by Stuart Evers
Threads was broadcast on Sunday 23 September 1984. Filmed in documentary style, cold, meticulous and terrifyingly objective, it dramatizes the effect of an atomic strike on Sheffield. The initial panic, the all-engulfing fireball, and most shockingly, the aftermath; the few survivors eking out lives in dark medieval fields, lit by the bitter light of a nuclear winter. It is the single most terrifying work of art ever made. Nothing else comes close.
My scene was over quickly. The director called action and I ran demented, trying to outrun the bomb. The director shouted cut, and we all stopped, all imagining the bloom of a mushroom cloud. It took just under a minute. The director watched the rushes back on his iPhone; called it a wrap.
Threads Redux was part of the Sheffield Documentary Festival, the largest of its kind in the world, and back at its hospitality hub, I drank a large gin and tonic as if it were Fanta. Jude Rogers, a fellow writer, came over to join me, set down her wine and asked me how I’d found the experience. I had no words, and was thankful Jude began to talk of the first time she’d watched the film, on a battered, oft-copied VHS, on a date at a boy’s house. A compelling seduction technique: shattering a girl and then giving her a shoulder to cry upon. She was not born when the film was broadcast, I imagine.
As Jude told of cowering in a nameless boy’s arms, I was taken back to another pair of arms, that of my childhood best friend. Her and Threads are bound together, woven and stitched into one another: I cannot think of one without the other.
We first met at school, a quiet yet resilient – perhaps even hostile – twelve-year-old. She was mordantly witty, scabrous at times, always capable of surprising with an out-of-character moment of personal revelation. We became inseparable; the two of us riding our teenage angst at the same pace.
In the last year of A-levels, she fell apart. I remember offering her some of my mother’s Valium to help her sleep and her declining, though she must have heard the plea in my voice. She failed A-levels. Spectacularly failed them, even though her predicted grades would have been good enough for Oxbridge. I went to Liverpool and left her behind with the parents she’d long come to resent.
Then in the February of 1980, she appeared at my door, a backpack on her shoulder, asking if she could stay. She didn’t leave for several years.
Anyone who has had a ruinously close relationship in their early twenties knows what happened next. You become symbiotic; you meld into one another. We shared clothes, we drank ourselves stupid, did things that in retrospect were astonishingly dangerous. We did not so much finish each other’s sentences, but fill in the next lines in an ever-stretching paragraph. And as anyone who has had a close relationship in their early twenties knows, it couldn’t last.
The Friday before Threads was broadcast, I told her I was going to see my parents; this the only way to ensure she would not try to tag along. I took the train to London to interview for a job at a music magazine. The editor was from Liverpool, he liked the sound of my recently acquired Scouse lilt, my disdain for the Beatles, my love of The Raincoats. We got drunk in a pub afterwards and he made a pass. I declined. He still gave me the job though. There and then.
On the train home, I wrote down all I would say to my friend, though I never said a word of it. Threads meant I did not have to say it. Threads meant she understood when eventually I cleared out without saying goodbye.
After Threads, I thought about the bomb constantly; thought about it even more than my act of cowardice. For a small feminist press, I wrote an essay about patriarchy and the bomb – reprinted in this volume – about how ships and planes were all female, but bombs always male. It is no coincidence that the first bombs were named Fat Man and Little Boy. I thought about the bomb more than my friend I left behind.
I have not looked her up, have not typed her name into search engines or social media platforms (I made this mistake before, only finding an electronic book of remembrance for my former lover, lost to multiple sclerosis). I do not look for her, but prefer to think of her holding me as we watched that film, holding me and saying it was all okay, that it was just a film. And for that moment forgetting what I was about to do, and what I had already done.
