Snowstop (37 page)

‘Don't go.' Jenny used all her strength to bring her face against her chest. Then she closed her own eyes and said: ‘Let's not look,' before being more sick than she could ever remember.

THIRTY-SIX

The place that had seemed so staid a refuge in the blizzard, plugged into the earth and beyond all notions of destruction and, what's more, eternally welcoming with warm punch and womb-like shelter, had in fact been rotten with woodworm, rising damp and deathwatch beetle, as if reinforced only by the faith of those who were stranded under its roof.

Thus Aaron felt as he took off his coat and jacket, determined to pull rubble clear, with Alfred at the other end, and Fred taking position in the middle. The beam was brown below and black on top, a ponderousness pinning laths, plaster, chairs and tables, making a rapidly diminishing prison that Wayne and Lance must be pulled out of before everything slid, because half a bed hung through the ceiling, a counterpane waved to warn or encourage, and foul water descended the wall below a buckled window frame. He would lift the beam or die in trying, though to have survived the explosion and then throw the gift of life back into God's face would be opposing nature.

Fred heaved at the wood. ‘The pipes must have split.' Some, against the regulations, had been plastic, and snow melting around them stank like soot.

‘Stop fucking nattering,' came Wayne's faint voice, ‘or I'll never do a kickstart again. My ribs have gone, and I'm getting snow on my face.'

‘Take your sweat. We're getting there.' Fred looked anxious, though not upwards, such a gesture bad for morale. ‘The whole lot might tumble.'

The beam was of hernia weight, and Aaron had previously suffered one from lifting too many logs after cutting down old trees in the garden. Beryl said he should get a lad from the village to help, but such work in solitude was precious in the peace it brought.

Both hands under, he remembered in
Les Misérables
how the escaped convict Jean Valjean had put himself beneath a cart and raised it to save a man's life, though such a feat made him known to a policeman looking on. Aaron couldn't tell whether the frog-croak came from planks at the far end of the beam, or from the ceiling, but the strain at his back and stomach turned into a dread ache, as if his legs would also crack. ‘Sweat for England, you bastards.' Lance's voice sounded above the blizzard. ‘A rat's staring at me, and I don't like rats.'

Alfred groaned at the load he worked at, sweat dripping onto the rubble. He slid bricks and wood under the beam to get it higher, twigging the stress of the situation as if he had inherited the brain of his engineer father, because should Aaron let go, the beam would only fall an inch or two. ‘I wanted to see the explosion,' Wayne complained, ‘not have the whole shop fall on top of me.'

Clothes chilled from plastery mud, Aaron raised a weight to last the rest of his life, stomach hardening as wood, a matter of holding on and hoping the body would sustain him: ‘I'll count up to fifty, and then let go.'

The effort separated him from the world. Fred and Alfred pulled at bricks to make the gap bigger. Far from book-dealing, or the self-indulgent fits of his sister, or his evil encouragement of her plight, and distant also from his nihilistic streaks of cheating, Aaron knew that everything you did affected someone else and had to be allowed for, no resolution except by pain of spirit and the extreme use of grit and sinew.

‘I'll count up to fifty, and then let go,' but when he got there he said, no one to hear because the voice of the blizzard was even louder among the ruins: ‘I had better make it a hundred, though it'll be impossible to go on longer. And when they're safe I'll ask Enid if she wants to come away with me. We'll drive to the south coast and stay in a hotel. I don't think she will, because she can hardly bear to look at my raddled grandad face twisted with toothache.'

At the hundred mark he said: ‘I'll manage ten more, and try not to brood on my squalid fate for ever.' Then he endured without counting, eyes closed because he couldn't bear to check how the loads were shifting, till it came as almost a shock that no more effort was needed.

Wayne limped to the broken door, gasping, hands pressed against his ribs. Fred helped Lance away: ‘I think this young soldier might have broken his leg.'

Aaron stepped aside, and the spike of lath that had gone through his trousers at the calf still waved as he hurried to safety.

