The Litten Path

by James Clarke

  “Kind of present?”

  “What do you think?” Arthur beamed. “You can thank the overtime.”

  Shell chewed a strand of hair broken free from her ponytail. “Didn’t think there were any.”

  “Well there were.”

  “Right.”

  “Serious, love.”

  “Aren’t you always?” Shell caught Lawrence’s eye. “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Chap were on his hols,” said Arthur. “It were last one and he wanted rid.”

  Lawrence had to admire his father’s gall.

  “Suppose it’s a nice pattern though, isn’t it, kiddo?” There was the slightest lilt to his mother’s voice, and in this moment, seeing her not daring to like her gift, Lawrence realised that although he hadn’t a clue what the future held for him the last thing he ever wanted was what his mam had.

  “Yeah,” he said, bringing his mug of tea to his mouth and wrinkling the bridge of his nose so it would look like he was smiling.

  “Then it’s a keeper,” his mam replied brightly. “Thanks, both yous, I’m touched, proud, actually. You’ve worked hard and it’s a nice thought. Really, it is.”

  Arthur looked about ready to click his heels. He aimed a kiss at his wife’s cheek but the oblivious Shell turned away and left him puckering at thin air. That was all it took to send Lawrence into the kitchen. He clanked his empty mug by the sink and watched the rigid strings of sleet slanting against the window.

  Two weeks later and a wardrobe opened, several tiny moths flying out of it. Truancy was an easy enough trick, especially on Fridays. Arthur was on six till twos so up at five and gone for half past, whilst Mam was on her visit to lay flowers on Grandad’s grave and chat to Granny Kelly in the care home. Lawrence had gone along with her in the past but by this stage it seemed pointless. Last memories sent rolling down the pinball drain, Granny Kelly didn’t recognise anyone anymore. By now the Topaz stud in her engagement ring would be getting knocked by Shell’s unpainted fingernails. By now, Asa Scanlan’s Fiesta would have grumbled through town and deposited Arthur at Brantford pit.

  Lawrence grabbed the basics from the wardrobe: a pair of shorts, his slippers and a cable-knit sweater. Another moth settled on the door as he closed it. He put his finger on the insect and left a glittery brown smear on a sticker of Mel Sterland.

  Downstairs he flicked on the telly. It was March and TVAM was on. He noticed his sweater had finally lost that cloying, second-hand smell as he dragged the neck hole over his head, the thought interrupted by a sharp sound in the cloth and a peculiar give in the fabric.

  He tugged the sweater off and held it to the light. There was a large tear under one arm and, elsewhere, sunshine gleamed through it in a series of unnatural pin-pricks. He flopped, bare-chested, onto the settee. Another moth was nearby: he swatted it. He’d lost count of how many he’d killed recently. They were paltry things, barely seeming to move and when they did flying so gently towards the nearest source of light that all you had to do was clap them from the air, or crush them against whatever they were crawling on.

  He concentrated on the people on the screen. Some wore NUM badges, most dark colours. Under their soupy sky, each one of them seemed to resemble his father. The protesters rushed into the police, jamming against a fence where a man in a donkey jacket stood. There was a crush as the fence collapsed, people flooding the screen and trying not to stand on the man. The crowd heaved over him, rushing like oil into an oxbow lake.

  The camera cut away, straight to an image of a pit, a pit as mucky and confusing as the workings under the bonnet of a car. Headgear spun against the day. Trucks and footprints and smog pipes and bilge pumps, cabins and coke ovens, work yards and brick-yards, girders and timber; equipment, equipment, equipment.

  Lawrence almost expected to see Uncle Het barking at someone, neck streaked by that scar of his that looked like a cross-section of salami. The screen emptied. It focused on a close-up of an exhaust, then the car itself, a yellow bug crawling along a road that trickled over the moor, heading south. Lawrence supposed that was where everybody off the telly went: up the Litten Path.

