The Little Snowman

Music:

Adam Lay Y Bounden- Boris Ord

In the Bleak Midwinter- Holst

While Shepherd's Watched Their Flocks by Night

Away In a Manger arr. Cleobury

The Shepherd's Farewell- Berlioz

Content Warning:

Mental illness theme

Transcript

The Little Snowman

They had the carol service at St. Mary the Virgin a few days before the end of advent, on the night of the 21st, December. The service started at seven-thirty and ended at about nine. By some unlikely blessing, there was a thick blanket of winter snow on the ground. 

It was a ten minute walk from the quay-side church to Terry Winnock’s house. Terry Winnock lived in a little bungalow, part of a terrace of one-storey properties, on a street called Morlock Street. Terry lived at Number 20. He lived alone and he didn’t know the names of his next-door neighbours.

During the service, he had been watched and monitored with a quiet sense of concern. He was an abrasive character, oddly dressed, who smelt bad. His exit was followed by a gaze of quizzical severity and pity.  

He left the lit mouth of the church behind him, left behind the after-service mince pies and mulled wine, left behind the high white pyramidal spire towering over the quays. The gently upset waters were a deep blue wash of orange lamplight, starlight, the pale glow of a fat crescent moon, and the cheerful hues of sailing boats, some with lighted windows. The snow decoratively- even artfully- whitened every surface in its cold, compacted, mattress-thick layer.   

Terry moved slowly, bent nearly double. He was an old man, his hair as white as the snow on the ground, his face skullishly narrow and shrunken, his voice a childish tremble; his stoop was extreme and eccentric- caricature: like that of a thirty year-old actor acting the part of an old man in some physical theatre piece. Terry shivered. The stiff hush and chill of the world made him feel weak, weak and liable to exhaustion as he crawled through it- not just weak but shockingly, tremorously mortal. From his armpit, a new polyp issued its throb of complaint. 

Besides his aches and pains, he was tutting and fuming about the choice of carols. “Carols”- inverted commas. The penultimate carol had been and continued to be a source of especial offence. Calypso crap, he muttered angrily, more than once. Calypso crap. He thought, with contempt, of those who had sung it most avidly, of the moronic enthusiasm which had so alienated him. 

He walked, and his feet made slow, tentative prints in the snow. A female owl called out, in a sure, emphatic monosyllable, some distance away. She called again. And again. No male offered an answer.  

Terry had been looking forward to the carol service; he considered it one of the few final pleasures available to him in his isolated dotage, one of the few reasons to continue living (this wasn’t much of an exaggeration). He had been animated during the day. On the other side of the service, he was the opposite of animated. It wasn’t all that he had hoped; it hadn’t been what he had hoped. But what had he hoped? He couldn’t be sure. All he was sure of was an unignorable feeling of absence, of hunger and malnourishment where he had hoped for fortification. And, further to that, a dark hue of rejection which coloured the whole experience.        

He had filled his coat pockets with nearly twenty spare and abandoned copies of the service sheets from the carol service. From the table standing by the entrance to the church, by the little rusted stoop of holy water, he had scooped up as much literature as he had been able to without being observed. He had also dared to steal two little violet-backed bibles, and a small green psalter. 

The journey didn’t take long but it weakened him considerably. Winds moaned in sporadic crescendos of anger and despair but they were powerless to dislodge even the thinnest dust from the fallen snow. As Terry neared Morlock Street, he saw the last, empty bus- like some phantom craft- come sailing past his house, not stopping at the Morlock bus stop, which was just outside his house. 