‘It's lovely. Not a cloud in the sky.' Paul knew those days that started so well: sun on snow which protected and kept warm the little goings-on underneath. Such weather could turn very nasty between dawn and dusk. Visibility was good across moors and hills, scratchmarks of walled hedges in the distance, showing how local the blizzard had been but might not be if it began again. The wind was muzzled of its howl, turned direction and settled from the northwest, God alone knowing what it would do in the next few hours. He lay at full length, checking wires leading to the little black box.

Bill shone the torch. ‘Did you ever get a licence for this CB radio?'

‘Don't ask, or you'll make me laugh. I might bang my head. The screw's so loose the wire ain't making contact. And the aerial's unplugged. I'm surprised they didn't hear that bang twenty miles away and send a chopper to investigate. My fingers are so dead I can't make the two ends stay together.'

Charlie passed a cigarette. ‘They wouldn't know which way to look, would they?'

‘The trouble is,' Bill said, ‘you need a licence for the CB, and we ain't got one, so the coppers'll nick us when they jump out of the chopper even before they offer a fag and a mug of tea to the injured. It might mean a two-hundred-pound fine. They're bound to ask for our licence.'

Paul rubbed his fingers till they were supple and live enough to knot the wires. Static sounded like chips thrown into a pan of smoking oil and, damping the volume, he pushed buttons to bring voices loud and clear from the outside.

Five gone, and none had stopped on their way to pay what they owed. Well, they wouldn't, would they? Fred mused that just as the dead could tell no tales, neither were they capable of settling their scores, though you could be sure they would be called to account when they got to the other side, if there was such a place which, considering the list of misdemeanours he had built up against himself, he sincerely hoped there was hot. In what was left of the kitchen he spent the remaining provisions like a generous sailor. The fridge and deepfreeze had been cut off from the start, and he couldn't imagine any of his guests staying many more hours, in which case they would eat royally of sausages, chops, steak and all manner of vegetables. ‘It's no use shoving an emergency stock into the snow, because foxes and wild cats will get their noses at it,' he said in answer to Aaron, as if the time for common sense had long been over.

‘What about my father's body, then?'

‘Animals roam all over the place in a blizzard,' Fred told him gleefully. ‘You always find a few sheep gnawed to the bone.' No longer the manager of a hotel, of which there wasn't much left in any case, it didn't matter who he offended. ‘You're not going to bring his body back inside, either.' He was well muffled up, for in spite of a woodstove in the kitchen, half of one wall was down. ‘It won't be hygienic, not by this time. It won't be very pretty.'

Wayne turned his steak over. ‘Every time I chew, my ribs ache summat rotten. I'll have to wait for a proper blow-out till after Garry's funeral.'

‘A mass funeral,' Lance said. ‘He would have loved it.'

‘You lot just don't care about him, do you?' Enid shouted. ‘I hate you. He was all right. But you lot haven't got any sense or feeling to talk like that. You make me sick.'

Wayne stood up unsteadily, holding his knife and fork as if he might make her part of his meal. ‘What do you know about feelings?' he wheezed. But with his cracked ribs he wanted to curl up in a darkened room with a bottle of whisky. ‘Next time a maniac goes around the country in a blizzard with a van like that we'll arrange for you to get stranded with some nice posh
civilized
people. Then you'll be raped, drawn and quartered before you can wiggle your tight little arse.' He pushed his plate aside, unable to eat. The hotel had fallen in, and the world could do the same as far as he was concerned. ‘We'll never forget Garry, so shut your gob.'

She turned to Aaron. ‘Are you going to let him insult me like that?'

‘Let's get on with our meal,' he said.

Fred came into the kitchen with a tray of soiled pots. Those in the lumber room were belching, farting, or puffing cigarettes and groaning from their injuries. He was sorry about that. The lads were more hurt than they let on, so he would leave them alone and hope the medics got here soon to mend 'em and bandage 'em. Even so, they seemed more harmless under their tribulations than before they had known about the van, and that couldn't be bad. It was amazing how pain and peril turned tearaways into heroes. He would show his appreciation by rustling up something tasty for dessert. What they really needed was a good plate of spotted dick smothered in a rich egg custard, or hot dumplings running with treacle, but neither time nor cooking facilities allowed of that. He kicked at a large rat running across broken glass to safety under the sink. ‘Not another one away?'

