Snowstop

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘If we went out now, in which direction would we go? The nearest farm, according to Fred, is half a mile or more. To struggle through twelve-foot drifts, which was what the newsflash said they were, before the batteries of the radio ran out, would mean death from exposure. And those who wouldn’t be able to keep up, what would we do with them? Leave them behind?’

  ‘I could climb on the roof and send an SOS with a flashlight,’ Lance said. ‘Somebody might see it, and pass it on.’

  ‘Yes, God,’ Garry said. ‘He knows Morse code. The only thing is, I thought He’d snuffed it.’

  Daniel’s words were wrenched out because it was more than any bodily pain to keep them in. ‘He can’t be dead, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Neither would you. It could only be God who brought us to this.’ Who else had held the friable arms of the timing mechanism apart for so long? If he didn’t think that God alone was responsible he would run for the wall and bang out his brains in despair, though he felt something near terror at having broken his silence when all rights to do so had been taken away. ‘God decided, and drew us together for His higher purpose, just as He made me do what I did. Everything that happens is part of His scheme.’

  His words were English, but the outlandish language grated so painfully on Aaron he wanted to get up and strangle him. Perhaps the hatred was from a déjà vu dose of his own slipshod way of expression when he was young and writing poems, something he had ceased to do when the future closed its doors. The flash of similarity blinded him to pity unless, he thought, it was pain from the rotting tooth once more on the attack, but if so what had made it reassert itself? Calm so far, enjoying the rarity of being marooned (in any case, he had problems to solve), his sudden craving for violence against Daniel was only stoppable with the greatest effort.

  Not everyone bothered to hold it back. A heavy ashtray spun by Daniel’s head and hit the lintel of the fireplace. ‘You shitbag!’ Garry’s effort made him gasp at the pain in his leg, and he was even more enraged because he had missed. ‘You’ll be in jail soon, not fucking church. Or you’ll be dead, if I have owt to do with it.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’ When Sally tried to stop him talking he pushed her away so forcefully that her back struck the chair. ‘If anyone should try to get us out of this, it ought to be me.’

  Parsons peered at the maelstrom of snow. After twenty years down the pit his ears could pick out any sound that was different, and he swore he heard the churning blades of a helicopter. Yet it couldn’t be, came from his fantasy of hope perhaps. Pressing an ear to cold glass, the uproar of the blizzard heightened the ante of cyclonic wildness.

  Daniel fell from Keith’s push at his chest. ‘There’s nothing you can do to help. If you want to be safe, stay quiet.’

  Sally was not part of such people, never had been. She belonged with Daniel, sat by him to be loathed as part of him, marked off from those who thought themselves much in the right but were as culpable as anyone because all they had in mind was to kill. Daniel had done what he had done out of an idealism he had never clearly understood. ‘It’s your responsibility that nothing happens to him, and I’ll hold you to it, believe me.’

  ‘Not a duty I take too heavily, I might tell you.’ Keith turned from her. ‘The next question is whether there are any bomb-disposal experts among us, who can fight their way across the yard and tackle that tangle of wires and fuses? Well, I knew it wasn’t on, but I had to ask. It’s the only thing that would save us, though even a bomb-disposal expert can make the wrong move.’

  Parsons wished somebody would, in his lower moments, because what could he say when he got back to Ashfield? His life was finished, so he didn’t much care whether he did or not. There would be nothing but scorn from the lads, even if they didn’t have him prosecuted, and there were more than a few who would want to. I’m over the hill, rotting from the inside out, and I can feel it speeding up, doing its stuff with every minute that passes. If I had to run a hundred yards for a bus I would drop dead before grabbing the rail. Twenty years ago, when I was ripping out coal underground, and was a dedicated servant of the Union, I made up my mind I would get to the top in that set-up at least, but somewhere on the mountainside of endeavour I began donkeying around in circles. I’m bloody sure that was a helicopter, unless it was a chimney falling down in the wind, or drainpipes cracking under the weight of snow. And then what did I do? Spent the Union’s money in a Soho club, fifty quid for a bottle of stuff they called wine but tasted like the worst vinegar in England, and then off to bed with a woman who wanted to whip me because I couldn’t get it up. ‘It’s nourishment I want,’ I said, ‘not punishment.’ On my way to meet Jenny at the station I found she’d robbed me blind. Christ, I’ll tell ’em it fell out of my back pocket. ‘I was mugged,’ I’ll say. ‘Don’t kill me just for that.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Keith stood by the fire, a hand in his pocket as if it were full of ideas and he couldn’t decide which to bring out next. ‘The question is,’ he said, ‘whether one of us can’t get to the nearest house or phone box to explain matters, and call a bomb-disposal specialist in by helicopter.’

