Snowstop

  From the wet chimney wall he heard the far-off belly-scraping of a large rat dragging towards him. Sleep was what he needed, and dreams. He breathed again, to stop his lungs bursting, because what was the use? Dreams had been his only freedom, exquisite or horrible didn’t matter. You could always wake up from dreams. The worst dream, which he’d had more than once, was when he was going to be hanged. Why or what for he didn’t know, but he felt dread in every bone, the horrible fear of the end about to be inflicted on him. Had an ancestor suffered this, in a fight against the dastardly English? Then, still in the dream, he was able to tell himself it was a dream, only a dream, even as the hard rope was put around his neck. In dreams you were free because nothing was final. You always woke into a world where no situation could be as awful as the one in the dream.

  He was wrong. This wasn’t a dream. It was events in life that you had to be afraid of, because they happened inexorably, and you didn’t have the freedom to wake up from them. Murderers should be hanged, his mother had always said. He screamed at her phosphorescent face filling the whole attic and advancing slowly towards him. Two black helmeted figures leapt up from before his feet.

  Part 2

  TWENTY-SIX

  ‘Old Ferret, all present and correct, sir!’

  They bundled him into an armchair and gave imitation salutes. Twice lucky seven were back in the same room. Huge logs burned so that it was impossible to get close. Nobody spoke, as if they were one family after the enormous dinner of a Yulish reunion, in that lull between the pious intake of calories and the explosion of distilled venom from grudges ancestral.

  Fred turned out two of the lamps, and Aaron thought how much more interesting faces asleep or in repose were under candlelight. ‘We might be here for days, and that means nights as well,’ Fred told them. Keith nodded, glad to have such details taken into account. No one seemed to worry about the van outside, or they didn’t believe what it meant, or they were so disorientated that reality couldn’t get through. If no one did anything they were within hours of death. Gwen’s lifeless face stared at him in triumph, an image he prayed for his will to push aside. It would never depart, and being with her again in a few hours, even if in oblivion, did not seem strange, only horrible, and so he would do all to avoid it. He didn’t want to be whatever she was, nor where she was, because who could guarantee that she might not be waiting somewhere? He was ready to act, but the others wouldn’t help until they were as terrified and determined to stay alive as he was.

  Daniel felt as if the limits of his face were several miles out. He had never been in this country before, where the flesh ached dully from collision with boot and fist, and the body no longer belonged to him. Trying to touch, he couldn’t reach, one eye covered by the blue mountain of its swelling, his right knee a nodule as if the bone had been taken away. It was all too distant, only the blur of pain transmitted from the centre of his damaged fortress, the crenellations a wavy line, the moat a rubbish ditch, portcullis crumbled. He found a patch of stiff and bloody hair from a crack in the skull, but the twinge was momentary. He told his hands not to move. His audience might see, and not like it.

  He had escaped being kicked to death because the dogs’ keeper had ordered them from their fun. Another minute and they would have been impossible to hold, savages only sated when they had drunk his blood.

  Old age, Percy knew, was never as old as it was supposed to be. Full of purpose because he was among people he could feel safe with, he walked in the direction of the fire, a criss-cross of heavy timbers in a white blaze hotter than Hell itself the closer he got, so, being forced back by a pain at his eyes, he swerved towards Daniel and stood over him with a hand on his chin as if wondering what he should do now. They soon knew.

  After the second vicious smack Wayne leapt up and pulled him away. ‘Keep off, Dad, he’s our meat.’

  ‘No,’ Percy shrieked, ‘he’s not meat any more,’ and turned back to his chair, where he dozed with the assurance that when the time came his instincts would serve him as well as anybody else’s. He cat-slept, in and out of comfort, coming into noise, going back into silence or dreams. The spit of burning logs, or the anguished baby moan of the wind, brought him sometimes into the room.