The bungalow was set back from the street, separated from it by a walled garden, a small section of lawn, white with snow at this time. Terry was so exhausted by the ten minute walk from the church- his pockets so heavy with newly acquired spoils- that he didn’t notice a new, curious figure on his lawn. Fashioned from the snow, which had heaped over several days on the dead grass, there was a small, well-formed, carefully featured snowman, a snow-child really. It was the size of a small child, a child of four or five. It stood, like the strangest new-sprouted flower, on curved, snake-like, clearly defined legs- connected to the white ground- with the most miraculous, skinny arms, entangled. These crossed arms gave the little snowman a disapproving quality. But the face, fronting a small, spherical head, was calm and clement. It stared straight at Terry’s living room, straight at the dark curtained windows, its back to the street, to the bus-stop. The little snowman was wearing a woollen hat of light, butterfly blue; and a marmalade-coloured cravat, looped not tied. The face, delicately featured and vivid, had been hand-sculpted. There was nothing crude about the snow-face, no use of pebbles or fruit for noses, no quick finger-holes for eyes. The face had a cherubic, eerie, emptily beauteous majesty about it. 

But Terry did not notice it. He did not notice the little figure on the snow of his lawn. He located his housekey with interminable difficulty and at last opened the door. Left side of the porch, there was a strange, stone bulldog. It faced the street, pudgy and severe and squinting. Terry could not get the door all the way open, some resistance on the other side pushed against it. Through the allowed gap, Terry entered, and shut the door behind him. The hallway lit up immediately. A soft, ordinary orange sidled through a small diamond of glass in the off-white front door and lay in a lit section on the black and white pavement (the snow had been worn down in places by human footfall- which, earlier in the day, had been more or less constant).

Terry pushed through the boxes and boxes of VHS tapes, the stacks of letters tied with string, the piles and piles of newspapers. He passed the profusion of boardgames, the spread of charity shop shoes (many of them feminine, high-heeled), and the forest of coats. He went to the kitchen, wading through the bags and bags of toys, devices, and charity shop miscellany until he reached the section of countertop beside the draining-board where ten kettles (of various styles) stood to obsequious attention. Pick me! pick me! they seemed to soundlessly implore. On the kitchen table, records rose to the ceiling in towers. 

He made tea (earl grey) and took it to the living room. (The living room light went on and lit up the little white lawn, and the incredible little snowman at its centre). It took him a great effort of concentration to walk without tripping. Into the sole uncluttered sofa space he lowered himself, settling a little victoriously, still wearing his coat. Sixteen unused paper-shredders huddled around him, some still in their boxes.  

The tea went down and inspired an optimism within him which took him by surprise. For a fleeting time, he felt comfortingly enclosed in his hoard. He had seen the literature, the biggest, most upsetting words had been branded onto his consciousness: “unmanageable clutter”, “compulsion”, “addiction”, “psychiatric ailment”, “inability to discard”, “childhood neglect”. He thought, as he often did, about the immense neglect his parents had shown him when he was a boy: his father’s eternal working hours, his mother’s substance abuse issues and generally lax attitude towards childcare. He decided, now as ever, that such facts of his existence were unimportant, were irrelevant, and had done nothing to shape his adulthood. He surveyed, with a deep, wretched soar of satisfaction, the sitting room bookcase which he had devoted purely to pornographic magazines. It was a source of great comfort to him that a good many of those magazines had followed him from house to house to house. 20, Morlock was the seventh house he had hoarded up to the point of illegality. From all six of his prior properties he had been evicted. And a seventh eviction was not all that far off.         

He thought then of the little volumes and the leaflets and the service sheets in his coat pockets. He looked around the heaped room. He was immune to the acridity, the taut mustiness that rose everywhere from the hoard and filled the house. There was a noise, a scuttling of feet, a sound like a crisp packet being disturbed. But Terry didn’t hear it. 

Terry pondered where he would place the new items he had obtained. It wasn’t a simple problem. From his pocket, he took the service sheets and the light, glossy pamphlets he had snatched from the table by the church entrance. They burned in his hand with a strange, ephemeral worth, something almost impossible to articulate. The church literature was printed with service times, history, hundred year old images of the church, grinning clerical faces- the smiles rictus, the blocks of text beneath them written in a cadence of forced friendliness. On the service sheets he saw hymn and scripture fragments. “And he shall be called…and the government shall…”; “…came down and Glory shone around”, “…cattle are lowing…”, “…worshipped the beloved with a kiss”.

