The Litten Path

by James Clarke

  She tried to concentrate on the stage. It was no good. A kernel of unease had taken seed in the veiled uncertainty in people’s faces earlier, in the bags under Cherry Cairns’ eyes and her Arthur’s damaged face, and now it was in flower. She would never confess to anyone how relieved she’d been when her husband wouldn’t let her clean his wounds that morning. It was hard enough to feel attracted to Arthur these days. A cracked plate for a face, she just wouldn’t have known what to make of.

  The three behind her were jostling again. Shell huffed at them once more and wished for Het.

  “Go on, Trev. Go on, dare you.”

  A hand darted below Shell’s waist like an eel snapping out of a wall, grabbing at her behind. She’d been expecting the louts to try something, so managed to get hold of the wrist, dug her nails into the exposed section of skin and tugged hard, forcing the hand’s owner to tumble off the stairs into the crowd.

  He landed like a rock dropped into a sandpit. People were knocked sideways as the lad’s beer bottle flew from his hand, smashed on the pavement and became a wet asterisk.

  Scattered folk picked themselves up as the police arrived, four officers varying in size. They roughed Shell’s aggressor to his feet. He was winded and making desperate huck-huck noises. Shell tried to keep calm. She was tempted to go and see if the young man was OK, but one of the officers had hold of him. “Man up,” the officer said, forcibly straightening the lad upright by the collar. The copper was fair-haired. He had pretty eyes and one of those cruel, playful mouths. “What the fucking hell you doing?” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear.

  The blond officer let go of the youngster, shoving him in the back so he could bend over and catch his breath. Scargill’s voice was at this point unintelligible. Everyone in the vicinity was facing this way.

  Shell gripped her wrist but kept losing count of her pulse. The shortest of the four policemen stepped forward. He had stripes on his arm and a beard encircled his tight little grimace. “Someone better own up,” he said. “Or we’ll cordon the whole area and take the lot of yous in.”

  No one responded. Shell picked the cameras out on the other side of the rally. She was about to whistle for their attention when Joyce caught her eye, shook her head and mouthed the word: No.

  “I’ll give till five for someone to tell us what’s happened,” the bearded sergeant said.

  No one spoke. The blond officer aimed his radio at his mouth. He twisted Shell’s assailant’s collar like a wet flannel.

  Three.

  Four.

  The youngster’s nose bled. Serves him right for touching her up, thought Shell. Then again, these bastards were the police, the same police that had smashed her Arthur’s face in, and at the end of the day it was about direct action. Scargill would be proud and so would Het.

  She hopped off the wall. “It were me,” she said. “It were my fault.”

  “Right then,” the sergeant said, signalling for his men to come and take Shell. The third officer looked about ten years old, the fourth had an Adam’s apple that made him look like he’d swallowed a ping-pong ball. As they took Shell by either arm, the sergeant addressed the crowd. “I’m not having a few idiots disrupt a peaceful rally. Listen to your man, clap your hands and get yourselves home.” He turned to Shell. “And frankly, Miss, I’m surprised at you.”

  He was little, probably soft as anything.

  “Why’s that?” said Shell.

  The policeman stopped.

  “As I mean, you hardly know me.”

  The sergeant came closer, podge nose practically grazing Shell’s cheek.

  “What the fuck did you just say?”

  Shell’s legs nearly went. These bastards had knocked her family about. They were ruining peoples’ lives. Stop and search every time she wanted to go anywhere. She took a deep breath. “I said, I don’t know how you’re surprised.”

  The policeman lowered his voice further. Pantomime of it. Burl of it. “Have we a problem?”

  “I were just saying—”

  “You causing a disturbance?”

  “You can see I’m not.”

  “Jeff, is this one causing a disturbance?”

  The blond officer laughed. “She’s a pest, Sarge. She can deny it all she likes.”

  Shell knew all about pests, silken specks that incubated in your dreams and infested everything you knew. “I’m just pointing out the generalisation,” she said. “As I’m a woman, you’re surprised. What if I were defending myself? What if it were an accident?”

