Trevor the Weather and the whole harvest pie man

of plastic polar bears

With little consideration for the treacherous conditions underfoot, the crowds rushed from shop to shop. Gloves shoved in pockets or dropped somewhere, frozen fingers clasped bunches of bags and crumpled scraps of paper. On them were listed ideas for presents for sons and daughters, husbands and aunts. And although nothing on the lists could ever be found in the shops’ half-empty shelves, still they were clutched, fervent as ever, in a blinkered chase toward closing time.

Between the shoppers stumbled sozzled office workers, groups of men and women of all types and ages, without coats nor sense of balance, who sang and kissed their way to and from the old market place, which contained a dozen pubs and bars clustered around a cobbled square.

Walking towards the hospital, near to where he'd parked his car, Dan was accosted by two student nurses. Immunised against the cold by large doses of alcohol, the two of them, still in uniform with tinsel crowns and a sprig of mistletoe, dashed across the street to wish him Merry Christmas and plant firm kisses on his face. He smiled, and would have been flattered, had the girls not been so drunk they would have kissed a bulldog's rear end had it happened to pass their way.

It was below freezing outside and Dan was relieved to get in the car. As he started the engine, he pushed the heating vent to hot and flipped on the fan. A viscious blast of cold air caught him full in the face and he quickly flipped it off again. But he still felt as if his veins were flooded with warm treacle. Partly it was the physical heat of hurrying through the crowds in five layers of clothing, then being cocooned in the car, out of the northerly wind. It was also the relief of knowing that work was finally over and he would be able to spend a whole week with Amy.

Dan was generally a Christmas cynic, a spendthrift Scrooge who, in the run up to the big day, worried constantly about how much each present, each reckless night out was costing him. He was given to grumbling at length about the spiritual vacuity of the shops with their plasticy window displays and incessant Xmas medleys, and the supermarkets, who turned up the heating, bumped up their prices and piped the scent of mince pies and brandy butter through their ventilation shafts.

Nonetheless, as he drove home through the town centre, beneath the festive street illuminations, which had remained unchanged since his childhood (or at least seemed as if they had), some remembered infant anticipation of presents, chocolates and general pleasure caused the glow within him to intensify. And, for a time, he felt nothing but genuine goodwill towards the people he passed - the embarrassing drunks, the bickering couples and grizzling kids, he smiled at them all.

On his way to the Daffodil Lion he even took a detour through a certain road to drive past a house that was each Christmas bedecked in several thousand watts-worth of lights and had a huge Santa Claus on the roof.

Each year Santa was in a different predicament. The previous year, his Sleigh had crashed into the chimney and he was hitching a lift on the side of the roof. This year he was being accosted by eight feet of spot-lit plastic polar bear.

Quite where one obtained a plastic polar bear Dan didn't know. And what the point of it was he knew even less. Probably there was no point to it at all other than pure reckless fun. He imagined the owner of the house, having sketched out his latest seasonal display (probably in mid-April), ringing a bizarre succession of contacts in the plastic animals business in order to obtain the said bear. Maybe it wasn't that planned. Maybe he just rang up various suppliers and asked if they had any large plastic animals with a winter theme. Perhaps he'd been hoping for penguins and the polar bear was the nearest he could get.

Pausing outside the house, watching the strings of coloured lights flash on and off, Dan wondered how the man afforded his electricity bill. Did he buy all those lights and the figures he used in his roof display or did he just loan them? And what happened to them afterwards? Were they sold on to someone even more eccentric? Or did the man have a garage stacked full of plastic bears and snowmen and reindeers, not to mention dozens of dirty elves and a mooning santa with a musical arse?

Dan smiled to himself and drove away from the Santa house, watching it glow against trees in his rear-view mirror. It hadn't thawed all day, and the trees, coated thick with frost, swayed cautiously in the Arctic breeze, as if scared they might shatter and melt into the night, sparkling between the street lamps like sugared decorations among candles on a cake.

As Dan drove down the slippery lane to the Lion, he imagined what it would be like if the houses really were made of iced cake or, even better, ice cream. They would form a frozen feast for sweet-toothed ogres. He pictured the town's people cowering behind sugar glass windows, and hiding beneath vanilla beds, as giant hands smashed through roofs of corrugated wafer, and grabbed up handfuls of mint chip and raspberry ripple flavoured furniture.

Come spring, the whole lot would melt. And a flood of sweet, white cream would gush down the ring road, drowning everything. The people who hadn't been eaten by the ogres or submerged in the sticky deluge would have to build camps in church spires or the upper branches of tall trees to survive.

They would live on a diet of leaves and melted cream, and maybe build rafts from driftwood, or venture out on canoes and spoon the stuff up with their paddles. He hoped he remembered to mention this idea to Graham later on. Graham was into surreal imagery, and he did a lot of canoeing.

Not much chance of there being any snow though, thought Dan, not real snow like there was when he was a kid. And as he parked at the pub, he looked up at the sky and made a wish for a proper white winter.

Trevor the Weather's revenge

Westing United FC, in the whole of the team's eighty-four year history, had never won a thing. Their best season was 1975/76 when they were promoted to the giddy heights of the First Division of the Hellenic League, (but even then only as runners-up).

The following year, having managed to win only two games, they plummeted straight back into Division Two, and had been on a downward slide ever since. Westing had for several seasons languished in the Three Counties League, where they struggled against teams from various villages and districts (whose combined population was probably half that of the town).

Ironically, over the years, the town had produced more than it's fair share of good players. For example, there was Tommy Morris, who'd been a resilient right back for Chelsea in the nineteen thirties, and had even won a couple of England Caps. In the post-war area too, the team sheets of the Football League were full of Westingshire-born players.

In fact, if half of Westing's recent football talent had actually stayed in the town, they would have produced a team that could easily have held it's own in the First Division. But who wanted to stay in the semi-professional provinces when the big boys were beckoning from cities North and East, and London was only a couple of hours up the motorway?

The best known of Westing's more recent footballing exiles was Trevor Hughes, a prolific goal scorer who, among others, had played for Fulham, West Ham, Swindon and Northern Ireland (by virtue of his Grandmother having been born in County Londonderry).

To his credit, Trevor was about the only decent player who had ever returned to the pitches of Westing (albeit after a broken ankle which prematurely ended his league career at the age of twenty-seven).

Fortunately for Westing, after his big break, Trevor 'the weather' Hughes (so named because he always scored if it was raining), had become disillusioned with the Football League. Despite having been paid full wages for a season in which he hardly kicked a ball, he was of the firm opinion that money had spoiled the game. OK, football had always been a business. There had always been people who had cashed in on it's popularity. But never before had the commercialisation seemed so cynical.

Players were treated like some commodity to be haggled over by men who had never kicked a ball in their lives - the accountants, the lawyers, the agents, the local business tycoons turned chairmen, the shareholders for fuck's sake. They showed you precious little respect or understanding when you were out there scoring hat-tricks. And if you weren't out there - well, to them a career ended by injury was nothing more than an inconvenient blip on the balance sheet, a wasted business opportunity. To them, when you could no longer perform as a player, you ceased to exist as a person.

He remembered walking along the corridors of a certain club a couple of weeks after his contract had ‘failed to be renewed’. He’d passed his former team Captain, the Manager and club Chairman all deep in conversation.

The Chairman ignored him. The Manager glanced up briefly and his former colleague looked at him as if to say "what the fuck are you still doing here?” Not one of them bothered to stop and ask how the leg was, how he was getting on. Not a word. It made him angry at first, then sad, then determined.

Instead of becoming a freelance scout for some third division outfit, joining the post office or selling insurance, as most players would have done, Trevor decided that he was going to play again. Having been turned down (after one quick look at his leg X-rays) by every team in every major league in the country, he persuaded Westing United (who were more desperate than most) to sign him up as their player manager.

