Snowstop

by Alan Sillitoe

  Fred walked towards them, fingers twiddling at his waistcoat. ‘Don’t touch that. I draw the line there. It’s part of the hotel.’ He didn’t want the ship to go down without a fight: the deck raked with grapeshot, all rigging splintered, a glowing cannonball sizzling into the magazine, and when Garry reached for the peacock’s tail he broke an empty whisky bottle against his skull, blood trickling through sparse hair.

  Garry, not realizing how wounded he was, or that he was wounded at all, turned from the resplendent bird and went with murderous hands towards Fred who, gasping at what he had set going, stepped back in the direction of the fireplace. He had only imagined the action, but now that it was done, and in so little time, he changed tack and skittered between tables to the door that was blocked by Wayne as if keeping goal.

  ‘Let’s kill the bastard,’ Garry said.

  She put off the light and packed the bedclothes gently around him, lulling his body in an Aga patch of heat, taking no chances on letting the cold alert him. He would sleep while she found someone to tell.

  She slipped her pants on, tights wrinkled but they would have to stay, one nipple caught but the bra soon adjusted, everything in silence, hardly moving, then the shirt and skirt put on while he slept. She had to stop her teeth clicking from fear or cold, going with shoes in hand towards the door. Thumps and screams from below might not disturb him but a mouse-creak out of the worm-eaten boards would bring him in a mad leap across her path. ‘I can’t sleep, I’m going for a walk,’ she would say, if hands gripped her wrists, or fingers pressed at her throat.

  He sat up, stark and clear in the darkness, as if filings of phosphorus glistened around him. Perhaps he saw her only in his crazy mind, imagined her still providing the heat, for he lay on his side as if to face her for more of the comfort she had given – and began to snore.

  The latch took time to lift, no one to hear as she drew the door slowly towards her, sufficiently to slide her body out and be gone. Who would believe her? Would she give credit to someone who with manic eye buttonholed her in a hotel lounge and said that a huge amount of terrorist’s explosives parked in the yard was due to go off in ten hours’ time? She would think them a fugitive from the local funny farm and run a mile.

  While standing outside to mull on it, and rooted by another cacophony of animal rage from downstairs, the door snapped open, and Daniel caught her by the arm.

  ‘Where are you going, without me?’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Enid took her hands from his wet and languid penis. Strange how it was such a bulltup one minute, and small like a cat’s the next. ‘It sounds like those bikers are killing poor old Fred. I hope so. He asks for it sometimes.’

  He thought it nothing less than miraculous that she had given her pale and exquisite body over to his adoration. ‘We can’t let them, then. You stay here, while I go down.’ From thinking he would be able to pass the night in unaccustomed bliss, the noise from below would not let even the most dedicated morphetic sleep.

  ‘Not likely,’ she said. ‘I want to see.’

  A screech could have been man or gale, the pitch-note ending in a thump at the gables, suggesting a body landing after being hurled. ‘Get dressed quickly, then. The central heating system seems to have packed in.’

  He kissed her when she pressed against him to ask: ‘Do I still have that job?’

  And more, whatever Beryl might say, and she would surely have plenty. Every time he went away she teased him how he would one day come back with a wife. Some hope of that, he had to reassure her pleading grey-green eyes, so deep the attachment between them that she would turn murderous if it happened. Well, the worst always did occur, after you stopped thinking about it, the time never of your own choosing. ‘Yes, you still have the job.’

  When they walked hand-in-hand along the corridor, Keith and. his girl friend came level. ‘I suppose you’re on the same expedition?’ Aaron said. ‘We have to do something.’

  Sally, never so glad in her life to hear voices halfway sane, broke Daniel’s grip: he slid back into his lair – or that was how she would tell it a few weeks later, which was impossible, since the women she knew were friendly with Stanley, as indeed were their male acquaintances, not the sort to condone her minor though disastrous affair. She followed them downstairs, as another jack-in-the-box scream came up to meet them.

