‘You’re not with me,’ Paul complained.
‘Too fucking right I’m not. What bad dream did you get that stunt from? I’m glad it’s getting light at last, that’s all I can say.’ He let out a particularly fruity belch. ‘We’ll have another fry-up soon.’
‘It’s foolproof,’ Paul resumed, though well knowing that if the plan failed they would blame him to the death, and that if it came out right their lips would be too solidly glued to the brandy bottle to spare a common thank you. ‘I’ve worked it all out. We place an advert in the International Herald Tribune.’ He pulled a stub of pencil and a piece of scruffy paper from the ticket pocket of his suit. ‘“Does it worry you what will happen when you’re dead? We would not be surprised. So why not go back to Blighty by refrigerated lorry? Our competitive rates will be right up your street.” Well, something like that. You two see if you can do any better. There’ll be so many enquiries we’ll need a secretary and an office to deal with ’em. We’ll do it for half of what the railways charge, and then …’
A light whiter than snow filled both windows, a thunderclap pushing the rictus of agony back into Daniel’s head. Pebbled glass swirled like shrapnel, and waves of force travelled along snowdrifts to hit the pantechnicon rear-end on, lifting the wheels so that the heavier front sent vibrations backwards like a dog shaking off water. Daniel, nothing to reach for, fell into the vortex of his screams.
The mattresses were yanked away and, as if with a life of their own, came back and tried to smother them. All three heard shouts of panic and shock, wondering where they came from, and what they had done to deserve whatever was happening, as pots and lamps and the stove flew. They rolled and collided within the doors that had stayed bolted, and Bill found himself clutching the stove, hoping to God it wouldn’t ignite as paraffin squirted over his arm.
The receding echo held more terror than the great bang, a malice implying the threat of returning to finish the job. Charlie held the frying pan but was curious as to how it came into his hand, as if he had been placed on guard should anyone try to get in or out. He ran a finger down his cheek and saw blood. ‘What the hell was that, then?’
Paul’s laugh was as if from a parrot which had just reached out and torn into someone’s finger. He took a card from the scattered deck which turned out to be a middle grade nonentity, squinting because the other eye wouldn’t open, and trembling that it might stay shut for the rest of his life. ‘It sounds like the fucking atom bomb went off.’
They looked at him while the wind, as if awed by the explosion, stayed quiet. Charlie released the frying pan for fear he would hurl it at Paul. ‘God took umbrage, and quite rightly so, at your cock-eyed scheme. Corpses! We was nearly able to begin on ourselves.’
‘Look at the mess.’ Bill smiled at finding he could stand. ‘We’d better get some sacks and nail ’em at the windows. If we hadn’t been dug into the snow the van would have gone like matchwood. Maybe it was a tanker carrying chemicals.’
A mattress had burst, foam rubber like imitation shards of dark steel scattered among the tea chests. ‘I thought it was what’s-his-name up there’ – Charlie wiped a gritty tear from his cheek – ‘but he’s down here now, and he’s dead.’ They looked at the face, and the tortured body. ‘I reckon he’s better off. Now we can tip him outside.’
‘He had a long way to fall, and that’s a fact,’ Bill said. ‘He’s broken every bone in his stupid fucking body, by the look of it. Some people just shouldn’t come out in the snow.’
Fred whistled, shoes crunching bricks and glass in what was left of the lounge. Another one away, and that was for sure, over the sticks, up the slope, and off to the happy hunting grounds. Them as dies will be the lucky ones, as he’d read somewhere. Maybe more than Keith had caught a packet, because Wayne and Lance hadn’t been able to leave their dead mate, due to loyalty and friendship, which wasn’t as old-fashioned as he had thought. In their peril they were not provided with the heartless wherewithal to leap for safety, or the sense to drag him after them. God knows, he weighed little enough after losing all his blood. And as for that young tart running out into the blizzard, she must have taken much of the blast when it came. I don’t suppose she looks very pretty now, so if I don’t see her again I can burn that envelope he left me with.
‘That’s it, then.’ Enid smoothed her headscarf and the borrowed coat. ‘That’s it at last. Now we can relax again.’
