by James Clarke
They drove on a bit. “I’m sorry, love,” Arthur eventually said.
“You’re all right, lass. Thought you’d be on t’march today.”
“Not fit for service,” Arthur said, pointing at the mask still covering a portion of his face. “And if you must know, I’m out looking for me lad.”
Asa changed gear. “Why, where’s he gone?”
“He’s gone and got himself in hot water.”
“Well how’s he done that then?”
“What’s this, Spanish Inquisition?”
The sun reached its zenith as Barnes’ Wood disappeared behind the Fiesta. The truth was that between picketing and not forgiving being dropped in it with Shell, Arthur hadn’t a clue what was going on with his son. It was high time that was remedied. Skipping school and knocking around with a maniac: the boy was out of control. The bewildered look on his face when Arthur found him with that girl yesterday beggared belief. Lawrence hadn’t been able to believe that his old man had showed up, seeming to forget that Arthur had been young himself once, and had in fact been a seasoned skiver in his day. And although Arthur didn’t condone missing school – there’d be words on that – didn’t Lawrence know not to hang around town afterwards? It was common sense. As, for that matter, was not standing like a lemon while your girlfriend kicked your dad in the fucking balls.
Arthur gobbled another four codeine and felt the Swarsby photographs in his pocket. They were his only copies. He’d been too scared to put them down in case he lost them.
They were soon near the Brantford side of town, not far from Threndle House.
“What march you on about anyway?” Arthur said.
“Sheffield. Jan’s there with your Shell and a few others.”
“Oh, right.”
“Tha didn’t know?”
“Course I bloody did.”
There was nothing to do except drive. Without work, a picket or any money, aimlessness was what life often boiled down to these days. Arthur semi-watched for Lawrence while Asa drove. The day’s heat was in ascension. They coasted along the textured, marked road, past the rec, pausing at the lights next to the bus stand where the night bus still picked people up on their way home from The Bluenote most weekends.
“Many’s the eve spent swaying at that stop,” said Arthur fondly, turning to watch the metal post, wonky in its cement foot. Takeaway boxes spilled from the mouth of the bin strapped to it.
The bin’s jumbled outline faded as they drove. “When we were lads,” said Asa, and Arthur smiled. So many evenings had begun with the two of them sat on opposite sides of the 273, heading straight from their shift to the welfare then hitting The Bluenote, an old club that had swollen banks of lights next to the mobile disco, and a dancefloor filled almost exclusively with girls.
Upon arrival Arthur always went straight to the bogs to take the black socks off the outsides of his shoes – he had to disguise his scruffs somehow – then pushed back through the crowd to find the shitfaced Asa. In those days the candlewax floor had just been replaced by the hard material that made your feet stick, and the club turn sang in their own accent. Three to four hours on the piss then home to Shell, rubbing the corduroy of her spine. “Your hands are freezing,” she’d say.
“You look so bloody good, love.”
“It’s the light fooling you.”
So what if it was? Sometimes Arthur’s mouth wouldn’t feel like his own as he kissed his wife’s neck, as he sank to her lower regions, the coarse nature of her legs. Sometimes it could have been anyone in bed with him. He could have been anyone himself, a perfect stranger to Shell. Their curtains were often lit from the street below, each flower of the fabric’s print assuming new life the harder you squinted at it. Altered roses. Living foliage.
“Leathered in the Bluenote.” Asa laughed. They were driving towards the Grey Grebe by then. “Bloody Nora. You on that lamppost.” He adjusted his weight in his chair. “One handed pull-up’s from t’top.”
“Them birds were having kittens,” said Arthur.
“Bugger me, what were their names again?”
They turned the corner. The two of them had been friends since they were first partnered up at Brantford. A couple of years older than Arthur, Asa started at the pit after it held a recruitment drive across the borough. The management bussed lads in from the local schools and impressed them with the machinery, the struts, joists, coke houses and brick houses, the various ovens and stories of the spoil pile that lit up every now and again thanks to overzealous piling, combustible pouches of air trapped all too dangerously.
