Tag Archives: Snow

Naked in the Snow

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Jaymz had been missing for weeks. One minute he was there, and the next he wasn’t. People hadn’t noticed, at least not to start with, but after a couple of days the void was unavoidable. It was then that people began to speculate.

Emily, with her spotty face, was the first to realise, because she was secretly in love with him, and thought that he might have taken up with a girl. Bradley, the boy who claimed to have the biggest dick, claimed that Jaymz had been arrested. Then there was sweet and innocent Olivia, who worried that he might be lying injured in a hospital bed. Dav, which was short for Davion, pulled himself away from his iPhone, and said that Jaymz was dead in a ditch. Conor reckoned that he was delirious with pneumonia.  I didn’t say anything.

It was a credit to Jaymz that people came up with such outlandish reasons for his disappearance.

The last time anybody saw him was on a freezing cold Wednesday night. He climbed the railings beside the Lagon and stared at the twinkly lights on the other side. Then he turned around and told us about the time he jumped fully clothed into the blackness of the river. There hadn’t been a reason to do so but had seemed like a good thing to do.

We got into the back of Conor’s old Bedford Dormobile and drove up to Belfast Castle with spectacular views over the city. We sat on a wall drinking cheap cider until it started to snow, and Conor worried that the camper van might not make it back down the winding slope. Jaymz laughed and said that anything would get to the bottom of the hill in snow. It might not get down in one piece, but it would certainly get there.

The snow got heavier and while Bradley and Dav made snowballs, we huddled in the cold. Emily told Jaymz that she loved the way he spelt his name, which was exactly what he wanted to hear. That’s me, cool by nature, he’d swaggered, forgetting that he’d once told me that his granda had chosen the name after an obscure disco singer. Emily, with her black greasy hair and spots, almost wet her knickers because Jaymz had spoken to her.

Jaymz was plastered, but always able to make everyone else seem drunker than he was. A casual observer might not notice the difference between the extrovert and the booze fighter, but at times like this he could be unpredictable. Like the time he was drunk and climbed a tall oak tree to swing from its branches before jumping twenty feet to the ground. He should have broken a leg or something, but he didn’t. And when he scaled tall scaffolding on Agincourt Avenue and hung upside down by the legs, he might easily have slipped to his death. But nothing bad ever happened to him.

Despite his background, Jaymz was an enigma, larger than life, happy, and oozing confidence. He was never one for words, had little knowledge about anything, but what he lacked from his pitiful upbringing, he made up with composure that gave him film star appeal. There were plenty who said it was arrogance, and the police hated him for it, but it wasn’t hard to see why we adored him, and as you’ve probably guessed, worshipped the ground that he walked on.

But on that chilly night, he did something quite extraordinary. To our astonishment, he took off all his clothes and stood bollock naked. There were no inhibitions, the embarrassment was ours, and then he slowly fell backwards into the snow, and stared at the sky. He turned milky white, whiter than the snow around him, goose pimples on his arms and legs, and shivered uncontrollably. With a defiant look on his face, Jaymz said nothing at all.

We laughed and cheered, not at him, because whatever he did was okay with us. And then, after laying in the snow for ten minutes, he stood up like he was rising from the dead, his body dripping wet. Bradley, who now had every right to claim the world’s biggest dick, collected Jaymz’ sodden clothes and helped him dress. Jaymz didn’t say a word, but smirked, and looked like he’d fallen into a trance. Maybe he did catch pneumonia that night, because after he slipped away into the darkness, none of us had seen him since.

Days turned into weeks and when Jaymz didn’t appear, Dav and Olivia went to his house at Cliftonville to find him. Dav looked worried when he reported back. His parents hadn’t seen Jaymz either, or weren’t the least bit concerned about his disappearance. The old man had swigged from a can of beer and cussed Jaymz for not looking after his XL Bully. His mother had shrugged her shoulders and carried on watching The Chase, something lost on Dav because she wasn’t the brightest, and he believed that Jaymz’ level of thickness came from her.

I remembered a note that Jaymz once wrote and was shocked to see that the scrawl belonged to that of a small child. “The soul has beem givem its owm ears to hear thigs the mimd does not umderstamd.”

His slip into obscurity wasn’t surprising to me. There were clues on social media that the others hadn’t noticed. While their own accounts contained dozens of photos of Jaymz and his misdemeanours, they failed to realise that he posted very little himself. His Facebook page only contained a couple of images. There was nothing on Instagram, X, or Tik Tok, and for somebody as extroverted as Jaymz this was strange.

I picked up on this anomaly during the summer and spent weeks looking for reasons why this might be. That was how I was. If I saw something that intrigued me then I’d go to great lengths to find out more. It was an obsession that made me think that I might have a form of OCD.