He put the sheets down and held the two bibles and the psalter in his hands. They filled his old, veined hands with a similar, even greater, but no less fleeting, sense of value and comfort. He was unbothered by the fact that he had stolen them, that he was guilty of some small but hardly insignificant crime. He turned the crinkled pages of the psalter. His eye caught interesting fragments: phrases of boundless praise for creation, promises of redemption- free of platitude, and Old Testament vows of rage and vengeance. But he knew really that the content of what he acquired didn’t matter much: what mattered was the weight and substance and tonnage, the pure, sheer thrill of acquisition. He decided that when he’d finished his tea he would put the bibles, the psalter, the leaflets, and the service sheets he had eagerly gathered up from the pews after the carol service, in the hallway. He would find a place for them among the boxes of letters and newspapers, he wondered if there might be room in the medicine cabinet. He thought of the children, he focused quite hard on the faces of the children, singing that stupid, modern “carol”. Calypso crap, he muttered again. He didn’t blame the children of course. He blamed the adults. He blamed them for putting inferior words in the mouths of the little children. 

Terry thought he began to hear singing. Minute by minute, he became surer and surer that the singing was occurring outside his mind. The chanting, distant and improbable at first, seemed to come closer. 

With great difficulty, Terry stood up from the settee. The settee had once been a bright, vibrant red but was now a brown so deep that it was almost black. In the place where he had just been seated, he laid the bibles and the psalter and the service booklets and the leaflets with a religious slowness and solemnity. He believed that, outside, some singing procession was passing. He couldn’t make out the words or the melody, nor was either known to him. To which mysterious, esoteric faith did these dark, processing figures belong? from what pagan volume were those haunting measures quarried? He got the right-hand curtain open, the rings slid along the rail with an unpleasant, rusted crunch. Still he heard- or thought he heard- those troubling, singing voices. It had resumed snowing. The flakes fell, with noiseless, coordinated softness from the heavens, all the way down, down to the dark streets shining. But Terry saw no procession. 

He saw instead, the terrible, deadpan beauty of the little snowman, the little boy of snow, standing in the centre of the little garden, the centre of the snow-heap on the grassless lawn. Terry vocalised a reaction to the little figure. He couldn’t account for it. It disturbed him. He felt intensely looked at by the vacant eyes. He felt, without knowing how or why, that the little snow-figure knew and somehow minded that Terry was looking at him. The regard was intent and icy and mutual. 

Terry retreated and drew the curtains. His armpit smarted from the polyp; still he heard the voices. To bed, I must get to bed, he muttered. With forlorn fearfulness, he trudged off to bed and stripped himself down to his baggy white underpants. He took a dressing gown of light peach from the bedhead and wrapped himself up in it like a blanket, unable, out of weariness or indifference or both, to place his long, skinny arms in the big sleeves. He went to sleep almost instantly, with unnatural haste.

Just after two o’clock in the morning, he woke again. He rose from his bed, slowly, painfully. He stood. He forgot that his arms were not in the sleeves of his dressing gown and the dressing gown fell down. It fell from his shoulders and landed in a heap on the floor, immuring his scratched ankles. The dressing gown’s quick downward slip revealed gaunt pale shoulders and stained underpants into which he had unknowingly urinated while asleep. He heard voices next door, raised, muffled. He remembered that when he was a child, his parents sometimes argued. He remembered lying awake at night, straining to understand the source of their quarrel. They argued in an alien language. Or sometimes he would only think it was his parents arguing and then discover that it was the neighbours, told so by some small tonal or rhythmic detail in the half-heard voices. Then he’d doubt himself, strain harder to hear. Invariably he’d fall asleep, unsure who was arguing.   

