Snowstop (7 page)

‘Dunno, really. So then I got a job as a general dogsbody for the local Union branch. Then I sold our biggish house and bought one at the end of a row. Don't know why I'm telling you. You're not saying much about yourself.'

‘I haven't had time.' He was annoyed at being attacked in such a way that he was unable to defend himself. She had obviously had much practice and experience, or she had been born that way. Then he was annoyed at being annoyed.

‘It's because you're a man, I suppose.'

‘If you believe that, you'll believe anything.'

Parsons came back. Knowing himself to be the centre of the world – wherever he was – put a light on his face that Aaron couldn't wish him free of. ‘I thought I would never stop peeing. Didn't even know I wanted to go. It was like the River Nile! It must be the bloody weather.'

A girl came in with a tray, and stood as if not knowing which of them to throw it at. ‘Who wanted this, then?'

‘Over here,' Jenny called.

Parsons lifted his arm, the immaculate cuff of a white shirt showing a gold link. ‘I'm the starvo, my love.'

‘I'm not your bleeding love. My name is Enid.' The mouth of her bony face was made smaller by forward-pushing teeth, though Aaron noted signs of a fine figure under her apron. Her puffed-up, copious hair was a glorious russet, as if a light shone from inside, so Parsons hoped she was nice enough to risk a joke. ‘I thought you'd gone off to grow the wheat, and kill the turkey.'

Plate and pint mug clattered down. ‘If I'd known we was going to be so busy I wouldn't have come in tonight. I could have been chewing pills with my boy friend. It would have been better than rotting in this cemetery.'

‘Never mind, love, we can go back into the snow and have a nice time dying, if it'll make you happy. Give the lass fifty pence for her trouble,' he said to Jenny.

She opened her purse, souvenir of a holiday in Morocco with Raymond, and put the coin on the tray. Enid walked out, head tilted as if she had been insulted.

Parsons turned to Aaron. ‘If anybody had given me a tanner at her age I would have thought it was my birthday. Not even a thank you. I suppose the little trollop's got so much in the bank she don't know what to do with it.' He rubbed his cheek with the gold ring as if it might bring her back in a better temper. ‘Would you like some of this sandwich?' He offered it around, then sank half the pint and eliminated the supper as if it had strayed into his cleverly laid ambush.

EIGHT

It
would,
Alfred said to himself. It would, for all the good that could come of it.

Well, it would snow, wouldn't it? Something like this had to happen, on the journey of a lifetime.

Wouldn't it, then, you silly old so-and-so?

But the silly old – he could think of many things worse – was his eighty-year-old father, Percy Joseph, sitting beside him like a ventriloquist's rag-and-putty doll, as flocks of white came against the windscreen like horses at Aintree ridden by the cleverest jockeys in the world.

His poor old geriatric dad stared as if happiness hemmed him in and there was nothing to worry about. And so here he was, Alfred, taking the useless old bore to where he could die in peace and be no more bother.

A man such as himself, fifty last birthday, should not be beholden to this batty old chap who had gaffered him since birth and only stopped now that he drooled and forgot what he said from one minute to the next, though he sometimes came to and recalled in marvellous detail what
his
old so-and-so of a father had said when he was five years of age.

His eyes might not see much but he had wandering hands. ‘I can't put up with it any longer,' Betty from next door said. ‘I don't mind tidying the place up after him and giving him his dinner, but he puts his hands all over me when I'm standing at the stove cooking his stew. He touches me – well, you know, in all
them
places.'

Sexual harassment, wasn't that what they called it nowadays? ‘I'll have a word with him.' His sigh would have blown down Parliament.

‘I wish you would.'

‘I'll tell him to put more time in on his garden. That'll give him something to take his mind off it.'

‘Yes, do tell him. I try, but he don't do as I say.'

Well, he wouldn't, would he, because you're only the cleaning woman, aren't you? And why he should want to touch a fifty-year-old slag with five grown kids and a figure like a bag of Nutty Ashless God alone knows, though I suppose he thinks you're Joan Bakewell or somebody like that.

‘Do you know, Father, I think I'll take you to see our Brian down in Bournemouth for a few days.'

