The Secrets of Pain

1

The house was right next to the road, wherever the road was.

And out in front there was a woman.

Not exactly dressed for the weather, thin cardigan all lumpy with snow. Stumbling about in Bronwen’s lights and the blinding white hell, waving her arms. And they were going to run her down, cut her in half.

‘Gomer!’ Danny roared. ‘ No! ’

The snow was coming down like rubble now, had been this past four hours, and if Danny couldn’t see through it there was no chance that Gomer could. When Bronwen lurched and the snow sprayed up, Danny was thinking, Oh Christ, it’ll be all blotched red.

Then they’d stopped. Apart from Bronwen’s grumpy chuntering, there was silence. The front door of the house was wide open, yellow light splattered over the snow like warm custard on ice cream. Some of it reaching Gomer, sitting at the wheel in his old donkey jacket, with his cap and his sawn-off mittens and his muffler and the snowlight in his glasses.

‘What we done?’ Danny heard his own voice, all hollow. ‘What we done, Gomer?’

Oh God. Leaning on his side door, breaking through the crispy layer of snow. New tractor, out for the first time with the snowplough. This superhero routine of Gomer’s, coming out in the dark to clear – for free – the roads that Hereford Council wouldn’t go near… well, you learned to live with that, but how long before he was a danger to other folks and hisself?

You ask Danny, it was starting to look like the time had come.

A slapping on the door panel, Gomer’s side.

‘ Who’s that in there? ’

Danny went, ‘Woooh.’

Sagging in blind relief. It was her. Gomer, meanwhile, totally relaxed, was letting his window down, the ciggy glowing in his face.

‘We help at all?’

‘… dies of frostbite, what do he care? Long as he ’s bloody warm!’ The woman, entirely alive, glaring up at the cab, hair all white and wild. ‘Not you. Him in there, look.’

Glancing behind her just as the front door of the farmhouse got punched shut from inside and the warm light vanished.

‘En’t that typical? He won’t do nothin’, ’cept toss another bloody block on the fire. Serve the buggers right. Let ’em get theirselves out. Then back to his beer.’ She was standing back, snow over the tops of her wellies, squinting, then she went, ‘ Gomer? ’

‘Ah,’ Gomer said. ‘Sarah, is it?’

‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire! Thought you was long retired, boy!’

Danny was too cold to smile. Gomer had an angry puff on his roll-up. Long as the ole boy had his ciggies, the cold never seemed to bother him. Least, not as much as the idea of folks thinking he was too advanced in years to be driving heavy plant through a blizzard. His voice was distinctly gruffer as he drew out the last half-inch of ciggy.

‘Problem, is it, girl?’

‘Some fool in a car, it is,’ this Sarah said. ‘Come whizzin’ clean off the road on the bend back there. Slides across, crashes through the gate and straight down the bloody hill!’

‘You sure?’

‘Sure? I was at the bedroom window, Gomer, couldn’t hardly miss him. Straight through! Headlights all over the snow, then they’ve gone, look. Well, there en’t no way out of there. Ends in forestry.’

‘So, let’s get this right, girl,’ Gomer said. ‘There’s a car or some’ing gone down over this yere hill, and he’s vanished?’

‘Likely buried already, and we en’t got no gear to haul him out. Can you get through in that thing. Gomer?’

It was like the whole cab was bulging with Gomer’s outrage.

‘ This thing? ’

Danny sighed.

‘Gomer, mabbe we should call the-’

‘En’t nowhere…’ Gomer tossing the last millimetre of ciggy into the snow ‘… on God’s earth this girl can’t get through.’

Danny, defeated, looked up at the falling sky. Snow and ice had come hard and bitter after Christmas, right after the floods. Over a month of running out of oil, on account of the tankers couldn’t get through, and starving rats raiding your vehicle from underneath, dining on your electrics. A brief respite early in February and then, just when you thought you’d seen the end of winter, the bastard was back with both fists bunched, and Gomer Parry had got hisself a big new JCB tractor called Bronwen and something to prove.

Danny climbed down and found the car hadn’t gone crunching through the gate after all.

‘Some fool left him open.’

He climbed back in, slammed the door. No warmer in here. Bronwen had a cracking heater, only Gomer wouldn’t use it in case he nodded off at the wheel and some bastard magistrate had his HGV licence off him.

‘Shouldn’t be no gate there at all,’ Gomer said. ‘No fence, neither. Common land, it is. Bridleway. Only Dickie, see, he reckons if he d’keep fencin’ it off, one day folks is gonner forget it don’t belong to him.’

He lowered the plough: tracks in the headlights, but Danny saw they were filling up fast. Gomer set about clearing the field entrance in case they came back with something on tow.

Danny said. ‘Dickie who?’

‘On the pop half the time. Dickie Protheroe. Her’s gotter hold it all together, ennit?’

‘Ah, so that’s Dickie Protheroe’s new wife, is it? Never seed her before.’

‘Course you en’t. On account of Dickie’s in the pub and her’s back yere holdin’ it all together.’

‘Aye,’ Danny said. ‘Fair play to her.’

Pulling snow out of his beard, thinking whoever was down there could be badly hurt, or worse. Could’ve hit a tree or a power pole.

‘Land Rover, them tracks,’ Gomer said. ‘Long wheelbase. Only one set o’ tracks so he en’t out.’ He sniffed. ‘Right, then. We go for it?’