  He switched off the TV and sat back, tugging at the rug’s tassels with his toes. They’d had people round to admire the damn thing the weekend before, where it had made a welcome distraction from the pit dispute, which was the inevitable main topic of conversation. Arthur for one was against striking. “What good’s taking action on someone else’s behalf,” he said, “cutting us nose off to spite another lad’s face?” which was one of his brasher statements, holding court, as was his custom, causing a stir on an afternoon of chicken drumsticks and paper plates.

  Lawrence didn’t know whether he agreed or disagreed with his father. He no longer bothered to enter into meaningful discussions with endless men like him and the other heavy-arsed loudmouths in the room. Pissed in the afternoon with their sideburns in need of a trim, vigorously mantled cheeks and noses with snowflakes of blood vessels burst in them, banging on about variety performances or cars or ways of doing things in days gone by, when everything was harder fought for and therefore more genuine.

  Another grey Sunday. Mam cracked out the china she’d lifted from Granny Kelly’s when she first took ill, and stood behind the settee rubbing Arthur’s neck while he talked up the luxury under everyone’s feet. Accepting the rug had given Shell such a lift that Lawrence found himself having to make the best of a gathering he’d no one to invite to, answering the same questions about school, giving the same shrug when asked what he was going to do when he left, head dipping when told how much he’d grown, how handsome he was when he knew he wasn’t good looking.

  The Sunday ladies drank Babycham, the men bitters, canisters of brown ale that went flat once poured into the plastic cups. Lawrence’s hair was combed in the middle like it was ten years ago, as he helped show off the rug and an antique carriage clock to everybody. The clock was another of Arthur’s gifts, and so deep had it put him in Shell’s good books that he was allowed to smoke indoors, although Lawrence’s mam was so busy finishing the cupcakes that she forgot to put out ashtrays.

  Arthur tapped fag ash into his hand while detailing the clock’s story. A win on the dogs had seen its purchase. “Last minute, like,” he said. “I thought I’d use the winnings for another summat for the wife. You’re chuffed aren’t you, love?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “My wife. My only keeper.”

  Eye contact was to be avoided, it seemed. Arthur emptied his hand into the plant pot then hurried to the kitchen to be loud and overly helpful instead. He could be seen pouring crisps into the plastic bowl on the worktop, sorting drinks and peering into the sink’s plughole, staring as if it was some kind of vortex.

  In the lounge Lawrence pushed his finger through the chewed hole under the sweater’s arm. It had all felt so artificial. The out-of-date fruitcake that was ‘still OK’, the fig rolls the Scanlans brought and Gordon Lomas’ hyah-hyah laugh and bald fucking head. Everyone wore pastel or beige, the women criticised Princess Diana and the blokes gathered in ribald groups. The afternoon peaked when Lawrence went to the kitchen to fetch more pop and caught his parents in there, touching one another.

  But what alternative? Protest and cry fake? His mam would kill him. This was Yorkshire. Far better to keep quiet than be thought soft. Far better to sit back and enjoy the sausage rolls.

  The sweater’s tear was now so much bigger that he might as well have done with it. He tugged at its edges until he’d ripped the garment apart completely.

  Satisfying to at least ruin something.

  Another moth flew past. Lawrence tried to get it, missed. He tried again and slapped the coffee table where it landed, the impact rattling the windowpane.

  He looked around the room. On the armchair were moths. The electric fireplace, moths. On the ornaments, the TV and the lampshade.

&nb
sp; He went upstairs to check his wardrobe and found more holes in the clothes hanging in there. The culprits crawled over the desk and all four walls. Lawrence swatted all of those that he could see then carried his clothes outdoors, slinging them over the washing line by the brazier Arthur used to burn the litter people threw over their fence, and the leaves shed by the sycamores stooping over their yard. Lawrence would light a fire to smoke the bastards out. Bonfires did for midges; he’d fumigate the moths from his clothes the same way.

  But not before he combed the rest of his room, checking under the single bed pushed against the wall, vacuuming the steps of floor space then changing the bedding. Still no nest. Just crawling or flying insects that were crushed as fast as he came across them.