Lissa Capel, Kingdom Cum: Selected Essays, 1984–2018 (Influx Press, 2019)
4
They opened the French doors onto the veranda; Carter disallowed from smoking inside while Josie was in state. The two chairs, wicker, cushioned in red cotton, looked out over the fields, a rattan table between them, heavily ringed from Scotch and wine. Their lives together: two men in two chairs, a table between them, a fair approximation of their berth in Shropshire.
During the months they didn’t speak, Drum had missed Carter with a visceral, physical hurt. He’d tried to talk to Gwen in the way he spoke to Carter, but their exchanges were laboured; she did not quite follow the internal logic, the bends and swerves, could not cut flesh and plaster wound within the same argument. She was game for it, she understood. Transparent old Drum. To lose a daughter, inexcusable; to lose a friend, unimaginable.
Détente was reached with a bottle brought round on a Friday night. Carter’s invitation to the veranda to make some inroads into it. Seconds to decide. He could feel Gwen’s smile warm his back. A phoney war over, the sun down and the outside fairy lights lit, red, blue, yellow, green. A drink of Scotch, the smell of Carter’s cigarettes, the averted eyes of his apology.
‘I know this isn’t your fault,’ Drum had said. ‘I shouldn’t have blamed you.’
‘It’s forgotten,’ Carter said.
‘I keep thinking she’ll come back,’ Drum said. ‘At the start of the day I think this’ll be the day she comes home, tail between and all that.’
Drum looked into the lights again, the muddle of them through the tears he would not shed.
‘She’ll be back,’ Carter said. ‘Mark my words.’
He thought of that night, that reconciliation, the absolute conviction of Carter’s words. Four years now. Four, soon to be five. Her birthdays came and went; so too the lightening of the mornings and the pulling in of the nights. Long times in the fields, alone with imaginings and cows. Days in rain and sleet, the smatter of it on the milking shed’s corrugated roof, the snap of the inflators on the cows’ teats, the checking through of jobs and routine.
For all the hard work, for all the worries of money, of the safety of the livestock, of milk prices, of the creep of pipeline production and bigger, more economically viable farms, he would not swap the life. The closeness of his son, the days spent with him, precious now, unsaid but precious. Annie might have run away, but no doubt would have one day run away regardless. You change a life, but the material essence of it can’t be altered. She was always going to leave him; she had always been leaving him. She would come back though. When it was time. She would return and he would forgive her.
‘You’ll be watching tonight?’ Carter said, sitting down on the wicker chair, lighting his cigarette.
Drum nodded.
‘I wanted to watch it with you,’ Carter said. ‘But with Tommy staying . . .’
‘We can watch it together another time,’ Drum said.
‘You’re recording it?’ Carter said.
‘Gwen and Nate have been on at me to get a video for ages. Got it yesterday.’
Carter nodded and blew out a swatch of smoke.
Drum took a sip of his Scotch. The wind was up and Carter’s limp hair danced like children.
‘Daph won’t watch it,’ Carter said. ‘Tom neither.’
‘Fatherhood suits him,’ Drum said. ‘You can tell.’
‘He likes the control,’ he said. ‘That I can see. He’s read all these books. Has all these ideas. Thinks he’s raising the next Iron Lady.’
‘He looks happy.’
‘She’s a good girl, that Victoria. But I told him, I said, there’s more to life than just kids and wife. You need to live a little before all that, or you’ll live too much when you shouldn’t. He said to me, “Not everyone’s like you
, Dad.” The little skate. Bastard thinks he knows it all. I told him, I was in Service, every one of his ancestors fought a war at some stage, but he thinks he knows it all? He just laughed. They have no fear, these kids. If they fall, we’ll be here to help them. If we’re not here, the state will be. We had it good, but this lot, they’ve got it made.’
Carter stubbed out his cigarette and opened his pack for another. He looked at Drum.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It gets me like this when he comes here. Worse now there’s a kid. All Daph ever talks about, all she cares about.’
‘Gwen’s convinced Anneka’s pregnant. Says she knows it.’
