A Following Of Sorts

A Following Of Sorts
Ali Shaw

As a young woman, Marianne Threfken contracted an illness that never
left her. It made her teeth chatter on summer days. It made her skin
pimple and tighten in weather that made others strip and sweat. In
winter her apartment - windows bolted and radiators grinding -
dehydrated visitors who sat in just vests or t-shirts, clawing at their
collars while Marianne huddled on the sofa in a bobble hat and a
blanket drawn over her knees. On the harshest days she couldn't venture
outside unless dressed in a balaclava and two scarves. She learnt to
live a quiet life: working from home as a designer of knitwear, content
with the sound of her clicking needles linking woollen thread
together.

A young man supplied Marianne with wool. Only the finest, sheared from
his own flock by his own hand. After Marianne first phoned him to
enquire about his products he sat down in his workshop and slowly
rolled tobacco into a cigarette. His hands were shaking and he couldn't
hold the paper straight. His fingers knocked tobacco out of line. Her
voice had done this. He'd heard a beautiful tremor in her vowels. When
he finally steadied himself to smoke the cigarette, he thought about
the way she spoke.

Marianne and the sheepshearer's first date came on. A winter's night,
some time in early February. The sheepshearer knocked on her door and
when Marianne opened it a rush of hot air blasted his skin. She wore a
white woollen cardigan over a woollen dress and white stockings,
buckskin boots, a woollen white hat and matching gloves. She shook like
a bird clinging to a branch in the wind.

'What a cold night,' she said. 'How do I look?'

'Beautiful.'

'Thank you. I made these clothes myself.'

From his wool. The union wasn't lost on him and he laughed suddenly and
nervously without having meant to.

After they first made love - steamy by necessity in her sweltering
bedroom - his post-coital cigarette near lit it itself in the heat.
Yes, he was in awe of this quiet lady who knitted the days away amid
her heaps of beautifully crafted mittens and socks. He took her hand as
she drifted to sleep, kneaded her icy fingers in his and wondered what
kind of ring would suit them best.

Eventually the sheepshearer grew eager to hear the timid voices of
little Mariannes while Marianne longed for the patter of tiny
sheepshearer feet. But her illness had distorted more than her nervous
system. She was as barren as winter and no treatment could force
conception. To console themselves they took a string of holidays to
carefully planned destinations. Sailing through fjords, gazing at the
northern lights, crunching the snow beneath their feet near the
poles.

In the Arctic they were ambushed by a blizzard and holed up in a tiny
shack for three days.

There was an obvious and pleasurable way to stay warm?

And on one of those three days, Marianne conceived.

Although scarcely able to believe her good fortune, she resolved not to
tell her sheepshearer until she was certain. The disappointment would
be too bitter to risk. Then, on a day hammered by summer rain, he had
an accident. He'd hurried to bring the flock in from the downpour, only
to find that the wind had ripped a panel about a metre wide from the
roof of their stalls. Swearing to himself, he found the ladder and
leant it precariously against the wall. He climbed up and poked his
head out of the hole, squinting through the lashing rain while sheep
bleated beneath him. The panel of corrugated iron had not escaped
entirely. One rattling screw still pinned it in place, though the wind
had flipped it back as if it were the cover of a sketchbook. The
sheepshearer strained to reach it. He had spare screws. It would be
fixed in no time. Thunder rumbled. The sheep jittered and bucked about.
One of them collided with the ladder.

Marianne was told how her sheepshearer was found the next morning with
his flock bleating over him and his heart stopped. She thought about
the baby inside her and how he would grow up fatherless. When he was
born she named him James, which had been her sheepshearer's name.

As James grew it made Marianne smile to see he had his father's frame
and tactile fingers. But from where James inherited his grey eyes and
peculiarly white hair she couldn't say. One inheritance that certainly
could be traced was his unfortunate sensitivity to cold, as bad if not
worse than his mother's.
His childhood was beautiful, if at times lonely. He delighted both his
mother and himself by knitting. He was a prodigious knitter. Many
mornings James woke Marianne before dawn by leaping onto her bed and
waving his latest creation, be it a giant woollen reindeer stuffed with
more wool, a pair of woollen curtains or a woollen Superman
costume.
Then, on a bitter December day as James approached his sixth birthday,
Marianne stood warming gloved hands over the hob where her tin kettle
wheezed. She heard James enter the kitchen. He moaned. She turned to
see him leaning in the doorway with a glisten of sweat across his
forehead and cheeks. But then, when Marianne rushed to him, she saw the
sweat was something like sea salt: a pin-prick crystal had formed on
each pore. She wiped his face with her glove and felt like she'd
handled a snowball. The crystals melted into the wool on her palm.
James slumped down and Marianne caught him just in time to stop his
head striking the floor.

The doctor arrived and was clueless. James hadn't recovered
consciousness and lay still in his bed taking short, slow breaths. Cold
had turned the sheet beneath him rigid like the frozen surface of a
lake. The pillow, hard as rock, glittered in the light from his bedside
lamp. Fresh crystals of ice grown from his pores were lengthening
slowly and merging with each other. An icicle of frozen drool hung to
the pillow from his chin.