Mining life was known for this kind of unpredictability as much as it was known for its sense of community, and that, coupled with the prospect of rising wages and a house paid for by the coal board, appealed to lads like Asa who were done with school the minute they got there and anxious to start tucking into their lives.
Asa put his name down for a job that day and six months later was working with Arthur on the fetch and carry. Typical new starters, their first duty was salvaging scrap down the Grafton Belt, a spent seam of coal in one of the oldest Brantford districts beneath Litten. Their job was to scoot around retrieving what was left down there, ‘On the wood’ or ‘on the metal’, depending what you were after that day, barely able to see a few yards ahead, collecting the shite left behind by old crews, pre and post war, in times when it was almost as muggy above ground as it was below, before the clean air act stopped the atmosphere on the streets from feeling like a willow curtain you could part with your hands. Like a brattice partition, even. The controller of the gas.
Lads the same age who labour together can get close in a matter of days. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re alike. Asa’s eyes were without curiosity. They were passages into a mind occupied by the sporting pinks, the weekend and the next morning and not much else. His friendship with Arthur was subterranean. Patina of dust over their lamp glass as they shared their snap. Some people are chucked together, others are drawn. When Arthur and Shell Newman met Asa and Janice Scanlan, Arthur was wildly jealous. There were no bottomless lakes in the Scanlans’ marriage. There were no dreams of wolves or plague doctors or past lives. Meeting the other couple had made him realise for the first time that the simplistic measure was the better yardstick. That the Newmans had saddled themselves by reading meaning into everything.
“We took them up the moor. Oh, what were their names, Art? When you found that skull.”
“Hang a left here, Scanny. Is that him?”
“Where?”
“Going up Flintwicks.”
On their way towards the Grey Grebe, the Fiesta turned up the estate. Flintwicks was a puzzle of streets built to retain pit workers after Litten was declared a manpower deficiency area back in the fifties. For some reason its streets were named after towns on the south coast. Horsham, Arundel, Tonbridge, Swanage . . . Up one of these closes strode a narrow youngster in jeans and t-shirt.
“Fucking down there. Turn left, Asa.”
The car swung crazily down Rudgwick. The windscreen was so mucky that Asa had to put the wipers on as he said it didn’t look like Lawrence, he had too much hair.
“It’s grown back loads. Now slow down, I don’t want him spooked . . .”
“Jackie and Pauline.”
“Eh?”
“Them birds.”
“Bob on, lad. Now I remember.”
Though Arthur had never really forgotten. Jackie possessed a hefty nose and teeth that in the right light had looked like rock, calcified deposits in her gums. She’d been fending off the advances of a slippery little man in the Bluenote so Arthur had stepped in, then, at closing time, let Jackie persuade him into a night walk. The pair were splash-lit by street-light, looking almost radioactive, thought Arthur, as Jackie said she thought he was dead brave, when in fact he knew he was one of the biggest cowards who had ev
er lived.
The Morse Code wink of an aeroplane’s lights. The lull of the dark. Side by side, strolling the uneven camber of the Litten Path. “It’s wet,” said Jackie. “I said it’s wet out.”
“Have us coat, if you like.”
“Oh, warm us, will you, Arthur. Come here.”
She wasn’t a patch on Shell. Arthur let her take his arm anyway. Asa and the other one were laughing as they picked their route behind, the sky looking tender to the touch, a shifting honeycomb as Jackie leaned in for her kiss. Why the fuck not? Arthur was so pissed he’d have agreed to anything. Colour. Fireworks. Het. Arthur was leaning forward, listening to Jackie’s nostrils, the weird whistling noise they made, when he heard the crunching sound.
He pulled back. “Jesus.”
“What is it?”
“I think you’ve stood on summat.”
