Snowstop (13 page)

Daniel peered out of the back window into the beautiful pure world, thinking of the dismal black slush when the thaw came. Where had the bikers gone? Maybe people were imagining weirdos and jack-o'-lanterns shaped out of the snow, clothed and given life by some malignant god to torment him alone.

He turned his head, and the van was there. He hoped it was fantasy, or there were so many of that type it could be anybody's, except that the last three ciphers of the numberplate marked it as the one he had driven. Snow was building up against the wheels, and the door beckoned him to go down and sit inside, turn on the engine and say goodbye to the world. Or stay with it till the cargo exploded.

The world outside was dangerous. Thin glass, painted over by his breath, kept him from it. Hard to think he would ever lift that latch and get back to the zany territory of the Cause. Before collecting the van he had gone into the upstairs room of a terraced house (at Warrington. Of all towns it had to be Warrington), not even staying in the parlour whose door opened onto the pavement. The room had a disassembled bed pushed against the wall to the right of the window as he went in, an electric heater instead of a fire in the grate, a table under the window, and a couple of chairs and a stool. Their looks were distrustful because he wouldn't sit on their grubby chairs.

Maybe they had sent him off with a load either to get caught or be killed. He picked the van up at specified traffic lights, while on red changing with the driver, no one the wiser. ‘Whatever you do, don't be in this van at eight o'clock,' was all the other said, the laugh something Daniel could have done without. Just one of their jokes. They think I've betrayed them sometime in the past, so they've set me up. There was no reason for them to think any such thing, but no reason could blossom into every reason, like when they had got Smith who was never proved guilty.

The bikers must have gone, so what was the sense of that? Perhaps there had been two vans and they departed in the other, but how, in such a blizzard? The van was so close to the wall that when the stuff went off the hotel would become a crater in the landscape. It was the end of the line. If he told them, they would stay and be blown to pieces. Heads they lose and tails they lose. There was no saying which was worse, since he would lose as well. His father might have been able to give him an answer, but he was long dead and couldn't have known the difference between right and wrong even when he was alive.

SIXTEEN

Fred locked up and bolted because nobody else could be expected, unless a phantom of the Labrador snows blundered in, but who could believe in a thing like that, though he almost did when the thump of a battering ram made the building shudder, followed by a series of cannonball blows, a rhythm of impending doom swaying the lights. Parsons uptilted the last of his champagne. ‘It sounds like the rent man.'

The veins of Fred's temples stood out like leeches about to burst, cheeks reddening as if fed by them. In the silence he had no voice, and they were startled by a tall, broad (and balding, as would be any long-time biker) man of about thirty, with his Belstaff black wax cotton jacket open to show an American-style backwoods shirt. He wore cowboy boots and gauntlets, and a black noddy bucket shone in his left hand. ‘Aren't you going to let my mates in? They'll be dead in the snow if you don't, and if that happens you'll be lying on the deck bleeding all over it – for a start.'

To Aaron he had the kind of face you couldn't tell much about until he did something to make people realize what he was like, and then he would know a little of what he was like himself, and be satisfied with the recognition. His deprived yet intelligent features would not become refined or even more harmonious for centuries – if then – something he wasn't to know, while everyone else did, though he was as happy with himself as he could ever hope to be.

‘My name's Garry, and you spell it with two Rs. I never got the third, so don't try and tell me which one's missing. Now then, who's the landlord of this poxed-up pub?'

Fred fastened the last button of his waistcoat, and switched from amiable penguin to fighting cock. ‘This isn't a pub. And if it was it wouldn't be poxed-up, not if I was running it, which I am. For your information it's The White Cavalier Hotel, and it also happens to be closed for the night.'

‘How can it be?' Percy added to the seed of Fred's distress, who at least had supposed the other clients would be on his side. ‘He's in, isn't he?'

More blows at the front door rattled every pane, as if they were driving a dumper truck against the wood. Garry set his helmet on a table, and pulled a brass Zippo from his top pocket. He had a trick of throwing a cigarette from waist level and catching it neatly between his lips before lighting up. ‘If you don't let my mates in, I'll push a table through a window and they'll come in that way. Then you'll sit in a draught all night, and you wouldn't like that, would you, Frog-chops?'