  “Madam, I am telling you to calm down.”

  “Why does everyone keep saying that? I’m perfectly calm.”

  “If you don’t calm down, Miss. I will arrest you.”

  Shell grit her teeth. She’d come this far. “Well that’s up to you,” she said, “but I hoped you’d at least see sense and let me try and explain what happened.”

  It was as easy as that. Shell’s arms were cranked painfully behind her back, her name was taken and her rights read while they fitted the cuffs. The metal clicked and pinched, and then she found herself being led through the crowd. She could see Joyce disappear. Shell didn’t even have chance to shout after her, so quickly was she lost.

  “Just goes to show,” she called out to the people around her, “It just goes to show what they’re really like.”

  “Button it or we’ll do you for resisting arrest.”

  “I’m coming willingly!”

  “You’re coming how we say you are.”

  As Shell was steered onward, a stranger appeared from the multitude and walked by her side. “Go quiet,” he told her. “Say nowt. South Yorks can be bastards when they get you on your own.”

  “That’s enough,” said one of Shell’s escorts, shoving the stranger in the chest. The man held up both hands and backed away.

  Shell kept her trap shut after that. She was brought towards a line of police transit vans parked outside a command point: a small marquee behind a Heras fence erected in abuttal with a Portakabin that had metal shutters covering its windows. She could hear laughter. Arthur Scargill was joking up on stage.

  Joyce suddenly appeared, stepping into Shell’s path. “Officers please,” she said. “May I have a word?”

  The policemen paused. Shell’s mouth was as dry as anything as Joyce began to speak, her plummy church manner made all the more convincing by her puritanical pudding-bowl of self-snipped hair. She was pale, tremendously so. “I’m afraid this woman’s not right in the head,” she said.

  The officers laughed. “Back away, love. This is an arrest.”

  Roughly, Joyce was ushered out of the way. The policemen frogmarched Shell on. Joyce hurried with them, pushing in front again, this time holding a hand before Shell’s captors as if she was herself an officer of the law, halting the traffic.

  “Listen,” she said, “I can testify with absolute certainty that this woman is an incorrigible eccentric, and not responsible for her actions. Officers, please. What happened was an accident. I saw the whole thing.”

  One of the policemen stepped towards Joyce with his hand on his baton, but Joyce stood her ground. “Really,” she said. “Let me introduce myself. My name is Joyce Stride and I am the chairlady of the L.W.A.P.C. Litten Woman against Pit Closures.”

  “Hold on! Hold the fuck on.”

  It was the blond policeman. He stomped over and shoved his truncheon directly under Joyce’s nose. A polished thing, sensual looking. His chalky fingers nestled in the grip.

  “Say your name, please,” he said briskly. He could have been ex-military.

  “I . . . why?”

  “You lot and your questions. When you get an order from someone in uniform, you don’t say: Why, you say: Yes. Understand?”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t you mean fucking yes?”

&n
bsp; “Yes!”

  “Yes fucking what?”

  “Yes, officer.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.” The man pointed his truncheon at Shell. “You, Mouth. Following?”

  “Plain as day,” said Shell.

  “Halle-fucking-lujah.” The truncheon whipped back towards Joyce, who, to her credit, didn’t cry out as the weapon stopped a centimetre from her eyeball. “Now, say your fucking name. Or are you refusing to tell an officer of the law your fucking name?”

  “I just told you my name.”

  The blond policeman pushed his truncheon hard against Joyce’s cheek, forcing her head sideways.

  “It’s Joyce,” she said. “Joyce Stride.”

  “Well done, Joyce Stride. Now who do you think you are, that you’d try to obstruct my colleagues in the engagement of their duties?”

  “I . . . I am a member of the L.W.A.P.C, a friend of this woman, and I can assure you that she has done nothing wrong.”

  Now the truncheon switched to beneath Joyce’s nose, pushing her head back almost ninety degrees. The blond man in uniform could barely keep from laughing as he said “You’re a member of fuck all, love.”

