by James Clarke
“You all right, lad? You all right?” Het said, skidding to his knees beside the wounded officer. No one liked to see a thing like that. But another officer arrived and smashed Het on the elbow with his baton.
“Leave off him, cunt.”
Het clutched at the pain and watched the wounded policeman being dragged away. He and the injured man gazed at one another, nothing really to be said.
Projectiles. A police charge. Now, as the picketers’ defeat seemed likely, Het spotted his brother, Arthur, reaching out and stealing a policeman’s helmet off his head.
And Het laughed because it was Arthur, Arthur through and through, and Arthur was laughing too, only the policeman didn’t find it funny. He struck Het’s brother savagely in the face. “Have that then.” Then he snatched the helmet from the ground as Arthur was sent spiralling back into the crowd.
Het had almost reached his brother when something stopped him. How would Arthur react? Retreat and save himself, as Het had just done? Or something else entirely?
As if he needed to ask. Arthur re-appeared, staggering wildly in the direction of his assailant. Het was there in seconds, and having been halted, Arthur lost the will to fight, he and Het propping each other up, Het jealous of Arthur’s strength, his brother’s will to act when he had practically wet himself. It was then that he saw the difference between them, the push and pull of each personality. And what would their father have said, had he been here to witness this? What would Sam say, come to think of it, after all the ugly things Het had called him? He’d been no good that day, full of fear, all his life standing because he was scared to be seen sitting down. Great gusts of shame filled his lungs. “Get off,” he said to Arthur, unable to bear the comparisons orbiting in his mind. “Let go.” But he was the one doing the holding and his brother’s face was a mess.
“Knuckle duster,” Arthur said, leaning against Het and bleeding against his shoulder.
“Worst it’s been. I’m telling you that’s worst I’ve seen it.”
Het was down the welfare. A few others who’d been at Tyndale were also present, but mostly the room, decorated by banners from beams and lodge icons and portraits hanging on the walls, was dead quiet.
Het paid for his drinks and returned to where Shell was waiting, her hair tied back, wearing that sideways expression that always made her seem like she was remembering something from long ago.
The ale was warm and sweet and Het was happy when he was with Shell. He described again how Arthur had been injured. It was a southern policeman that had done it: a man in a white shirt rather than a blue, so it must have been one of the draft from the London Met or Thames Valley forces, heavyweights on extra brass, out of their usual jurisdictions.
It was policemen like this who made comments when they pulled you over, who turfed you out onto the road, roughed you up and called you darling. Het had recently been told by one of these officers that the miners deserved what was happening to them. You and the rest of the fucking scrubbers, his face pushed into the jagged gravel of the hard shoulder. There was an Alsatian, the animal’s fur collecting drizzle pearls as it barked heat into the miners’ faces from no more than an inch away. The daffodils were in bloom by the roadside, your scar stretching as you tried to escape clasping jaws. “That strawberry ice cream?” one of the policemen said to Het, jabbing his scar with a nail-bit finger. “Fuck off back to Rotherham.”
“Well, where’s he now?” said Shell, “You must have some idea.” She sipped her drink.
“You tell me.”
“Well I would only he came back in one of them Phantom of the Opera type things. Fuming, he were, while I fetched ointment and sponge. When I came down he’d hopped it.”
“Hospital sorted all that,” said Het.
“But I’m his wife.”
Shell might be Arthur’s wife but it wasn’t as if she was out searching for him. Back from her new job at the bakery, acting concerned with a drink. She reminded Het of his mother in that she always behaved how was expected, never mind that she probably didn’t mean a word of what came out of her mouth. Another chance and another, one more, always terrified of the alternative, the Litten Path. He watched Shell’s lips and wondered what they would taste like.
“He’ll turn up. Still if you’re worried we could ask around,” Het said.
“Give over. I’m not having folk think I can’t look after my own husband.”
Janice Scanlan approached their table, asking where the latest food donations were to go. Shell would never admit to being the one in charge, but the other women looked up to her and it was obvious she enjoyed the responsibility. She directed Jan to a table at the back where food tins and welfare packages were steadily accumulating. Channelled regionally by the union, the donation and care parcels were flooding in from the locality and elsewhere: the public, via international aid and other unions, other governments and overseas pits. The comrades in Russia had been especially kind. Although it might feel like it sometimes, the striking miners were not alone.
It was Shell who’d started Litten’s soup kitchen. Over the last few weeks she’d also helped design placards, come on marches and when the police charged the pickets, blown her whistle and chanted with the best of them. She packed the snap, made it, too. She poured the coffee, listened to people’s problems and helped them mend their clothes. Het was proud to say Shell was as much a part of this struggle as any man, and if you asked her about those who snuck like rats into work around the back of the pits, those who were bold enough to argue it out with the picketers out front or even fight their way through the crowds, never mind those who wormed their way in, entreating those brave enough to come on strike, insisting that they were only thinking of their families, Shell knew the name for them.
