by James Clarke
Silence.
“Kid?” Remorse marched its challenge. Arthur went over to crouch by Lawrence’s knee. The greasy antimacassar behind his son’s head was badly in need of a wash.
“I shouldn’t have done that.”
“You’re a flaming hypocrite!”
“I know.”
“You can’t blame us for everything, Dad. I said I were sorry.”
“Me an’ all.”
“I couldn’t stop her.”
“You weren’t to know she’d do that.”
“She didn’t know who you were . . .”
“Well . . . likewise.”
“She thought you were some nutter.”
“Well, that were one thing she were right about.”
That got a laugh.
“She’s my friend.”
“Who, Lawrence? Who is she?”
“Evie Swarsby.”
Course it was.
“Swarsby?” said Asa, who’d chosen that moment to re-enter the room. “That prick’s had the nerve to be posting Tory leaflets through us doors.”
“Aye,” replied Arthur, re-setting the mask against his face and tugging the elastic over his head. “An’ what you doing knocking around with her when you should be in school, kid?”
“Because I’ve been expelled, Dad. They’ve gone and expelled me.”
11
No one likes having to apologise, it’s a horrible thing to have to do.
Lawrence was in the lounge listening to the familiar metal scratch of the key pushing into the lock. “I’ll do the talking,” said Arthur, acting as if he cared.
“Do we really have to tell her?”
“You’ve sat on it long enough. I’d start getting yourself straight if I were you. Tuck your shirt in. Do them laces.”
The front door opened. Lawrence scrunched his toes. He could hear the muted rustle of his mam’s denim jacket being hung on the hook. He assessed how quickly he could make it to the back door. His hair had only just grown back after the last disaster.
She pushed into the room. “Oh . . .” She laid a hand against her heart.
“All right, love.”
Shell glanced at Arthur, who tried to act as if he couldn’t recognise the way his wife was deliberately keeping her distance from him. Lawrence knew better. He watched the removal of the mask. How it was laid on the armrest with great care.
“Sorry, love,” said Mam, setting down her handbag. The cloud out of the open window looked like bubble wrap.
“’Bout what?”
“Nowt.”
“You’re back late.”
“Am I?”
Mam apologised again.
“Not to worry,” said Arthur while Lawrence waited, the awkward plaintiff, the scent of honeysuckle coming at him through the open window.
His dad tried again. “So were the march—”
“I did hear you, love. It were fine.”
Knotted fingers and swimming eyes, Lawrence’s mam finally noticed him. He held her gaze long enough for her to know what she could do with it.
“That’s good then,” his dad said, glancing at the sky breaking through the cloud like a blueberry splat in a bowl of semolina. Lawrence and he were nearly the same height these days, neither gangling, simply sizable, though Arthur, hewer by trade, had broader shoulders from hefting the drills and the picks and what have you. Lawrence didn’t know much about his dad’s work. He didn’t care to know. This might be the worst day of his life. He could practically hear the gush of blood in his arteries and veins. The pastel day was terrifying in its stillness.
“Aye,” Mam was saying, a blistered feel to her voice. “But nowt to write home about.”
She addressed Lawrence directly. “You all right, kid?”
It was an old trick of hers, coming at you sideways. The best thing to do was answer quick. “Not bad,” replied Lawrence, thinking of those sooty hands clamping his skull; the fervid swish of the kitchen scissors.
“Good,” said Mam.
Lawrence thinned his lips.
The truth had already been discovered, yet it was about to be revealed again, which made it something of a paradox: a secret that had already been told. Lawrence could sense Arthur gearing himself up to pass on what he’d heard at Asa’s. It hadn’t been pretty earlier; Asa had to hold him back: a father who had always been so proud of his grammar school son. But at least Lawrence had been allowed to say his piece. His dad had the courtesy to stay quiet most of the way home, too, perhaps understanding failure for the ugly subject it was: one of the hardest things a person ever has to face.
