Snowstop (23 page)

Fred looked through the doorway, the air so full of flying powder he saw only the outline of a muscled arm drawing back for another exultant smash. Keith brushed bits of wood and dust from his clothes, and when there was a hole big enough for a head to go through Garry lifted the visor of his knightly helmet and called down: ‘We'll be there in a bit.' He paused to sneeze. ‘I'll need the axe, though, to snap these bits of lath off.'

Lance in the lumber room slotted a carpenter's saw between the edge of the trap door and the ceiling, and cut through the wedge holding it in place. When it fell open towards him he immediately thrust his saw into the space like a weapon should anyone jab down. ‘He won't surrender, I know Old Ferret. He was a strict bastard at school, the only teacher who wouldn't let us arse around.'

Wayne at the foot of the ladder spat, and dodged the ricochet. ‘And now we know why. A killer, that's why. Here's the hammer. Knock it around, to make him think we're about to have his guts for garters.'

‘It's a claw hammer.' Lance tossed it from haft to head as if it were an ivory-handled gun in the Wild West, then banged a jungle rhythm around the gap. ‘A real murder weapon. He was all right, as well, though. He tried to teach us summat.'

‘Yeh, about how great England was,' Wayne said. ‘He used to cry a bit when he said it, just so's we'd believe him. As if we needed that wet prick to tell us what we already knew. Here, let me have a go. I'll make his fucking tripes jump.'

At a signal, Lance came down. ‘They've smashed a hole in the other place,' Fred whispered, ‘and everything's ready. But the Captain says you've got to be dead quiet.'

Wayne pressed against the ladder to keep it firm. The only sound was an uneven moaning of the wind from beyond slates and walls. Lance went through the trap door slowly so that his leather jacket pressing at the edges wouldn't give warning by its squeak.

Reaching for the cosmos, you had to shift slates from between the rafters, and pull them out as do prisoners in hencoop Victorian jails. He would root a way through, roll in a blanket of snow, and go down the sloping roof, no stars in the blizzard to light his escape, moiling clouds holding them off. He would fall through space into the yard, break from his shell and fight each hypothermic step till a safe haven was gained.

While the vivid scene comforted, he restrained his stave from smashing the first slate, knowing that whatever he did could only bring the end closer. The fearful banging began, and because it wasn't feasible to defend two places at once, he would gladly descend peacefully if they would let him, knowing that his ex-pupils turned yobbos could be dealt with – though not the man Keith, who had them under his barbaric control. If the bikers had not succumbed to such a person they might have merited redemption at some future hour, but they had found their natural ally and master, and been set on hounding someone whose mission had crosswired into a dead end because his mother foretold it.

Hearing her mini-mouth saying that God had turned his back on him, he recollected with loathing her theological platitudes. Regardless of cuts at his numbed fingers, he pulled shards and shavings clear so that he could unhook more slates. A flat undersurface of packed snow broke into crystals and fell against eyes and hair.

Light from far off picked out the beams, as he frantically pulled at the covering roof, showing himself to heaven before the pack closed in. There was no time to climb through and escape, but he would wreck as much of their refuge as he could. He stabbed into the snow, lunging as if to draw blood from the Almighty God who would not use His power to save him. Heavy and sharp, the slates became easier to rip away, till water ran down the warmth of the chimney, larger pieces of snow slopping around him. He sent a slate spinning, which broke to pieces on hitting a strut, the noise making him smile and forget his peril.

A wet sleeve turned his arm heavy and cold, the second slate falling uselessly between the beams. ‘When you are sent on a mission you're on your own, but we assume you will get there. We're mature people at the game, and nothing is expected to go wrong through human error.' They had come up through the ranks, so who could deny them their purblind assumptions, their power? They weren't an army fair and square for all to see. They were an underground gang or gangs, as much on the hooks of fate as he was. Things went wrong, by chance, or betrayal, sudden inexplicable despair, or excess of confidence, or because of the weather. In the beginning was the word, and the word was luck. In his memory of arguing with them he always spoke with an Irish accent – ever perfecting his shibbolethic passwords – but he hadn't, not at all, not in actuality, because somehow he had neither the mouth nor throat for it.

