Derek Beaven - His Coldest Winter

He went to the sitting room. The grey-white glare struck up through the undrawn curtains. It scoured the hastily textured ceiling, exposed the jazzy walls, the geometric light fittings, the scratch-resistant wood-block floor, the teak-style sideboard. It clung to the one beauty, the polished piano, where Alan and his mother found a degree of sympathy. The Rayburn in the fireplace had gone out. He switched on the electric heater in the dining area and stood over it, shivering, holding his breath.

Then he switched it off. Four days – because of the snow. Or was that merely an excuse? Cynth could hardly have predicted the weather. All he had to do was swap brooding for action. And there was no need to take the bike. All he had to do was get over to her door somehow and knock, while the snow kept the gangs away. He’d walk if he had to, set off as soon as he’d run his mother’s errand. He must simply get dressed, snatch something to eat, wrap up. Four days. There was only the Fairhursts’ address. Only that one thing. He went up to his parents’ bedroom.

The address book lay on her dressing table, exactly where she’d said. He found the house number and closed it again. His fingertips rested on the cover. The book was right next to her lipsticks, her powder jars and sprays. Her scent still lingered in the air; her dresses filled the cupboard. Fastened to tangled nylons in her drawer was an elasticated garment she wore next to her skin. Before he knew it, before he even knew why, he was wavering. Cynth would never know, neither would his mother. It was just a game. He could give it up when he liked. Four days was long enough – a good stint, even.

Now he was remote, almost an onlooker. Someone had said there was a tart in the fourth year, if you gave her a quid … Tarts with Teds, bike boys with painted girls, grubby, trodden articles from Tit Bits, The People, Reveille – some women liked it, were insatiable. There was a place you could touch them and they’d do anything. The complicated female clothes fastened awkwardly here, zipped clumsily there, and soon Cynth was queen of the bypass. After that, in his mother’s threefold mirror, it didn’t take him long. A few minutes, and it was all over.

But the feeling afterwards was bitter as ever. Poor boy, he hated himself. He wished he had been killed at the Elstree. It wasn’t the deed – trivial, a pantomime – but the shame. Why did this shitty side of things always have to show through, this script of a dirty planet, hurriedly made-up, abruptly shoved in, scrawled across unsullied teenage love? His life was worthless. He was paralysed, crippled, because his father so respected his mother, cared so assiduously for her, showed nothing the least sexual in his approaches to her. Lionel in this so triumphed over his oddities – while he , Alan, was the sick, perverted one. He alone wore the family’s missing sexuality.

ALAN CLEANED HIS face and put the garments back, still covering his traces. He thought of the bike death he’d escaped and Cynth picking him out, and he tried not to cry. She was real and waiting for him, and he’d just disqualified himself from ever going near her. He’d let her and everyone down, because of what he was.

He stood for a moment on the stair, oblivious to the cold. Called away. Come when the snow clears away. As his hand strayed over the splodgy, embossed wallpaper, a peculiar train of thought struck him: Cynth and the disappearance of his father were somehow connected. He snorted and carried on down. But there was a logic to it so perfect and tempting – just as at the Bee – that he stopped once again to let the idea sink in. It was like one of those flip-flop circuits his father went on about. If he let Cynth go, Lionel would be back in a day or two. If, on the other hand, Alan went after Cynth – as he still longed to, as she herself had invited him to – the eerie conviction grew that his Commie dad would never show up again. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck as he recognised exactly the quantum condition his father had joked about. Lionel, just like the cat in the story, was in two situations at once, and the determining factor was Alan himself.

He laughed out loud and dismissed the whole notion. It was a thought experiment, the sort of ridiculous parlour game Lionel himself might have dreamed up – if he’d ever played parlour games. No one could shape things retrospectively. The bells of St Peter’s began in the town.

His mother had been concerned about the heating. The so-called chalet was deceptively spacious; two of its four bedrooms were tucked like polar caves under the ground-floor eaves. In one was a huge cast-iron boiler, which Lionel had found in Exchange and Mart , its pieces so heavy they’d almost crushed the car’s suspension. His father, fired up himself, had assembled it, persisting with calculation and design.

The other bedroom he’d already turned into a workshop for his projects, installing a bench and a Gothic, industrial lathe. For the boiler, he’d burst forth to rip the home apart, tunnelling through walls, wrenching up floor-boards, creating ventages and installing thermostats, wiring and cursing again. Flung hammers had missed Alan, the dutiful apprentice, by inches. For all this sweat and telemetry, the heating system had failed to heat. A fault lay at its heart so basic as to be childlike – a complete misimagination of the heat transfer from copper to ducted air. Prime Lionel, of course, unworldly and bitterly funny; but an image came to Alan before he could stop it, of his father already under interrogation, his face bloodied, his legs jerking. He hooked an iron handle into the boiler’s lid, lifted it and peered inside.

Only embers remained from the night. He opened the draught as far as it would go, before dumping in fresh coke from the scuttle. Then he prowled for food. Back in his bedroom, he dressed himself beside one of Lionel’s grilles, and the breeze raised goose pimples on his legs.

He hitched up his jeans. Sadly, he scooped Brylcreem on to the palm of each hand, and swept it through his thick dark hair. He had to stoop to see in his own mirror – quite like his mother as it happened, sultry, maybe a GI’s kid, even. He combed his quiff, checked this profile, now that, touched at definite sideburns with his razor. The good looks were a cruel irony; it was a cold hard world. Lionel had said so often enough – and Lionel should know.

Listlessly, he zipped his suede jacket, picked up his gloves and silk scarf. He went down to run his drab errand – all that was left of an impulse so hopeful only minutes before. A pair of his dad’s wellingtons stood by the door to the boiler room. He plunged his feet in them, because there were no others to fit him.

CRYSTALLINE BETWEEN CHALET and garage, the snow was chest high. He kicked a path. The slot of sky was leaden. The frontages, all open-plan, were mapped into one steep slope by the overnight fall. A neighbour was clearing a drive; a child, wrapped up in coats and scarves, patted a snowman. The church bells began again, echoing back from the opposite side of the muffled town, and the sound touched him – strident, so public.

He screwed the key and swung the garage door up from its white wedge. His Triumph stood on the oil-stained cement gleaming dimly, its mudguards spotless, the chrome of its two silencers lustrous from his efforts. He sat astride the tangerine-and-cream petrol tank and the big twin wafted up its greased-burnt metal smell. He squeezed at the clutch and clicked the gear change with his toe. The handlebars swerved in his grip when he twisted the throttle.

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