Snowstop

by Alan Sillitoe

  He turned his head, and the van was there. He hoped it was fantasy, or there were so many of that type it could be anybody’s, except that the last three ciphers of the numberplate marked it as the one he had driven. Snow was building up against the wheels, and the door beckoned him to go down and sit inside, turn on the engine and say goodbye to the world. Or stay with it till the cargo exploded.

  The world outside was dangerous. Thin glass, painted over by his breath, kept him from it. Hard to think he would ever lift that latch and get back to the zany territory of the Cause. Before collecting the van he had gone into the upstairs room of a terraced house (at Warrington. Of all towns it had to be Warrington), not even staying in the parlour whose door opened onto the pavement. The room had a disassembled bed pushed against the wall to the right of the window as he went in, an electric heater instead of a fire in the grate, a table under the window, and a couple of chairs and a stool. Their looks were distrustful because he wouldn’t sit on their grubby chairs.

  Maybe they had sent him off with a load either to get caught or be killed. He picked the van up at specified traffic lights, while on red changing with the driver, no one the wiser. ‘Whatever you do, don’t be in this van at eight o’clock,’ was all the other said, the laugh something Daniel could have done without. Just one of their jokes. They think I’ve betrayed them sometime in the past, so they’ve set me up. There was no reason for them to think any such thing, but no reason could blossom into every reason, like when they had got Smith who was never proved guilty.

  The bikers must have gone, so what was the sense of that? Perhaps there had been two vans and they departed in the other, but how, in such a blizzard? The van was so close to the wall that when the stuff went off the hotel would become a crater in the landscape. It was the end of the line. If he told them, they would stay and be blown to pieces. Heads they lose and tails they lose. There was no saying which was worse, since he would lose as well. His father might have been able to give him an answer, but he was long dead and couldn’t have known the difference between right and wrong even when he was alive.

  SIXTEEN

  Fred locked up and bolted because nobody else could be expected, unless a phantom of the Labrador snows blundered in, but who could believe in a thing like that, though he almost did when the thump of a battering ram made the building shudder, followed by a series of cannonball blows, a rhythm of impending doom swaying the lights. Parsons uptilted the last of his champagne. ‘It sounds like the rent man.’

  The veins of Fred’s temples stood out like leeches about to burst, cheeks reddening as if fed by them. In the silence he had no voice, and they were startled by a tall, broad (and balding, as would be any long-time biker) man of about thirty, with his Belstaff black wax cotton jacket open to show an American-style backwoods shirt. He wore cowboy boots and gauntlets, and a black noddy bucket shone in his left hand. ‘Aren’t you going to let my mates in? They’ll be dead in the snow if you don’t, and if that happens you’ll be lying on the deck bleeding all over it – for a start.’

  To Aaron he had the kind of face you couldn’t tell much about until he did something to make people realize what he was like, and then he would know a little of what he was like himself, and be satisfied with the recognition. His deprived yet intelligent features would not become refined or even more harmonious for centuries – if then – something he wasn’t to know, while everyone else did, though he was as happy with himself as he could ever hope to be.

  ‘My name’s Garry, and you spell it with two Rs. I never got the third, so don’t try and tell me which one’s missing. Now then, who’s the landlord of this poxed-up pub?’

  Fred fastened the last button of his waistcoat, and switched from amiable penguin to fighting cock. ‘This isn’t a pub. And if it was it wouldn’t be poxed-up, not if I was running it, which I am. For your information it’s The White Cavalier Hotel, and it also happens to be closed for the night.’

  ‘How can it be?’ Percy added to the seed of Fred’s distress, who at least had supposed the other clients would be on his side. ‘He’s in, isn’t he?’

  More blows at the front door rattled every pane, as if they were driving a dumper truck against the wood. Garry set his helmet on a table, and pulled a brass Zippo from his top pocket. He had a trick of throwing a cigarette from waist level and catching it neatly between his lips before lighting up. ‘If you don’t let my mates in, I’ll push a table through a window and they’ll come in that way. Then you’ll sit in a draught all night, and you wouldn’t like that, would you, Frog-chops?’

