Snowstop (33 page)

‘I love the smell,' Eileen said, as he laid strips of streaky bacon from a five-pound pack on a hotplate over the fire. ‘It's the best meal in the world.'

‘I prefer the smell of roast turkey,' he said, ‘when it comes out of the oven at Christmas.' She was complimenting him on his work, so he could almost take to her. ‘Turkey and stuffing: it's the best smell in the world.'

She moved from the warm rail to let him throw more logs into the stove, his best dried logs held back from the fire in the lounge. ‘Did you have a party, then?'

‘At this hotel we did. I set up a Christmas Special, at twelve quid a head. All anybody could eat. And did they eat! It did me good to see 'em, except that they were robbing me blind. They said I made the best garlic bread they'd ever tasted. I came out on top, though, financial-wise. And I didn't mind, anyway, because it was good for trade at other times, except that it's been falling off a bit lately.'

She leaned forward to light some paper for her cigarette: ‘I wish I'd been there.'

He struck a large kitchen match for her. ‘You should have been.'

‘Well, I was elsewhere, wasn't I?'

‘Where was that?'

‘At my boy friend's. We had a can of beer and a pizza between us.'

‘That's not much to celebrate on.'

‘We enjoyed it, though.'

‘If I've got a place by next Christmas,' he said, ‘you can come and eat all the stuff you like. I shan't charge you anything.'

‘I don't want charity. If I've got no money I'll do some work for you to earn it.'

‘No, you won't. I'll treat you. For old times' sake.'

If what Keith had said was true, she thought, he would either be dead or in prison. She still didn't know. But she had to believe what he had said about his wife, because nobody would tell a whopping lie like that.

‘Now what are you crying for? He's alive, isn't he? Listen, I can hear them coming in. It's a good job we've got these bacon sarnies on the go. Everybody loves a bacon sandwich.' It might be better if he
was
dead, though, he told himself, and then she would have his money. The daft young thing don't know how lucky she is. No, she would only lose it in six months, so he'd better stay alive.

The first run they had done was to the West Country, and Lance remembered them belting down the M5 like skirmishers trying to get in front of an army, Garry in front, followed by Wayne, and then him, weaving between the cars of happy holidaymakers with noddy toys hanging in the back and kids either puking up or howling out for water. All three heading next summer for Devon they would gun along in the sun, stopping for a cream tea at a place Garry had known from his earliest roadworthy days. But even with such a picture he felt so dead tired it was a struggle to keep both hands at the bacon sandwich and chew it down.

Fred went with his tray to Aaron and Alfred. ‘How is he, then?'

‘I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't dead.'

Parsons lay, mouth fallen open, soundless, eyes upwhite and seeing nothing. Fred used the force of both hands to close the mouth, then pressed on the eyelids to conceal the ghastly stare, and arrange arms across the chest. He was dead all right, but what could you do? We all had to die sometime. ‘I can put undertaker down on my list of trades now, and that's for sure.' He spread a blanket: ‘A man in his condition shouldn't have been sent out. Anybody might have known he'd have had a heart attack.'

He didn't care how many went, now that his father had gone. ‘Try telling it to that stuck-up swine. All I can say is: God preserve us from bloody heroes.'

‘I did. Parsons could have got out of it if he'd wanted, but he insisted on doing his turn. He must have known the score. Everybody I've ever known always knew that kind of score. Have another bacon sarnie?'

‘Thanks, I will. I thought I was about to cop it as well, a time or two. You won't get the MBE I laughed to myself, but you might end up with the MCA pinned to your chest. That's what they said my brother-in-law died of – massive cardiac arrest. But I've never worked so hard out there, and I hope I'll never do anything like it again.' He ran a hand over himself, as if hoping to find another coat to button up against the chill. ‘I might as well chuck some more wood on the fire.' He reached out for a chair and, gripping top right and bottom left worked the legs loose till all the blood from his body seemed to be in his face. He riffled the ashes with a poker and threw the bits on. ‘We may be in out of the snow, but I'm still bloody freezing.'