  Fred’s map, fished from what he called The Information Drawer, was an old one-inch clothbacked provisional edition hurried out for use by the Home Guard during the Second World War, a relic picked off a junk barrow in the market for ten pence. All but falling to pieces, its only use was in showing that if you went left from the hotel the road undulated for miles until it reached a valley and the nearest village. If you turned right it did the same for an equal number of miles and led right into the fangs of the gale.

  ‘We’re up the creek,’ Eileen said, ‘without even a soup spoon.’

  Joking in face of peril, feeling no responsibility for getting out of it but waiting for someone to tell you what to do, must be paradise to them, but for Keith such a state would be torment. To them it was normal, but he had been born to show people and think for people and, when necessary, to lead people. At such times he was most alive: people trusted him, and wallowing in their dependence was like a tonic – though finally he must justify their faith.

  Your secrets were your own, until you let them out. Look into people’s eyes and, however frank you appeared, they could know nothing unless you told them. In a crisis, when it mattered to conceal what you were thinking (so as to mull more effectively over your choice of what to say), you were one person hidden and for yourself alone, then another for those with whom you had to deal. So he could hope to be their saviour, while guilty of murder. Such thoughts were necessary for his strength of purpose – pausing only to seem more caring to his audience, as if to imply that a half-concealed scholarliness mixed with the man of action.

  His tone was one of impatience at Eileen’s remark. ‘Not too far up it. I saw a pair of skis in the junk room. They weren’t exactly new, but the rats hadn’t eaten the straps as they did the leather of the Assyrians’ shields. The runners look straight, so the only question is who, apart from myself, is able to ski?’

  The bikers couldn’t, he was sure, and Aaron would be too old to plunge through such conditions. As for Parsons and Alfred, the same for them with knobs on, even if they could ski, which he doubted.

  ‘I can,’ Sally said. ‘Ever since I was old enough to stand on my feet. My parents insisted I do everything: type, swim, drive, ride – and also ski. I can do it as well as anyone here, if not better. The snow must be above the hedges by now. It should be plain sailing.’

  Keith remembered a white-out near Bluedale Tarn, when with all his weight and strength (and experience) he could hardly stand against the wind which was blowing from the direction he needed to go. The only way was to have the wind with him, though it pushed and buffeted, and more than doubled the distance to safety, with moments when he thought he would never reach his hotel. A local farmer lost in the same storm was found dead a month later, in spite of building himself a shelter in the lee of a wall.

  The expression was eager in her offer
of help, but he considered it useless to sacrifice her. ‘It’s nothing for me,’ she went on. ‘I can do it easily. It’s a brilliant idea.’

  He sought a way to refuse that would not drive her to try more persuasion, which he might not be able to resist. He understood why she pleaded, and even felt envious at such a gallant way of cancelling her mistake with Daniel, but he couldn’t let her absolve herself at the cost of her life. He told them about Bluedale Tarn. ‘If the wind drops, I’ll think about it. Nobody can live in this weather, skis or not.’

  ‘You don’t trust me.’ She struggled not to cry or swear, or do both. Her face was dirty and bruised where Wayne had hit her. He mustn’t let that happen again. All of them looked like street cleaners in for their tea break, except for Percy and Fred. ‘You think I’ll get to safety, then leave you in the lurch,’ she said. ‘What a mind you have. As if I could leave him to your rotten schemes. You don’t know anything, however clued-up you might be in other ways.’

