Snowstop

  ‘We’ll need as many spare lights as we can get for those who go in front to clear the snow,’ Keith said. ‘Also, wear every scrap of clothing you can wrap around your bodies. Are there any chains we can put on the wheels?’

  Fred sat writing a list of the wanted items. ‘Not for a van. The wheels are too big. We can try them, though.’

  Daniel pushed Sally’s hand from his mouth. ‘You won’t even get to the gate.’

  Fingers moved among bottles in the half-dark – wine, beer and whisky – chose the solid neck of a champagne bottle and grasped it as firmly as to uproot a tree. Keith at the window tried to assess their prospects, but behind the wind there was discordant singing, like a woman wailing her heart out, calling him. At the back of the wind, a multitude of people on the moors and hillsides howled as if a terrible disaster were about to overtake them. He was hypnotized by the noise that went on and on intolerably, but he stood it out, couldn’t turn from the cold glass, forced himself to listen, moments like days, to the endless wailing of cosmic despair breaking the heart of that part of the world which thought itself safe, as if all beyond the hotel was a vast Pompeii being earthquaked out of existence. A real and immediate scream filled the room, a heavy object smashing dully against flesh.

  Daniel’s blood raced him to the floor.

  ‘He opened his trap once too often.’ The jagged glass went again at the injured head. ‘I told you to belt up.’

  Parsons and Aaron pulled him away, and Wayne sat down but kept the bottle in reach as if for another bout at the time of his choosing. Keith stood over him, staring the crazed face out, the mind behind peeled of all sense.

  ‘He asked for it.’ Wayne burned bright with indignation at Daniel’s gloating pessimism. ‘If he opens his mouth again, he’s had it. We don’t need him any more. I feel like a massacre. Fuck the van. Let’s have fun. We’ll fuck the place up before the van does. Let’s take a few happy walkers with us.’

  ‘We’ve got to stick together.’ Garry spoke softly, and Keith was appalled at his pallor when he held a light close, glad the candles had been so low on the illumination of his suffering. ‘We’ll shift that snow,’ Garry said. ‘We didn’t have so many tools when we moved the van before, did we? If we wreck the place we’re on that Daniel’s side. We got the van here, didn’t we? Well then, we’ll get it away again.’

  Hands over her head, sinking to the floor, Sally knew there was nothing to be done, either for Daniel or for herself, only to go down at his scream of pain and despair. They would murder him, and then kill her, both lost if they didn’t run away, no one willing to help. The hideaway under her arms and inside her closed eyes was dark and warm, a last protectorate formed by cutting out sound and light, as the howl from someone she hoped was not herself went on and on.

  Fred came in with a bowl of warm water and a pile of hand towels, busy as on a summer’s day when a kid had gone uncontrollably headfirst from one of the swings in his garden. He had been meaning to cull stones out of the playground, but then gravel was just as bad to the palms and knees of a falling child. ‘In my business you have to be a jack of all trades: plumber, carpenter, electrician, even a doctor, like now. Come on, Mr Daniel, let’s see the damage. We’ll soon have the bleeding stopped. But that screaming’s a bit of a nuisance, isn’t it? What’s got into her?’

  ‘Kill the bitch,’ Garry said faintly. ‘She’s getting on my wick with her racket.’

  Fred pulled Sally’s arm out of her lock, the flat of his hand ringing against her face. She stared, then discovered where she was. ‘You ought to be all right now, miss. I’m sorry I had to do that, but I’m sure you’ll understand now you’re back to normal.’

  Lance stretched himself and reached for his leathers. The jacket was heavy with studs and belt but Jenny held it high enough for his arms to go in, getting her amiable strong guy ready for his labours. Enid and Eileen fitted up Wayne with trousers little slimmer than his legs, boots well zipped and buckled to the knees, jacket fastened with press studs and thick belt, helmet with visor set on his head. ‘Look at that fussy old bastard dabbing at that little cut I gave Old Ferret with the bottle. He’ll still be at it when the balloon goes up.’

  Fred scissored another strip off to tie the bandage, then stood back to view his work. ‘You’ll be all right now.’

  ‘I wish you’d stop my leg bleeding,’ Garry said, ‘instead of wasting your time on that pair, though if he’s as all right as you said I was he’ll be dead in a couple of hours. His troubles are over, if he did but know it.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Enid said. ‘Look at that blood on the floor.’