At first, I tried to find out whether Jaymz had secret accounts, but that got me nowhere. Then I set up fake accounts in case he was blocking people that knew him. I suspected that he’d cottoned on to my sleuthing because for a while he seemed overly friendly, as if he was testing me, but I put that down to my paranoia.

With no success, I started following Jaymz like a stalker. Except that I didn’t see myself as one. He had no idea, and it wasn’t my intention to make him feel uncomfortable. If I had, then Jaymz would have punched me hard in the face.

Whenever Jaymz said that he was going home, I made excuses and said that I was going home too. With this pretence I would walk in the opposite direction and double back after him. The first few times I lost him, and this was because he wasn’t going home at all. I discovered this after almost bumping into him as he walked back into the city.

He sloped along Wellington Place before disappearing in the streets. It was always the same story. I followed him several times, but he gave me the slip.

Sometimes I asked questions to find out what it was that he wasn’t telling us, and hoped that he might let something slip, but he never did. He would laugh and give the same cretinous responses. What do you want to know? I like Fontaines D.C. I have a tattoo on my arse. I once shagged a donkey. I piss the bed when I’m drunk. I’m a Catholic bastard. Haha! Always a joke.

This consuming passion stopped when I realised that I had become his stalker after all. What had I been hoping to achieve? If there was a hidden side to him then maybe it was because I had created it.  

After that night, Jaymz never reappeared and melted away with the snow. Emily often talked about him and couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing him again. Conor told her to forget him. He’d shown everyone that he had a small dick and had always been a waste. She looked like she might cry.

Life was dull, as if a light had been switched off, but nobody reported him missing. Not his parents. Not his older brother who was in prison. Not his big sister with ten screaming kids. I thought about him occasionally, believing that if I did, then he would think about us too. But whether he thought about us or not, it didn’t matter, because nothing happened, he had gone.

Dav repeated his comment about Jaymz being dead in a ditch, and I thought it might be true. There were those who didn’t like his cockiness, a need to be centre of attention, and he might have rubbed them up the wrong way. Especially the kids around the Waterworks who weren’t afraid to inflict the severest form of punishment. Every time they pulled a body from the Lagon I waited to see if it was Jaymz, but it never was.

Eventually, we decided that Dav was right, that Jaymz was dead, and chose to remember him as we did that night, naked in the snow, never growing old. And then, in years to come, with bad eyes, poor hearing, and stumbling with walking sticks, we’d still be able to laugh about him.

River Phoenix said it was an awesome performance

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Close your eyes. Hear the silent snow. Listen to your soul speak/Adrienne Posey

It snowed in New York on New Year’s Eve. It started early morning and shrouded the city with relentless cruelty. It ruined everyone’s plans and forced them to stay home. By late evening, the city was silent.

Mitch Keller felt miserable. Truth be known, he’d been unhappy for weeks and he didn’t know why. This made him feel even worse.

He’d bailed on party invites and realised how his absence would be taken. They would think him arrogant for not going, their parties not important enough for somebody of his repute.

Instead, he’d stayed in his cavernous TriBeCa apartment, the Triangle Below Canal Street, and looked through steamed up windows at a strange world. And all the time he drank Jack Daniels because he thought it would make him feel better, but it didn’t.

Mitch had everything. A leading role in a TV series, a play on Broadway, and his agent said he was first choice for a forthcoming movie role. He was recognised when he walked the streets.

In the afternoon, Mitch watched a rerun of ER, the one where Carter paid a visit to his drug-addict cousin who answered the door looking like shit. “How are you feeling?” Carter asks him. “When you’re ill, you feel worse than you are.”

He turned the channel over and watched Homicide: Life on the Street, but it depressed him even more, and switched the TV off.

When night came, Mitch did something he rarely did. He dressed in a big coat from a charity store, found a woolly hat that wasn’t his, and the loneliest man in the world went outside. He walked the cold abandoned streets that nobody went to.

The snow was knee high in places and where it wasn’t, it crunched underfoot, because the temperature had dropped. He saw the white hats that had formed on chairs and tables outside a café he knew. Snow piled up against the door of its dark entrance. He thought about the people who worked there, having fun with family and friends inside a bright and cheery apartment in a part of the city where it was cheaper to live.

Mitch could only think of Zombies.

But he continued walking through unfamiliar streets where there was nobody, and cars were lost under thick blankets, and lights shone from upper apartments. There was a secret world above, one he wasn’t part of, and he wished that he could be in one of them, a tiny apartment, with somebody who cooked spaghetti and meatballs and talked to him like a normal person.

He remembered the summer when he was a teenage boy and walked down a similar street. Mrs Zsepy leaned out of an upstairs window and waved. Mitch shouted and asked her how she was, and she called back that she was fine. Afterwards, he heard her shout to a neighbour across the street. “Mitch is a good kid,” she called. “He’s a sensitive boy.” There was nobody leaning out of a window tonight.

