by James Clarke
“Well you’ve brought enough stuff.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
They were as bad as each other. The coach departed, and in almost no time Shell felt all resistance slip away. She rested her head on Het’s shoulder as the ignorant, selfish wilderness drifted by. They’d be through Gainsborough soon enough, traversing Louth and the Lincolnshire Wolds. Then they’d reach the shifting metal sea, where, how did that W.H. Auden one from Arthur’s anthology go again? Where all that you are not, looks back on all that you are.
Something like that, anyway.
The charabanc’s windows wouldn’t open so it was an uncomfortable journey whenever they hit traffic; they might as well have been sitting in a greenhouse. Shell feigned sleep but the other passengers were making too much noise for her to pull it off convincingly. The youngsters especially. They were all kinds of excitable after being treated to spending money by the union, who had funded the trip with money raised from a Trades Council gala earlier that summer. Everyone was terrifically excited by the first break they’d enjoyed in months. Thankfully the noise meant it was hard to talk over the racket. Shell simply watched Het point out a few sights: the Scarborough Hotel she knew he’d once stayed in; the site where Seeley House used to be, the former miners’ convalescent home.
Last off the coach, they headed to the sand, where already the mining families had dispersed amid their handsome happiness. Shell could see the shrieking scaffold of the roller coaster and the bulb-studded spokes of the Ferris wheel in the amusement park. Men had their trousers rolled to the knee and shirts removed to reveal dimpled, onion-white flesh. One old boy had twisted his hankie at the corners to cover a sensitive head.
Het carried the bags as they wandered through. “Shall we sit a bit?” he said, content to stop anywhere.
“In fact can we go along?” Shell replied. She wanted to be alone on the marzipan, watch the breakers and the mudflats, listen to the waves smash themselves apart.
Along they went. All the way Het gave Shell goosebumps, or at least something did. Maybe this was how she could finally define love, or at least what she felt when she was alone with her husband’s brother. She wanted to confide in Het. She wanted to show him her mind’s vaulting outlays, the false peaks and promontories where her thoughts seemed to sprout oily wings and stare crazily back at her. She had never let Arthur see any of that.
Skegness, so bracing. Shell wanted well away from all the Butlin’s, Jolly Fisherman shit. People were tearing into their ice creams like cows with salt licks. Long burgundy tongues flicking Mr Whippy. She walked on, worrying about this sort of imagery, the caustic analogies that sprang so readily to her mind. What was wrong with her that in a heartbeat she thought this way, summoning a head full of alley cats, Whitsun slags and chimneypots full of ash? To think as she did. It was cruel to doubt her marriage, cruel on Lawrence and cruel on Het, who she’d all but strung along these months, refusing to acknowledge what was between them or perhaps spending too much time acknowledging it on some subconscious level, and not wanting to flag it up to her responsible self because the moment that she did it would have to stop.
Until today. She didn’t know if she could rein in her tendencies anymore. She and Het strolled by the ocean, took their shoes off and waded in time through the freezing, fizzing water. After a while the crowds were gone. It was just them by a dune, which they descended so they could pitch the windbreaker up.
“Will you tell us what happened?” she said, once they’d laid out the towels.
“About what?”
“Don’t try that wi’ me.”
By concentrating on unpacking the bag, Shell gave Het the space he needed to explain what had happened. Two weeks ago, he and a few others had ventured out past curfew. Their plan had been to picket Braithwaite Main then head home for lunch, flying elsewhere that afternoon. Chris Skelly still had his phoneline up and running and had been receiving silent calls, probably from the police seeing if he was in or not. He’d got a call that morning and been daft enough not to answer it as he was leaving the house.
“I should have known then,” Het said. “I should have thought.”
Het, Chris, Gordon Lomas, David Cairns and Darren Roach all convened at The Masons, went up the pit road then drove up the M180 to Braithwaite, an older pit than Brantford, where people had worked the High Switch seam for nearly sixty years. Never had Braithwaite had a problem with scabs, yet chief constable trickery had fooled some of the desperate strikers there into going back to work. Fancy being one of the only people in Yorkshire scabbing, especially at a famous pit like Braithwaite. What happened to the traitors’ wives, Shell thought. A name change, a new life. Where would they go? Who would they know? It would be awful.
