All she could do was cry. She sat there in the hospital bed, listening to me stumble out a few shitty phrases. and cried silently. Her eyes wept: now on their own, now accompanied by her shuddering shoulders. She shook her head at me, incredulously, as if to say "the gall, the chutzpah, the nerve." Then she said what I was desperately hoping she wouldn't say.

"Don't you understand? Can't you see it? It's your fault. It's all your fault. You took him away from me."

And then:

"You've ruined my life. You've, you've ruined everything. You've no idea how it feels. You don't know wh-what it's like, to be passed over f-for a man."

Not saying anything else, I got up and walked. Out of her room (the nurses looked at me, expressionless) and through the ward to the corridors. Off the tiled floors, onto brown carpet, and reaching the lift. I pressed the button and waited, holding the top of my head with my hands. What could I have told her? That I knew exactly how it felt? The lift arrived with the sound of a quavering, synthesised bell, and the doors clumped open. I stepped inside and pressed "G", closing the doors and setting the lift off on its journey. Should I have hit back, as gently as possible, fought what I heard in her voice - not hating me, but people like me? The lift stopped and tipped me out. I walked past corridors, drinks machines, and the reception desk, and the automatic front doors slid aside at the last minute to let me leave. I'd been dumped for all sorts; plenty of them had been bastards and bitches and I knew about it and couldn't do anything. But in the end the eddies and the whorls had just been kind to me. They'd kept me away from the rocks on which Mel had foundered.

Outside it was snowing again. I walked into the quiet, the black and the white. I kept walking, away from the hospital towards town, waiting for the falling snow to wash me clean, to wash me clean away.