  Alfred’s eyes stayed as open as oysters under a rain of lemon juice. He could run into the snow as well as the next man, get as far from the van as would save his life, but the question was: how far would far be if he had to carry his father? No-bloody-where at all, should he collapse from a heart attack under the weight. Half the roof and three quarters of the main wall might crash onto his napper before he reached the gate, the sort of joke he wouldn’t be able to enjoy. The kindest thing would be to leave the old so-and-so to the explosion, and hope he would go suddenly and without pain, better than living months or years as a cabbage-brain, bossed and tormented by a pack of sadistic old bags in a cheap south-coast nursing home.

  If he got clear and his father didn’t, the blessing would be on both sides. What a way to think about your own flesh and blood – but when he put a hand to his cheeks to see if there were any tears the dry flesh made him smile. Tired of jumbling the same ideas, he imagined talking the issue over with his brothers, his wife, his children, even his neighbours and friends, and knowing that everyone would call him a merciless villain.

  He had read the word for it somewhere a long time ago, in a history book most likely. Parricide. Well, there would be a word for it, wouldn’t there? The fact that you couldn’t get away with anything convinced him he would never have the guts to do it, though having considered the matter at least deserved a dummy run for when the time came.

  She feared to touch the red and purple bruises, but held his hands, fingers folded into the palms, and kissed his lips, which seemed the least damaged part of him. He was some person found on a raft after twenty days adrift, one man left from the many who had perished. He made a smile, but she saw pain. Only pain would come if he tried to speak and say how wrong she had been for causing his distress. Her screams from the room below had buried his own cries at the fear of death, as well as the dreadful blows drummed onto his poor body, forcing Keith up the ladder to pull them away.

  She had done with shouting, hoped her insults would echo in Keith’s mind till the day he died. As for those biking goon-bullies, nothing could move them to feel regret, though if it was true that ‘vengeance was the Lord’s alone’ she hoped He would take care of it sooner rather than later, that they would find their Nemesis under the wheels of a hundred-ton juggernaut, and live only long enough to realize why it was that the Lord had done His work. As for that vile Jenny who had been to bed with one of them, and was stroking his greasy hair, and no doubt whispering praises for his part in the disgraceful riot, she would like to kill her and not let the Lord have the pleasure.

  ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’ She pressed his hands gently, seeking a response in his eyes, and speaking so close that no one would hear. ‘Whatever happens, I won’t leave you. I love you. We’ll always be together.’ Yet the statement was hard to believe, only her way to try and help him bear his suffering.

  The room was filled with lovers, Garry saw, everyone paired off except him and his mate Wayne. There weren’t enough to go round, that’s why. His fists were his lovers, and they’d had a sufficient piece of action to last a few nights at least. He couldn’t remember yesterday, nor care less whether tomorrow came. If what that bag Sally screamed about him had been true he ought to wish it never would, but she hadn’t had a slate go into her thigh like a sabre. Without his leather trousers the leg would have been sliced off, and even then the gash was too deep to bear thinking about, though he didn’t want to bother anybody now that the job was over.

  Fred wound an old sheet around him soaked in a bottle of iodine, and the bleeding seemed to have stopped, so he lay in his underpants like a wounded swaddie in the Falklands, bare legs thrust in front. Though the flesh was chilly there was the danger of getting a hard-on, and then w
here would he be, with everyone to see it?

  He reached for his jacket, covering himself in case it happened. The fight had been more equal than Sally could have known. Lance would have been left headless if he hadn’t worn a helmet, and Wayne had a bruise as big as a headlamp from his forehead hitting a beam. They had taken enough damage between them to add up to as much if not more than Daniel had got, so he couldn’t feel bad about having put the boot in.

  He had only intended getting him down after a couple of thumps to calm him, but the shock from the slate sent him a bit loco, the same with Lance and Wayne when they saw what happened. His laugh brought a glare of rank detestation from Sally, which made him laugh again. If Daniel had been killed he would have asked her to marry him, or take up with him. It must be wonderful, wedded to a woman who not only cursed like a navvy but mixed her spiel with words you hardly knew the meaning of. It would be an education listening to her, and the thought of such a future stopped pain drumming at his leg for a few minutes. Daniel, warped from birth, had still been lucky enough to shaft a nice big lovely woman with a vocabulary like a dictionary, which dirty video he’d better stop running through his brainbox or there would be more than a hard-on under his jacket.

