Snowstop (10 page)

‘You're trying to get me sozzled,' Eileen said. ‘But I don't care. I like to get a bit tiddly now and again.'

‘You've certainly earned a drink.' Glasses touched, and were drained. ‘Let's go and see our room. You can tell me whether you like it or not.'

The true exit was the window not the door, Daniel decided, to watch and see yet not to go, a picture of the outside which would torment but not elucidate, rather than a door which, inviting him to action, would surely kill. His courage was exposed, determination found lacking, sight battened on snow flocking down, nothing to do except wait and hope. To open a door and run into the elemental trap would release him from civilized anxiety. He liked the window because he could see and not act, and his attachment to duty gave way to an acceptance of the unusual peace, nothing to be done but enjoy comfort and be calmed by the falling curtain of snow, like the weeks prior to a marriage that promised everlasting protection and ease, before the wagons of doom as in grand opera rumbled over the cobbles.

He would be killed for failure, but deserved to be whitened as utterly as the window for the butcheries he had helped to bring about – not much to take credit for, if credit he wanted, knowing well enough what he had done. You couldn't pay for the sins of your father, though his mother had set him on a course of thinking he ought to, so that he had committed sufficient to bleach his father's crime sheet white.

The snow had saved his soul in burying the van with its radar time-locks, directionally-set detonators, the quarter-ton imperial weight, rendered the box of technology so harmless that a muffled volcano would lift only ice and darkness. His eyes widened, as if the white-out shielded more mysteries than he could conceive of at the moment.

‘Is it still snowing?' Percy called.

Daniel came from the window. ‘Less than it was, whatever that means.'

‘None of us will get away tonight,' he cackled. ‘We'll be here till Doomsday.'

Alfred opened all the buttons of his dark cashmere overcoat. ‘Finish your drink, Father.'

‘I'm right, though. You'll see.' The swallow went skewwhiff, splashing his collar. Wiping himself, he took the watch from his waistcoat. ‘We've been here an hour already, but we'll need a calendar by the time we've done.'

Standing in the garden outside the kitchen window Alfred had heard his father talking to himself, which he supposed was understandable if no one else was living in the house. But nowadays he was beginning to talk to himself even when other people were close, and that couldn't be good.

Sally asked the serving girl what wine they had in the cellar.

‘What sort do you want?' She spoke angrily, tongue going over her uneven teeth.

‘What do you have?'

‘How do I know? We've got all sorts.'

‘See if you can find me a half-bottle of nice Bordeaux.'

Enid put the few coins on the tray into her apron pocket, drying fingers up and down her thigh. ‘I expect we've got some somewhere. But he don't like me rummaging through the wine. He thinks I might knock a bottle off. As if I would!' She laughed. ‘The best vinegar in England! A chap once sent some back, and Fred nearly went bonkers because nobody had done that before. But it tasted like rotten plonk, as well, when I finished off a glass somebody left on their table.'

She smoothed a pale cheek, which turned momentarily rose, and when she walked out with swaying hips Tom Parsons said: ‘She wants her arse smacking, that one does.'

Sally doubted it, but not the sincerity of his desire, supposing the world to be full of perverted men, though the dancing people of her dreams might not laugh at such notions, at Death in his cap and bells, at her in his wake, but always their love and lust combining, turning as swiftly in their priapic gyrations as space in the great hall would allow, under the light of candelabras, fuelled by the fumes of wine and the subtle odours of sweat, she not knowing where the vision came from, but half her body was in it, heart and left breast and leg caught in the swirl, the other half about to be dragged helplessly after, as she in her deepest being wished to be.

Her husband or mother might say she was going mad, but the stunted man's words somehow connected to her peculiar spectacle of obscene revelry.

‘Revolting,' she said, shaking the picture from her mind.

Daniel, surprised at such a fervent reaction to Parsons' jocular remark, looked at her with interest.

TWELVE

The lee side of the van was better for comfort, but not much. Foreheads to the tin, they pissed yellow holes in the snow deep enough for any midget to crawl into and survive the winter.

Garry passed the bottle. Life was only worth living if you were half cut and riding the bike, though being in the blizzard on his vibrant seven-fifty wasn't the best way to be either. ‘Windy tonight.'

