by James Clarke
On the wall was a photo collage, a boy and a girl in most of the pictures. The boy was a pretty thing, effeminate. The girl always wore sunglasses, had a face you could never truly make out. This must be the Swarsby children. There they were holding a Labrador puppy. There they were by a sports car and there again in a picture with a pretty woman with hair like pasta twirls, a satisfied man in his forties. Clive Swarsby was in only one of the photos. His arm was around another man, a handsome man, severe hair parted, prissy-looking. Swarsby and this man wore waistcoats, bow-ties, cummerbunds. They were surrounded by mist, or was it rug smoke? Each tilted a conceited face towards the camera.
Blink and you’re the wrong side of thirty. Never travelled, soft as shit and one day to be deader than driftwood. There was no point in bloody anything, not even your next breath. Arthur punched the photo collage, breaking the glass, then climbed the staircase of Threndle House. As he went, his hand dripped blood into the port spillage. Not that he noticed. He wouldn’t really much have cared if he had.
The upstairs was exactly like the downstairs. Dusty, sparsely decorated, Threndle’s rooms were either devoid of furniture, character or both. You had to laugh, so Arthur did. He laughed drunkenly through this grand old house.
Eventually he reached the master bedroom, which was as blue as the living room and just as furnished. More boxes were stacked against the walls, three wide, four high. There was a bed, king-sized, and the armchair and linen chest were fancily lined. Velvety drapes, a Juliet balcony, a compact dresser, a set of drawers and more boxes. Fuck me, a bathroom. Arthur had grown up using an outdoor bog.
Standing out on the balcony he smoked a roll-up and disposed of the dog-end, watching the ember nicker away in the wind. Swarsby’s bedroom looked like an unpacked set from one of those melodramas his mam used to drag him and Sam to. Aged seven and eight at the Odeon in Rotherham, Sam sitting transfixed, fingers belly-clasped, Arthur tugging the loose threads on the armrests and kicking the backs of the seats in front.
He sat on the bed where Swarsby slept: a father whose family weren’t forever looking at him like he was a meal that had gone wrong. When you thought about it, a big house was as good as it got, and it wasn’t even that good.
He gripped his knees until he’d composed himself, then went to the dresser, rifling through the drawers for something, anything, that he could sell that might make enough money to see out this strike. It wasn’t like the Swarsbys didn’t have plenty already. And if Shell already thought him a thief, why disappoint her expectations?
A jewellery box was in the top drawer, hidden at the back. It was made of sandalwood, uncarved but well-varnished, and had a copper clasp and a vacant keyhole. Arthur had just stuffed the box up his sweater when two channels of light flashed up the driveway and swept the bedroom. He ducked, swearing, feeling as hollow yet constricted as he did whenever he and Asa descended into the airlock at Brantford, speeding in the cage towards the drift tunnel. He tucked the sweater into the waist of his jeans to trap the box, then crawled out of the room, cursing every light as he made his way towards the stairs. He’d had to turn on, hadn’t he? Now the house was lit up like a bloody Christmas tree.
The stairs he took two at a time, pain in his toe forgotten. There wouldn’t be much Arthur could say to Shell if he was caught. On the other hand it might give him the chance to tell her that he loved her.
He burst outside and saw another vivid moon. The temperature had dropped and the car’s brisk light dominated everything, fog light penetrating the March air.
Too many roll-ups: Arthur had to catch his breath. He could see the lawn stretching beyond him like a great woollen pinafore. He felt oddly weightless, had a mind to walk towards the car now that it had finished parking, actually, both hands held out, ready for the cuffs. He might as well, seeing as between the coal board, the government and his family, the whole world wanted to gut him and part of him wished more than anything that it would get a move on.
“Arthur!”
A figure was standing on the garden wall, hands on its hips. Arthur shrank from it, but in doing so was obliged to edge closer to the car, which had just killed its engine. People were climbing out. “Why are the lights on?” said a girl. She wasn’t from around here.