  Keith launched himself on a two at a time descent, a flight through the bar which caught his hip on the hard wood, turning him from the joy of action to rage as, after righting himself, he felt the pain and, in order to diminish it, was in the space of a few seconds manifested before Garry whose neck he held in a grip no one could break. ‘You’ll be dead if you don’t drop that poker.’

  ‘Don’t move’ – Aaron placed himself between them and Wayne – ‘or you’ll have me to reckon with’ – fists raised and pushing him further and further away from the action with blows of his stomach. The threatening but disembodied voice got through, Wayne forced so far back he fell momentarily into an armchair.

  Only one button was left to Fred’s waistcoat, but strongly enough sewn by Doris’s loving hand to prevent his shirted belly coming through. A sleeve of his jacket had been scorched by the poker, and hair lay over his forehead like weeds unwatered. He got up from hands and knees, eyes bloodshot with outrage and mortal fear. ‘The lot of you must have been dead from the toe-nails up not to hear what was going on.’

  Keith was just audible to Garry. The cold exuberance, after a time which had spent him to the marrow, so cleared his mind that he would indeed have murdered if the weapon hadn’t fallen. He looked around, till it was plain that the horrible smell of burning flesh had been no more than the stink of peacock feathers. When the neck was near to breaking, he let go. ‘Make trouble from now on, and you’ll be the loser.’

  Wayne stood up, fists moving apart as if to bracket into oblivion any foolish head that got between. ‘I’ll have him.’

  With a madman’s breath at his ear, Garry knew they had met someone who was dangerous, a man serious about killing and not out for fun alone: the instinct to get into a senseless fight had to be crushed. He took Wayne by the elbow, tapped the end of the settle with his boot. ‘We’ll get this back to where it belongs’ – telling himself to keep his dignity, never let anyone think you were hurt, either in mind or body. They should only have dropped into a place like this on a summer’s evening, the bikes primed outside for a quick getaway.

  Aaron put chairs and tables upright – those which would stand – Fred gazing moodily at his lounge coming back into some way shipshape. ‘Bring us plenty of coffee,’ Keith said to him. ‘We’ll all need it. Make it double strength. I’ll pay.’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ Enid said. ‘I’ll brew it as black as the ace of spades. Another day’s wages won’t do me any harm.’ The wrecked room, the approving noise of the blizzard, and the phenomenon of men clumsily putting the place in order, made her employment seem more interesting.

  ‘Do it, then, while I clean myself up.’ Fred was glad she had altered her notion of leaving. ‘Then I can make an inventory of the damage.’

  ‘It’ll give him something to do,’ Wayne jeered. ‘I’d like a fag, though. Mine have all gone.’

  Keith threw his packet.

  ‘Still got my Zippo at least.’ He ignited it, and smiled. ‘Thanks, mate.’

  Eileen walked across and retrieved the cigarettes so that Keith could offer her one. What a terrible thing they had done, to make such a mess of the place. They probably came from nice homes. Bikers often did, though you could tell from the faces of these, and the way they were dressed, how much they loved causing trouble.

  ‘How did you manage to get here?’ Keith wanted to know.

  ‘We had to leave our bikes in a lay-by, about half a mile away,’ Garry said. ‘But we found this van, and set it going. I’ll never know how we got it here.’

  ‘It belongs to an old schoolteacher of mine,’ Wayne said. ‘He must have made his way on foo
t. He’s sleeping it off upstairs. Funny van, though. It’s full of weird stuff. None of us could figure it out.’

  ‘Explosives,’ Sally spoke up. ‘I’ll have a cigarette too, if. I may.’

  Keith gave her one. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He told me, upstairs, after I – slept with him. All fused-up and primed to go off at eight in the morning. It’s supposed to be in London by then.’ She felt a pinch of guilt at betraying his secret, but it would mean little if they assumed her to be mad or a liar.

  ‘You deserve top marks for trying to entertain us through the long evening,’ Aaron said.

  ‘I’m only telling you what he told me.’ She was arguing with a face that belonged to someone else, rubbing hard across her mouth as if to bring back her own features. ‘And I was convinced.’

