The Litten Path

by James Clarke

  Mam put her hands on her hips. “Lawrence?”

  “An’ all while we’ve been caught up wi’ strike, the selfish bugger,” said Arthur. He looked frantic and catty, an impulsive loon, assuming the worst and blundering in on the assumption his son was betraying him, when it was his wife doing the cheating.

  “I want to hear it from him,” Mam said. “Kiddo?”

  This was it. Get it over with. “It’s true,” Lawrence answered quietly. He was relieved to get the words out, actually, shed the layer. “I were kicked out of school,” he said. “A few weeks back.”

  Mam snorted. She put her hands behind her neck and clamped her tongue between her teeth. So it was confirmed, Lawrence’s failure had been established. And of course she’d shoulder none of the blame and nor would Arthur.

  “Don’t look like that,” said Lawrence.

  “Like what?”

  “Like what you are doing!” He tried to leave the room, only for Arthur to block his path.

  “You need to face this, lad.”

  Face it? Lawrence could finally see his father properly, see behind that convenient plastic thing, the pupil of a good eye reduced to the size of an insect: like a blood-filled tick left drowned in an empty teacup. The eye said it all: Arthur was terrified of Shell finding out about the break-in at Threndle House. In spite of her rudeness, her coldness, her directness, he was afraid to lose her, a wife his brother had already taken. And what a thing it was, to pity your father and how he fooled himself.

  “You better tell us what happened,” Mam said.

  “He’ll tell you,” Lawrence replied, “Won’t you, Dad,” and this time he managed to battle out onto the landing where the lampshade hung above the stairs like a wasp’s nest. He could hear his parents going at it behind him, arguing over the things they wanted for him, which were really just projections of what they wanted for themselves. Mam was calling him stupid, her own son. Who else knows? she was saying. Who have you told? Thanking her lucky stars Lawrence had been sent to the grammar school rather than Litten Modern. People might have thought them snobs sending him there, but it was a blessing in this light. The explosion had been controlled, like a warhead on a distant reef.

  Lawrence hurried to his room to pack his things. He would head to his grandmother’s, which was a short walk through the cherry blossom specks blowing out of the grounds of Cottonlea Retirement Home, past the weathercock turning on the spire of St Michael’s. He loaded his pack and headed out, stopping on the landing to listen to his mother one more time. Through the bedroom door he heard her. He could forget about school. Brantford was the best place for him because heaven knew he didn’t listen to his parents.

  “No way,” Arthur was shouting, “No son of mine . . .” and this sent Shell storming out of the room.

  Here she was, saying the words, probably the worst thing she could ever have said to Lawrence:

  “Soon as this is all over, your uncle will put a word in for you down pit. He knows people, does Het. He’ll sort it like always.”

  “Not the only thing Het sorts though, is it,” snapped Lawrence.

  He was out of the house and down the road within a minute.

  12

  Het pulled his scar tight and brought the razor to his face. Then he drew the blade through the froth. Iron filings of stubble floated in the bowl of pearly water, collecting almost deliberately at the edges.

  This routine every morning. Het actually liked the look of himself in the mirror, masked by a soapy beard. Sometimes he felt like he should just let it grow for real.

  Too far in to back out now though. He mowed clear lines of skin down his foamy cheek and for once didn’t cut himself, then it was done and he was getting dressed. The radio chittered the news; it was only on because he found mornings without another human voice eerie.

  It was a short journey to the petrol station. With money getting tight, he’d been driving the Maxi to pickets himself rather than forking out for lifts from the other lads. Taking the risk was preferable to dipping into savings, plus he preferred driving to being driven. Some people were born to be driven. Not Het. He liked being the one behind the wheel. It was a question of ability, of natural indifference when you got to the county lines. The others were better at crouching in the back or lying under the blankets, and usually there was some unfortunate hidden in the boot.

  “Duck down, boys.”