“Daddy, look,” said a boy.
Nor him.
“Someone’s been inside. You two stay in the car while I go check.”
Swarsbys.
Arthur crept over the lawn to where the figure on the wall had been. There was no longer anyone there. He knew it was the only exit point, the same spot he and Lawrence had hopped over the night of the moth rug. He was about to make a break for it when a hand slipped over his mouth. He squirmed. Tried to cry out. Driving an elbow into his captor’s torso, he was rewarded with a grunt.
Still he was held fast.
Arthur kicked the man’s legs but another arm slid around his belly, somehow missing the jewellery box. He was forced upon the grass and pinned. Lips retreated across teeth. The world was soaking and a strange, cushioned piece of flesh was pressing against his shaven head. A weighted mass dug upon his back.
Arthur knew then who had him: whose hand was exerting the pressure. It was the same hand that had held him when he was a boy, the same hand that had stopped him from setting fire to the old tenterhouse on the hill that time. It was the same hand that had clamped to its howling owner’s neck all those years ago.
“Get off, Het. Let us go!”
Then came another voice.
“Dad.”
Arthur stopped struggling immediately.
“All right, kid.”
“What you doing?”
Het let go. Arthur climbed to his feet, and, seeing that his son and brother had come for him, had never felt so ashamed in all his life. He was going to cry. He couldn’t stop himself.
A sob came out.
Het shoved Arthur with both hands. “What the flaming hell!”
Arthur tried to speak. Het had him by the lapels now and he supposed he was in for a right pasting when the car’s horn sounded from over the way.
“Dad,” the girl called, “they’re still out here!”
Arthur pulled himself together and led the others into the shadows as Clive Swarsby appeared in the doorway of Threndle House. A squat man, Swarsby moved nimbly enough back to the car, ordering his son out of the way.
Lawrence’s eyes were like two whirlpools, a pair of expiring suns. Arthur felt choked, like he might swoon. He didn’t know what to do.
“We need to move,” said Het.
There was always that.
The Swarsby’s car reversed, its headlights beginning to sweep the garden. Just free from view, Arthur hurried behind Lawrence and Het. He was shame. Recycled fear. His bloody foot was hurting and the lights were in pursuit.
“In here,” said Het, disappearing into the undergrowth with Lawrence following. Arthur paused, a few steps behind. Maybe things would be better for everyone if he wasn’t around. There had to be better role models for his clever lad. Better husbands for his lovely wife.
He sat on the grass. Above him was the universe, Cassiopeia. Miss Bose had taught him the constellations but that hadn’t been enough to keep him from her purse. He’d gone to the tinker fair on her pension, telling himself she wouldn’t miss the cash and he could stand the different way she began to look at him, because no one else knew where the handbag was. Only him.
Arthur apologised to the dead woman’s ghost and lay on his back with one hand spread over his eyes so that he could peer up at infinity through his fingers. To think of the lambent burning Pleiades up there, to see the first green blazes up in the mystics, a panel of night clear on this evening; he began to cry. Shell didn’t want the tree. She thought he’d taken it. Electric blue.
Time passed. A couple of seconds. Then a set of arms slipped under Arthur’s armpits an
d lifted him on to his feet.
“No you don’t, you’re not getting out of it that easy!”
Het.
Arthur was slapped around the face, twice, three times, then dragged by the wrist through the garden.
The headlights had them. Swarsby was shouting. Arthur ran towards a pale hand that he could see at last, a rescue arm dangling from the wall.
Lawrence.
He raised his arms to seek his son, ready to be hauled to safety.
But the hand disappeared.
“Lawrence,” Arthur hissed. “Kid!”
4
Lawrence knotted his tie around his neck and drew it up to his Adam’s apple. It felt almost like a noose. He slid his legs into their trousers then put on his blazer. The sole of his shoe was coming away and the tots from over the road were being noisy again. David Cairns was saying goodbye to them, barefoot in his dressing gown, holding a bowl of something. The guy looked pretty pleased with himself. The strike must make a nice little break from work.
