“I know you blokes keep your eyes open. I wondered if you’d noticed anybody new working this part of the estate. Anyone selling, you know what I mean?”
They knew what I meant all right. When I said ‘you keep your eyes open’ they knew I meant ‘you lot are all unemployed and have got nothing better to do.’
“We don’t take any notice,” said Jeff. “Why should we?”
“You care about what goes on round here, don’t you?”
“Maybe. But that’s our business.”
“No bugger bothers about us, do they?” said Colin. “Forgotten about us, they have. The council, police, government. Nobody gives a toss about us down here. We’ve got the worst crime rate in the area, but we haven’t had a beat bobby walk down this end of the village for years. And do you know they’re shutting the old community house now? So why should we help anybody?”
“That’s terrible,” said Nuala, moving away from the car again, ears flapping. “Somebody ought to do something. There should be a community action group.”
They looked at her, then back at me. I was starting to get the impression they felt sorry for me.
“You know I can make it worth your while.”
“What’s this, charity?” snapped Colin.
“No. Payment. Information is valuable.”
“Well...”
“Well?”
“There might have been some bugger,” admitted Jeff.
“Who?”
“Don’t know his name. Our Ryan said this bloke come up to him and some of his mates outside the Welfare. They’d never seen him before. He was selling.”
“Drugs?”
“Well, he weren’t the Avon lady,” said Jeff.
“What did he look like?”
“You’d have to ask Ryan. He’s down at the rec, playing football.”
“Okay. Anybody else?”
“There was that car hanging about,” said Colin.
“Yeah? Whereabouts?”
“Couple of places I’ve seen it. Same car. Waiting, like.”
“What make of car?”
“Dunno. Blue-coloured thing. German. Not the usual sort of motor that visits round here. You’d think it might be the doctor on a call or something. But it wasn’t, not this one.”
“Oh yeah, and somebody from the Gazette was round asking questions,” said Jeff.
The local press? Blimey, it must have been something earth shattering like a golden wedding to bring them out onto the Forest Estate.
“What were they after?”
“Background.”
“Eh?”
“That’s what they called it. Two of them, there were. One with a camera. Doing an article on drugs.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Nowt. We don’t talk to the Gazette.”
I bit my lip impatiently, but said nothing. I knew it would be a waste of time. Not good old Nuala, though. She walked straight into it.
“Why not?” she said. “Have they done something to upset you?”
Jeff and Colin turned to look at her as if she was an invader from the planet Mars, or maybe even some soft southerner who didn’t know any better. For a moment, it seemed as though they were just going to ignore her question. She was still only a woman. But a faint stirring of defensiveness won the day.
“We don’t talk to the Gazette since the strike,” said Jeff. “Nobody does.”
Nuala had every right to look gobsmacked at this. The miners’ strike was in 1984. To her, it was ancient history. It might as well have happened just after the Battle of Hastings and the Spanish Armada. It was something you read about in books that have grainy black and white photographs of men with donkey jackets and long sideburns standing round braziers, facing columns of helmeted police. Maybe, at a pinch, you might accidentally catch a snippet of TV archive footage showing Arthur Scargill in full rant, his words meaning no more to anybody now than King Harold’s address to his troops before Hastings — and I’m not forgetting the fact that Harold would have been speaking in Anglo Saxon.
But these men were ex-miners who’d lived through the strike, and they had long memories. Come to think of it, they still had the donkey jackets and the sideburns too.
Although geographically in Nottinghamshire, some of the local pits had been part of British Coal’s South Yorkshire area. In the Yorkshire coalfields they were NUM men, the National Union of Mineworkers, some of Scargill’s brave, ageing lads. The breakaway union, the UDM, had recruited its members from the Nottinghamshire coalfield, whose pits that stood no more than a mile or two away. It was no wonder this had been the scene of so many bitter confrontations.
But Nuala wasn’t to know that. She’d missed the mass pickets and the intimidation, the armies of police, the strike-breakers and the communities ripped apart by violent feuding. She wasn’t to know that these men had taken a decision not to talk to their local paper following a front page editorial during the strike urging them to go back to work. As far as they were concerned, the paper had taken sides, and it had been the wrong side — the side of Maggie Thatcher and the bosses. The decision not to speak to the Gazette had probably been taken during a heated meeting of an NUM branch that was now long since defunct.
Their pit itself had closed years ago. The newspaper had been taken over by a big national group, and the owners and editors had all moved on since 1984. But Jeff and Colin were still sticking to the decision not to speak to the Gazette. They would stick to it until they died. They were NUM men.
“It seems a bit short-sighted to me,” said Nuala.
For God’s sake, didn’t she get the vibes? I thought women were supposed to be sensitive to people’s feelings? These blokes were suddenly giving off hostility like a barbed wire fence. And if their thoughts weren’t enough, they were giving it some body language too — shoulders hunched forward, heads lowered like bulls about to charge, eyes staring unblinking at this irritating thing in their midst. Their sideburns bristled like the spines of hedgehogs about to perforate an inquisitive cat.
“Well, I mean — they could help you, couldn’t they? If you asked them, they might give you some support here. A bit of publicity for your problems.”
God knows what might have happened if the Fiesta XR2 hadn’t screamed round the corner on two wheels just at that moment. I don’t suppose Jeff or Colin would actually have hit a woman. They might have taken the preferable course and hit me instead. Once the first fist went in, that would have been it — they would all have been on me. One in, all in. That’s solidarity.
But as it was, they turned as a man, their jeans stretching over their spreading hips and their false teeth twitching angrily as they eyeballed the Fiesta and its occupants. The car bounced off one kerb and was in the air for a few seconds as it hit the speed ramp before disappearing round the next corner.
“Bloody joy riders!” said Colin.
“Who is it? We’ll have the buggers.”
“Them two pillocks from the Villas again.”
“They’ll kill somebody one day.”
“It’s their mam and dad’s fault, I reckon. They’ve got no more sense than to let the silly sods do it.”
“Let’s go round there and sort ’em out.”
“Aye, Jeff, you’re right. Time somebody did that.”
“Bloody police are useless, any road.”
“Police? They’ll be sitting on their arses at Ollerton.”
“Come on, then.”
And off they went, chuntering among themselves, suddenly converted from aggressive left-wing trade union radicals to equally aggressive reactionary property-owning citizens. The moment saved us — or me, at least. But it hadn’t got us any further.
Before we got to the car, I stopped dead on the pavement and turned to speak to Nuala.