It was Mam who was the unpredictable one. She’d defend you in public but had no time for excuses behind closed doors. Once when Lawrence’s goalie gloves were stolen by one of the Champion lads from around the corner, she’d called round, given Cath Champion and her sons what for then come home and had a go at Lawrence for not standing up for himself. He was grounded in the ensuing argument, which was ironic, given that he was at that point giving an account of himself as she’d wanted him to in the first place. Irony was never one of Shell’s strong suits. Spite was. Later, Lawrence found his gloves with the tip of the pinkie snipped off each hand. He got his own back by taking the batteries from his mam’s alarm clock so she missed her appointment the next day at the doctor’s.
He watched her at the door connecting to the hallway. She held it open with her elbow and bothered at the wall-hooks, removing a large piece of cloth from her jacket, balling it up then dropping it in the waste paper basket by the minibar.
She held herself stiffly, brown curls unleashed and her forehead seeming to stick out plainly. Lawrence craned to see in the bin. There was a t-shirt there.
“Love, we’ve something to say,” said Arthur, his inflated face yet another thing to behold, so distended that it made Lawrence think of the grotesque cherub the Threndle House gargoyle had probably once been. With its dying fall, petrifying into stone.
“I said, Shell, me and the boy have news.”
Here we go. Lawrence had been over this moment many times, and whenever he got to the point where he told his mam none of this would have happened if it weren’t for her, that broad, adamant mouth dislocated and she devoured him.
He couldn’t move. He stared at where the rug used to be, the scrubbed boards, tessellating under the furniture, slot-complex, imperfect, up to the walls that penned them, the bone surface of . . .
“Can it not wait?” Shell was saying. “I’m tired.”
Yes!
“Well, love, not really, no.”
“Well I’m afraid it’ll have to. I’ve had a long day, been on my feet hours and . . .” Shell stopped. Lawrence didn’t know where to look. “I’m just done in, OK? I need to get my head down.”
She left the room dabbing at her eyes.
The door eased back ajar. When he was sure his mother was out of earshot, Lawrence asked what was up with her.
“How do you mean?” said Arthur.
“You didn’t see?”
“She’s tired, kid.”
“She were nearly in tears, Dad, I swear.”
“Get off wi’ you.”
“She were.”
Arthur hesitated, then went to the foot of the stairs. “Sure you’re all right, love?”
Mam yelled back that she was fine.
See, Arthur said, without words, adding as he re-fitted the mask. “Another of her moods.”
“Go see her, Dad.”
“Hark at you, trying to get rid.”
“Come on,” said Lawrence. “It’s not that.”
“You must think I came down wi’ the last shower, lad.”
“Honestly, go speak to her.”
“Give me one good reason why.”
“I just have
done!”
Arthur’s single eye was kind of horrifying; the plastic of his mask picked out the ochre in its iris, giving the impression of some dreadfully revealed ulterior consciousness.
“It’s obvious,” said Lawrence. “She didn’t say anything when she saw us standing here like a pair of wedding ushers. She didn’t seem surprised.”
“Women, lad.” Arthur chuckled. “She weren’t bothered about my face neither.”
And nor were you, is what Lawrence supposed he didn’t say.
“Fine. What now? Can it not wait? She’ll only want to go down school when she hears.” Lawrence could picture his mam bursting through the swing doors at Fernside, through the cloakroom and up the steps to the foyer, demanding Grundy take her son back. It would never occur to her that Lawrence didn’t want to go back, that without school was the broader palette, and painting with it, Evie Swarsby. He was a man now. This was life.
Not that Arthur appeared convinced. Old jaw-face, a man smelling of booze when all he’d been on was tea. A nasty trick, using that padlock. It had made Lawrence miss his meeting with Evie. He’d resorted to climbing out of the window and nearly killed himself.