Het was present for the arrival of the scab bus and its escort. A lot of men heaving, fainting in the crush. Some picketers erected a barricade, tearing down a row of saplings and nearby street signs and piling them up – all sorts of garbage in the road. Over the pile the bus went, having to slow, giving a lad with an automatic centre punch the chance to pop the windows in the doors. The driver’s lap was full of glass after the picketers tore the cage off and smashed his windscreen. The poor bugger didn’t know what had hit him by the sounds of it. And serves him right, Shell thought. Serves him bloody right.
Yet the police resistance was too strong and into the maw of Braithwaite went the scabs, Het, as ever, pushed front due to his size, face to face with an officer, so close that he could still vividly describe the plaque on the man’s teeth, the condensation on the insides of his visor, the leather chinstrap and the pimple on the bridge of his nose.
When some of the picketers lit a fire Het and the others returned to the Austin Maxi, the police getting hold of Darren Roach and giving him some hammer. The Litten men had a bruised flight home. They discovered Het’s car had been reported and its plates recorded, when, on the way back, they were stopped by a Leyland police van. The van overtook them, braking sharply in their path, a turn that left skidmarks on the road.
Four bobbies leapt out and knocked Het’s wing mirrors off, smashed his front and rear lights and then the windscreen. Before the police had chance to drag any of the miners out, the men scarpered. Het was the one they followed. He navigated the stile and drop fields at the base of Withens’ Peak, tracked all the time by the Leyland, which from some distance he could see was still after him. The police must have been using field glasses, because when Het ducked into a farmyard they caught him nearly straight away and chased him on to a pigeon shed. Terrified, cornered, Het opened all the hutches and set the pigeons free, the spooked birds flapping like feather dusters into the policemen’s faces. In the melee, Het somehow managed to get away.
He arrived home to a patrol car; the authorities knew he was a picketer; his name had been taken in the past and they had his beloved car as evidence he’d broken curfew. Taken to Doncaster station and booked in, Het was locked up for hours then moved on because they needed the cell space for more prisoners arriving from another picket. Back at Strepley nick they kept him in the communal cells until midnight. They threatened to charge him with assaulting police. Told him all sorts.
“They were like, you’re not so hard wi’out your mates, are you,” Het said, his sandwich untouched. “Drove me past them Swarsby posters on the way to the station an’ all – funny what sticks in the mind. Charged me wi’ unlawful assembly when all I’ve tried to do is save us jobs. Arrested, Shell. I’ve turned up to God knows how many pickets and not so much as chucked a stone. Not once. I’ve just been there.”
They watched the water. The malt breeze retreated and went another way.
“Condition of us bail is I’ve to report to police station every morning now for eleven,” Het said. “Have us name signed. Stuck indoors for a curfew all of my own: seven at night till nine in the flaming morning. Banned from any property belonging to the NCB, Central Electricity Gener
ating Board and British Rail, amongst others.”
“It’ll be fine, love. I’m sure it will.”
“Will it?”
She couldn’t say.
After a while, Het remarked that the rocks beyond looked like Conisborough Castle, and did Shell fancy having a look? She’d been deliberating whether nor not to tell him about what had happened in Sheffield and was grateful for an excuse not to. “Course, love,” she said. She took his arm.
The prospect of rain made the day feel potent. It had been so long since Shell had been anywhere, and here she was with Het. The huge rock appeared to move the more she looked at it, and way beyond it sailed a ferry, a pale monolith transporting passengers to another country. She blinked into the wind. It was a pleasantry, this day: a humid privilege before winter on the coast. Back Shell lingered, enjoying the moment, leaving Het to continue on to the rock. Her fringe tickled her eyes, as did the piquant sting of the salt. Her hood snapped and blew against her shoulders, front and back. Cairns of stones lay in the sand everywhere. It was as if someone had been performing rituals.
