Too Cold For Snow

it on down! The manager sounded as if he’d been taking lots of drugs.
    It was unfortunate that Aunt Higgy passed away the week before the christening. Dove & Son, the undertakers who always buried the Pearsons, had a bit of a rush on, what with the flu outbreak and a virulent attack of MRSA which picked off a dozen old people in Prince William Hospital in two days. So they could only bury Higgy on the same Sunday. And because her second cousin twice removed, Bessie Pearson, was one of those scythed off by the influenza, Mr Dove, always the most compassionate man, offered a two-for-one deal, where Aunt Higgy would be “looked after” along with someone else, thereby halving the costs.
    The other dearly-departed was a lonely spinster, so they wouldn’t need an extra car for the mourners. As it transpired they didn’t even need one car, as nobody bothered to go. Each family member paid their share of the funeral arrangements, which, given the number of the tribe, reduced each contribution to a round twenty quid. Consciences salved, the Pearsons as an entity felt pleased they had played a small part in the send-off. Even if there was no-one there to actually send her off into the beyond, or heaven, or wherever.
    Aunt Higgy wasn’t well thought of. She kept her love in an iron container at the bottom of the septic tank so it was little surprise that, given the choice, everyone chose to go to the christening. She had irradiated a smoldering hatred of all and sundry and all and sundry had at the very least disliked her in return.
    The child to be baptised, Owen Peredur Pearson, radiated cherubic innocence and contentment. He had survived an illness in the first few weeks of his life that had almost stolen him away and his bloated pasty face had actually been taking the penultimate gasp of air when he pulled back from the brink. His traumatised parents were told that he had probably choked on something unbeknown to them but the shock of being on the brink of death had dislodged it just as invisibly. ‘It happens,’ said the doctor with a professional shrug, the shrug that signals ‘I can’t get involved in your pain or I won’t be able to play golf tomorrow.’
    Owen was trebly precious for that and even his brother and sister didn’t grudge him the limitless attention he got from his mother from that day on. They recognised that protective, maternal mix of fear and care as something that might come in useful in their own lives later on, something to invest in.
    That awful night, as she cradled her barely sentient son, Anne Pearson had glimpsed her child in the limbo puerorum, the purgatorial half-way house where un-baptised children go. It’s a white room with a white wall and a white door and there are no comforts beyond the company of the other terrified kids who will also be trapped there forever.
    The day of the christening dawned with a strange lilac light coming out of the east, which was soon dissipated by a confident sun. Keith and his wife Anne woke first thing, as excited as could be.
    Despite the family antipathy, Keith and Anne felt they should mark the old lady’s passing in some reverential way, so after a conflab with the family elders – Uncle Turk, the Duchess and Minging Pete – they held a minute’s silence in the disco.
    To keep the men at the bar happy, this coincided with half-time in the Premiership football game, so the men posed respectfully with their lagers in front of the TV while the children, in frozen, mannequin poses, nodded their heads groundwards, as if in prayer, in a break from Boney M.
    ‘She’d have liked that,’ said Keith.
    ‘She didn’t like anything, Keith,’ said Anne, nodding to the barman that he could turn up the volume on the telly again.
    ‘Oh, she wasn’t that bad.’
    ‘She was entirely bad. What about that time she taught all the children to do that obscene gesture?’
    ‘Which obscene gesture?’ Embarrassingly, Anne formed her fingers into an exaggerated ‘O’ and pressed her tongue inside, waggling it about.
    ‘The international suggestion of cunnilingus, Keith. We had parents in tears when they came to pick up the kids. One of the children repeated it in the nativity play, in the direction of the three wise men. That woman came to family gatherings just so she could sabotage them. She almost brought this family to its knees on more than one occasion, she really did. And what about the really bad stuff? I’ll just mention one of her crimes