Course Evie was gone by the time he arrived at the tree cave. Ages he’d waited, listening to the helpless wood, starting at every movement, scratching Evie’s name against a rock because he was too weak to carve it properly into a tree. Scribbling it out in case she ever saw it.
As the crow flies he’d left for Threndle House. The day had boiled and a police van thundered by, as they seemed to more and more of late. Crisp white shirts and a motley pack of yowling dogs. “Pit’s that way,” one of them called out of the window as the van went by. He was pointing at a muddy puddle.
Then came the arrival of Asa’s car, red peril bursting into your line of sight. Lawrence was embarrassed about breaking down after being corralled in that alleyway, but you can’t fight cumulative tears, and he didn’t think Asa would tell anyone. He knew his father certainly wouldn’t.
Here was Arthur now. “You’re not getting out of this,” he said, as if that was the only thing on Lawrence’s mind.
“Maybe I’m not trying to, Dad. Maybe summat’s up with Mam and it’s obvious to anyone but a fucking sieve-head like you.”
Lawrence had the Swarsbys to thank for a direct comment like that. He and Arthur had shared their differences over the years, but Lawrence didn’t think he’d ever sworn at his father before. The eye in that mask had boggled wonderfully. A single finger had jabbed him in the chest.
Bastard should never have hit him. Lawrence stood outside the chipped door of his parents’ room and prepared to knock-on. He regretted what he’d said but was also thrilled by it.
Mam wasn’t asleep – Lawrence could hear her moving about in the room. He lifted his hand, belly scooped out with nerves, thumped the door and pushed it open without waiting for an answer.
His mam was standing at the end of the bed wearing only her bra and knickers. A bruise as dark as an oil slick spread up her thigh, a sheen of stubble emerged sternly from her armpits and, to Lawrence’s surprise, she had a torso that was far from doughy.
She whirled around. “Did I say come in?”
Lawrence stuttered sorry and backed out.
Minutes later she summoned him. He was leaning against the landing wall by then. He never knew his mam had varicose veins. They meandered from the summits of her ankles and weren’t far off in colour from the coal mark on his dad’s face.
The room smelled of air freshener and there was a swatter on the drawers, speckled with moth corpses. By Arthur’s side of the bed, unoccupied for weeks, was a Perspex framed picture of Lawrence as a boy, aged maybe seven, cracked from where it had been knocked on the floor and trodden on. The wardrobes were built into the wall and the curtains were drawn to keep out the summer. Mam’s hair had been tied back into an almost militant ponytail as she lay down, her face isolated against the canary-coloured bedding.
“Mam.”
“Kiddo.”
“Dad’s worried.”
“Is he now?”
Lawrence took a deep breath, noticing for the first time how little of his mother he could read in this room. There were no pictures, no mementos or keepsakes, not even any books, not like Arthur. Shell must do her saving in her head. She must have had a cavernous trove in her, a smuggler’s cove accessible only by underground passage.
“You look all, I dunno.”
“I just had a big day, love.”
“Where’d you get to?”
“Sheffield. An’ I already said I’m not talking about it.”
That was just one of many things Mam wasn’t talking about. She had set off so early that morning that Lawrence hadn’t heard her leave. He’d certainly heard her the night before. He’d finished the last of the shit-mix with Evie and Duncan, then, after they’d staggered home, Evie supporting her vomiting brother, dodged into the phonebox near the bakery at the sight of Uncle Het. The last thing Lawrence needed was to be caught out drunk in the evening.
Through the closed door he’d watched that unmistakable figure. Hector had been huge to Lawrence as a boy and was large even now. More round-shouldered than broad, he was shaped like an Egyptian sarcophagus, and had at first blocked the person walking by his side with her arm linked with his. Lawrence recognised his mother through damaged glass. Shell was laughing in the last of evening’s light. It would have been a nice sound to hear in different circumstances.