He felt impelled towards the living room. Before going to bed, he had seen something in the window. Had he dreamed that uncanniness? that child of snow staring its lugubrious, thousand-yard stare at him through the swirling snow? had he imagined that taking, spectral face in the window?

He pushed aside boxes, storage boxes of misted plastic. Towers of boxes, he had no idea what was inside them. He felt them there, crowding around him, but took no comfort from their being there, from their certain hardness. He stubbed his toe on an edge but didn’t feel it. Things in the mess, unknown parasites, scattered at his coming. He didn’t hear their scurries, their flights through the wretched accumulations all around. 

He got to what he thought was the living room. He felt for the light switch and was amazed when his fingers lit successfully upon it. The light switched on and showed, immediately, the copious clutter of the living room. He tramped to the window and looked out, with fascinated trepidation, at the silent, snowy night. 

It was still there. The child. Standing up from the snow blanket. The face, eerily human, was without expression but as vivid as anything Terry had ever seen. 

He stumbled towards the garden, through the hallway, still in his underwear. The mess all around continued to thwart him but he pushed on, his big toe gashed and bleeding. He opened the front door and stepped out into the snow, full of some unhinged resolve. He felt immediately the piercing chill, coldest of all on his bare foot-soles. But he didn’t retreat from it. He pressed on, staggering onto the little patch of garden, barren and lifeless but for this ghostly, glassy, little-boy life at its centre.

He towered over the child, the tip of the blue, woollen hat. The deep yellow light of the living room lay on the lawn in a holy blast. The snow-child’s eyes twinkled. The night was so dead and hard and harsh.

The snow settling all the time in his snow-white hair and prickling his shoulders with fragmentary cold, Terry stretched forth the most tentative, the most reluctant, frightened finger. He felt in the place where the two white lips formed an opening, not far above the neck-loop of the marmalade cravat. He pushed his finger into the mouth of the little snowman. A strange, unfeasible texture answered his touch, rubbery, like a good bookmark. And then, in an instant, it was the warm wetness of saliva, of cheek-lining, that he felt. He cried out and pulled back his hand abruptly. 

He fell down. The cold. The cold! He could hear children’s voices. He heard it: repeating, cloying measures of that awful, bouncy “hymn”. He couldn’t make out the words, just the tune. He knew that he was dying, that the cold had penetrated too deeply within him, that the snow falling endlessly from the sky was a death dust. He knew that this was death. 

Though he lamented for a very brief moment that the words he heard, that the sounds he heard, that the melody he heard in his closing moments were not more angelic, were not of a higher and more serious calibre, he felt himself drawn with awful, unbearable longing and elegy towards the voices, towards the memory itself, towards its transformed irritation, its complex and altered radiance, towards the children’s faces.   

The snow offered him a sense of ablution, a sense of uncluttered clarity. He breathed in the cold, pure air of the night. It seemed to him…fifty, twenty, maybe a hundred years since he had drawn such a clear, clean breath.  

Calypso crap. He heard the phrase in his mind, felt himself reaching for it but was too spent, too feeble to utter it. Calypso…calypso.

He was discovered without delay on the morning of the 22nd. People, including the police, assumed that the little snowman had been the product of some kind of deranged, last minute artistry, that to construct him had been Terry Winnock’s final act. The light was, of course, still on in the living room when the responding officer pushed open the front door, encountered resistance from within, overcame it, and went inside.    

They brushed the snow from Terry’s hardened, pallid body and revealed beneath the latter, harder layers, a cleansing wateriness that shone in the morning’s brightness and made him gleam like a creature newborn. 

People noticed the parked police cars and the cordon of police tape and the congregating officers. People became aware that the poor soul whose house it was (No. 20, Morlock St.) had died in the night. The secret also got out, with a stifled graduality, that, in life, the man had been a hoarder. But people commented primarily on the little, silver-white snowman who stood before the house, facing the street, on the uncanny poignancy of the downcast eyes, the sullen, expired-looking face, the coronet of holly on the white, bald head, and on the slender, outstretched arms.