Percy looked up from a topless dolly on Page Three, eyes glinting at the prospect of seeing some real ones on the beaches. ‘I should like that. Bournemouth's a nice place, or so I've always heard.'

He leered, fingers already roaming. Alfred slapped them down. You had to be sorry. You might be like that yourself one day – though he hoped he'd be able to blow his brains out first – but at the moment he was a bit of a pest, causing so much bother when he needed every minute to organize the coming and going of his dozen lorries, keep them on the road every day so as to make the firm pay. Finding a woman willing to look after him had meant all sorts of trouble and expense, but now he had to be put away, helped to pack his suitcase for the longest weekend ever known in
his
lifetime.

He hadn't been senile while sorting his kit, because he thought he was going to see Brian. He imagined pivoting a telescope onto the beach – as if women sported nude in midwinter, and him not feeling the difference any more between hot and cold. His wavering hands indicated the snowflakes. ‘Are we there already?'

‘I think we're going to be stranded.'

‘I love snow. We used to play in it when we was kids. We chucked it at each other till we couldn't feel our fingers. Do you know, Alfred, we used to put stones in the snowballs, or bits of coal. Caught each other a treat on the noddles. Gang against gang it was. Ah, you're only young once.'

Tell me another. Alfred glanced at him. He had been a pit engineer, a tall strong man, with five kids who no longer wanted to own him, and a wife who was dead and buried. Alfred recalled him in his domineering glory, a pain in the arse to everyone with his mixture of beer-swilling and womanizing when he had half the chance, and now there was the job of putting him out of the way because he could neither be looked after nor take care of himself. Brian was in Bournemouth, Ted was in Australia, Arthur was dead in a car smash, and Phil in Scotland was like the rest who wanted nothing to do with him. So he had to be boarded out, and wasn't going to Bournemouth at all, but Bognor, though he wouldn't know the difference once he was among the other geriatrics.

It was hard to say when they would get there, with this little lot coming down. He didn't relish getting stuck, because even though the old man might perish as quietly as a lamb, maybe he himself would go under as well, which wasn't on the cards at all if he could help it. They would have to stop at the next civilized outpost, and set off again in the morning. ‘Are you cold, Father?' He changed gear, hoping to get up the hill. ‘Cold, Dad?' he shouted.

‘All right, don't break my ear-drum. I'm as warm as toast in here.'

You would be. No sense, no feeling.

‘Are
you
cold, Alfred?'

The old bugger was normal again, which pressed on Alfred's heart and made him fit to weep. ‘No, Father. I'm OK.'

‘A bit o' weather makes me feel young again. I courted your mother when it was like this. Kisses warmed us both. The smell of her coat with melted snow on the cloth, and flakes of it on her lovely fair hair. You can't forget things such as that, not till the day after you're dead, Alfred. Her lips were cold, but her heart was hot and rosy. She had breath like strawberry leaves.'

‘You've had a long life, Father.'

He touched his son's hand on the steering wheel, held on warmly. ‘Not long enough, my old son. Anyway, I feel young still, don't you worry.'

He was relieved when the grip relaxed. I suppose everybody does, till they kick the bucket. Percy showed himself awake, to prove he hadn't been asleep, or inattentive, or in any way wandering. ‘The cottages we lived in when we was young shared a pump, and I would take a bucket out at five in the morning to dip my head in before walking three miles to work. It livened me up no end.'

Alfred felt close enough to follow his thoughts, knew the great effort made by his father, who in turn sensed that Alfred had understood, so he laid his head back into a rest he reckoned he deserved because of the willpower used. Nobody was going to think him senile if he could help it.

Alfred saw lights, and the hotel sign. It wasn't safe to go any further. He turned into the courtyard of a posh-looking hostelry called The White Cavalier Hotel, making his own tracks and parking between a car and a van. What the hell there was – or had been, or would ever be – to laugh about in this wide world he would never know, but lugging your semi-crackpot of a dad from one end of the country to the other, a man you had loved as much as yourself and even more – and hated even worse, at times – was no joke at all. Tears came while saying: ‘Come on, wake up, Father. We're here, for a while, anyway.'

