Daniel looked around the room as if he hadn’t seen it before – limitless in the gloom, people slumped in their chairs as if in the waiting room to Hell and hoping for the doors to open soon. He could do as he liked now that he was doomed with the rest of them, wouldn’t bother to tell that the van battery was all but flat, only good if you kept the wheels turning, having barely got it going again when it stalled at traffic lights outside Warrington. He stood, a demented-looking figure with a bloodsoaked towel around his head. ‘They won’t come back.’
‘You look like a real fucking terrorist now,’ Eileen said. ‘One of them Arabs. But if you don’t stop saying things like that, I’ll go in the kitchen for a carving knife and finish you off. I won’t fuck around with a bit of old bottle.’
Garry raised a fist, as if to indicate that no one would deserve it more. His tongue wouldn’t do as it was told. He slept and woke. Words spoken in the room came through to his dreams, and when no one took his advice on what they should do with Daniel he assumed they couldn’t hear, being too much in the shadow. In more light they might have heard him better, done something. When Jenny came to hold his hand, a fragment of warmth went momentarily back into his body.
Fred bent from the waist to look. ‘This young rating could do with a few blankets’ – spreading over him what remained. ‘You’ll sleep like a top under these.’
Aaron took the flashlight. ‘Let’s fetch more. They’re going to be needed.’
‘What for?’ Enid wanted to be left alone. Heat was supposed to rise, when there was any, but upstairs it was like entering headfirst into a layer of ice. ‘I’m perishing,’ she said at the landing.
He kissed her lips, hoping to warm her. ‘Go back, then. I’ll do it on my own.’
‘No, I want to help you. It’s like a morgue down there. I’ll only go back if you come with me.’
‘We’ll find some blankets first.’ His light picked out the exit sign, which he read as TIXE, then focused on wetness spreading from the corner of the ceiling, the wind sounding as if packs of dogs were assembling to go on a journey.
She gripped his hand, as if the building had been abandoned years ago. ‘The place ain’t the same any more.’
‘It will be, when the lights come on again, and the heat gets going.’ He led her into the spare room where the ladder rested against the open trap door. Air streamed from the attic as cold and strong as a river in the tundra. He put a foot on the ladder. ‘I’m going up to have a look.’
‘Don’t leave me in the dark.’
He held her in his arms till she stopped shivering. ‘Only for a moment. I promise.’
Sally followed him to the window. The same dull whiteness bulged at the panes. ‘What are you thinking about?’
He saw only her eyes, nothing of the rest of her face, so turned to the snow, fatally drawn. ‘We must get out.’
She wanted to unravel the towel that made him look as unreasonable as his words. A pocket had been torn from his jacket, his trousers were ripped at the knee. His power, such as remained, was in thinking they had a future. She touched his arm. ‘Where?’
‘Away,’ he said, ‘anywhere,’ as casually as if suggesting a walk through summer glades, with no more danger than a cooling shower of rain. ‘We’ll be all right, the two of us. One alone might not be, but two can find a wall, and build a shelter. We’ll make a palace in the snow.’
She was cold against him, even inside, ice coming through and freezing the sentiment. The sound of a grown man sobbing by the fire told her there was no more hope. She wanted to shout for him to be his age, pull himself together, it wasn’t natural for a man in his fifties to cry because his father had died. No man should cry. Her father never had, and she wouldn’t when he died. Nor when her mother passed away, come to that. ‘We have to stay here. They’ll get rid of the van, and then everyone will be all right.’
A palace of snow would make them impermeable to cold, halls of ice for eternal lovers to shelter in. They belonged together. ‘I believed you when you said you loved me.’
She stood with folded arms, warmed by her coat. Yes, it had been love, nothing more so, but it would be suicide to go into the blizzard, though whether she would or not if the time came, and she had no way of stopping him, she couldn’t say.