  Slowing it. Staring ahead like all you had behind you was a set of walking boots and a raincoat. Only once had they been caught when Het was driving. They’d been chased and had their names taken, mind you, which was something to think about. When he’d been stopped in the past, Het had been sent on his way with a scare and a story to tell, but this cataloguing of dissenters made him nervous. The government were building profiles, getting clever.

  Het also liked taking the men home after a picket. Long quiet drives. You dropped one guy off and then two more until it was just you and the last man left. You get to know someone when it’s just you and them in your car. Sometimes the wives would invite him indoors to stretch his legs, and there he’d see how they lived, smell their personal smells, note the accoutrements, the mannerisms and various kids.

  Families were hell on him. They also spurred him on. Local and otherwise, those on and off picket reminded Het why he was doing all this in the first place. For every day now it was another pit, another town or cokeworks, steelworks, power station, hoarse throat, muscles sore from hefting bin bags of paint off the sides of bridges onto scab lorries and police motorbikes, upending barricades, using trails of barbed wire to block compounds, sabotaging machinery and running, always charging, a big man at the tip of the flying-V, breaking the police lines and earning bravery ales at 72 pence a pint, calming his brother down whenever Arthur tried to run the other lads at darts and kept losing his brass.

  So maybe Brantford wasn’t closing. Others were and the employees of those pits had jobs just as worth saving. This was how Het did things. How all people worth their salt behaved. As long as wide was the case. Examples had to be set. They had their codes.

  Picketing was his only income. It was a quid a day for flying, two if you did a double. You and a car full of guys after the extra money, flying in to picket one place, falling back to do another. Het had made twenty quid petrol since that messy afternoon at Tyndale back in May.

  Most recently he’d done a run to Port Talbot to picket with the taffs at the steel docks where they’d been shipping in American coal. He and about ten others had spent the night in sleeping bags on the living room carpet of a local ventilation engineer. Het had already forgotten their host’s name, but he was a NACOD so still getting paid, so what did it matter? And not that it was necessarily the man’s fault that his union was a part of the industry yet not bothering to strike, but it must have made the struggle something of a holiday, no?

  No one said anything. It would have been rude. But Het suspected the bloke made everyone bacon butties out of guilt. Because it must be a bit of all right, getting paid to sit on your backside for months on end while the NUM were out fighting for a cause your union were a part of yet failing to commit to. Pressed shoulder to shoulder with the others, Het hardly slept because he was stuck on the end of the row, where it was colder, because of his height. The engineer’s carpet was orange and he had a fancy record player. Het’s head had lain beneath the table it perched on. He’d bumped it waking up – a knock on the bonce to raise a soul come morning. Then to the wife after shuffling into the kitchen: “Ta, pet. Black with one sugar for me, please.”

  He arrived at his mam’s. In ’83 there’d been a heatwave and now, one year on, it felt like there would be another. Morning of mid-June. Blazing hot already. Het wished he had the time to make the most of it.

  He’d taken to his mam’s more and more of late, started checking in on Lawrence, who’d come to stay after a falling out with his
parents. Not that Het possessed a great deal of interest in the little tyke, but Lawrence was a good enough reason to grab a free dinner whilst trying regain enough of Arthur’s favour to see Shell again.

  Because she wouldn’t see him anymore, not for love nor money, two things he’d never had a great deal of. They’d been getting on so well recently, too. Course tongues had wagged; Het had set them straight. It should have been fine. He just couldn’t understand what was going on with Shell.

  Perhaps it was that night at the bakery. The shutters had been lowered and locked and the shop’s spotlights flickered off, leaving the two of them alone in the back area. Somehow they’d gotten onto his being single. The how and why of it.

  “I’m lonely,” said Het.

  “So get a dog.”

  Moving closer. There was always something to Shell, some breach in her wellbeing she wouldn’t share with him.

  Het said, “That’s not what I meant.”

  And Shell said she knew that. “I’m not daft, you lunk.”

