Snowstop (32 page)

Not to think, to accept, to let everything go. She promised paradise, but how stupid if they both died. ‘I want you to live, because I love you, and if you live, then I live. Whatever happens, you won't be poor. Fred will tell you why.'

‘Oh, fuck off,' she cried, the heart wrenched out of her. ‘I don't know what you're on about. I said I loved you, didn't I?'

No one could hear it better expressed – at any other time. He felt eighteen again, unable to trust himself, so said: ‘A few days ago I left my wife. I killed her, then I left her.'

‘It won't work. Tell me another.'

‘No, listen. She taunted me. She said our daughter wasn't mine. She said she'd had an affair at the time she was conceived. We've hated each other for years, and more or less gone our own ways, as far as we were able to. Why she told me what she did I don't know, though it was at the end of a long argument, and I'd said things which must have hurt her as well. So she came back with something to finish all our arguments. I'd thought all my life that no matter how much we loathed each other there was one mark of the love we must have felt at first. But she'd never felt it. She'd gone out and got pregnant by a boy friend, then told me the child was mine. I knew she was right, but in any case she assured me of it, swore it was true, and gave details which I'd suspected all along. I killed her. Then I loaded the car with enough things to live rough, and drove up to the Lakes. I was going back to give myself up, when I met you. I don't know where I was going. Maybe the police are looking for me already, though she might not have been found yet. I didn't mean to kill her, but that won't help me in court. Nor do I deserve it to. I could live with you happily, because I love you, but please go into the hotel, and I'll come later. Then we'll decide what to do. You can bet I'll be all right. I'm in no danger. But give me another kiss first.'

THIRTY-THREE

The high platform was covered with sacks, and when Daniel moved across he saw three men playing cards below, a white pint mug of steaming tea by each. Cigarette smoke mixed with the whiff of fuel from a primus, and he picked out a blackened kettle, teapot, an opened packet of sugar, a carton of milk, a frying pan and plates, an inventory helping him not to scream from pain in every fibre of his body.

‘It seems he's awake,' someone said, as if he had no right to be. ‘Hey, mate, you up there, welcome to the best little removal van in Christendom, or anywhere else, come to that. Let's get him down, and see what we can find out.'

The inside of the black pantechnicon was lined with plywood tea chests, and a pair of stepladders rested near a porter's barrow by locked doors at the far end. The plates of a split-up Pirelli calendar pasted along the sides had been jabbed by stoves and bedsteads brought in and carried out. ‘We pulled you in, when we heard you go bump in the night.'

‘Where am I?'

He came up the ladder to Daniel's level, a man in a khaki button-front overall smock. ‘Somewhere in bloody Derbyshire, I suppose. We only cut through this way to save petrol, which the gaffer always likes to hear about, though he's not going to be happy at us getting stuck. Do you think you can manage down this ladder? My name's Charlie. That's Bill. Paul, the one who's sneaking a look at my hand of cards, will get knifed when I get back, if he don't put 'em down.'

‘It ain't worth it.' Paul was a cadaverous man in a grey three-piece suit, such apparel possibly lifted from some trunk or other during a move. ‘I dealt you such a piss-poor hand.'

‘I'll be all right,' Daniel said, ‘with a little assistance.' Bill came to help, more solid in body than the others, wearing dark-blue dungarees – all three men unified by their Day-Glo scarves and woolly hats against the cold. The van swayed from a heavy fist of wind, and Daniel screamed on slipping down the bottom few rungs.

Bill grasped, to break his fall. ‘You seem in a bit of a mess, mate.'

‘I'll do another brew.' Paul threw the cards into a common heap, and began cranking the primus. ‘We all need it, and he looks as if he'll die if he don't get summat into him. It's bloody perishing, even in here.'

They laid Daniel on the floor. ‘He needs a doctor.' Charlie unknotted his tie, then covered him with a dust sheet and several large sacks till only the head showed.

‘My car broke down.' The weight of coverings made him feel worse, so he pushed them aside. ‘I got stopped. Must have hit a post. Couldn't tell. I was knocked out. I don't know how long for. But then I woke, and thought I'd get some help.'

