Spaghetti Junction

I had been snow-drifting through December, on slow trains and delayed buses, ending each day with a long icy walk past other bodies, also losing grip.

I could not get home that night, none of us could; Spaghetti Junction had filled with snow. We decided to camp at the office.

The heavy snow was unexpected. It had been mild that morning. Warm enough for icicles to ding from the roofs, impale children through their tiny soft skulls, kebabs of blood and hot chocolate. I hoped for such things then. I still do. To fill up the corners of my grey days with blood, circle them red.

I’d started Temping the August of my eighteenth birthday. I gifted myself the stationery cupboard, a bag full of paperclips and Post-It Notes. Theft, plus small chugs of Vodka made the hours chain together into long silver lines, of days and weeks, months I could pin-number from a wall.

Outside, that December day, the roads had vanished, the shops shuttered, my broken brain in a broken world, stranged by snow. Marshmallow cars, bollards of mountain lion and goat, skeletons of ice, snow folding its paws over doors, bunting roofs white.

We walked.

All the trains had stopped, all the buses gone.

All the wild was fleeing, Alaskan Geese crumping through the sky.

Flurries of snowmen, carrot noses pointing out the night. The fog of it, people melting, dropping into mist.

Tempting, to lay down next to a snow lion, sleep inside a zebra crossing, to freeze into spaghetti junction, go invisible in the snow. Be dug up in the future, bone-by-bone like a woolly-mammoth.

Instead, we went to find a pub. There’s always a pub.

The ‘Pig and Whistle’ was open.  I ordered a pint.

Another.

Another.

We ate crisps, then we ordered burgers, chicken, steaks, fries, like we could digest the cold out of ourselves.

That was when Dan in Accounting arrived, late, brushing snow out his spikey hair.

“Jesus, it’s like a pack of ravenous wolves in here,” he smiled.

We stopped eating, talking, stared at him. 

“I could hear you lot a mile off. You ladies. You’re so,” he paused and looked at Kayla’s plate, “hearty.”

Kayla had ordered a steak, and had been putting triangles of bloody meat in her mouth seconds earlier, corporate red lipstick wearing back to skin.

Kayla clanked her knife and fork down on the plate, smushed her napkin to a snowball on top.

 “Fuck off Dan,” I said.

“Whoa. Whatever happened to being ladylike,” Dan said. He grinned.

The other guys sat on the edge of his conversation, some lighting up, some rolling eyes.

‘Chill out, it’s just banter,’ he said to me.

“Women always get called animals though, don’t they? Pigs, bitches,” I said.

“It’s nothing personal,’ Dan replied, ‘We just don’t want you getting too husky.”

I ate more Salt and Vinegar crisps and willed Dan to die.

I listened to the wild dogs outside, skidding over ice.

Kayla drank white wine till she laughed, a strange laugh with vines all over it, I laughed too, let myself go, to the howl in the wind, the footsteps in snow, spin speckles, flicks of flight.

If you listen well to the snow, you can hear the animals pirouette, the swish and whine of a canine triple Salchow.

The feral hounds circled the bins, breaking glass, looking for scraps to flesh their bones, ready for a fight.

It was dark on the walk back to the office, brick alleys snuffly with mutts snoring in doorways, puppies shivering in the curve of every snow angel. A bite in the squall; the whistle of a pig, a lion; a pack of bollard goats.

The world was getting deep, nippy, twisty about the ankles.

I cut through a crocodile of school children.

There were glaciers forming outside the municipal library.

Drunk, back in the office, everyone set up camps behind their desks – tent-forts, coats over chairs. They iglooed into snores.

While everyone slept, I stole stationary.

It helped. To have an infinite supply of white, empty notebooks, cheap biros to gouge a blue crack in the ice.

By dawn, the snow was melting, I’d written my application to University, an essay about the gender of sound, woman as animal, hungry, raw.

The thaw slushed everyone back into shushed phone-calls and blind busy nothing.

I went back to work too, as an Alaskan Malamute. A Siberian hound, husky. A strong storm-weather dog, with muscle, speed, endurance and claws. My paws would itch at night, soft pads splitting white into bone. My new goal was to pull in heavier loads.

Soon, I had three-hundred and twenty-two Bic-biros, sixty-one notebooks, seven mouse-mats, sixty-two highlighters and a large aloe-vera plant from the staff kitchen. 

Twenty-two years on, as I look at the Oxford College library before of me, I see through the glass. It’s snowing. December, again.

I’m there too, in the window. Reflected. Decembering, remembering. I groom my wolf hairs, curl the whitening forward.

I push open the window, taste the sky, the Spaghetti Junction of it. Iced whorls of motorway, frosted white noise; the years I was trapped inside, how I stole my way out.

I look at the twelve girls sitting their entrance-exams today, seventeen-years old. I wonder who among them writes about Echo, or the howling dog-voiced Furies, deadly Sirens, babbling Kassandra, Iambe with her skirt around her neck, exposing open lips. Who will stop at this junction? Who will race, steal space, wear a blizzard for a face?

‘You have five minutes remaining,’ I say.

They grip their pens, and snarl.

One minute

Two

Three

Four

 ‘Put down your pens,’ I say, and none of them do, all of them keep writing, all of them have a sentence to finish, words running up mountains, clawed nibs digging down, all growl, somewhere in the wolf-thickets, scratching white nothing into howl.