Too Cold For Snow

conjure up visions at will, like a starving saint in a cave.
    One day Alaw believed a gang had kidnapped her two sons. They had them gagged and bound in the coalhouse and there was dark muttering about being inventive about the torture. Another day she took a sled out over the pack ice to where prowling polar bears scouted for seal cubs, but she could explain little of this, only rounding her lips into a perfect ‘O’ and making the sound of a tiny hiss. Then, one day, her mind was just one enormous rapture, as colours danced in kaleidoscopic choreography: lilac, diesel blue, mango-green shimmying with powder grey, pea green melding with black of night, aquamarine melting into sunflower and milky cream, and, more luminous than the others, queen of the dance, a shimmering titanium white, executing some dazzling disco to the strobe of her own liquid skin. Billy Wired would have envied her the brain-cinema.
    The day we met the consultant at Brynmeillion hospital was a day of cheery weather, with a pearl sun in a Mediterranean blue sky. When he showed us the scan results I thought immediately of tetrads, those kilometer squares I used when mapping breeding birds, from greenshank, spotted by satellite in the Flow Country, to buzzards pinpointed in the Cornish countryside. Spots on the charts marked strokes she’s had. The consultant held the sheets as if they were on fire.
    ‘Do you understand?’ he asked her.
    ‘Does she understand?’ he asked me, noting the vacancy of her stare.
    I looked at her head – the fine nose and the blood flecked eyes. Despite her growing confusion these past months there had been nothing to intimate this moment. This demented moment. What goes through that imploding mind?
    On a willow wand, serenading the settling dusk, the nightingale pens its solitary symphony. Its liquid voice is a rivulet of delight. But in her nun’s room, stripped of decoration, Mam’s eyes are wide with fear. They are coming for her. They will get her for certain. She knows. Her birdlike body is a cocoon of tightening feathers, as invisible wires pull her ribcage together, close to bursting point.
    In a country she has never seen, the cancer-sickened President has ordered a meal for his penultimate night at the helm. He wants to taste guilt, and it comes in the shape of l’ortolan, the bright little bunting. Emberiza hortulana , to give it its Latin name.
    The birds have been trapped deep in the south of this cruel country by men with lime sticks and nearinvisible nets made of horsehair string. They were then blinded in keeping with centuries of tradition and kept in a small bamboo box for a month where they were fed a steady supply of figs, millet and grapes. The ortolan. The fig pecker. When the fig pecker has grown to four times its normal size it is drowned in Armagnac. Steeped to death.
    The gluttonous President is also having oysters, foie gras and capons but the tongue’s great prize is the tiny bird. The erstwhile President tucks his bib into his tight collar, and despite his illness he begins to salivate like a puppy. He then covers his head with a white cloth as the small birds are placed in the oven. A priest with a penchant for finches and catamites started this gourmet tradition long centuries ago as a way of masking his disgusting gluttony from God, away from divine reprimand.
    ‘Father, forgive me for I have eaten everything in the Ark apart from the tortoiseshell…’
    The cook, called Fabien, busies himself with the diminutive main course. He reads his notes, because this is an uncommon meal and it is for the President. ‘Place in oven at incinerating temperature for four or five minutes. L’ortolan should be served immediately; it is meant to be so hot that you must rest it on your tongue while inhaling rapidly through your mouth. This cools the bird, but its real purpose is to force you to release the tiny cascade of ambrosial fat.’ Sounds tricky, thinks Fabien, who likes Indian food himself. Especially chicken vindaloo.
    Under his shroud Francois Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand, the first socialist president of the Fifth Republic, places the entire four-ounce bird into his mouth, its head jutting pathetically between his lips. He bites off the marble-sized head and discards it on the salver provided. It will amuse the cat. He tries to savour his memory of an historic role as the first president for two full terms, his mouth full of bird-body . He knows the rules of history: how they