Snowstop

by Alan Sillitoe

  Alfred finished his bowl, Fred noting how often he had seen the grieving eat more than most, after they had made the first food in their mouths go down.

  ‘Aren’t you hungry, sir?’ Wayne said. ‘I’m not, but I’m on my second helping, so I suppose I must be. We need a bit of packing inside us for going out again.’

  Keith, finding it good counsel, finished eating, and guided Fred into the corridor between lounge and kitchen. Now what? Fred was irritated at not getting a word as to why. These high-handed types got on his bloody wick, but he wasn’t able to say them nay, or not listen. To make a fuss would damage his pride more than giving in to their whims. Even so, he would like to tell them where to get off, but knew he never could.

  Keith gave him a slip of paper with the make and licence number of the van. ‘If we don’t come back, give this to the police. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll do that. I’ve thought about it already. We can’t let that bugger go scot-free. Not that I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody like that didn’t manage it, but we’ll do all we can to have him pulled in.’

  ‘I also want you to witness this sheet of paper. It’s a Will. Sign underneath my signature, and put the date.’

  Another trade! Would they never stop coming? Commissioner for Oaths now. They’d heckled him as a mess-deck lawyer a time or two on the ship. ‘Is this it, sir? To her a third?’

  His tone hardened. ‘Will you do it, or won’t you?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do. Now get me an envelope.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  You could not live imagining that each second might be your last. Such innocence, the anarchism of the naive, would end civilization. Even to think one hour ahead was a step forward. When men began to wonder where the next meal was coming from, and who might attack them for the food they hunted, the ability to live in the present had gone for ever, though in truth it could never have existed, the state of Eden only tolerable to the mad, who can’t or won’t see any future. Crimes committed were a price that had to be paid. ‘Wait here, till I’ve been to the toilet.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The door wouldn’t close. Had one of the bikers kicked it off its hinges, or was the building already subsiding under the weight of snow? He folded the four crisp fifty-pound notes in with his Will, and sealed the envelope.

  ‘Take good care of this,’ he told Fred. ‘I want your solemn promise.’

  ‘On the Holy Scriptures, sir. If we get through this mess all right, then good luck to her.’

  A star was sharp and bright beyond the hole of cloud, but having no others to fasten it to he did not know what name to give. Two made a connection, three a pattern, four a picture, but a single one was an astronomical trickster and to be ignored.

  The engine was healthy, chains fitted, and they were already digging a way for him to back into. He preferred them some yards ahead so that if the van exploded they might have a chance. Not much of one, true, but it was the best he could do – every second the final call for me as well, whether I like it or not, and I surely don’t. There was only the snow, and the job to be done, glad when the deceptive star was covered, nothing to think about except work.

  At the wheel, a cigarette burning, he watched them clearing and flattening so that the chains would grip. Uneven drifts further from the buildings were not more than a foot above the macadam, and when they were close to the gate he went anxiously forward, praying for luck, for the others, and also, he was half-ashamed to note, quite fervently for himself, thinking that if he came through all right he would stay with Eileen for as long as she could tolerate him.

  Daniel could no longer feel his feet and hands, but burning faith divided the freezing snow, a forlorn imprint of his passing. The inner glow was brighter now that he was alone. He should have realized from the beginning that only then did you come to full power. Even so, the purest of the pure can be diverted from the clear beam of their inspired way, though not for long. The debilitations of his enormous wound were annulled by him being able to go on, power provided by not knowing where that inner fire came from. Nor did he want to think, eschewing curiosity so that even if he had wanted to succumb to the storm like any ordinary person, he could not.

  His inexplicable spirit took him through the blizzard. When the border between his transcendental state, and the reality of wet clothes clinging around even colder flesh became indistinct, he rekindled the light by an act of will, pure will, the victory of the will. He kept the road’s edges at an equal distance, fighting for the economy of a straight line along which to measure progress by unfolding a finger for every hundred yards.

