Too Cold For Snow

fence was an original. Metal was unknown to them, all their tools, everything they had came from their animals – trenching tools from the antlers, water carriers from the innards, even jewellery, after a fashion, made from carved hoof and tiny stretched strips of hide.
    And here, in their party, was Boz, the man who wrote songs to sell lingerie and Belgian chocolate. Who once lost his cool because a company said he couldn’t overdub a ukulele on a twenty second blurt of noisy rubbish. Boz with his camera, trying to make sense of this way of life, which seemed to have elevated dignity and unfathomable wells of sadness.
    Beyond the fence, Boz watched the twenty-first century stuttering towards them, with a huge man squeezed into the Lilliputian cab of a mini bulldozer as if he was never meant to ever get out of it. Through the fiercely frosted pane of the cab the man was smoking, as if the pinprick glow at the end of his cigarette would keep him warm despite the plunging temperature drop. The fug of smoke and the obvious contortions of his enormous frame as he roboted the gears made him look inhuman. They all watched the little bulldozer come to a halt and were mesmerised by the spectacle of the man pouring his flesh out of the cab like toothpaste coming out of a tube.
    The man walked up to the fence and there was a long silence as they absorbed the sight of him and he evaluated the look of Boz and his Trappist clan. After a few minutes the man rasped out some questions in Russian and a young Nenet stepped forward to translate.
    ‘Who is he?’ said the Russian, his hands flopping dismissively in Boz’s direction.
    ‘He is a man who is working a film for us. He came in the air.’
    The other herders shook their heads in agreement even though they didn’t have a clue what they were on about. Behind them a bull reindeer snorted as if he was taking umbrage.
    The Russian nodded pensively.
    ‘Is there anything he needs?’
    The young man looked at Boz, showing his palms in what was near enough a universal gesture.
    Boz saw the fork in the path before him. The one that saw him playing cards while he waited for the oil company transit to take him away and the other path, where he stayed with his friends and completed the journey and only then worried about how the hell he’d get home. He could wait for a clattering helicopter to take him the hell out. Or stay here with a people who had survived atom bombs, uranium mines, bears, enforced work at the Bolshoi Nimnir gulag and the khitry wolves. Even if the vodka might get them in the end.
    He knew which path to take, into a place heavy with the ammoniac tang of reindeer piss, and where the night’s duvet of warmth was his snuggled up neighbours’ bodies, every one of them snoring as if they were worked by bellows, and the morning’s weak light was an ineffable triumph beyond the skills of any painter to record. Just as certainly as the lead reindeer, the hunyuk , sets the pace like a shaman with a drum he knew the path he would take. Amdip, duy, erimken . It led into the unknown, which to him was now curiously familiar, as familiar as his old mother’s face, smiling at him through the birch trees, proud, after all this time, of her wandering son.

TV Land
     
     
    The sun might someday set over this place in tropical glory, a spaghetti of tangerine light slivers and sauvignon ribbons looped into the west. But not quite yet, not while there’s more grey rain to fall. Not in this city of bad teeth, sodden litter, mangled dreams and three skyscrapers. Don’t come here if you want New York’s irrepressible verticality. Or neon retina fizzes from an advertising frenzy like Tokyo, or L.A. chunky smog, or the sheer teemingness of Kampala. Some cities you measure in epiphanies: this one you measure with a stick.
    Let’s spin around the cardinal points. To the east the Great Suburbs of TV Saturation. To the north it’s all Georgian and Edwardian mansions set in jungly leafiness, alive with blackbirds. Old money, deep roots. To the west a garden village gone to seed and, to the south, where the river used to meet the sea, they’ve closed the river mouth, that spastic act. Mosquitoes activate here, loving the septic lagoon.
    This random city.
    In a church a priest auditions new choristers with a tear of lust in his eye. They sing Bach and a piece by Arwel Hughes which conjures up pictures of snow.
    A Somali boy, ten years old, recites great tracts of an oral literature