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The Litten Path

Page 7

by James Clarke


  “I know the feeling,” he said.

  Evie removed her hand. The way she lit her cigarette, flame angling as she sucked, made Lawrence’s toes curl.

  Duncan stood up and patrolled the bunting line. “So what do you think of our improvements?”

  “They’re brill,” Lawrence lied.

  “Took us a long weekend. We’ve a lot of those at the moment.”

  “How come? I mean why’s that?” Lawrence glanced at Evie, who’d covered her face with her novel and was lying flat on the blanket.

  “Well Evie pretty much just has her exams, and I haven’t enrolled anywhere yet. Dad says I’ll be off to the West Ridings come September, if things don’t go to plan. Or back in London if they do. Till then we’re to be home-tutored.”

  Evie blew a raspberry under her book.

  “Suppose it’s nearly summer. End of school,” Lawrence said. “Would be daft starting somewhere just to leave.”

  “And let’s face it,” said Evie, “Clive wouldn’t send his darlings to any of the schools around here.”

  “Why, what’s up with them?”

  “What’s oop wi’ ’em?”

  Lawrence got to his feet. “Here, I know what I sound like, reight. But I’m not the one, it’s you who’s the new ones. You who sound weird.”

  “Jesus, I only meant our dad wouldn’t just send us anywhere,” said Evie.

  “This isn’t anywhere.”

  “Lawrence, that’s exactly what it is.”

  It was funny. Although he was himself allowed to criticise where he came from, the moment someone else cast aspersions upon Litten, Lawrence’s hackles rose.

  “Oh, darling. Have I offended you?”

  “Would it bother you if you had?”

  Evie was at last studying him with genuine interest. Only a minute ago, her hand had been on his knee.

  “I said would it bother you?”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  “Well doesn’t matter then, does it?”

  Duncan offered a round of applause. “Well if you ask me, Evie, I’d say Lawrence has got the measure of you!”

  5

  A totalled car rolling down the hill, a dot-to-dot of blue heads scattering from it. It was fun seeing the silver badges flashing the other way for once, helmets wobbling as the pigs fled. “Bobby’s on fucking bob,” shouted someone, but Het didn’t answer. He was concentrating on the smoke, hoping he wouldn’t reach it before the car went up.

  Lorries were around the corner and before them was the soon-to-be-torched car the picketers had sent to block the road. “You’re a genius, lad,” said Chris Skelly, and Het laughed, though he certainly didn’t feel like laughing.

  Nottingham coalfield. Tan yellow grass country. Fossil grey sky country. The Notts pits were refusing to back the action. Little wonder they’d stuffed things up: a scab county, always had been. Half the pits here were built by scabs during the strike of ’26. Better paid, better-equipped scabs. Notts had bought every lie, hook, line, sinker and bait box, yet again finding themselves on the wrong side of flaming right.

  Ollerton, where that lad had died a few weeks ago, was scab built. Hit by a brick, they said. Crushed, more like. Het had seen the picket. Now at Tyndale it was how it had been at Ollerton. Kicked off the minibus, police boarding, pointing their batons in your face, telling you to fuck off, turn back, just the same.

  They were escorted up the M1, accompanied by the police like flaming royalty over the county line. After that Chris drove them five miles north, stopping at the motorway services to buy a local map so Het could navigate them back south into Notts along the sneak roads, past Bolsover, where they parked the car and supped a recharge in a local pub. The landlord opened early for them. A key in the door and a sympathetic smile for a bloke from scabbing Mansfield.

  “You’re all right, lads. Come in.”

  They walked the rest of the way to Tyndale, an hour’s yomp through fields that quickly became marsh thanks to a hidden sike that flowed downhill, soaking all their feet. Het was in his element. It was early doors so everything was bathed in that magnificent morning light that crispens up the natural outlines. The cloud was rising from the arrowgrass the way it did on the coated moorland when you walked the Litten Path. Summer Geese, his dad used to call it, because of the shapes the steam made when it was evaporating into nothing after there’d been rain on a hot day.