  A pool had spread in the shadow, and when Fred took off the swabbings blood pulsed bright red from the wound. ‘We’ll do a tourniquet. I’ve seen worse at sea.’

  ‘I suppose you dragged the poor fuckers behind the ship in salt water,’ Garry said.

  ‘Only for a week.’

  Keith lifted the telephone on the bar, in case it had mended itself, but there was no sound. He hammered it against the desk.

  ‘That’s always the first to go,’ Fred told him. ‘That, and the power. I meant to get a generator in last year.’

  ‘Then you would have had enough light to operate on my leg,’ Garry said. ‘No thanks.’

  Fred tied the ligature, and the bleeding stopped.

  Which was good, Keith thought, unless gangrene’s the result. ‘We’ll look at you when we get back.’

  Percy stood up, staring ahead, clean and spruce as if he had just finished a long dolling-up for a Saturday night at the pub with his wife. ‘Aren’t you going to take me? I fancy a walk on Bournemouth’s lovely sands. The sun’s coming through the window, which is funny, with the blizzard going on. Still, I’ll bet some lovely nurses are sunbathing out there in their birthday suits.’

  In one swift walk, before Alfred could get to him, he was stroking Sally’s hair, a grin on his ancient maniacal face, large immaculate teeth fixed in her sight for ever. His hand roamed her shoulders and went down to a breast, gripped so hard she cried out and pushed him away, the fall-out of his body shaking the floor.

  Eileen looked at Keith, and he felt that to kiss her would be too much like saying goodbye, an impression he didn’t care to give. He smiled and touched her hand. ‘We won’t do it all at one go. We’ll have to come back for more help.’

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve never loved anybody so much in my life, honest. I know that now.’

  ‘I feel the same. Don’t worry.’ And that would have to do, as he turned from a sweeter farewell than he had ever received from Gwen, or given her. But then, I never loved her – though in the beginning he had been infatuated, and eventually obsessed by her as she wove and stitched and knitted him into her possessive web, and he had gone along with it, not knowing that one day he would kill her. Or maybe I always knew, he told himself, as they went into the blizzard.

  Part 3

  THIRTY

  The back door was as much in the lee of the tempest as any part of the hotel could be, Keith nevertheless leading Wayne and Lance into a meteorological topsy-turvyness similar to when he had yachted with boat-loving colleagues in gales around the Orkneys. The spirit was with them and the flesh was also willing, but icy snowbits drove against their cheeks, and Keith wished he too had a helmet instead of a balaclava around his head. Wayne and Lance wielded their spades and chopped a footpath through waist-high snow till a blade clanged against the back door of the van.

  Lance mouthed a joke no one heard, the flashlight brushing his visor, sound stopping all but their own Royal Banshee shouts of glee. Keith did not know who was who: one at the side door hammering with the spade handle to break the ice that crusted it shut, while whoever other it was slid between the van and the wall and after a few uppercuts with the handle opened a door.

  He got in and lay flat across the seat, pulling himself up like a spayed animal. One out and one in, between them they forced the other door to slide back, a thud t
hat sounded out the wind. They sat in a row, damp upholstery and mock leather smelling above the cold, snow padding the windscreen. ‘Now what?’

  Lance turned the key in the ignition, and the dull red spot came on and then went out, a lifeless click on trying a few more times. ‘Just what I thought. The fucking battery’s as flat as a pancake. Now we’re fucked, and no mistake.’

  Keith cleared water from his watchface – at four o’clock. There were two possibilities, he told himself. Only two, but listen, he said to them: ‘Either we find a car ready primed with a full battery and a set of jump leads in the boot so that we can start the motor from a boost out of the good one, or we unload the explosives and fuses into another car in which the engine will start, and drive that one away.’ But there were two disadvantages to consider. The first was that while manhandling the lethal cargo they might disturb it and – goodbye all.

  ‘Not yet,’ Wayne said. ‘I love the world still.’