‘I’ll need a week or two to get used to it.’ Alfred, the lower parts of his eyes like saucers filled with blood, needed three matches to light his cigar. ‘We’re all right, but what about the others?’
The wall was cold at Aaron’s back, dust and rubble around his feet. A beam had fallen in the opposite corner, where luckily no one had sheltered. ‘I’ll take a look.’ He stood up to go after Fred.
‘At least it’s daylight,’ Enid said, arms tight across her chest. ‘I want to get home and tell everybody I’m all right. They’ll be worried to death, I hope.’
‘You’d better not leave too soon after the authorities get through,’ Alfred said, ‘or you won’t be on television. You might even get a film contract if you primp your lovely self up a bit.’
‘Fuck off, you sarky old bastard.’
‘If my daughter Joan had said half as much to me I’d give her a bloody good hiding. But she’s well behaved, and I’ll have a house built for her as well one day. She went to the High School, she did.’
Fred called from a gap in the wall: ‘I can’t get through to the bikers. But they’re swearing worse than my old parrot, so come and give me a hand.’
‘It might be a farm,’ said Charlie. ‘Somebody else have a look.’
Bill put his spade down, and focused the field glasses. ‘The roof’s off. It’s derelict.’
Paul took them. ‘It’s a hotel. Or it was. I can see a sign. It must have killed everybody. There’s bits of a motor car. Or it might have been a van. We ought to get over there now it’s not blowing so much.’
‘It’s a good half-mile away,’ Charlie said, ‘though I suppose it might be better than staying in this truck for the next three days. It must have been a hundred tons of gas. I once read about a whole caravan park being wiped out from one bottle.’
‘It’d be more sensible,’ Bill said, ‘to get our engine started, then have another go at the radio. It’s got a two-year guarantee, so there can’t be all that much wrong with it. If you give me the flashlight I’ll try and get a word through to Smokey.’
Charlie put the binoculars back in their case. He loved his binoculars. They made him feel like General Montgomery. ‘Let’s go inside. We can cook our breakfast and think about it. If we have to trek through the snow we’ll need our bellies full.’
‘The first thing to do is get that corpse out. I can’t stand the smell.’ Paul cleared more snow from the top of the van. ‘If he stays much longer he might bring us bad luck, and we’ve had enough of that already.’
‘It’s changing, though,’ Charlie announced. ‘I swear blind it’s got a bit warmer since we came out. Anyway, let’s eat, then Marconi can bodge up that wireless and give the world a bit of Heavy Metal from the tape recorder.’
‘Are you hurt?’ Jenny said. ‘Can you stand up?’ Lips at her ears to beat the blizzard’s muffle. No blood, and the lion-headed stone pillar by the gate had kept her safe, a lucky chance in her rackety life. She had come out to find her, even before looking for Lance, because she knew he had to be all right. It had to be women and girls together, because no man would make it his first thought to help them. And Fred had gone to look out for the bikers.
The breasts and bellies of snow were pure to one side, but out towards the fields, along where the road was supposed to be, were twisted wheels, black ripped-out pieces of chassis, a door buckled beyond use, a steering wheel like a plastic toy some child had stamped on with disappointment, broken items she could not recognize, pieces of flesh she sought not to, odd bits of tubing like sections of dead snake, a
sleeve with an arm still in it, blue striated with red, couldn’t not see, scarves of blood, grey guts, a butcher’s shambles: bits of cardboard, coils of wire, the half page of a road atlas splashed with red like Chinese writing, spinning over and over in the wind, chasing a scalp, odd crimson rags and half a head.
‘Don’t go.’ Jenny used all her strength to bring her face against her chest. Then she closed her own eyes and said: ‘Let’s not look,’ before being more sick than she could ever remember.
THIRTY-SIX
The place that had seemed so staid a refuge in the blizzard, plugged into the earth and beyond all notions of destruction and, what’s more, eternally welcoming with warm punch and womb-like shelter, had in fact been rotten with woodworm, rising damp and deathwatch beetle, as if reinforced only by the faith of those who were stranded under its roof.