Wayne pulled his growth of beard out of the slipstream and wiped his lips. ‘Where's it coming from?'

‘Heaven, you cunt.'

‘Hell, I reckon.'

‘It'd melt then, wouldn't it?' Lance argued. ‘It would be rain. Or steam.'

Wayne flicked a drop of whisky onto his cock. ‘Don't say I never give you owt.'

‘Shall I tell you summat?' Garry said.

He zipped up. ‘As long as it's dirty.'

The Commer van bumped against them. ‘Well,' Garry said, ‘we're stuck. The bikes'll never get us out of this fucking lay-by.'

Wayne moaned. ‘You mean we're going to die?'

‘Too fucking right.' Lance plucked a duet with the wind on an imaginary guitar:

‘If you sleep in the snow

You won't hear yourself go:

Or so I have heard.

You get warmer and warmer

Like a humming-bird.'

Wayne bumped his head in despair. ‘It's all right for you: you scribble songs and want to go to Music City. You hope you'll be famous one day, not like us hopeless gets.'

‘I ain't had a fuck for three days,' Garry said. ‘I don't want to die a virgin.' He belched. ‘Them fucking chips is repeating on me again. Proper bloody Winchesters. I suppose the fat was off.'

‘It's the beer, not the chips.' Wayne drew a rag from his jacket and wiped the headlamp. ‘There, I won't let you die, Black Bess.' He kissed it. ‘You've served me well. You waited eighteen months while I was inside and didn't go whoring off with a Harley Davidson. I'll stand by you.'

‘Silly-born bastard,' Lance said. ‘You only nicked it last night: Some pimply-faced kid broke his heart when he woke up this morning, till his old lady promised him another for Christmas. He don't know Santa Claus can't get down a chimney with a BMW sticking out of his bag.'

Garry passed around more booze. ‘You're pissed out of your flowerpot.'

‘We're all pissed.' Wayne kicked snow from the van wheel. ‘Three piss-ants, and no fucking work in the morning.'

‘Yeh, let others work,' Lance said. ‘I'm generous like that. I only want to glide around on my BMW.'

‘BM-fucking-Ws,' Garry said. ‘I've shit 'em. Only posh fuckpigs arse around on BMWs – Bleeding Middle-class Wankers.'

‘It's better than Jap crap,' Lance said. ‘They break down all the time.'

‘That's why we love 'em.' Wayne's empty bottle fell silently into the snow. ‘If they didn't break down now and again we'd never learn owt. Still, are we going to die or not? When the boss wonders where I am in the morning he'll have to shift his own castings onto the lorry. I hope he breaks his fingernails.' He tried a handstand at the side of the van, sank in the snow and came up licking his lips. ‘Lovely! It tastes a treat.'

Garry wiped a snow flurry from the side of his face. ‘Do you want some sugar in it?'

‘We'll fucking freeze to death,' Wayne said. ‘I don't like the cold. Me mam got me some thermal long-combs, but I'm still freezing.'

Garry lifted three bottles of Pils from his pannier and handed them out. ‘Sorry I forgot the Ogri mugs, lads.'

‘Best cartoon character in the world, old Ogri.' Lance took a magazine from his topbox. ‘I always laugh when I read that stuff. You never see him in the posh papers like the
Mirror,
though. I don't know why.'

‘I love him as well.' Garry tapped his bottle on the Commer mudguard. ‘But seeing as we ain't got no Ogri mugs you'll have to suck on glass. We'll live five extra minutes. Not that we want to live for ever, do we? We wouldn't know what to do with ourselves. Fucking awful prospect.'

‘It's all right for you,' Wayne said. ‘You're thirty next birthday. You'll be too old then to do wheelies up Mount Everest.'

‘It looks like we'll have to walk out of this ice cream,' Lance said.

The wailing of the others sounded above the wind, broken by Garry. ‘Did you say
walk
? He
did.
He said
walk.
Did you hear that?
Walk!
Fucking walk, he said. Walk! Us! Bikers! Whoever heard of real live bikers walking? My heart wouldn't stand it. And if it did I'd never live it down. Walk! I'd get cramp. People would laugh. You must be out of your one-stroke mind. I'd never walk. I haven't walked since I was a baby. What
is
walking, anyway? Isn't it that funny little waddle people do when they want to get from A to B? And then they're only on their way to catch a bus.'

