Stephen Booth - Blood on the Tongue

Peter threw himself on the sofa and dug the remote from under a cushion. The set came on with a sizzle of static. There was news on — leading with a report on the effects of the bad weather across the country. Shots of children sledging and making snowmen were interspersed with clips showing lines of stranded cars, airport lounges packed with frustrated holidaymakers, railway travellers staring morosely at information boards, and snowploughs piling up snow twelve feet high by the side of a road in Scotland.

'Where's Dad?' asked Peter.

'He's with his photographs again,' she said.

'It's been a bad night, Grace. We had two young men brought in who'd taken a terrible beating with baseball bats.'

'I'm sorry.'

They sat for a few moments in silence. Grace could tell from the angle of her husband's head that he wasn't taking in the news on the TV any more than she was herself. She waited, aware of the power of silence, calming her breathing until she could hear the ticking of the radiators and the sound of a car engine on the crescent. There was a faint rustling of feathers from the far corner, where their blue and green parrot stirred in its cage, perhaps sensing the atmosphere in the room. It turned a black eye on the couple, then snapped at its bars with a sudden, angry click of its beak.

'If you must know,' said Peter, 'I think he's gone back.'

Grace felt her shoulders go rigid. 'Gone back where?' she said, though she knew perfectly well what he meant.

'Where do you think? To London.'

'To her?'

'Yes, to his wife. She has a name.'

'Andrew said she's in America, at a cousin's funeral.' Grace slapped one of her knees as if it had offended her by its inactivity. 'I've tried to phone him again, Peter. He's not answering.'

'We'll just have to wait until we hear from him, Grace. What else can we do?'

Grace manoeuvred alongside one of the armchairs, feeling the wheels slip into well-used grooves in the pile of the carpet. Peter made no move to help her, and he didn't even look to see how she was coping. She was glad he didn't do that any more. Once, she'd lost her temper at his clumsiness and had pushed him roughly away. He had said nothing, but she knew he had been shocked and hurt by her violence. Her legs might be useless, but her hands and wrists were strong.

'It doesn't make any sense,' she said. 'Why should he arrive out of the blue like that and then disappear again so suddenly, without a word?'

'There are a lot of things Andrew never got round to telling us about his life.'

'In a day? He didn't have time. A day isn't enough to make up for five missing years.'

'Grace, he has an entirely separate life of his own. You can't dwell on the past for ever.'

She'd heard this too often. It had become his mantra, as if it might become true if he repeated it often enough. Grace knew it wasn't true. If you had no present and no future, where was there to live but the past?

'But he's our son,' she said. 'My baby.'

'I know, I know.'

Grace knew she was reaching him. She lowered her voice to a whisper. 'My dear Piotr…'

But she heard Peter sigh and watched him finger a button on the remote. A weather forecast was on the other channel. An attractive young woman stood in front of a map scattered with fluffy white clouds that seemed to be dropping white blobs all over northern England. In a moment, Grace would have to go back to the kitchen to make her husband a pot of tea, or his routine would be upset and he'd sulk for the rest of the day.

'There's a lot more snow on the way,' he said.

The moment had passed. Grace lifted her hands to her face and sniffed the faint coating of oil on her fingers. The oil and the dark smudges on her hands were the constant signs of her reliance on machinery, of her enforced seclusion from the rest of humanity. She was a great believer in turning your disadvantages into something positive. But sometimes the positive was hard to find.

'Oh, wonderful,' she said. 'That's just what we want. More snow. More excuses for not finding him. Everyone will say they're too busy with other problems. Then they'll say it's too late, that we'll have to accept the fact he's gone.'

Grace stared at the icon of the Madonna in the alcove above the TV set. Tonight, she would pray again for their son. And she would force Peter to pray too.

'It causes a lot of problems, does snow,' said Peter. 'More than people think.'

But on the TV screen, the weather girl smiled out at them cheerfully, as if she thought snow was absolutely the best thing she could imagine in the whole world.

The Derbyshire County Council snowplough was brand new. It was a yellow Seddon Atkinson, with a bright steel blade, and its automatic hoppers could spray grit at passing cars like machine-gun fire. That morning, its crew was working to clear the main Snake Pass route to Glossop and the borders of Greater Manchester, battling through ever deeper drifts of snow as they climbed away from Ladybower Reservoir, with the River Ashop below them and the Roman road above them, skirting the lower slopes of Bleaklow and Irontongue Hill.

Trevor Bradley was the driver's mate this morning. He didn't like snowplough work, and he certainly didn't like getting up in the middle of the night to do it. Even worse, they had been sent to the Snake Pass, which was as desolate a spot as you could find yourself in, when every other bugger was still at home in his bed. They'd left the last houses far behind already, and on these long, unlit stretches of road there was nothing to be seen but their own headlights and endless banks of snow in front and on both sides. Bradley was glad when the driver had stopped for a few minutes at the isolated Snake Inn, where the owners had filled their vacuum flasks with coffee and given them hot pork pies from the microwave. The snowplough men were popular at the Snake, because on days like this they made all the difference between customers getting through to the inn and no one getting in or out at all.

A few minutes after re-starting, the snowplough had reached the stretch of road through Lady Clough and the Snake Plantations. Here, the hill became steeper and the headlights fell on even deeper drifts, where the wind had brought the snow down from the moors and blown it round the edge of the woods, sculpting it into strange and unlikely shapes.

Just past the last car park, before the end of the woods, Bradley thought he felt the impact of something solid that dragged along the road surface for a few yards under the blade of the plough. Then he saw a dark shape that was briefly revealed in a shower of snow as the blade lifted it and pushed it into the banking. It was followed by the impression of a man's face hovering near his window for a second, then falling away again. It had been a very white face, quite unreal, and could only have been a trick of the snow and the poor light.

'We hit something, Jack,' he said, sucking the last of the warm jelly from the pork pie off his fingers.

'No kidding?'

Jack stopped the engine, and they both got down. The driver seemed to be more worried about damage to the equipment than anything else. He'd told Trevor that people dumped loads of builder's rubbish in the lay-bys, and stuff like breeze-block and broken bricks could easily chip the blade. The plough was the latest investment by the highways department, and he was conscious of his responsibility for its pristine condition.

Meanwhile, Bradley poked around a bit by the side of the road, scraped some snow away with his gloved hands, and finally lifted a blue overnight bag out of the drift. The bag was empty. He could tell by the weight of it.

'That's careless,' he said.

He pushed a bit more snow aside. It looked as though the clothes had spilled out of the bag on to the roadside, because there was a shoe lying in the snow. It had a smart black leather toe, with a pattern printed on the upper. It wasn't a shoe anybody would have been walking in, of course, so it must have come from the luggage. Probably it had been some of the clothes that he'd seen in the headlights — a white shirt, perhaps, crumpled into the illusion of a human face as it was tossed out of the bag by the impact of the plough blade.