His former team mates, had they known he'd started playing again, would have pissed themselves at the thought of the great Trevor 'the weather' Hughes limping sadly through defeat after defeat in the Three Counties League. Except, Westing weren't being defeated.

During his time at a dozen different clubs, Trevor had come across many players unjustly consigned to the scrap heap. Players who'd fallen out with managers, or, like himself, been injured. Players who'd been deemed too short or too skinny, or not fast enough, or who'd simply not had a face that fitted.

Trevor didn't kick a ball during his first half-season atWesting. Instead he spent all day training and telephoning, training and telephoning, training and telephoning. By mid-August through persistence and persuasion, he had gathered together six or seven players, who could have been (and still could be) outstanding if given half-a-chance, as well as half-a-dozen promising youngsters. And by method rather than miracle, Trevor himself felt fit enough to join them for the first match of the season.

The match was against Millbank, a team that had beaten Westing three-nil in their previous fixture. In the dressing room before the game the Millbank players jovially bragged that this time the winning margin would be double that. They were almost right, for the final score was five-one. The only thing was, they weren't the winners, Westing were.

The snow storm

The day of the fourth round replay, was the day it really started to snow. Dan had been to a seminar in Reading ‘The impact of Biotechnology on European Volatile Markets.’ He’d planned to go home and change out of his shirt and slacks before going to the pub to watch the football with the others. However, the final presentation had dragged on and on.

The presentation was given by an obsessive molecular physicist who had shown over a hundred slides of genetically engineered proteins. The slides all looked identical to Dan - a lot of coloured blobs and tangled spaghetti, annotated by mysterious abbreviations. He didn’t even know why he was there. There had been precious little discussion about food marketing, the area he was involved in, just lots of detailed scientific presentations that went way over his head.

However, he was not as confused as one delegate, who didn’t realise that volatile was a collective term for food flavours and aromas, and had expected to hear investment bankers and brokers talking about the long-term prospects for risky biotech stocks.

The man had left early in the afternoon session, and Dan had been itching to sneak out as well. However, he was stuck in the middle of a row between a large French enzyme manufacture, whom he'd sat next to at lunch, and a pleasant looking (but rather irritating) German woman who kept pausing the speaker to query various minor discrepancies in his slides. There was no way round the Frenchman's huge thighs and stomach, and too much attention was focused on the German lady for him to comfortably push past her as she launched into yet another technical criticism.

As a result, Dan had been forced to sit there for an hour anxiously watching the snow flurries thicken outside, worrying whether he would get back to Westing to watch the cup replay at the Daffodil Lion.

It had been a long time since Dan had been so excited about the approach of a football match. He did sometimes get carried away when watching an England international with Zeph, Lennie and Graham and the rest. In fact, it was not unknown for him (after one or two pints) to leap to his feet and dance an impromptu clench-fisted twist when England scored.

However, pre-game butterflies were not something he had experienced, since he'd played himself (for an under seventeen team in the Westingshire Sunday Youth League). Of course, it was not everyday (year, decade or even century) that Westing qualified for the FA Cup proper, let alone reached the fourth round and forced a replay against a team like Queens Park Rangers.

OK, so QPR had been relegated from the Premiership a few seasons earlier. But they still had decent players, and for Trevor 'The Weather's' team of rebellious rejects to hold them to a draw was a minor miracle.

Perhaps Westing United's unlikely success had been an affront to nature, thought Dan as the snow began to fall more heavily. It were as if some malicious ancient god, watching the world from his ethereal vantage point, had decided enough was enough and scratched his flaky scalp over a map of South West England. Mind you, given Trevor The Weather's rain-inspired scoring record, the snow was probably a good omen.

Before the snow started, Dan (while gazing out of the window during the last morning lecture on commercial consolidation among European aroma manufacturers) had seen a huge swarm of birds fly above the campus. Sensing the impending storm, the birds, hundreds of them, swept and plunged together, their movements synchronised in one huge mass, all that is except for one bird who failed to keep up and seemed to dart around the edges of the group seemingly at random.

A reject or a rebel, thought Dan, superior or inferior? The confused cymbal player in the marching band, who wheels left instead of right and ruins the display? Or a wayward genius, who knows he is right and all the others are wrong...? Dan wasn't sure. One thing he did know was that the swarming birds were not a good sign.

When the snow came, the sky was first a constant pale grey. But, as the afternoon had progressed, it grew darker and darker outside, until the sky was black and the assistant who was operating the slide projector had to interrupt a presentation to turn half the lights on. Sudden gusts of wind rattled the windows alarmingly, and when the presentations finally came to an end shortly after five, Dan rushed out onto the campus and broke into a semi-jog as he negotiated the various residential blocks and trees that lay between him and the visitors car park. Partly he was keen to get out of the icy flurries of snow, and partly he was concerned he might not reach the pub before the match kicked-off.

Sitting in the traffic queues approaching the motorway, Dan wondered if it was snowing in south London. Probably, he thought, peering out through struggling wind screen wipers at rows of brake lights ahead. It must be snowing everywhere. He was half way along the motorway, when he felt the temperature outside suddenly drop, a strange stomach churning feeling like riding a lift full of ice. And the snow flurries quickly became a constant storm of thick flakes that started to settle deeply on the ground. It took Dan an hour to reach the Westing junction.

By the time he reached the town center, visibility was down to a few yards and the road was totally obscured by snow. It was impossible to see any white lines or other markings and in places he could not even tell where the road stopped and the pavement started. All he could do was try and follow the tracks of previous cars, which snaked this way and that, before being buried by yet more snow.

Dan gave up trying to brake and steer in the end, and at corners simply took his feet off the pedals, prayed and slid. The further he got down the Fettlington road, the fewer cars he saw. And when he eventually turned down the nameless lane that led to the Daffodil Lion, he had only a single set of tyre tracks to follow (and they were those of a mountain bike).

Already along the side of the lane, mini drifts had started to form. Dan knew he should really turn around and go straight home. But he'd said he'd be there to watch the match, so he continued stubbornly on.

The game had only just started when Dan finally arrived at the pub at ten-to-eight. It had been supposed to start at half-past the hour, but had been delayed due to a last minute pitch inspection and to allow more fans to get to the stadium before the kick off. The snow in London was nowhere near as bad as it was in Westingshire. But it still looked as if the telly above the bar was on the blink.

"Anyone scored yet?" asked Dan as he stumbled in through the door.

"Christ," said Lennie, turning to look at him with exaggerated surprise. "It's Frosty the snowman."

Dan looked down at his jacket which, in the short walk from the car park to the pub's front door had been spotted with dozens of icy flakes.

"Didn't think you'd make it man," said Zeph, his eyes not moving from the TV set.

"Neither did I," said Dan. He glanced round the empty room with a brief shake of his head.

A whole gang of people had been meant to be turning up to watch the game, but because of the snow, there were only six other people in the pub - Paul, the landlord, Diane, Zeph, Lennie, Graham and the man from the Whole Harvest Pie Company, who'd dropped by to promote his new range of meat-free pastries, and had decided to stay and watch the game. Dan had seen his refrigerated van parked outside. It was Green with the words ‘food to satisfy body and soul’ written on the side.

The pie man’s name was Malcolm, but everyone called him Mal. He was quite a tall thin man, in his late twenties, with mousey hair cut into a sixties bob like he was the fifth member of the Monkees. He had on a smart shirt and trousers and a pair of mock-leather shoes, over which he wore a ridiculous long cardigan, which he called his technicolour dreamcoat. He was perched on a stool with a plastic briefcase at his feet and a half-supped pint of bitter in his hand.