No guidance expected, she looked around. Jenny knelt, head on the blankets covering the injured leg of that horrid biker. Parsons’ whining snore dominated, until Eileen poked him, at which he stared as if she were mad, then turned into another position and slept more quietly. The old man was dead, his son mourning him like a child who had lost his mother. Enid and Aaron were prowling around upstairs, though God knows what they expected to discover. Keith and his pair of yobbos were in the snow at the back trying to move the van, and Fred was in the kitchen assembling food for their comfort. He would only think there would be less to feed if she ran away with Daniel.
Aaron’s light at the beams showed a tile ripped free by the wind, others following like bats in a mass panic, spinning into the turmoil of snow. Much of the roof was uncovered, half-frozen grit on the attic floor. Fred’s hotel would no longer be viable after the thaw. Making sure the trap was closed, he was careful to put one foot after the other on the ladder.
‘I thought you was never going to come back,’ she said. ‘That’s snow on your coat.’
‘If we’re here much longer it’ll be in the lounge as well. It won’t be any use telling anyone.’ They went into the rooms to gather as many blankets as could be found.
Spades were weapons of war. Sweat saves blood, as Keith had heard said, such fervour from one old soldier he would believe it for life. Work the body and you saved the spirit, which in turn looked after the body, and so you guarded both. In other words, treat every problem with care. Lavish it with time as well as mental labour, then sweat over it by digging into all the possible whys and wherefores. Such meticulous care for detail helped to win people to his way of thinking. You pondered on what intelligence was collected, while they drifted happy-go-lucky along, and when the problem fell into its many parts you fitted them together like the components of a machine gun, till you saw a way through and, with the illumination thus gained, took everyone with you.
The spades Fred had found were barely fit for peace, never mind war, especially against elemental malice in the heart of the blizzard, and when they were cutting at the solid door he was so afraid the handles would snap that he dragged them towards a window because glass was easier, leaded or not, enough particles soon freed from the frame to let them help each other over the sill and into the kitchen, stamping on putty and glass to get warm again.
The lounge was rank with woodsmoke after the outside air, Fred economizing his supply by pulling green logs from the top of the pile. ‘He’s trying to gas us or freeze us, just in case we get the van safe away.’ No blaze, the fire also gave less light, like one you’d made in a wood, Wayne thought, that a keeper or a farmer kicked to bits and chased you away from.
Keith found the place as squalid as a camp in the Arctic after nine months of winter. Where were the brushes and cleaning rags to fight off signs of the crack-up? People in the rear echelons should set to, and present an ordered place for destruction – if the hotel had to go. And if it didn’t, what then? Nothing was wasted. A clean front to life or death was all that mattered.
A circle of snow flopped around Wayne when he jumped: ‘My hot-aches are killing me. I’ll have frostbite soon, if I haven’t got it already. And look at the sweat running down my wrists. It’s like being in a sauna inside all this clobber.’ He smiled at the shadows, happy with his purpose in life. ‘I’d better not undo it, though, or I’ll croak from pneumonia.’
Lance crashed his helmet against the table. Jenny kissed him, and leaned across to light his cigarette. ‘It’s lovely weather for an Eskimo.’ He wiped the visor with a beer-soaked serviette. ‘I used to want to emigrate to Canada, but I think it’ll be Australia, if ever I do, unless I get a call from the Gra
nd Old Opry to go to Nashville!’
Keith felt inexpressibly tired, wrung out, ready to sleep or die: but he knew he must rouse himself, fight free from a sudden onset of total ineptitude. ‘We want the keys to the Volvo, because it’s the nearest car to the van. I’m sure the battery’s good on that, as well.’ From shadows by the fireplace came a sound halfway between that of a kid robbed of his toffees and someone who thought he had cut his finger but then sees his hand’s dropped off. ‘Who’s making that noise?’
‘The old man died,’ Aaron told him.
‘Is that all?’ Wayne said. ‘I wish my old man would. I’ve asked him to, many a time. He’d never do it for me, though.’ He reached a ham sandwich from the tray, then swung his rawboned hand, missing Fred by a millimetre, Fred wishing at the rush of air that they were still on inches and the gap bigger. ‘You’ve been at that titty-bottle again. I can tell. You stink rotten.’
‘Leave him alone,’ Keith said.