  Pity she won’t look at me, though not many of her sort would unless I chatted them up all evening and got them more than half seas over with a conveyor belt of short drinks. And where would I meet them, in the first place? The only way Fred the Landlord knew how to dress was to put on a white shirt and navy-blue suit, but even a happy walker like that must have better chances with women.

  She had fallen for that schoolteacher all right, though when it started I don’t suppose she knew what she was getting into, no more than I did when I gave the lads a bell and asked them out for a spin. On a night like this! Well, I’d been sweating my bollocks off all day, and didn’t even have the tranny on to tell me the weather because the woman at the house said it interfered with her work at the word processor. You can’t win ’em all, but it would be nice now and again to win one.

  Keith told himself he must look sharp, pull his finger out, do something for others’ sake as much as for his own, though it was hard to rouse his faculties or the energy. Inert in the brain, he knew he need only stand up for full power to flow back, to scratch his head and look as if in thought, able to settle every problem, for those around him to assume he was their man.

  You felt more powerful after killing someone. He hated himself for it, yet could act and be strong, as long as he didn’t question. He went between sickness and wanting to live. His mother had died when he was seven, and everyone said that his father had killed her. Disease did not run in the family, but tragedy did. Every fatal illness began with someone thinking they had caught a cold. Maybe it still does. She was dead before anybody could do anything. His father had gone away with a woman, his Aunt Virginia said. His father later married the woman, who brought Keith up. ‘Your mother died from broken love,’ his aunt told him. Broken love? Did that mean suicide? He still half wondered what it meant though yes, he certainly knew. ‘She wouldn’t have done it but for your father betraying her. He was an absolute rotter. If he had only pretended to love her she might not have died.’

  Keith was the age his father was when he’d had that devastating affair, killing his mother as surely as he had battered the life out of Gwen. His father still lived with the woman, because nothing can break a love affair started in such a way. At sixty-five, the old man was retired, and healthy, went to church every Sunday with his upright wife, the eternal lovers of a storybook Hertfordshire village.

  His mother receded into dreams, and then was forgotten because he had grown to adore his father, the bitter injustice not striking till much later. He hadn’t even disliked Helen, who had looked after him like her own child because she couldn’t have any. Maybe that was why his father fell in love with her, never easy in body or mind with children, though when Keith was older he taught him to shoot at his rifle club, took him walking, boating and cycling, horse riding and skiing, visited the zoo and all the museums with him, and when Keith at fourteen wanted to be with his friends, his father left him to himself without the slightest fuss.

  He would no doubt convince me with tears in his eyes that what happened thirty years ago hadn’t been his fault at all, Keith thought, and wondered how much his father’s life would be smashed when his only son was arrested for murder, which alone would be worth surviving any explosion for.

  The click of Garry’s Zippo interrupted his speculations. ‘We’ve got to do something with that murderer. We didn’t get him down here for nothing.’

  Wayne leaned across to share the flame. ‘That’s what I keep telling myself. If we’re going to be blown up in a few hours he ought to be made to pay for it.’

  ‘We’ll put him on trial.’ Garry was glad to turn his mind from the picture of Sally’s naked and active body, but he also wanted to torment her, as if she was responsible for the grinding pain in his thigh. ‘We’ll find him guilty, and then put him to death. Our helmets are black, so one of ’em will do for the cap. A bit of good old English justice, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I don’t want to die without somebody paying for it.’

  ‘How do we know we’re going to die, though, till we’re dead?’ Lance who had been listening opened his eyes to talk. ‘We might execute him, and then be alive tomorrow to tell the tale. That would put us in a fix. Not that I’m against killing him, mind you, even though he was my teacher.’

  ‘It’s a problem,’ Garry said, ‘and I don’t like problems. We should kill him for that alone.’