Het wondered what she’d think if she knew Arthur didn’t want to help the effort: that he might have scabbed if he could. Het was tempted to tell her, wanted her to know what kind of a man her husband was, only she must know, more than anyone she must know. Arthur Newman, gap toothed and magnetic. Wind him up and let him go. Offer him a pill and he’ll take two of them.
Equally Shell knew about Het’s father as few outside of the family ever did. She was young when she first met the Newmans. Het remembered her introduction, having to spend most of the night trying to keep cool whenever she glanced his way, cracking his finger joints under the table and kicking himself for missing that night at The Masons, letting Arthur get there first. He could hardly bear to look at Shell and had to resort to showing her what he was about by seeing to it that she got the best slice of beef. In his eagerness he knocked the gravy boat onto the carpet.
Dad liked her straight away. On a walk after the meal, Shell wasn’t afraid to joke and contradict Alec. Het walked with them at a slight remove, the collar of his coat pulled up to his nose. This girl was the bristle of autumn; she was the crunch of your boot heel in a frozen puddle. You don’t talk to a phenomenon of nature. You simply step back and watch it exact its force.
A few weeks later it turned out Shell was pregnant, and how the news delighted Alec, because it meant Arthur was finally on the straight and narrow, in the relationship for keeps, and wasn’t he doing well. Het endured his predicament quietly, in that desperate, English way, because Shell would never look twice at him, and even if she did and he took a chance smile up on its potential, it would ruin his father, especially after what had happened with Sam. Above all Alec Newman valued family. He would have been devastated at having to ostracise another son.
Sometimes Het felt like the only person who missed Alec. It was Alec who’d taught him about the pits; the brotherhood and strength of it. If one of you had a problem, you all did. That was the way of it. A repetitive life, perhaps. There was value in that. Het didn’t know what it was about hardship that made it so nostalgic over time, but he knew hard lives developed integrity in retrospect. Perhaps that was their ultimate rewar
d: being able to tell people how rough you’d had it was almost worth putting up with the thin end of the wedge.
Because there was no doubting Het would become a miner. It was what he’d always wanted, to be like his ancestors, valorous in the heat, working the rock. Dirty hands, clean wage. Growing up, Het’s dad had relayed to him all kinds of stories, stories of the coal face, working naked sometimes owing to the high temperatures before the regulations came in. Miners had worn all sorts of outfits, rag and bone get-ups from home, anything you didn’t mind getting grubby. Black snot. Coming to the surface with your socks stiff as a board, dressed in bloomers sometimes, flaming whatever, looking daft in the arse-loop, a rope chair used to repair the remote shafts the machinery couldn’t get to. The hours could be long and dangerous – you could feel suffocated at the greater depths – earning a crust beneath the crust, pit checks ringing in the banksmens’ and lamp room boxes. In those days you were paid by weight. You cut your cash from the earth, life funded by what you dug.
When Het remembered Alec talking about his early days in the pit or his country childhood, a youth of podding peas, harvest moons and autumn equinoxes, he pictured him in the living room with the circular mirror leaning against the fruit bowl. Dad shaved in the late afternoons because he said the light was better at that time, its angle casting a rhomboid of sun onto him that picked clear the hairy filaments sprouting from his skin. The shaving bowl was often so bright that it looked like a basin of cloud.
Work the badger brush. Lather the face. Story-telling while drawing a razor against the grain and down the throat. A father’s lessons impacted on sons more than they knew. Even now Het shaved the same way as his old man: in the living room, often late in the afternoon, a wet job, the blade’s serrations affecting his scar and occasionally slicing his skin (Alec never cut himself) because memory had enveloped him: thoughts of home and dreams. What he one day wanted and would try to get.
The pattern on his beer’s surface budded, flowered and dissolved. Het was sorry for how influenced by his dad he was; sorry for denouncing Sam as a queer. What had made Arthur show the old man those magazines, no one knew, but a poofter in the house was wrong so Het and his father had let Samson know it.
Still, what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you. It was Arthur’s fault for telling on Sam. Some days later Het had returned to where the fight happened and felt beneath his tread something larger than a stone; it was a tooth left on the pavement. He’d picked it up, the tip flecked with blood, the body yellow-cream, and dropped it in his pocket, rolling the sharpness between finger and thumb. He never did give it back. To this day the tooth remained in a drawer by his bed, a severed piece of his father’s mouth.
“I’ve finished,” Shell said.
“Me too.” Het downed his dregs. “I’m starved. Off home.”
“Oh,” said Shell. Was she crestfallen? “Well, if it’s food you’re after, I might be able to help.”
She produced from her bag a set of keys with a pink spongey cat attached, a silly grin practically forcing her face in two.
“We’ve some stock that’s for the bin but still decent. I was about to take it home only Lawrence is out and Arthur, well . . . I’ve left it. We could grab it if you like. If you’re nice I might even let you have a discount.”
The snooker balls knocked madly on the baize.
6
The mask covering Arthur’s cheek looked like a cricket box that had been cut in half. Lucky, they told him, he was lucky his vision wasn’t impaired. The swelling would go down at some point and he’d survive not being able to bring his teeth together for a few days.