‘Why don't you take a hatchet and start on the beams?' But Alfred didn't hear, and Fred knew that you just couldn't get into the haybox of some people, not even with sarcasm as blunt as a cold chisel.

Giving all her warmth to Garry had done him no good, and Jenny felt that she had no spark remaining, not even for herself. Lance's face was coated with grime and grease, eyes deadened with fatigue, flopped hair adhering from sweat. She didn't care to imagine what her own face looked like, on coming to the table, or think about what she had turned into since entering this house of death. She didn't have a job any more, but what would it matter if none of them lived beyond the night? If they did she would go back south and stay at her parents' till she found a job and a room of her own. They'd always told her that Raymond was no good, that she shouldn't have married him, and as for going off to live in the north … she would put up with any taunts to live in a more civilized place. No, it wasn't that, because wherever you were you couldn't escape from yourself, always a real Piranesi prison if ever there was one.

Lance thought this is how a soldier feels, not knowing you're going to be alive the next second, though not caring too much either because to do so would break you into a thousand bits even before a bomb or shell could do it. Still, it isn't in the Falklands, and I've got this lovely woman holding my hands, though hell, I don't know what to say to her except: ‘Love you, Jenny.'

Jenny was surprised by a smile that she felt improved her features. ‘I hope you'll be all right out there.'

‘I don't think about it,' he said. ‘It's in the bag, though the Chief'll never say so. All the time I was digging I was thinking about us in bed together.'

His inexperience had been made up for by guidance and abandon, and his energy. ‘I'm glad. I was thinking of you.'

‘Even when you was holding Garry's hand?'

‘It was a way of holding yours.'

‘He's still asleep,' Wayne said. ‘Fancy sleeping all through this. He don't know how lucky he is. It's not like him, though. That terrorist caught him a real packet. I hope he's burning in hell.'

‘He's dead,' Lance said. ‘You can bet on it.'

She drank her tea, not wanting anybody dead, yet not able to care if they were. It was cold. So was Garry, dead and cold, but they would discover it when their work was done, or nobody would find anybody if they were unlucky.

Keith sat with Eileen, and she held his hand, nothing to say, she just didn't want him to eat alone. Not even a dog should. Though he was in charge, and had done so much, he looked beaten, finish written on his face in streaks and wrinkles, lips more down than when they had been fighting their way through the snow to get here. His eyes were dark and fallen-in, his skin cracked and in places peeling into the grease. Maybe pain made him look at the end of his strength. Everybody else's face was in a rotten state, masks breaking up, except when they smiled or said something. He squeezed her hand, but she held from telling that it hurt, and pressed back gently when his fit of whatever it was had passed.

After one of the last quarrels with Gwen, when everything had been said on both sides to cause the maximum hurt, he went out of their Chelsea bijou gem – as she scathingly called it: she had never stopped telling him how much she disliked it, in spite of the half-million it would fetch on the market, and not being by any means so
bijou
– and drove over the bridge along the Inner Ring Road, comforted by traffic lights opening onto green-go when a hundred yards away.

Lulled by the light traffic he lost himself somewhere in Lewisham, circling but glad to note that for a while Gwen hadn't dominated his mind. Even realizing her absence only brought her back for a moment. He stopped by a pub to orientate himself with his atlas, to find a route out of town for the Kent coast, where he would go to a hotel and sleep the night in peace.

He wound the window down to let out cigar smoke, and heard singing from the pub. All windows were squares of light, and though the singing was hardly the King's College choir, he stood on the pavement to listen. The music rose and fell in waves of boisterous noise, till after a few choruses he made out the words, and began to laugh.
Ain't it grand, to be bloody well dead!
They struck him as well off-centre, for of course it could never be grand to be bloody well dead, though going by the sound of their happiness it might be exhilarating to say so.

Expecting to see harridans with false teeth and candyfloss hair he went inside to find a dozen girls, with punk or otherwise elegant hairdos, sitting at a long table with linked arms, swaying from left to right and singing at the height of their voices, all healthy, confident, with good teeth, nice individual clothes to each.

