The Northern Clemency (62 page)

When the car horn sounded in the early-morning street outside, it echoed in the silence like the hooter of a tugboat, melancholy and raw. It was so silent in the early mornings, only a single bird singing in wan hope of a mate in the holly tree in the back garden. Tim had been awake and half dressed for twenty minutes; he’d had a bath the night before, so as not to wake anyone in the morning with the hissing and clanking from the boiler.

In his brown cord trousers and bare-chested, carrying his favourite T-shirt, he went downstairs. He’d made himself a big mug of tea, and cut off a hunk of granary bread, savagely, an almost pyramidal slash, then slathered it with butter. If it hadn’t been more trouble than it was worth, and likely to raise the house, he’d have fried some bacon and
made a bacon butty with the HP sauce he’d made his mother buy. It was the sort of breakfast a man on a picket line deserved. But he ate the breakfast he had made for himself in the kitchen of the house with its view of a neat front garden, with its Italian tiles on the walls and its specially air-pocketed flooring, warm and yielding under bare feet in the winter.

He’d almost finished his tea when the car’s horn sounded outside. He looked outside; it was Fat Marge’s orange Marina, which had become Stig’s vehicle. It was going to be warm today; he quickly put his T-shirt on, rinsed the mug under the tap and put it upside-down in the rack. He went outside, and immediately Trudy stuck her head out of the open window and hissed, “You can’t wear that.”

“Why not?” Tim said. “It’s what we’re here for.” The T-shirt had a slogan on it: dig deep for the miners. It had been printed by somebody unprofessional, on the sort of T-shirt material that didn’t last more than a dozen washes; even now, only a few months into the miners’ strike, it was grey as a prison flannel, its capitals, printed in transfers, cracking like dry earth. He’d told his mum to wash it inside out, but he suspected she deliberately didn’t, or didn’t pay any attention to what he asked her to do.

“That’s exactly why,” Trudy said. “It’s because it’s what we’re here for that you can’t wear it. Haven’t you heard? The enforcement’s stopping cars and turning them back if they’re obvious radicals.”

“Back from where?” Tim said. He wasn’t in the mood for this, and especially for Trudy’s invariable habit of calling the police “the enforcement.” There was some justification for this, and he’d tried to use the term, but they’d looked strangely at him, as though it was Trudy’s copyrighted word. Trudy and, surprisingly, Stig, at the wheel of the car, were dressed with almost excessive respectability; Stig, satirically, in an old tweed jacket, certainly one of his dad’s, over a plain white T-shirt, Trudy in a beige top with laces tying up its slashed neck.

“Back from where they’re going to,” Trudy said. “They won’t let you anywhere near the picketing sites if they think you’re going to be trouble. And that spells trouble.”

“Have you had your breakfast?” Stig said, speaking for the first time. “We’re in a bit of a rush.”

“Fat Marge got up specially early,” Trudy said, “and made us a special breakfast. She thinks we’re going hiking on the moors. Thanks, Timmy,” Trudy said satirically, as Tim went back to the house to change his T-shirt. He stomped slightly, aware of them watching
him go. He bounded up the stairs, not caring whether he woke anyone now, and went quickly into his bedroom. He pulled out another T-shirt. None had no slogan on it, whether home-made, printed on home-tie-dyed cotton from stalls at radical fairs, or occasional semi-professional jobs from the radical bookshops. Everything was promoting or protesting, making some statement; it was either that or they did what Daniel’s clothes did: announced the multi-national exploiter, which profited from the making of these things, in external labels or even printed on the front, like slogans, announcing the triumph of sweatshop and profit. But the top one was ambiguous in its protest: the slogan was etch copper for zambia, a cause exotic even to most of Tim’s immediate circle, and written, as it happened, in ingratiating and suitable copperplate.

They were in a hurry to get to the picket, Tim knew. He stood up and looked out of the window at them, waiting outside. Trudy had got out of Fat Marge’s car and was leaning against it. It was early—nothing short of class warfare would get Trudy out of bed at this hour—and she was yawning. She took her left wrist in her right hand, and, like a triumphant boxer, raised both above her head as she voluptuously yawned. Her T-shirt broke loose of its moorings in her waistband, and rode upwards, exposing a pale and rounded patch of her belly. It was as if Tim had slipped sideways on some unseen patch of black ice underfoot, and found himself, a second later, shaking and unbalanced, but still standing, at the same place, a thousand years before. Trudy standing like that, just there, yawning like that, brought back a memory to him; the first time he had ever seen Sandra. She had got out of her car and stretched and yawned, on just such a morning as this.

She must have been much younger than Trudy was now. But just as the trees outside the window, though now presumably much bigger, seemed exactly the same as they had been ten years before, so Trudy seemed exactly as Sandra had been. There was nothing to connect them; Trudy possessed only a fragment of that beauty which Sandra had so fully inhabited. He had looked at Sandra for ten years, every day until she had got on a plane and left for Australia, and with every look there was a precious fragment of that wash of desire he had felt in his uncomprehending childish way the very first time. He never saw her now. But this memory, brought back all at once, was something that often occurred to him. He had looked at her carefully; had made as solid a set of memories of her speech and words as if he had stolen keepsakes of her and locked them in a box. He had stolen a letter of
hers to Daniel, before he had seen it. But that was all the physical avatar of hers he had, safe between the pages of a long history of the Cuban revolution. Now, mere thoughts of her were solid and regular in his mind. He thought they always would be.