'It's like a fever,' mumbled the doctor, 'only? only instead of burning
up he's freezing. What can I suggest? Perhaps you should find a way to
make him warmer? I'll have to study my books.'

The doctor looked in all the wrong places, in weighty medical tomes and
empirical science journals. He found nothing to make sense of James'
condition, which worsened with every morning as the weather outside
grew bitterer and the dismal evenings grew early.

All this time James was bedridden. On brighter days he could prop
himself up and drink soup that Marianne prepared for him. On sleeting
days or snowy days he was near comatose and an aura of bitter cold hung
in his bedroom.

Marianne's efforts to comprehend James' illness led, like the doctor's
efforts, to nowhere. Nowhere until she remembered (as if recalling a
favourite line from a poem) those three days of lovemaking with her
sheepshearer in the Arctic.
She had her old calendars and diaries neatly stacked in a drawer in her
bedroom. These she worked through backwards until she found the exact
dates of that beautiful trio of days. The third was the winter
solstice. James had been conceived with the northern hemisphere in the
heart of its winter.

Marianne considered what, if anything, this meant as she sat by James'
bedside, holding his rigid fingers and feeling their chill through
three layers of gloves. Then she phoned a travel agent.

The seven four seven touched down in the desert kicking up dust and red
dirt like tongues of fire.
Even as they'd flown south, James groggily parted his eyelids and
flexed his cracked lips. Creakily, he moved his hand to his face to
brush the flakes of ice from his eyelashes. Though Marianne's tear
still froze on contact as it dropped to his skin, the ice it made
wasn't frosted or hard.

She had a hotel booked for two weeks in a little town on the edge of
the outback near Sydney. Here it was summer, and in their clean little
room mother oversaw son's return to good health. Soon James was sharing
a deep glass of iced lemonade with Marianne as they sat in the heat,
each basking in a gentle sweat.

A week and a half passed in this fashion before - as they drank tea one
morning - James slammed down his cup and leant back worried. The tea
that had been steaming ten seconds before now lay tepid under a layer
of fine brown ice.

By midday, thick white clouds filled the sky and James shivered on the
hotel bed with his breath condensing in the air. Marianne wrapped him
in all the woollen clothes she had. She made him another piping hot cup
of tea, but the cup froze so quickly in his fingers that they stuck to
its handle. Outside, the white clouds condensed. Snowflakes settled on
the windowsills. People who'd been building tans on sun beds now stood
in amazement. A little girl who'd been making castles in a sand pit
squealed happily and began collecting snow for a snowman.

With no one else to turn to, Marianne made a long distance call to her
doctor.

'Frankly this is so? impossible. I would laugh at you if? if?' He
stammered to a halt on the phone. Marianne thought she could hear the
receiver quivering in his hand. 'It's the balmiest day of the decade
back here. People can scarcely believe it. I'm stood in my shorts and
sandals. My neighbour's sunbathing in her garden. But? it's
December.'

They said goodbye. Marianne put the phone down weakly and folded her
hands in her lap. Snow fell so thick outside that the mother of the
girl building the snowman called her name and scythed the air with her
arms to try to glimpse her while the girl called Mother! through teeth
chattering with cold and panic.

But Marianne knew what must be done. James had drawn all the weather of
winter to him, here to a place where winter should not be. Winter must
be led away again. They would leave on the next plane. At once she
phoned the doctor back and learnt from him science about the angle of
the earth to the sun and the way the planets twirled on their axes like
spinning tops, about the scorching equator and the reasons for a slow
sunrise and terrible cold at the poles. She had room service find her
an atlas, which she marked with a zigzag of ink. Then she booked
flights along a route that would see her and James lingering from
autumn to autumn across the continents. From Sydney they would at once
return north, via Mexico City to San Fransisco. Winter would snap on
their heels but they would outrun it, circling the northern hemisphere
on planes. It would smother half the globe in order to snare them. San
Fransisco to Quebec, Quebec to Rekyavik, Rekyavik to Moscow where they
would survive as much of late winter as James could bear before
creeping south, dissolving winter across the Middle East in
March.

After booking these journeys, Marianne's accounts were exhausted: her
overdraft drained and her credit cards maxed. But it meant they could
flee winter for some weeks, keeping James from his coma of ice. After
that, Marianne resolved, she'd figure something out.
On the plane, James opened his eyes: thawing. Through the tiny windows
Marianne could see white banks of cloud turning dark orange as the sun
dipped beneath the horizon. The layers of icicles covering James' skin
began to turn to water. Recovering more each minute, James shook drops
from his hair and flexed his blue fingers. His clothes were soaking
wet. Marianne dug through her hand luggage to find some dry things. She
had a frayed woollen jumper she'd knitted for James' father and she
helped the boy change into it now, glancing out the window as she did
so. Though the darkening winter clouds were in hushed pursuit, they
wouldn't catch their plane tonight.