  Shell felt that old crescendo, but the officer just grinned at her. “You’d better shut it,” he said, “before you make this any worse.”

  “You’re all right, Shell,” Joyce said, her voice pressured by the angle to which her throat had been forced. “I said, sir . . .” she said, batting the truncheon away and facing the officer boldly. “That this woman has done nothing wrong. She’s quite mad and incapable of holding her tongue, but that’s it. She shouldn’t be arrested and if she is I shall be making a complaint to your superiors.”

  “I’m sorry, I might have misheard, Miss Stride,” said the officer. “Did you just say you’d like to make a complaint?”

  “I did, sir. Your conduct has been shocking. You’re an officer of the law and as such should wield your power with the same respect you expect us citizens to abide by it.”

  Shell was certain Joyce was going to be struck. Her hands still secured, she broke free of the men holding her and stepped up to the blond officer, his slate-coloured eyes. “You leave her alone,” she began, but was stopped, partly by the large hand that reached out and grabbed her by the cheeks, and partly by the tempting smell of toffees that she could smell on the officer’s breath as he brought her close, the scent washing sweetly over her face.

  10

  A loaf of bread and a jar of potted beef in a plastic bag. Arthur made a point of not looking at the garish orange frontage of the job centre.

  Saturday and no idea where the wife was. He’d just stopped at the bakery, opening the door and setting off the funny klaxon. Course she wasn’t in. Si Gaskell was serving customers instead, long hair tied under that daft white hat, ponytail stuffed into one of those nets that look like they should be full of bird seed. The sleazy prick had no idea where Shell was. He’d stared at Arthur’s wracked face and refused to give him a discount on his loaf.

  Walking to save on bus fare, Arthur arrived home and entered the kitchen. From the plastic bag he removed the bread, swabbing two slices with margarine and another two with brown sauce. Out came the butter knife Lawrence used when he was a kid and his hands were too small to hold the main cutlery. Arthur stabbed the knife into the jar of potted beef – it was the perfect size – and spread the meat paste thickly across each buttered slice. These sandwiches he split into neat triangles, piling them onto a plastic plate and carrying the whole lot upstairs on a tray along with a mug of claggy-looking, terracotta-coloured tea.

  Outside Lawrence’s room he fished the key from his pocket. It slotted noisily into the padlock and popped the hook. Last night, home from the hill and the second attack on his person in a month, Arthur had unscrewed the galvanised hasp from the coal shed and fitted it to Lawrence’s door. When, as expected, Lawrence arrived home and snuck into bed without so much as a word of apology to his old man, Arthur rose from bed and locked his son in until the next morning. He was no pushover, not like he used to be.

  “I’ve lunch,” he said, shoving the door open with his foot. “Kid?”

  Little bastard.

  Arthur hurried to the open window, tea soaking the sandwiches as the tray clattered on the desk. Judging by the dents in the old toilet and coal shed roofs, Lawrence had done a circus act off the windowsill then escaped into the backs. By the back gate sat a pewter-coloured cat that Arthur could swear was smiling at him.

  Into the yard. His balls ached – that girl had really clouted him one – as he glared over the blunt wall at the sparrows twittering in the sycamores. This was him officially lumbered with a pair of AWOL’s now. They were selfish bastards, his family, the bloody pair of them.

  He should have known something was up when the noise died down earlier; the booted door panels given respite, the spherical handle ceasing to rattle. He should have known when there was no reply after he told Lawrence he’d be back with lunch, that they’d talk about what happened then.

  It was a mistake slipping into town in search of Shell. Ten minutes wasted, half an hour, forty even, because of her. Just the time it took to get to the mini-mart and the bakery, just the time for Lawrence to escape. Now the lad could be anywhere and Shell was off gallivanting about.

