A chilling story, not for the usual ghostly reasons, despite the title.
This story is set in a bleak dystopian future, with a constant gale-force icy wind. A young man struggles to survive – nothing can grow, all the animals and birds have gone, and, heavily protected by layers of clothing, thick gloves and goggles, he goes around looking for food in abandoned buildings, which sometimes collapse around him. There is a woman living in the house with him, Helene. They are not partners, in fact she is his former teacher, but he suspects she doesn’t recognise him. She is heavily pregnant, and barely moves, perhaps from despair. But he is determined to find her a Christmas gift, some Shakespeare, seemingly impossible in a world where almost everything has been destroyed.
This is speculative climate fiction, depicting a brutally cold and inhuman world, uncanny in its indifference to any fragile bodies simply trying to survive. I can’t imagine how much worse everything will become when the baby arrives.
Much of the story is simply description – but how powerful that description is, and how varied. How many ways are there to describe wind and cold, or abandoned interiors? More than I would have imagined.
“The wind was coming from the east when he woke. The windows on that side of the house boxed and clattered in their frames, even behind the stormboards, and the corrugated-iron sheet over the coop in the garden was hawing and creaking, as though it might rip off its rivets and fly off. The bellowing had come into his sleep, like a man’s voice…”
As a climate writer myself, this haunting story got under my skin and gets into my anthology.
First published in The New Statesman, 2014. You can find it here, along with a link to an audio recording. Collected in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, ed. Philip Hensher, Penguin, 2019
A Personal Anthology 