Dad liked her straight away. On a walk after the meal, Shell wasn’t afraid to joke and contradict Alec. Het walked with them at a slight remove, the collar of his coat pulled up to his nose. This girl was the bristle of autumn; she was the crunch of your boot heel in a frozen puddle. You don’t talk to a phenomenon of nature. You simply step back and watch it exact its force.
A few weeks later it turned out Shell was pregnant, and how the news delighted Alec, because it meant Arthur was finally on the straight and narrow, in the relationship for keeps, and wasn’t he doing well. Het endured his predicament quietly, in that desperate, English way, because Shell would never look twice at him, and even if she did and he took a chance smile up on its potential, it would ruin his father, especially after what had happened with Sam. Above all Alec Newman valued family. He would have been devastated at having to ostracise another son.
Sometimes Het felt like the only person who missed Alec. It was Alec who’d taught him about the pits; the brotherhood and strength of it. If one of you had a problem, you all did. That was the way of it. A repetitive life, perhaps. There was value in that. Het didn’t know what it was about hardship that made it so nostalgic over time, but he knew hard lives developed integrity in retrospect. Perhaps that was their ultimate reward: being able to tell people how rough you’d had it was almost worth putting up with the thin end of the wedge.
Because there was no doubting Het would become a miner. It was what he’d always wanted, to be like his ancestors, valorous in the heat, working the rock. Dirty hands, clean wage. Growing up, Het’s dad had relayed to him all kinds of stories, stories of the coal face, working naked sometimes owing to the high temperatures before the regulations came in. Miners had worn all sorts of outfits, rag and bone get-ups from home, anything you didn’t mind getting grubby. Black snot. Coming to the surface with your socks stiff as a board, dressed in bloomers sometimes, flaming whatever, looking daft in the arse-loop, a rope chair used to repair the remote shafts the machinery couldn’t get to. The hours could be long and dangerous◦– you could feel suffocated at the greater depths◦– earning a crust beneath the crust, pit checks ringing in the banksmens’ and lamp room boxes. In those days you were paid by weight. You cut your cash from the earth, life funded by what you dug.
When Het remembered Alec talking about his early days in the pit or his country childhood, a youth of podding peas, harvest moons and autumn equinoxes, he pictured him in the living room with the circular mirror leaning against the fruit bowl. Dad shaved in the late afternoons because he said the light was better at that time, its angle casting a rhomboid of sun onto him that picked clear the hairy filaments sprouting from his skin. The shaving bowl was often so bright that it looked like a basin of cloud.
Work the badger brush. Lather the face. Story-telling while drawing a razor against the grain and down the throat. A father’s lessons impacted on sons more than they knew. Even now Het shaved the same way as his old man: in the living room, often late in the afternoon, a wet job, the blade’s serrations affecting his scar and occasionally slicing his skin (Alec never cut himself) because memory had enveloped him: thoughts of home and dreams. What he one day wanted and would try to get.
The pattern on his beer’s surface budded, flowered and dissolved. Het was sorry for how influenced by his dad he was; sorry for denouncing Sam as a queer. What had made Arthur show the old man those magazines, no one knew, but a poofter in the house was wrong so Het and his father had let Samson know it.
Still, what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you. It was Arthur’s fault for telling on Sam. Some days later Het had returned to where the fight happened and felt beneath his tread something larger than a stone; it was a tooth left on the pavement. He’d picked it up, the tip flecked with blood, the body yellow-cream, and dropped it in his pocket, rolling the sharpness between finger and thumb. He never did give it back. To this day the tooth remained in a drawer by his bed, a severed piece of his father’s mouth.
“I’ve finished,” Shell said.
“Me too.” Het downed his dregs. “I’m starved. Off home.”
“Oh,” said Shell. Was she crestfallen? “Well, if it’s food you’re after, I might be able to help.”
She produced from her bag a set of keys with a pink spongey cat attached, a silly grin practically forcing her face in two.
“We’ve some stock that’s for the bin but still decent. I was about to take it home only Lawrence is out and Arthur, well… I’ve left it. We could grab it if you like. If you’re nice I might even let you have a discount.”
The snooker balls knocked madly on the baize.
6
THE MASK COVERING Arthur’s cheek looked like a cricket box that had been cut in half. Lucky, they told him, he was lucky his vision wasn’t impaired. The swelling would go down at some point and he’d survive not being able to bring his teeth together for a few days.
He tapped a couple of codeine out of the packet. Another two to make sure. They were too chalky to neck dry so he had to summon a load of spit to force them down. His rotten grimace was reflected back at him in the bus window. He’d discharged himself from hospital earlier, told them he didn’t need any more of their attention and the wife would see to him.
He’d have said anything.
It started to piss it down as he stalked the corridors of the outdoor market. Traders advertised their root vegetables, offered up samples on paper plates, sorting their change under the roof tarps while a fat-eyed dog in a coat yapped and strained on its lead until Arthur wanted to boot it in the face to shut it up.
He reached the high street. Daylight split between the buildings and the cobbles shone through in messy patches where the tarmac had crumbled away to nothing, the town’s history bleeding openly into the present.
Now the pavement was putty-coloured and family-run shops lined the streets. There were wire bins, cement-footed benches and beyond those, that emotive bandstand. Arthur was having one of those days where he felt like he knew everybody. He went into the fusty-looking shop to pick up his photographs.
The place smelled like damp towels. Leathery cameras hung from the walls by their straps like wing-pierced bats and glass cases containing lenses and flashes and tripods and photographic ephemera hemmed the sides of the room. There were frames containing black and white prints as well, and racks of postcards and albums. A dirty, cream-coloured booth lurked, portal-like, in the corner.
Arthur waited at the counter for the true contents of the jewellery box to be revealed. He’d forced it open the night he took it from Threndle House, finding inside a pot with a canister of film that he’d stashed in a holdall that had sagged guiltily at the bottom of his wardrobe since then.
Until two days ago. Arthur had been kidding himself he was waiting for the right moment to return the film, when really he was waiting until he got desperate enough to develop the negatives. Any help to see this strike out would be welcome. With Lawrence finishing school, Shell might be more inclined to move if they had some money. If these were pictures Arthur could actually put to good use, that was.
He’d taken to leaving the newspaper out, pages opened to where the college ads were printed like listings in the Radio Times. Shell had thought it was Lawrence being curious, and Arthur hadn’t dared tell her any different.