  The second snag was that a car would be less able to negotiate the snowdrifts than the robust van. So they must get back in the hotel and find out whose car had a full battery, or who thought their car had, and whether or not it was equipped with a set of jump leads to make the transfer of power. The prospect of finding that other car, supposing it existed, and assuming it could be found, and uncovering it from the snow, and manoeuvring it into position to get the two engines close, then opening both bonnets and attaching the jump leads with freezing clumsy fingers was, to put it mildly, awesome.

  ‘Let’s get moving, then,’ Lance said. ‘My nuts are knocking from the cold, even though they’re twenty-two-carat gold.’

  They tumbled into the snow like black polar bears – if there were such things in the Far North – and went back to the porch, while Keith stayed to make certain that the van doors weren’t entirely closed so that they wouldn’t lose the same sweat getting in again.

  Wayne kicked and Lance thumped, but the door to the hotel held, their efforts silent in the high pitch of the wind. Keith pushed at solid wood. If every little operation took so long they would still be arsing about by the deadline of eight o’clock. The Yale latch had been on when they came out, and had clicked behind. What they needed was luck, and you put yourself in the way of that only when you worked your hardest. They were willing and capable, so could afford to be hopeful, though all the force they could muster wouldn’t move the door.

  Aaron sheltered the last inch of his drink, as if a man out of the desert would come in and slurp it up. He wanted to make it last. The day was dire, he had known from the start that it would be, because every time he saw a word on a signpost or shop door he had tried to say it backwards. He often did this for amusement and to cultivate his dexterity with anagrams, but when the habit persisted, and he was unable to stop, it meant that something irritating or just plain unlucky would occur before the day was out.

  Duffle coat, scarves and gloves were heaped on the carpet while he waited for Keith and his myrmidons to come in cursing and exhausted, and tell him to have a go. He did not want to, saw no reason to, they were trapped and there was nothing to be done. The besetting sin of the English was idleness. At least Robert Burton had said so, and Burton should have known, writing but one book in his life. Maybe that makes me more English than most, he thought, because the others are labouring hard enough.

  Beryl worked harder, never still, even now she would be sitting at home in the room with the old-fashioned miner’s grate which shone because she black-leaded it every day to make it look traditional. At the table she would check the titles and prices for the next catalogue, or make sure the house accounts were in order. She took note of every penny spent, and of every pound that came in, a rigid framework he liked. Into such a dream world of work, love and lodging he would introduce Enid.

  He drank the last of his whisky. He thought it might come back up, but his stomach, like an old friend, let it rest. It was all lies, a pitiable deception of a lost and honest girl, because the offered job did not exist. The police were onto him for forgery. Even without that upheaval Beryl would have said we can’t afford her, the spare room is full of books, she will be more trouble than she’s worth. And he would have to tell her she was right, for to lose Beryl (and she was always threatening to go) would make life untenable. Any rift between them, and she would die, she said at the same time. So might he, the dread of the hostile world on him, because she had become his and his alone.

  Every month she stood for hours at the parlour window looking at the moon, weeping at the emptiness of her life, always after days of sullen complaint against everyone she had known: their parents, friends, him – most, he thought, not justified. Or she would rave about slights that had happened so long ago they did not deserve to be remembered, brewing herself into a pitiable crisis of nerves, raving as if a wolf were loose in her, possessed by a longing for the side of the moon she would never see. No inducement, persuasion, or show of affection could break that barrier, every fit as painful to him as if he were witnessing it for the first time.

  The end was always the same. Exhausted by unexplainable suffering, she allowed him to lead her to his bed, which he did with intense feelings of shame and joy. In the morning her eyes were clear, brow smooth, heart calm, levity for herself and subtle commiseration for him, and a wistful kind of gratitude that he had helped the storm go by. For him one evil cancelled out another, but what would happen if he took Enid home?

  The fire glowed between two half-burnt logs that would never sufficiently meet to give a warming flame, kept that way by Fred’s attack of manic parsimony. Alfred put his father close, laid his cashmere coat across to keep the blood from coagulating unto death. The old man’s teeth clattered like Ezekiel’s bones, stopped and then began again, eyes intently shut as if to let him listen more appreciatively to the rhythm. Alfred eased up his trousers, and the flesh above the socks was of a cold that would keep rising, an ice age in reverse going towards the warmer Pole.

  Jenny knew there wasn’t, but had to ask. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘He needs a warm hospital,’ and the sight of a lovely-looking nurse or two.

