There were murmurings of accord.
Later, I saw Ewart standing twenty metres or so from the fire by a table that carried the salads.
‘You got everything you need, Ewart?’
‘Oh aye. It’s a fine spread. You saw to this, did you?’
I nodded.
Ewart helped himself to a spoonful of coleslaw. He laid it on a floury bap and wrapped up a hunk of just-charred meat.
‘A good turn out, too,’ he noted. ‘You and your sister did well at farm. And Martha’s sister, Julie, did well at Post Office. She got word to those in village that pop in for cash pensions and benefits and like and those that draw cash for rents.’
‘It’s a good crowd,’ I agreed. ‘Do you think much will come of it?’
‘It’s hard to say,’ said Ewart. ‘I don’t know folk round here like I used to. I can’t tell how they feel any more, or how they think. Sometimes I think spirit’s dead and gone, but sometimes I think it’s still there, just resting its eyes. A lot of those here are sons and daughters of men that worked with me up at pit. So many passed away before their time. They drank too much and smoked too much and ate too much of this meat. We all did. But I do see something here of that old world. People are as poor now as they ever were, and as tired. And bringing people together of an evening is easier than keeping them apart. And by that same token, bringing a community back together is easier than setting people and families at odds. It’s just that that’s where all effort’s been this last ten years and more.’
Ewart took a bite of the burger and mayonnaise dribbled down his chin. I passed him a napkin from the table and he wiped his face. I saw that Vivien had been standing with us. She looked at Ewart uncertainly. I was not sure if they knew each other but before I made to introduce them, she spoke.
‘It wasn’t all that wonderful, all the time. Those men who would come together so naturally to support one another would go home drunk and beat their wives.’ Ewart was caught for a moment. Vivien continued, ‘There are dreams, Ewart, and there are memories. And there are memories of dreams.’
Ewart waited for a moment longer, and then, ‘Aye’. The old man nodded and smiled ruefully by way of departure. He walked towards the drinks table, where Martha was busying herself filling plastic cups with cider from a barrel.
‘Do you not think it will work, Vivien?’ I asked.
She simply shrugged.
Chapter Fourteen
I was at Vivien’s house the next day. She sat with me and talked for the best part of the morning but in the afternoon left me alone in front of the spitting fire and climbed the stairs. She had plans to meet a friend in town later that afternoon. She told me she would be staying there in the evening and going to a restaurant in Leeds then the theatre to see a play with this friend and she would stay over with her or him at her or his house. She did not say ‘him’ or ‘her’ at any point, though I listened hard for those words, and she did not mention her or his name, though I listened hard for that too. I asked questions that would ordinarily force use of a name or a ‘him’ or a ‘her’. She answered the questions politely, brusquely, but used none of those words.
I heard her moving around in the room above. The floorboards creaked and the heavy oak wardrobe door clicked open and shut. The rap of wire coat-hangers on a steel hanging rail carried clearly. Glass perfume bottles jangled against their neighbours as Vivien nudged the dressing table and pulled drawers from their tressels.
I heard because I listened closely.
I had been upstairs in Vivien’s house only once. The downstairs bathroom had been in repair and there had been wet paint on the walls.
My first thought, though I was ashamed to think it, was that upstairs was not quite as tidy as downstairs. Certainly it was not pristine. There were piles of books on chairs on the landing and an overflowing wastepaper basket. The tightly spun spider plants on the windowsill were tarnished at the tips and the soil in their pots was bone dry. The windows required a damp, soaped cloth on both sides. Greasy fingerprints marked the light switches and door handles.
The vinyl bathroom floor had been covered with a thick, browning rug, flecked with rose-scented talcum powder. I found a tub of this on the shelves behind the toilet. I knew the substance from our years with Granny Morley, when she would lift Cathy and I out of the bath, rub us almost dry with a towel, rub that soft talc like icing sugar onto our skin then help our little legs and arms step and slip into jersey pyjamas.
Above Vivien’s bathroom sink was a glass shelf beneath a mirror which held a couple of toothbrushes lying on their sides and a half-squeezed tube of toothpaste, its blue-specked gel oozing.
I had left the bathroom and meant to go straight back downstairs. Vivien had been in the kitchen pouring loose tea into a teapot. The kettle had been in full boil and masked any sounds she made down there or any sounds I made up here.
But the door to her bedroom had been ajar and, in all honesty, I could not help it. I was able to slip through the crack without pushing it any wider.
There was a pile of clothes on a chair in the corner and more on the bed, clean and dirty, and the wardrobe stood open.
First I had gone to the wardrobe and run my fingers down the arm of a silk blouse of dull ivory with fine violet embroidered petals and picked at its chipped mother-of-pearl buttons. Then I had taken a cotton dress on its hanger from the wardrobe and held it up. It was narrow at the waist and wider where the material hugged Vivien’s breasts and hips. When she wore dresses or buttoned-up blouses they often struggled to stretch over her breasts. And when she wore skirts they were tighter over her hips and sometimes quite baggy at her slim abdomen.
