David, over by the table, said, “Did you fill this?”
I tore myself away from the interesting stuff on the wall and followed Mick over to the ring, where David was peering into the aluminium pan. Where before it had been so over-filled with snow that it had looked like a big tub of ice-cream, now it held about an inch of water.
Mick observed, “It melts down to nothing, doesn’t it?” And then the silence that followed was like the slow race in a restaurant to reach for the bill.
But then, finally, I said, “I’ll get us some more.”
I don’t know how to describe the way the cold hit me as I stepped out of the hut. It was almost like walking into a wall, much worse than it had been when I’d made my way up there. The wind was the most disorienting factor, filling my eyes with hail and battering me around so hard that I could barely draw breath; but then, thankfully, it dropped a little, and the air cleared enough for me to see without being blinded.
Visibility was somewhere between fifty and a hundred yards, beyond which everything just greyed-out as if reality couldn’t hold together any further. I could see about half a dozen of the overhead sodium lights marching off in either direction, their illumination blanketed and diffused by the amount of snow clouding the air. Of the motorway itself I could make out the parallel lines of the crash barriers as hardly more than pencil marks sketched on to the snow, and that was it. A few of the lightweight plastic cones that had been used earlier to close off lanes had been blown around and had lodged themselves here and there like erratic missiles, but nothing else broke the even cover.
I didn’t see what Mick had been talking about. I didn’t hear any voices, just the wind in the wires somewhere off the road and out of sight. The sound meant nothing special to me.
I had a baked bean can, catering size, that was the only other clean-looking container that I’d been able to find, and I stooped and tried to fill it with snow. The newly-fallen stuff was too fine, it just streamed away as I tried to load it in, but then I tried wedging it into snowball nuggets and did rather better. I was already starting to shake with the cold. I paused for a moment to wipe at my nose with the back of my glove, and realised with a kind of awe that I couldn’t even feel the contact.
I fell back into the hut like a drowning man plucked from an icy sea. I’d been outside for less than a minute.
David looked up from the phone. I wouldn’t have believed how welcoming the place could look with its candlelight and comparative warmth and the road gang’s mugs set out ready, each with the name of an absent person written on the side in what looked like nail varnish. I did my best to make it look as if I had a grip on myself, and went over to set the rest of the snow to melt as Mick secured the door behind me.
“Still dead?” I said to David, with a nod at the phone.
“It’s not exactly dead,” he said, jiggling the cradle for about the hundredth time. “It’s more like an open line with nothing on the other end.”
“It’ll be like a field telephone,” Mick said from over by the door. “If nobody’s plugged in, then there’s no one to hear. How’s it looking outside?”
“I’d still rather be in here than out there,” I said.
Mick made the tea with a catering bag and some of that non-dairy whitener that looks and smells like paint. It was the worst I’d ever tasted, and the most welcome. The three of us pulled our chairs in close to get into the circle of warmth around the gas ring, and we grew heady on the monoxide fumes. Inevitably, the conversation returned to the clippings on the wall.
“You want to see it from their point of view,” Mick said. “It’ll be like working in a morgue. You get bad dreams for the first few weeks and then after that, it’s just another job.”
“How would you know?” David asked.
“I’ve got a brother-in-law who’s a nurse, he’s just about seen it all. I mean, the likes of me and you, we don’t know the half of what it’s about.”
David didn’t comment, but I suspect that by then he was starting to read something personal into everything that Mick was saying. I believed that I’d recognised his type by now. Some people’s reaction to pressure is to look around for someone convenient to dump on; they get angry, they get sarcastic, and if you pull through it tends to be in spite of them rather than with much in the way of help. I knew what Mick was talking about. I could imagine the team sitting there, patiently reading or playing cards while waiting for carnage. They were one up on us . . . we’d go through life telling ourselves that it was never going to happen, but they knew that it would and the knowledge wasn’t even anything special to them.
Mick seemed to be the one who was holding us together, here. I’m not sure that right then I’d have wanted to rely on David for anything. He was frowning at the floor, his borrowed donkey jacket sitting uneasily on his shoulders. Had he really struggled from his car to the cabin with just a suit jacket and no overcoat? He must have seen the way that the weather was going before he set out, but he didn’t look as if he’d taken any account of the possibility that he might have to step much beyond the warmth of a heated building or a moving car. Some people have too much faith in everything. I’m the opposite—I reckon that God intended few things to be immutable and that such things as designer luggage, golf shoes and the new shape of Volvo aren’t among them.