  Already the others were dying. He would outlive them, being one of the elect. The old man had died, the woman who had so stupidly followed him was dead. So would everyone be, none to unravel the mystery.

  Such reflections made the body immediate, reduced him to a moving corpse encased in icy clothes, matted within a miserable cocoon, each foot an anchor to drag now that he had lost count of the paces, which caused him to panic for a moment, because no will could alter the fact that he was a fragile mortal caught in the storm and lost for ever. Tears of chagrin froze onto his flesh, but he went on, veered to one side then back to the other, increasing the distance from the hotel, wanting only to sleep, sensing he was no more at last than a failed and miserable hibernologist staggering to perdition.

  Head and body were covered with ice, boots frozen into a stone and feet giving out the purest pain. He leaned against a window half hidden by snow, a window into what was impossible to say and, moaning hic jacet, he fell into the drift, a scream when he bruised himself on some metal object which he then tried to grasp. The outlines seemed those of a long hut, and he was wondering how he could get inside when a door was pushed against him and he fell.

  I haven’t handled one of these for thirty years, Alfred would have said if the gale hadn’t assailed his ear-drums to extinction, except to play around now and again in my little bungalow garden, and I didn’t have much truck with it then, hard labour being something I decided not to make a career out of. He was doing his level best with the shovel because the flood of the headlights would show him up as a shirker if he didn’t. An old football scarf around head and ears held a cap underneath, but his gloves and cashmere overcoat were the sort it behoved the boss of a haulage firm to wear. He worked as well as, if not better than, Aaron on one side and clapped-out Parsons on the other. The bikers were placed up front to draw the oldies on, unless Keith had decided they would be less in danger if the blast came. Thank you very much. What did he have to live for now that his father had gone? He laughed with the joy of freedom, though couldn’t help shovelling as if the old bugger still needled him with his gimlet eyes.

  Aaron had lifted boxes of books up and down stairs, bending at the knees to avoid back pain or a hernia, carrying heavy volumes into or from the car, and he was satisfied to find enough wind in his pipes for shifting snow. If he had done it straight from the laboratory job ten years ago he would have been on his knees and gasping his lungs out. He liked the cold blaze of gusting snow, the bite against ears and nose. If he went to prison for not having been clever enough with his false signatures he would look on this shovelling as the best of times. And if the flash of obliteration caught him unawares he would not have to decide any more what was and what was not worth recalling.

  The door clunked open, and Eileen wriggled across the seat. Before Keith could throw her out or say anything she fastened her lips on his. ‘I was fed up in there.’

  Stuck-up Jenny sat by that half-dead biker not saying a word but crying now and again, Enid was flopped in an armchair with what blankets were left, and barmy Fred whistled to himself while making little brew-ups and concoctions in the kitchen, telling her to piss off whenever she went in and tried to talk.

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ Keith said. He didn’t want her to go, though the longer he didn’t tell her the more certainly she would have to.


  ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I want to be with you. My place is here, darling, darling, darling.’ She felt herself burning into a blush: such a word would have made any other man laugh: posh, false, not for them, but with him there was no other to fit. ‘I want to stay. I don’t care what happens.’

  The only way was to get her by the throat and bundle her into the snow. Haul her to the hotel and lock the door. He couldn’t, and for once felt the same passion. ‘I love you, but I have work to do. I can do it better on my own.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you don’t love me. Not like I love you. You don’t know what love is. I’m beginning to think no man does. If you did you wouldn’t want to get rid of me. You can drive this rotten old van just as well if I’m sitting here, can’t you?’

  Chains clanked and bit around the wheels as he reversed several yards and then went forward, more precious distance gained. ‘You don’t know me. You know nothing about me. If you did you wouldn’t want to know me.’

  ‘I don’t care about knowing you. What does that matter? I love you, don’t I? Anyway, what do you know about me? But you said you loved me. I don’t know whether to believe you, if you keep on telling me to go. I just love you, and that’s that.’