I was skinny all over. My sitting bones could be seen and felt through my slender, pale buttocks, and I was conscious of it. My chest was thin too. My muscles were underdeveloped and my rib-rack stretched my skin almost translucent, and the edges of the bones were outlined in shadows when light came at them from above.
I had moved to the unsorted laundry on the bed.
You have to appreciate that I never thought of myself as a man. I did not even think of myself as a boy. Of course, if you had asked me I would certainly have replied that that was what I was. It is not as if I had ever actively rejected that designation. I just never thought about it. I had no reason to think about it. I lived with my sister and my father and they were my whole world. I did not think of Cathy as a girl nor as a woman, I thought of her as Cathy. I did not think of Daddy as a man, though I knew that he was. I thought about him, likewise, as Daddy.
In the months I lived with Daddy and Cathy in the copse I let my hair grow long. It was long through inattention. I did not think to cut it. I did not think to ask Cathy or Daddy to cut it for me. They did not prompt me. So it grew long. The colour of beech bark. And matted, for want of a comb. And in places the hair was lank with oil for, though I washed it, I could not wash it regularly. My nails were long too. I do not remember ever using nail scissors. I do not know if we had them in the house. When they became too much I picked and bit at them, trimming them roughly in that way. But with the exception of this occasional, inattentive grooming, I allowed the nails to grow. Not absurdly long, but slightly longer than, I discovered later, was appropriate for a boy. Or for a man. I did not know then that it was girls not boys who grew their hair and their nails long. I did not think about it. Nor did I realise that the men and boys who lived nearby would never wear a T-shirt that did not reach their jeans, as I did. Partly, again, this was through inattention. I had grown taller without noticing but still wore the same T-shirts. But partly, I have to admit, I wore my clothes in this manner because I had seen my mother wearing her clothes in this manner. I wore those little T-shirts and those too-tight jeans and I left my midriff bare because I had seen my mother do this. And nobody corrected me. Or nobody noticed. Or it did not matter. Or I do not know what.
So when I picked up some of Vivien’s underwear that time and I went upstairs to use the bathroom, and I
held it up and looked at the lace and examined the pale residue at the gusset, it was not like it would have been were I a grown man walking into a woman’s bedroom uninvited and doing those things. I assure you, it was not the same. I was not a threat. How could I have been?
I did not know about etiquette, nor about the correct and proper ways in which men and women should conduct themselves. Nor did I have any understanding that there were parts of the body that held a different worth, a different kind of value or category. And that those body parts were guarded with different kinds of clothing, and that some of the value or meaning of those body parts rubbed off on their prescribed clothes.
In short, I did not know what it was that I was doing.
And besides, my interest was not the same interest as the interests of real men.
So my actions cannot be categorised in the same way.
I heard Vivien upstairs again. She left her bedroom and went to the bathroom. She had put on the light. I could hear the breezy, oscillating hum of the extractor fan.
I got up out of my armchair and went over to the fireplace. I took the iron poker from its stand. Its handle had been too close to the flames and was hot to touch. I could only just hold it. I stabbed it into the heart of the glowing, fizzing coals. I held it there. I held it there for too long. The temperature of the iron was drawn from almost bearable to just unbearable and my grip instinctively loosed. The poker fell to the hearth and rang with a hollow harmony.
Vivien heard. ‘Is everything all right down there?’ she called.
I did not respond. Presumably, despite my silence, she was not concerned enough to repeat her enquiry nor to come down.
I thought about what I would need to do to get her to come rushing down. I covered my hand, still somewhat tender, with the sleeve of my pullover and reached down to grab the poker once again. I hesitated. It would be too much to use the poker to knock the coals onto the carpet. I was banking on the rug catching fire, or at least some strong charring, but knocking coals off the grate might do more damage than I could predict or control. All of Vivien’s furniture, paintings, books, could be incinerated. Then she would be forced to run down the stairs in her dressing gown or whatever.
I put the poker back in its stand and went into the kitchen. Vivien kept her best china plates on display on the upper shelves of an oak Welsh dresser. She had told me the maker once, and the age of the plates, and she had told me that they had been a wedding present to her great grandparents from a distant aunt.
They could all be ripped from their positions with one sweep of my arm. They would shatter on the counter surface of the lower cabinet, else cascade to the slate tiles and shatter there. The delicate, hand-limned indigo flowers and maroon leaves in disarticulated pieces on the floor. Vivien would hear the commotion from upstairs and come rushing down.
It would be thrilling, to be sure. But ultimately I knew that I would not be able to stand the censure. She would run down the stairs and see me standing among the shards of her family heirloom. My heartbeat would quicken, I am certain that it would. There would be a terrific excitement in it. But then the excitement would curdle. I would see her incredulity, her despair, her ire, and my guilt would first creep then rush to meet my elation, deep in the pit of my guts.
I took the kettle off its stand, filled it with water then placed it back and flicked the switch. At first the filament simply hummed but soon the water stirred. The gurgle of the water and the roar of the shooting steam were enough to mask the sound of my footsteps. I gently climbed the staircase.