  ‘Were you?’ Keith smiled.

  ‘I wasn’t for a while. Then he gave the details in such a way that I couldn’t not be. He tried to stop me coming down to tell you. Luckily, you showed up in the corridor, and he had to let me go. He said there was enough explosives in the van to demolish a block of flats, maybe enough material for a whole campaign.’

  Aaron, by the tail of the peacock, looked through the window. The wind’s subtle knife found cracks and, rubbing mist from the glass, he cupped hands around his eyes to see heavy flakes of falling snow.

  ‘It’s in the back courtyard,’ Garry said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t buried by now.’

  ‘You mean’ – Keith walked to her table as if in a dream and someone was handing him a prize he had always hoped for, yet which would turn to dust before he could use it – ‘we either sit here waiting to be blasted, or we go out into the blizzard and freeze to death?’

  She smiled at his speed of thought, but had told them, so would say no more. They could take it or leave it.

  ‘I hope she’s having us on.’ Enid stubbed out her cigarette, as if that would be to blame for whatever might in any case happen. ‘We get that sort now and again, real fucking jokers. A man came in once saying he was Jesus Christ. The world was going to end in half an hour, he said, a big smile right across his clock. It didn’t, though, but we had a good laugh over it. He paid his bill next morning, and even left Fred a big tip. Old Fred didn’t know whether to throw it back in his face or run away wagging his tail.’

  ‘I’ve never been blown up before,’ Eileen said. ‘I wonder what it will be like? As long as I come back together again, I don’t suppose I’ll mind.’

  ‘My bits wouldn’t know how to find each other,’ Wayne said with a smile.

  ‘So what do we do?’ Garry said to Keith.

  ‘We’d better see if there’s anything in it. Would you and your mate like to do a little job? It shouldn’t take long.’ He turned to Sally. ‘What’s the room number?’

  They seemed to believe her, so she agreed to talk again.

  ‘Do it with as little rough stuff as possible,’ Keith told them. ‘And that’s an order.’

  ‘You can trust us,’ Garry said. ‘As long as he’s a good lad. If he ain’t, we’ll pull him down in his birthday suit.’

  He had to fasten the knot of his tie three times before the two ends were of equal length. In the old days he wore a brass tie-pin, but such things weren’t used any more. He only knew that the Cause was lost, or his part in it, if ever it had been found. The light before the mirror wasn’t good, and trembling hands didn’t help. She had gone down and told them everything, and now he must flee into the snow, curl up in a hollow and never see morning. The experience was so real he seemed to have done it already and come back to life, so now he needn’t do it, but he must still save himself, because if they believed what she told them they would kill him, and they would certainly believe such a ‘right sort’ of good-looking Englishwoman like her, accept it from her honest and open face as readily as he had been deceived by it. She deserved to be killed, but everyone would die anyway, therefore it didn’t matter. He should have begged with all his soul for her to stay the whole night, a decision to be regretted for ever because there was no explanation for it, the sort with which his life had been only too full.

  He found himself at the top of another descending staircase in the large and complicated house. Where it led he didn’t know, but it must be a safer place than the one he stood in. They were surely out to find him. He hadn’t lived a double life not to know when the air was throbbing with danger for him and him alone, so he would get to some place of concealment, and rest until the whole establishment disintegrated, a blinding wave of flame and smoke.

  When he was eight and a gang of rough boys from school cried out that they were going to get Daniel and have some fun, he ran into a wood of which he had always been afraid because some said it was haunted and others that it was full of snakes, but the bushes parted for his frantic passage, streams narrowing for the leap, giant elms smoothing their boles to draw him deeper into shadowy gloom till the boys were so far behind he could choose his hiding place. They soon tired of looking, but one boy, stout and cunning, the school bully, was more diligent than the rest. Daniel in his hideaway sharpened a stick to needlepoint with the penknife his mother had given him so that he could cut his daily apple at school, and pushed it with all his scared force into the boy’s leg after he had stood for some minutes wondering what direction to go in. Daniel jabbed again and again, like St George’s lance at the dragon, then dropped the crimson stick and ran from his howling victim. Before reaching the edge of the wood he was fearful that the boy would bleed to death or get gangrene so that his leg would have to be amputated. Daniel learned that the cunning have their pride and the vicious have their freedom, not knowing which word fitted him, but hoping now that he was both, and able to deal with anyone who was rash enough to get in his way.

