Lawrence’s eyes were like two whirlpools, a pair of expiring suns. Arthur felt choked, like he might swoon. He didn’t know what to do.
“We need to move,” said Het.
There was always that.
The Swarsby’s car reversed, its headlights beginning to sweep the garden. Just free from view, Arthur hurried behind Lawrence and Het. He was shame. Recycled fear. His bloody foot was hurting and the lights were in pursuit.
“In here,” said Het, disappearing into the undergrowth with Lawrence following. Arthur paused, a few steps behind. Maybe things would be better for everyone if he wasn’t around. There had to be better role models for his clever lad. Better husbands for his lovely wife.
He sat on the grass. Above him was the universe, Cassiopeia. Miss Bose had taught him the constellations but that hadn’t been enough to keep him from her purse. He’d gone to the tinker fair on her pension, telling himself she wouldn’t miss the cash and he could stand the different way she began to look at him, because no one else knew where the handbag was. Only him.
Arthur apologised to the dead woman’s ghost and lay on his back with one hand spread over his eyes so that he could peer up at infinity through his fingers. To think of the lambent burning Pleiades up there, to see the first green blazes up in the mystics, a panel of night clear on this evening; he began to cry. Shell didn’t want the tree. She thought he’d taken it. Electric blue.
Time passed. A couple of seconds. Then a set of arms slipped under Arthur’s armpits and lifted him on to his feet.
“No you don’t, you’re not getting out of it that easy!”
Het.
Arthur was slapped around the face, twice, three times, then dragged by the wrist through the garden.
The headlights had them. Swarsby was shouting. Arthur ran towards a pale hand that he could see at last, a rescue arm dangling from the wall.
Lawrence.
He raised his arms to seek his son, ready to be hauled to safety.
But the hand disappeared.
“Lawrence,” Arthur hissed. “Kid!”
4
LAWRENCE KNOTTED HIS tie around his neck and drew it up to his Adam’s apple. It felt almost like a noose. He slid his legs into their trousers then put on his blazer. The sole of his shoe was coming away and the tots from over the road were being noisy again. David Cairns was saying goodbye to them, barefoot in his dressing gown, holding a bowl of something. The guy looked pretty pleased with himself. The strike must make a nice little break from work.
Mam was going on about something from downstairs so Lawrence shouted back, voice wavering in that half-broken way that always embarrassed him. He was coming, he called at the door. The bus wasn’t due for ten minutes anyway.
Shell pushed into the room and dropped a slice of starkly buttered toast on the desk. “Still need to get a move on,” she said, missing the sour face Lawrence made behind her back.
“Am doing,” he said.
No reply.
Leaving breakfast to go cold, Lawrence stopped on the landing to poke his head into the spare room where his dad slept these days. Arthur wore a t-shirt, yellow underpants and odd socks. He looked like a huge dolly peg, flat across the inflatable bed, face-down on the settee cushion he used as a pillow. The curtains were open behind him, a cold block of daylight causing the scab on his head to glisten, the smell of last night’s booze strung powerfully across the room.
It had been two weeks since that night, the crying, the lying on the grass. Lawrence had tried to forget his own revolting excitement as he ran from the Swarsbys but it had been impossible. He’d giggled, actually giggled, climbing up that wall. A moment later Arthur had arrived. Lawrence had been about to help his dad up when he spotted the Swarsby girl wandering into the car’s headlights. He’d straightened up to get a better look at her and left his father to scramble up the bricks on his own, then act like it was him who’d done something wrong. Cheek of him. Shape of him. A sullen lump in the front seat all the way home. Lawrence entered the room, whipped the cushion from under Arthur and thwacked him around the head with it.
He belted out of the house and down the street towards the sticky sound of wet tyres creeping along the tarmac, managing to catch the bus before it left. He paid the driver and stepped down the aisle, but the empty bus was running later than he was. It jolted off before he’d had time to sit.
The momentum carried Lawrence to the back seat, where he fell against a window. There he watched Litten go by. It was almost as if the town was moving and he was the one rooted to the spot.
It took roughly an hour to get to school, seeing as Arthur had forced him to take the test for Fernside Grammar rather than enrolling at Litten Modern like everybody else. Weeks of coaching it had taken. All those Saturdays doing practice papers, Arthur supervising him with the aid of the answer sheet, sometimes depriving you of dinner if you didn’t do well enough.
Despite all the revision everyone was surprised when Lawrence got into Fernside, scraping his maths but coasting English and verbal reasoning. Arthur was over the moon. He bought the school uniform as soon as it was in stock and had Lawrence parading down the welfare in his blazer and shorts, the brass buckle shoes he’d been assured were in no way girly. Lawrence did what he always did: went along with the decision that was made for him.
Although he was never once asked if he wanted to attend Fernside, and had drifted through the years there. The other kids from his primary school grew up nearby, yet distant, the lifelong friends his dad promised he’d make at Fernside never quite materialising. Lawrence blamed himself. He was easily tongue-tied and overcompensated when he managed to break from his shyness, coming across desperate, insincere or plain weird. He cringed to remember the time he claimed to have a copy of I Spit on Your Grave, the time he said he’d kissed all those girls in town and the time he said he’d met Brian Clough on a day out in Leeds. He could hardly contest the stick he’d got when the truth came out, but supposed it had always been in the post one way or another. All his life Lawrence had attracted mean-spiritedness. He was just one of those people.
The double-decker crawled through Litten. It was an old model, one of those damp shithouses where the foam in the chairs was flat from overuse and someone had ripped the ashtrays from every armrest. The back seat was set in front of the engine and it vibrated whenever the bus stopped, sending a stuffy heat wafting over Lawrence that began to judder him to sleep where he sat.
Litten’s dozy outskirts. Hills shaped like upturned basins. Sky-striving trees and smoke-stacks of industry, each of the borough’s villages dealt its parade of shops selling pre-sliced bread, canned goods and the local paper. Livestock were herded up these roads and the headgear of the pit was always visible. The gas from Brantford coke ovens stank. Brantford the moody animal, blazing out hair perms of sulphurous gas.
And there was the theatre, now derelict, the sullen rec with its swings wrapped over the top bars, the roundabout covered in scrawled names and a single shoe lying by the slide. All Lawrence wanted to do was escape this place, yet at the same time Litten was home, nothing as comforting as home, all your life knowing it, knowing it as much as you wanted to know what lay beyond home’s borders.
The bus turned uphill. The route took it past where Lawrence used to have his paper round, where he’d been sacked for stealing the softcore supplementaries from the tabloids. He had thought he’d never be caught, because what kind of a customer was going to complain to the newsagents that the tit-section from their Sunday Sport was missing? Mr Hayden from the corner house on Dearden Fold, that’s who.