3

There was a crusted pattern flecked across Arthur’s hand. It was too dark to see, but he could feel it.

And his knuckles hurt when he flexed his fingers. He was lying on the grass, in the countryside or maybe a garden, and the stars studded above him like beads. He was damp all over. He hated the damp.

He sat up to rub the wetter target-shapes on his back. He could taste iron, actually, wasn’t as drunk as before but still felt it, and how long had he been bleeding for?

There was the gargoyle, the marker overlooking Threndle House. Arthur groaned, sort-of-remembering resting against the warm metal counter of the chippy, dinner out of a newspaper by the bandstand, then the pub. Always the pub. Front teeth clacking the glass’ brim, sprawl of empties in front, alone because everyone else was at the welfare for the ballot. Every hand packed bolting to vote yes.

Every hand except his. Withered rollies and then the shop, pointing over the bloke’s shoulder at the serious stuff regimented like bottles in a shooting gallery. Arthur must have come here afterwards, wandering the grounds of Threndle House a firmer prospect than home.

He stood up, drunk. Was that smoke nearby? There could hardly be many fires going at this hour. Likely it was just mist.

The burning rug had made its mark. Arthur kept smelling it, its rank scent summarising his past-its-best marriage, Eau de Shite, a staleness such as came out of your hair when you washed it the morning after the night before.

When you still had hair, that was. Arthur circled the house until he felt the uneasy texture of broken glass under his feet. This must be the place, Threndle’s façade. One of the two panes of glass in the French doors had a hole in it. Arthur put his finger to the nasty edges. Was this his handy work? It had to be. After all, there was nobody else around.

He whistled. Delicious was the moment. They always were, visceral cigarette burns in the fabric of your day. Twisting the aerial from a car, tipping the bins over on your way home late at night, maintaining eye contact for that extra moment; doing something just for the pleasure of doing it when no one was around to catch you almost outweighed the desperate need to deny everything later on if ever questioned about the act. Arthur crouched. Here was proof of his presence: the neck of a bottle of white rum, broken off, the cap still screwed-on tight.

Now he remembered drinking the last of it, tightening the lid then throwing the empty bottle at the wall. Its detonation had zinged his face just as that coal lump at Brantford had done. Just as the firework had done on the 5th of November, 1957, when Het’s unforgettable scream tore through the Yorkshire air, seconds after The Mighty Atom blasted out of Sam’s hand and struck him in the jaw. Arthur was made to pay for that. He’d bought the fireworks and lit the Atom as Sam held it. “For a joke,” he’d wept. “I didn’t mean it.” His dad’s fist impacted on the bridge of his nose anyway.

“Fuck off.”

You could talk directly to the past when you wanted to. Arthur dropped the piece of bottle, licked his finger and weighed the options presenting themselves. Go home or go further. Bollocks or brains. Threndle House was the ancestral home of the Brantfords, who owned the pit before the whole industry went up the Litten Path, nationalised. Its windows felt almost unreal as he touched their stone surroundings, although he supposed everything felt a little fake when you really questioned it.

There was a longing inside of Arthur, and what could be done about that? He knew all about futility. All his life he’d done his best, and still he was a disappointment to his son. And as for Shell, thanks would be a fine thing. So they’d loved each other; she’d gotten pregnant. She was the one who wanted to do it all the time and hated rubber johnnies. Not to mention Arthur’s father always getting at them, constantly telling them how ashamed he was they weren’t married. Alec Newman refused to even look Shell’s parents in the eye until their children were wed. Shell didn’t have to listen to old Alec like Arthur did. She could have said no when the ring came out. And maybe she ought to have, if this was how she was going to be about it.

Fuck it. He pushed his hand through the hole in the French door’s window and reached for the key inside, finding nothing there. He belched, tasted rum, vomit and chips. He’d take a look around like he’d done on the night he found the moth rug. See what having the world on a fork got you. Let a politician be on the end of an executive decision for once. See how they bloody liked it.

