The bloke was coming with the photos. It had taken Arthur just two years to sign away the next fifteen. Everyone needs coal. Everyone will always be wanting coal.
Yeah right.
Outside he stopped to watch the expensive TVs in the windows of the electronics shop. They were blaring the regional news, some weather report depicting skinny teens chucking themselves off a pier, star shapes plummeting into the water. Arthur stared at the screens for ages, thought about things, then hurried to look at the Swarsby photographs in peace.
He chose a secluded part of Litten Hilclass="underline" a combe hidden from the wind and prying eyes, a hollow where he might sit. Somewhere below, beyond the town, its terraces and its shopfronts, was his home, static and anchored by a family. Partially screening this view was a tier of silver birch. Flushed green, the trees looked like a queue of ragged men gazing past Arthur, ancient figures concerned with things far beyond his understanding. Things that didn’t concern him.
It was a bright afternoon, the likes of which you never normally saw when working underground all day. The Codeine had dissolved to become a pleasant drag in Arthur’s veins, and the envelope in his hand was neither thick nor heavy. Sometimes it was good being on strike. He lay back and rested on his elbows. Tranquil clouds coasted by, great scooped whorls of clotted cream. The place reminded him of being a kid. He often spent the day up here with Sam, or down in Barnes’ Wood, at the elm tree, dressed in sweaters, scarves and hats, smoking singles they’d bought from the mini-mart before coming home to dinner and pudding◦– often a great pot of stewed pears that simmered like gold lava on the Primus ring.
For some reason it was always winter in Arthur’s memory. Salted paths and shards of ice in the milk bottles when you went to collect them from the front step every morning. In Arthur’s mind Het was always cleaning his first car with a shammy leather as it stood on the cobbles. Mr Perfect with his Vauxhall Victor and a special place at the top of the house. Het always wore a hat, a deer stalker with the flaps lowered, knotted under his chin. He insisted it was to stem the cold but it seemed no coincidence that the flaps hid the hideous scar on his neck. Arthur was always grateful for those extra squares of padded cloth.
On the day of The Mighty Atom, Mam’s lipstick had been purple and sticky-looking. She wore a striped apron and a flowery dress, one hand arched across her forehead, middle finger and thumb placed on either temple as she turned away from Arthur because she couldn’t stand the sight of him. Dad’s hair was always prudently combed, his shirt pressed and tucked, but that day he purposefully rolled his sleeves up so he could deliver the hammer blow to Arthur’s nose less than ten minutes after arriving home from the hospital. Blood running down your front while your equally culpable brother cowered nearby, wrongly thinking he’d be the next to get a whack from the old man.
“That’s for what tha’s done to Hector.”
“I didn’t mean it!”
“Tha never does.”
“You never think, lad.”
“I’m sorry, Mam.”
“Don’t cry. You’re a waste of space, Arthur.”
“I’m not crying.”
“You better not be. Not after what tha did.”
The discordant colour of the meadow grass Het lay in, fireworks popping in the distance and everywhere the smell of cordite. Crack, crack while your mam watched your dad break your fucking nose. Bonfire Boy, the other kids took to calling Het, although Arthur fought anyone he ever heard say it.
“Lawrence!”
Arthur opened his eyes. The bloody Codeine had nearly made him doze off. He sat up and tore open the envelope, spread it against the stooks of short grass, a stash of black and white Swarsby photographs, of which there were two distinct sets.
The first was a series, a sequence concentrating on one subject: the man Arthur recognised from the framed photo collage at Threndle House. It was the handsome bugger who’d posed with Clive Swarsby in the dinner suit. In these new photos the man was older, clean shaven, hair slicked into a helmet of grey, although he’d lost none of that defiance Arthur first noted when he punched the photo collage all those nights ago, impact decimating the smug twat’s face.
The guy was in London by the looks of it, eating in a restaurant with another bloke, then climbing into a black cab with this thick-haired, heavily-built sod. The second man was pale of complexion. He wore a sweater over a tartan shirt and a blazer over that. The two of them were going into a lovely old hotel, The Savoy.
The second set of pictures were of the handsome man and a teenage girl who must have been about Lawrence’s age. She sported shoulder-length hair and wasn’t pretty by any stretch of the imagination. She was more beautiful, like a cliff.
She had been photographed getting into a limo with the man, who touched her elbow as if pinching a corner of paper. There was certainly closeness between them.
Certainly something.
Her build was familiar, and gazing at her skin’s starkness reminded Arthur of the feeling he sometimes got when he was amid the stippled remoteness of the moorland, where the lapwings looped their acrobatics through the dense air, wielding the freedom of the tops.
He stuffed the photos into his anorak. It seemed sensible to head home, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to see Shell again so soon after running out on her that morning, and now he’d just heard someone calling his son’s name beyond the thorns.
It had to be his lad, so Arthur stood, and between the motion, the pain in his face and the Codeine, he staggered. Groaning, he made his way across the hill towards the voices.
7
IT WAS A strange time. May was surrendering to June and the swallows were returning north. You could see them: tracers skimming low, chasing the afternoons into loft-spaces and empty farmhouses. The summer exams were coming, too, though Lawrence tried not to think about those. He hadn’t been to school in over two weeks and doubted he’d see another classroom again.
The business with the pie continued. The school was up in arms: a pretty teacher hobbled by two yobs from the lower sets, Grundy the head-teacher as good saying it, peering over his Roman nose, practically welling up, thought Lawrence, looking back on things, facing him and Ryan Fenton from behind that desk.
The air conditioning fan had turned on the ceiling, the breeze fluttering the post-it notes and the A1 pad balanced on its stand. Grundy went on and on. Lawrence had never really been in trouble before but he was a low achiever so it was obvious what Grundy thought. When asked what he’d to say for himself, Lawrence tried to explain what had happened, but was halted by Grundy’s raised hand. There was a visible wart on the head’s finger above where a wedding band should have been. Miss Potts had told him everything he needed to know.
“It isn’t me you owe your apology to. And you realise how you sound, given that you ran from the scene?”
There were filing cabinets, a brown carpet and certificates on the wall. There was an oil painting of Grundy in his gown, lopsided at one corner.
“Don’t shrug at me.”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“I’ve seen boys like you. Lies prosper, don’t they? And what of your fathers, what do they do that they’d raise two sons who’d do a thing like this?”