  Fred backed a pace at the difference in their heights, ‘I’ve told you, we’re closed.’ He wasn’t having such riff-raff on his premises. People like that didn’t freeze to death anyway: they were unkillable. And if they weren’t, then it could only be a matter of good riddance. He hadn’t made his way so painfully up in life to tolerate such dregs as that. They would come in only over his dead body. ‘You’d better clear off, unless you want me to phone for the police.’

  ‘Let them in,’ Parsons called, ‘on such a night. If you don’t, I’ll do it.’ He turned to Aaron. ‘That short-arsed bugger would have us all up for murder.’

  They kicked snow from their boots when Aaron pulled the door open. ‘You’d better keep back, Mr Scumbag-Landlord,’ Garry warned.

  In for a penny, in for a pound. ‘Get me another bottle of champagne,’ Parsons told Fred, ‘if you want something to do.’

  The drink had made Jenny drowsy, but her senses sharpened on seeing the three bikers at the bar. Fred, like the sensible man he decided he had better be, asked what they would care to order.

  ‘A foaming pint, for a start.’ Lance faced into the room, tapping a rhythm at the wood behind his heel. The thick coat with a full range of shoulder tassels came to his knees, and Jenny didn’t feel as wary of him as of the others. His thin face looked more sunken with weariness than she supposed it might normally be. He was sallow skinned, though his full lips seemed about to say something which would justify his presence on earth, making her wonder how he could possibly have teamed up with the others.

  ‘I could eat a hoss between two mattresses,’ Wayne said, ‘if you’ve got it, though that lovely bit of stuff will do to be going on with,’ he added, when Enid came into the room. He stroked his beard, and smoothed the hair tied back in the shape of a little saveloy. Jenny wouldn’t trust him an inch, with his preening and his mean mouth much obscured by hair. Under his biker’s gear, well laced with studs, he wore a suede jacket and a white highnecked collarless shirt.

  Enid turned a deadly-nightshade glare on Wayne, her mouth shaping into as fine a sneer as Aaron had ever seen. The crisp-coated burial mounds outside made the silence so profound that everyone seemed more individual, a silence ended by Enid’s knife-sharp request for him to: ‘Fuck off! If my boy friend was here he’d have your bollocks off and roast ’em over a slow fire as soon as look at you!’

  Percy gave a weird hyena-ish laugh. ‘That’s right, my old duck, you tell him. Anybody would say the same. Come to that, who the hell are you lot?’

  Lance’s pint had gone down, and the tattoo heeltap changed to a banging on the bar with his glass as he smiled at Jenny, who looked away on being caught in her scrutiny. ‘I’ll tell you who we are. We’re our own special club of bikers, Knights of the Arterial Road – the KAR Club. We used to be The Magnificent Seven, but now we’re The Three Musketeers. I expect we’ll be The Lone Ranger soon. And then I’ll slop tears!’

  Darkness came down like a curtain on their laughter, as if he had been godsent to entertain them in their isolation. ‘It looks like the blackout’s come back,’ Percy said. ‘Or maybe the dam’s burst. Too much sand in the cement.’

  ‘Shut up, Father.’ Yet Alfred was happy at the old man’s return to more ordinary consciousness since nature had put them up against it. Maybe he hadn’t gone senile after all, either that or there was a case for geriatrics being sent to areas of high disaster incide
nce to keep them a few more years in the land of clarity.

  ‘You’d better search out for some lamps and candles,’ Aaron advised when the lights came on again. Fred felt as if it would be safer to remain a statue for the rest of the night. But that won’t do, he told himself. A statue is something that dogs piss against, and you should never let that happen, though you’re half-pissed already, more, even, if they knew the truth. But who wants the truth in this imperfect world? ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘And you,’ Wayne told Enid, ‘bring us three turkey sandwiches – and I don’t mean tomcat – with plenty of meat spilling from between thick slices of granary bread!’

  She dipped, and folded, and nodded, then uglied her face to an extreme, as if to liquefy the features and pour them in a poisonous acidic stream in his direction. ‘Yes sir, no sir, three bags full of shit, sir, you …’ The word-bin was empty, but the bin itself was made of words, a chipboard container of words which, though brittle, would not be snapped off.