It had misted. Jackie peered at her feet and saw that she had trampled on the body of a dead badger. She leapt away. Arthur picked up the beast’s skull. The moment felt profound. He had stumbled upon the remains of the most English of all creatures, and it was dead. Eventually Jackie must have left him to it, or maybe Arthur left her; he could forget so easily what wasn’t relevant. He jogged home, walked home, floated home to his dozing wife and sleeping son, the tiny augury stowed inside his anorak pocket. He’d watched his family wake up. He’d made them breakfast.
“It’s him, Asa.”
The subsidiary drag of Flintwicks stretched beyond, with enough road for Asa to put his foot down and speed towards the figure a hundred or so yards away, the figure who turned, saw the car and broke into a run.
“Only a lad of yours would run for nowt, Arthur.”
“Well get after him, Scanny. Carpe diem.”
“I don’t speak French.”
“Just fucking drive.”
The Fiesta hurtled up the macadam, following the dirty soles of Lawrence’s shoes that blinked in sequence. They were going uphill and the car managed to catch him easily.
Arthur wound down his window and told Lawrence to stop. When the lad didn’t he told him he was grounded until further notice.
He pulled his head back into the car. “Get on t’curb. Scanny.”
“That’ll do tyres.”
“You’re not on a penny farthing!”
“I need this motor, Arthur, I’ll not risk it!”
Arthur was about to grab the wheel when a ginnel emerged to the car’s left. A walkway with cement-panelled walls and waist high railings at either end. Lawrence headed straight down it.
“Fuck’s sake, pull over.”
Arthur jumped out of the car, vaulted the fence and sprinted down the shortcut after his son. Tall weeds sprouted between the paving and there were several white dog turds, NO SURRENDER spray-painted up the length of one of the sidings.
Hard to gain on a young man. Although Arthur lived a physical life, giving chase meant a different kind of fitness. Step. Step. Step. His beat on the pavement sent jagged bolts of pain up his fractured face.
“Stop, lad!”
Lawrence kept going.
“Lawrence, please stop!”
Little bastard.
Arthur had a stitch. He watched his son go and was about to call after him when the end of the ginnel flooded red. It was Asa. He had driven around the block and barred the way with the Fiesta.
Arthur hurried as best he could, while Asa stood at the passage’s exit with both arms crossed. Realising he’d been bagged, Lawrence leant, breathless, against a wall. Arthur was about to give him what for when he realised the boy was crying.
“You’re all right, kid,” he said, putting his arms around his son. “Your dad’s here.”
The front door opened directly into Asa’s living room on Winchester Close. A picture of Ken Scanlan smiled above the wooden mantelpiece. Ken had been a banksman at Brantford, hauling back the cage gates, responsible for the loading and reloading of men and tubs of coal. He’d bought the house from the NCB and passed it on to Asa and Janice and the girls. Their very own home that they now couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage on.
Arthur had shielded Lawrence long enough for his face to dry. He sat him down while Asa went to make the tea.
The long minute, the endless second.
“State of that shirt. What you been ironing it with, an hot brick?”
Lawrence didn’t reply.
“You needn’t have run.”
“You needn’t have locked us in last night.”
Asa was whistling in the next room. Lawrence had always been like this. “If anyone should be angry, it should be me, kid.”
Another shrug.
“Skipping school, you’ll end up like me, let alone that we’re at risk of having Education Welfare round. They’ll have us up in court, lad, then what will your mam say?”
Lawrence fiddled with the laces of his trainers.
“Can you at least look at me?”
Rubbing the tears had left Lawrence’s eyes inflamed. His defiant expression suggested he knew this would be something Arthur hated to see. He was dead right about that.
Arthur’s voice cracked. “I said you were out of school again, weren’t you?”
“Aye.”
“And that’s a poor do.”
“Suppose.”
Fuck me, what did it take to make the lad budge? It was bad enough having a son, one that looked so much like you made you feel like you were telling yourself off in situations like this. Shell was better at this sort of thing. Discipline, dinners and the day-to-day were her territory. Advice, schemes and homework were Arthur’s.
