“We’ve done well here,” said Arthur.
“Suppose.”
“Do you not think so?”
…The salt water up your nose. The dread line where the horizon met the sky…
Dad started going over the story again. They’d saved up, bought the rug out of town and blah blah. They had to tell Mam something. She’d never accept a stolen gift and a cast off she couldn’t help but look down on. Words Lawrence knew to be true, though the fact they had to be kept secret and couldn’t be spoken in front of her made them feel like lies.
When his mam finally walked through the door, Lawrence stood well away from his dad. Shell Newman had a frank, open face that tended to hang, but as she saw the rug for the first time, her lips pinched. She wasn’t one for taking promptly to acts of kindness.
“What’s this?” she said.
“Present, love.”
“Kind of present?”
“What do you think?” Arthur beamed. “You can thank the overtime.”
Shell chewed a strand of hair broken free from her ponytail. “Didn’t think there were any.”
“Well there were.”
“Right.”
“Serious, love.”
“Aren’t you always?” Shell caught Lawrence’s eye. “Oh, I don’t know.”
“Chap were on his hols,” said Arthur. “It were last one and he wanted rid.”
Lawrence had to admire his father’s gall.
“Suppose it’s a nice pattern though, isn’t it, kiddo?” There was the slightest lilt to his mother’s voice, and in this moment, seeing her not daring to like her gift, Lawrence realised that although he hadn’t a clue what the future held for him the last thing he ever wanted was what his mam had.
“Yeah,” he said, bringing his mug of tea to his mouth and wrinkling the bridge of his nose so it would look like he was smiling.
“Then it’s a keeper,” his mam replied brightly. “Thanks, both yous, I’m touched, proud, actually. You’ve worked hard and it’s a nice thought. Really, it is.”
Arthur looked about ready to click his heels. He aimed a kiss at his wife’s cheek but the oblivious Shell turned away and left him puckering at thin air. That was all it took to send Lawrence into the kitchen. He clanked his empty mug by the sink and watched the rigid strings of sleet slanting against the window.
Two weeks later and a wardrobe opened, several tiny moths flying out of it. Truancy was an easy enough trick, especially on Fridays. Arthur was on six till twos so up at five and gone for half past, whilst Mam was on her visit to lay flowers on Grandad’s grave and chat to Granny Kelly in the care home. Lawrence had gone along with her in the past but by this stage it seemed pointless. Last memories sent rolling down the pinball drain, Granny Kelly didn’t recognise anyone anymore. By now the Topaz stud in her engagement ring would be getting knocked by Shell’s unpainted fingernails. By now, Asa Scanlan’s Fiesta would have grumbled through town and deposited Arthur at Brantford pit.
Lawrence grabbed the basics from the wardrobe: a pair of shorts, his slippers and a cable-knit sweater. Another moth settled on the door as he closed it. He put his finger on the insect and left a glittery brown smear on a sticker of Mel Sterland.
Downstairs he flicked on the telly. It was March and TVAM was on. He noticed his sweater had finally lost that cloying, second-hand smell as he dragged the neck hole over his head, the thought interrupted by a sharp sound in the cloth and a peculiar give in the fabric.
He tugged the sweater off and held it to the light. There was a large tear under one arm and, elsewhere, sunshine gleamed through it in a series of unnatural pin-pricks. He flopped, bare-chested, onto the settee. Another moth was nearby: he swatted it. He’d lost count of how many he’d killed recently. They were paltry things, barely seeming to move and when they did flying so gently towards the nearest source of light that all you had to do was clap them from the air, or crush them against whatever they were crawling on.
He concentrated on the people on the screen. Some wore NUM badges, most dark colours. Under their soupy sky, each one of them seemed to resemble his father. The protesters rushed into the police, jamming against a fence where a man in a donkey jacket stood. There was a crush as the fence collapsed, people flooding the screen and trying not to stand on the man. The crowd heaved over him, rushing like oil into an oxbow lake.
The camera cut away, straight to an image of a pit, a pit as mucky and confusing as the workings under the bonnet of a car. Headgear spun against the day. Trucks and footprints and smog pipes and bilge pumps, cabins and coke ovens, work yards and brick-yards, girders and timber; equipment, equipment, equipment.
Lawrence almost expected to see Uncle Het barking at someone, neck streaked by that scar of his that looked like a cross-section of salami. The screen emptied. It focused on a close-up of an exhaust, then the car itself, a yellow bug crawling along a road that trickled over the moor, heading south. Lawrence supposed that was where everybody off the telly went: up the Litten Path.
He switched off the TV and sat back, tugging at the rug’s tassels with his toes. They’d had people round to admire the damn thing the weekend before, where it had made a welcome distraction from the pit dispute, which was the inevitable main topic of conversation. Arthur for one was against striking. “What good’s taking action on someone else’s behalf,” he said, “cutting us nose off to spite another lad’s face?” which was one of his brasher statements, holding court, as was his custom, causing a stir on an afternoon of chicken drumsticks and paper plates.
Lawrence didn’t know whether he agreed or disagreed with his father. He no longer bothered to enter into meaningful discussions with endless men like him and the other heavy-arsed loudmouths in the room. Pissed in the afternoon with their sideburns in need of a trim, vigorously mantled cheeks and noses with snowflakes of blood vessels burst in them, banging on about variety performances or cars or ways of doing things in days gone by, when everything was harder fought for and therefore more genuine.
Another grey Sunday. Mam cracked out the china she’d lifted from Granny Kelly’s when she first took ill, and stood behind the settee rubbing Arthur’s neck while he talked up the luxury under everyone’s feet. Accepting the rug had given Shell such a lift that Lawrence found himself having to make the best of a gathering he’d no one to invite to, answering the same questions about school, giving the same shrug when asked what he was going to do when he left, head dipping when told how much he’d grown, how handsome he was when he knew he wasn’t good looking.
The Sunday ladies drank Babycham, the men bitters, canisters of brown ale that went flat once poured into the plastic cups. Lawrence’s hair was combed in the middle like it was ten years ago, as he helped show off the rug and an antique carriage clock to everybody. The clock was another of Arthur’s gifts, and so deep had it put him in Shell’s good books that he was allowed to smoke indoors, although Lawrence’s mam was so busy finishing the cupcakes that she forgot to put out ashtrays.
Arthur tapped fag ash into his hand while detailing the clock’s story. A win on the dogs had seen its purchase. “Last minute, like,” he said. “I thought I’d use the winnings for another summat for the wife. You’re chuffed aren’t you, love?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“My wife. My only keeper.”
Eye contact was to be avoided, it seemed. Arthur emptied his hand into the plant pot then hurried to the kitchen to be loud and overly helpful instead. He could be seen pouring crisps into the plastic bowl on the worktop, sorting drinks and peering into the sink’s plughole, staring as if it was some kind of vortex.