‘Bus!' They latched arms so close that heads touched, laughing till the tears froze.

‘We've got to move,' Lance said, ‘and the bikes won't do it. They've hudged closer since we stopped. They know it's all up with them, poor things.' He cried bitter tears. ‘We'll have to go from one to another with a gun to blow their brains out, so they won't suffer too much.' He sniffed, back into manhood. ‘My old man'll have to open the stall in Uttoxeter market on his own tomorrow.'

‘What we need,' Wayne said, ‘is a nice big van to get us out of this freezing shit.'

They thought on the matter.

‘You might as well wish for the moon,' Garry said. ‘We can't even see the road. In the meantime, though, is there any more gut rot? No? We'll have to start on the petrol, then. A cup o' four-star, anybody?' He unscrewed the cap, dipped a finger, held it to the wind, and licked. ‘The bastards would water tit milk if it came out of a can.'

‘A bad year,' Lance said. ‘Our Ken works down the pit, and when he got his NUM diary not long ago it told you the best years for wine. But after that Scargill strike it didn't tell you any more. Nobody could afford even vinegar. A real fucking killpig of a strike that was. He had to sell his car. But everybody was getting rid of theirs as well, so he only got fifty quid for it.'

‘He shouldn't have come out,' Wayne said.

‘He had to, didn't he, bighead?'

‘Well, you don't have to do everything people tell you to, do you?'

‘Yeh, but we shouldn't have come out tonight, should we? But we did, and in this bleeding weather as well. Who would believe it?'

‘I wonder what the forecast is?' Wayne said. ‘My leg's like a bit of old pitprop. Fancy coming for a spin on a rotten night like this.'

‘No time's perfect.' Lance looked around the back of the van, barely able to stand against the peltering snow. ‘If we push out into it we won't last five minutes. Maybe we can get this thing going.'

Garry considered it for the extended time of one second. ‘It's been dumped. Somebody nicked it and flogged it along the road till the petrol ran out.'

‘Got any tools?'

‘Tools? You're off your fucking cowpat. I wouldn't know what to do with 'em.'

Lance cleared the snow from the handle, wrenched the door open, and clambered in. ‘At least we'll get our arses out of the snow.'

‘Eh,' Garry exclaimed, ‘lad's clever. He'll get his fucking O Levels next.'

‘He might even learn to walk,' Wayne said. ‘I hear they teach you at night school. You only have to totter twenty-five yards in the test.'

‘Then he'll meet another little walker,' Garry went on, ‘one with tits, and happen after a while they'll get wed, and have a gaggle of little snotty-nosed walkers. They'll go by us long-haired greasy biking bastards with their little piggy noses stuck in the air. Walkers! I hate 'em, nearly as much as buses and taxis and cars.'

Lance pulled wires from behind the dashboard. A smoky roar blurted from the engine, lights dimly yellow on the snow. ‘Get in, for fuck's sake, but kick a bit of that white stuff from around the wheels first.'

Tyres scuffed and spun. ‘Push, you idle bastards.'

‘Ah,' said Garry, ‘push! That's different. Bikers might not be able to walk, but they can push all right. Come on, let's get this wagon moving.'

While Lance coughed himself breathless, Garry took a turn in the cabin and kept the engine lively, got them a few feet forward. ‘One more heave-ho, and we're in the clear.' He roared the power to encourage, till hot gas from the exhaust set the pushers screaming that they would kill him if he didn't stop choking them alive. ‘It's warming you up. Make you drunk quicker than booze.' He put on all systems in well-timed operation, the van swaying onto the road.

Garry stayed at the controls. ‘Come on, my beauty, don't let us down.' He slid the doors back. ‘Shake the snow off your boots before you get into my nice van, you flea-bitten deadbeats.' He weaved, threading the drifts at a crawl.

Lance noticed a decrease in the snow, a slight drop in the wind. ‘We're on the move. Maybe God won't let us snuff it, after all.'

Wayne laughed. ‘God? Did you hear that, lads? God! God's dead, you daft get. I knocked him flying at a Belisha beacon last week. His fucking pension book went all over the shop. You should have seen the look on his face. A wonderful sight. Eh, we're going quicker, do you notice?'