As Dan approached the bar, Mal glanced up and grinned.

"Some night, eh?"

Diane bustled down the bar and beckoned Dan over.

"Here, get your jacket off before you catch your death." She turned to her husband. "Paul, get the boy a towel."

As Paul reluctantly, but dutifully, got off his bar stool in front of the TV. Dan slipped out of his jacket and, with a yawn, rested both elbows on the bar. Diane poured him a whisky. He winced at the taste (and knew he shouldn’t be drinking if he was intending to drive home). But, shivering in his shirt sleeves, he sipped gratefully at the glass.

Diane disappeared through the door behind the bar. He could hear her call up the stairs, "And bring one of your jumpers down."

Paul soon appeared clutching what looked suspiciously like the towel he used to dry off his Rottweiler puppy, Emma, along with a lurid lilac cardigan that Diane used to wear.

"Honestly," said Diane, shaking her head as Paul tossed the cardigan and towel at Dan before returning to his seat in front of the TV.

Diane reached out to take the stuff upstairs, but Dan stopped her. "It's OK," he said.

"Don't be silly," said Diane.

There followed a brief tug of war with the towel, during which they both broke into childish laughter, much to Paul's disgust.

"We are trying to watch a game of football here," he said.

Dan, having won the tug of war, rubbed at his hair with the towel, and did a fair imitation of Emma the Rottweiler’s bark. The dog raised her head questioningly, and Diane smiled. Paul was about to say something again, when Westing suddenly broke away from the goal area where they had been besieged for the previous ten minutes, releasing Trevor 'The Weather' on the right wing just beyond the half-way line.

Though not as fast as he once was, Trevor managed to slip past QPR's last defender and, spotting the keeper way off his line, attempted an audacious, diagonal chip from thirty-five yards out. The ball hovered tantalisingly in the air, half-disappeared in the swirling snow, before dropping over the keeper's outstretched hands and onto the roof of the net.

Clutching the lilac cardigan in his lap, Dan went and sat beside the others in front of the TV, as they let out a collective groan.

"Fucking hell," said Zeph, holding his head in his hands. "He should have taken it on."

"The keeper was a long way off his line," said Graham, who - with a nod of greeting to Dan - had just returned from the loo.

"Tricky angle though," said Mal the Whole Harvest Pie Man.

Dan nodded.

"Yea, I would have cut inside a bit before shooting."

"Oh would you," said Paul, cuttingly.

Dan shrugged and downed his whisky with an indifferent gulp. Outside, the snow storm showed no sign of abating. And the seven of them in the bar clustered closer round the TV as the freezing wind ripped through the trees, battered the windows and howled hungrily at the door.

Things seemed to be getting worse in London too. It was now almost impossible to see either the players or the ball, and, as half-time approached the referee spent more time looking at his watch and the sky than the game going on around him. But still QPR had not managed to score, and the longer the match went on the better Westing seemed to play.

In the last five minutes of the first half, they managed to turn the tables on QPR, and pin them down in their area, winning three corners in a row. For the third corner, virtually on the stroke of half-time, they had thrown everyone except the goalkeeper into the box, and as the ball was lofted high over from the left, the camera struggled to zoom in on the melee of players scrambling in the snow.

The ball struck the back of one player's head and bounced almost vertically into the air. As the ball fell, a pair of opposing players jumped together, collided and missed it. The keeper rushed forward and slipped in the snow. In his wake, a dozen players descended on the ball like a pack of dogs on a rabbit.

Somehow, the ball broke free and trickled towards the empty goal, rapidly followed by Trevor 'The Weather.'

"Yesss," said Lennie, clenching his fists in anticipation.

"Come on," said Zeph. "Get your fucking foot to it man!"

"It's there," said Dan. "It's got to be."

But before Westing's player manager could smash the ball into the roof of the net, the pub was plunged into darkness.

"I don't bloody believe it," said Paul.

"For fuck's sake," said Zeph.

There followed the sound of a chair falling over and a metallic clunk as an ash tray tumbled to the stone floor.

"You all right man?" said Zeph.

"I think it was Emma," said Graham. "I felt something furry brush past me."

"That was Diane's jumper," said Dan.

"But Diane's over there isn't she?" said Graham.

"Just looking for the torch," came Diane's muffled response from behind the bar.

"No, I was holding it," explained Dan. "The lilac one that Paul so kindly brought down for me... Ouch, who was that?"

"I'm so sorry," said Mal the Frozen Pie Man, who had been wandering blindly through the bar with arms outstretched and fingers spread.

"You practically had me eye out."

"Wish I'd been able to see that," said Zeph, chuckling. The dialing of a mobile phone beeped through the darkness.

"Hello," said Lennie's voice. "Hello, is that Tony? Oh sorry, Gary. I was dialing in the dark, yea. We've had a fucking power cut here. Listen mate you watching the game. Yea. You still got your power on?....Oh fuck, never mind...Aha the radio, yea. I hadn't thought of that. So did he score or what? ...Oh fucking hell, what for?....Shit, so it's half time now is it?Nil-all, yea?" A groan went round the bar. “Yea, listen, I better go. Looks like my batteries are running a bit low....Yea, will do....Cheers matey...Yea, bye."

A momentary hush descended on the bar, broken only by the sound of Emma the Rottweiler chewing something she shouldn't.

"Disallowed," said Lennie. "They gave a free kick to QPR."

"Fucking referees," said Zeph. "Always favour the League side, the bastards."

The Whole Harvest pie man nodded.

"Well," said Dan. "It was a bit of a scramble."

"Who's side are you on?" asked Paul.

"I was just saying...oh, never mind." A weak beam of light suddenly played round the bar, as Diane returned with a torch, and a lantern with a tea light.

"Aha," said the pie man. “Let there be light.”

"Hey Paul. You got a radio?" asked Zeph.

"Only the hi-fi," said Paul.

"Shit," said Zeph. "That don't run on batteries.""

“Nope."

"Anyway," cut in Diane. "I'm not sure we've got any spare batteries, and we need those for the torch."

"What about candles," suggested Dan?

Zeph tried to think of something witty to say about candles not fitting into the battery compartment of a radio, but couldn't.

"What you really want is one of those new clockwork radios," said the pie man.

"Yea," said Graham enthusiastically. "You just wind it up."

"I wonder why no one thought of that before?" said Dan.

"They probably did," said Graham. "But there's more money to be made out of selling batteries. Think how much a pack of Duracels cost. Think how many millions of packets are sold each year. Tons of them."

"Absolutely," said the Whole Harvest pie man. "All dumped in landfills, leaking acid into the nearest river."

Paul’s voice adopted the exaggerated tones of a TV continuity announcer.

"That was a party political broadcast on behalf of the Fettlington branch of the Green Party."

"Look, forget fucking politics,” said Zeph. “What we going to do about the football?”

"What about a car radio," said Dan?

"Eh, the boy's a fucking genius," said Zeph, looking towards the door. "Now who's car we going to....?"

They all looked at Dan.

Surrounded by swirling darkness where the snow fell ever faster, the five of them sat huddled in Dan's Renault. Dan was in the driver's seat with the engine idling and Graham beside him. Paul, Lennie and Zeph were crammed into the back. The match they'd been listening to had been abandoned some five minutes earlier, but despite the cramped conditions and farty atmosphere inside the car they'd made no move to return to the pub less than twenty- five yards away.

"Do you think she's all right in there," asked Dan? He nodded in the general direction of the Lion where Diane had remained with the Whole Harvest pie man.

"Probably," said Paul.

"Unless Mal turns out to be a serial killer," said Zeph.

"Maybe we better go back inside before he garrotes the Weetabix," said Lennie.

Graham farted, shamelessly.

