Too Cold For Snow

hands.
     
    You can tell the house where the neo-Nazis live because they’ve got a big graffito on the front wall proclaiming allegiance to Combat 19. In the front garden – if you can use the term for the stretch of napalmed grass where they torched a Kawasaki after an altercation with a bunch of bikers – there is a flagpole where on ceremonial occasions – such as St George’s Day and Hitler’s birthday – they often hoist a swastika flag. It’s the one actually used by the Third Reich and if anyone has the temerity to try to bring it down they will get hurt.
    The largest ground floor room of No. 3 Lavender Drive is given over to a gym filled with homemade equipment that looks as if it came out of an Amnesty International report. One stand involves hanging upside down like a fruit bat with your belt hanging from a meat hook holding dumbbells in your hands.
    They have also adapted an old bedstead into a device in which you lie on the springs, while the others pile steel plates on your chest. Today they were running a chain through the window to a tree outside and hooking it to the twin handles of an industrial-sized dustbin filled with breeze blocks and bits of brick. One of them, Scrote, was being fitted with a homemade bit for his mouth, like a scold’s bridle, the sort of thing they used in medieval days to wire a woman’s mouth shut.
    ‘Take the strain, fucker,’ said one gigantic man called Raz, who looked as if he could. They checked the chain was wrapped tight against the bin. And just to reassure the guinea pig the giant said. ‘And if your head comes off we’re going to stick it on a pole and hold you up there with pride.’
    Veins stood proud on Scrote’s forehead, looking fit to burst. His eyeballs looked as if they were going to jump their sockets. Out in the garden there was almost a childish glee as the ten men shouted, ‘It’s moving’ as the bin shuddered and lifted a millimeter or so as Scrote arched his back and planted his jackboots in the damp earth. He spat out breath and drew in air, his face gurning with the difficulty of it, his skin tones running through a spectrum from crimson to claret.
    ‘Come on fucker, bring that baby home,’ shouted the giant, his voice like bass bins in a rock sound system.
    And then the bin was lifting, first with just one part of the rim still on the ground and then, accompanied with one huge exhalation like a death gasp and a great tearing sound as his knee cartilage ripped in two, Scrote started walking backwards with people clearing a path for him.
    It took three of them to take the harness off Scrote’s head and even the hardest man in south Wales started screaming as they did so. The men were amazed because he hadn’t so much as whimpered when a schizoid who lived in of the prefabs had planted a machete in his arm. Scrote retched out two thick chunks of bone and gristle, once part of his jawbone and gums, as the men cheered to have seen something so übermensch. Four teeth kerplinked onto the gravel leaving tiny skittering trails of blood. The man washed out his mouth with tequila.
    Krink watched all of this, absorbed all the data. It was always wise to know what you were up against. As Chairman Mao advised, the first condition of guerrilla warfare is the true and absolute recognition of the adversary. He’d already decided that they were in for a mix of poison and hand-to-hand combat. He’d enjoy seeing fear in the whites of their eyes. But before that could happen he had an idea about someone who might want to join him in his tasks.
    In their beds the women dealt with what they’d done, going through moral contortions. One argued it was a decision born out of love, another took the Old Testament line of an eye for an eye, while others worried themselves senseless about being involved in murder. You could call it assassination, you could call it ridding the world of scum, but in the eyes of the law, and in the eye of all moral conscience, it was murder, no doubt about it. One thing they were agreed upon: if the estate was finally rid of the scum then they would have a slap up meal at The Goat, even going so far as to have starters, prawn cocktails all round.
    In the sitting room above the bookshop, the two men were finishing a gargantuan breakfast.
    ‘That was a great breakfast, Krink, although we probably had a little too much for what we’re about do. It’s very physical.’
    Krink smiled at Kamosiwe’s provocative