  She wondered at the smile when his cheeks were wet with tears. ‘So might the rest of us, before the night’s over.’

  Percy’s eyes took time to settle and focus. ‘I should be out there, giving the lads a hand.’

  He’ll get at me with his last breath, Alfred thought. He means why aren’t I with them. They don’t need me yet, he could say, but it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference.

  Percy called out in self-reproach: ‘But I’m not up to it. I’ve got these awful aches in my shoulders.’

  ‘Try to rest,’ Alfred said. ‘You’ll be fit to travel in the morning then.’

  Aaron thought they should get him upstairs to bed, but Alfred waved him away: ‘I want to keep an eye on him down here.’

  Enid was putting the various drinks together, like to like – beer, whisky, wine, gin and sherry. ‘We always do this when we clear up. Fred tips the spirits back in the bottles, but he lets me have the other dregs before I go home. The beer and wine makes me sleep better. Only I’m not going home tonight.’

  ‘I’ll never get to the palm trees,’ Percy sighed. ‘I know it’s a geriatrics’ home you’re taking me to, and who wants to go to one of them? I twigged we wasn’t going to our Brian’s. I’m not so bloody daft.’

  A ship had come, to pull Alfred away from the island where he had been marooned with his father since birth. Or that’s what it seemed. The old man was dying, and he wanted him to, but at the same time he hoped he would go on living. ‘I was only trying to do what was best.’

  The rattle in the throat declined to a cynical laugh. ‘Oh, I know you was. I was a pest at times, wasn’t I? Everybody is, though. You’ll be a pest one day. Maybe even a bigger one than I’ve ever been. If you aren’t a pest to somebody you aren’t alive. And everybody’s alive, so everybody’s a pest, aren’t they?’

  His hands
seemed to be searching around the inside of a refrigerator for his favourite leftovers. ‘Sing “Greensleeves” to me, Alfred.’

  ‘I can’t sing, you know that.’

  ‘I allus loved it. It brings everything back. Your mother loved it, as well. There’s a lot to say goodbye to. Life’s a bit of a pushbike at times, ain’t it?’

  Why don’t you die, you old bastard? – which Alfred didn’t entirely mean, Percy’s words (and his) a row of taps releasing more tears. ‘Don’t leave me, Dad.’

  ‘I’m not going, you silly sod. What makes you think so? It’s just that I don’t know where I’m coming to.’

  No one was going anywhere on a night like this, Eileen thought, the gale thumping and bumping at every brick. She should have stayed in Buxton. Even a doss in a shop doorway would have been cushier, though the police might have prodded her on a few times.

  Fred came in with a heap of blankets, the captain of the ship once more, or The Flying Bloody Dutchman, though even that was something to smile about. ‘It’s too late,’ Aaron said, ‘though you might as well cover him. But it was more than blankets he needed, so don’t feel bad about it.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t. We expect casualties on a trip like this. Even though I run a tight ship you can’t stop the odd accident. We crossed the North Atlantic in such weather once, and lost three chaps. One died of an ulcer, one had a brain haemorrhage, and the third disappeared over the side from no apparent cause. It was the worst crossing I’d ever been on. I left the ship as soon as I could. I trod on a bloody great rat as I went down the gangplank.’

  ‘Did you?’ Eileen said.

  ‘You should have heard it squeal. I had a heavy kitbag on my shoulder, and I weighed more than I do now.’

  Eileen sniffed. ‘Poor bloody rat.’

  ‘I didn’t think so. I hated ’em.’

  Alfred took the other end of the blanket, to spread it over the body. Talking right to the end: I might have known. If he could talk, and get on at you at the same time, he was alive, nobody more so. I thought he would never let go of the rail, but he’s gone now, back to his tadpoles in jamjars as a kid, and the way sense was knocked into him at school, then to working and college at the same time on the engineering side, living for next to nothing a week and being happy on it because fags were a shilling for twenty and beer a tanner a pint, when courting was courting because you had to be careful of VD and putting a girl in the club – back to hiking and the bike, hard work and cold water, football on the wasteground, the pictures once a week if you were lucky and the music hall when you were flush – back to the happy days you couldn’t get back to till you died, and then you were lucky to find anything at all, though he was sure his domineering old bugger of a father would get all he wanted, even on the other side.