He laughed, as if testing his humour as a weapon against them. They wouldn't find him, in spite of their torches. He launched slates lethally one way and then the other at advancing light. The beam struck when he altered stance. Slates in reserve were as sharp as razors and as weighty as claymores, chilblains plaguing his fingers, however, when he touched them, ready for the well-fed confident hunters.

They had warm clothing. Their voices threatened: find him, get him, kill him: curses and futile exhortations. He flung with all his strength, a scream of rage as a slate struck, one of them out of the game. A boot went through lath and plaster. Someone laughed. ‘Come on, Ferret, it's no good. We've got you cornered. You can't get away. Be a good lad, Ferret, and stop chucking slates about. You've hurt my mate, so isn't that enough? Come down with us and get warm. We won't hurt you if you do.'

He knew how to care for himself in his own kingdom, had been here since before he was born. Let them gain it by inch and foot. He forced himself not to answer, or explain, or plead that they leave him alone, change sides, help him. They had retreated, turned lights off and vanished, silence but for the ever-wailing blizzard.

Unbelieving, he skimmed more slates as a test. They were cunning, well trained, patient under fire, wouldn't let him know if they were anywhere at all. They would hear him breathing, so he breathed as if he were dead, too rarefied and superior to need air in his lungs.

From the wet chimney wall he heard the far-off belly-scraping of a large rat dragging towards him. Sleep was what he needed, and dreams. He breathed again, to stop his lungs bursting, because what was the use? Dreams had been his only freedom, exquisite or horrible didn't matter. You could always wake up from dreams. The worst dream, which he'd had more than once, was when he was going to be hanged. Why or what for he didn't know, but he felt dread in every bone, the horrible fear of the end about to be inflicted on him. Had an ancestor suffered this, in a fight against the dastardly English? Then, still in the dream, he was able to tell himself it was a dream, only a dream, even as the hard rope was put around his neck. In dreams you were free because nothing was final. You always woke into a world where no situation could be as awful as the one in the dream.

He was wrong. This wasn't a dream. It was events in life that you had to be afraid of, because they happened inexorably, and you didn't have the freedom to wake up from them. Murderers should be hanged, his mother had always said. He screamed at her phosphorescent face filling the whole attic and advancing slowly towards him. Two black helmeted figures leapt up from before his feet.

Part 2

TWENTY-SIX

‘Old Ferret, all present and correct, sir!'

They bundled him into an armchair and gave imitation salutes. Twice lucky seven were back in the same room. Huge logs burned so that it was impossible to get close. Nobody spoke, as if they were one family after the enormous dinner of a Yulish reunion, in that lull between the pious intake of calories and the explosion of distilled venom from grudges ancestral.

Fred turned out two of the lamps, and Aaron thought how much more interesting faces asleep or in repose were under candlelight. ‘We might be here for days, and that means nights as well,' Fred told them. Keith nodded, glad to have such details taken into account. No one seemed to worry about the van outside, or they didn't believe what it meant, or they were so disorientated that reality couldn't get through. If no one did anything they were within hours of death. Gwen's lifeless face stared at him in triumph, an image he prayed for his will to push aside. It would never depart, and being with her again in a few hours, even if in oblivion, did not seem strange, only horrible, and so he would do all to avoid it. He didn't want to be whatever she was, nor where she was, because who could guarantee that she might not be waiting somewhere? He was ready to act, but the others wouldn't help until they were as terrified and determined to stay alive as he was.

Daniel felt as if the limits of his face were several miles out. He had never been in this country before, where the flesh ached dully from collision with boot and fist, and the body no longer belonged to him. Trying to touch, he couldn't reach, one eye covered by the blue mountain of its swelling, his right knee a nodule as if the bone had been taken away. It was all too distant, only the blur of pain transmitted from the centre of his damaged fortress, the crenellations a wavy line, the moat a rubbish ditch, portcullis crumbled. He found a patch of stiff and bloody hair from a crack in the skull, but the twinge was momentary. He told his hands not to move. His audience might see, and not like it.

