“Will you tell us what happened?” she said, once they’d laid out the towels.
“About what?”
“Don’t try that wi’ me.”
By concentrating on unpacking the bag, Shell gave Het the space he needed to explain what had happened. Two weeks ago, he and a few others had ventured out past curfew. Their plan had been to picket Braithwaite Main then head home for lunch, flying elsewhere that afternoon. Chris Skelly still had his phoneline up and running and had been receiving silent calls, probably from the police seeing if he was in or not. He’d got a call that morning and been daft enough not to answer it as he was leaving the house.
“I should have known then,” Het said. “I should have thought.”
Het, Chris, Gordon Lomas, David Cairns and Darren Roach all convened at The Masons, went up the pit road then drove up the M180 to Braithwaite, an older pit than Brantford, where people had worked the High Switch seam for nearly sixty years. Never had Braithwaite had a problem with scabs, yet chief constable trickery had fooled some of the desperate strikers there into going back to work. Fancy being one of the only people in Yorkshire scabbing, especially at a famous pit like Braithwaite. What happened to the traitors’ wives, Shell thought. A name change, a new life. Where would they go? Who would they know? It would be awful.
Het was present for the arrival of the scab bus and its escort. A lot of men heaving, fainting in the crush. Some picketers erected a barricade, tearing down a row of saplings and nearby street signs and piling them up◦– all sorts of garbage in the road. Over the pile the bus went, having to slow, giving a lad with an automatic centre punch the chance to pop the windows in the doors. The driver’s lap was full of glass after the picketers tore the cage off and smashed his windscreen. The poor bugger didn’t know what had hit him by the sounds of it. And serves him right, Shell thought. Serves him bloody right.
Yet the police resistance was too strong and into the maw of Braithwaite went the scabs, Het, as ever, pushed front due to his size, face to face with an officer, so close that he could still vividly describe the plaque on the man’s teeth, the condensation on the insides of his visor, the leather chinstrap and the pimple on the bridge of his nose.
When some of the picketers lit a fire Het and the others returned to the Austin Maxi, the police getting hold of Darren Roach and giving him some hammer. The Litten men had a bruised flight home. They discovered Het’s car had been reported and its plates recorded, when, on the way back, they were stopped by a Leyland police van. The van overtook them, braking sharply in their path, a turn that left skidmarks on the road.
Four bobbies leapt out and knocked Het’s wing mirrors off, smashed his front and rear lights and then the windscreen. Before the police had chance to drag any of the miners out, the men scarpered. Het was the one they followed. He navigated the stile and drop fields at the base of Withens’ Peak, tracked all the time by the Leyland, which from some distance he could see was still after him. The police must have been using field glasses, because when Het ducked into a farmyard they caught him nearly straight away and chased him on to a pigeon shed. Terrified, cornered, Het opened all the hutches and set the pigeons free, the spooked birds flapping like feather dusters into the policemen’s faces. In the melee, Het somehow managed to get away.
He arrived home to a patrol car; the authorities knew he was a picketer; his name had been taken in the past and they had his beloved car as evidence he’d broken curfew. Taken to Doncaster station and booked in, Het was locked up for hours then moved on because they needed the cell space for more prisoners arriving from another picket. Back at Strepley nick they kept him in the communal cells until midnight. They threatened to charge him with assaulting police. Told him all sorts.
“They were like, you’re not so hard wi’out your mates, are you,” Het said, his sandwich untouched. “Drove me past them Swarsby posters on the way to the station an’ all◦– funny what sticks in the mind. Charged me wi’ unlawful assembly when all I’ve tried to do is save us jobs. Arrested, Shell. I’ve turned up to God knows how many pickets and not so much as chucked a stone. Not once. I’ve just been there.”
They watched the water. The malt breeze retreated and went another way.
“Condition of us bail is I’ve to report to police station every morning now for eleven,” Het said. “Have us name signed. Stuck indoors for a curfew all of my own: seven at night till nine in the flaming morning. Banned from any property belonging to the NCB, Central Electricity Generating Board and British Rail, amongst others.”
“It’ll be fine, love. I’m sure it will.”
“Will it?”
She couldn’t say.
After a while, Het remarked that the rocks beyond looked like Conisborough Castle, and did Shell fancy having a look? She’d been deliberating whether nor not to tell him about what had happened in Sheffield and was grateful for an excuse not to. “Course, love,” she said. She took his arm.
The prospect of rain made the day feel potent. It had been so long since Shell had been anywhere, and here she was with Het. The huge rock appeared to move the more she looked at it, and way beyond it sailed a ferry, a pale monolith transporting passengers to another country. She blinked into the wind. It was a pleasantry, this day: a humid privilege before winter on the coast. Back Shell lingered, enjoying the moment, leaving Het to continue on to the rock. Her fringe tickled her eyes, as did the piquant sting of the salt. Her hood snapped and blew against her shoulders, front and back. Cairns of stones lay in the sand everywhere. It was as if someone had been performing rituals.
Shell picked a wary route towards the water’s edge until she stood on the precipice of a rock pool. Captivated by the miniature stalagmites, the vivid reds and blemished qualities of the rock, she called to Het, pausing as she saw how far ahead he was, and wishing he’d respond.
She watched the pool, for how long she didn’t know. Its blank surface was so windblown that it created wavelets the eye couldn’t focus on properly. These textures grew more hypnotic the more Shell observed them, the rippling water with its pure, blank sheen and beneath it: vibrancy, only one perspective or the other visible at any one time. Never the two at once.
Shell loved the sea then, and felt as far beyond herself as she’d ever felt. In her mind was the Litten Path. She could walk it and join Het. She could return to the windbreaker and grab her bag, easy.
So what was it going to be?
She called his name.
“Het!”
And he must have had some idea what she was going to say, because he said, “I’ve something to tell you,” when he arrived, appearing quite shaken.
Shell didn’t want to hear it. This was what she wanted, and it was so very fair.
“Can it not wait?” she said.
She took Het’s hand and placed it against her breast.
17
THE CASTLE ROCK turned out to be sea rats, hundreds of them crawling over a stone hillock. Hard to believe, yet there it was: all that brine-sleeked fur. Het watched the creatures idling and scurrying over the kelp. Vast clouds had built into smoky turrets beyond them, and the acrid rodent smell supplanted the fresh coastal air.
It was lucky Shell hadn’t seen them. She’d lagged behind as Het got closer to the rock, missing the despairing noise he made as he realised what the shifting mass actually was. It had been like looking at things through a pebble glass window, then it had made an awful kind of sense.