“I’m getting you home,” Het was saying, “Stuff this.” He was sweating and Bob had his cap off and his hands on his knees.
“Did you not see that?” said Lawrence. “Did you not see what they did?”
“I’m not blind, lad. We need to get going.”
Lawrence followed, looking back the way they’d come. He was old enough and he could take it. Evie would be so impressed when she heard about this.
He shaded his eyes, wanting, in a weird way, to laugh. Marauding picketers were attacking the police. The horses had retreated and Lawrence couldn’t see where the trucks were. Perhaps they’d made it into the compound already.
A small man in uniform with a Clark Gable moustache appeared at the front of the police line, holding a megaphone.
“Clements,” said Bob. “Assistant Chief Clements.”
That made Het turn.
Chief Clements spoke clearly into his megaphone. He warned everyone that if the picket did not disperse itself it would be dispersed by force. It was a little late for that. Lawrence broke into the laugh that had been threatening him and turned to his uncle for approval, but didn’t get it. Typical. Het was nothing but a big man with a stone face and such an unwillingness to acknowledge life’s absurdities that he had become absurd himself.
Het began to clap. “Wi’out fear or favour,” he shouted. “Wi’out fear or favour, Tony. Lest we forget.”
Stones fell. So did many of the nuggets of coal people had brought with them as an ironic statement. Lawrence kept missing where they went. He found himself urged closer towards the front lines. A lot more police on horseback now contained the field, as did the dogs, the barking dogs. It was back or forwards only. The picketers had been rounded up, penned here and then attacked, and Lawrence saw the heat as a living, sentient thing, a palpable screen through which the clamour of the hounds chasing him into the trees might be heard, their merry jaggeds tearing his shins and the fleshy beanbags of his calves.
Close now. Close enough to see the detail. More megaphone. More Zulu. The noise was horrible. We will hurt you if you try it. We will put our boot on your windpipe and increase the pressure.
Lawrence was to the side of the main ruck, set apart from Bob and Het, who appeared to have forgotten all about their plan to leave, so caught up were they by shouting at the horde of police officers.
Then it was happening.
The horses came again.
People screamed. Lawrence did too, he couldn’t help it. An armoured rider came at him, massive astride its saddle, twelve-foot tall and lit by a sun halo, baton raised, using it to scare the picketers away from Orgreave cokeworks.
Back home you saw beasts like these. They came plodding for their feed, docile heads hanging over drystone walls, fluid lips and fringes that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a character from Dallas. It was so easy to take for granted their power, so easy to forget what they might look like bearing down on you. This one rippled with sheer weight. You don’t hang around for that. The horse was a velvety, dark chocolate colour and had a pale kite of felt midway up its muzzle. Its mounted officer wore a clear visor and a black coat, zipped up to the chin, implacable as he cantered by to urge on the picket, only Bob was too slow; he turned at the wrong time and took a baton to the face.
Blood flecked Lawrence, or was it sweat? The police horse reared, making that squealing noise you heard on Westerns, and that was all it took. Lawrence ran. He ran the contents of his veins to water. It was enough. More than enough. Up the field he ran, swinging a left in a full-on panic. A TV crew were getting everything. At least that was something, he thought.
He reached the end of the field. They’d agreed to meet at The Plough pub, down the Catcliffe end, if they were split up, but Lawrence had no idea where that was anymore. Without Het he’d be stuck. He’d have to go back. He was not the man he’d thought he was. He was just a boy.
He retraced his tracks. Past the fighting elements he went, past the milling groups and those cowering in huddles, returning to where he’d been. The picket was getting into the police here, a smaller group who’d become bottle-necked. It was nasty stuff that took reinforcements to break up. The offending picketers were being beaten, dragged away. The season’s heat, 1984. All that’s solid melts into air.
There was a slight incline. Enough hill to stand on and search for Het. Lawrence could see horses. He could hear their hooves clattering in the turf, rucking clods of grass up and leaving behind rutted channels of roiled sod. He moved on. At his feet were the indentations the hooves made. Impacted U-shapes that would have collected glassy pools of water if it was raining. He finally spotted Het, the green shirt, the black cords, the soles of his Doc Martens on display as he knelt next to the dazed Bob.
Relieved, wild, Lawrence skidded over. ‘It’s me,’ he began to say, but stopped. Because over Het’s shoulder he could see police emerging from outside the factory. A lot more police and they were coming this way.
It was a mass of officers holding circular shields. These men carried long batons and marched in protective gear. Behind them was a battalion of yet more bobbies in their helmets and their caps, spread across the vaulted diameter of the tophill. The front shield patrol wore round helmets with the same clear visors as the men on horseback. They wore dark gloves, too, in which they gripped their weapons and the transparent shields that stated: POLICE. As if they were in some way unrecognisable. As if anyone could forget the sight of them in woollen sweaters and smart ties, coming to mop this protest from the field.
Uncle Het followed Lawrence’s line of sight, and what he saw made him force Bob Roach on to his feet. The older man had a huge bump on his forehead. He was bleeding, asking for his son. Darren was nowhere.
“Where did you go?” Het grabbed Lawrence. “I said to stay close!”
“I thought you said to Gran there’d be no trouble!”
They commenced their escape. The police advance was forcing the picketers away from the cokeworks towards the bottom end of the field. Depth charges of action took place everywhere. Squads of officers barrelled at random to seize people from the crowd and carry them to the command post. One agent tended to do the selecting. Red shirt, go. Bald head, grab him.
Whack.
Of course there were missiles. These served to wind the police up even more. Most of their detainees resisted arrest; it was taking several officers to bring a picketer down, and they weren’t doing it gently. In some instances the arrestee would be aided by the picket. Lawrence saw one man dragged down by four officers, only to be freed by a gang of picketers. Men punching policeman. Lawrence had never seen that. He had never thought that he would.
Halfway up the field a camera crew arrived. A blue camera with a stumpy robotic lens, pointing at them. “Steve, get this… get the guy’s blood.”
The furred boom hoisted, the TV crew ignoring Lawrence, filming tall Het, his hair out of kilt, glasses midway down his nose. They filmed Bob: rusty bloodstain marking his face, limping badly.
The crew stalked backwards, filming. It wasn’t far to the village end of the field, the only exits an embankment with an acute plunge down to the railway tracks, and the packed bridge leading into the village. Lawrence led the way towards the bridge. There was an immense jam of people there but it seemed a better option than the hill, especially now that he and Het were supporting the dazed Bob.
But the shield units were coming and the horse-torn grass, the din around and the gulf inside. It was the complacency of it all, the efficiency, and so what if Lawrence was suddenly gripping the TV boom? He wrenched the pole, which came out of the sound man’s hands easily enough. The guy was young, blonde, ginger. What did it matter? Lawrence hit him in the face, hard enough to make him stagger.