"What's up with your fucking guts, man" asked Zeph?"

He's been eating that guys' pies," said Lennie.

"Dry roasted rhubarb was it?"

"I may have put a bit too much Tara Masala in my lentil casserole," admitted Graham.

"Turn the air conditioning on," said Paul.

"It's too cold," said Dan. "Anyway, battery’s knackered, and I don’t want to get stuck here all night."

"Yea, typical," said Zeph. "Remember that old Renault 11 I had, the GLX. Went like a rocket, but the electrics were all over the shop. Especially when it rained. I was driving down the M5 in a thunder storm and the windscreen wipers just totally packed up. Turned out a fucking fuse had gone. It was mental."

Dan nodded.

"You're lucky it was just a fuse. You try getting new brake cylinders." He twisted in his seat and looked over his shoulder at Zeph. "Last service I had, some twat set up my brake discs wrong." He raised a flattened hand at an angle from the vertical. "Like that, see. Cut into the fucking cylinder. And could I get a new one? Could I bollocks. According to the bloke in the garage, because the car workers keep going on strike in France, they use loads of different manufacturers for their parts. Before you order anything you have to check your chassis number on this central computer to find out what one you need. He reckoned they used about ten different cylinders the year my motor was made."

"I can fucking believe it," said Paul contemptuously. "Bloody socialists. It's a shame really, because some of the old Renaults had good engines.”

“Don't think I'd buy another one though."

"Mind you," said Dan. "Fords are just as bad. Remember that Escort I had. Spent more time off the road than on. And even when it was going, it wasn't exactly Formula One."

"Cosworths are shit hot though, man" said Zeph.

Paul nodded.

"Totally different class of engineering."

There was a sudden knock at the Renault's windows, which startled Zeph so much he hit his head on the car's ceiling.

"What the fuck was that?" he said. Lennie wiped condensation from the inside of the window and peered out at a figure outside.

"Looks like the ghost of Christmas past," he said.

"No it's only Mal," said Paul, opening the car door.

A gust of icy wind swept in.

"I'm just going," said Mal.

"Going?" said Zeph. "You won't be going nowhere in this man. It's fucking treacherous."

Mal shrugged as he stooped down to look into the car.

"I'm a bit worried about my pies," he said. "I really ought to get them back to base."

"No way," said Lennie.

"Len's right," said Dan. "You'd have to be insane to try and drive in these conditions."

"Off you go then," muttered Zeph, sniggering. The others ignored him.

"I suppose you're right," said Mal. "I guess I could kip in the van."

"Don't be daft," said Dan. "You’ll freeze to death.”

"Yea, you might as well kip inside with the rest of us ," said Paul. "There's a couple of beds in the back room."

"Where am I going to sleep then?" said Dan (who normally shared the back room with Graham).

Lennie winked mischievously.

"You could always ask Diane if she could squeeze you in beside Paul."

Paul snorted dismissively.

"I don't think he's up for that, man" chortled Zeph. He dug Paul in the ribs. "Three in a bed with Dan. I bet that's your fucking fantasy."

Paul's voice took on an aggressive tone (normally reserved for when he was dealing with out-of-hand drinkers).

"If you cunts don't let up you won't be fucking sleeping anywhere."

Lennie laughed.

" I'd take that as a no then, Dan."

Then they all hurried off through the snow, leaving Dan to carefully lock his car. Mal hovered in the car staring anxiously at the van.

"Don't worry about it," said Dan. "No one's going to be nick your pies in this weather."

"I guess not," said Mal.

And, heads down, they hurried through the blizzard to the pub's warmth.

Stranded

Dan gazed out from the bedroom window. Outside there were only two colours he could see - the blue-grey of the sky and the white of the snow; deep, pure, everywhere, the entire landscape submerged and clarified. It had been so bright when he'd woken, Dan thought he'd overslept and that it must be approaching midday. But when he'd looked at his watch it was barely eight - the low sun reflected by the snow creating the illusion of summerlike light.

After a breakfast of toast, coffee and snow-related acclamations (none of which came close to describing the dreamlike scene the blizzard had created) Dan and Graham decided to venture outside. Despite the sunshine, the temperature was no more than minus five. And both men kept most of their faces covered from the cold - Dan by a woolly hat and scarf and Graham by his hair, which he had released from its customary pony tail. However, those features that protruded were battered remorselessly by the metallic harshness of the freezing wind.

Only a few inches of snow had fallen overnight, but the winds that had swept across the open fields had created drifts several feet deep. The drifts had spilled over the low hedges at the edge of the fields and across the lane that connected the Daffodil Lion to the main road and the world beyond.

To drive along the lane would be totally impossible, even with a snow plough. Besides which, Dan's Renault and Lennie's Audi had both been almost totally submerged by snow at the edge of the open car park.

Graham - in his usual absurd way - had strapped a couple of old tennis rackets to his boots. They actually worked quite well as impromptu snow shoes. Even so, he soon sank into the powdery whiteness, clogging the nylon mesh.

"Doesn't look as if we'll be going anywhere for a while," said Graham, as they struggled to wade through the drifts.

"No," said Dan, laughing, up to his waist in snow.

When they returned to the bar, Dan's trousers were soaked and his face was red where the wind had slapped against it.

"No joy?" asked Paul.

"Nope," said Dan with a brief shake of his head. "The drifts are just too deep."

"We're totally cut-off," said Graham. "You can't even walk anywhere."

"Great," said Paul.

"Still," said Dan, glancing up at the lights and the TV above the bar, "at least the electricity's back on."

Zeph and Lennie came down stairs, along with Mal the Whole Harvest Pie rep, who had shared their bedroom for the night.

"What's it like out there man," asked Zeph?

"Snowy," said Dan.

Lennie jerked his head towards the TV.

"Shit look at that," he said. The electricity had come back on and the local news was showing a helicopter shot of the Westingshire countryside.

"Where's that," asked Zeph?

"That's right here," said Dan. “Look, there’s Fettlington church.”

"It looks like fucking Siberia," said Lennie.

"It is," said Dan. "You should try going out there. You'll freeze your face off."

"Does that mean we're stranded?" asked the Whole Harvest rep.

"Looks like it," said Dan.

"Yea, unless you've got a pair of skis handy," said Lennie.

"Or one of them snow scooter things," said Zeph.

Dan nodded.

"Yea, that's what we need. We could zip into town then across the fields."

"Typical," said Paul, who evidently wasn't pleased about having half-a-dozen people trapped indefinitely in his pub. "As soon as we get a bit of snow everything grinds to a halt. I bet they don't have this problem in Norway or Iceland. They get snow like this all the time and they just get on with it."

"Well," said Dan. "You don't really expect this kind of thing round here. I expect in Iceland they've all got skis and stuff, and barriers to protect the roads from drifts."

"It's global climate change," said Graham. "The start of the new ice age. In a couple of years time it'll be like this for months."

"I though we were meant to be getting milder winters," said Dan, "and Mediterranean summers, because of global warming."

"No one really knows, what's going to happen" said Graham. "We're filling the atmosphere with so many different pollutants it could go either way."

"Absolutely," said Mal the Whole Harvest pie man. “If the Gulf Stream goes, we’ll have weather like this for half the year.”

Graham nodded.

"You can't mess with...." he started to say, but Paul cut him off in mid flow.

"You can't mess with nature or nature messes with you." He let out a laboured sigh. "Why do we have to listen to this crap every time there's a bit of bad weather or someone spills a bit of bleach in a river. You can't get a decent spray-on deodorant now, because of the bloody ozone layer. I can’t see what the problem is. At least you don’t have to go to Spain anymore to get a decent suntan."

"Well," snapped the Whole Harvest rep, his voice quivering with nervous indignation. "If people like you gave the planet a bit more respect it wouldn't be in this bloody mess."

