Star Matters

by David John West

  Charlotte and Joe could enjoy this distraction without feeling the desperate need to get involved in these teenage love affairs. They had seen it all over and over before emotionally but their youthful bodies did have hormonally driven urges that were equally demanding. Charlotte in particular was effortless in translating her athleticism and easy-going nature into becoming a lithe and naturally rhythmic dancer, making the other girls seem coltish in comparison. Christopher chatted to some of the other boys in the school science group as he watched her sideways from the edge of the dance floor. She spent considerable time in Joe’s company at these dances. He told himself that she never really committed to those small physical intimacies with him that would prove they were indeed going out together as a couple. Indeed, Charlotte would always take time to seek out Christopher and those moments would make his evening without ever turning into anything more than chatting. The other guys in his social group were totally impressed that Charlotte sought him out and they would fall silent to hear what she had to say and what he would reply. They would be disappointed with the everyday nature of their conversation. Christopher told himself that he didn’t want to push it with Charlotte and spoil their friendship but there was also the gnawing fear that if he let his true feelings out then she would be shocked and horrified and that would ruin everything. Charlotte saw it all in his eyes and let it stay unsaid avoiding encouragement or disappointment.

  One evening they were returning on the top deck of the bus the four miles home. It was around Christmas and it was bitingly cold, dark and clear out. They were quiet after the evening’s excitement at the disco and chatter was sparse. Several of the schoolmates were there and there was enough room to spread out and take a two-seat space for themselves on either side of the central aisle. Joe was towards the front of the top deck and Christopher at the rear close to the top of the stairs that wound up from the bottom deck. Fortunately for both that evening Charlotte was out with her parents so she was not involved. At the first bus stop after they had boarded the bus Alec Coghlan clumped up the stairs, his head rising into view on the top deck as he trod up the stairs to stare straight into Christopher’s startled gaze sitting as he was opposite the exit at the top of the stairs.

  Alec had been out in the bars of the small town with his gang and Christopher withered under the cold aggressive stare he turned on him now. A few rows of seats further along Joe could see that Alec was under the influence of drugs or drink. His movements were loose and uncoordinated as he barged and swayed across the top of the stairwell as the bus pulled away. It was also clear that Alec’s attention was fully on Christopher and that there had been bad blood between the two that Joe had previously been unaware of. Joe was conflicted: he knew he could easily intervene if events got out of hand but equally he should maintain a low profile and not become involved if he possibly could avoid it. In that tense moment the cameo was set; nothing had yet happened but events were afoot and that was about to change.

  Christopher stared helpless with horror into Alec’s face as it rose up the steps to the top deck of the bus and loomed over his seated form. The surprise emergence so close to Christopher meant that there was no escaping the shock of the moment showing on his face, fuelling Alec’s drunken aggression. Alec was beyond any inhibitions he may have had with the combination of his bullying personality fortified by his drinking session throughout that evening. Christopher felt his stomach pour distress widely across his being and he shrank back into his seat. Christopher only recognised this as fear itself; he was unaware this sensation could be harnessed to defend himself. Alec on the other hand felt like a predatory animal, barriers to action reduced by the recent beers, and he menaced over Christopher aggressively, fuelled by Christopher cringing more into his seat.

  Alec leaned right over Christopher’s head so his chest was angled above him and slurred, “Whad yer looking at!?” A moment later he swung drunkenly with his left fist and clipped across the top of Christopher’s head, horrifying the dozen or so passengers sparsely covering the top deck of the bus. Most were returning from their Friday evening’s social events, some were young people like Christopher and Joe, but some were middle-aged people returning from going out for the evening and they were unwilling or unable to help.

  Christopher was unhurt by the glancing blow but his mind was fleeting in panic. He was consumed by the imminence and dangers of Alec’s next actions. He knew Joe was a few seat rows forward and that he had seen Joe handle Alec so well in the past. Christopher acknowledged that he should be able to deal with this situation himself but still he hoped, Surely Joe will step in and sort Alec out for me. His immediate next thought was that he wanted to handle this situation himself. Also he had not helped Joe when he was in such similar trouble with Alec after school. He had meant to but it had all been over so quickly and then he had felt weak not supporting his friend. On the other hand Christopher had allowed Alec to push him around physically and verbally in recent months when they had bumped into each other and Christopher had shrunk away from any kind of physical defence. Christopher had simply not known what to do in the face of imminent violent threat to himself.

  Joe had seen Alec swing that drunken roundhouse punch at Christopher that mostly missed its intended target. He had just cuffed Christopher with his wrist rather than his fist showing just how incapable he was. Joe had been in a relaxed and neutral mood passing the bus journey home after his evening out. He was unready for such unpleasantness and further did not want to be seen to be getting involved in a fight with Alec all over again. Experience had taught him that the authorities may not see his intervention as praiseworthy or care to find out who was the cause and who was the foil. They may even see equal blame if a fracas ensued and then he and Alec would be in equal trouble. Clearly Joe could see Christopher was not going to defend himself beyond clasping his arms across his head. His cowed form was very vulnerable to more blows from Alec leaning over him who looked surprised and frustrated that his first blow missed its target. Joe’s thoughts tumbled over in his mind. After all these ages why did it take him more time now to size up a situation and act than it did when he was a young soul so many centuries past? Was it a good or bad thing that he was so conflicted and saw more argument to be brought before a decision which should really be so simple? The dilemma to decide to act swiftly or let it play out did not show on his features. He was just another onlooker sitting on a bus with an unpleasant scenario playing out that all found distasteful, deciding whether to get involved or pretending to ignore the situation.