  ‘It’s even worse,’ Lance said. ‘It’s a moral problem. If we put him on trial, and then execute him for being a terrorist and killing us, or killing any of us, we’ll be guilty if we’re alive tomorrow. But if we don’t do him in for killing us, and we get blown to smithereens, and he doesn’t, he’ll only get twenty years in clink. He’ll be free and on the streets again in fifteen, back at school teaching kids.’

  ‘But what if he gets blown up as well as us?’ Wayne said.

  ‘Dead men tell no fucking tales,’ Garry said, ‘so we might as well top him. There’s some lovely beams in the attic, and I saw a coil of rope in that spare room.’

  ‘It’s still a moral problem,’ Lance said. ‘You can’t get away from it. That’s what moral problems are like. He used to talk to us at school about moral problems. Just think of it! He was shunting fucking guncotton all over the shop, and he talked about moral problems. Not that I understood a word of what he chuntered on about, so we can’t try him on that count as well.’

  ‘It’ll only be moral if we hang him.’ Garry made another roll-up. ‘Even if none of us die we can make him swing, just for having a load of bombs that he knew would blow people up. He might only get six months in a court of law, not twenty years, but to me it’s a hanging matter. I mean to say, I don’t have fuck-all to do with his politics. Nobody does here. We’re just innocent bystanders, aren’t we?’

  ‘Too fucking true,’ Wayne said solemnly.

  ‘We top him, then,’ Garry said. ‘Right?’

  ‘You can for me. He’ll swing a treat.’

  ‘I expect he ought to be tried first,’ Lance said.

  ‘Oh, we’ll try him all right,’ Garry said. ‘We aren’t fucking heathens. All square and above board. Then we’ll hang him. After all, his bomb load’s outside, ain’t it? We should know. We drove it here.’

  ‘That means you’re the guilty ones.’ Sally’s words were loud enough to suggest they were indisputable. Daniel shook from the icy cold that was his alone. ‘At least he left it in a place where it wouldn’t harm anyone.’

  ‘Except a few passing motorists,’ Garry said.

  ‘Or bikers,’ Wayne jeered.

  ‘You deserve to die, as well.’ Garry altered position to ease his leg. Ferocious ants were gnawing at it. ‘You took his part, so how do we know you aren’t one of them? You was in it from the beginning, and fo
llowed him in your car to make sure he got to where he was going.’

  ‘I arrived before him,’ she said coolly.

  ‘What difference does that make? You only went ahead to make sure the coast was clear. Terrorists use people like you because nobody would dream of suspecting you. You can’t fool me. It’s only shits like you who help terrorists to blow ordinary people like us to bits.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they even get paid for it,’ Wayne said, ‘apart from expenses. They’ do it for kicks. I dream all the time of making a fucking great blaze in the middle of Chesterfield, but I’d never do it. I might hurt somebody, or get put inside if I was caught.’

  She couldn’t plead for Keith to hold them back, though he would be happy to hear her do so, for he was her sort after all, and would stop them sooner or later. One minute she loved Daniel, to a pitch never felt before, a melting together of temperaments that pushed tears to her eyes. She fought them, also, then became still, with a desperate uncertainty as to where such weakness would take her. A few hours ago she was driving to the airport, no one closer than dull and familiar Stanley.

  Wayne pushed her aside to reach Daniel. ‘Your van’s full of explosives, eh?’

  Words came thick and distorted out of his battered features. ‘It is. I wish it wasn’t, but it is.’

  ‘When is it due to explode?’ Keith, needing them to hear it from the Devil’s own lips, pulled him by the arm to make him sit up.

  The world and everyone connected to it was meaningless, too far away from Daniel, except for Sally’s warm hand, and even that was taken from him. Sharp aches ran through his legs and head, and he smiled because his limbs were becoming real again. ‘Eight o’clock is what I heard. I’m not supposed to know.’

  ‘Stand up,’ Keith said.

  Daniel knew an order when he heard one, helped up through the climbing frame of pain which would prevent him falling once he was at the top. He feared the three savages who had pulled him from the attic, but Keith was more dangerous, merciless grey eyes close to his face: ‘Where were you supposed to take it?’