Het said, “That’s not what I meant.”
And Shell said she knew that. “I’m not daft, you lunk.”
Smiling, also serious, Het stuck his hand out and rested it upon Shell’s, accidentally-on-purpose. She returned the sentiment with her thumb, dragging the digit from under his palm then pressing the back of his hand with it, firmly, before drawing sharply away to face the bread shelf with its base of bronzed, angled poles.
No more of anything. No more of that. The disturbance of the paper bag as Shell filled it with buns. The fuzzy honey light of the hatch in the oven being switched off. Het picked up a roll; it was hard in his grasp. He pierced its crust and found it was still soft in the middle. Shell was watching him, he could feel it. He daren’t look back. She’d appreciate it more this way, because the curtain of possibility was drawing shut. To call attention to what had just happened, to have it acknowledged, Shell would only deny it. It was her way.
“You’re always so solemn.”
“It’s just my face. People think I’m crabby or in a mood when it’s just the weather on us mind or last night’s telly.”
“Must be nice to be thought mysterious.”
“Am I really that mysterious?”
“Aye, Het. Unfortunately you are.”
A heave in him. Was it to be how it had been when the bakery door closed, when they’d gone around the counter together with what felt like the same intention?
“Aren’t we all though?” Shell added. “I mean, heck.”
Het adjusted his glasses. Shell led him to the door. He didn’t understand why she was holding her hand out, a moment later he clocked.
“You’re having us on.”
“You’ve your tea, now cough up.”
Het made a show of looking for his wallet, pulled an old receipt out and placed it in Shell’s hand.
She smacked his forearm. “So what am I to tell Gaskell then?”
“Tell him tuna butties of a weekend for Newman. H.”
“Drop dead wi’ your tuna.”
“I’ve refined tastes, me.”
Down the street, Shell’s arm linked with Het’s as she laughed at the thought of him as refined. It was nice when people had an idea of you. Shell told Het about tomorrow’s trip to Sheffield on the way home. She was so excited. Much later, Het sat alone in his flat, got as drunk as he dared then woke up on the settee in the small hours. Arthur had showed up as soon as Het returned home from picketing Selcroft the following morning.
NOW HE WAITED for his food. It wasn’t so long ago that he’d been served here twice a day. He’d temporarily moved in with his mam to let her care for him after his dad was blown up. Neither of them had wanted to talk; they weren’t those kinds of people. It was more of a practical arrangement. Mam adopted him as her point of focus. Het allowed it, needing to feel useful, such a thankless situation was his grief. So tangible the impact his presence had on her.
He was always more of a dependent than his brothers. He’d only moved into his own place a couple of years before his dad’s accident, leaving home after overhearing a loaded comment at work one day about mummy’s boys.
Mam was fussing now in the kitchen. More pumice stone than pebble, Helen Newman refused to pander to summer protocol and was serving hotpot for breakfast in the middle of June. The kitchen thumped with heat. Every window steamed and the smell of chopped thyme and sweating onions surrounded them.
“Smells great,” said Het, flapping his shirt. He’d long since learned where questioning his mother got him.
“You sound surprised.” Helen approached with a wooden spoon loaded with hotpot. “Where today?”
God, the heat of that mouthful. “Orgreave,” Het said.
“Speak up, lad.”
“Orgreave.”
“Be careful, won’t you.”
Wincing, Het swallowed the burning wad of mush. From the moment The Mighty Atom had struck him, his mam had been overly protective of him. She’d only worry if she knew the extent of things at Orgreave cokeworks, so Het told her there was nothing to worry about. “The press have made mountains out of molehills,” he said.
Which in a way was true. The NUM had permitted the plant to use enough fuel to keep their boilers running, thus protecting their expensive ovens, only British Steel had persuaded Orgreave into supplying them with coal behind the union’s back. With Orgreave scabbing, every union was up in arms. ASLEF and NUR crews had refused to ferry anything to or from the plant by rail after the Treeton men picketed one of the nearby road bridges. Now the site was accessible only by car and lorry.
This had let to relentless fly picketing, police and batons, bricks and the bramble run for Het just the other day. For two weeks they’d been going up to Orgreave. Two weeks of sunbathing, sharing a laugh with the police (some of them were all right), then fighting whenever the trucks showed up. Missiles and batons. Het had been chased into the woods and taken a nasty whack that left him with a jaundiced patch that was currently becoming a lump on the back of his neck.
“Molehills,” his mam said.
Course every day Arthur wanted to go up to Orgreave. So did a lot of lads. If you wanted a scrum you went up to Orgreave. Flying out then falling back to Orgreave. Mansfield, Orgreave. Derbyshire, Orgreave. Yorkshire and the approximate Midlands.
For a bloke who’d never even wanted to strike, Arthur was certainly throwing himself into the pickets of late. Het wasn’t sure what to do about it. He’d never actually planned to report the break-in at Threndle House; he’d just wanted his brother to do the right thing for once. Put up or shut up. Like most men of principle Het found it hard to laugh at himself even though it often meant he got birthed backwards trying to grit his teeth through life’s contradictions. Take now. On the one hand if Arthur didn’t strike, Het would never have forgiven him, on the other, he wasn’t sure he wanted his brother picketing now at all. The monkey had been given a gun and the means to fire it, and it felt like every day they moved closer to a reckoning.
Het wouldn’t call saying there was no trouble at Orgreave lying. It was just underplaying it. His mam might be a miner’s wife from a mining family, she was also from that law abiding post-war generation who’d been conditioned in the belief that there were some things you simply did not do, fighting with police coming pretty high on that list. Not only could Helen not bear to think of her sons in trouble, she also couldn’t grasp that these days if you were against public disorder you ended up sitting on your hands while the authorities stomped all over you.
“Whole union’ll be there,” Het said. “From across country.”
“You’re like Gandhi, lad.”
Het suppressed a smile. “Summat like that.”
The egg timer trilled. Het’s mam opened the oven and checked inside. She stepped back, her spectacles steamed. She removed them; her exposed eyes looking a little like raisins. She said, “But a mother still worries.”
The bowls were spaced out, ready to serve. Mam was shrinking with age. Unusually for a woman her age, she kept her hair long, cascading freely over her shoulders, and she wore a dark smock and amber-coloured beads, brown stockings and ballet pumps that she said helped her go on tip-toes to reach things. The back end of sixty. No goals beyond completing the next day and then the next day and then the next.
Het said, “Best off putting that out of your mind.”
“Not easy when you see the state of them pickets.”
“Telly’s full o’ rot, Mam”
“Well what about the papers?”
Het had been surprised at how the media had rallied around Thatcher. How did they think it was going to go, the way the police carried on? If anything, all the violence was the governments’ fault◦– in ’74 the miners had been allowed to picket where they liked. Things had been comparatively sedate back then. “Them too,” he said.