  They joined the picket late, them and a few others, some stopping at the shop to get a few tinnies in then singing their way through the housing estate. It was good crack, although it was a different story now Het found himself running behind a timebomb, the winder and shaft at Tyndale dreadful against the sky. Het saw in that fretwork and turning wheel a nightmare, and he hoped he wouldn’t end up like Davey Jones of Ollerton.

  At the bottom of the hill the police regrouped. According to some local scrotes watching the mounting protest from a street corner, the burning car had been a scab motor. Some of the other Brantford lads agreed it was parked way too close to the pit to be anything but, so they trashed it, tore the radio out and slashed all the seats. Het tried to stop them and was told to fuck off for the second time that day. He redeemed himself once the perpetrators had moved on, mind you, hitting on the idea of using the wreckage to stop the lorries. His idea had been to simply roll the car, flaming Arthur’s had been to stuff a rag soaked in zippo fluid into the fuel cap for good measure, sparking it with a clipper as it went.

  How Het had let himself be talked into that, he didn’t know. He cursed as the makeshift fuse did its work, yelping at the blossoming explosion, a popped balloon of orange that roared into the sky and lit the trees, those pine trees, the grainy-looking midlands way beyond him.

  All heat bursts were a reminder of The Mighty Atom. Het was a good twenty yards behind this particular blast, yet still close enough to feel it, the scorch as good as all over him, reminding him of the stink of burnt hair, the feel of his hand sticking to the raw jelly of his neck where there was no more skin. Thankfully this time the glare disappeared, folding in on itself as opposed to all over his life.

  The car was propelled over a cleft in the hill. It dive-bombed onto its nose like a paper aeroplane, rolled towards the road and came to a stop, burning.

  That got everyone’s attention.

  A group of policemen gathered at the hill’s base, beyond the burning car, in front of the thoroughfare leading to the pit gates. Het ran at them. So did everybody else. Nothing was more important than stopping those turncoats getting the scab coke. They had to stop the Judases from getting in.

  Police faces blurred by heat; a line of linked arms, faceless golems at least three men deep. Het navigated the blockade as the toxicity of the car became a hindrance. He ran towards the pigs; he was really shouting. Boots on the grass. Everyone at it. Voices of hundreds of wronged and angry men.

  Scabs. Scabs. You’re all just fucking scabs.

  The police shouted back. Fucking come on then. They steeled themselves, expressions mashed. The lot of them brandished truncheons.

  This was the part. This was the moment. Long legs always meant Het arrived first. He ploughed into the police line, waxy head butting into them. Arthur was a few yards away doing the same thing: a brother who he’d forced into this. Plague a beautiful woman like that? Set such examples to your son? All right, an oddball but still a son. A son who didn’t deserve the selfish dad he’d been landed with.

  The other night Het had driven them all back from Threndle House in the Austin Maxi, switching the radio on because it meant no one would have to talk, Frankie Goes to Hollywood careening out of the speakers; the three of them laughing before going quiet again.

  They parked outside Arthur’s terrace, then while Lawrence was inside checking to see if Shell was awake, Het told his brother how it was going to be. Arthur was going to back the strike like
the rest of them. Every picket. Every protest. Every rally. Do some good for a change. Fight for everyone’s livelihoods and stand up for himself. Arthur was coming on picket because Het said so.

  Het said, “I want to see you do what’s right. I want you to set an example.”

  “And you’d know all about that.”

  “I’m serious, Art. You’re coming on strike proper.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I go to the police about tonight.”

  How quickly that bald head turned. Snap. Outlined distinctly against the misted window.

  “You serious?”

  “Like what I said—”

  “Fuckin’ heard you the first time.”

  Silence. Arthur drew a curt rectangle shape on the glass with his finger. Several choice flicks turned the rectangle 3-D.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Het began. “But this is important . . .”

  “Save it. I’ll do your dirty work for you, Het, if that’s what you want.”

  “It’s not that. That’s not it . . .” Het said, trailing off. Their father’s flippant malice ran through Arthur and he had never known how to deal with it.