Mitch thought about Patrick Swayze, whom he once met and liked, and the movie that he was hoping to star in with him. He thought about Sam in Ghost, a decent man, a decent ghost, but then he remembered the scene where his friend Carl is killed by a huge piece of falling glass and steps out of his body and is whisked away by black spirits, doomed for eternity.

The snow was falling harder, and the faster it fell, it caused the weight on his mind to get heavier. He was soaked, a thousand snowflakes clinging to his hat and coat, and he was cold. Each snowflake weighed heavy on him. And he’d wandered somewhere he didn’t know, where the streets would never be cleared of snow because nobody went there.

There were abandoned factories and meat packing plants where snow blew through broken windows and the missing tiles to form little mountains inside. There was a doorway, protected by planks of wood nailed together, but with space for somebody to climb through.

Mitch thought of dead rats, frozen in the snow, and wanted to see one.

He climbed through the gap and found himself in a dark hallway that might once have been the entrance to an office. It matched the strange silence. A city wrapped in cotton wool, muffled until nothing could be heard.

He sat in a corner, amidst broken glass and syringes, closed his eyes and thought about his nightmare. He needed somebody to talk to, but there was nobody. But the longer he remained there, in this dank, dark space, the more it provided odd comfort.

As he slipped between sleep and consciousness, he thought about people hitting the bottom. And he believed that when you hit rock bottom you bounced, but it was a matter of how hard you bounced. If you hit the bottom hard then you were likely to bounce right back to where you came from. But a slow fall didn’t provide enough bounce and you might settle on that bottom forever.

Mitch did bounce, and he bounced hard, and he considered that moment the worst it could get. But he picked himself up, went outside, and walked through the snow back to his apartment. He saw other people in the streets who were celebrating a new beginning.

It was time for a change, and he needed a new start as well.

Mitch resolved to put New York, and dreams of Hollywood, behind him, and move to Paris where he would be successful in Europe. And that’s what he did.

He never made that Swayze movie, but before he left New York, he starred in a film, the one that everybody remembered, and for one scene.

It was a long time ago now, but it still seemed like yesterday, and he thought back to when production had wrapped, and Danny had encouraged him to go to that small cinema at the Paramount lot to watch the preview cut. He hadn’t wanted to go, but Danny insisted.

Danny had been his childhood friend and he remembered the days when they used to shoot pool together, but when Mitch started acting, they drifted apart, and one day somebody told Mitch that Danny had died in a car accident. But he hadn’t, because one day Mitch saw him on the street outside his New York apartment and the two were reunited.

The two of them sat in the dark theatre and watched the movie, and Mitch thought he was quite good in it. He hadn’t been looking forward to the final scene, the one that earned him an Oscar nomination, but when it came, he thought it brilliant.

The scene is where Mitch is in a derelict factory, propped up in a corner where he has sheltered from the snow outside, and the camera pans across his unshaven face and sunken eyes, wet with snow, but showing no emotion. And then, somebody clambers through a gap in the boarded-up doorway and sits beside him.

The down-at-heel stranger talks to him, but Mitch is too cold to respond. It plays out for several minutes, and the stranger, who is just a kid, tells him that his life is wasted. They share a needle, and Mitch just sits there while something is pumped into the vein on his arm.

Mitch thinks the kid is good.

And then, the kid steals his hat and coat, and goes through the pockets where he finds a little money. Mitch sits motionless, watching this unfamiliar person, but grateful that there is somebody to talk to. And the look in his pained eyes, as the kid goes back into the snow wearing his hat and coat and leaving Mitch to die.

The lights came up and everybody clapped and cheered, and Mitch knew that the movie would be a critical success.

On the way out, Mitch saw River Phoenix, who’d watched the preview, and had made his way over to them. He told Mitch that it was an awesome performance and that last scene would always be be remembered. But Mitch realised that it couldn’t have been River Phoenix because he had died a few years earlier and he wondered who it might have been.

Danny put his arm around Mitch’s shoulder and guided him outside where there was a bright light, a mysterious light that looked incredibly beautiful.

River Phoenix/By Bruce Weber

That moment/Late night snow tales

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It snowed heavily, and the night grew darker, and bewilderingly silent. It reminded me of a Sunday night many years ago. The snow had fallen and trapped us inside, and there were only three TV channels to watch. But late at night, we watched an American TV series called Nero Wolfe that starred that fat bloke from Cannon. I still remember that episode. Many winters have gone. But tonight, when snow fell and we were trapped once again, we dared to switch on the heating and watch TV.  And late at night, with thousands of programmes to choose from, we spent an hour deciding what to watch, and I realised that this was the same length of time it had taken to watch Nero Wolfe back then. This time we chose a movie, The Power of the Dog, and felt sadder and colder.