Mam was going on about something from downstairs so Lawrence shouted back, voice wavering in that half-broken way that always embarrassed him. He was coming, he called at the door. The bus wasn’t due for ten minutes anyway.
Shell pushed into the room and dropped a slice of starkly buttered toast on the desk. “Still need to get a move on,” she said, missing the sour face Lawrence made behind her back.
“Am doing,” he said.
No reply.
Leaving breakfast to go cold, Lawrence stopped on the landing to poke his head into the spare room where his dad slept these days. Arthur wore a t-shirt, yellow underpants and odd socks. He looked like a huge dolly peg, flat across the inflatable bed, face-down on the settee cushion he used as a pillow. The curtains were open behind him, a cold block of daylight causing the scab on his head to glisten, the smell of last night’s booze strung powerfully across the room.
It had been two weeks since that night, the crying, the lying on the grass. Lawrence had tried to forget his own revolting excitement as he ran from the Swarsbys but it had been impossible. He’d giggled, actually giggled, climbing up that wall. A moment later Arthur had arrived. Lawrence had been about to help his dad up when he spotted the Swarsby girl wandering into the car’s headlights. He’d straightened up to get a better look at her and left his father to scramble up the bricks on his own, then act like it was him who’d done something wrong. Cheek of him. Shape of him. A sullen lump in the front seat all the way home. Lawrence entered the room, whipped the cushion from under Arthur and thwacked him around the head with it.
He belted out of the house and down the street towards the sticky sound of wet tyres creeping along the tarmac, managing to catch the bus before it left. He paid the driver and stepped down the aisle, but the empty bus was running later than he was. It jolted off before he’d had time to sit.
The momentum carried Lawrence to the back seat, where he fell against a window. There he watched Litten go by. It was almost as if the town was moving and he was the one rooted to the spot.
It took roughly an hour to get to school, seeing as Arthur had forced him to take the test for Fernside Grammar rather than enrolling at Litten Modern like everybody else. Weeks of coaching it had taken. All those Saturdays doing practice papers, Arthur supervising him with the aid of the answer sheet, sometimes depriving you of dinner if you didn’t do well enough.
Despite all the revision everyone was surprised when Lawrence got into Fernside, scraping his maths but coasting English and verbal reasoning. Arthur was over the moon. He bought the school uniform as soon as it was in stock and had Lawrence parading down the welfare in his blazer and shorts, the brass buckle shoes he’d been assured were in no way girly. Lawrence did what he always did: went along with the decision that was made for him.
Although he was never once asked if he wanted to attend Fernside, and had drifted through the years there. The other kids from his primary school grew up nearby, yet distant, the lifelong friends his dad promised he’d make at Fernside never quite materialising. Lawrence blamed himself. He was easily tongue-tied and overcompensated when he managed to break from his shyness, coming across desperate, insincere or plain weird. He cringed to remember the time he claimed to have a copy of I Spit on Your Grave, the time he said he’d kissed all those girls in town and the time he said he’d met Brian Clough on a day out in Leeds. He could hardly contest the stick he’d got when the truth came out, but supposed it had always been in the post one way or another. All his life Lawrence had attracted mean-spiritedness. He was just one of those people.
The double-decker crawled through Litten. It was an old model, one of those damp shithouses where the foam in the chairs was flat from overuse and someone had ripped the ashtrays from every armrest. The back seat was set in front of the engine and it vibrated whenever the bus stopped, sending a stuffy heat wafting over Lawrence that began to judder him to sleep where he sat.
Litten’s dozy outskirts. Hills shaped like upturned basins. Sky-striving trees and smoke-stacks of industry, each of the borough’s villages dealt its parade of shops selling pre-sliced bread, canned goods and the local paper. Livestock were herded up these roads and the headgear of the pit was always visible. The gas from Brantford coke ovens stank. Brantford the moody animal, blazing out hair perms of sulphurous gas.