  ‘I’d like to sleep with you for ever,’ Lance said. ‘You’re all the songs I’ve ever known rolled into one.’

  ‘You’re lovely as well. But we must get up and see what that racket was all about downstairs.’

  He laughed. ‘You mean I’ll never see your lovely body again? I love your marvellous tits when you bend over me.’

  ‘Thank you very much. I’m sure you’ll see them whenever you like. And I’ll see you as often as I can.’ She couldn’t be sure of anything, but it was a delight to have someone as young as this, biker or not. She didn’t think he’d had many women before, but it was good all the same, making the past with Raymond seem less important which, she thought, was nothing short of brilliant.

  ‘It sounds like somebody’s at the door,’ he said. ‘Or is it a dentist’s drill for a pterodactyl’s toothache?’

  She got into slacks and jersey, but Lance had nothing on when he let them in. ‘Oh, it’s you two. What’s up, then?’

  ‘It stinks like a Texas whorehouse in here,’ Garry said. ‘Have you seen that shitbag of a schoolteacher?’

  ‘He was downstairs, wasn’t he? What are you looking under the bed for?’

  Wayne opened the wardrobe. ‘He ain’t in here.’

  ‘We want him,’ Garry said, ‘dead or alive.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

  ‘No fucking way. Did you know that that clapped-out van of his is full of explosives and Christ knows what else? About five thousand tons of it, and if it goes off we’ll give the world a bigger fucking show than the Dam Busters, except that we’ll be the ones to get busted.’

  ‘Half of Derbyshire, which includes this hotel, will go to the moon and back,’ Wayne said.

  ‘Old Ferret a terrorist?’ Lance stood on the bed to get his underpants on. ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘You’d better. He told it to that tart he slept with.’

  ‘You mean woman,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do. We’re on the lookout for him. He ain’t in the room we were told he was.’ He threw Lance’s trousers and they snaked around his face. ‘You come with us as well. And you’d better go downstairs, miss. Maybe they’ll save you some c
offee.’

  ‘Somebody’s having you on. Explosives in that van! We drove it here, didn’t we?’

  Garry laughed. ‘Yes, and don’t expect anybody to thank us for it. Weren’t we the world’s biggest twits? When we get hold of that schoolteacher we might be able to find out what’s what. He’s bound to be in the hotel somewhere, and whoever finds him had better sit on him hard till the others get there. You can blind him, if you like, but don’t make him dumb. He’s got to talk.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Parsons’ head was a globe of the world, four-fifths water and five continents clonking around – or was it six? Boiling lava was in the middle of it all, and he couldn’t lift it from the pillow, try as he might. Beer and champagne never mixed, as he ought to have known, and in spite of having lost count of the buckets he had put into himself his only need was for water to slake those fires in the middle of his globe.

  He couldn’t even blame Jenny – the baggage. He had loved her since she started working for the office, but naturally she wouldn’t have anything to do with an old fartbag like him, though one or two young girls had before her. As for Kitty, his wife – well, she’s fifty-five, and acts like an old woman already, saying that the carpet they’ve just had laid (the best bloody Co-op Axminster) or the new coat he had got her from Griffin and Spalding’s in Nottingham, would see her out. I ask you! See her out! Who could live with that and not go after a bit of crumpet on the side now and again? At least if he packed her in and took up with a young woman he wouldn’t hear things like that. In any case, even if you were young you could be dead in half an hour, but at fifty-odd you don’t want to be reminded that a new chair or carpet will see you out. At fifty-odd you want to think you’re going to live for ever. Nevertheless, he loved his wife and kids, and you couldn’t live with a woman all that long and not think the world of her, no matter how mad she drove you now and again.