"I think he was being ironic," said Dan.

“Sarcastic, actually,” said Lennie.

"Either way,” said Dan. “He was just winding Graham up.”

"Ah," said the Whole Harvest pie man. His already flushed neck, turned a deeper red. "I’m very sorry Paul, I thought you were ..." He let out a little laugh. "Well you certainly had me fooled."

Paul stayed mischievously stony faced.

Dan glanced at his watch. It was approaching ten o'clock.

"Here, can I use the phone, Paul?"

"You might as well," said Paul morosely. "You've taken over the rest of the bloody place."

"Do you have to always be so difficult?" asked Diane, who had joined them. She looked apologetically at Dan. "Of course you can, love. Come through."

He followed her to the phone in the corridor behind the bar, and dialled the office.

He was quite taken aback when the phone was answered so quickly (by Sandra, one of the receptionists). He'd expected the office to be closed with the answer phone on. But he could tell by the background of industrious clatter, that it was as busy as usual.

"Hi there," he said. "It's Dan."

Sandra sounded relieved.

"We wondered where you'd got to. Are you all right?"

"I'm stuck in the snow," he explained.

"Oh dear, have you crashed the car?" she asked.

"No I'm stuck in the pub," he said, and laughed.

"A pub?" said Sandra, sounding confused and a little take aback.

It occurred to Dan it might have been more subtle to refer to the Daffodil Lion as a ‘friend's place’ or some such euphemism, but plodded on with his explanation.

"Yea, I went to watch the football there last night, and now I've been trapped by the snow."

"Really," said Sandra - her voice tinged with a mixture of surprise and scepticism.

"Really," said Dan firmly, "The drifts are several feet deep."

"Oh," said Sandra. "The roads are OK in town."

Dan was tempted to say - come and fucking see for yourself if you don't believe me. See how you like being stranded with no change of underwear, snow-soaked trousers and nothing more than a lilac lady’s cardigan to keep the cold off! But instead he just said:

"Didn't you see the Hallowsmere Valley on the news this morning? I'm right in the thick of it. You can't even walk outside."

"Oh," said Sandra. "Will you be in tomorrow?"

"Not unless someone wants to come and pick me up by helicopter."

"What do you want me to tell Dr Wilson."

"Well, just tell him I'm stranded in the snow and I'll be in as soon as I can. If anyone desperately needs to get in touch they can contact me on five four seven two six zero."

"We'll you'll still need a sick certificate," said Sandra.

Although there was no one to watch him, Dan pretended to repeatedly bang the receiver against his forehead, before answering.

"Well I'll probably have a dose of snow blindness and quite possibly hypothermia by then, so that's OK.," he said.

"Otherwise I'll take it as holiday. I can go skiing and build snowmen and things."

"OK," said Sandra, seeming not to sense that he was being sarcastic. "I'll pass the message on."

"Thank you," said Dan, with laboured breeziness. "Bye then."

"Bye," said Sandra, her voice filling with glee, in anticipation of telling everyone that 'Dan couldn't come to work because he was still in the pub.'

Frozen spliff

It was strange, thought Dan, sucking on his umpteenth spliff. Amy was away again, touring Finland (playing the female lead in Equus, a play about a disturbed stable-hand who stabs horses' eyes). The report on food enzymes he was supposed to be working on wasn't due to be finished for a couple of weeks. Yet, there he was twisted up with anxiety at his severance from the outside world, while everyone else – who had good reason to be concerned about being marooned in the pub - seemed to be completely unfazed by the situation.

Zeph, even though he constantly argued with his girlfriend, Jenny, was hardly ever apart from her. And he seemed to suffer iron-withdrawl symptoms if he were away from the multi-gym for more than an hour. Yet he was lolled in a chair cool as you like, sipping his fourth pineapple juice and watching a discussion about surrogate mothers on daytime TV.

Lennie was equally casual. He didn't seem to care at all that he couldn't get into Herbal Heaven, where he worked, or that his wife Leonora had to manage the shop without him.

He had made one call to her, concerning an assignment of scented candles he'd bought prior to Christmas on sale or return, which he wanted counted and re-boxed before they were picked up by the supplier. But aside from that, he seemed happy to let the world of pseudo-spiritual knick-knacks revolve away without him.

The only person who could possibly have escaped from the pub was Graham, as he lived less than two miles away and his mountain bike could, in theory have ventured where a car wouldn’t dare to. However, as they’d discovered first thing, the drifts prevented one walking more than a few yards (even with a couple of tennis rackets strapped to one's feet). So, cycling into that white wilderness would be foolish.

Even if Graham had been able to cycle through the snow, Dan guessed he would probably have stayed put. Graham had a rather misplaced, muskateer-like sense of solidarity, which meant he'd consider it his duty to remain stranded with his farting, feckless friends rather than return home.

Unluckiest of them all perhaps was the Whole Harvest pie guy. He'd merely lingered over a swift half to build up a bit of rapport with his customers, and had ended up being trapped, possibly for days on end, with half-a-dozen people he barely knew.

Actually, Mal didn't seem that bothered about being cut-off from civilisation. His main concern was his frozen food. Mid-morning - they'd helped him dig away the snow from the back of his van so that he could check on his pies. There were rows and rows of them along with various veggie dishes in silver trays with lids of recycled cardboard.

If it had been mid summer, of course the pies would have been ruined. But the temperatures had plummeted so low during the night (minus eleven, or so it had said on the breakfast news), there was no way they could have started to thaw. And as luck would have it (or at least so the Mal thought), Paul had a large industrial freezer (about eight feet high and three feet deep) which was nearly empty following Christmas, and could easily accommodate them all.

"Of course, normally," said Mal, as they unloaded the stacks of frozen produce from the van to the freezer, "I would just have to chuck them. Environmental health and all that. But given the conditions…” he gestured at the snow that surrounded them. "Well, it seems such a waste."

Dan nodded and lifted another stack of trays. The iced aluminium was too cold to grip with bare hands, so he pulled the sleeves of the purple cardigan over his fingers, and clamped the pies stiffly between his fists in an unintentional parody of an amputee.

Once the pies were safely inside the freezer, Mal seemed less worried about his plight. Paul also cheered up.

At breakfast, Paul had been less than pleased to be lumbered with Dan, Lennie and the rest. He’d grumbled for most of the morning about them pissing away his profits, as Zeph polished off the pineapple juice. However, come lunch-time Paul mellowed, drawing comfort from Mal’s plight. The irony of a van full of frozen produce being stranded by a freak snow storm tickled him. And he'd stood chuckling out loud as he'd watched Dan and Graham trudge in and out of the snow laden down with the pie guy’s precious stock.

From the sense of relief on Mal’s face when the last lattice pastry was stacked, Paul guessed that the pie man thought his food would remain untouched in the freezer until the roads were clear (when it would then be loaded back into his van). However, Paul knew that, over the next couple of days, if the snow ploughs weren’t able to get through to them, he would have to let Graham and Zeph and the others polish off most of the pies. Mal - out of politeness (and the fact that he was outnumbered by six to one) - would have to pretend this was perfectly OK, although Paul knew the pie man would be totally gutted to see even one of his precious pastries illicitly consumed.

Paul decided, for the time being, he would let Mal continue under the misapprehension that his stock was saved, and smiled amiably at him across the bar. He felt no qualms about the imminent destruction of the pie man’s livelihood. It wasn’t his fault. It was just fate. In fact, by Paul’s reckoning, the situation was near-biblical. One moment his freezer was empty. The next there was a freak snowstorm, he had a pub full of hungry guests and suddenly, as if by magic, the freezer was full. It was a minor modern miracle. He just couldn't decide yet whether he pictured himself or Mal in the Messianic role.