And there was the theatre, now derelict, the sullen rec with its swings wrapped over the top bars, the roundabout covered in scrawled names and a single shoe lying by the slide. All Lawrence wanted to do was escape this place, yet at the same time Litten was home, nothing as comforting as home, all your life knowing it, knowing it as much as you wanted to know what lay beyond home’s borders.
The bus turned uphill. The route took it past where Lawrence used to have his paper round, where he’d been sacked for stealing the softcore supplementaries from the tabloids. He had thought he’d never be caught, because what kind of a customer was going to complain to the newsagents that the tit-section from their Sunday Sport was missing? Mr Hayden from the corner house on Dearden Fold, that’s who.
“Oi, Antwerp! What’s so funny?” called a voice. They were a good way along the route by then and the bus had nearly filled.
Lawrence made a show of being engrossed by the boy opposite. The kid was pulling a clod of gum into a vine and letting it swing from his fingers.
“Antwerp, you cunt!”
It was Ryan Fenton and a crony peering across the bottom deck from the stairwell. Through the cobweb of smoke drifting down the gangway, Lawrence could see Fenton’s gold earring, his prosthetic-looking head leering cruelly at him.
“Fuck knows what he’s laughin’ at. His slap head’s turning blue in’t cold. Here, give us a wave, Antwerp.”
Lawrence forced a laugh. Since his head had been shaved, everyone had been calling him Antwerp because he was the spit of a Belgian war victim from the history text book. It was Regis’ fault. The silly twat had nodded and smiled when it was first mentioned in class, and that legitimised everything. Now thanks to a clueless history teacher and a pair of warring parents, Lawrence was stuck, singled out in a way he couldn’t lie or joke his way out of.
People were looking – he was going to have to respond. “Blue head?” he called down the bus. “It’s March not Christmas, you pricks.”
There were ‘ohs’ from the people within earshot. Ryan Fenton’s face dropped as he shoved through the crowd towards Lawrence, the whiteheads on his forehead livid, mouth parting like a badly-sliced chicken fillet.
Lawrence was preparing to spring over the seats in front when the bus intervened, swerving around a corner and throwing anyone on their feet to the other side of the aisle. He darted from his chair, feeling a hand cuff him around the head as he went to stand by the driver. An Antwerp, give us a wave, chant followed him; it was taken up by the entire bus. “That you they’re on at?” said the drive
r. Each hand sported a hazy tattoo of a swallow.
“No,” said Lawrence. “I don’t know who they’re on about.”
In part, Fernside Grammar looked like a medical complex. Flat-roofed and monochrome, the new blocks were divided into conjoined buildings, blank windows dividing up the wall space. The old building was mossy and spired. It had a bell tower and a munificent stained glass window, the school insignia carved into a cornerstone above the main entrance. Its approach was a steep wind tunnel with a shaking school sign. The pupils headed under the sign through the main gates. They buttoned and held their blazers, shrieked through the double-doors to seek shelter.
First lesson was Food Tech, and they were making Shepherd’s Pie. Lawrence perched on a stool in the kitchen classroom while his teacher, Miss Potts, demonstrated how to chop onions. Cookery was better than CDT and metalwork, which were taught in the winter and summer terms respectively. With cookery you got a second tea, which was usually devoured cold on the bus home.
This was a low ability set and it wasn’t difficult to see why. Lawrence always ended up with the duds. Miss Potts had tears in her eyes, her slender fingers gripping the chef’s knife, onion peelings littering the table like pencil shavings. The sleek way her lips formed, they could have been made of clay. Lawrence imagined being asked to stay behind after the lesson; it wouldn’t take long for total concession to ensue, Miss Potts gasping acceptance. The fantasy was getting really interesting when a paper ball rebounded off the back of his head. He turned around and there was Ryan Fenton, grinning at him.