Men along the bar and a few older women looked as if such merriment wasn't taking place and there was nothing between them and the wall but silence and empty tables. Keith mimed a clap of applause, and one of the girls waved, her smile a flower thrown for him alone, to wear till it faded from his lapel. Sipping brandy and smoking a cigar, he enjoyed the crude yet funnily inspiring songs, as if the girls had inexplicably taken to such old-time melodies for the verve and gusto of their music.

They cared for no one, young women who worked hard and had money to spend, not the sort who would tolerate the marital anguish he was locked into, though maybe they would have to later. When he got home he could answer Gwen's taunts with such equanimity that they went to bed without further quarrelling.

Sixty yards out on the road, the blast would sweep through the hotel like a thousand knives and kill everyone inside, so one more attempt was needed to get the van clear, and at half-past six there was no more time to play with.

‘Another stint.' He touched Lance on the shoulder. ‘Just one more,' he said to Wayne. ‘I want you as well, for as long as you can do anything to help,' he told Alfred and Aaron.

They followed without complaint.

Every trade had a different apron, the escutcheon of skill and industry, but Fred of many trades had only one. He had bought a dozen of the strongest cloth, and picked them out himself. Doris chose everything else, which was right, but the aprons were his. Never let anyone choose your aprons, not even your employers, the butler at his first job had said. If the slave bought his own chains they wouldn't feel as strong.

Funny things you thought of when you could be blown up at any time. He wore an apron so as not to sully his suit, narrow grey and white stripes that made him look a little longer in the body. He listed the trades he had been forced into on this long night which was not yet over. Barman and waiter at the beginning, then cook and bottlewasher, doctor for the wounded and priest for the dying, and undertaker if you thought about it, which he did as he whistled with apparent cheerfulness between the tables, collecting pots and cutlery, hearing the baleful groans of the gale and half expecting the floor to heave under him as it had in the old days at sea. In a great gale he had been aware that the waves were big enough to tip the whole caboodle into oblivion. Any second could come and without anybody's by-your-leave decide to be their last.

So he had been in that state before this awful night, had learned that you couldn't be frightened out of your life for more than a few minutes. And anyway, he had told the young lad with him in the galley, the system could only take so much uncertainty, so you might just as well settle down and forget it, which he had known how to do ever since. All you needed was something to occupy yourself, and you could cock a snook at God Almighty Himself, if you cared to. And then you could rely on the God of Israel to look on you grimly (but with a hidden smile somewhere) and say: ‘Carry on, then, lad.' You could always find a place in God's favour if you were working.

THIRTY-FOUR

Eileen felt better if she talked. She had been born knowing that there was no greater way of easing the heart but, if that was the case, why was it that all the people she had known hadn't wanted to hear what she had to say? While Keith was outside doing what he had to do (and she would never be absolutely convinced that he had to do it, no matter what anyone said the danger was), every second that went by was a painful cut somewhere on her skin, so that if she didn't talk there would be so many cuts she would bleed to death.

Maybe she ought to try singing, but she would sound like a wailing cat, and didn't want to frighten anybody more than they were already. Let the wind do that, moaning around like a man who hadn't got any ciggies just before Bank Holiday.

Enid slept on two armchairs pushed together, as far from Parsons' corpse as she could get, a dead body Keith hadn't told anybody to throw out because he seemed too knackered to bother, maybe too disappointed at how things were going. Jenny at the table, hands by the side of her face, looked as if a bit of a natter might not do her any harm. ‘I wonder how much longer we'll have to go on waiting?' Eileen asked.

The light from two Calor lamps at different ends of the room barely reached each other. Chairs had gone into the fire, which spat and subsided, as if it had taken umbrage and would warm them no more. The wind through gaps and cracks gave the bit of candle nicked from the kitchen a hard time in staying alight. Jenny looked at this poor young drab in the man's overcoat Fred had found for her. ‘Is all this waiting around getting on your nerves?'