Januariad

The radiator in the kitchen had been broken all year, and this was not a problem until the week we travelled back to her home town for Christmas. On returning we felt the cold as soon as we entered the apartment. She turned the handle of the kitchen door and bounced right off it. It took our combined shoulders to force it; the drifts of snow were four feet high against walls.

She’d left the window open, I’d left the window open. Each blamed the other. We put our coats back on and boiled a kettle. Our cups of hot tea created small holes in the mounds of white on the kitchen table. ‘It’s very beautiful,’ she said. It was very beautiful. Neither of us closed the window.

We took to keeping most of our food in the fridge in order to stop it from freezing. Some of it we brought out to the living room. The window continued to throw huge amounts of white into the kitchen, a result of the swirling winds that came up the north-angled alleyway.

We kept the door closed, and walked in channels of compacted snow to reduce melt. Avoiding switching on the oven meant we ate mostly fruits and yoghurt, cold meats and bread. Anything that didn’t require the cooker. One night we had take-away pizzas in the living room, but we were back in the kitchen, swaddled in winter clothes, for tea and biscuits.

She would take long, hot baths, then walk across the apartment and throw herself steaming into the drifts of snow. One evening she melted so much that we had to go downstairs and carry up bucketfuls of fresh fall from the alleyway. We stood dripping in the elevator and argued about whether or not this was cheating.

The next morning our downstairs neighbour called to the door to report a damp patch on her ceiling. Back in the kitchen there was a noticeable thaw. The wind had turned, and the alleyway was quiet again. With buckets and saucepans we shovelled piles of snow out the open window, entirely burying my car below on the road. I didn’t notice this until later, when I went downstairs and had to dig the same snow a second time.