Read Online Snowstop by Alan Sillitoe - Free Book Online

could come of it.
    Well, it would snow, wouldn’t it? Something like this had to happen, on the journey of a lifetime.
    Wouldn’t it, then, you silly old so-and-so?
    But the silly old – he could think of many things worse – was his eighty-year-old father, Percy Joseph, sitting beside him like a ventriloquist’s rag-and-putty doll, as flocks of white came against the windscreen like horses at Aintree ridden by the cleverest jockeys in the world.
    His poor old geriatric dad stared as if happiness hemmed him in and there was nothing to worry about. And so here he was, Alfred, taking the useless old bore to where he could die in peace and be no more bother.
    A man such as himself, fifty last birthday, should not be beholden to this batty old chap who had gaffered him since birth and only stopped now that he drooled and forgot what he said from one minute to the next, though he sometimes came to and recalled in marvellous detail what his old so-and-so of a father had said when he was five years of age.
    His eyes might not see much but he had wandering hands. ‘I can’t put up with it any longer,’ Betty from next door said. ‘I don’t mind tidying the place up after him and giving him his dinner, but he puts his hands all over me when I’m standing at the stove cooking his stew. He touches me – well, you know, in all them places.’
    Sexual harassment, wasn’t that what they called it nowadays? ‘I’ll have a word with him.’ His sigh would have blown down Parliament.
    â€˜I wish you would.’
    â€˜I’ll tell him to put more time in on his garden. That’ll give him something to take his mind off it.’
    â€˜Yes, do tell him. I try, but he don’t do as I say.’
    Well, he wouldn’t, would he, because you’re only the cleaning woman, aren’t you? And why he should want to touch a fifty-year-old slag with five grown kids and a figure like a bag of Nutty Ashless God alone knows, though I suppose he thinks you’re Joan Bakewell or somebody like that.
    â€˜Do you know, Father, I think I’ll take you to see our Brian down in Bournemouth for a few days.’
    Percy looked up from a topless dolly on Page Three, eyes glinting at the prospect of seeing some real ones on the beaches. ‘I should like that. Bournemouth’s a nice place, or so I’ve always heard.’
    He leered, fingers already roaming. Alfred slapped them down. You had to be sorry. You might be like that yourself one day – though he hoped he’d be able to blow his brains out first – but at the moment he was a bit of a pest, causing so much bother when he needed every minute to organize the coming and going of his dozen lorries, keep them on the road every day so as to make the firm pay. Finding a woman willing to look after him had meant all sorts of trouble and expense, but now he had to be put away, helped to pack his suitcase for the longest weekend ever known in his lifetime.
    He hadn’t been senile while sorting his kit, because he thought he was going to see Brian. He imagined pivoting a telescope onto the beach – as if women sported nude in midwinter, and him not feeling the difference any more between hot and cold. His wavering hands indicated the snowflakes. ‘Are we there already?’
    â€˜I think we’re going to be stranded.’
    â€˜I love snow. We used to play in it when we was kids. We chucked it at each other till we couldn’t feel our fingers. Do you know, Alfred, we used to put stones in the snowballs, or bits of coal. Caught each other a treat on the noddles. Gang against gang it was. Ah, you’re only young once.’
    Tell me another. Alfred glanced at him. He had been a pit engineer, a tall strong man, with five kids who no longer wanted to own him, and a wife who was dead and buried. Alfred recalled him in his domineering glory, a pain in the arse to everyone with his mixture of