  Arthur rubbed the window clean and stared through it, all bruised nobility, acting as if the night’s thieving and embarrassment hadn’t just happened. “Not what?” he said. “Tell us what it’s not.”

  Het kept it buttoned. Lawrence would be back soon, a nephew who’d already been through one of life’s traumatic rites of passage that night, witnessing, as all sons one day must, the moment when their father humiliates themselves in front of them, becomes flawed, fallible, just a man.

  Although there had been plenty enough to say and always had been. Because people might like Arthur, they might find him relatable, laugh at his jokes and invite him out on the town . . . that didn’t mean for one second they had any idea what being around someone like that was actually like. Because all Het’s life the bookies had backed the other horse, and all Het’s life he couldn’t help but wonder how Arthur had got the sweet deal he had. For pity’s sake, if Het’s scars had been on his body, he wouldn’t have minded so much, but the face? You just couldn’t get away from it. The thing about scars is they don’t just scar your skin, they scar your confidence, too. Damn near take it away altogether.

  Decades spent shying away from cameras. Often, just when Het thought he’d gotten used to how he looked, he’d catch sight of himself a certain way and be reminded all over again of the deformity splashing up his neck and jaw, punctuated by a full stop and a dash, scarified blotch marks on the chin and lip from where the larger bits of plastic had melted on him.

  It was no wonder he was always losing his temper. Firework face, dry eyes that felt like they had sand beneath the lids, too much heaviness at the stomach and unwieldy hair he had to lash with wax to do anything with; he ran into the police and he hid himself. He pushed at the cops until he fell over and he got back up again because he was tall enough and he could manage it.

  Thinking back to Water Street as you did so. Recalling the silence of your car, sat with your brother, wishing you could trade places with your nephew, because to watch the sleepy peace emanate from Shell; maybe she’d wake and see you, not your face, never that, but your outline, your strong, work-built, toil-hewn frame . . . Het fought for breath. The problem with things you couldn’t have was that you could have them if you really put your mind to it, and that made it so much worse. The front door of Arthur’s house had seemed to bow with all that resided on the other side of it. It was all Het could do to avoid shoulder-barging through it. Instead he’d shifted in his seat and peeled at the no smoking sticker plastered to the inside of his car window, an action which caught Arthur’s attention.

  “You’ve a no smoking sign in your car,” Arthur said, “an’ you don’t even fuckin’ smoke.”

  “I’m sorry?” Het said, when indeed he’d heard. He polished his glasses on the front of his shirt, his reflection way too visible in the lenses.

  Arthur laughed. “I were just saying—”

  “But you’ll join us on pickets. You’ll make it count.”

  Arthur sighed, looked at his lap. “Fine, fuck off then,” he said, then exited the car, missing Het’s apology that was delivered to thin air.

  “I’m sorry.”

  It was no use. As the lights ticked on in the house, Het sped away, vowing to make a good egg of his brother, a man according to the terms set out for them when they were boys. No crying. No mucking about. Be as honest as the day is long and be good to your wife. Be good to the woman in your life. Het would do that. Do it for Shell. Make Arthur play ball just like he’d been made to all his life. Het Newman, eldest hero, told from day one that his brothers looked up to him, never mind whom he had to look up to. For who’s an eldest son with an abrupt father to turn to when it comes to the business of making your way in a world you don’t understand, in a life you didn’t ask for but were given anyway?

  The police were so many, and such force. It took a certain kind of person to become a police officer. Some good, certainly. Something else too.

  Het pushed and leaned into the ruck because they were them and he was him and that line was made to be crossed. A hand bashed his nose, blood trailing down his septum and reaching his mouth. The first lorry was trying to get through. It was nearly at the gates and would have gotten into the compound if it weren’t for the picketers. Chris Skelly was saying something but the scrum was too frantic and he was pushed from sight. Het could hardly breathe. Men upon men. Pushing the line and pushing it and the batons reaching in and striking you and pushing it and pushing it and hitting back if you can and pushing some more, trying to get to the lorries and with a yell unleashing that word.