 

He had to kick his way inside. This fucking living room was the size of the whole downstairs of his house, that igloo on Water Street. Everything was cast in blue. Arthur’s shadow pushed across the room’s cloaked features. He put his arms out so that his shadow looked like it had claws: a monster rising up the wall, sneaking up on the settee and the footstool, the sideboard, the piano, the armchair.

Those French doors had been locked tighter than he’d thought and now his foot was bloody killing him. He limped to the wall and managed to switch on the light, revealing an overcrowded room. Fancy wood with swirls in it. Raised wallpaper, dense carpet, a polished candelabra and cut glass. A large painting was there, too, and loads of boxes were piled up. Stacked and collected gubbins in every corner.

Arthur fixed himself a glass of port. He’d never liked it much but it was the kind of thing people drank in places like this, so he thought he should probably give it another go. He sank to the settee, drink slopping on to the cushions. The trick was to let your eyes close and your thoughts run. It was his mansion, his living-room. There was a gruff dog at his feet and the walls could have been made from wedding cake they were that white. Candles were lit everywhere, too. He’d wear a suit if he lived here. All day, every day. No tweed or worsted. A simple dinner black. The missus would be smiling by the piano. Shell. A younger Shell with bigger tits. Arthur knocked the port back and poured another. It tasted like cough syrup. He picked a candle up and put it down again, sparked it up then ran his finger along its length, into the swamp up top. Wax concealed his fingerprint. It was hot for a couple of seconds and then it was fine.

He opened his eyes. Same old Arthur. Couple of hundred quid a week Arthur. Shouting to make yourself heard Arthur. Sweating your tits off under halogen work lights Arthur. He took another sip of port, eased his shoe off and massaged his aching foot. Pain and swirling troubles were his lot, a life that would one day be lost that he’d never really had chance to start living.

After a while he shuffled into the atrium, stopping at the foot of the stairs to inhale the heavy smell of turps and white spirit. Threndle House felt deserted in the same way that schools do when the children have gone home for the day. In the same way that multi-storey car parks do when dusk falls.

There was a noise nearby that brought him back to Brantford, a persistent scrape similar to those made by the pit mice that first arrived in the hay bales when the ponies of old were still in use. Rodents in the districts, white-furred because they never saw natural light, chewing holes in your fucking butties if you ever made the mistake of putting them down. Arthur fumbled for another light switch, managed to find one and illuminated the hall, to be greeted by an ugly sight. Dust sheets bobbled with scrunches of masking tape were twisted into mad plaits up the floor, while padded fibreglass insulation the colour of intestines and a tabloid newspaper were scattered nearby. There were hunks of rubble and all kinds of detritus. The place was a bloody building site.

Arthur ran a hand along a wall covered by a landscape of part-stripped wallpaper, torn into bladed shapes, serrated peaks. Nearby a radio lay on its side with the battery panel open to reveal it had nothing to power it.

Down went the last of the port, only its rich taste mixed with the smell of turps made Arthur gag. He spat out his mouthful, leaving a thick puddle on the dusty tiles, and looked up to see an old mirror propped against the staircase.

He let the glass tumbler break on the floor, then knelt down so he could blink at his own reflection in the mirror and stick his tongue out, that overworked slab of grey meat.

He opened his mouth as wide as it would go and tensed his head until he could feel the blood in his temples going like the clappers and his face turning a boggling crimson. He used to do this in front of the old bedroom mirror when he was a kid after his classes with Miss Bose. Miss Bose, a retired local teacher who had way too much time on her hands, had been enlisted to help on Wednesday evenings because Arthur had a problem saying his ‘S’, or as his father put it, problems getting his mouth around what needed saying because he was otherwise satisfied getting it wrong.

Miss Bose’s services were paid for in kind: the three Newman boys to help her when she needed something doing. This might be a message delivering, a fence painting, her shopping fetching or her yard weeding. Old bird had aspic in the kitchen: a plate of opaque jelly with a boiled egg in it; pork pies or segments of spam. She devoured the Reader’s Digest and eschewed home remedies. She’d once held Arthur’s head over a can of tar because she said it would help with his chesty cough.

“New York, unique, unique New York,” said Arthur. That was one of the exercises Miss Bose used to have him say, walking from one end of her lounge to the other with an encyclopaedia balanced on his head.