He tapped a couple of codeine out of the packet. Another two to make sure. They were too chalky to neck dry so he had to summon a load of spit to force them down. His rotten grimace was reflected back at him in the bus window. He’d discharged himself from hospital earlier, told them he didn’t need any more of their attention and the wife would see to him.
He’d have said anything.
It started to piss it down as he stalked the corridors of the outdoor market. Traders advertised their root vegetables, offered up samples on paper plates, sorting their change under the roof tarps while a fat-eyed dog in a coat yapped and strained on its lead until Arthur wanted to boot it in the face to shut it up.
He reached the high street. Daylight split between the buildings and the cobbles shone through in messy patches where the tarmac had crumbled away to nothing, the town’s history bleeding openly into the present.
Now the pavement was putty-coloured and family-run shops lined the streets. There were wire bins, cement-footed benches and beyond those, that emotive bandstand. Arthur was having one of those days where he felt like he knew everybody. He went into the fusty-looking shop to pick up his photographs.
The place smelled like damp towels. Leathery cameras hung from the walls by their straps like wing-pierced bats and glass cases containing lenses and flashes and tripods and photographic ephemera hemmed the sides of the room. There were frames containing black and white prints as well, and racks of postcards and albums. A dirty, cream-coloured booth lurked, portal-like, in the corner.
Arthur waited at the counter for the true contents of the jewellery box to be revealed. He’d forced it open the night he took it from Threndle House, finding inside a pot with a canister of film that he’d stashed in a holdall that had sagged guiltily at the bottom of his wardrobe since then.
Until two days ago. Arthur had been kidding himself he was waiting for the right moment to return the film, when really he was waiting until he got desperate enough to develop the negatives. Any help to see this strike out would be welcome. With Lawrence finishing school, Shell might be more inclined to move if they had some money. If these were pictures Arthur could actually put to good use, that was.
He’d taken to leaving the newspaper out, pages opened to where the college ads were printed like listings in the Radio Times. Shell had thought it was Lawrence being curious, and Arthur hadn’t dared tell her any different.
“What’s he want wi’ all this palaver?” she’d said, shaking her head.
Fuck the pits, Arthur nearly said. “I’ve no idea.”
Over a month on the lilo. A month of being side-stepped. Shell’s first ever job and she was using it to avoid him. Flour-stained trousers, lingering down the welfare, being vindictive. Nothing was good enough, not even the maple tree that had been as nice a thing as Arthur could think to buy Shell to say sorry for the business with the rug. Even going on fly picket hadn’t been enough to please her. At least at first it hadn’t. As soon as she found out he’d put his name down she’d strode home and interrupted him in the yard.
“Were you going to tell us?”
“Tell you what?”
“You know fine well, Arthur.”
He’d put down his bloody book. “I thought I’d do my bit. Same as you.”
“Right the way up to this you were saying what’s point in going on strike. Now you’re all for helping.”
“So?”
“So what’s new?”
Unable to confess the truth, Arthur watched Shell, the wind tickling his naked scalp. Never mind that, love. Never mind the way you made me look.
“Just reckon there’s no point being a bit on strike,” he said.
“You all over the country?”
“I can freeze my bollocks off in t’midlands as good as I can here.”
“You’ve heard what it’s getting like . . .”
“Worried, Shell?”
“Am I heck.”
“Bloody sounds like you are.”
“Why on earth should I be worried? It’ll be good for you. If anything, I’m glad.”
That had blown her off the scent.
“It’s paid work at least.”
“Quid a picket. Crack out the bunting.”
You
had to laugh. Some were getting it in the neck from their wives for not working. Not Arthur. Meeting at three in the bloody morning at the welfare or the pub, arriving at whatever godforsaken pit it was this time for some argy-bargy with the police, then home to an iceberg he had hopes of thawing. “So how were it?” Shell had taken to asking, and whether it was or was not, Arthur would always tell her it was shite. He hated being Het’s lapdog and his wife would be easier to keep a hold of if she felt sorry for him. It had come to this.
A typical example:
“Where to today?”
“Broscombe.”
“Shite?”
“Messy.”
“Tell us.”
And so he’d explain.
“What they’ve started doing is letting a few cars through the roadblocks to find out where we’re headed. Then they hit us there later. Happened today, love, they charged us. Didn’t think they would. Don’t always. Sometimes they just bang their shields to scare you, provoke a reaction so they can make arrests. They like telling us what they’re making, eighty a day, some of them, whatever it is. Five hundred a week I’ve heard some get. Bold as buggery, fifty of ’em giving you shit-eye, rubbing it in about their new furniture and new carpets and tellies while we’ve not two sticks to rub together. Crowing about what they’re getting at our expense. They’re cold, love. Really they are.”
The way Shell breathed.
“Anyroad, before scabs come this time one of the lads must have said summat back to ’em. Or maybe he said summat first, I’m not sure. Either way, it doesn’t take much for pigs to come down on you like a ton of bricks. They flew at us. I fought back, tha knows me. One of the lads even put through one of the windows on their van. It was one of the old ones. Rest had cages fitted. Got a bit hairy.”