The pie man’s predicament had put Paul in such a jovial mood, he actively encouraged the consumption of free alcohol during lunch. And hence by mid-afternoon, the atmosphere of casual acceptance, which had pervaded the pub that morning, had given way to one of positive abandon. And it was not long before Zeph, Lennie and Graham and even Mal, in his technicolour dreamcoat, were outside throwing snowballs at each other.

Although, after a couple of lagers, Dan had cheered up a bit, he choose not to join them, mumbling some excuse about having a touch of flu. In reality, he still couldn't stop thinking about work, and the report he was meant to be writing. He wondered out loud if he should ring the office again and make sure that Sandra had properly explained his predicament to Mr Wilson. But Diane, with a small shake of her head, told him to relax, and go and join the others outside.

Dan, of course, was not really worried about work. That was just a convenient anxiety with which to obscure the true cause of his concern – Amy, and her theatre tour of Finland. Normally his time was divided between work, home, the Lion and sleep. He was so busy doing something or driving somewhere, he didn't have a chance to sit and think about his girlfriend (if Amy could really be described as such).

But, stuck in snowy limbo, he had hours to dwell upon the image of all those blubbery Finns gaping at Jenny strutting naked around the stage. He suddenly thought of her, before she'd left, sat dripping on the rim of the bath, calmly using his razor to trim the straggly bits from the edge of her pubic triangle. He'd joked that he'd be able to lick her now without scratching his face. And she’d pulled a face, because normally it was she who complained that his stubble scratched the insides of her thighs.

He couldn't help himself but wonder if she'd be similarly offended by the walrus-moustache of some hairy, handsome Finn. He just hoped her co-star’s tackle was disproportionate to that of the imaginary horses whose eyes, in dim, red stage lights, he pretended to strike out with a plastic sickle.

There's no people like snow people

To their credit, given that they were all supposedly adults, the stranded seven did not start building things from snow until the second day of their incarceration. They were all sat in the bar waiting to be rescued, when someone suggested building a snowman, and Graham - partly in self-parody – said:

"Don't you mean a snow person?"

"For God's sake," said Paul. "Is nothing sacred from your political correctness?"

"I'm not being politically correct," said Graham. "I'm just saying that it doesn't necessarily have to be a snowman."

"He's right," said Dan. "It could be a snowwoman."

"Oh come on, when did you last see a snowman with tits?" asked Zeph.

"Well, when did you last see a snowman with a cock?" said Dan.

"It's under their coat," said Lennie.

"Or you could move the carrot," said Zeph.

"Carrot?" said Mal.

“You know, the old carrot for the nose, man. You never do that when you were a kid? Use a carrot for the nose, a couple of stones for eyes and give it a moustache and your old man's pipe?"

"See," said Paul. "When did you last see a woman with a moustache and a pipe." He paused for effect and added. "No, on second thoughts there was that couple in here the other night..."

They all chortled.

“Live and let live,” muttered Graham quietly.

“Hear, hear,” said Mal.

"Well," said Paul defiantly. "You're going to tell me next that snowmen are racist, cos there aren't any black ones."

Dan looked embarrassedly at Zeph. But he appeared to have ignored Paul's comment.

"Graham was just saying," explained Lennie, "that you can make any thing you want to out of snow. It doesn't have to be a snow man. It could be a snow dog or a penguin. In fact, I'll think I'll go outside now and make myself one."

"OK," said Paul. "You make a snow penguin, Dan can make a snow man, Graham can make a snow woman and we'll see which turns out best."

"Yea and I'll go down the coal shed and make a fucking blackman," said Zeph (although Dan couldn't tell if he was just being very sarcastic or had in fact been put out by the flippancy of Paul's earlier remarks).

"I tell you what," said Paul. “Why don’t we make it a bit more interesting?” He bought over a clean pint glass and put it down in the middle of the table. "You all put a fiver in there. Make a snow man or a snow person or whatever you so wish, and whoever makes the best one takes the lot."

"All right," said Dan. “I’m in.”

Zeph shrugged and got out his wallet.

"What about you Donatello?" said Paul holding the glass in front of Lennie's nose.

"Depends who's judging," said Lennie.

"I don't mind," said the pie man.

"No you're in the fucking contest man," said Zeph.

"OK, Diane can be judge," said Paul.

"We all know who'll win then," said Zeph. He swigged from his glass and looked meaningfully across at Dan.

"OK," said Paul. "Me and Diane will both judge."

"OK," said Lennie. He produced a wad of notes from his back pocket.

"Christ. You raided the Monopoly box?” asked Zeph.

“I was meant to be going to buy some stock on the way home,“ he said. “We get a discount for cash.” He peeled off a fiver.

Zeph snatched the note from Lennie's hand and held it up to the light.

"Well, it looks like the real thing."

He tossed the note across to Paul.

"Just make sure you don't smudge the ink," said Mal.

"Oh, ha, ha, ha," said Zeph caustically.

"Hey," said Mal. "You won't think you're so clever when we take your money man."

"So, what are you going to build then?" asked Zeph. “A snow ecosystem?”

The pie man tapped his nose.

"You just wait and see.”

Of carrots and things

"Got any more carrots?" asked Dan.

He poked his head into the scullery where Diane was reading the travel supplement of a week-old Sunday Newspaper, with Emma the rottweiler’s head in her lap.

"Help yourself," she said, without looking up. She gestured at the walk-in cupboard at the side of the room, and added, "If there's any left."

"Sorry," said Dan. He paused awkwardly in the middle of the tiled floor. "Probably the last thing you wanted, being lumbered with us lot."

Diane looked up and shook her head at the ridiculousness of him stood there, wearing her lilac cardigan under Paul's old Jaguar coat.

"We'll manage," she smiled. "We usually do."

Dan nodded and grinned.

"No-one expected all this snow."

"No," she said.

In the cupboard, Dan found a bag of carrots that were starting to sprout.

"I might as well take all of these," he said re-emerging into the room. "They're no good for cooking. They've started to go green."

"Whatever you like," said Diane. She sighed and Emma shifted her head, and looked up at Dan with mournful doggy eyes.

"Shall I take her outside for a bit," asked Dan?

"She doesn’t like the snow," said Diane, patting the Rottweiler’s, sleek back. Dan squatted down and stroked the dog’s bullet head.

"I though you were supposed to be tough,” said Dan. He stood up. "A little run around wouldn't do her any harm."

"I guess not," said Diane. She gave Emma a little shove and the Rottweiler got up and looked up expectantly at Dan.

"Don't keep her out there too long."

"I won’t ," said Dan. "See you later."

"OK," said Diane, and returned her attention to a feature on diving holidays in St Lucia, while Emma followed Dan out of the room, butting her head against Dan's elbow to try and get at the carrots he was cradling.

Outside, it were as if all the elements - the air, the wind, the light - had, along with the snow, become frozen, solidified, sharpened. The sky had the opaque, curved blueness of an upturned ceramic bowl. And, punched into it, the sun was like a newly minted coin of exploding magnesium. But everyone was too busy piling up snow to take any notice of the scenery.

Mal, Graham, Zeph and Lennie were all trying to outdo each other by making large scultptures. Dan couldn’t be bothered and had completed his penguin, before the others had even got started. He didn’t give a shit about the fiver he’d lost by taking part in this charade, but he was bored and decided to make a whole flock of penguins (or rather a rookery, which Graham had pointed out to him was the correct collective term for a group of the Antarctic birds) - hence the need for additional carrots, to use as beaks.

