A splash of whisky onto wood, and Daniel couldn’t speak for a moment, gripping one hand with the other to stop the shakes. ‘People? What people?’
‘Oh, three lads. Would you believe it? They’re throwing snowballs at each other. It must be marvellous to be young.’
‘You’re never anything else,’ Tom Parsons shouted, ‘if you’re worth half your salt, eh, Mr Stone?’
But Percy was in the desert of the wandering, head back and mouth open, mind gone to where no one could guess. ‘Just leave him,’ Alfred said. ‘He’s never much trouble.’
Daniel looked out of a front window, drifts building across the road. A single snowflake had lost its way, so went back up as if to join the Gadarene rush elsewhere. Such a winter seemed new to him, though he took it as a sign of getting old when you thought the weather patterns were changing. From feeling free of trouble he was overwhelmed by anxiety, and went back to the tables. ‘How did they get here?’
‘They looked like bikers,’ Aaron said, ‘but I think they came in a van.’
‘We passed ’em a few hours ago,’ Percy called. ‘I told you already. A Commer van in a lay-by. They were having the time of their lives, but who wouldn’t? I got up to some right tricks at their age. I never told you, did I, Alfred?’
Parsons poured Jenny a second glass. ‘It’s the one drink that makes me want to live for ever, and I hope it does the same to you.’
‘I only want it to put me to sleep.’
‘Sleep! She wants to sleep! You’ll get all the sleep you need after you’re dead. Life’s for wearing yourself out, for the big cosy bed in Heaven!’
‘I wish you’d all go to sleep.’ Fred had heard on the radio that there were twelve-foot drifts in the county. If he jumped into one from the roof he would be lost to the world, as if he had never existed, because there would still be seven feet under him. Yet he didn’t want to sleep, either, as if psychic emanations from the vast padding of snow were keeping the eyes open, the senses expectant. In the last big snowstop of a few years ago, all those stranded had gone upstairs like zombies by nine o’clock, unable to stay awake. It was hard to say what made this fall so different.
Daniel peered out of the back window into the beautiful pure world, thinking of the dismal black slush when the thaw came. Where had the bikers gone? Maybe people were imagining weirdos and jack-o’-lanterns shaped out of the snow, clothed and given life by some malignant god to torment him alone.
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.’