Wayne smiled. ‘I was only trying to get my blood going. It’s like mud, and it hurts. He’s more than half-pissed, though.’
Life and limb wasn’t worth tuppence to these types. The only respect you got, Fred knew, for what it was worth, came from people who looked on you as lower than a dog. He levelled his bow tie. ‘We’ve had two away, Mr, Blackwell. Three, if you count old Mr Percy, though he’s still here, in body at least.’
Food gave energy, beat the tiredness. Keith paused in his eating. ‘Who are they?’
‘The woman Sally, and her boy friend.’
Murderous fingers gripped his knife, though he couldn’t have said whether to slice that incompetent fool or himself. You curbed the impulses of the rabble at your peril. He should have allowed Wayne to kill them both. ‘Why did you let them go?’
‘I wonder how Garry is, with his bad leg?’
‘He’s asleep,’ Jenny said. ‘I’m keeping an eye on him.’
‘I hope he’s all right.’ Lance saw him lying back in the half-dark. ‘If he isn’t, I’ll smash that Daniel to bits.’
‘I couldn’t stop them.’ Fred stood back a few paces, as if to show he knew his place, and also because his place seemed a safer spot at the moment to stand in. Any trouble, and he would be more limber than anyone could know in those electrified seconds before they decided to take a witless poke at him. ‘I was in the kitchen doing the sandwiches. The others were asleep.’
‘She had the Volvo, didn’t she?’
‘Yes, sir.’ He sensed the rebuke that he should have kept everyone awake with words or threats, but he knew he hadn’t the backbone to make a captain, something he had always felt. He wasn’t discouraged to be reminded of it, as long as he could act the part now and again. He had often been the life and spirit of the ship with his impersonations of those who were more successful in achieving rank. Funny, how a situation such as this took you back to a time when your next minute also did not bear thinking about. But bosun at least he could call himself. ‘I’ve got the number in the book.’
‘And her handbag’s gone, with the keys?’ His own car would be far more trouble to get into position, though at least he carried jump leads.
‘Something smells good,’ Wayne said.
Jack of all trades was also a cook, and glad to sidestep the foetid air of recrimination. ‘I’ve got the biggest pot I could find on the stove: the soup of soups. I chucked in vegetables, tinned and raw, a bottle of olive oil, lard, onions, rice and a few spuds, as well as a chopped-up chicken and a pound of bacon. Anybody who goes out into the snow is going to have their bellies full. I wouldn’t be me if they didn’t. And those who don’t have to shake hands with the blizzard will have a breakfast they’ll never forget.’
‘I hate fucking soup.’ Wayne liked fun. Fun stopped him knowing a self he might not like and therefore turn dangerous. He winked at all but Fred. ‘I broke my mother’s heart over soup, so she had to make stews. I love stew. I love her cakes, as well. She’s the best cakemaker in all Derbyshire. She made a big sponge cake for my twenty-first birthday. It was shaped like a motorbike, icing and all, twenty-one candles on the topbox. Dad said she’d never be able to do it, but she did.’
Fred stepped over broken glass to flick a crumb off the table, ‘I’d give her a job here.’
‘She wouldn’t work for a cunt like you. Twenty-one candles on the topbox, and every one of them was lit!’
‘You must have been spoiled all your life,’ Eileen said, enviously.
‘I was, duck. That’s why I’m so rotten!’
‘Another thing’ – Keith turned to Alfred, scornful at such open manifestation of his misery – ‘get rid of that corpse. Parsons, Aaron, help him to push it into the snow. I don’t want to see it there when we get back.’
Fish slid around the pool, and vanished. But they didn’t vanish. They turned a corner and were no more seen. So, little Alfred fixed his eyes on them to see where they went, while his father on the bank took out cakes and lemonade, tea and cheese sandwiches for himself. The sun made them warm and lazy, though not the fish coming out from the muddy bank and sliving towards the middle. This time he followed it, but the cake stuck in his mouth, and when he choked his tall and frightened dad gently banged his back so he would spit it out and breathe again. He had read a book once which called them ‘halcyon days’. ‘Put him outside? Do you know what you’re saying?’