  Gwen had come back to life in her, so to kill again would be easy. Let her have the skis, and go. Her death wouldn’t be on his conscience. But the matter was finished, and he felt better at disposing of it. Experience had scored into him that in the face of irrelevant accusations you either stayed quiet or set further talk off at a tangent. ‘The map was printed in 1942, so I wonder if any new buildings have been put up since? There could be a place closer than we think.’

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ Fred told him, ‘and I know the area well.’

  ‘You can’t put me off,’ she said. ‘I still want to go.’

  ‘Have a dekko through the window,’ Parsons told her. The blizzard mocked their isolation, bumping around salients and inlets with the noise of despairing travellers trying to reach safety. ‘Or the back door. It’s an inferno.’

  ‘She wants to run the whole show,’ Garry said. ‘Keith’s the only one as could make it, but he can’t go because the gaffer’s got to stay at the controls.’

  They were silent and waiting, but he hardly knew how to proceed, lit a cigarette and looked at their faces, features shifty and uncertain where they had once been clear. He assumed his to show the same puzzling blend of uncertainty.

  ‘It sounds like the wolves are after us,’ Lance said. ‘Eh, Ferret, what rhymes with wolf? I’m in the mood to write a song.’

  ‘There are no rhymes any more.’ Daniel took the cigarette that Sally had lit. ‘Neither rhyme nor reason. We’re beyond all that. Whatever he says, nothing will succeed.’

  Daniel’s unwillingness to hide his glee enraged Wayne, who opened the short blade out of a Leatherman pouch and jabbed it towards him. ‘If we try, and whatever it is doesn’t work, you’ll die. I’ll make sure of that. I’ll slit your fucking throat.’

  Keith, not as successful at keeping anxiety from his face as he thought, wondered how long he would be able to hold them in check and, if the final panic took the form of a blood bath, whose side he would be on. ‘Tell your boy friend to keep quiet,’ he said to her.

  She smoothed her cheek over Daniel’s lips, held his hand and whispered that she loved him. His tormented features filled her with a longing to be with him where they could renew the delight of when she had known him yet not known him. He wanted to die and didn’t care, lived in a void and loved no one, which was why she would protect him even at the cost of her life, would die with him because there could be no life after him, no going back into the appalling emptiness of the past.

  Percy startled them with his razor-honed pronouncement. ‘Them as can, do. Them as can’t, teach.’

  ‘I thought you were asleep, Father?’

  ‘I never sleep, you know that. A pit engineer catnaps. He can be called out any minute. When you turn the gas on, water pours out.’

  He hated those who laughed. ‘Your mind’s wandering again,’ Alfred said.

  ‘And your brain’s zigzagging around the maypole if you think that plumber’s any good. You’d be better off getting a monkey from the zoo. He might be all right on a motorbike, but he couldn’t plumb a Wendy house.’

  Keith wondered who would want to go on living with a father like that, with the chance that you would end up like him. Maybe others among them were also thinking that the effort wouldn’t be worth it. He had to persuade them otherwise by unrolling the last possible option.

  Alfred seemed about to put his father into a sleep he wouldn’t wake up from. The old man’s only safe, Aaron thought, because we’re here, otherwise Alfred would have smothered him by now, though if we weren’t here he wouldn’t be so embarrassed and want to kill him. ‘I don’t need your opinion about my business,’ Alfred said, exasperated. ‘So go back to sleep.’

  Garry had known it was a dream, to fix up a whole house and get himself into business. Even so, if anybody died in the snow, should they ever get that far, he hoped it would be the old man. The idea of the house had been good in hiding the pain in his thigh, which now came back as if hooked hands were inside and trying to rip a way out.

  ‘If you had taken my advice from the beginning you’d have been a lot richer than you are today,’ Percy went on. ‘And who was it got you started, anyway? Me. Who told you what to do and how to do it? Me. And who lent you five thousand quid to get your first lorries? Me. Without interest, as well, because I never expected to see it back.’