Shell picked a wary route towards the water’s edge until she stood on the precipice of a rock pool. Captivated by the miniature stalagmites, the vivid reds and blemished qualities of the rock, she called to Het, pausing as she saw how far ahead he was, and wishing he’d respond.
She watched the pool, for how long she didn’t know. Its blank surface was so windblown that it created wavelets the eye couldn’t focus on properly. These textures grew more hypnotic the more Shell observed them, the rippling water with its pure, blank sheen and beneath it: vibrancy, only one perspective or the other visible at any one time. Never the two at once.
Shell loved the sea then, and felt as far beyond herself as she’d ever felt. In her mind was the Litten Path. She could walk it and join Het. She could return to the windbreaker and grab her bag, easy.
So what was it going to be?
She called his name.
“Het!”
And he must have had some idea what she was going to say, because he said, “I’ve something to tell you,” when he arrived, appearing quite shaken.
Shell didn’t want to hear it. This was what she wanted, and it was so very fair.
“Can it not wait?” she said.
She took Het’s hand and placed it against her breast.
17
The castle rock turned out to be sea rats, hundreds of them crawling over a stone hillock. Hard to believe, yet there it was: all that brine-sleeked fur. Het watched the creatures idling and scurrying over the kelp. Vast clouds had built into smoky turrets beyond them, and the acrid rodent smell supplanted the fresh coastal air.
It was lucky Shell hadn’t seen them. She’d lagged behind as Het got closer to the rock, missing the despairing noise he made as he realised what the shifting mass actually was. It had been like looking at things through a pebble glass window, then it had made an awful kind of sense.
Shell had been spot-on before: he had decided to come to Skegness when he saw her name on the welfare list, taking a punt on Lawrence being too far gone, too grown-up and too angry for the trip, and Arthur being, well, Arthur. Het registered and hoped none of them would see.
It was easy, lingering out of sight until you were convinced Shell was alone, then boarding the coach while she was in the WMC. The practiced expression Het wore for when she sat next to him went completely unnoticed. You couldn’t second guess her. The quickest, bluntest mouth he had ever known had been practically silent up to this point.
Talking now though, wasn’t she. Het answered Shell’s call. He was ready to say the words. About that husband of yours . . . well, it was me who had him picketing in March. So ask me how Arthur turned considerate, Shell. I’ll tell you why.
But how to put it? She was so fragile. Her head resting on his shoulder all the way here had told him that much. Surrounded by witnesses, too. Shell must have known what people would say, she did it anyway. All those weeks wondering how she felt. Couldn’t phone or go round. Wrote a letter and binned it. Wrote another and binned that too.
Shell was grinning, curls blown about everywhere. It was unfair how drawn to her Het was. He kept thinking about those rats, their tang, the sea’s undercurrent. They were omens, and this terrified Het. He tried not to let Shell see how shaken he was. He did a good job of it, too, because as he arrived and stood before her, she gazed at him and said, “Can it not wait,” when he tried to tell her about Arthur.
He’d expected nothing, so got everything. Shell took his hand and totally levelled him with it. Her nipple grew bold under his fingers, and she touched his scar.
No one touched his scar.
In that moment Het belonged to his brother’s wife. She could have torn his heart from his eye socket for all he cared.
All there was to be done, it was all to be done. Het let himself be guided to the towels. The windbreaker was driven into the sand, and beneath it, to the sound of rippling canvas, he kissed Shell for the first time. He was a virgin in that he’d never made love to anyone he cared about. A virgin in that he’d never gone with someone spoken for. The sand was rough and damp and there was a great lurch in Het’s guts as he removed Shell’s pants and slid them down to her ankles. Accelerate into the bend. The overbearing jangle of his belt buckle. The rapid moments of a cumbersome morning. The pair of their bodies clicked.