  Alec settled the dilemma for them as his left arm blow passing across Christopher’s scalp carried his shoulders clockwise over the seat back and pulled his head around to face the front of the bus. His face registered comically slowly that Joe was sitting there and was looking on, his indecision appearing as quiet confidence to Alec, who had completed the ungainly punch and briefly considered what to do next. What had just seemed an easy and compulsive victim in the seated Christopher suddenly became much more challenging if Joe got involved, and he would be if Alec hit Christopher again. Alec was feeling fatigued anyway so he affected nonchalance and moved down the aisle a couple of steps to slump into the first vacant two seats he could find. He thought he had dealt with Christopher as he deserved and certainly did not want Joe to get involved. Best to leave things as they were with his minor victory over both Christopher and mentally over Joe as he associated the two as friends.

  Christopher was relieved to see the situation had resolved itself without further violence. He felt inadequate in that he had let himself down in front of Alec again and at some level blamed it on Joe for not coming to his aid though he knew that was unreasonable and he felt ignoble immediately at the thought. Joe felt he had let down Christopher by not coming fast enough to his aid but the incident was over so quickly that if he had intervened then that could only have escalated the situation. He had not acted to help Christopher when he could have done and that
would remain an unspoken hurdle between the two for a long time ahead. All three protagonists in the little drama had been affected and would carry the scars and the lessons learned into their futures.

  Winter merged into spring and those months passed quietly for the generation turning eighteen years old and with A level examinations in the early summer that would decide whether they went on to university and indeed which course and institution they would qualify for. This meant that most days were governed by their revision schedule which was an individual and lonely pursuit and there was little time left over for socialising so these earlier teenage passions and relations of all kinds were subjugated to pressure of schoolwork.

  The exams came round as awesome events always do and the three friends were in a good state of readiness when the reality of coming back to school for the exams was upon them. They found themselves sitting tensely quiet in unfamiliar lines of individual examination tables with overturned papers set up in the larger halls. Studious silence concealed anxieties and expectations. Familiar teachers who were willing their pupils to perform nonetheless assumed grave countenance and explained the rules of the examination before inviting them to turn over their papers and reveal whether they had indeed prepared for the actual questions posed in the papers.

  Christopher, Charlotte and Joe came out of the various examinations feeling quietly confident. There had been no nightmares of papers with questions they were not expecting or did not understand, and they had managed to complete each in the time allotted and with good accounting of their knowledge. There had been some muttered conversations after the various examinations had ended in nervous release by all the pupils but these were largely muted as they all recovered from the intensity of the situation. Charlotte and Joe in particular were largely unwilling to compare notes and feelings with other examinees and besides they had to get home to prepare for their other subject exams.

  EIGHT

  It was decided by his parents that Joe needed to earn some money that summer after his exams to support himself to some extent at university. Charles used his work contacts to find Joe a job as a labourer in a metal reclamation site between Sheffield and the M1 motorway. The site would take skips full of general waste from industrial sites and process it to extract the precious metal. Charles also found Joe a lift to work with a local man who drove one of the big motorised shovels on the site, Mick Coghlan, who turned out to be Alec’s father. Alec had left school at the first opportunity and was also now labouring at the reclamation site permanently as his father had found work for him there. Father and son Coghlan travelled daily in an old blue Ford saloon to the site.

  On Joe’s first day he was waiting outside his house in old jeans, T-shirt and trainers carrying a small rucksack with his lunch and drinks. The Coghlans pulled up outside and Mick greeted him warmly enough across Alec’s open passenger window. It was clear that Mick had no knowledge about Alec’s bad behaviour in the past. It was also clear that Mick was bigger and burlier altogether than Alec so the son was uncharacteristically quiet in his father’s presence.

  “Hello Joe, time to be off,” said Mick through the open car window, one hand proprietorially on the steering wheel.

  “Thanks for picking me up,” offered Joe. “Hello Alec,” he added in turn.

  “Hello Joe,” gruffed Alec without turning to look.

  Joe climbed into the back seat of the Ford and settled in. It was clear that there was not much conversation in the Coghlan vehicle on its run to work. Both Coghlans seemed to be suffering with headaches. That summer provided the usual mix of warm humid weather conditions and this particular day was dry and intermittent sunshine flitted across the car windows. The journey consisted of a slow drive across old mining villages and rolling countryside followed by a short fast motorway journey before the turn in towards Sheffield.