I’d been heading for my girlfriend’s place over in the next county when I’d come to my own unscheduled journey’s end. She was with a big retail chain who were moving her around and paying her peanuts, and I was just about holding down one of those jobs that they kept telling me might or might not turn out to be something permanent. The only way that we could ever get together was at weekends, hiding out from the landlady in her one-roomed flat. Mine must have been one of the last cars to get on to the road before they’d closed it. I’d had to stop as a jack-knifed articulated lorry had been cleared from the sliproad, and then it took two policemen to get me rolling again because my tyres wouldn’t grip on the icy surface. They advised me to stay in low gear and to keep my revs down, and I remember their last words to me as I managed to get moving again—Rather you than me, pal. It got worse as I went on. After half an hour in first gear, following the crash barrier like a blind man following a rail, the temperature needle crept up into the red zone and then finally both hoses blew. I stopped and taped them and topped up the water, but the engine seized soon after that.
Mick was the only one who seemed to be listening as I told them the story. He said, “I’ve been driving this route since they opened it. I’ve never known it this bad. It looks like the end of the world.”
“You’ve got a knack of seeing the bright side, Mick,” I told him.
“You won’t have seen that road train about half a mile on,” he said. “A big new wagon and two trailers. It was blocking the road all the way across, that’s why I had to give up and walk back to the last light I’d seen. Those things are like dinosaurs, they’ll go on through anything. But it couldn’t get through this. What do you reckon, Desmond?”
“It’s David!” His sudden shout was startling in the enclosed space of the cabin, and I think even Mick was surprised by the reaction he got.
“All right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, bloody get it right, then!”
“I said I’m sorry. I was only asking what you thought.”
“I just want to get home,” David said miserably, looking down at the floor as if he was embarrassed by his sudden outburst.
And then Mick said, with unexpected gentleness, “Nothing to argue with there, Dave.”
It was then that the gas ring began to make a popping sound. We all turned to look and I heard somebody say Oh, shit, and then I realised that it had been me.
The flame didn’t exactly go out, not right away, but it was obviously into some kind of terminal struggle. Mick reached under the table and heaved out the squat metal cylinder; when he raised it two-handed and gave it a shake, there sounded to be about
a cupful of liquid sloshing around in the bottom.
“There’s some left,” David said hopefully.
“You always get some in the bottom,” Mick said. “Still means it’s empty.”
There was another cylinder under the table and right at the back, but this one sounded just about the same. By now the ring was giving out no heat at all and making such a racket that nobody objected when Mick turned the valve to shut it off.
The silence got to us before the cold did. But the cold started getting to us a couple of minutes later.
We broke open the lockers in the hope of finding more coats or blankets, but all that we found were tools and empty lunch buckets and mud-encrusted work boots. David’s earlier remark about burning the furniture no longer seemed like a joke, but the truth of it was that there wasn’t much about the furniture that was combustible. The chairs were mostly tubular steel and the table was some kind of laminate over chipboard, which left a stack of soft-core porno magazines and a few paperbacks and one deck of cards. By now, the hut had turned from a haven into an icebox.
David was the one who put it into words.
He said, “We’re going to have to go out and find somewhere else, aren’t we?” He made it sound as if the place itself had done a number and betrayed us. “This is great,” he said bitterly. “This really puts the fucking tin lid on it.”
Possibly we could have stayed put, jogged on the spot a little, done our best to keep going in the sub-zero air until the worst of the weather receded and rescue came pushing through. But Mick was already going through the lockers for a second time, as if looking again for something that he’d already seen.
“The way I see it,” he said, “there’s only one thing we can do.”
“The services?” I hazarded.
“We’d never make it that far. It’s more than two miles and it might as well be twenty. I reckon we can do maybe a quarter of that, at the most.”
“Which gets us nowhere,” David said.
“It gets us as far as that big road train that’s blocking the carriageway.” So saying, Mick reached into the third locker and came out with a short, hooked wrecking bar. Holding up the jemmy he went on, “If we can get into that and get its engine running, we can sit tight in the cab with the heater on.”
“Until the fuel runs out,” I said, probably a touch too pessimistically.
“Those things never run out. They’ve got tanks like swimming pools. We can either wait for the snowplough to find us or else strike out again as the weather improves. What do you think?”
“It’ll have a radio,” David said, with a sense of discovery that seemed to surprise even him.
We both looked at him.
“A CB radio,” he said. “Don’t most of these big trucks carry them? We can tell someone where we are”
“That we can, Dave,” Mick said with a note of approval, and then he looked from him to me. “Are you game?”
“Let’s go,” I said, sounding about four-hundred per cent more eager than I felt. But Mick raised a hand as if to say, slow down.
“Just wait on a minute,” he said. “There’s no point in all of us scrambling out together. What I reckon is, one of us strikes out and does the necessary, and then he leans on the horn as a signal for the others to follow.”
“I wouldn’t know what to do,” David said bleakly.
“Me neither,” I said.
“Well,” Mick said, “since we’re talking about breaking and entering and a little creative rewiring, I’d say that I’m the only one with the education in the appropriate subjects around here. Am I right?”