He decided upon a different approach, pointing at himself with both thumbs. “You’ve not even asked about the face.”
“You’ve hardly given us chance. I mean I did wonder . . .”
“Jesus, I weren’t pissed-up if that’s what that look means.”
“Well, what were it then?”
“You’re as bad as your mam, you are!”
Asa entered, carrying the tea. “Jan’s had some shifts at Masons so’s splashed out,” he said, tossing Lawrence and Arthur a chocolate biscuit each. Arthur could smell the whiskey in his own mug. Asa winked.
“Another thing not mentioned is that girl. Calamity Jane an’ her size twelves,” Arthur said.
“Has Seabreeze got himself a bird?” Asa rolled his sleeves up.
“He wishes.”
“What d’you know about it, Dad?” Lawrence snapped.
“I know she’s not all there.” Arthur tapped his head. “Bad influence. You’re best getting rid.”
“Why, what’d she do?” said Asa.
“Nowt.”
“You don’t get it,” said Lawrence, hands scrunched in his lap.
“No, I don’t,” replied Arthur, though definitely he did.
Their eyes met. “I’m sorry, all right?” Lawrence conceded, which choked Arthur. He blamed the hangover for this mimsiness. He always felt fraught the day after a bout of drinking.
“I should bloody well hope so,” he said, downing the last of his hot, splendid tea. As it slipped down his throat, quick as mercury, he had the feeling of a glorious neon fluid being poured over his brain, coursing into every rivulet, every artery.
“Any chance of another, Scanny?”
“Course.” Asa left the room and a moment later the kettle could be heard.
“Still ran though, didn’t you. Couldn’t help yoursen, leaving your old man in the lurch.”
The kettle was getting louder. Lawrence was so soft.
“First the rug, then the tree, now this. As if I don’t have enough on us plate. Never mind your bloody mam.”
“None of that were my fault, Dad.”
“Never is. Never has been. You don’t care ’bout school. He’s not fus
sed, my grammar lad’s not bothered about making summat of hisself. All he wants is to muck about and drop his dad in it. Standing there while some loony attacks him.”
“Dad, I didn’t—”
“Oh fucking own summat for once, will you, kid?”
Lawrence set down his own mug. “You what?”
The carpet at their feet was some imitation Afghani thing, a crystal pattern surrounded by acanthus leaves. At home they were back to the old floor and whose bloody fault was bloody that? A pessimist wife and a feeble fucking kid who refused to make the most of the opportunity gifted to him. All those nights going over the practice papers, all that encouragement, fuck’s sake. Lawrence was on the wag and making out to Shell that the tree had been nicked and Het was one nil up and as for Shell that ungrateful sack of spuds. Arthur realised he was standing. “You’re weak, lad, moaner like your mam! Look at you, shy as fuck. You’re a liability. I used to be able to rely on you.”
Lawrence stood too. “That’s rich coming from you!” he shouted, and maybe he was right. Maybe in a lot of ways he had a right to say such a thing, but as a son there was no way he was getting away with talking to his father like that. Arthur slapped Lawrence around the face.
Have that.
The two of them glared at one another, breathing heavily. When Arthur looked away, Lawrence flopped so heavily into the armchair that the poker set fell over by the fireplace. The sound of the ringing ash pan and sweep was the sound of something broken between the two of them.
In the shrinking that followed, Arthur retreated to a framed photo mounted on the wall. It was another one of Ken Scanlan. This time Ken was holding baby Asa in front of a huge drill rig. Arthur removed his mask. Within the sheen of the glass, he could make out the motley patch of grazing on his cheek. It spread from the main impact point under the socket of a marshmallow eye, a bruised hump like a spoil heap.
“Mess, isn’t it?”
Lawrence had his head in his hands.
“I said it’s a mess, isn’t it?”