‘Don't worry,' Bill said. ‘You're in good hands. I reckon you should have stayed with your car, though. That's what they tell you to do.'

‘He probably didn't know what he was doing,' Paul said, ‘after the knock on his napper. He just thought he'd get out and walk, poor sod. Look at him. Frost-bite all over. He looks as if he's crawled out of a fire, and fell on a broken bottle. His face's all cut up, where it ain't turning black. There ain't much we can do for him. He's shaking like a leaf.'

‘Some tea might help. And what about a couple of aspirins, Charlie? There must be some in that chemist's shop you carry about everywhere.'

Daniel contained his agony, trying to smile. ‘I've fallen among Good Samaritans.'

‘That you have,' Bill said, ‘that you have, mate. We might be common-or-garden removal men, but we're also gentlemen of the road, out to help distressed travellers.'

‘Unless he's a social worker,' Charlie snarled. ‘We'd draw the line at social workers. They tried to take my kid away once.'

Daniel wanted to tell them he was a teacher, but maybe they didn't like teachers, either. There seemed no hard surface under him, he was floating in distilled pain, his instinct telling him to reach for a tree branch or door handle and stop falling. He tried to compute how far he was from the hotel, and crawled through more and more snow into the nightmare of a sudden thaw, his refuge visible from an upper window, and people coming to get him, each with a coil of stiff hard rope, led by a woman with skeletal head and demented eyes, limbs bare and hands sprouting claws, on an unstoppable route towards him as if all the rage of the world was pouring from her hurt lips at his cruelty.

‘His bloody screams are getting on my wick,' Bill said. ‘Let's either chuck him outside, or give him his tea. 'Appen he'll choke on it and give us some peace.'

‘Wake up,' Charlie said sharply at Daniel's ear.

He looked, eyes swelling with terror. ‘Where am I?'

‘If you'll stop screaming a minute I'll tell you,' Paul said. ‘You're in The Blue Herald, one of Ramble's furniture vans, so you're safe and sound. Lift yourself up a bit and drink this. It's strong tea, with plenty of sugar and milk. Here's three aspirins as well.' He showed them in the palm of his hand. ‘They'll do you the world of good.'

He sweated and shivered, but the nightmare had gone, and the lukewarm tea tasting of paraffin nectarized his veins nevertheless, easing him into a sleep in which he only dreamed of being in agony.

‘Thank God,' Bill said, ‘now we can have another game. I only hope we don't get any more refugees parking themselves on us.'

‘Maybe we'll be here for weeks,' Paul said. ‘They'll eat all our supplies and take our jobs, though if we do run out of something to eat we can have a game and serve the loser up for dinner. Or we could carve a slice off you know who.'

‘He'll be rotten before he dies,' Bill said. ‘You can smell him already, even in this cold den. I don't mind starving to death, if it comes to it, but I'm buggered if I'm going to die in agony eating tainted food.'

‘We've got to be prepared for all eventualities,' Paul said. ‘Don't you recollect what happened to old Jack Bailey and his crew on the way back from Brindisi after doing that Greek run? They took a short cut through Switzerland, and got stuck in the snow for three weeks. Luckily, they'd picked up a hitchhiker near Milan. Jack told me he'd bought a bottle of olive oil and a bag of dried mushrooms in Italy, so that helped as well. When it thawed they sank what was left of him chained to an old tyre in one of them Swiss lakes. Jack'd stop at nowt to get his teeth into a good dinner.'

Bill reached for the primus. ‘I don't think I would be reduced to that, though, as long as I had plenty of tea and sugar, and a few cartons of fags.'

‘Mind you,' Paul went on, ‘if it came to that sort of crisis there'd be no option, would there? Not that I do think we're going to be here anything like three weeks. The cold's not as sharp as it was. Yes, I will have another mug of tea. It's no use offering that poor bugger any. It'll be wasted on him. He fetched half the last lot up.'

The house was bigger than he had imagined, not a bungalow at all, but floor after floor and bits going off in all directions. Somebody had got there before him, because it was already fully plumbed up, unless he had done it in another life and forgotten. Maybe his estimate had been too high, or Alfred had spotted some fault in the details, though you couldn't think so to see how no expense had been spared. The baths were porcelain and the taps were gold, and in every room there was one of them funny little bidets which he had seen in even some of the cheaper places in France where he had stayed with Wayne and Lance. Every bathroom was tarted up like a picture from a catalogue so that you would think the Queen was going to live there.

