“You better tell us what happened,” Mam said.
“He’ll tell you,” Lawrence replied, “Won’t you, Dad,” and this time he managed to battle out onto the landing where the lampshade hung above the stairs like a wasp’s nest. He could hear his parents going at it behind him, arguing over the things they wanted for him, which were really just projections of what they wanted for themselves. Mam was calling him stupid, her own son. Who else knows? she was saying. Who have you told? Thanking her lucky stars Lawrence had been sent to the grammar school rather than Litten Modern. People might have thought them snobs sending him there, but it was a blessing in this light. The explosion had been controlled, like a warhead on a distant reef.
Lawrence hurried to his room to pack his things. He would head to his grandmother’s, which was a short walk through the cherry blossom specks blowing out of the grounds of Cottonlea Retirement Home, past the weathercock turning on the spire of St Michael’s. He loaded his pack and headed out, stopping on the landing to listen to his mother one more time. Through the bedroom door he heard her. He could forget about school. Brantford was the best place for him because heaven knew he didn’t listen to his parents.
“No way,” Arthur was shouting, “No son of mine…” and this sent Shell storming out of the room.
Here she was, saying the words, probably the worst thing she could ever have said to Lawrence:
“Soon as this is all over, your uncle will put a word in for you down pit. He knows people, does Het. He’ll sort it like always.”
“Not the only thing Het sorts though, is it,” snapped Lawrence.
He was out of the house and down the road within a minute.
12
HET PULLED HIS scar tight and brought the razor to his face. Then he drew the blade through the froth. Iron filings of stubble floated in the bowl of pearly water, collecting almost deliberately at the edges.
This routine every morning. Het actually liked the look of himself in the mirror, masked by a soapy beard. Sometimes he felt like he should just let it grow for real.
Too far in to back out now though. He mowed clear lines of skin down his foamy cheek and for once didn’t cut himself, then it was done and he was getting dressed. The radio chittered the news; it was only on because he found mornings without another human voice eerie.
It was a short journey to the petrol station. With money getting tight, he’d been driving the Maxi to pickets himself rather than forking out for lifts from the other lads. Taking the risk was preferable to dipping into savings, plus he preferred driving to being driven. Some people were born to be driven. Not Het. He liked being the one behind the wheel. It was a question of ability, of natural indifference when you got to the county lines. The others were better at crouching in the back or lying under the blankets, and usually there was some unfortunate hidden in the boot.
“Duck down, boys.”
Slowing it. Staring ahead like all you had behind you was a set of walking boots and a raincoat. Only once had they been caught when Het was driving. They’d been chased and had their names taken, mind you, which was something to think about. When he’d been stopped in the past, Het had been sent on his way with a scare and a story to tell, but this cataloguing of dissenters made him nervous. The government were building profiles, getting clever.
Het also liked taking the men home after a picket. Long quiet drives. You dropped one guy off and then two more until it was just you and the last man left. You get to know someone when it’s just you and them in your car. Sometimes the wives would invite him indoors to stretch his legs, and there he’d see how they lived, smell their personal smells, note the accoutrements, the mannerisms and various kids.
Families were hell on him. They also spurred him on. Local and otherwise, those on and off picket reminded Het why he was doing all this in the first place. For every day now it was another pit, another town or cokeworks, steelworks, power station, hoarse throat, muscles sore from hefting bin bags of paint off the sides of bridges onto scab lorries and police motorbikes, upending barricades, using trails of barbed wire to block compounds, sabotaging machinery and running, always charging, a big man at the tip of the flying-V, breaking the police lines and earning bravery ales at 72 pence a pint, calming his brother down whenever Arthur tried to run the other lads at darts and kept losing his brass.
So maybe Brantford wasn’t closing. Others were and the employees of those pits had jobs just as worth saving. This was how Het did things. How all people worth their salt behaved. As long as wide was the case. Examples had to be set. They had their codes.
Picketing was his only income. It was a quid a day for flying, two if you did a double. You and a car full of guys after the extra money, flying in to picket one place, falling back to do another. Het had made twenty quid petrol since that messy afternoon at Tyndale back in May.
Most recently he’d done a run to Port Talbot to picket with the taffs at the steel docks where they’d been shipping in American coal. He and about ten others had spent the night in sleeping bags on the living room carpet of a local ventilation engineer. Het had already forgotten their host’s name, but he was a NACOD so still getting paid, so what did it matter? And not that it was necessarily the man’s fault that his union was a part of the industry yet not bothering to strike, but it must have made the struggle something of a holiday, no?
No one said anything. It would have been rude. But Het suspected the bloke made everyone bacon butties out of guilt. Because it must be a bit of all right, getting paid to sit on your backside for months on end while the NUM were out fighting for a cause your union were a part of yet failing to commit to. Pressed shoulder to shoulder with the others, Het hardly slept because he was stuck on the end of the row, where it was colder, because of his height. The engineer’s carpet was orange and he had a fancy record player. Het’s head had lain beneath the table it perched on. He’d bumped it waking up◦– a knock on the bonce to raise a soul come morning. Then to the wife after shuffling into the kitchen: “Ta, pet. Black with one sugar for me, please.”
He arrived at his mam’s. In ’83 there’d been a heatwave and now, one year on, it felt like there would be another. Morning of mid-June. Blazing hot already. Het wished he had the time to make the most of it.
He’d taken to his mam’s more and more of late, started checking in on Lawrence, who’d come to stay after a falling out with his parents. Not that Het possessed a great deal of interest in the little tyke, but Lawrence was a good enough reason to grab a free dinner whilst trying regain enough of Arthur’s favour to see Shell again.
Because she wouldn’t see him anymore, not for love nor money, two things he’d never had a great deal of. They’d been getting on so well recently, too. Course tongues had wagged; Het had set them straight. It should have been fine. He just couldn’t understand what was going on with Shell.
Perhaps it was that night at the bakery. The shutters had been lowered and locked and the shop’s spotlights flickered off, leaving the two of them alone in the back area. Somehow they’d gotten onto his being single. The how and why of it.
“I’m lonely,” said Het.
“So get a dog.”
Moving closer. There was always something to Shell, some breach in her wellbeing she wouldn’t share with him.