In the Falling Snow by Caryl Phillips Page B

large wooden tables surrounded by orange plastic chairs, which are generally vacant. Should anybody inadvertently leave a book on top of one of the tables then the eager librarian will swoop and swiftly return the volume to its rightful place on a shelf. It is over a year since he first scanned the popular music ‘collection’ and discovered that, apart from a paperback biography of Nat King Cole, and a semi-academic book which claimed to be an investigation of the influence of religion on the musical development of Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett and Curtis Mayfield, there is no material in this library that is going to be of any use to him. Nevertheless, he has temporarily abandoned the neat desk at his Wilton Road flat in the hope that a change of atmosphere will stimulate him to begin writing. This is the second afternoon that he has sat in a plastic chair at the far end of the larger of the two tables with his back to the window. From this vantage point he need only raise his head slightly to see who is coming through the door. However, in two days he has barely set down a word that he has not immediately scratched out with his cheap blue biro, having deemed the writing to be either derivative or so trite that, were he to be brutally honest, his advice to himself would be to give up.
    At four o’clock she comes in, and again she sits at his table and reaches into her rucksack and pulls out a carefully folded copy of today’s
Evening Standard
. She takes out a small notebook and a battered paperback dictionary and she begins to read the newspaper. Every few minutes she carefully writes a word into her notebook, and then she reaches for the dictionary and quickly leafs through it until she finds the appropriate dog-eared page and meticulously transcribes more words into her notebook. Her face is strangely angelic, and he guesses that she is Slavic. She is certainly pretty, despite the fact that she is wearing no makeup, and her blonde hair is bunched untidily on top of her head and loosely fastened with some sort of bulbous plastic clip. The previous day their eyes met briefly as he stood up to leave, and she offered him the faintest of smiles before lowering her gaze and returning her attention to the clutter of material on the table. As he passed behind her back he noticed that the newspaper was open at the international news section, but he didn’t know if these pages were of particular interest to her, or if the girl just systematically worked her way through the tabloid.
    He folds the flimsy piece of paper in half and then leans over and slides the note towards her. She looks up before he has time to withdraw his hand, and he self-consciously pushes the message the last few inches. It rises up and momentarily butterflies open before coming to rest, closed, in front of her. He smiles and shrugs his shoulders in a gesture of fake helplessness, and he watches as she ignores him and picks up the note and begins to read. She reads it again, and then again, and he worries now that either her English is bad, or his handwriting is unclear, but after what feels like an age she reaches for her pen and begins to write. Without meeting his eyes, she slides the note back in his direction and continues to read the newspaper. ‘In one hour, please.’ The letters are carefully attached to each other with anxious loops and curls as though this is a child’s first attempt at joined-up writing. He remembers that Laurie’s first sentences betrayed a similar deliberation, and he accused Annabelle’s mother of interfering with what the boy’s teachers were doing. Annabelle admitted that, on the afternoons that her mother spent with Laurie, she often sat him down on a bench at the zoo, or in a café, and helped her grandson with his writing, but Annabelle failed to understand what harm her mother was doing. When Annabelle asked him what exactly he meant by ‘middle-class writing’, he tried to explain, but he soon gave up, realising