Millions of damp craters began to appear in the beach. Rain pelleted Het and Shell’s bodies, the back of Het’s head, Shell’s face. Het felt hideous and wistful. They’d hardly finished being together and already they had to separate. He patted sand from himself, went to do the same to Shell, then thought better of it: it was too fraternal a gesture. Plus the wind had started to blow east and everyone knows that means there’s been a change in luck.
Shell re-packed the bag. She was already acting weird, so Het tried to put his arms around her.
“We shouldn’t have done that,” she said, rubbing her wrist as if she’d been stung.
“We had to.”
“Were wrong.”
“Couldn’t be helped and you know it.”
Her palm was on her forehead, the other hand flat on top of that. “We’ve to get back.”
“I’ll come wi’ you.”
“People might see.”
“We’ve all afternoon —”
“You might, Het. I’m taking train.”
She wouldn’t let him help her with the bags. Het watched her leave then once she’d gone, went to where everyone from the beach was hurrying to escape the heavy weather. Alone, Het watched the whitecaps come and go, before heading to the arcade to dry off. The coach wasn’t leaving for a couple of hours yet anyway.
❦
He spent the rest of the day thinking. Orgreave refused to be forgotten. Losing Lawrence and having to go after him that day rated as one of the scariest moments of Het’s life. It had been madness amid those Rotherham houses. Tons of horse, dog and foot soldier coming at you down residential streets. Bob Roach insisted on coming to look for Lawrence and got clattered a second time for his trouble. The police tried not to go for your head in case it showed, in case they did damage they couldn’t take back. A snatch squad hauled Bob topside.
Het had taken cover in a garden before escaping into a snick between two houses. From there he saw more beatings than he thought possible. The police went absolutely mad and Lawrence was nowhere to be seen. Back home and frantic, he journeyed to his mother’s, but the kid wasn’t there either. Banshee tyres screeched around the corner of Water Street next, but no one was in at Shell’s, thank God. Welfare, no. Streets, no, and the woods, where Sam and Arthur used to exclude him? Forget it.
He even tried the police station. Hospitals. Nothing. Arriving home and thinking: Sack it, I’ll head back to Orgreave. He’d known what he was in for and damn well got it. The Catcliffe e
nd was full of bleeding men, The Plough car park was like the aftermath of a warzone. It was civil war when you thought about it, though, wasn’t it? Civil war.
That horrid jog tophill. There had been relative calm after the push of the short shield units into the village, police and picketer alike recharging their batteries; only Arthur Scargill went and got himself arrested and sent the entire afternoon up the Litten Path. The usual bombardment ensued. You name it, all of it was hurled at the police. Savage heat pumped from a watery sun and horses, horses, horses.
The cavalry had attacked the picket and forced it into Orgreave village and the nearby industrial estate for the worst carnage of the day. It was all over the place by the time Het arrived for his second serving, going man-to-man, describing Lawrence to anyone who’d listen: as futile gesture as there could have been. With Orgreave Lane blocked by chaos, Het was forced down that rotten slope again, making the acute journey to the train tracks, practically in tears. His was no rebel heart. If anything had happened to her son, Shell would never have let it go. He had no choice at all that flaming day.
That was a few months ago, nearly three. Lawrence turned up later that evening and acted as if nothing had gone on, ruthlessly shrugging Het off when he tried to hug him and see if he was all right. Kid was bloody Arthur mark two.
Since then Het’s savings had been drained and to top that, as a condition of his bail, he was banned from picketing so couldn’t get his fly money anymore. There was what the union could offer – it wasn’t much. With the government mounting a challenge against the legality of the strike, pursuing the NUM’s brass in court, it was dead broke. The priority had to be local families. Therefore Het relied on the soup kitchen for his snap and his wits for everything else. His flat had mostly emptied, the valuable commodities gone.
He’d tried to find work. He’d done the pubs and gone out of town to speak to building companies, services. Nothing doing. He’d even left a card in the newsagent’s offering his services as a handyman at a knock-down rate, receiving not a call, just a few comments when it was brought up in the food queue come Friday.