Carter beat his hand on the table. Something done when playing backgammon. Hard lines. Drum had dreamed of Anneka’s baby; already talking, already dressed in school uniform. Drum talking to the child but the child not understanding, deaf perhaps, or not understanding his accent. He’d watched Gwen cry in the night when she thought he was sleeping, heard her move to the spare room that always smelled of Anneka no matter how many dishes of potpourri were left on the dresser.
‘I thought Gwen was going to leave me,’ Drum said. ‘There was a time not long ago, I thought she was just going to jack it all in.’
Carter raised an eyebrow.
‘You never said.’
‘I’m saying now.’
‘She’s always seemed so strong. Even after everything.’
‘You’re not the only one who can put on a show,’ Drum said.
Carter took in a long lungful of smoke, blew it out in two straight beams from his nose.
‘We should go inside.’
‘Yes.’
They stayed in the wicker chairs, looking out over the fields, the only sound Carter smoking and Drummond drinking.
*
Drum set the video to record before the programme started. When he came to watch it again, so many times later, the first ten minutes of tape were coverage of a darts match, Cliff Lazarenko forever beating Leighton Rees three sets to one. The darts hitting the board, Cliff victorious; Tony Gubba congratulating him on his progress to the next round. Dart after dart, on fast forward; the players waddling ducklike to the board, ripping them from it.
Gwen came into the living room as, on screen, a spider constructed a web. Over the sound of birdsong, a voiceover, stentorian and authoritative, the voice he had wanted to hear on the phone, the one wishing him luck, said:
In an urban society, everything connects. Each person’s needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong, also make it vulnerable.
The birdsong and spider disappeared, replaced by the smoke and engine noise of a city.
‘I’m not sure I can watch this,’ Gwen said.
But she stayed. She stayed and she held his hand as the bomb dropped and the people screamed. She stayed as everything burned: bones and bodies; buildings and fields; an ET soft toy: a pointed, nasty detail. The tea on the table grew cold. He watched, burned alive and bunkered both. He felt the cool air of down below, what he’d imagined was going on above while he was down there, happening now on the television, much as he’d seen it. The panic, the desperation, the white light and nothing. The collective trauma, the one experienced now up and down the country. The audience watching this, watching the horror unfold over time, a day, a week, a month, a year, the power of that.
Having lived through it once, here to live through it again; worse this way, worse with the concrete of the visuals. He could smell Gault. He could see Anneka screaming. He could see Nate and he could see Anneka and he could see his wife and he could see Gault at the radio, calling off the exercise. He could see the nuclear winter. The nuclear winter as he had not seen it. The years of the survivors. The cold and black, the tilling of unfertile land.
It was him on the moorland, the hills, the blasted black territories. It was him almost mute, surviving there, day by day. It was them all together under the slate-black skies. And at the end, it was not them. It was Anneka. Anneka alive and pregnant, pregnant and giving birth.
A symbol of hope that birth, in the squalid makeshift maternity ward, and it was Anneka, not the actress, who was handed her baby, wrapped in swaddling, the swaddling covered in blood. And it was Anneka, not the actress, looking down on her baby, her face curious at first, then disbelieving and then in terror. Absolute terror, the actress, the Anneka, absolute terror and her face contorted and just the sound of a scream, so loud the scream the wooden housing of the television shook, and then the end, the very end, Anneka, the actress, dissolving and the film ending. Credits rolling, but the scream still shuddering the living room.
He took the two mugs of cold tea through to the kitchen. Gwen followed him, poured two glasses of Scotch. They sipped their drinks in the kitchen, standing and not looking at each other.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘And this isn’t the time.’
‘When will it ever be?’ she said. She looked at him in ice and fire, in bomb and blast, in love and rockets.
‘Whether you help me or not,’ she said. ‘I’m going to find her.’
He looked at his drink, he looked at his wife. He saw his daughter birth the terror child, saw her scream, the noise audible around the world.
‘You can’t stop me,’ she said.