  ‘Little moxy’s cross,’ Garry said. ‘Is this a public house, or in’t it?’

  Daniel spoke for them all. ‘Why don’t you ask her properly?’

  ‘They want sandwiches,’ Enid’s voice stayed envenomed, ‘and booze, but who’s going to pay for it? That’s what I’d like to know. I know your sort. I’m surprised you got the beer. I suppose Fred only did it to stop you cutting his throat, but I’m not frightened of a pack of ratty highwaymen like you.’

  Garry held up a plastic bank card. ‘What’s this, then? I’ve got a wallet full, and they weren’t nicked, either. Maybe they’ll be useful to buy a car with one day, but I won’t get one of them tin boxes for a cripple till I’m over the hill at forty. Meanwhile I’m an emergency plumber who goes everywhere on his ton-upper and panniers stuffed with tools. That’s my job. I answer phone calls so quick my customers love me, though they pay double time because I’m on twenty-four-hour standby. I’ve got plenty of money in the bank, and I’ll have even more when this lot’s over, fixing all the burst pipes and blocked faucets. I’ll be a millionaire for a few days, anyway.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll each be wanting a room?’ Fred, mollified by the sight of credit cards, set a camping lamp on the bar, and waited for an answer. Not knowing who had money and who was a tramp didn’t make his job easy these days.

  ‘We might.’ Garry lit a cigarette that hadn’t been machine made. ‘Then again, we might not.’

  ‘Herbal fags.’ Percy sniffed. ‘They smell nice.’

  ‘Have one, Dad.’ He lifted another from his tin and took it across. The air was filled with a bucolic aroma.

  ‘Perhaps it’ll thaw in an hour,’ Lance said, ‘and then we can float away under the stars. We’ll turn the van upside down and paddle it down the road.’

  ‘That van is mine,’ Daniel said. ‘I left it in a lay-by where I thought it would be safe. You seem to have got it going and driven it here. For which I suppose I ought to thank you, though it’s hard to think how you did it.’

  ‘We thought it belonged to a mob of spivs up from the Smoke. The back’s packed with hi-fi stuff.’

  Daniel congratulated himself on feeling so calm at a time of danger. These types were fresh from Eden compared to those he usually dealt with. They still had pips on their lips.

  ‘Which fell off the back of a lorry,’ Lance said.

  ‘A bloody juggernaut, I expect.’ Wayne looked closely at Daniel. ‘I’ve seen you somewhere before.’

  ‘In borstal,’ Garry said.

  ‘No, but at some bloody school near enough to borstal. You was a teacher at Matchwood Comprehensive. I hate faces, so I never forget ’em!’

  Many potential yobbos had sat before him, faces dead and smirky in turn, vicious or asleep, passive or threatening, but always a few who could spell before they left, which was much to be said for them, though not so much for the system. He had never agreed with those bearded beer-drinking so-called benign instructors who moulded their accents to put the kids at their ease, then lulled them into believing that it didn’t matter how you spelt as long as the words could be understood, and that arithmetic was all right provided the answers came out close enough. Try telling that to a shopkeeper you went to for a job! It had changed for the better now, though the one called Garry might have been a victim of such beliefs.

  ‘You’re right,’ Lance said. ‘Would you believe it? How are you, Mr Butler, sir?’

  The stench of cannabis was as if they were caught among burning stubble after the harvest. He had once taken some from boys in the playground and flushed it down the toilet. ‘Didn’t I teach you about rhyming?’ He shook the cold strong hand. ‘You were interested in writing pop songs, if I remember.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Lance said.

  He had tried to guide him towards poetry, suggesting Yeats and Tennyson, but that was a stage Lance had not aspired to, fearing the scorn of his mates, which told Daniel he would never do anything worthwhile. Even so, without preamble; he had one day read ‘Byzantium’ to the class and, a few lines in, no face moved, frozen images as never to be forgotten as the verse itself.

  ‘Can I buy you a drink, sir?’

  ‘All teachers should be shot,’ Garry said, ‘though maybe not when it’s snowing and we’re up shit’s creek together.’