Ten minutes from midnight when they went in, and the windscreen was near-opaque. Like being inside a washing machine when somebody’d overdone it with the powder. Hoping to God this wouldn’t end in no pink snow, Danny dug his hands into his pockets. Warming himself inside with thoughts of the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury on a hot night at the end of June, coloured lights in rippling sequence, the strobes going, the ole Strat hard against his thigh as he went sailing off into the solo from ‘Mephisto’s Blues’.

Well, it could be, if only Lol would realize how much he had to offer… if the boy could just overcome that persistent low self-esteem.

What the hell, life was good.

Had been good.

‘You all right, Gomer?’

‘Course I’m all right.’

Bronwen went grinding on between leafless trees turned into great white mushrooms. Humpy, glistening ground and a teeming sky, the countryside like a strange new-made bed, all the familiar creases filled in.

A slow, downward slope, now, the snow-level rising either side of them. Not going to be that easy getting back up.

‘Oh, hell!’

Patches of grey stone in the lights.

‘All right, boy, I seen him.’

‘What the hell is it, Gomer?’

‘Looks like an ole sheep-shelter.’

Gomer brought Bronwen grunting to a stop and Danny made out the roof of a vehicle behind the broken wall, a wedge of thick snow on top. How the hell did he get behind the bloody wall? Danny lowered his window.

‘You all right there?’

No reply. He glanced behind. The incline they’d just come down would look dangerously steep on the way back. He turned back to find shadows moving silently on either side, just beyond the lights. Danny stiffened. How many of the buggers were in this yere Land Rover, and why wasn’t they calling out? Like, Thank God you come, kind o’ thing.

‘En’t bein’ funny, Gomer, but I don’t altogether like the looks of this, to be honest.’

The shadows were spreading out, circling and crouching like a pack of wolves. Five of them at least, murky grey now in the swirling night.

A sudden massive bang on Danny’s side of the tractor.

One of them was there. All black, no face.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! on the panel.

The man was in camouflage kit. Gloves, balaclava. No glint of eyes behind the slit.

Danny got his window up to just a bit of a crack. Looked at Gomer across the grey light in the cab. In the past year, two JCBs had been nicked from this area. All right, not hijacked, just stolen out of their sheds, but there was big money in a brand new tractor and a first time for everything.

‘Don’t wanner make a thing ’bout this, Gomer, but how about we don’t get out till we finds out a bit- No! Gomer!’

‘Balls!’ Gomer was leaning across Danny, mouth up to the crack at the top of the window. ‘ Gomer Parry Plant Hire. You all right, there?’

Oh Jesus… Like these were the magic words, the key to not getting dragged out into the snow and having the shit beaten out of you while the lovely new tractor you’d called Bronwen and had blessed by the vicar got shipped out to Lagos.

Danny was going, ‘Look, pal, we-’

When the voice came out of the snow.

‘Yow know who we are.’

Aye, that kind of voice. Full of clouds and night and a bit of Birmingham, and now Danny could see two solid shadows, either side of the camouflage man. Gomer coughed, a bit hoarse.

‘This a hexercise, pal?’

Silence. Then a short, little laugh.

‘Give the ole man a coconut.’

‘What I figured,’ Gomer said. ‘Only, Sarah back there, see-’

‘… so yow just turn this bus around, yeah, and bugger off.’

All the breath went out of Danny in a steam of relief.

‘I should just do it, Gomer. These guys, they don’t make a habit of flashin’ their ID.’

‘Put your lights out, now,’ the camouflage man said. ‘Then fuck off and forget you seen anything.’

Danny shifted uncomfortably in his seat. You wanted cooperation, you didn’t talk quite like this to Gomer Parry. Five foot four and well past seventy, but you just didn’t. Everybody knew that.

‘And you might find it easier if you put that filthy cigarette out.’

‘Now listen, boy-’

‘Just do what he says, eh, Gomer,’ Danny hissed. ‘You can complain to the Government later.’

Gomer said nothing, just let the windows glide up, putting the tractor into reverse and reaching out for the lights.

Only, the mad ole bugger didn’t switch them off, he threw them on full beam, making a starburst in the snow, and – Jesus! – Danny was jerking back as Bronwen swung round hard, on a slide. In the lights he’d seen what he’d seen – what he thought he’d seen – before the tractor lurched and bucked and went snarling back along the track they’d made earlier.

Danny and Gomer didn’t speak at all till they’d managed to make it up the hill and out the gate and onto the road again. Then Danny sat up and looked hard into Gomer’s thick, misty specs.

‘We really see that?’

‘Hexercise,’ Gomer said gruffly. ‘That’s all it is. Kind o’ jobs they get, they gotter be hard, ennit?’

‘Well, yeah, but, Gomer…’

‘ Hexercise,’ Gomer said. ‘That’s what we tells Sarah Protheroe. Her’ll know.’

‘You reckon?’

‘And we don’t say nothin’ else. All right?’

Danny was shivering. He’d go along with that. Anything. But what they’d seen in the white hell… in other circumstances it could have been almost funny, but in a late-February blizzard, in the minutes after midnight, it was enough to scare the shit out of you.

Especially the way the fifth man had been just standing there laughing, bollock naked in the snow.