  He felt warmer at hearing words of such simple and unsolicited devotion – at this time of his life. ‘You have to believe I love you.’ Wondering whether she would when he knocked her senseless, he was afraid to hit her, even out of love and protection, because would he be able to stop?

  ‘I want to be with you. After, I want to live with you. I know you’re married, so I don’t mind if you can’t see me often. I love you, but you don’t know what that means.’ She began to cry, her body moving up and down in its covering of clothes. She seemed to have taken every coat in the hotel, as if really meaning to stay with him in the snow for ever. ‘I want you, so let me stay. I want everything. I want to have a baby with you.’

  They were level with the stone pillars of the gate, a lion surmounting each. A ditch by the roadside full of snow must be avoided, Lance signalling him clear with a flashlight.

  ‘Do you know what you’re saying?’

  ‘Oh yes. I don’t always, but I do now.’

  ‘If you love me it would be better for you to remember me than get killed with me.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t. I don’t want to live if you get killed. I’ll go mad. I’ll be out of my brain as long as I live. I won’t be able to work, or talk to anybody for the rest of my life. I’ll go around not wanting to live. I’ll drift from squat to squat with all I own in two plastic bags. I’ll be the youngest bag-lady in Manchester.’ She was laughing. ‘Look at that snow! Life’s marvellous, isn’t it? Well, I think so. So just let me stay, and don’t think about what might not happen.’

  Not to think, to accept, to let everything go. She promised paradise, but how stupid if they both died. ‘I want you to live, because I love you, and if you live, then I live. Whatever happens, you won’t be poor. Fred will tell you why.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ she cried, the heart wrenched out of her. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about. I said I loved you, didn’t I?’

  No one could hear it better expressed – at any other time. He felt eighteen again, unable to trust himself, so said: ‘A few days ago I left my wife. I killed her, then I left her.’

  ‘It won’t work. Tell me another.’

  ‘No, listen. She taunted me. She said our daughter wasn’t mine. She said she’d had an affair at the time she was conceived. We’ve hated each other for years, and more or less gone our own ways, as far as we were able to. Why she told me what she did I don’t know, though it was at the end of a long argument, and I’d said things which must have hurt her as well. So she came back with something to finish all our arguments. I’d thought all my life that no matter how much we loathed each other there was one mark of the love we must have felt at first. But she’d never felt it. She’d gone out and got pregnant by a boy friend, then told me the child was mine. I knew she was right, but in any case she assured me of it, swore it was true, and gave details which I’d suspected all along. I killed her. Then I loaded the car with enough things to live rough, and drove up to the Lakes. I was going back to give myself up, when I met you. I don’t know where I was going. Maybe the police are looking for me already, though she might not have been found yet. I didn’t mean to kill her, but that won’t help me in court. Nor do I deserve it to. I could live with you happily, because I love you, but please go into the hotel, and I’ll come later. Then we’ll decide what to do. You can bet I’ll be all right. I’m in no danger. But give me another kiss first.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  The high platform was covered with sacks, and when Daniel moved across he saw three men playing cards below, a white pint mug of steaming tea by each. Cigarette smoke mixed with the whiff of fuel from a primus, and he picked out a blackened kettle, teapot, an opened packet of sugar, a carton of milk, a frying pan and plates, an inventory helping him not to scream from pain in every fibre of his body.

  ‘It seems he’s awake,’ someone said, as if he had no right to be. ‘Hey, mate, you up there, welcome to the best little removal van in Christendom, or anywhere else, come to that. Let’s get him down, and see what we can find out.’

  The inside of the black pantechnicon was lined with plywood tea chests, and a pair of stepladders rested near a porter’s barrow by locked doors at the far end. The plates of a split-up Pirelli calendar pasted along the sides had been jabbed by stoves and bedsteads brought in and carried out. ‘We pulled you in, when we heard you go bump in the night.’

  ‘Where am I?’