“Red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry.”

That was another.

He’d hated her lessons at the time. Now he enjoyed thinking about them. He liked to think of Miss Bose. The plastic headscarf she wore, her rouge, the way she scrubbed soot from her front step with a donkey stone and swept the dust from the pavement, feathered her ornaments. With her potted aspidistra and her rose petal perfume, the old lady was a throwback to the energy of the past, to having a future laid out for you, to a time when you didn’t have to work in the noise and the hot dark, spending your spare moments at the pub, the library or the moor, thinking often of that Larkin poem from your mam’s copy of The Less Deceived: ‘Spring’. The lines about those the female season has the least use for, seeing her the best of all.

On the wall was a photo collage, a boy and a girl in most of the pictures. The boy was a pretty thing, effeminate. The girl always wore sunglasses, had a face you could never truly make out. This must be the Swarsby children. There they were holding a Labrador puppy. There they were by a sports car and there again in a picture with a pretty woman with hair like pasta twirls, a satisfied man in his forties. Clive Swarsby was in only one of the photos. His arm was around another man, a handsome man, severe hair parted, prissy-looking. Swarsby and this man wore waistcoats, bow-ties, cummerbunds. They were surrounded by mist, or was it rug smoke? Each tilted a conceited face towards the camera.

Blink and you’re the wrong side of thirty. Never travelled, soft as shit and one day to be deader than driftwood. There was no point in bloody anything, not even your next breath. Arthur punched the photo collage, breaking the glass, then climbed the staircase of Threndle House. As he went, his hand dripped blood into the port spillage. Not that he noticed. He wouldn’t really much have cared if he had.

 

The upstairs was exactly like the downstairs. Dusty, sparsely decorated, Threndle’s rooms were either devoid of furniture, character or both. You had to laugh, so Arthur did. He laughed drunkenly through this grand old house.

Eventually he reached the master bedroom, which was as blue as the living room and just as furnished. More boxes were stacked against the walls, three wide, four high. There was a bed, king-sized, and the armchair and linen chest were fancily lined. Velvety drapes, a Juliet balcony, a compact dresser, a set of drawers and more boxes. Fuck me, a bathroom. Arthur had grown up using an outdoor bog.

Standing out on the balcony he smoked a roll-up and disposed of the dog-end, watching the ember nicker away in the wind. Swarsby’s bedroom looked like an unpacked set from one of those melodramas his mam used to drag him and Sam to. Aged seven and eight at the Odeon in Rotherham, Sam sitting transfixed, fingers belly-clasped, Arthur tugging the loose threads on the armrests and kicking the backs of the seats in front.

He sat on the bed where Swarsby slept: a father whose family weren’t forever looking at him like he was a meal that had gone wrong. When you thought about it, a big house was as good as it got, and it wasn’t even that good.

He gripped his knees until he’d composed himself, then went to the dresser, rifling through the drawers for something, anything, that he could sell that might make enough money to see out this strike. It wasn’t like the Swarsbys didn’t have plenty already. And if Shell already thought him a thief, why disappoint her expectations?

A jewellery box was in the top drawer, hidden at the back. It was made of sandalwood, uncarved but well-varnished, and had a copper clasp and a vacant keyhole. Arthur had just stuffed the box up his sweater when two channels of light flashed up the driveway and swept the bedroom. He ducked, swearing, feeling as hollow yet constricted as he did whenever he and Asa descended into the airlock at Brantford, speeding in the cage towards the drift tunnel. He tucked the sweater into the waist of his jeans to trap the box, then crawled out of the room, cursing every light as he made his way towards the stairs. He’d had to turn on, hadn’t he? Now the house was lit up like a bloody Christmas tree.

The stairs he took two at a time, pain in his toe forgotten. There wouldn’t be much Arthur could say to Shell if he was caught. On the other hand it might give him the chance to tell her that he loved her.

He burst outside and saw another vivid moon. The temperature had dropped and the car’s brisk light dominated everything, fog light penetrating the March air.