He had escaped being kicked to death because the dogs' keeper had ordered them from their fun. Another minute and they would have been impossible to hold, savages only sated when they had drunk his blood.

Old age, Percy knew, was never as old as it was supposed to be. Full of purpose because he was among people he could feel safe with, he walked in the direction of the fire, a criss-cross of heavy timbers in a white blaze hotter than Hell itself the closer he got, so, being forced back by a pain at his eyes, he swerved towards Daniel and stood over him with a hand on his chin as if wondering what he should do now. They soon knew.

After the second vicious smack Wayne leapt up and pulled him away. ‘Keep off, Dad, he's our meat.'

‘No,' Percy shrieked, ‘he's not meat any more,' and turned back to his chair, where he dozed with the assurance that when the time came his instincts would serve him as well as anybody else's. He cat-slept, in and out of comfort, coming into noise, going back into silence or dreams. The spit of burning logs, or the anguished baby moan of the wind, brought him sometimes into the room.

Alfred's eyes stayed as open as oysters under a rain of lemon juice. He could run into the snow as well as the next man, get as far from the van as would save his life, but the question was: how far would far be if he had to carry his father? No-bloody-where at all, should he collapse from a heart attack under the weight. Half the roof and three quarters of the main wall might crash onto his napper before he reached the gate, the sort of joke he wouldn't be able to enjoy. The kindest thing would be to leave the old so-and-so to the explosion, and hope he would go suddenly and without pain, better than living months or years as a cabbage-brain, bossed and tormented by a pack of sadistic old bags in a cheap south-coast nursing home.

If he got clear and his father didn't, the blessing would be on both sides. What a way to think about your own flesh and blood – but when he put a hand to his cheeks to see if there were any tears the dry flesh made him smile. Tired of jumbling the same ideas, he imagined talking the issue over with his brothers, his wife, his children, even his neighbours and friends, and knowing that everyone would call him a merciless villain.

He had read the word for it somewhere a long time ago, in a history book most likely.
Parricide.
Well, there would be a word for it, wouldn't there? The fact that you couldn't get away with anything convinced him he would never have the guts to do it, though having considered the matter at least deserved a dummy run for when the time came.

She feared to touch the red and purple bruises, but held his hands, fingers folded into the palms, and kissed his lips, which seemed the least damaged part of him. He was some person found on a raft after twenty days adrift, one man left from the many who had perished. He made a smile, but she saw pain. Only pain would come if he tried to speak and say how wrong she had been for causing his distress. Her screams from the room below had buried his own cries at the fear of death, as well as the dreadful blows drummed onto his poor body, forcing Keith up the ladder to pull them away.

She had done with shouting, hoped her insults would echo in Keith's mind till the day he died. As for those biking goon-bullies, nothing could move them to feel regret, though if it was true that ‘vengeance was the Lord's alone' she hoped He would take care of it sooner rather than later, that they would find their Nemesis under the wheels of a hundred-ton juggernaut, and live only long enough to realize why it was that the Lord had done His work. As for that vile Jenny who had been to bed with one of them, and was stroking his greasy hair, and no doubt whispering praises for his part in the disgraceful riot, she would like to kill her and not let the Lord have the pleasure.

‘Everything's going to be all right.' She pressed his hands gently, seeking a response in his eyes, and speaking so close that no one would hear. ‘Whatever happens, I won't leave you. I love you. We'll always be together.' Yet the statement was hard to believe, only her way to try and help him bear his suffering.

The room was filled with lovers, Garry saw, everyone paired off except him and his mate Wayne. There weren't enough to go round, that's why. His fists were his lovers, and they'd had a sufficient piece of action to last a few nights at least. He couldn't remember yesterday, nor care less whether tomorrow came. If what that bag Sally screamed about him had been true he ought to wish it never would, but she hadn't had a slate go into her thigh like a sabre. Without his leather trousers the leg would have been sliced off, and even then the gash was too deep to bear thinking about, though he didn't want to bother anybody now that the job was over.