  He came up the ladder to Daniel’s level, a man in a khaki button-front overall smock. ‘Somewhere in bloody Derbyshire, I suppose. We only cut through this way to save petrol, which the gaffer always likes to hear about, though he’s not going to be happy at us getting stuck. Do you think you can manage down this ladder? My name’s Charlie. That’s Bill. Paul, the one who’s sneaking a look at my hand of cards, will get knifed when I get back, if he don’t put ’em down.’

  ‘It ain’t worth it.’ Paul was a cadaverous man in a grey three-piece suit, such apparel possibly lifted from some trunk or other during a move. ‘I dealt you such a piss-poor hand.’

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ Daniel said, ‘with a little assistance.’ Bill came to help, more solid in body than the others, wearing dark-blue dungarees – all three men unified by their Day-Glo scarves and woolly hats against the cold. The van swayed from a heavy fist of wind, and Daniel screamed on slipping down the bottom few rungs.

  Bill grasped, to break his fall. ‘You seem in a bit of a mess, mate.’

  ‘I’ll do another brew.’ Paul threw the cards into a common heap, and began cranking the primus. ‘We all need it, and he looks as if he’ll die if he don’t get summat into him. It’s bloody perishing, even in here.’

  They laid Daniel on the floor. ‘He needs a doctor.’ Charlie unknotted his tie, then covered him with a dust sheet and several large sacks till only the head showed.

  ‘My car broke down.’ The weight of coverings made him feel worse, so he pushed them aside. ‘I got stopped. Must have hit a post. Couldn’t tell. I was knocked out. I don’t know how long for. But then I woke, and thought I’d get some help.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Bill said. ‘You’re in good hands. I reckon you should have stayed with your car, though. That’s what they tell you to do.’

  ‘He probably didn’t know what he was doing,’ Paul said, ‘after the knock on his napper. He just thought he’d get out and walk, poor sod. Look at him. Frost-bite all over. He looks as if he’s crawled out of a fire, and fell on a broken bottle. His face’s all cut up, where it ain’t turning black. There ain’t much we can do for him. He’s shaking like a leaf.’

  ‘Some tea might help. And what about a couple of aspirins, Charlie? There must be some in that chemist’s shop you carry about everywhere.’

  Daniel contained
his agony, trying to smile. ‘I’ve fallen among Good Samaritans.’

  ‘That you have,’ Bill said, ‘that you have, mate. We might be common-or-garden removal men, but we’re also gentlemen of the road, out to help distressed travellers.’

  ‘Unless he’s a social worker,’ Charlie snarled. ‘We’d draw the line at social workers. They tried to take my kid away once.’

  Daniel wanted to tell them he was a teacher, but maybe they didn’t like teachers, either. There seemed no hard surface under him, he was floating in distilled pain, his instinct telling him to reach for a tree branch or door handle and stop falling. He tried to compute how far he was from the hotel, and crawled through more and more snow into the nightmare of a sudden thaw, his refuge visible from an upper window, and people coming to get him, each with a coil of stiff hard rope, led by a woman with skeletal head and demented eyes, limbs bare and hands sprouting claws, on an unstoppable route towards him as if all the rage of the world was pouring from her hurt lips at his cruelty.

  ‘His bloody screams are getting on my wick,’ Bill said. ‘Let’s either chuck him outside, or give him his tea. ’Appen he’ll choke on it and give us some peace.’

  ‘Wake up,’ Charlie said sharply at Daniel’s ear.

  He looked, eyes swelling with terror. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘If you’ll stop screaming a minute I’ll tell you,’ Paul said. ‘You’re in The Blue Herald, one of Ramble’s furniture vans, so you’re safe and sound. Lift yourself up a bit and drink this. It’s strong tea, with plenty of sugar and milk. Here’s three aspirins as well.’ He showed them in the palm of his hand. ‘They’ll do you the world of good.’

  He sweated and shivered, but the nightmare had gone, and the lukewarm tea tasting of paraffin nectarized his veins nevertheless, easing him into a sleep in which he only dreamed of being in agony.