Whilst Dan proceeded to pile up mounds of snow in order to create his extra penguins, Lennie and Zeph took it upon themselves to pelt his original snowbird with snowballs, managing to dislodge one wing. A prolonged battle ensued, during which Emma scampered from thrower to thrower, head lowered like a charging bull, before spotting a large carrot discarded on ther ground, and running off with it into the field behind the pub.

When Dan returned from chasing Emma through the drifts, all that remained of his first snow penguin was a frozen head (the carrot beak having - in his absence - been removed and inserted into the top of it's snowy skull). Once Dan had apologetically returned a sodden Emma back to the scullery, he decided to convert his snow mounds into a wall, which wouldn't prevent any renewed snow attacks, but at least offered him some shelter from them.

By the time Dan had completed his defences, Lennie and Zeph who had joined forces had managed to create the body of a snowman about three feet across and eight feet high. Meanwhile Graham was busy sculpting a reclining snow Mother Nature with an over-generous bosom. And Mal had constructed the foundations of what promised to be an impressive igloo.

After a couple more rather half-hearted snowball fights, the men decided to call a truce and returned inside for a drink. The sharp wind and savage light had scraped and bitten at their skin, giving their fingers and faces the red, rawness of freshly sliced bacon. And their clothes were heavy with compacted snow.

"Jesus, what are you lot like?" exclaimed Paul, as the men trudged into the bar like polar explorers, and processed soggily towards the fire he'd just lit at the far end of the lounge.

The next morning - after a night of too many beers and too little sleep – no one felt like rushing out into the snow. There was no sign of any thaw. In fact, a few further flurries of snow had fallen overnight, deepening the drifts.

Paul rang the council to find out if the snow ploughs were any nearer to getting through. But apparently they weren't a priority. The council offered to arrange for a helicopter drop of supplies. But Paul told them not to bother.

"Don't worry mate," he said. "We've got a freezer full of frozen pies."

Mal looked glum, slipped on his technicolour dreamcoat, and went outside to continue with his igloo.

The others eventually joined him and, by the end of the afternoon, their sculptures were reaching ridiculous proportions.

Dan had created a column of thirteen Penguins. He would have made more, had Emma not run off with the rest of his carrots. Lennie and Zeph's snowman had (with the assistance of a ladder and a large bucket) grown to about twelve feet tall and six feet wide. Mal’s igloo was almost half built. And Graham's increasingly abstract Mother Nature would have made Henry Moore proud.

The next day, having tired of endless penguins, Dan offered to help Mal with the igloo. But Mal (who was looking increasingly anxious about the rapid consumption of his pies) said he was going to go and check the drifts and see if there was anyway through to the main road.

“No way,” said Dan. “We looked before.”

“It must have thawed by now,” said Mal.

“Naa, it’s worse than ever,” said Dan. “If you don’t believe me, you’re welcome to go and look for yourself. But I reckon you’re wasting your time.”

“We’ll see,” said Mal, and off he trudged in his technicolor dreamcoat - hood up like some skinny, psychedelic Santa.

Meanwhile Lennie and Zeph (having reached the limits) of their ladder had started to build the giant snowman's head. They struggled with the head for almost an hour, before deciding to give up and create a neck a quarter of the way down the snow giant's original body.

"Hey that's cheating," called out Dan.

"Who says?" said Zeph, and rather neatly decapitated one of Dan's penguins with a large snowball. During the battle, that followed all but three of Dan's penguins were destroyed and the snow giant was reduced to a shapeless mound of snow.

Zeph got quite carried away at one point, leaping onto Dan's back as he pierced the snow giant's midriff with the ladder. Zeph had to be prised off by Lennie and Graham. But not before he'd bloodied Dan's nose against the ice.

"What did you do that for?" asked Dan.

"You've fucking destroyed it man," said Zeph.

"What about my fucking penguins?" said Dan, wiping a smear of blood from his top lip.

"That weren't me," said Zeph. "That was them." He jerked a thumb at Lennie and Graham, who held their hands up in a gesture of innocence.

"They were stupid," anyway said Zeph. He picked up a handful of loose snow and tossed it towards the remains of the rookery, where Emma lay happily crunching carrots.

"Not as stupid as your headless lump," said Dan. "At least my penguins had a bit of character."

Zeph sighed and offered Dan his hand.

"I'm sorry man, I didn't meant to do that to your nose."

Their handshake turned into a hug, and they decided to go back inside.

“What happened to you?” asked Paul, surveying Dan’s blood smeared face as he entered the bar.

“Stray snowball,” said Dan.

“Stray Zeph,” said Lennie.

“It was an accident,” said Graham.

“You better clean yourself up,” said Paul. “I’ve just been on the phone again and they’re going to be through to us by this evening, just in time for the fourth round replay.”

Everyone cheered.

They’d been sat inside sharing a bottle of whisky and warming themsleves around the fire for a couple of hours, when Grham asked casually.

“Where’s Mal got to then?”

“Last time I saw him was after lunch, “ said Dan. “He was going to check out the lane. I think he was worried about his pies.”

“That was hours ago,” said Lennie.

“He must have gone back inside,” said Dan. “He’s probably upstairs having a kip.”

“I don’t blame him,” said Zeph. “I’m fucking frozen.”

Dan called across to Paul.

“How did Mal get on then?”

Paul looked puzzled.

“Mal?”

“Yea, he went to look for a way through to the main road, just after lunch?”

“Well, he hasn’t been back here,” said Paul.

“He must be,” said Dan. “He’s upstairs having a kip isn’t he?”

Paul went to the back of the bar and called through the door.

“Diane, is Mal up there?”

They heard her voice call down.

“No, he was outside with you lot wasn’t he.”

Dan felt his insides turn over.

“Shit,” he said.

“He must have met the snow plough or something,” said Zeph.

“Yea, don’t worry,” said Lennie. “He would have come back otherwise.”

Dan and Graham exchanged glances.

“This doesn’t look good,” said Graham. “We tried the other morning and it was impossible to get anywhere.”

“Well, it must have started to thaw,” said Lennie.

“It hasn’t though has it,” said Dan. “If anything it’s worse than ever with the wind and the extra snow last night.”

“We should go and look for him,” said Graham.

“He’ll be all right,” said Paul. “Did he have his mobile with him?”

“I think so, “ said Dan. “He was wearing his coat and everything.”

Paul plucked a business card from behind the bar, and tried the pie man’s number.

“He’s switched it off,” said Paul.

“Or the batteries have run flat,” said Dan. “I never saw him charging it.”

Diane appeared.

“What’s going on,” she asked? She looked at Dan. “What happened to your face?”

“Long story,” said Dan. “Mal’s gone missing.”

“He’s not gone missing,” said Paul dismissively.

“He’s been gone several hours,” said Lennie. “He told Dan he was going down the lane.”

“He was still worried about his pies,” explained Dan.

“We should go and look for him,” repeated Zeph.

“No-one is going anywhere,” said Diane. She grabbed Paul’s mobile from him, and started to dial.

“Hello, police, please…Hello, yes. This is Diane Evans at the Daffodil Lion near Fettlington. We’ve been stranded here for three days, and one of our party tried to walk to the main road several hours ago and we think he may have got lost…”

“What you doing?” hissed Paul. “He’ll be back here any moment.”

Diane covered the receiver with her hand.

“Will you be bloody quiet,” she said.

“You’re overreacting,” said Paul.

“You should never have let him go off,” she said. “What were you thinking?”

“It’s not my bloody fault,” said Paul. “He’s a grown man. Anyway, Dan was the last one to see him.”

“Be quite,” said Diane, flapping her hand at him. She listened on the phone for a couple of seconds, then turned to Dan. “What was the time when you last saw Mal?”

“I’m not sure exactly?” mumbled Dan, his head jumbled by guilt and panic.

“Quick,” said Diane, “this is important.”

“Well, it must have been when we first went out after lunch.”