Vivien’s bedroom was next to the bathroom and the door was half open. She stood in a bra and slip. The bra was black with lace trim. The slip was cream and silky. The thick tan waistband of her flesh-coloured tights was visible above the slip and it pinched her tummy. The place just below the thinnest part of her waist, where she would have kept her baby had she been pregnant, bulged against the cream satin. She had combed her hair and there was a slight, deliberate kink in it. The kink caught the incandescent light in her bedroom and turned it radiant gold.
She stood by the mirror and leaned as she applied mascara to her eyelashes.
She had not seen me. She had not heard me. The kettle sang. I backed away, back across the landing and down the stairs.
Half an hour or so later she came down in full dress. She was beautiful.
IV
I talk to Bill more than I should. I ramble. I distract him from the road. I talk to him about Cathy and about Daddy, about our house on the hill, about the woods and trees, about the food we ate and the cider we drank. I talk to him about the friends we made and the animals we kept. I tell him everything. Everything that happened that night.
I was tired of walking, and Bill was also travelling north. Meet her at the destination, he said to me. Find her at the end of the line.
I jumped up into his cab and we drove into the night.
I am his radio. I stutter and burble and fizz with the telling. And then I fall silent as I lose myself in thought.
It is rightly a two hour ride to Edinburgh, but this stranger weaves a crooked path. He takes back roads and diagonals and hops from town to town and village to village to deliver his cargo. I see more of the country than I had known was there. All the better to search for her, he said. You don’t know where she’s gone, he said. In that he might be right.
We pass over hills of heather in purple. We see the great rock illuminated from miles away and the ebb and surge of the grizzled North Sea.
Eyes blue like the North Sea, Daddy once said of my sister. Eyes blue like the North Sea.
Bill talks to me about the marks on his body. He once caught the wrong end of a lit soldering iron when he was still at school and the palm of his hand has melted like wax and stretched over the flexing bones. Part of his toe is missing on his left foot, lost to a mis-struck hammer. A jagged scar runs the length of his right thigh from when he fell while scaling a barbed fence. There are marks on his face from fights. Nothing proper, mind. Not like Daddy’s fights. Just scraps. There are peppered dots on his eyeballs from an infection when he was young. Otherwise the irises are the brown and grey of West Yorkshire sandstone, flecked likewise with the soot of industry.
I spot myself in the grimy rain-flecked wing- mirrors of Bill’s cab, leaning against the passenger’s window smeared with the grease from my cheeks and fingerprints and the grease and fingerprints of whoever has come before me. I am hollow. Distorted. Out of focus. Out of frame. The world rushes behind my image. Beside me Bill tells more tales. Issues with contractors. News from the world of haulage. People jumping out of the container when he opens up the back after a sea crossing. People even he did not know were there.
We stop on a back road somewhere in the Borders. We will continue in the morning. We settle for the night. He tells me that when he first saw me he thought I was a wee girl. A wee girl alone by the side of the road.
I turn out to face the window. There is mist on the pane. The street beyond is dark and damp and limned with a humble glow.
This man who is older than my Daddy takes my hand in his.
I hold my breath.
Chapter Fifteen
Mr Royce said the bonfire had galvanised the community. Cathy and I took this as a good thing. Now, he said, it was a case of turning that good will into action.
Mr Royce set about organising the farm labourers. They would demand better pay. The landowners round here had been holding them in check with the threat of shopping them for benefits fraud, but Mr Royce said if enough of them stuck together, with good evidence that the bosses were complicit in their activities, their threats would come to nothing. The landowners would try to hire work from elsewhere to fill the gaps. The potatoes needed sorting, the fruit needed picking, the summer months were here and harvest was approaching. The fields could not be left unworked.
They met in the mornings at the usual pick-up spots but instead of climbing into the vans, they handed their foreman a sheet
of paper on which they had written their demands. Mr Royce had helped them with this. He had experience from the miners’ strikes, though this was a smaller group, and I heard Mr Royce admit quietly to Daddy one evening that it might be too small a group to make a difference and that the work they did was too easily replaced.
It was hoped that the withholding of rents would make more of a difference. More families could participate in this. People who lived in houses that the council had built and once owned but which Mr Price or his friends had since bought up. The rents were higher than most could afford and everyone in the neighbouring villages – old pit villages – had accrued debts with Price and the others. Debts that they feared could be called in at any time, in any number of ways.
Daddy went with Mr Royce to each house in turn. Many had been there with us for the bonfire and those that had not had heard of the plans through other avenues. Daddy and Mr Royce told each one that everyone was going to stop paying their rents, and instead the money they would usually give over to Mr Price or the other landlords would be collected into a central fund. This was to help people in times of need and Mr Royce said in private that it would be good for just in case. Just in case things did not go their way and in the end everyone had to pay up anyway. Again, he did not admit this to the group, just in discussion with Martha and Daddy, to which Cathy and I always listened in.
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