Thus Aaron felt as he took off his coat and jacket, determined to pull rubble clear, with Alfred at the other end, and Fred taking position in the middle. The beam was brown below and black on top, a ponderousness pinning laths, plaster, chairs and tables, making a rapidly diminishing prison that Wayne and Lance must be pulled out of before everything slid, because half a bed hung through the ceiling, a counterpane waved to warn or encourage, and foul water descended the wall below a buckled window frame. He would lift the beam or die in trying, though to have survived the explosion and then throw the gift of life back into God’s face would be opposing nature.
Fred heaved at the wood. ‘The pipes must have split.’ Some, against the regulations, had been plastic, and snow melting around them stank like soot.
‘Stop fucking nattering,’ came Wayne’s faint voice, ‘or I’ll never do a kickstart again. My ribs have gone, and I’m getting snow on my face.’
‘Take your sweat. We’re getting there.’ Fred looked anxious, though not upwards, such a gesture bad for morale. ‘The whole lot might tumble.’
The beam was of hernia weight, and Aaron had previously suffered one from lifting too many logs after cutting down old trees in the garden. Beryl said he should get a lad from the village to help, but such work in solitude was precious in the peace it brought.
Both hands under, he remembered in Les Misérables how the escaped convict Jean Valjean had put himself beneath a cart and raised it to save a man’s life, though such a feat made him known to a policeman looking on. Aaron couldn’t tell whether the frog-croak came from planks at the far end of the beam, or from the ceiling, but the strain at his back and stomach turned into a dread ache, as if his legs would also crack. ‘Sweat for England, you bastards.’ Lance’s voice sounded above the blizzard. ‘A rat’s staring at me, and I don’t like rats.’
Alfred groaned at the load he worked at, sweat dripping onto the rubble. He slid bricks and wood under the beam to get it higher, twigging the stress of the situation as if he had inherited the brain of his engineer father, because should Aaron let go, the beam would only fall an inch or two. ‘I wanted to see the explosion,’ Wayne complained, ‘not have the whole shop fall on top of me.’
Clothes chilled from plastery mud, Aaron raised a weight to last the rest of his life, stomach hardening as wood, a matter of holding on and hoping the body would sustain him: ‘I’ll count up to fifty, and then let go.’
The effort separated him from the world. Fred and Alfred pulled at bricks to make the gap bigger. Far from book-dealing, or the self-indulgent fits of his sister, or his evil encouragement of her plight, and distant also from his nihilistic streaks of cheating, Aaron knew that everything you did affected someone else and had to be allowed for, no resolution except by pain of spirit and the extreme use of grit and sinew.
‘I’ll count up to fifty, and then let go,’ but when he got there he said, no one to hear because the voice of the blizzard was even louder among the ruins: ‘I had better make it a hundred, though it’ll be impossible to go on longer. And when they’re safe I’ll ask Enid if she wants to come away with me. We’ll drive to the south coast and stay in a hotel. I don’t think she will, because she can hardly bear to look at my raddled grandad face twisted with toothache.’
At the hundred mark he said: ‘I’ll manage ten more, and try not to brood on my squalid fate for ever.’ Then he endured without counting, eyes closed because he couldn’t bear to check how the loads were shifting, till it came as almost a shock that no more effort was needed.
Wayne limped to the broken door, gasping, hands pressed against his ribs. Fred helped Lance away: ‘I think this young soldier might have broken his leg.’
Aaron stepped aside, and the spike of lath that had gone through his trousers at the calf still waved as he hurried to safety.
‘It’s lovely. Not a cloud in the sky.’ Paul knew those days that started so well: sun on snow which protected and kept warm the little goings-on underneath. Such weather could turn very nasty between dawn and dusk. Visibility was good across moors and hills, scratchmarks of walled hedges in the distance, showing how local the blizzard had been but might not be if it began again. The wind was muzzled of its howl, turned direction and settled from the northwest, God alone knowing what it would do in the next few hours. He lay at full length, checking wires leading to the little black box.
Bill shone the torch. ‘Did you ever get a licence for this CB radio?’
