LITMIR.BIZ

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her in the attitude of prayer as the big Diesel engine roared back at the wind.

      “Please!”

      CHAPTER 2

      The big Diesel engine hammered and ground away, pushing back into the cab the smell of burning oil and such a flood of warmth that Jerry groaned aloud halfway between pleasure at being alive and pain at his dead-white nose and fingers. The girl looked sullenly at him, deeply resentful. Jerry surfaced out of his delirium.

      “Give him the coffee now, lass,” the driver told her. “Under the seat by you.” His eyes were on the swirling whiteness where the foglights punched yellow holes to the grey wall at the roadside. “Go on!” he said again.

      She didn’t answer, but she did rummage under the seat. Jerry was aware of her hostility; it was the driver who had saved him.

      “Here,” she muttered, slopping the smoking coffee into a cup. “Don’t spill it on me coat! It’s suede!”

      “Brenda’s a hard-faced cow,” the driver said.

      Brenda swore at him.

      Jerry had met the sort before, though not one so hard so young. He was fairly sure that she would have left him to die in the snow, given a choice. The driver, whose name he didn’t know yet, had hesitated. He was a big, muscular, middle-aged man with a comfortable look about him; there’d be a family, Jerry thought. Obviously he’d weighed up Jerry’s condition against the situation in which he’d been caught. And either his basic humanity, or his fears of an investigation should Jerry be left, had won. He would know that the tanker’s presence would have been noted by someone. Jerry preferred to think that he’d done the right thing by instinct.

      His fingers had almost no feeling in them, but he could hold the mug of coffee steadily enough. The trouble was that the steam was causing his nose an exquisite agony; through tear-filled eyes, he could see the girl’s hands. One was tattooed on each finger: L-O-V-E, the four fingers spelt. What was on the other? He couldn’t see. It seemed incredible to him that he was alive and warm, that the bitter snow was outside and he within. He remembered vaguely that he had tried to cuddle against her thin body: and she hadn’t liked it. The hell with the miserable bitch; and her fingers.

      “What were you doing out there anyway?” asked the driver, as they swept around a series of sharp bends,

      “Walking,” said Jerry. “It was fine when I set out.”

      “What’s your name, then?”

      “Howard. Jerry Howard.”

      “I’m Bill Ainsley. You’ve met Brenda.”

      “Hello,” said Jerry suffused with gratitude.

      “How’re your hands?” asked Bill. “I were Army in the war. I’ve seen frost-bite. You haven’t got it.”

      “My hands must have been underneath. They’re all right. My nose hurts.”

      “Your nose wouldn’t get frostbitten. They never do.”

      Brenda watched each man, turning from one to another like an umpire. She had a thin pink suede coat over a tiny pink skirt. Long black tights ran down to red woollen socks and heavy boots. Like all the others, she had a duffel bag stuffed to the top. And that was all.

      “Wrenched your ankle too?”

      “I fell over. I got stuck climbing.”

      “Climbing! Climbing bloody what?” exclaimed Brenda in her pit-village voice.

      “A rock face,” Jerry told her. “Toller Edge.”

      “What for? You must be mad!”

      “There was two killed climbing near Capel Curig when I went through last Easter,” said Bill. “Came off together, straight down a thousand feet.”

      “Silly sods,” said Brenda.

      She had dark, malevolent eyes that had been filled with a dreamy kind of fire when they had first focused on Jerry; now they were sharp and dark and hating. Bill grinned at her.

      “You’re lucky to have time,” he told Jerry. “You a student?”

      “Yes. That’s right.”

      “Students!” spat Brenda. “They want stuffing, all of them!”

      “She doesn’t like students,” explained Bill. “Two of them tried to go for her one night in the back of a Mini. She only likes lorry men.”

      Brenda swore coarsely.

      “Thought you were a student or a teacher,” Bill said. “The beard.”

      Brenda swore again.

      Jerry saw that she was almost beautiful. Her figure wasn’t ripe yet, but it would be. She was craning forward, her neck arching in a sweet curve.

      “Aye, wheer you’re going?” Brenda shouted. “This isn’t the Manchester road!”

      “No,” explained Bill. “I can’t turn the tanker till we get to the end of this one—there isn’t a place to turn for miles.”

      “Then wheer are you going?”

      Jerry was interested by this time; so far, he had been concerned with only the fact of his survival, the pain of sensation returning to his body, and the strange dislike of the girl.

      “I could maybe get a lift back to Sheffield,” Jerry said, hearing the crunching of the massive eight tyres on drifted snow. “A bus maybe.”

      “No chance,” Bill said. “No driver’s going to turn out tonight.”

      “Wheer are we going!” Brenda spat insistently.

      The caff. Castle Caff.

      “That dump!”

      “I can turn in their yard. Get back on to the road.”

      Jerry knew this place. It served as a halting-place for the men who drove the vast lorries over the backbone of England through lanes which had been laid down for carts; the caff was useful to the walkers and campers too, though they were tolerated rather than encouraged.

      “I’m not going theer!” the girl shouted.

      “Then you’ll have to get out and walk, lass.”

      “Oh, you sod.”

      “And sod you,” said Bill equably. The huge tanker skidded for seconds on locked wheels as he took it round a steep curve. Jerry looked out and saw a glimpse of lights far below in a break in the blizzard. They were climbing now along the shoulder of the rock he had seen from the gritstone edge: they would climb further until they were halfway up the shivering, loose shale face of Devil’s Peak, right up to the curious projection of rocks that from a distance, and in the right light, had the configuration of a pair of curved horns. All the local peaks had names—Mam Tor and Chee Tor and Mam Nick—usually the ancient names of forgotten peoples. None was so appropriately named as this. It seemed strange, almost ironical, to be sitting in a tanker after almost freezing to death and then making for Devil’s Peak which had seemed to leer at him only an hour or two ago. But he wanted to go back to Sheffield. It was Friday, and Friday night was beer and darts night.

      “Maybe there’ll be a lorry at the caff,” he said. “You know, Bill, going back my way.”

      “Could be,” Bill agreed. “Still, you’re out of trouble, aren’t you?”

      He looked worried. The unspoken question was in the air. Would Jerry make any comment on the presence of the girl? Jerry sensed the man’s discomfort.

      “Why not leave me at the caff?” he said. “You go on—if I can’t get a lift, I’ll stay till morning.”

      Bill grinned suddenly, his fleshy face relaxed completely, “Aye. Brenda and me’ll go on to Manchester. Sure you’ll be all right?”

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