5
They were ambivalent to him, the cows. They seemed to love his father, but treated Nate as mere wrangler, and somehow they were worse on Sundays. Seemed to know he was probably hungover. The only time it was different was when he watched the births, the guts and matter of it, the blind, jellied calves emerging. His father was moved by it. Every time he was moved, and Nate could not help himself either. The cows looked at him differently then, but not now.
They used surge milkers still, though others had upgraded to pipeline systems, a development his father had steadfastly opposed. The speed meant more cows could be milked, the graft was less than with the surge milkers, but his father had seen pipeline in action and thought the cows looked unhappy. It was a fear of not being able to fix them, though; Nate thought. Of having to learn something new after so long herding the cows into the herringbone enclosures, affixing the teats, setting the rate of suction just so, fixing pulsators, reattaching blown air hoses.
‘You know where you are with surge,’ his father would say. ‘Know to the gallon what’s coming. Keeps the mastitis at bay too. They’re happy girls, why change that?’
Because I already have the back of a sixty-year-old. Because an hour less with the cows would be an hour free of them. Because I spend too long replacing gaskets, getting evils from the cows as the suction fails once again.
He put the inflators on the teats of a cow his father called Patch, set the pulsator. He’d tried to speed up the process once, but his father had shaken his head, told him impatience would be the death of him. His father right, of course: no way to short-cut the process. The pump started, the milk flowed, he set about the next one, the one his father called Jem.
It was an automated process, both he and the cows. An animal production line. There were other things he could have done. An ex-professional footballer gave them a talk at the college, a question-and-answer thing. The ex-pro regaled them with his meagre glories, then told them he was now a physiotherapist, something he’d become interested in after a long injury. Nate had looked into a course; he did not have the qualifications, did not ultimately have the interest. Easier to stay on the farm, easier to be with his father, take his money on a Friday, live without worry for bills and food.
The fifth milker would not work, nothing happening when he attached the inflators. He turned on the vacuum pump and leaned his bulk on top of it, the pressure on the gasket kicking the pulsator into life.
‘Make a farmer of you yet, boy,’ he said, aping his father.
Though he was already a farmer, at least in the daytime, at least when working. To look at him, yes, a farmer, a farmhand, close to
the land, close to the cattle, his little whistles to them. Harris the dog, his German shepherd raised from a pup, alert and lively, as suspicious as his owner about the cows. Nate could talk as a farmer, could make like one, but it still felt like something temporary, something he would outgrow, like thinking he’d play for City.
In a fight, someone did his ankle. An accident, not intentional. He watched City lose the Cup Final replay on the television with his leg up. Football dying for him then. The posters came down from the walls. He no longer nutmegged Cruyff, no longer thought of Asa Hartford, other things having taken over. The farm mainly; the farm and Pete. The working week and then Friday-night fighting with Pete. Pete now living in the old caravan, his uncle Joseph disowning him. No word of why. Later, Nate understanding. In the caravan, understanding. Things always different in the caravan; a place of greater safety.
It was warm in the milking shed, and he watched the cows while smoking a joint, his right hand bruised, the knuckle flattened, more so than usual. Making a fist still smarted a couple of days on from the ruck. The knuckle had gone on the extreme of his right hand. A tattoo there would now read love and hat. A smile at that. Him and Pete on a Friday. Fights and then to the caravan, to inspect the wounds. Kiss the wounds and welts away. Pete now sleeping; Nate’s turn to herd.
Nate had seen them arrive: Thomas with his hair gel and slip-on shoes; the wife, posh bird, the kind that liked him well enough sometimes, the kind who would touch his arms and giggle, the way they did with Pete. Like Pete, he had no trust in these women. ‘Like horses, men like us,’ Pete had said. ‘Horses, but not for breeding.’ They’d done men like Thomas. Beaten them in the town centre, outside pubs. Not much sport, but fun nonetheless.