Evie was at last studying him with genuine interest. Only a minute ago, her hand had been on his knee.
“I said would it bother you?”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
“Well doesn’t matter then, does it?”
Duncan offered a round of applause. “Well if you ask me, Evie, I’d say Lawrence has got the measure of you!”
5
A TOTALLED CAR rolling down the hill, a dot-to-dot of blue heads scattering from it. It was fun seeing the silver badges flashing the other way for once, helmets wobbling as the pigs fled. “Bobby’s on fucking bob,” shouted someone, but Het didn’t answer. He was concentrating on the smoke, hoping he wouldn’t reach it before the car went up.
Lorries were around the corner and before them was the soon-to-be-torched car the picketers had sent to block the road. “You’re a genius, lad,” said Chris Skelly, and Het laughed, though he certainly didn’t feel like laughing.
Nottingham coalfield. Tan yellow grass country. Fossil grey sky country. The Notts pits were refusing to back the action. Little wonder they’d stuffed things up: a scab county, always had been. Half the pits here were built by scabs during the strike of ’26. Better paid, better-equipped scabs. Notts had bought every lie, hook, line, sinker and bait box, yet again finding themselves on the wrong side of flaming right.
Ollerton, where that lad had died a few weeks ago, was scab built. Hit by a brick, they said. Crushed, more like. Het had seen the picket. Now at Tyndale it was how it had been at Ollerton. Kicked off the minibus, police boarding, pointing their batons in your face, telling you to fuck off, turn back, just the same.
They were escorted up the M1, accompanied by the police like flaming royalty over the county line. After that Chris drove them five miles north, stopping at the motorway services to buy a local map so Het could navigate them back south into Notts along the sneak roads, past Bolsover, where they parked the car and supped a recharge in a local pub. The landlord opened early for them. A key in the door and a sympathetic smile for a bloke from scabbing Mansfield.
“You’re all right, lads. Come in.”
They walked the rest of the way to Tyndale, an hour’s yomp through fields that quickly became marsh thanks to a hidden sike that flowed downhill, soaking all their feet. Het was in his element. It was early doors so everything was bathed in that magnificent morning light that crispens up the natural outlines. The cloud was rising from the arrowgrass the way it did on the coated moorland when you walked the Litten Path. Summer Geese, his dad used to call it, because of the shapes the steam made when it was evaporating into nothing after there’d been rain on a hot day.
They joined the picket late, them and a few others, some stopping at the shop to get a few tinnies in then singing their way through the housing estate. It was good crack, although it was a different story now Het found himself running behind a timebomb, the winder and shaft at Tyndale dreadful against the sky. Het saw in that fretwork and turning wheel a nightmare, and he hoped he wouldn’t end up like Davey Jones of Ollerton.
At the bottom of the hill the police regrouped. According to some local scrotes watching the mounting protest from a street corner, the burning car had been a scab motor. Some of the other Brantford lads agreed it was parked way too close to the pit to be anything but, so they trashed it, tore the radio out and slashed all the seats. Het tried to stop them and was told to fuck off for the second time that day. He redeemed himself once the perpetrators had moved on, mind you, hitting on the idea of using the wreckage to stop the lorries. His idea had been to simply roll the car, flaming Arthur’s had been to stuff a rag soaked in zippo fluid into the fuel cap for good measure, sparking it with a clipper as it went.
How Het had let himself be talked into that, he didn’t know. He cursed as the makeshift fuse did its work, yelping at the blossoming explosion, a popped balloon of orange that roared into the sky and lit the trees, those pine trees, the grainy-looking midlands way beyond him.
All heat bursts were a reminder of The Mighty Atom. Het was a good twenty yards behind this particular blast, yet still close enough to feel it, the scorch as good as all over him, reminding him of the stink of burnt hair, the feel of his hand sticking to the raw jelly of his neck where there was no more skin. Thankfully this time the glare disappeared, folding in on itself as opposed to all over his life.
The car was propelled over a cleft in the hill. It dive-bombed onto its nose like a paper aeroplane, rolled towards the road and came to a stop, burning.
That got everyone’s attention.
A group of policemen gathered at the hill’s base, beyond the burning car, in front of the thoroughfare leading to the pit gates. Het ran at them. So did everybody else. Nothing was more important than stopping those turncoats getting the scab coke. They had to stop the Judases from getting in.
Police faces blurred by heat; a line of linked arms, faceless golems at least three men deep. Het navigated the blockade as the toxicity of the car became a hindrance. He ran towards the pigs; he was really shouting. Boots on the grass. Everyone at it. Voices of hundreds of wronged and angry men.
Scabs. Scabs. You’re all just fucking scabs.
The police shouted back. Fucking come on then. They steeled themselves, expressions mashed. The lot of them brandished truncheons.
This was the part. This was the moment. Long legs always meant Het arrived first. He ploughed into the police line, waxy head butting into them. Arthur was a few yards away doing the same thing: a brother who he’d forced into this. Plague a beautiful woman like that? Set such examples to your son? All right, an oddball but still a son. A son who didn’t deserve the selfish dad he’d been landed with.
The other night Het had driven them all back from Threndle House in the Austin Maxi, switching the radio on because it meant no one would have to talk, Frankie Goes to Hollywood careening out of the speakers; the three of them laughing before going quiet again.
They parked outside Arthur’s terrace, then while Lawrence was inside checking to see if Shell was awake, Het told his brother how it was going to be. Arthur was going to back the strike like the rest of them. Every picket. Every protest. Every rally. Do some good for a change. Fight for everyone’s livelihoods and stand up for himself. Arthur was coming on picket because Het said so.
Het said, “I want to see you do what’s right. I want you to set an example.”
“And you’d know all about that.”
“I’m serious, Art. You’re coming on strike proper.”
“Or what?”
“Or I go to the police about tonight.”
How quickly that bald head turned. Snap. Outlined distinctly against the misted window.
“You serious?”
“Like what I said—”
“Fuckin’ heard you the first time.”
Silence. Arthur drew a curt rectangle shape on the glass with his finger. Several choice flicks turned the rectangle 3-D.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Het began. “But this is important…”
“Save it. I’ll do your dirty work for you, Het, if that’s what you want.”
“It’s not that. That’s not it…” Het said, trailing off. Their father’s flippant malice ran through Arthur and he had never known how to deal with it.
Arthur rubbed the window clean and stared through it, all bruised nobility, acting as if the night’s thieving and embarrassment hadn’t just happened. “Not what?” he said. “Tell us what it’s not.”
Het kept it buttoned. Lawrence would be back soon, a nephew who’d already been through one of life’s traumatic rites of passage that night, witnessing, as all sons one day must, the moment when their father humiliates themselves in front of them, becomes flawed, fallible, just a man.