She was looking at him now without her usual eagerness. He’d try a yarn, get a headstart and try not to lose it. The trick was to think past or even through the expulsion. Without school he could pay his way – that might oil the wheels – although thinking about it, the working road’s corollary was to stay forever in Litten where the only jobs were at the pit. And what could Lawrence do while the strike raged? Work elsewhere? Even if there was a job for a boy with no experience or skills, he was far from ready to start earning. He’d only just begun to live; to consider what he wanted, like the Swarsbys did.
“Is that why you came, love? To check on your mam?”
She was almost smiling. “Kind of,” said Lawrence. “But there’s summat I need to tell you first.”
Her benign expression faltered. Perhaps she’d sensed the approaching half-truth. After all, she’d had over a decade’s experience of them from the master of the art himself, downstairs.
“So I know you said Dad’d have to wait with what he’d to say, Mam, only—”
“Give me strength. I’m positive your father appreciates you as his messenger but, Lawrence.” The final bit of his name was all sibilance. “I don’t know what it is wi’ you two that’s making me have to say everything twice today. But I just want to be left alone. So will you please just listen to your mam.”
Well, if that was what she wanted. Lawrence’s hands went nervously to the buttons of his shirt. It wasn’t every day you were granted time, let alone opportunity. Together the two felt like gift horses liable to bolt and leave you on your arse if you didn’t saddle them right.
“I’m sorry, Mam,” he said, staying where he was. Mam’s eyes clicked open, little pink cogs. Lawrence had never seen her display sustained vulnerability like this before. He wondered what had happened. This was as open as she’d ever been. He was afraid.
“If you still want to chat, come back later,” she said softly, burrowing into her pillow and turning her back, the matter closed.
Lawrence opened the door and shut it again so she’d think he’d gone. He couldn’t explain why he wanted to watch this fickle woman sleep, her shape as it rose and fell. The picture of him on Arthur’s side felt a thousand years old, and looking at it made Lawrence think about how he might feel one day, remembering this moment, these minutes, this stay of execution. Would his future self be as different as he was from the boy caught unawares in that
damaged frame?
Then the door flew open to reveal Arthur with a panicked look on his face. “What’s going on? You’ve been ages. What you been saying about me?”
The slatted blinds bled zebra stripes. Shell rolled over in the light. “What you on about, Arthur? I’m trying to sleep.”
“Fucking Lawrence has been expelled.”
“What?”
“I’ve been trying to tell you.”
The metal canteen was in his dad’s top pocket. Booze breath and heavy hands, a square fucking head and gap front teeth. Arthur stepped into the room and blocked the door. Lawrence was trapped between either parent.
Mam sat up and put her palm against that cornice of a forehead. There was nothing to do but wait, take in the pattern of the covers and the chintzy wallpaper. June and still cold, only in Litten. Lawrence wondered if he could make it out of the window.
“What do you mean?” Shell said.
Arthur always pointed when he had the bit between his teeth. He was doing it now. “I mean why doesn’t Lawrence stop gossiping about his old man for once and admit what’s happened, if he hasn’t already, which I’m guessing he hasn’t, given that you’re still in your flamin’ pit, Shell . . . Go on, kid, tell your mam what you’ve gone and done.”
A discarded pair of Mam’s knickers was under the bed. It had been hard enough confessing what happened earlier, shuddering home from the Scanlan’s as the abandoned bleach works rose on the skyline. Appearing to sense this, Arthur had boasted about trespassing in the barren factory with his brothers, leaping over the open shaft for the guide rails on the third floor. Where were those considerations now? Lawrence looked ashamedly at the floor and hated his dad.
“Our son has been expelled. Now will you listen, woman?”
Shell leapt out of bed. She wore a long red t-shirt with a picture of a bear on it. “He’s not. Lawrence, tell your dad about the paper. Why’d he be circling college ads if he’s been chucked out of school, Arthur?”
“Never mind that,” said Arthur, going the colour of the nightie. “It’s true, love. I’ve caught him yesterday. Weeks back this has happened and he’s not told us.”