  Next he tackled his parents’ room. This was not a place to be entered lightly, not because his parents were especially private people, but because being in their personal space made you feel like you had somehow wandered into their brains. This room was where Mam and Dad became Shell and Arthur, the parts of them Lawrence knew nothing of, ever so close to being revealed. Medicine, lingerie, letters, receipts, private heirlooms, belly-button fluff and toenail clippings. All of it told their secret, human story.

  Lawrence only dared search their wardrobe, although it was the same state of affairs in there as in his. He left every item hanging – Mam would hit the roof if she knew he’d been touching their stuff – taking the trouble to vacuum the carpet then the landing, spraying enough air freshener in the bathroom to choke any living thing to death.

  Downstairs he took out more moths and cleaned the stains they’d left on the walls by spitting on the hem of his t-shirt and using it as a makeshift cloth. The kitchen was all round edges, vinyl floor and Formica surfaces, its cupboards so packed and regularly used that the chances of a hidden nest were slim. Lawrence went to the living room to check in there instead.

  The rug was like a stagnant sea. Lawrence vacuumed its exposed sections until he reached the settee with its fringe that tickled the floor. He lifted the heavy piece of furniture with one hand and went to push the vacuum underneath it with the other, but as he bent to see what he was doing, he noticed a papery movement lurking within the shadows.

  The settee thunked to the floor. Lawrence stumbled onto his arse, the vacuum sucking a few rug tassels up and making a desperate noise. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Lawrence lifted the settee again and saw the hysterical gathering beneath it. The congregation and the shift. The antennae and the wing.

  He dragged the settee into the middle of the room. Revealed where he’d shifted it were thousands of moths, writhing and crawling over one another. ‘He slid the armchair out and found a lot more where that had been, then lifting the rug he found maggots: cream-coloured puddles of insects squirming in the dust, half-caught by the clumps of hair and the dirt and . . .

  “Kiddo?”

  Some voices could cut through anything. Lawrence switched the vacuum off, not daring to turn as he heard his mother’s keys clattering on the floor. His belly was after gold in the gymnastics and still he had the rug’s corner in his hand.

  “Mam.”

  The lines of Shell’s face were tight, her mouth an O-shape. She let out a moan of disgust, so soft it could almost have been a squeal.

  It made Lawrence let go of the rug, which slapped to the ground, its force creating a ripple that sent a plague of moths flickering into the air. The insects rose and engulfed the living room. They glittered like dust motes in the sunshine streaming through the big window.

  “Jesus!” Shell cried, slamming the door to protect the upstairs and swiping at Lawrence. Her nails caught his nape hair as he tried to escape, as she dragged him into the yard along with a wooden chair from the kitchen. Lawrence kept trying to speak. He kept saying her name.

  Mam.

  Mam.

  “Get your clothes off and sit on that bloody chair!” Shell shrieked.

  Lawrence did as he was told while his mam removed her denim jacket and wrapped it around her face, tying the arms at the rear of her head. She marched back into the house and opened a window, a plume of moths erupting from the gap as Lawrence listened to her talking to someone on the front desk at Brantford.

  “Tell him his wife’s on t’phone,” said Shell, “and I don’t care if shift’s about to wash, I want him home, A-S-A-bloody-P!”

  Soon Arthur returned, stepping from a taxi in his boiler suit and boots. Lawrence had stripped to his Y-fronts by then. He squinted towards the unbearable sun as his father took one look at the rug, rolled up and smoking in the brazier, spread each hand and said, “Well, obviously. Obviously . . .”

  Mam’s chin was tucked into her throat.

  “She knows, Dad,” blurted Lawrence.

  Arthur stared.

  “I said she knows.”

  “You told her?”

  “I had to.”

  “You told her.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  “You never think, do you? About anything.”

  Lawrence wiped his streaming eyes. He’d slipped his trainers back on because his feet were cold. He liked the way the maroon laces weaved in and out through their dirty eyelets: interlinked and criss-crossed; over and under; the over and the under and the . . .

  “Jesus, Shell, I got it . . . I got in a deal!”

  That dull sound again.

  “The truth, Arthur. For once the bloody truth.”