  Smiling, also serious, Het stuck his hand out and rested it upon Shell’s, accidentally-on-purpose. She returned the sentiment with her thumb, dragging the digit from under his palm then pressing the back of his hand with it, firmly, before drawing sharply away to face the bread shelf with its base of bronzed, angled poles.

  No more of anything. No more of that. The disturbance of the paper bag as Shell filled it with buns. The fuzzy honey light of the hatch in the oven being switched off. Het picked up a roll; it was hard in his grasp. He pierced its crust and found it was still soft in the middle. Shell was watching him, he could feel it. He daren’t look back. She’d appreciate it more this way, because the curtain of possibility was drawing shut. To call attention to what had just happened, to have it acknowledged, Shell would only deny it. It was her way.

  “You’re always so solemn.”

  “It’s just my face. People think I’m crabby or in a mood when it’s just the weather on us mind or last night’s telly.”

  “Must be nice to be thought mysterious.”

  “Am I really that mysterious?”

  “Aye, Het. Unfortunately you are.”

  A heave in him. Was it to be how it had been when the bakery door closed, when they’d gone around the counter together with what felt like the same intention?

  “Aren’t we all though?” Shell added. “I mean, heck.”

  Het adjusted his glasses. Shell led him to the door. He didn’t understand why she was holding her hand out, a moment later he clocked.

  “You’re having us on.”

  “You’ve your tea, now cough up.”

  Het made a show of looking for his wallet, pulled an old receipt out and placed it in Shell’s hand.

  She smacked his forearm. “So what am I to tell Gaskell then?”

  “Tell him tuna butties of a weekend for Newman. H.”

  “Drop dead wi’ your tuna.”

  “I’ve refined tastes, me.”

  Down the street, Shell’s arm linked with Het’s as she laughed at the thought of him as refined. It was nice when people had an idea of you. Shell told Het about tomorrow’s trip to Sheffield on the way home. She was so excited. Much later, Het sat alone in his flat, got as drunk as he dared then woke up on the settee in the small hours. Arthur had showed up as soon as Het returned home from picketing Selcroft the following morning.

  Now he waited for his food. It wasn’t so long ago that he’d been served here twice a day. He’d temporarily moved in with his mam to let her care for him after his dad was blown up. Neither of them had wanted to talk; they weren’t those kinds of people. It was more of a practical arrangement. Mam adopted him as her point of focus. Het allowed it, needing to feel useful, such a thankless situation was his grief. So tangible the impact his presence had on her.

  He was always more of a dependent than his brothers. He’d only moved into his own place a couple of years before his dad’s accident, leaving home after overhearing a loaded comment at work one day about mummy’s boys.

  Mam was fussing now in the kitchen. More pumice stone than pebble, Helen Newman refused to pander to summer protocol and was serving hotpot for breakfast in the middle of June. The kitchen thumped with heat. Every window steamed and the smell of chopped thyme and sweating onions surrounded them.

  “Smells great,” said Het, flapping his shirt. He’d long since learned where questioning his mother got him.

  “You sound surprised.” Helen approached with a wooden spoon loaded with hotpot. “Where today?”

  God, the heat of that mouthful. “Orgreave,” Het said.

  “Speak up, lad.”

  “Orgreave.”

  “Be careful, won’t you.”

  Wincing, Het swallowed the burning wad of mush. From the moment The Mighty Atom had struck him, his mam had been overly protective of him. She’d only worry if she knew the extent of things at Orgreave cokeworks, so Het told her there was nothing to worry about. “The press have made mountains out of molehills,” he said.

  Which in a way was true. The NUM had permitted the plant to use enough fuel to keep their boilers running, thus protecting their expensive ovens, only British Steel had persuaded Orgreave into supplying them with coal behind the union’s back. With Orgreave scabbing, every union was up in arms. ASLEF and NUR crews had refused to ferry anything to or from the plant by rail after the Treeton men picketed one of the nearby road bridges. Now the site was accessible only by car and lorry.