  Arthur tried to think logically. The kind of places he’d seek if he were in his son’s position had their synonyms, and these were the places he should check. For the library read the market. For the moorland read the woods. If it was Arthur running away because his friend had just attacked his father, it’d be no contest, he’d take the Litten Path, go down the street rather than up it, defying the little peat canyons and the sinkholes left by the pit ponies, heading past the abandoned Land Rover, sky-blue, rusted and paint-peeled, the springs bursting out of their seats like the components to a broken jack-in-a-box.

  There was nowhere better than the moor. Always Arthur could feel it: a mental space as much as a physical one, everything made remote upon its stretch. He’d half a mind to go there now, wading through the bog cotton, up the steeps, buffeted by the weather, witnessed only by the lozenge pupils of the sheep grazing on the bare flat of purple and hazel. But it was out of the question. He set off for Barnes’ Wood. The forest would be perfect for Lawrence to hide in. It was where guilt’s fugitive could disappear beneath the undergrowth like a serpent.

  The Ogden was at low ebb. Sludge banks on either side tilted toward the surrounding woods and tracts of milky sunlight glazed through, broken simply by the knuckle, peg and beam of the trees, one of which had a cache of beer cans stuffed in it.

  Arthur’s trainers sank in the bog, and he almost slipped on the distorted pages of a porn magazine that lay twisted, sodden in the muck. The paper skin of the naked woman was torn and she had a black stripe hiding both eyes, stars concealing each nipple. She couldn’t quite smile in the direction of a plastic bag woven around a tree root. Arthur stopped for a piss. Silence otherwise.

  He arrived at the ruins on the south side of the wood. He’d come exploring here with Lawrence in the past, for the odd tryst with former girlfriend in days gone by, bare arse chafing the cold as he fucked and rocked on the brick, spit collecting in that heavy after-moment. Blinking and becoming yourself again. Pulling out and returning gratefully to being separate.

  But that was an age ago and now everything seemed smaller. Two of the ruin’s four walls were gone and nettles as tall as corn sprouted in what could once have been the kitchen. The structure was crumbling until one day it would cease to exist at all.

  Further past the ruin Arthur came to the track that fed the tree cave that he and Sam used to visit. He wondered if the elm had gotten any bigger. His mam used to say elms are associated with death because they drop branches without warning and their wood is a preferred material for coffins. Perhaps that was why Arthur liked them so mu
ch. The river bridge was nearby. The stretched verticals of the beech trees looked like they had faces in them. There was no chance of going to the den now. Too much of the past was sealed within its boundary.

  Traffic. There was a lot more of that these days. It made a steady sound that crept steadily as might a glacier. Lawrence wasn’t here. Maybe Arthur didn’t know this place at all. Maybe he didn’t know his son and never had done.

  He headed for home, kicking a stone towards town until a red car sounded its horn and drew in some yards ahead. Arthur approached, drew to the wound-down window, passenger side, bent so he could see the driver and said, “What you doing, you? You’re wasting petrol.”

  “Bored,” said Asa Scanlan.

  “You’re always bored.”

  Asa leaned over and opened the door. He was a compassionate and volatile man with a big round head and a bob in the bridge of his nose; his cheeks were bristled and his arms were taut. “Frame yourself,” he said, revving the Fiesta’s engine.

  There was the waiting seat and there was waiting wood, and here was the open door. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” said Arthur, climbing into the car.

  “Got any cigs?”

  “I said you’re a sight for sore eyes, Moonface.”

  Asa braked in the middle of the road. “What’d I say about calling us that?”

  “Calling you what?”

  “Does tha want a lift or what?”

  Asa was so easy. Arthur switched on the pilot light and made a silly face under it that was murder on his broken cheek. Thankfully it was enough to get Asa chuckling.

  “Just don’t call us that, all right?” said Asa.

  “What, Moonface?”

  “Funny.” Asa set off again. “Face is the last thing you can chat on wi’.”

  Arthur passed Asa the tobacco and thumped him on the arm. His old friend spoke the language of assent ninety percent of the time. He was all go on thens and why nots and you’re not wrongs, but you could rile him into a no when you had a mind to. Winding Asa Scanlan up was as easy as setting a mousetrap off with a pencil.