by Gary Bell
When his father left home in ’82, like so many others who were never to return from the Welfare or the bookies or wherever, there were rumours of him being captured for running out on the IRA seven years earlier; rumours started, I’d always suspected, by Sean.
‘All the boys we lost under here …’ he went on, tapping one foot sharply on the ground beside the railing, crushing soft leaves underfoot. ‘And for what? Two hundred acres of open space for horses and dogs to come and shit on? The seams all flooded, shafts filled with concrete …’ He sighed.
‘Least you’ve got somewhere nice to bring the kids,’ I said. ‘Nicer than headstocks, anyway. Remember the first time your old man brought us here?’
‘Nineteen eighty-one. Sixteen years old.’ The edges of his mouth turned up into a wan smile, as he gazed over the dying lake. ‘Never shit myself as much as I did getting changed and going through that lamp room. Queuing at the deployment centre, all belted up with the self-rescuers on, waiting at the pit bank for our turn to descend …’
‘Miss your ride, miss your shift,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well, you never did make a very good miner.’
‘Claustrophobes don’t.’
He checked his watch and flicked the butt of his fag into the eerie green water, where it extinguished with the faintest trace of a hiss.
‘We’d better wrap this up,’ he said. ‘I’m on the bloody clock. Come on, car park’s this way.’
The return stroll was quieter than before, less jovial, as Sean led us down a different, shorter trail. He seemed to know the place like the back of his hand. When we eventually got to the car park he fished the keys out from his pocket and unlocked his bright patrol car with the click of a button.
‘Nice car,’ I noted with a whistle. ‘What is that? Brand-new Fiesta? I thought you boys were supposed to be on a budget? Looks like they’re treating you all right.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘She isn’t mine. You should see the squabble in the parade room after every morning briefing; we’ve got three new keys on the board there, with thirty uniforms scrapping over them.’
‘Don’t you get to take it home with you? Perks of the job?’
‘Yeah, sure. I just park it up on the kerb outside my place every night. That’d be nice and inconspicuous, wouldn’t it? My neighbours would probably shit a brick, you know what they’re like round here.’
‘You’re still in Cotgrave?’
‘No …’ He hesitated, grinning slyly, and couldn’t resist a final boast. He never could. ‘You remember Ralph Dickinson from the footy? Rich boy. Lazy eye. Used to throw those massive parties whenever his parents were away in the summer?’
I nodded. ‘They had that big old farmhouse up in Radcliffe? Beautiful place.’
‘Well, not any more they don’t. We got it for a fucking steal during the recession.’
‘The recession? Which one?’ I smiled. ‘It’s a nice place, Sean. Sounds like you’re doing well for yourself. I’m glad.’
‘You’d better believe it.’ He adjusted his tie, smile fading, car keys swinging from his knuckle. ‘We’ll have to get a crate in some night.’
‘That’ll be the next time one of our acquaintances gets arrested for murder, I suppose.’
He clicked his tongue, patted me on the shoulder, and handed me a card with his mobile number on it. ‘Save that junior of yours a job.’
‘Cheers.’
He started to walk away, then stopped, turned back, and gestured towards the nearest bunch of trees. ‘A million years from now,’ he said, ‘all this … all these trees, the plants and the animals. You know what it’ll be?’
‘Dead?’
‘Coal,’ he said. ‘It’ll all just be coal, a mile underground.’
‘A morbid thought there, Sean.’
He didn’t smile. ‘Do us a favour, won’t you, Rook? Do yourself a favour.’
‘What’s that, Sean?’
He fiddled his thumbs under his belt, scrunched his nose, and then looked me dead in the eye.
‘Throw the case. Let them bury that cunt. The world’s a better place with scumbags like Barber behind bars.’
And then he walked away without another backward glance, the shadow of a hooligan’s swagger still pulling at his shoulders, heavy soles clomping across the dull surface of the macadam.
12
I couldn’t face the drive back to London this close to rush hour, and I still had so many unanswered questions. I opted instead for the short journey north-west into Nottingham to spend the night.
Out of my three sisters, I knew that Shannon still lived in Cotgrave, and Tina and Sue would never move beyond the borders of the county, but I hadn’t been in touch with any of them since Jenny had walked out, and I didn’t have the strength to lie to them, nor to embark on what would surely be a long and raw conversation were I to turn up for the evening unannounced. Instead, I rolled into the centre of the city and checked myself into a room at the Ibis.
I’d kept my sisters relatively close over the years, which was to say I hadn’t turned my back on them completely. We shared Christmas cards, and I’d done the uncle thing at plenty of birthday parties, though that was mostly down to Jenny’s efforts.
My agnate siblings, on the other hand, I barely knew by anything more than their names. I don’t know if any attended our estranged father’s funeral in ’99. All those leftovers of the families he’d started and departed over the years, like a smattering of oil paintings half-finished and abandoned, never a picture completed after ours.
I did hear from Shannon that the wake was held at the Miners’ Welfare, the former Welfare Scheme Social Club, and it resulted in a bloody punch-up and an untimely raid by the cops, and I couldn’t think of anything more befitting the aggressor they’d laid to the soil. Even in life he’d belonged to the ground, and never did adapt well to the above.