The trouble was, they had fucked up the central heating, and
he
would never have done that. He couldn't see a radiator anywhere, and as for a fireplace, forget it. It was the coldest house he had ever been in, though there was bright blue sky at every window, and lights on in every room. He climbed a spiral staircase to see what was on the next floor but funnily enough couldn't go any further because some steps were missing. There was no carpet and they were so filthy with broken glass and wet dead leaves he nearly went arse over bollocks. Then his breath was torn out like a flame, and when he tried to jump to where the steps began, instead of backing down like a sensible lad, he fell, and kept on falling.

Clouds were dividing, such gaps showing the Big Dipper. Aaron's pleasing fantasy was to have it turn into an actual scoop, and clear a ten-mile lane through the snow, along which they could walk to freedom. Beyond the gate, Lance and Wayne leaned against the side of the van as if asleep. His watch showed six o'clock, eyes closing, and the ache in his arms total. He went a few paces back towards the hotel and, no coordination in any limb, fell sideways.

The wind beat as if to power the massive sails of a ship, at war with stillness, not the random drumming of the blizzard, but gusting with some new purpose not yet apparent. Alfred and Parsons had given up half an hour ago. The clean and welcome smell momentarily revived him. Drawing his spade out of the snow, like Excalibur from the Stone, he cradled it for fear he would lose such a prime tool of their endeavours.

The even piping of jet engines came from thousands of metres up in blue sky and sun, telling those living near an airport that another ordinary day was soon to start, a sound reminding him that the trap they were locked in could not stay closed for ever.

The van stood out, stark and dark green, coils of pale smoke from its exhaust, almost alive in relishing its power to destroy them all. Keith looked dispiritedly at the ramp of snow, and at the Trojan Horse it seemed impossible to budge more.

Wayne took off his helmet, a smile followed by the gesture of a hand across his throat signifying that he'd had enough. Lance turned his visor towards Keith as if to say that whoever owned the head inside would do no more. But Keith knew there was always more energy where that came from, an untapped abundance in everyone still, that last black rock of reserve waiting to move the van another hundred yards.

They followed him like a patrol of yetis, Lance in the lead, Aaron and Wayne together. The glow of false dawn about the yard faded as clouds closed. Snow flurries irritated his face, a hand sliding over the greased features, stung his eyes that were barely able to see.

He stood alone in the dark between the cars, did not know why. An animal sound mimicked the wind, a note of despair turning to a tone of wonder at surface snow flying into clouds of mist to find a better position and becoming more and more irritable at knowing they never would. The issue of life and death had lost its bite. Utter exhaustion stopped him knowing where he was. Belonging nowhere softened the spirit, till he remembered that the job was not yet done, and forced himself to go in after the others.

Fred needed no help, but Eileen followed him from lounge to kitchen, and from bar to store room – like a little dog, the lucky bitch, because she surely knows about the bit of paper that rustles in my pocket where'er I walk.

He was jealous of his work, work being precious, work being like gold to him. He made each task last, spun it out because while there was something to do he wasn't worrying about past or future, nor the present which could end more abruptly than he wanted and which therefore didn't bear thinking about.

He had never known what happiness was, only that if he worked he was not unhappy. Work was a luxury – especially in this situation – as long as enough money came with it to keep him in food and shelter, and the little packets of those cigars that he puffed with such relish. He had faith that Keith would bring them sound in wind and limb through the night, and keep the bikers working so hard that they wouldn't have the energy to torment him any more.

By dawn, if you looked at the way things were going, the hotel would no longer be habitable. The attics were full of snow and debris, the ceilings of the bedrooms were patched with damp, icy wind was coming down the stairs. In other words, it would be a write-off. He would claim full insurance, and begin the great work all over again – like that bloke who kept pushing a boulder up a hill because God or whoever at the top always rolled it back to the bottom. This time though he would buy a place on the coast in a more benign climate. Maybe he would even start up somewhere in Spain, because Doris would be sure to come back to him then.