  The metal reclamation site was on the site of an old colliery. The company had bought the whole site but most of it was unworked, being several scrap metal piles littered about. In one corner hulked a rusty plant comprising two interlinked conveyor belts each with large round industrial electromagnets hanging over the belts to extract the bulk of the metal. The big industrial motor shovels picked up the waste deposited by hydraulic trucks that regularly came through the gates. The mixed waste was then dropped into a hopper that fed the start of the first conveyor. There was a station on each conveyor for a labourer to stand upside of the electromagnet to take off metal not picked by the magnet. The conveyor then carried on to the top about ten metres high where it dropped into a second hopper to a further conveyor where the process began again to make sure no metal escaped unsorted from the plant. At the end of the second conveyor the waste went into a big pile where a motor shovel took it away. The shovel operator was eagle-eyed and incentivised to check the labourers were not shirking and letting large metal pieces pass right through the system and to be thrown away in the waste.

  There were two broken-down old wooden railway carriages close by. One was freshly, but badly, painted and functioned as the manager’s office, and the other sported its original ancient wood stain and was used as the lunch cabin for the workers. The total personnel complement was four motor shovel and JCB drivers, three labourers and one manager.

  Alec and Joe were the labourers on the improbably articulated plant. A third labourer was so ancient and dusty it was improbable there was any useful life left in him and he mostly passed the day leaning on a sturdy shovel. The manager introduced himself to Joe and it was clear that Joe’s father was known to the management of the company, as he was acting overly respectfully.

  “First day you will take the second conveyor position, Joe. Alec has been doing the job a few weeks now and he can help show you the way. If lumps of metal come past then you pull them off into a pile next to your station and the shovel will come and get the pile from time to time.”

  Joe and Alec walked over to the plant. Alec said, “What he didn’t tell you is some of the big flat pieces can weigh a ton then the magnet can’t pull them off the belt. Thing to do is tip them up and roll them off. If they get too heavy you press the big red stop button and climb on the belt to lift and roll ’em. But Fred hates it when you stop the plant. His job is to keep the whole thing running all the time – but not lose any metal over the end of your belt.”

  “Thanks, Alec.” Joe hadn’t ever engaged Alec in meaningful conversation previously. Alec was much subdued as the youngest full-time worker of the crew to which his father belonged. And Alec needed Joe’s help to do the labouring to make sure no precious metal was wasted.

  Joe climbed the ten or so steps up to his little platform alongside the conveyor, running from the low end to his right to the high end to his left. Each conveyor ran about twenty metres long. On Joe’s left-hand side was the flat concrete area where his metal pieces made a pile for the motor shovel to collect. A couple of minutes after he arrived a warning siren went off and the whole plant creaked into life. It had been a dry week and dust blew off every moving part. There was little sign of oil anywhere so the metal on metal parts started a clanking cacophony that was impressively thunderous. The first motor shovel picked up a load of fresh uniformly rust-coloured waste and dropped it into the hopper of Alec’s conveyor so that the belt filled continually with a mixed stream of rufous soil, trash and metal. The metal was everything from thin strip to large dollops, flat and cool from blast furnace floors. The first electromagnet pulled off much of the metal then the conveyor moved on to Alec who picked over the stream and dropped metal parts in his pile. Soon after the stream of junk started coming over the top of Alec’s conveyor into Joe’s hopper and started filling his conveyor. For a short time Joe was confused by the stream; it was harder to tell by eye what was metal than he had thought. Most was coated in dirt and trash so not exactly the shiny metal he had been expecting to identify.

  It was messy, noisy work but Joe soon got used to it and started singing
songs against the din of the machinery to entertain himself. The first large piece of metal fell with a thud straight through on to Joe’s conveyor and started up towards him. It was more than a metre round and a few centimetres thick. It passed unmoved under the big electromagnet hulking ominously up the conveyor. Joe understood the theory of using the speed of the conveyor to get his hands under the leading edge of it, lift it on edge vertically then bowl it off using the movement of the conveyor as impetus. As it arrived he was shocked by the weight of it, which had been unaffected by the big magnet, and it would not lift. He hit the red stop button as the flat piece was passing him by. The entire plant stopped and in the ensuing silence he climbed on to the belt and squatted down to use the power of his legs to lever the piece upright and then roll it over the edge into his pile with a heavy thud.

  Shouts went up from the other workers wanting to know why the machine had been stopped. On the first belt Alec was smirking as Joe was getting the blame for stopping the precious plant. He had tried but could not budge the weight of the blast furnace floor spill. He saw Joe jump on the stopped belt and found himself impressed despite his instincts as Joe used the power of his legs and the wedge of his back muscles to roll the big piece off the belt. Alec was close to Joe in size but Alec could not have moved that piece. He watched as Joe jumped off the belt again onto his work platform and pressed the green restart button. Joe smiled through his early accumulation of grime and waved to the watching faces. They went back to work. A couple of hours went by and they stopped for a twenty-minute break. The biggest shovel driver went in the cabin first. A very large rat greeted him on opening the door. He swung a metal capped boot at the rat and hit it clean on the snout killing it as it flew through the air to strike the far wall. No one much bothered about it as they filled the kettle and put on a brew of tea. Joe sat quietly and ate a biscuit, conscious he needed to make his food last all day.