The last time I had been home was in 1988, when I made a fleeting return for a different funeral, the burial of twenty-three-year-old Aidan Barber. If anything could’ve bolstered or justified my recent decision to become a barrister, it was watching the ground swallow that wooden box whole with my childhood friend inside.
Aidan had always wanted more from life, more than the colliery could offer, and certainly more than his brothers, uncles and father had desired between them, but for all his good looks, intelligence and wit, he never could outrun his surname. It attracted trouble and violence wherever he went, like nails to a magnet, and though he longed to break the cycle, especially after seeing me leave, the pull of the pit was strong, as if gravity intensified around the open maw of its bottomless chasm. The longer he stayed, the less of a chance he ever had, and, like almost every other coal miner’s son, he ended up following his family into the pit. It was there that he met his fate.
At the end of another gruelling shift, Aidan, a robust six-footer, couldn’t face the back-breaking stagger to the lift, which waited almost half a mile away at the opposite end of the low, narrow tunnel. His damaged leg was stiff in the warmth of the sunlight, let alone in the cold, dark damp.
There was, however, a quicker way to get to the lift; it defied every safety regulation on site, but he’d seen his reckless brothers do it time and time again without getting caught, and this day he fancied his chances. A conveyor belt ran through the warren of the mine, carrying tonnes of coal to the shaft to be lifted up to the surface, and a man could save himself the gruelling trek home with a sly joyride along the apparatus.
But the coal cutter was also hidden somewhere along the belt, a colossal piece of machinery that chewed the rock face into manageable chunks, crunching and mangling anything that the belt brought sliding into its jaws.
With a great swell of heartbreak, I couldn’t help but wonder, as I helped lower his coffin into the cold dirt of the churchyard, how much of my friend they’d actually managed to salvage from the chained teeth and knuckles of that machine, or how much of the weight I was holding was merely the coal that ha
d been blended into his remains.
Billy didn’t cry at the funeral. I remember that. He only stared off into nothingness, statuesque as the headstones that grew crooked and weathered around us, surrounded by his friends of the time, all those brawny young white men.
Seeing Sean McCarthy as the strapping married man he’d become, father and professional success, had rekindled memories I’d long left behind, and these were the things that haunted my steps as I ventured out through the unseasonable frost to the nearest off-licence to withdraw some cash and buy a bottle of Jameson’s for company in the room.
I poured a handful of fingers into the water glass provided in the plastic-covered en suite and then sat back to watch the video files on the disk included in the brief.
Several times I played through the CCTV footage of The Girl’s final day, the scant seconds yielded from security cameras across the village. The first footage came from the service station on Main Road at half past ten on Friday morning.
In it, she entered the forecourt on foot, polyester down jacket fastened against the April wind that rocked the pumps; it was the same bright, canary-yellow jacket that would end up muddied and tossed over her naked body, long after the rest of her clothes had been taken by the night.
Inside the kiosk, she used the Nescafé machine to purchase a small black coffee with loose change from her pocket – no purse – and left without any interaction, exiting the forecourt the same way she’d come in.
The next camera – fixed outside the Sainsbury’s Local on Bingham Road – captured her walking east only minutes later, disposable coffee cup in hand, neither noticeably hurried nor cautious in the pace of her boots on the pavement. So blissfully ignorant to the horrors that were in wait. She didn’t show up again until thirteen hours later, when she used the toilet in the Welfare Scheme Social Club, and was followed into the storm by Billy.
Drinking, watching, I found myself longing to know who she really was. I tried to put myself in her position, imagining what it must’ve been like not only to meet such a terrifying, brutal end, but to do so with total anonymity, with nobody to mourn her. Into the glass, I absently muttered the words of Emily Dickinson.
‘I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too?’
The whiskey wasn’t helping – how naive to hope it might – and I had to force myself to stop replaying the footage and move on to the recording of Billy’s interview at the station from the following day.
He looked even more massive than usual, practically swelling against the four walls of the small interrogation room, a black box recording in the centre of the table, two officers facing him from the side nearest the camera’s high-angle viewpoint. One of the officers must’ve been DCS DeWitt, while the boxy little solicitor at Billy’s shoulder wasn’t trying too hard to disguise her expression of being a woman dragged in over bank holiday weekend to back a losing horse.
Where were you last night? Why were you burning clothes in your garden this morning?
Did you know the victim? Did you kill her?
No comment. No comment. No comment. No comment.
It went on and on that way, and it wasn’t until I’d drained more than half the bottle that I finally slumped into a deep, drunken, dreamless sleep.
I woke to rain galloping like mustangs against the windowpane.
In summer, the curtains would’ve been paling already, but the early hours of autumn were a deep and solid dark.
For a moment, lying in semiconscious delirium, I thought I was home. Not in Nottinghamshire, or even my present London apartment, but really home. Darkness so thick makes it easy to be fooled.
I reached out into the area beside me, fingers outstretched, and found only empty space and a horrible sinking sensation. We’d fought again, I realised. She’d be off in the spare bedroom, or, worse, over at her parents’, and I’d been left to sober up and think about my actions.