  This had let to relentless fly picketing, police and batons, bricks and the bramble run for Het just the other day. For two weeks they’d been going up to Orgreave. Two weeks of sunbathing, sharing a laugh with the police (some of them were all right), then fighting whenever the trucks showed up. Missiles and batons. Het had been chased into the woods and taken a nasty whack that left him with a jaundiced patch that was currently becoming a lump on the back of his neck.

  “Molehills,” his mam said.

  Course every day Arthur wanted to go up to Orgreave. So did a lot of lads. If you wanted a scrum you went up to Orgreave. Flying out then falling back to Orgreave. Mansfield, Orgreave. Derbyshire, Orgreave. Yorkshire and the approximate Midlands.

  For a bloke who’d never even wanted to strike, Arthur was certainly throwing himself into the pickets of late. Het wasn’t sure what to do about it. He’d never actually planned to report the break-in at Threndle House; he’d just wanted his brother to do the right thing for once. Put up or shut up. Like most men of principle Het found it hard to laugh at himself even though it often meant he got birthed backwards trying to grit his teeth through life’s contradictions. Take now. On the one hand if Arthur didn’t strike, Het would never have forgiven him, on the other, he wasn’t sure he wanted his brother picketing now at all. The monkey had been given a gun and the means to fire it, and it felt like every day they moved closer to a reckoning.

  Het wouldn’t call saying there was no trouble at Orgreave lying. It was just underplaying it. His mam might be a miner’s wife from a mining family, she was also from that law abiding post-war generation who’d been conditioned in the belief that there were some things you simply did not do, fighting with police coming pretty high on that list. Not only could Helen not bear to think of her sons in trouble, she also couldn’t grasp that these days if you were against public disorder you ended up sitting on your hands while the authorities stomped all over you.

  “Whole union’ll be there,” Het said. “From across country.”

  “You’re like Gandhi, lad.”

  Het suppressed a smile. “Summat like that.”

  The egg timer trilled. Het’s mam opened the oven and checked inside. She stepped back, her spectacles steamed. She removed them; her exposed eyes looking a little like raisins. She said, “But a mother still worries.”

  The bowls were spaced out, ready to serve. M
am was shrinking with age. Unusually for a woman her age, she kept her hair long, cascading freely over her shoulders, and she wore a dark smock and amber-coloured beads, brown stockings and ballet pumps that she said helped her go on tip-toes to reach things. The back end of sixty. No goals beyond completing the next day and then the next day and then the next.

  Het said, “Best off putting that out of your mind.”

  “Not easy when you see the state of them pickets.”

  “Telly’s full o’ rot, Mam”

  “Well what about the papers?”

  Het had been surprised at how the media had rallied around Thatcher. How did they think it was going to go, the way the police carried on? If anything, all the violence was the governments’ fault – in ’74 the miners had been allowed to picket where they liked. Things had been comparatively sedate back then. “Them too,” he said.

  “People have died.”

  Het snorted. “All the more reason to keep going.”

  Mam ladled some hotpot into the bowls. Beige swill with bits in it. The government were claiming all this nonsense was to streamline the industry and save money, never mind it cost money to shut the pits, it didn’t save. It was obvious to Het that if the NUM backed down over this then the government would think they had a green light to do whatever they pleased, boss the unions over anything. They’d send it all up the Litten Path. Gas, bus, rail, post, health, prisons, you name it.

  “Well just remember you don’t have to bark every time NUM says so,” said his mam. “Last time they tried this we got stuck wi’ a three day week. Streets full o’ rubbish. Never mind the fact most of our brass goes straight into their leaders’ back pockets.”

  Het left the table before he said something out of turn. Union corruption was a thing of the past, and occasionally over-stepping the mark in the name of what was right didn’t mean every union wanted crushing. Up the stairs and to the left, he went, into the blandest of all rooms, the pensioner’s spare. Lawrence’s smell shocked Het: teenage sweat and teenage spunk, cheap deodorant failing to mask it. A pair of hairy feet stuck out from under the blanket of the usually well-made, single bed.