  Lawrence’s father looked like he might bolt, but he was cowed by the faces in the neighbouring windows, which were themselves bloated and paled by the glass. There were no escapes in knotty little working communities like Litten.

  “All right,” he said.

  “Did you not hear her, Dad? If you just say what happened . . .”

  Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose. “Lawrence,” he said. “I’m tired of hearing your voice.”

  He sat on the ground.

  “It were all from skip.”

  Mam’s chin lifted. Her chest heaved. “How do you mean skip?”

  “Frigging bin, all right! From nice place, Threndle House.”

  “Rug?”

  “Course rug.”

  “Clock too?”

  Arthur nodded. The rug had really taken. Its busy flames sounded almost like water running into a bathtub. They licked the air, noxious and declarative, the burned fabric terribly sour-smelling.

  “They were both in good nick, like. I mean you saw ’em, Shell.”

  “My husband the thief.”

  “I thought it might make a change. I thought it might cheer you up.”

  “Everything costs summat.”

  “Think I don’t know that?”

  “It’s made a show of us in front of everyone!”

  Mam’s bottom lip practically touched her nose. With a visible effort, she controlled herself. “Lower your heads,” she said. “Pair of yous.”

  “Why?” said Lawrence. His dad still wouldn’t look at him.

  “Just do it,” Mam said. “As I need to check.”

  “For what?”

  “Infection,” Mam spat. She strode forward and grabbed Lawrence by his head.

  2

  It felt good to be alone.

  Shell sat in the kitchen staring at the light. On the counter was Arthur’s dinner: a can of spaghetti hoops set next to a plate of thawing fish fingers and chips. The frozen food landing on the china plate as she emptied it from its packet an hour ago had been the only sound in the house, and since then she had sat.

  The familiar whirr of the airing cupboard. Shell had found the note after putting the food out. It said to wait a while, come meet them at Litten Hill. Arthur had specified to come at ‘tea time’ which might have sounded fine but Shell hadn’t been able to work out when was best to leave, and realised it was so typically unspecific an instruction that
she could barely give voice to her frustration.

  She’d waited on the lip of the bath, firing tepid soap suds down her naked back. She’d waited in the bedroom, towel-drying her hair and letting it hang, and now she waited in the kitchen with her husband’s dinner defrosting by her side. The hulking sky spread robustly outside the painted-shut kitchen window.

  She made a final patrol of the house. The smell of disinfectant and bleach hugged everything. It was over a couple of weeks since she’d burned the gifts, but vividly Shell recalled the bubbling of the carriage clock, its varnish peeling like skin from a lesion in a fingerprint. Dying time becoming visible through that strange ripple in perspective that heat causes.

  The rug took longer to disappear. Shell left Lawrence alone while she went to the garage to fetch the petrol. She’d expected him to have scarpered when she returned, or at least to be pulling his clothes on, but he’d stayed where he was, her son, desolate in underpants and trainers.

  She’d emptied the jerry can and tossed the match and as the rug took flame, saw how ashamed Lawrence was, although whether it was for infesting their home, being in thrall to his useless dad, bunking off school or being a party to lying and embarrassing her in front of the whole town, Shell wasn’t sure. He was probably just upset at being caught out. The second liar in a house of liars – you’d think he’d been dragged up.

  Together they watched the rug burn. Shell thought she’d seen the moths ablaze, rising like scraps of confetti. Again she couldn’t be sure. Perhaps dead moths were what she wanted to see. Those itinerant specks of insignificance symbolising the things that plagued her home, all the things that bothered her; the things that weighed her down.

  Although burning the rug hadn’t ended the infestation, because every day since Shell had vacuumed. Every day she had polished and prodded the crannies with the duster. She had washed the settee covers and the curtains and she had sprayed all the surfaces until they ran slick with detergent, but the insects clung on as stubbornly to things as she did.

  There was one now, fluttering towards the light. Shell went for it, missed. Those two were waiting; she didn’t want to join them. Lawrence, that teen. Arthur, that husband. It was hard to know how to deal with them. She had nothing much to say to either one.