He was right, and as far as I was concerned he could make all the jibes about education that he wanted as long as he got us out of this. He turned up his collar and buttoned up his coat, and he pulled on his sheepskin gloves as I moved with him to the door. David decided to give the phone yet another try as I made ready to let Mick out into the unwelcoming night.
I said, “You’re mad, you know that?”
“I had my brain surgically removed,” Mick said. “I’ve been feeling much better without it.” Then he turned serious. “I’m going to get down to the crash barrier and follow it along, otherwise there’s no knowing where I may end up. Keep listening for the horn.” He glanced at David. “And keep an eye on him.”
“He’ll be all right.”
“If he starts messing about, dump him. I mean it.”
There was a blast of cold air for the brief second or so between Mick going out and me getting the door closed after him, and this time it stayed in there with us like some unwelcome dog that had dashed in and was standing its ground. David had slammed the phone down with a curse, as if its non-cooperation was a matter of deliberate choice, before settling on one of the chairs with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his borrowed coat and the collar up over his nose to recirculate the heat of his breath. He looked like some odd kind of animal retreating into its blue worsted shell.
“I heard what he said, you know.” His voice was muffled by the thick material, and sounded distant.
“He didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Yeah, I bet. And who does he think he is? Scott of the Antarctic?”
“I don’t care if he thinks he’s Scotty of the Enterprise. If he gets us out of trouble he’ll be okay by me.”
He settled in deeper. “Well, don’t go worrying about me. I’m no deadweight.”
“Never said I thought you were.”
There was silence for a while.
Then he said, “Pretty serious, though, isn’t it?”
Yes, I was thinking, it was pretty serious . . . but it could have been worse. Worse was being sliced in two at a combined speed of a hundred and fifty miles an hour, just because someone else chose the day of your trip to cross the central reservation and come looking for suicide in the oncoming traffic. Worse was being buried alive in concrete, so deep that even X-rays couldn’t find you. It was sitting with your hands on the wheel while your head lay on the back seat. It was any one of the fifty or so examples of a messy and uncontrolled exit to be found in the road gang’s private black museum over there on the wall.
“We’ve still got options,” I said. “That puts us one step ahead.”
“As long as he makes it,” David said.
The next twenty or thirty minutes seemed to last for ever. David wasn’t great company, particularly after the way that Mick’s parting words had stung him. I wondered what I ought to expect; more of the ball-and-chain act, or would he become dangerously gung-ho? If the latter, then I was going to be happy to let him go out first.
Finally, the wind dropped a little and we heard the distant sound of a horn.
I said, with some relief, “Our call, I think.”
David said that he was ready. I asked him if he wanted to take one last shot at the phone, but he said no.
“The greaseball was right in one thing,” he said. “You listen for long enough, and you do start to hear them calling your name.”
I let him go out ahead of me.
My spirit of optimism took an instant hammering as the door was banging shut behind us; compared to this brutal storm, the wind that had set the wires keening on my last excursion had been a precise and delicate instrument. All sound and sense were destroyed on contact, and I was beginning to panic when I felt David’s rough grip on my arm, shoving me forward into the blind haze. The snow had drifted high in places, masking the contours of the ground beneath and making progress even more difficult; we stumbled and floundered downhill towards the road surface, and as we descended from the more exposed slopes the wind mercifully lessened. We got across to the central crash barrier, a constant mist of snow steaming from its knife-edged top, but by then I’d become as disoriented as if I’d been popped into a box and shaken.
“Which way?” I shouted, and David had to put his face right up to my ear to make himself heard.
“Northbound!” he roared.
“What?”
“This way!” And he gave me a hard push to get me moving.
I wouldn’t have believed how heavy the going could be. It went from thigh-deep to waist-deep and then back to thigh-deep again, and the barrier disappeared for entire stretches so that we had to navigate by the yellow sodium lights above us. I’d break the trail for a while, and then David would move up and replace me. Any tracks that Mick might have left had been obliterated, but then there was the sound of the distant horn to lead us on whenever the storm took out a beat to let it through.
He’d made it. So would I.
I reckoned that we’d been going for about three hours, although a more rational part of my mind knew that it had actually been closer to fifteen minutes, when we reached the first place where we could stop and rest. It was a flyover bridge, too high and too wide to feel like much of a shelter but offering a respite from the cutting edge of the wind. We staggered in so all-over numb that we might as well have been on Novocaine drips for the last quarter hour, and we collapsed against the wall like footsoldiers in some forgotten war.
“Are you okay?” I said to David, my voice oddly flattened by the carpet of snow that had blown in under the bridge.
“You must be fucking joking,” he gasped, and that was all I could get out of him.
I tried to knock off some of the dry snow that had crusted on to my clothing. I didn’t want to risk any of it melting and soaking through only to re-freeze as we pushed on. It came off in chunks. David was hunkered down and hugging himself, presenting as small an area for heat loss as he could. If we stayed here for too long, we might end up staying here for good.
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