‘The body will be better preserved. Open a window and drop him out. You’ll find him again when it thaws.’
‘We could cremate him,’ Wayne said. ‘That old furniture in the spare room would burn a treat. Then there’s the tables in here. A funeral pile, like in India. I suppose it would stink, though, inside here. And we’re not fucking savages, are we?’
Eyes convexed under Alfred’s lids, then bulged dangerously. ‘He’s staying with me. You’re not the gaffer here.’
‘I am, for the time being anyway,’ Keith said. ‘Somebody has to be, and I can’t see anyone else willing to take over the job. I expect to find that body gone when we come back. And if you don’t do as I say you’ll be dead as well.’ He pushed by and drew the blanket back. They hadn’t closed those staring pot-white orbs that had widened at the shock of death: the eyes of the head being smashed again and again at the wooden bannister made him throw the cloth over. There were no rules any more, no laws, only the ones he made. He didn’t say that, though they had to know he would slaughter anyone who stood in his way. There could only be one voice in the Republic of Possible Catastrophe, though the illusion of reason and consensus must be fostered. ‘It’s unhygienic to have a body in the room. We have to live here for the next few hours, maybe for days.’
‘He’s my father,’ Alfred wept.
‘He’s dead. Throw him outside. Come on, lads, time’s running out, and there’s a lot of work to do.’
Lance and Wayne donned gloves and helmets, ready for the wind and snow. Watching them go, Alfred knew he had to defend his rights. His father would have laughed: ‘You’re still a little lad, and don’t know what it’s all about. Either shut up and let them get on with it, or get the biggest carving knife you can find and take one with you. Two would be even better, but oh, for God’s sake, don’t whine or waffle.’
Nor did Parsons like a corpse in the room. ‘It’s bad for morale, and it’ll smell soon. If we plonk him out of the back door he’ll keep as fresh as a daisy. We’ll ask Fred to get a Bible from upstairs and say a prayer over him.’
THIRTY-ONE
Powdery snow thrashed up by the wind made his cock so small it must have gone into the furthest fold of his pants, but his fingers had to find it, since the only way to unfreeze the lock of the BMW was to send out a jet of hot piss. No need to explain, he thumbed around, found the end and worked the rest through: work, you idle bastard, earn your keep for once in your life. Iced tips rattled at his back while the amber stream went like a spinning garden hose, Wayne’s torch spot on target.
The door opened as if the car had been six months in the d
ry, but that was the easiest part. Keith’s smile was returned by a thumbs up in their gloves, which he knew was a gesture embedded in himself as well, the old sign of success and complicity crossing all boundaries.
They crammed in for shelter and he turned the engine on, the soft purr a tuning fork to the wind, then a roar as Keith stamped the accelerator. All systems go, the magic wands of the wipers grated over particles of frozen snow and picked up speed.
A gully was created the size of the car, sides of snow mounting as they dug. He hadn’t believed work could be done so quickly, but they laboured without discussion, Lance near the boot and Wayne lost in the snow behind, and soon the sunken tracks became apparent and their trenches joined, wider than the car and down to the level of the wheels till a spade struck tarmac.
More space than Keith needed, but more was always better. The heaters cleared all Perspex, and he backed into the space till the rear window showed only snow. Like born surveyors they had set the angle at which the car would come side on to the van, digging as if any minute the shelling would begin, their previous excavation joining the one they worked on now.
Like a heavily-encased astronaut stepping on a Siberian-scaped moon, gravity pushing him around the storm and, hardly able to see, Lance wished for windscreen wipers on his visor, a minuscule motor to turn them, as well as heated clothing like an aviator’s as he worked at cold dust and pale blue by the spadeful coming up in woolly slabs and going high to left or right, the snow light compared to soaking worm-laden soil. An intense ache along both arms slowed him, though there would be no honour in resting until they got the van clear and made everybody safe. Cold sweat under his leathers weighed, which was why he thought he might be on the moon, his blood running and his stomach warm, though the body turned so sluggish he wanted to lie in the snow and sleep.