“Mam.”
“Kiddo.”
“Dad’s worried.”
“Is he now?”
Lawrence took a deep breath, noticing for the first time how little of his mother he could read in this room. There were no pictures, no mementos or keepsakes, not even any books, not like Arthur. Shell must do her saving in her head. She must have had a cavernous trove in her, a smuggler’s cove accessible only by underground passage.
“You look all, I dunno.”
“I just had a big day, love.”
“Where’d you get to?”
“Sheffield. An’ I already said I’m not talking about it.”
That was just one of many things Mam wasn’t talking about. She had set off so early that morning that Lawrence hadn’t heard her leave. He’d certainly heard her the night before. He’d finished the last of the shit-mix with Evie and Duncan, then, after they’d staggered home, Evie supporting her vomiting brother, dodged into the phonebox near the bakery at the sight of Uncle Het. The last thing Lawrence needed was to be caught out drunk in the evening.
Through the closed door he’d watched that unmistakable figure. Hector had been huge to Lawrence as a boy and was large even now. More round-shouldered than broad, he was shaped like an Egyptian sarcophagus, and had at first blocked the person walking by his side with her arm linked with his. Lawrence recognised his mother through damaged glass. Shell was laughing in the last of evening’s light. It would have been a nice sound to hear in different circumstances.
She was looking at him now without her usual eagerness. He’d try a yarn, get a headstart and try not to lose it. The trick was to think past or even through the expulsion. Without school he could pay his way◦– that might oil the wheels◦– although thinking about it, the working road’s corollary was to stay forever in Litten where the only jobs were at the pit. And what could Lawrence do while the strike raged? Work elsewhere? Even if there was a job for a boy with no experience or skills, he was far from ready to start earning. He’d only just begun to live; to consider what he wanted, like the Swarsbys did.
“Is that why you came, love? To check on your mam?”
She was almost smiling. “Kind of,” said Lawrence. “But there’s summat I need to tell you first.”
Her benign expression faltered. Perhaps she’d sensed the approaching half-truth. After all, she’d had over a decade’s experience of them from the master of the art himself, downstairs.
“So I know you said Dad’d have to wait with what he’d to say, Mam, only—”
“Give me strength. I’m positive your father appreciates you as his messenger but, Lawrence.” The final bit of his name was all sibilance. “I don’t know what it is wi’ you two that’s making me have to say everything twice today. But I just want to be left alone. So will you please just listen to your mam.”
Well, if that was what she wanted. Lawrence’s hands went nervously to the buttons of his shirt. It wasn’t every day you were granted time, let alone opportunity. Together the two felt like gift horses liable to bolt and leave you on your arse if you didn’t saddle them right.
“I’m sorry, Mam,” he said, staying where he was. Mam’s eyes clicked open, little pink cogs. Lawrence had never seen her display sustained vulnerability like this before. He wondered what had happened. This was as open as she’d ever been. He was afraid.
“If you still want to chat, come back later,” she said softly, burrowing into her pillow and turning her back, the matter closed.
Lawrence opened the door and shut it again so she’d think he’d gone. He couldn’t explain why he wanted to watch this fickle woman sleep, her shape as it rose and fell. The picture of him on Arthur’s side felt a thousand years old, and looking at it made Lawrence think about how he might feel one day, remembering this moment, these minutes, this stay of execution. Would his future self be as different as he was from the boy caught unawares in that damaged frame?
Then the door flew open to reveal Arthur with a panicked look on his face. “What’s going on? You’ve been ages. What you been saying about me?”
The slatted blinds bled zebra stripes. Shell rolled over in the light. “What you on about, Arthur? I’m trying to sleep.”
“Fucking Lawrence has been expelled.”
“What?”
“I’ve been trying to tell you.”
The metal canteen was in his dad’s top pocket. Booze breath and heavy hands, a square fucking head and gap front teeth. Arthur stepped into the room and blocked the door. Lawrence was trapped between either parent.
Mam sat up and put her palm against that cornice of a forehead. There was nothing to do but wait, take in the pattern of the covers and the chintzy wallpaper. June and still cold, only in Litten. Lawrence wondered if he could make it out of the window.
“What do you mean?” Shell said.
Arthur always pointed when he had the bit between his teeth. He was doing it now. “I mean why doesn’t Lawrence stop gossiping about his old man for once and admit what’s happened, if he hasn’t already, which I’m guessing he hasn’t, given that you’re still in your flamin’ pit, Shell… Go on, kid, tell your mam what you’ve gone and done.”
A discarded pair of Mam’s knickers was under the bed. It had been hard enough confessing what happened earlier, shuddering home from the Scanlan’s as the abandoned bleach works rose on the skyline. Appearing to sense this, Arthur had boasted about trespassing in the barren factory with his brothers, leaping over the open shaft for the guide rails on the third floor. Where were those considerations now? Lawrence looked ashamedly at the floor and hated his dad.
“Our son has been expelled. Now will you listen, woman?”
Shell leapt out of bed. She wore a long red t-shirt with a picture of a bear on it. “He’s not. Lawrence, tell your dad about the paper. Why’d he be circling college ads if he’s been chucked out of school, Arthur?”
“Never mind that,” said Arthur, going the colour of the nightie. “It’s true, love. I’ve caught him yesterday. Weeks back this has happened and he’s not told us.”
Mam put her hands on her hips. “Lawrence?”
“An’ all while we’ve been caught up wi’ strike, the selfish bugger,” said Arthur. He looked frantic and catty, an impulsive loon, assuming the worst and blundering in on the assumption his son was betraying him, when it was his wife doing the cheating.
“I want to hear it from him,” Mam said. “Kiddo?”
This was it. Get it over with. “It’s true,” Lawrence answered quietly. He was relieved to get the words out, actually, shed the layer. “I were kicked out of school,” he said. “A few weeks back.”
Mam snorted. She put her hands behind her neck and clamped her tongue between her teeth. So it was confirmed, Lawrence’s failure had been established. And of course she’d shoulder none of the blame and nor would Arthur.
“Don’t look like that,” said Lawrence.
“Like what?”
“Like what you are doing!” He tried to leave the room, only for Arthur to block his path.
“You need to face this, lad.”
Face it? Lawrence could finally see his father properly, see behind that convenient plastic thing, the pupil of a good eye reduced to the size of an insect: like a blood-filled tick left drowned in an empty teacup. The eye said it alclass="underline" Arthur was terrified of Shell finding out about the break-in at Threndle House. In spite of her rudeness, her coldness, her directness, he was afraid to lose her, a wife his brother had already taken. And what a thing it was, to pity your father and how he fooled himself.