“It would be about quarter to one,” said Graham. “They were half way through the regional news.”

“About twelve forty-five,” Diane told the police. Everyone was quiet as they realised Mal had actually been gone nearly five hours, and it was getting dark outside.

Diane finished her call.

“I’m afraid they say the lane is impassable by foot. They’re sending out a helicopter.”

None of them knew what to say.

“I should never have let him go,” said Dan. “I thought he’d come back straight away.”

“He could be frozen to death by now,” said Lennie.

“He’s probably holed up somewhere,” said Zeph. “He’s got a lighter. He can make himself a fire. No one dies in a couple of hours.”

Graham looked at the ice on the outside of the windows. As a canoeist, he knew that anyone, if wet, could succumb to hypothermia in half that time, But he didn’t say anything. He could see how Dan was feeling.

“Look, you’re all getting worried about nothing,” said Paul. “I’m sure Mal’s fine. And if he is stuck somewhere, they’ll soon find him with the chopper.”

Everyone nodded. But they spent a sleepless night, sat in the bar, telling each other over and over that of course he’d be OK, as the helicopter rumbled overhead.

The thaw

It was mid-morning by the time the snow plough had cleared a path down the lane. There was still no sign of the pie man, but there had been no fresh snow fall, and to Dan’s relief, the police considered no news to be good news. Although Mal wasn’t at his home address, they guessed he must have somehow battled through to the road and hitched a lift to the house of a friend or relative.

Amazingly, Dan’s Renault actually started first time and he ended up giving a lift to Graham, Zeph and Lennie (whose car wouldn’t start). Dan found it relatively easy to reach the end of the lane, slowly crunching along the tracks left by the snow plough.

Frustratingly, when they reached the Fettlington Road it was clear of snow, save for a bit of slush. It seemed ridiculous that they had been forced to spend over three days cut off from the outside world, due to a few flakes of frozen water and a strong wind. And driving toward Westing, past other cars and trucks and pubs and houses, Dan had never before been so grateful to see a cash point machine, a newsagents or a supermarket.

Beside the road, snow was melting from the roofs of cottages, and there were patches of bare driveway where cars had been parked. On the pavements, where walkers had compacted the snow it remained inches thick, with melted patches where handfuls of grit and salt had been hopefully thrown. And on the verges, tufts of grass - uncut since late Autumn - poked crisply through the slowly subsiding whiteness.

Towards the edge of town, the River West had burst it's banks, and the flooded meadows had become a huge ice rink on which sat ducks and other water fowl. The edge of the ice had started to melt, creating a narrow stream where some of the birds were happily preening, flapping showers of droplets into the air.

On the evergreen trees beyond the frozen flood, smaller birds chirped a welcome to the sun, dislodging miniature flurries of snow as they hopped from branch to branch. But on more sparsely-leafed bushes, ice had repeatedly melted and frozen, creating a cascade of icicles which glistened and dripped beneath the rising sun - making the glazed branches too slippery and awkward to serve as a perch.

On the industrial estates, where snow had frozen fast to corrugated roofs, it fell in slabs with thunderous crashes, shattering windscreens and denting bonnets, causing the office workers to rush out into the car park (twittering not unlike the birds) as they reversed their vehicles back from the buildings' edge.

That night they all (foolishly, but stubbornly) returned to the pub to watch the rescheduled fourth round replay. Unfortunately for Trevor the Weather and the rest of the Westing Boys, it was a clear bright night, and Queen’s Park Rangers, after squandering several chances, put a couple past them in the second half. As Dan drove morosely home, he saw the Pie Man’s van was still parked outside the pub.

The van stayed there for a week, and still no one had seen hide nor hair of the pie man. As the snow continued to thaw, the police searched the area with dogs, but no body was found, and the mystery deepened. Mal’s disappearance was even mentioned on the local news. Posters were put up around town. Old friends and acquaintances were tracked down and contacted. Everyone who had been stranded in the pub was informally interviewed by the investigation team. But still there was no trace of the pie man. Not a crumb.

About ten days after Mal had disappeared off into the snow, Dan had taken Emma for a walk. He often did this partly out of boredom and loneliness, and an excuse to spend time with Diane. On this particular morning he was walking alone, and Emma had run off into the overgrown copse behind the pub.

As Dan followed the Rotwieller puppy deeper and deeper into the darkness of the trees, he felt a chill pass through him and saw patches of snow still unmelted on the ground. Then, through the twisted trunks he saw something else that literally made him freeze. There, about fifty yards away was a splash of colour. He didn’t want to believe it at first, but as he got closer, he recognized the unmistakable patterns of the pie man’s wooly coat.

Sick with fear, but driven on by an urge to discover the pie man’s body, he struggled through the branches and dead brambles until he reached the coat. It was draped over a lump of snow, and he guessed the pie man’s remains must be underneath. He was terrified, and knew he shouldn’t disturb the scene, but he couldn’t stop himself lifting the edge of the coat and giving the mound a little prod.

He expected to touch something solid underneath, but he just felt the wet softness of the snow. He probed a little harder and deeper, but still felt nothing. In fact, half of the mound collapsed revealing nothing more sinster than more snow underneath. It was weird, thought Dan, the pie man couldn’t have decomposed in such a short time, but it looked as if there was no body after all. This was conveniently confirmed a few seconds later, by Emma, who bounded over and leapt playfully on the coat, flattening it into the cold earth.

Dan grabbed the puppy by her collar, clipped her lead pack on and dragged her back to the pub.

At first, Diane and Paul thought he was having them on. But the look on his face told them he wasn’t, and they called the police. Within minutes the woods and pub were cordoned off, and Dan and the others were taken in and questioned, properly this time.

Dan, being the last person to see Mal and the one to discover his coat, was singled out for a particularly rigorous interview. Fortunately, he had not been out of sight of the others for more than two minutes, and with so many alibis the police eventually released him.

Dan tried to explain it all to Amy when she called from Finland. However he got a bit emotional and the story got a bit garbled and when she ended the call, he was sure she still thought he was a murder suspect (which, he surmised, would not necessarily strengthen what remained of their relationship).

The weeks went on, the search was widened, but still no body was discovered. Mal’s disappearance even got a brief mention on Crimewatch and he had a full five minutes on Crimestoppers – the TV West version of the show. It was eerie seeing the pub on film and Mal’s face grinning from the screen – as if he had dissolved into the airwaves like Mike TV in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, trapped forever in digital purgatory, destined for virtual burial on DVD in some TV archive.

Although millions of people must have seen Mal’s face (and a small handful of people called in, convinced that they’d seen him at Westing Bus Station or Gatwick or some small supermarket in Solihul), the investigating officers received no concrete leads. A few days later, they pulled Dan in again and asked him why he didn’t like Mal, how he’d killed him, and where he’d buried the body. After a surreal 36 hours, Dan was released without charge. When he got home, he saw on the news that the police had arrested another suspect, but had also released him. It wasn’t until the local newspaper came knocking on his door that evening, that he finally twigged the man on the news was him. But he had the sense to say nothing to the reporter (charming and attractive though she was). And when he warned her that he had called the police she soon scarpered.

When the detective arrived, he told Dan he’d done the right thing. Having looked warily round the lounge (as if scouting for hidden microphones or reporter’s feet peeping out from beneath the curtains) he apologised for having been so hard on him.

“We know you didn’t do it,” said the detective. “But you were our main line of enquiry, and you do understand in these circumstances we have to interview you thoroughly, if only to confirm your innocence.”

Dan nodded.

“I understand fully,” said Dan. “It’s just so bloody strange how he disappeared like that. I mean, it’s almost as if he just melted away.”

“Perhaps,” said the detective, sighing, “perhaps he did.”