Fred backed a pace at the difference in their heights, ‘I've told you, we're closed.' He wasn't having such riff-raff on his premises. People like that didn't freeze to death anyway: they were unkillable. And if they weren't, then it could only be a matter of good riddance. He hadn't made his way so painfully up in life to tolerate such dregs as that. They would come in only over his dead body. ‘You'd better clear off, unless you want me to phone for the police.'

‘Let them in,' Parsons called, ‘on such a night. If you don't, I'll do it.' He turned to Aaron. ‘That short-arsed bugger would have us all up for murder.'

They kicked snow from their boots when Aaron pulled the door open. ‘You'd better keep back, Mr Scumbag-Landlord,' Garry warned.

In for a penny, in for a pound. ‘Get me another bottle of champagne,' Parsons told Fred, ‘if you want something to do.'

The drink had made Jenny drowsy, but her senses sharpened on seeing the three bikers at the bar. Fred, like the sensible man he decided he had better be, asked what they would care to order.

‘A foaming pint, for a start.' Lance faced into the room, tapping a rhythm at the wood behind his heel. The thick coat with a full range of shoulder tassels came to his knees, and Jenny didn't feel as wary of him as of the others. His thin face looked more sunken with weariness than she supposed it might normally be. He was sallow skinned, though his full lips seemed about to say something which would justify his presence on earth, making her wonder how he could possibly have teamed up with the others.

‘I could eat a hoss between two mattresses,' Wayne said, ‘if you've got it, though that lovely bit of stuff will do to be going on with,' he added, when Enid came into the room. He stroked his beard, and smoothed the hair tied back in the shape of a little saveloy. Jenny wouldn't trust him an inch, with his preening and his mean mouth much obscured by hair. Under his biker's gear, well laced with studs, he wore a suede jacket and a white highnecked collarless shirt.

Enid turned a deadly-nightshade glare on Wayne, her mouth shaping into as fine a sneer as Aaron had ever seen. The crisp-coated burial mounds outside made the silence so profound that everyone seemed more individual, a silence ended by Enid's knife-sharp request for him to: ‘Fuck off! If my boy friend was here he'd have your bollocks off and roast 'em over a slow fire as soon as look at you!'

Percy gave a weird hyena-ish laugh. ‘That's right, my old duck, you tell him. Anybody would say the same. Come to that, who the hell
are
you lot?'

Lance's pint had gone down, and the tattoo heeltap changed to a banging on the bar with his glass as he smiled at Jenny, who looked away on being caught in her scrutiny. ‘I'll tell you who we are. We're our own special club of bikers, Knights of the Arterial Road – the KAR Club. We used to be The Magnificent Seven, but now we're The Three Musketeers. I expect we'll be The Lone Ranger soon. And then I'll slop tears!'

Darkness came down like a curtain on their laughter, as if he had been godsent to entertain them in their isolation. ‘It looks like the blackout's come back,' Percy said. ‘Or maybe the dam's burst. Too much sand in the cement.'

‘Shut up, Father.' Yet Alfred was happy at the old man's return to more ordinary consciousness since nature had put them up against it. Maybe he hadn't gone senile after all, either that or there was a case for geriatrics being sent to areas of high disaster incidence to keep them a few more years in the land of clarity.

‘You'd better search out for some lamps and candles,' Aaron advised when the lights came on again. Fred felt as if it would be safer to remain a statue for the rest of the night. But that won't do, he told himself. A statue is something that dogs piss against, and you should never let that happen, though you're half-pissed already, more, even, if they knew the truth. But who wants the truth in this imperfect world? ‘I'll see what I can do.'

‘And you,' Wayne told Enid, ‘bring us three turkey sandwiches – and I don't mean tomcat – with plenty of meat spilling from between thick slices of granary bread!'

She dipped, and folded, and nodded, then uglied her face to an extreme, as if to liquefy the features and pour them in a poisonous acidic stream in his direction. ‘Yes sir, no sir, three bags full of shit, sir, you …' The word-bin was empty, but the bin itself was made of words, a chipboard container of words which, though brittle, would not be snapped off.