Too many roll-ups: Arthur had to catch his breath. He could see the lawn stretching beyond him like a great woollen pinafore. He felt oddly weightless, had a mind to walk towards the car now that it had finished parking, actually, both hands held out, ready for the cuffs. He might as well, seeing as between the coal board, the government and his family, the whole world wanted to gut him and part of him wished more than anything that it would get a move on.

“Arthur!”

A figure was standing on the garden wall, hands on its hips. Arthur shrank from it, but in doing so was obliged to edge closer to the car, which had just killed its engine. People were climbing out. “Why are the lights on?” said a girl. She wasn’t from around here.

“Daddy, look,” said a boy.

Nor him.

“Someone’s been inside. You two stay in the car while I go check.”

Swarsbys.

Arthur crept over the lawn to where the figure on the wall had been. There was no longer anyone there. He knew it was the only exit point, the same spot he and Lawrence had hopped over the night of the moth rug. He was about to make a break for it when a hand slipped over his mouth. He squirmed. Tried to cry out. Driving an elbow into his captor’s torso, he was rewarded with a grunt.

Still he was held fast.

Arthur kicked the man’s legs but another arm slid around his belly, somehow missing the jewellery box. He was forced upon the grass and pinned. Lips retreated across teeth. The world was soaking and a strange, cushioned piece of flesh was pressing against his shaven head. A weighted mass dug upon his back.

Arthur knew then who had him: whose hand was exerting the pressure. It was the same hand that had held him when he was a boy, the same hand that had stopped him from setting fire to the old tenterhouse on the hill that time. It was the same hand that had clamped to its howling owner’s neck all those years ago.

“Get off, Het. Let us go!”

Then came another voice.

“Dad.”

Arthur stopped struggling immediately.

“All right, kid.”

“What you doing?”

Het let go. Arthur climbed to his feet, and, seeing that his son and brother had come for him, had never felt so ashamed in all his life. He was going to cry. He couldn’t stop himself.

A sob came out.

Het shoved Arthur with both hands. “What the flaming hell!”

Arthur tried to speak. Het had him by the lapels now and he supposed he was in for a right pasting when the car’s horn sounded from over the way.

“Dad,” the girl called, “they’re still out here!”

Arthur pulled himself together and led the others into the shadows as Clive Swarsby appeared in the doorway of Threndle House. A squat man, Swarsby moved nimbly enough back to the car, ordering his son out of the way.

Lawrence’s eyes were like two whirlpools, a pair of expiring suns. Arthur felt choked, like he might swoon. He didn’t know what to do.

“We need to move,” said Het.

There was always that.

The Swarsby’s car reversed, its headlights beginning to sweep the garden. Just free from view, Arthur hurried behind Lawrence and Het. He was shame. Recycled fear. His bloody foot was hurting and the lights were in pursuit.

“In here,” said Het, disappearing into the undergrowth with Lawrence following. Arthur paused, a few steps behind. Maybe things would be better for everyone if he wasn’t around. There had to be better role models for his clever lad. Better husbands for his lovely wife.

He sat on the grass. Above him was the universe, Cassiopeia. Miss Bose had taught him the constellations but that hadn’t been enough to keep him from her purse. He’d gone to the tinker fair on her pension, telling himself she wouldn’t miss the cash and he could stand the different way she began to look at him, because no one else knew where the handbag was. Only him.

Arthur apologised to the dead woman’s ghost and lay on his back with one hand spread over his eyes so that he could peer up at infinity through his fingers. To think of the lambent burning Pleiades up there, to see the first green blazes up in the mystics, a panel of night clear on this evening; he began to cry. Shell didn’t want the tree. She thought he’d taken it. Electric blue.

Time passed. A couple of seconds. Then a set of arms slipped under Arthur’s armpits and lifted him on to his feet.

“No you don’t, you’re not getting out of it that easy!”

Het.

Arthur was slapped around the face, twice, three times, then dragged by the wrist through the garden.

The headlights had them. Swarsby was shouting. Arthur ran towards a pale hand that he could see at last, a rescue arm dangling from the wall.

Lawrence.

He raised his arms to seek his son, ready to be hauled to safety.

But the hand disappeared.

“Lawrence,” Arthur hissed. “Kid!”