‘Don’t ask, or you’ll make me laugh. I might bang my head. The screw’s so loose the wire ain’t making contact. And the aerial’s unplugged. I’m surprised they didn’t hear that bang twenty miles away and send a chopper to investigate. My fingers are so dead I can’t make the two ends stay together.’
Charlie passed a cigarette. ‘They wouldn’t know which way to look, would they?’
‘The trouble is,’ Bill said, ‘you need a licence for the CB, and we ain’t got one, so the coppers’ll nick us when they jump out of the chopper even before they offer a fag and a mug of tea to the injured. It might mean a two-hundred-pound fine. They’re bound to ask for our licence.’
Paul rubbed his fingers till they were supple and live enough to knot the wires. Static sounded like chips thrown into a pan of smoking oil and, damping the volume, he pushed buttons to bring voices loud and clear from the outside.
Five gone, and none had stopped on their way to pay what they owed. Well, they wouldn’t, would they? Fred mused that just as the dead could tell no tales, neither were they capable of settling their scores, though you could be sure they would be called to account when they got to the other side, if there was such a place which, considering the list of misdemeanours he had built up against himself, he sincerely hoped there was hot. In what was left of the kitchen he spent the remaining provisions like a generous sailor. The fridge and deepfreeze had been cut off from the start, and he couldn’t imagine any of his guests staying many more hours, in which case they would eat royally of sausages, chops, steak and all manner of vegetables. ‘It’s no use shoving an emergency stock into the snow, because foxes and wild cats will get their noses at it,’ he said in answer to Aaron, as if the time for common sense had long been over.
‘What about my father’s body, then?’
‘Animals roam all over the place in a blizzard,’ Fred told him gleefully. ‘You always find a few sheep gnawed to the bone.’ No longer the manager of a hotel, of which there wasn’t much left in any case, it didn’t matter who he offended. ‘You’re not going to bring his body back inside, either.’ He was well muffled up, for in spite of a woodstove in the kitchen, half of one wall was down. ‘It won’t be hygienic, not by this time. It won’t be very pretty.’
Wayne turned his steak over. ‘Every time I chew, my ribs ache summat rotten. I’ll have to wait for a proper blow-out till after Garry’s funeral.’
‘A mass funeral,’ Lance said. ‘He would have loved it.’
‘You lot just don’t care about him, do you?’ Enid shouted. ‘I hate you. He was all right. But you lot haven’t got any sense or feeling to talk like that. You make me sick.’
Wayne stood up unstea
dily, holding his knife and fork as if he might make her part of his meal. ‘What do you know about feelings?’ he wheezed. But with his cracked ribs he wanted to curl up in a darkened room with a bottle of whisky. ‘Next time a maniac goes around the country in a blizzard with a van like that we’ll arrange for you to get stranded with some nice posh civilized people. Then you’ll be raped, drawn and quartered before you can wiggle your tight little arse.’ He pushed his plate aside, unable to eat. The hotel had fallen in, and the world could do the same as far as he was concerned. ‘We’ll never forget Garry, so shut your gob.’
She turned to Aaron. ‘Are you going to let him insult me like that?’
‘Let’s get on with our meal,’ he said.
Fred came into the kitchen with a tray of soiled pots. Those in the lumber room were belching, farting, or puffing cigarettes and groaning from their injuries. He was sorry about that. The lads were more hurt than they let on, so he would leave them alone and hope the medics got here soon to mend ’em and bandage ’em. Even so, they seemed more harmless under their tribulations than before they had known about the van, and that couldn’t be bad. It was amazing how pain and peril turned tearaways into heroes. He would show his appreciation by rustling up something tasty for dessert. What they really needed was a good plate of spotted dick smothered in a rich egg custard, or hot dumplings running with treacle, but neither time nor cooking facilities allowed of that. He kicked at a large rat running across broken glass to safety under the sink. ‘Not another one away?’
‘She’s fainted,’ Jenny said. ‘Is there a dry bed somewhere?’
He pointed to a mattress. ‘I kipped on it myself now, and again last night. What happened?’
‘She saw the mess.’
‘I told her not to go out.’
‘Well, now she knows. And so do I.’