‘Little moxy's cross,' Garry said. ‘Is this a public house, or in't it?'

Daniel spoke for them all. ‘Why don't you ask her properly?'

‘They want sandwiches,' Enid's voice stayed envenomed, ‘and booze, but who's going to pay for it? That's what I'd like to know. I know your sort. I'm surprised you got the beer. I suppose Fred only did it to stop you cutting his throat, but I'm not frightened of a pack of ratty highwaymen like you.'

Garry held up a plastic bank card. ‘What's this, then? I've got a wallet full, and they weren't nicked, either. Maybe they'll be useful to buy a car with one day, but I won't get one of them tin boxes for a cripple till I'm over the hill at forty. Meanwhile I'm an emergency plumber who goes everywhere on his ton-upper and panniers stuffed with tools. That's my job. I answer phone calls so quick my customers love me, though they pay double time because I'm on twenty-four-hour standby. I've got plenty of money in the bank, and I'll have even more when this lot's over, fixing all the burst pipes and blocked faucets. I'll be a millionaire for a few days, anyway.'

‘I suppose you'll each be wanting a room?' Fred, mollified by the sight of credit cards, set a camping lamp on the bar, and waited for an answer. Not knowing who had money and who was a tramp didn't make his job easy these days.

‘We might.' Garry lit a cigarette that hadn't been machine made. ‘Then again, we might not.'

‘Herbal fags.' Percy sniffed. ‘They smell nice.'

‘Have one, Dad.' He lifted another from his tin and took it across. The air was filled with a bucolic aroma.

‘Perhaps it'll thaw in an hour,' Lance said, ‘and then we can float away under the stars. We'll turn the van upside down and paddle it down the road.'

‘That van is mine,' Daniel said. ‘I left it in a lay-by where I thought it would be safe. You seem to have got it going and driven it here. For which I suppose I ought to thank you, though it's hard to think how you did it.'

‘We thought it belonged to a mob of spivs up from the Smoke. The back's packed with hi-fi stuff.'

Daniel congratulated himself on feeling so calm at a time of danger. These types were fresh from Eden compared to those he usually dealt with. They still had pips on their lips.

‘Which fell off the back of a lorry,' Lance said.

‘A bloody juggernaut, I expect.' Wayne looked closely at Daniel. ‘I've seen you somewhere before.'

‘In borstal,' Garry said.

‘No, but at some bloody school near enough to borstal. You was a teacher at Matchwood Comprehensive. I hate faces, so I never forget 'em!'

Many potential yobbos had sat before him, faces dead and smirky in turn, vicious or asleep, passive or threatening, but always a few who could spell before they left, which was much to be said for them, though not so much for the system. He had never agreed with those bearded beer-drinking so-called benign instructors who moulded their accents to put the kids at their ease, then lulled them into believing that it didn't matter how you spelt as long as the words could be understood, and that arithmetic was all right provided the answers came out close enough. Try telling that to a shopkeeper you went to for a job! It had changed for the better now, though the one called Garry might have been a victim of such beliefs.

‘You're right,' Lance said. ‘Would you believe it? How are you, Mr Butler, sir?'

The stench of cannabis was as if they were caught among burning stubble after the harvest. He had once taken some from boys in the playground and flushed it down the toilet. ‘Didn't I teach you about rhyming?' He shook the cold strong hand. ‘You were interested in writing pop songs, if I remember.'

‘That's right,' Lance said.

He had tried to guide him towards poetry, suggesting Yeats and Tennyson, but that was a stage Lance had not aspired to, fearing the scorn of his mates, which told Daniel he would never do anything worthwhile. Even so, without preamble; he had one day read ‘Byzantium' to the class and, a few lines in, no face moved, frozen images as never to be forgotten as the verse itself.

‘Can I buy you a drink, sir?'

‘All teachers should be shot,' Garry said, ‘though maybe not when it's snowing and we're up shit's creek together.'

‘Not Old Ferret,' Wayne said. ‘That's what we used to call him. We liked him, though, didn't we – sir? We'll drive your van anywhere you want it to go, being as we're the only ones who can. Anything to do you a favour, after all them years you tried to drum knowledge into our big soft heads.'