Then he saw Lawrence.
The boy no longer wore jeans and a bobbled woollen sweater. He looked smart, Arthur’s son of such dense varieties who must have weighed no more than ten stone soaking wet. Lawrence had a rough smile, just like his mam, using the side of his mouth just like Shell did. He also had that same lack of eloquence that felt oddly verbose, that same talent for putting things. But Arthur was in there too. Lawrence had the same reluctance to comply as his doomed old man.
And that was it, wasn’t it? At the end of the day your child was as alone and corporeal as you were. You couldn’t protect them. Everything they went through, they went through because of you, simply down to the sheer fact of being brought into this world. Maybe they were better off deracinated. Arthur could have smashed the window and dragged Lawrence out. He could have done the same to Swarsby, any of them. But why wreck things for his son just because he’d run out of track? He thought for a moment that he could hear the blast charges of Brantford pit. He listened again. There was only the wind.
The next part was easy. Arthur headed into town to do what he should have done months ago. He knocked on the door of Clifford Briscoe, Brantford’s pit manager, and told him he wanted to go back to work.
19
EVIE WATCHED LAWRENCE emerge from the ironmongers. It was cold and her scarf smelt like peppermints. She blew against the cashmere, hot damp spreading across her face. Her first north winter and it was as cold as she’d expected. Mischief Night, not even November, the pavement ice pale and the Christmas lights suspended prematurely across the street in unlit colours.
Evie mimed a round of applause as Lawrence raised the glue tin above his head. He’d grown out that vicious skinhead and might even scrub up presentably for somebody one day.
She took his arm and headed towards the woods, where they were to meet Duncan. Her brother had gotten over the garden party better than she had. Right up to the faint Evie could recall, the flutes of champagne, the wisp of cigar and scotch fumes, acquisitive attitudes practically slathering off the walls.
Bram had just been there. How could that have been how he first saw Evie again? She thought of his esoteric good looks: he had a face like a leather briefcase, his shoes squeaking with every movement. Evie’s mother loitered behind him, tutting about missing the speeches thanks to another performance. That same old paradigm of disappointment.
The afternoon sky was streaked with violet when they eventually arrived at the den. The elm tree’s garlands were withered and its bunting was faded, the painted stripes up the neighbouring tree chipped and sparse. As the ground was wet and the chair under the tarp had long gone, Evie had Lawrence clean some stones for them to sit on. He’d been windbagging about something so she thought she’d better set him a task.
Presently she sat while Lawrence prised the lid from the tin with his house key and emptied the glue into the sandwich bag the way she’d showed him. They took turns huffing at the bag, trapping and exhaling the glue’s fumes as if having panic attacks. Amid the whirl of solvent, Evie thoughts divided… her train ride north at five am, dosed on the Nitrazepam she’d stolen from her mother’s bathroom, so out of it she had to be escorted from the train by the ticket inspector when she arrived in Litten… sleeping it off… awakening to Clive emerging from his study with a cut above the eye… Duncan… ‘Please don’t say anything’… lolling in the garden with a drink until Lawrence arrived, babbling about horses, in danger of crying and knowing neither of them would forget it if he did… sorry I wasn’t at the woods… kissing her… letting him do it… Bram was… Fiona fixed… the season had flowed into August and beyond the trees, the trees, there was a gate…
“That was fun,” said Evie.
“It’s mad is what it is.”
Evie snorted.
“What’s so funny?” Lawrence said.
“Your lips have gone all blue.”
“They haven’t.”
Evie let him kiss her cheek and put his arm around her, but soon grew tired and shrugged him off. Submitting to the designs of someone you pitied was just another act of self-harm. Bram had taught her that much.
She nudged the glue tin out of sight at the sound of her brother. When Duncan arrived, his eyes flicked to the sticky bag. His hair reached to his chin now. He was still some distance from attaining Lawrence’s height, but was broader in chest. Evie had caught him doing press-ups only the other day.
“All set?” he said, pushing a sheaf of hair behind his ears.
“Born ready.”
“What about you, Lawrence? Mischief Night.”
“Looking forward to it,” Lawrence said, glancing to his left, which Evie had read somewhere was a sure sign of a lie. She leapt onto his back and demanded a piggy-back.
They took the bus over the high road, through the police cordons towards Whitbeck. Passing through the checkpoint, the concertinaed roofs of the old army barracks drew into view. There was an assortment of police vehicles in the exercise yard: Transits, Bedfords and Leylands, cars, carriers, bikes, horseboxes and Range Rovers. Never mind the men. Evie pointed it all out to Lawrence, who didn’t seem bothered.
He could suit himself. Out of the rear window, if it would do, was a suet and cinder-coloured firmament framing the spoil heap on the edge of Litten, and adjacent to that great false hill, by a few miles, stood the colliery’s winding gear and chimneys. Evie was feeling kind; she would not remind Lawrence of the subterranean drama of alignments and networks that formed the citadel of his future, at least not today. He was watching a bird ghosting in flight outside, its tiny form leaving the emaciated shapes of industry far behind. Evie made eye contact with him in the window but could think of nothing to say.
The bus stopped ten minutes’ walk from Fernside Grammar. Evie was beginning to feel the ping of the Dexedrine she’d also taken from her mother’s bathroom and supposed Lawrence must be feeling the fizz too. Duncan, none the wiser, removed three rubber masks from his bag: a witch, a vampire and a werewolf. “Vampire for me,” he said. “And I think we can guess who gets what between you two.”
Evie took the werewolf mask.
Fernside felt abnormally quiet. It had been such a long time since Evie was in a school. Since passing her O-levels well enough to get into college, she had decided to defer a year to ‘figure things out.’ She wouldn’t miss the jostle for position, the obligations and insecurity of education. Her future in the real world would be so very different.
The masks fitted closely against their faces. Evie felt delicious in hers. Hidden from herself as well as others, she felt energised and alert, displaced. Or maybe it was just the amphetamines.
She followed Lawrence uphill to the sports hall. The new complex had just been completed, replacing the concrete tennis courts. Grundy, Fernside’s headmaster, patrolled it daily, a pitted block of windowless concrete that had a green roof that lent it the appearance of a huge lunchbox.
They shook the cans of spray-paint and began to graffiti the outside of the hall. They had a colour each: Lawrence red, Duncan blue and Evie yellow, painting a massive crude jack-o-lantern on the brick and writing the name Grundy above it. They gave the figure a gross body with naked, lactating breasts and a pustulating cock and balls. At its feet they sprayed the corpses of children, trampled, prone. Fuck off, Bastard, Twat, Evie wrote, whilst sitting on Lawrence’s shoulders.
Happy Mischief Night.