  ‘You did get it back, though, didn’t you?’ Alfred said mildly.

  ‘After twelve bloody years I did. You held off as long as you could. You had it in the bank making interest, because you hoped I would die, and you needn’t bother then. But I didn’t die, did I? And I won’t, either. I’ll see you out, you see if I don’t.’

  Aaron stood. ‘Lay a few more bottles out, Fred. A double whisky for me.’ Not so much for conviviality as for his tooth. Tormented by draughts and chill, Hell was where you had toothache, and Paradise where you didn’t.

  Fred was pleased to take orders, middle of the night or not. That was what he was here for, such action a sign of normal life, placing glasses on a tray and balancing their weights to keep it even, a tuneless whistle at the thought of the till ringing. Hidden from them at the other end of the bar, he told himself that if Doris was here to share the work, life would be fine. But she wasn’t and, considering the mess, it was just as well. If she were here she would never stop nagging – and I would never stop swearing. If only I hadn’t learned to swear! But then, I shouldn’t have been six years a sailor, because sailors swear, though when you think about it, who doesn’t? The only reason women don’t swear as much as men is that they nag and men don’t.

  He flung the white towel over his arm, scrawled fingernails through his hair, took a sip of Aaron’s whisky as if to be sure it was a good brand, and strode into the lounge like one of the best waiters in the business.

  TWENTY-NINE

  How does a common fly get to where it is? Why does it land on any particular spot? A big black confident muff-footed specimen rested on the back of Keith’s hand, hairs for a jungle and between the veins for valleys, a summer fly that had survived the autumn in some warm cupboard and now came out sensing that there was no safe place even for a scavenging fly.

  He couldn’t understand why everyone looked so cold: caps on, woolly hats donned, coats pulled together, overcoats buttoned and belted. He felt neither one nor the other, more proof (should he need it, though he forced himself not to) that he was different.

  ‘Our only hope is to start the van,’ he said, after they had settled with their drinks, ‘and get it as far from the hotel as possible. Fred tells me there are spades and tools in one of the stables. Two or three hundred yards should be enough. Then we shelter in the strongest room to escape the worst of the blast. I’ll drive the van myself, but I’ll need volunteers with spades and mattocks to clear the way.’

  He had come to the point aimed for from the beginning, the cul-de-sac of action in which he hoped to find the dream of youth which youth had waited to spring on him like a giant well-poisoned cobra in mi
ddle age, something about to happen which would erase the significance of all that had gone before. He had wanted such an event for a long time, had sensed it was inevitable and never been unduly worried whether he won through or not, since it was hard to imagine life after the snow. A dream beyond the dream could not exist when the present was so important. He wondered if the others felt anything similar, or would object to him drawing them into his adventure of redemption. They were talking all at once, and he let them go on, because that also was part of working towards the final plan at his own circumlocutory rate.

  ‘I’ll drive the van,’ Aaron said.

  ‘Another fucker wants the George Cross.’ Wayne spat. ‘I’m willing to dig, though. I’ll dig from here to Australia to spite that bomb-carrying fuckpig. I once dug my old man’s garden over in one day. He swore I couldn’t, so I bet him five quid I could. He thought I was as soft as shit because I was a biker. I knew the cunning old bastard only wanted to get the garden dug over for a fiver, but I proved I could do it, all the same.’

  ‘I don’t care what I do,’ Lance said. ‘Dig, drive, dance a jig. I’m willing to get at the wheel, though, because I’m a biker. When you’re doing a ton on the motorway, every second can be your last, and who wants to live for ever?’

  ‘Everything in the van must be melting into a jelly,’ Daniel said. Never getting to the drop-off point was the peril of the trade, a flash, and only a few bits in a bucket were left, after a couple of days finding them. He considered himself back in the comity of cave-land society now that the last hope had been proposed. ‘You would be wiser not to listen to your guru, and try getting through the blizzard to safety. It would be better to die in the cold and be in one piece when they found you, than have your bits scattered so that they’ll never know who was who if they do.’