how it is, darling, in the snow is

Small blue plastic bottle (once contained face cream), filled with brandy, the real stuff, she says

Did you drink the brandy?

Mum had a tipple

Dad, belligerent, refusing everything offered to him, trudging on in the snow

Denying: hot water bottle, brandy, chocolate, scarf, hat, gloves

Accepting: the walking cane brought back by my mother’s grandfather from Malaysia

The cane was grown from the ground up, straightened as it grew

Fastened to the top of the cane: an engraving in silver from the children of a school

On the edge of an old empire

Given in thanks

I see them in the distance

I flash the torch

Can’t remember how to signal SOS

What I mean instead: I am here. I recognise you. I have come to get you. I have walked out into the night and the snow to rescue you and bring you home. You are my parents. Hello.

Flash. Flash. Flash.

I flash the torch up into the branches, loaded with snow

The spare branches across the night sky are like fine gilded letters from an old, perhaps dead, universe

The sky itself, full of powder, glows with orange light, as the halo of light from an eclipsed star, as the aura around, or radiation from, all things

Only the electric glow of London and her M25

I hear the snow in the dark and it sounds like deer and foxes and wolves and all the old animals that slept or are sleeping where the white fell down, through trees, touching undergrowth, touching soil and skeleton leaf and fur and beak

Memory of the red horse pushing its nose deep into the thick blanket of soft snow, making broken tracks out of her desire for a fresh patch of grass, for something to curl under her tongue and teeth and chew

Walking from A

Walking from C

Meeting at B

Returning to A

ROAD CLOSED. POLICE SLOW

The road is ok. This stretch is ok. You can keep going. I’ve been walking half an hour and I’ve seen no accidents. This road is clear

Thanks. Funny night to take a walk, mate

I clutch the cane. I stab it deep into the snow

He clutches the cane. He walks more quickly and surely on this treacherous surface than he crosses the carpet in the living room

An argument later. Shut up. Don’t tell me to shut up

A phone call. Are you alive?

He walks in front

I take her arm, her shoes slip and slide

A hot plate of food, delivered two doors down

Like a petulant child

The concert was brilliant

He didn’t play the peace anthem

He didn’t play Home for Christmas

He played the B___ R___ though

Took me back twenty years.

House lights on