  Scab.

  Men were being dragged out. Tall Het saw above everyone’s heads, these men dragged into the vans. Dogs barked on the outskirts of the ruck and the lights from the police cars flashed a febrile blue, for all the good that did. The day was warm. It was a pleasant afternoon in May. Normally Het would be finishing the early shift about now, off for his crossword and an ale down the welfare and maybe a turn around the dell where the alder leaves hissed and turned, catkins like tresses of hair, hanging ready for the wind to take. But not today. Not in these parts, in this England or in this life.

  Feeling faint, he fought for space. Beyond him was the cab of the front lorry. In it sat a driver crossing another picket, a non-union man, probably getting double or triple wages for a job like this, bribed by the government because they wouldn’t stump up the cash to keep a few pits open but it didn’t matter what it cost to be rid of them.

  The guy had a dark moustache and curly hair. He could have been any one of them, so Het beseeched him, on his mind all who were opposing him, everyone he knew and so many he didn’t. “Please stop your truck!” he cried. “Please stop your truck, you bloody idiot!”

  The lorry crawled on.

  Police reinforcements arrived to force the picket away, and as Het was driven from the pit gates along with everybody else, he despised the man in that lorry for thinking he was any different, for thinking he and the rest of the scabs wouldn’t be as for the chop as everybody else when the time came.

  More sirens. Here in the midlands the sun seemed to hang deeper and burn with an intensity Het had never known before. It was a government masterstroke to split the industry on closures. They couldn’t divide the miners on wages – that had only united them in the past. They were doing it by allegiance instead. Shut a few pits – not all – stockpile as much British coal as possible then import extra from Poland, Australia and Colombia, break the miners’ support structures by tweaking the Social Security Act to reduce the welfare payments for the families of the men on strike, pay guns for hire like that driver, bribe anyone daft enough into rolling over by offering them early redundancy pay-outs and somehow keep the midlands working. Not forgetti
ng the police: the nation’s forces had been mobilised into an enormous army.

  In the crowd he had to admire it. He played football with Sandy Coates and Mick Halsall, the union reps at Brantford. He had their ear. They’d been to Silverwood, the regional strike HQ outside of Rotherham, and later told Het straight. “They’ve come back to do us,” said Mick. “After ’72 and ’74. They stitched us up to do us proper. But it’s Tyndale this week so you and that brother of yours get down wi’ rest of the lads an’ try an’ do some good.”

  Four white vans screeched signatures into the gravel. Their doors ker-clunked and men burst out, this lot in riot gear. The wrecked car was burning and the smoke, the smoke, the smoke.

  The squadron waded in, landing blow after blow until the picketers fell away and the rest of the lorries roared into the compound. It was the sort of thing Het saw on his programmes about the crusades, today’s skirmish tracing its lineage back to days when battles were won with swords and arrows rather than fists and stones, before bomber jackets and bovver boots; before bricks were thrown.

  A policeman loomed into view. “Get back! Fucking get back!” he screamed, clad entirely in body armour. He swung a baton at Het, who was wearing only a t-shirt, blue jeans and his ‘Save the Pits’ badge.

  Now Het thought himself a brave man. His mother had told him he was brave plenty of times, especially when she found out about Dad and the other woman, when Het took her to one side and told her what she needed to hear: her sons loved her, she was important, strong and kind, all the things old Alec had forgotten. But here was a beating and who wouldn’t be afraid of that?

  He ran, hearing the officer’s jeers. He could hardly take exception to them, because what kind of a leader runs? A craven one, that’s who. A big man who’d never had his way and was scared of what he’d do if he ever got it.

  Shell.

  Het made it to the hill. Some lads had broken a wall apart and were using the debris as missiles. Rocks and stones soared overhead, chunks of mortar and nasty bits of car and windscreen, all other kinds of rubbish. Het spun round and headed back towards the melee, where it felt safer, in time to see a policeman take the full force of something to the brow. The socket above the man’s eye was badly caved, blood leaking like a paint splash down his face.

 

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