I couldn’t remember what we’d rowed about, but it was almost definitely my fault.
It usually was.
Then I recognised the papery quality of the pillowcase against my cheek, and registered the dense silence behind the fireproof door, and the hotel swam mercilessly into being all around me.
For what it was worth, I still could’ve been in my own studio flat in London. It was just as impersonal and void of any individuality, like a show house with an unwanted squatter. Not like the home we’d shared, which had glistened and glowed with character and warmth all year round.
Jenny’s taste had always been so effortless. While I was off working twelve to sixteen hours a day in chambers and courts across the country, she’d single-handedly fashioned us a home that was as classically beautiful and quirky as she was, bolstered by an endless array of objects and ornaments amassed from Portobello Road, or else handed down through the generations. When it came to family heirlooms, I brought nothing to the table, inheriting only my father’s occasional temper.
Jenny had been born into more money than most would earn in a lifetime, and it had afforded her the enviable opportunity to follow every whim she desired, though I didn’t know anything about that when we first met at the Whitechapel Gallery. It was an exhibition for celebrated figurative artist Lucian Freud, elusive grandson of Sigmund; I’d gatecrashed for the free canapés and wine, but what I found was a woman who was beautiful, grungy, and outspoken in all the ways I’d never known. A talented illustrator, she was struggling at the time to make an impression on the city’s busy art scene, after failing to make an impact with the violin.
Ironically, it was my attendance at Bar school that saw me swiftly snubbed by the mob of sculptors, painters and shabby pseudo bohemians she called her friends, who unanimously scorned me for being a barrister, an elitist slave to the status quo, before scurrying back to their parents’ mansions in the west of the capital, far from my bed under the open sky.
But Jenny wasn’t like them. She wasn’t like anybody else at all.
The Jameson’s was sweating out through my pores and into the hotel sheets, taking my mood along with it, dragging my thoughts off to dark places, and my mouth felt as if I’d eaten a bagful of flour. I grudgingly swung my feet onto the thinning carpet and staggered through the darkness for the taps in the en suite.
I hit the light, shielding my eyes against the glare, lapped mouthfuls straight from the cold tap, and then watched myself piss lazily in the hotel’s unforgiving full-length mirror.
The man shaking himself off there looked old and overweight. His features were weathered, somewhat squashed, and framed in lines I hardly recognised. He looked stern and unapproachable, everything I’d never wanted to become, and stretch marks patterned his pale stomach in streaks. Two scars marked the groin in a V shape, mementos of symmetrical inguinal hernias, while a more sinister scar swept across the breadth of the chest.
I faced my reflection every day, but it felt like a long time since I’d seen the whole picture spread out so boorishly before me. I couldn’t be sure if it was the alcohol vacating my bloodstream, or the effect of returning to my home county that had turned my perception so morose, but seeing myself like that, alone in the double room, made me thoroughly depressed.
Compelled by gloom, desperate to reach out and touch something, I found myself fumbling for my phone on the bedside table after I’d slumped back under the quilt.
The clock onscreen told me it was almost half past four, and I had a message from Charles Stein, my newly appointed junior on the fraud case, which I didn’t even bother reading.
Instead, I had another whiskey straight from the neck of the bottle and embarked on the mother of all self-loathing text messages, riddled with lamentations, apologies and pity.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t even sure if she still had the same number.
Last I’d heard, she’d gone back to using Jennifer. I wondered if she’d kept the Rook.
She’d known all about my background, eventually, and she said she didn’t care.
Even after she took me in off the streets, into her elegant Kensington apartment; even after I passed the Bar and proposed, desperate to, as they say, lock her down; even after our first, second and fifteenth wedding anniversaries, I was always doubtful, worried that I might’ve been just another phase of rebellion against the class to which she’d been born, destined to become as short-lived as her ventures into veganism, Buddhism, Hinduism, blue hair, skiing, cycling and sculpting.
She accused me of building walls.
At first, she’d tease. ‘Why don’t you ever talk to me about your work? I tell you everything!’
Which must be easy to do, I’d think to myself, when your days consist of doodling mischievous bunnies for an unpublished series of children’s books … but, of course, I never said that to her. Not in the early years. That didn’t come until much later, long after the cute and playful repartee had descended into absolute ferocity, and we could hardly be in the same room without rowing.
‘You really want to know what I did today? You really want to know?’
‘Yes!’ she screamed one night. ‘I really want to fucking know!’
I plunged my hand into the recycling, pulled out the morning’s copy of the Guardian, and launched it across the dining table.
‘Front page.’
She looked down at the mugshot of McGrath there, convicted paedophile, recently released after more than twenty-five years and subsequently alleged to have raped another two pre-pubescent boys.
‘Him?’ She shrugged. ‘I read it already. He’s disgusting.’
‘He is,’ I told her, ‘and if tomorrow goes well, I’ll have him back outside the playgrounds before nightfall, because one of us has to actually work for a living.’
And that was the beginning of the end.
Even before the death threats started to find their way into our mail.
Halfway through my mortifying magnum opus of a text message, I had a sudden change of heart, a flush of common sense, and, thankfully, deleted it all.