  ‘Not Old Ferret,’ Wayne said. ‘That’s what we used to call him. We liked him, though, didn’t we – sir? We’ll drive your van anywhere you want it to go, being as we’re the only ones who can. Anything to do you a favour, after all them years you tried to drum knowledge into our big soft heads.’

  They were amiable at the moment, boasting, stoned perhaps and soon to be drunk as well, the best the world had to offer, except that they were on the wrong side, as far as he was concerned, the worse side because it was no side at all.

  ‘It depends what’s in the van, don’t it?’ Garry said. ‘We wouldn’t want to flog our goolies off if it wasn’t important, would we?’

  ‘Forget about it, for the moment,’ Daniel said quickly. Perhaps they did have the grit to get it to Coventry. He could telephone and say it was on its way, and if they argued for not having got it there himself, that would be their problem, though it would be his as well when they caught him. Then he recalled that the telephone lines were dead.

  ‘We can have a rave-up,’ Lance said. ‘To think we met our old teacher when we got stuck in a blizzard.’

  ‘I always wondered what became of you,’ Daniel said. ‘You were different to the others.’ He couldn’t stop his tongue from being the schoolmaster, Mr Chips of the slums, the man his mother had decided he would be, and what the greater part of him in those days had wanted to be. Looking at him from Heaven, the only place for her, if she was anywhere, she would be happy in that shark-like possessive way which had ruined his life by forcing him to be something which was not part of his nature. But he became even more of what she had in mind, a caricature in fact, to prove to himself that he at least had some independence. Therefore he could allow himself to enjoy being the schoolmaster, idolized by two old boys, rough and common as they were, who recalled what he had tried to do for them.

  They stood as if expecting wisdom that only he as an old teacher could provide. He was sorry to disappoint them, yet they took the blow calmly, he thought, tamed at the moment by his presence. What he wanted – and craved for them to desire, though it was an accolade he knew he could never have, and therefore a blessed state that they could never have though he hoped for it against all odds nevertheless – was to be a god and run their lives from birth to death on the principles of love and justice and the mellow rules of sweet reason, till the world became perfect for teachers and taught alike, the harmony of the just and the elect to prevail over all rough beasts, pain and bloodshed banished for ever.

  SEVENTEEN

  Sally felt culled by the hair, out of a doze between icy terylene sheets, as if barbaric assailants were at the castle drawbridge of her dreams, vandals spilling in for rapine
and plunder. Eyes pinned open, and sleep impossible, she would go down and find out what mayhem had broken loose.

  It was a poor show, she thought, not having the wherewithal in her luggage to change from skirt and blouse into a frock: stockings and knickers instead of tights: her favourite amber beads and a Liberty’s silk scarf. With a state of mind so altered such formality would have kept her within range of who she was, and stopped that happening which she might not like to remember. No, that wasn’t how she felt at all. What she really wanted to be clad in was her leopardskin trousers, highnecked white shirt (opened a button or two) and black high heels. Stanley hated a rig that was outlandish enough to get everyone looking her way.

  Standing in the doorway, she observed Daniel’s ruminations, his eyes beamed downwards, deepening as if some recollection was coming full thunder on him, a pushing out and drawing back of the lower lip, and a more subtle alteration of his visible cheek. He was at the point of speaking to himself, or action of some sort, or even – a notion that caused her to hold back a laugh – a mild kind of fit.

  She supposed the state of people’s souls was marked on their faces, especially when they didn’t suspect scrutiny, though Stanley’s smooth visage showed so little he had to talk for her to know what was on his mind, and whatever was revealed proved that he didn’t exist at the intensity she sensed in Daniel, whose differing layers of expression only increased her curiosity.

  He looked up at this rangy blonde holding the bannister just outside the door. He had never known whether he was quick to show the red face on being surprised out of his reflections; or whether he was generally calm at any disturbance, always unable to decide which personality to use. With the short-fuse version he sometimes felt close to madness, and for that reason rarely employed it, knowing it was his responsibility when he did, and having no sympathy for people who couldn’t control it (like some who also worked for the Cause) and might therefore be considered mad. To be mad was a matter of choice, it seemed to him, because on losing his temper he could watch himself doing so, and revert to a calm state easily enough.