NINE

‘Send a St Bernard dog if I fall down and sprain a kneecap.' Eileen pantomimed a sluggish curving track towards the distant glimmer, nothing important in life except wanting to survive, a force buried deep enough to be undisturbed by any levity. ‘I would drink its brandy, then send it back for more while I had a little zizz.'

‘You'd die,' he shouted, finding her tone more acceptable when she was trying to be funny, ‘from hypothermia.'

‘Who's he when he's at home? One of them Latin doctors?' She clutched his hand. ‘If I died I might wake up and live. I've been waiting all my life for that.'

What else she said the jealous wind took away. The cold went through his boots, a poultice of water against flesh. Her feet must be beyond stone, though at twenty years younger he supposed she felt yet didn't feel.

Steely-tipped dust stung his cheeks. She pulled him because the wind had gone mad. Let her think she was helping, but the foot-deep icy floss clutched her knees as they pushed a way to the door. Under the outside light he watched her bony face, deprived for generations, a phosphorous intensity in her visage that he might only witness again if they passed whatever was left of their lives together – a strange idea. Their faces close, he touched her cold lips with a finger, then she drew closer and they kissed, she holding him tight, both wondering why, even whether they had kissed at all in the bitter flurry of the wind.

Feet on fire and arms aching, she wanted shelter and warmth, drew apart and pulled the dopey sod on so's they wouldn't be all night in the deep freeze. It wasn't so bad for him with a warm coat and solid boots, but for her it was chronic – as she gave her best smile and hoped it would have some effect. Her fingers found the latch, and when she vanished before him he followed inside.

The flagstone corridor was bordered by dark panelling, beams crossing above. They shook off the snow by an umbrella stand and a rack for walking sticks and guns. ‘Like two dogs!' She imagined a woolly-bully cuddle with an amiable beast, far from the snarling Rotties that Trevor had hoped to get into his furnished room.

The dyspeptic short-arse of a landlord asked what he could do for him, not looking at her, so that she felt like telling him to crawl up his own hole and die, except that the pong would kill everybody inside ten miles. He could see they were caught in the storm, Keith thought, lighting a cigarette. ‘We'd better take a room, I suppose.'

‘A double with bath will be forty pounds, sir.'

‘Bank card all right?' Mr and Mrs Robinson would do in the book, though he couldn't think why it shot into his mind. Usually it was Smith.

‘What about your luggage, sir?'

He put keys on the counter. ‘It's outside, in the BMW. Have someone bring it in, and take it to our room.'

‘I'm afraid I can't, sir.' Fred smoothed his waistcoat. ‘Our chap hasn't come in tonight. Nor has anyone except the girl.' He nodded towards the window. ‘You can see why.'

‘I'm not blind.' He stilled his rage. ‘Why don't
you
do it?'

‘There's too much on, I'm afraid.' Fred realized the danger, seeing this face blazing like red mercury going up a thermometer, so he turned away thinking how hard a night it would be if more such types came in.

Eileen gargoyled her features, zipping up her jacket. ‘Don't bother. I'll go.'

If she wanted to pay him back for the ride it would be churlish to stop her. ‘Are you sure?'

‘No sweat.' A score of solid and heavy keys fitted the grapple of her fingers. ‘I said so, didn't I?'

‘There's a small brown case in the boot. Just get that.'

Their inward track was smoothed into yeti hollows of white between door and car. Head down, she pushed her shoulder against the malign force. Overhead a big door stopped her seeing the stars, someone up there holding it shut, a grizzly-bearded old bastard in his warm cottage whose starving slaves outside worked at wind machines, perishing everyone in the wilds of earth to let them know, as if they didn't already, that life was hard. She hated snow more than anything, but whatever you hated was bound to come more often than anything else.

Clearing the keyhole saturated her fingers to deadness through woollen gloves, dreading to drop the key-bunch and not find it again, at which the grizzly-bearded old bastard up top would laugh his guts out till breakfast, if he ever laughed at anything, and if he ever had breakfast, since somebody like that would be scoffing all the time. Such a pack of keys would sink from their weight and not be found till the thaw, so many keys to unlock cars, houses, suitcases, but she had never opened anything in her life that belonged only to her, wouldn't mind such a key letting into a house all her own, though you had to unlock a dream first, and how much would that key weigh?