‘She's fainted,' Jenny said. ‘Is there a dry bed somewhere?'

He pointed to a mattress. ‘I kipped on it myself now, and again last night. What happened?'

‘She saw the mess.'

‘I told her not to go out.'

‘Well, now she knows. And so do I.'

He set the tray on the sink. ‘We don't even have any water. Everything's frozen, or burst. I hope we'll be out of it soon. It's getting intolerable, even to me.'

She let Eileen gently down, thinking it typical of him not to help. The struggle of getting her in from the storm had been almost too much, as if both might never reach shelter.

He turned doctor again. ‘I'll find some brandy.'

Eileen lay on her back, arm over eyes, mouth shaped in the perpetual horror of a half-formed cry. Someone had punched her into a nightmare, and she was running up and down tunnels unable to find a way out. Her forehead, was cold, the pale skin unwrinkled, and Jenny hoped that soothing fingers would do some good. Eileen's breathing was even, as if she were asleep, shocked out of herself but into something she had never known about, senseless from the exhaustion of terror and utter loss. Jenny touched her lips, then quickly took the hand away at the thought of being bitten, a melancholy smile at such an unlikely occurrence.

Fred shook the bottle's insides to a froth, snapped out the cork, and put it to her nose. ‘This is better than any brandy. A ship's carpenter once gave me the formula. But I wonder where she'll go when she leaves here? Keith picked her up off the road.'

Snow had melted into her clothes, but her warm sweet breath came through the odour. ‘I'll take her home with me.'

She surprised herself, because what would she do about Lance? Let things happen as they might or might not, she'd see him or she wouldn't, surely no need to worry about wanting her when you had spent a night dying and being born again. She would love who she liked. No, that's not it. I'll never be able to change, nor will she, but if we can't live with each other, at least for a while, who the hell can we live with? ‘I'm out of a job as well, but we'll manage.'

‘Better you than me,' he said.

‘It never could be you, could it?' she responded sharply.

‘It's having some effect. She's coming round, but you'd better stay with her.'

‘I will.'

‘Poor thing needs somebody. And when you get her home, give her this envelope.'

‘What is it?'

‘How the hell should I know? Keith left it for her. Maybe it's a last will and testament. A Dear Eileen letter, for all I care.'

Alfred dragged a mahogany table from the fireplace and set a box under it where a leg was missing. He stacked jumble around the walls, sorted stuff for burning. A boot through the unhinged door of a wardrobe sent clouds of snuff and splinters towards that part of the ceiling still able to cover them from driving snow. ‘We can sit it out here a treat.' He was proud of the order he had made. ‘The bikers are asleep, and they deserve to be. I wish I was their age again.'

‘You had a good time when you were, I suppose?'

‘I worked too hard,' he said to Aaron. ‘I never had the guts to be more myself than I dared. With my father in the offing all the time I had to watch my Ps and Qs. He had to know about every little thing. I suppose it did my character some good, by the time I was forty anyway. It seems funny now he's gone. Mother died ten years ago – or was it twelve? – so I'm an orphan! What a bloody silly thing to be, at my age! All I want is to see my daughter married, and get back to business, though the first thing' – he lit a cigar from a burning stick which he threw down before his eyebrows singed – ‘will be to get my father decently buried. I have a son, but he cleared off five years ago to live in London, where he's working on computers. He's got two kids of his own, and pays for 'em to go to a private school. He had more guts than I did, and didn't want me breathing down his neck, though I tried not to when he was little. His grandfather was as nice as pie to him, would you believe it? So I hope he'll come up for the funeral, though it wouldn't surprise me if he didn't. I even offered to buy him a car last year, but he said he'd already got one. That's the modern generation for you.'

Enid looked at Aaron as if, he thought, she had never seen him before. ‘I'll go home as soon as I can, and let my parents know I'm all right. I don't like them to be worried. When they're worried they get upset.'