She had gone from his life. Perhaps all he could do was to try to find those women, like Trudy, in whom his desire could mine a fragment of that pure quality now embodied on the other side of the world, in one woman he hadn’t seen for years.

“You took your time,” Trudy said, as he got into the car.

“Are we all right, then?” Tim said to Stig.

“You’ll get away with that,” Stig said, meaning the T-shirt. “You know something? Trudy was just saying. Your house, it looks completely mad.”

“My dad’s idea.”

Whenever it was the right season, and, as everyone always said, the climbers about the house shot all at once into bloom like a moment, prolonged into weeks, of applause, and the house itself, no more interesting or remarkable or special than any other house in this road, turned for a long moment into what might have been a house of blossom and nothing else.

As Stig started the car, Mr. Sellers opposite was coming out in his suit, keys in hand. Something in the way he shut the door made it clear that his wife, Sandra’s mother, was still asleep. Of course, there was nobody else in the house to wake up: Sandra was in Australia (a sudden shot of her in bikini, laughing as she ran out of the surf) and that Francis had left home, was in London, wasn’t he?

“He’s up early,” Stig said, setting off.

“Works for the Electricity Board,” Tim said. “My mum’s friends with his wife. She says he’s always having to leave the house before seven.”

“I don’t wonder,” Trudy said. “They ought to be supporting the action, and they’ll be working against it. We should go and let down his tyres.”

“What’s it got to do with him?”

“Who do you think’s buying the blackleg coal, if we don’t stop it leaving the pits?”

“Oh, yeah,” Tim said. He was vague about the destination of the coal: he always thought of it as going into people’s fireplaces, but of course nobody did that any more.

They quickly left the western suburbs, the blackened stately villas
of Broomhill with their remains of railings like cut-off blackened teeth. Nobody was about; the morning was high and blue and slightly steaming, the dew smoking above the municipal gardens. It was going to be hot. They drove through town, round the Hole in the Road, hardly being stopped by lights at all, and only now was traffic beginning to build up. Tim saw a single, boarded-up shop, and turned to make sure. There’d been shops like this on the outskirts, in the poor places, as Tim could never stop himself thinking of them. He’d seen shops in frazzled arcades which had discovered they served no need, and where no one else could see a need either, and had been boarded up. But that happened in the poor places. It hadn’t happened in Broomhill, where Nick’s flower shop had already been turned into a bookshop, with forty copies of
Frost in May
fanned out in the window round a left-over vase of Nick’s with a sprig of blossom in it. It hadn’t happened, before, in the middle of town. That had been a trendy clothes shop, selling jeans mostly; he’d bought a pair of cords there once himself. He hadn’t noticed it was closed, and now it was boarded up. Perhaps Sheffield itself counted as a poor place now.

There was an increasingly sour smell in the car. You might have thought Trudy would have taken the opportunity to have a bath before she set off in a small car on a warm morning. “We’re not picking you up,” he said in surprise, turning round to her; they were driving past Hyde Park Flats in its immense sour concrete ribbon on the hillside above the station. It hadn’t occurred to him that it was odd, Trudy being in the car from Lodge Moor, nor had he really understood what had been meant when she’d said that Fat Marge had made them both breakfast. He hadn’t been paying attention.

“I stayed at Stig’s last night,” Trudy said. “We thought it would be easier.” She had a sort of triumph in her voice; he hadn’t known she saw him as some kind of rival for Stig’s attention, though Tim knew he thought of her in that way.

“It’s quicker,” Stig said. “Trudy wanted to borrow a book, so she came up last night and stayed.”

“You don’t have to explain,” Trudy said, her voice rising. “Not to little Timmy. Oh, and by the way, Timmy. We didn’t screw or anything.”

“I never thought you had,” Tim said. “I don’t make those sorts of assumptions. Where are we meeting the others?”

“At the service station car park, just on the M18,” Stig said. “Throw them off the track a bit.”

“Where are we going?”

“Orgreave,” Trudy said. “No harm in telling you now.”

And now the roads were widening out, leaving Sheffield behind. The carriageway ran like a mournful mountain pass behind high peaks of slag, lowering and black. Down in the valleys, the palaces of the steel-makers, vast and cubic and full of fire; up here, the unworking coal-sorters, huge and yet frail, their sides dustily clamped with metal stairs, like drawings executed in dust. Tim wondered what they looked like, in their car with bricks in the boot. To the other drivers, they could be normal. Just then, like a physical thrill, a police van drove past; not just a police car, but a whole van, its windows lined with chain-link and filled with shadowy dark figures. As it overtook them—Stig was driving at an ostentatiously moderate speed—Tim felt sure that they would wave them over. But in the back window, two heads, leaning forward, helmetless, in intimate conference. The three of them in the Marina must look like what they were not, students off to Manchester for the day.

“Pigs,” Trudy said, with obstinate routine.

“They must be stupid,” Stig said. “If they knew their job, they’d be putting roadblocks up for miles around.”

“You can’t stop democratic protest,” Trudy said. “It’s not just us supporting the miners, it’s the ordinary people of Sheffield. You’ll see.”

And this seemed to be the case because, in ten minutes’ time, they slowed at the signs for the service station turn-off, the three fat white stripes on blue, two, one—signs that had always fascinated Tim when he was young. They turned off, and drove into the car park. There seemed to be nobody there, or just families getting in and out of cars, but Stig seemed to know where to go. He parked at the far end of the car park, overlooking the motorway, and almost at once the doors of cars near them opened, disgorging half a dozen people like them.

Stig and Trudy knew them, and there was quite a lot of pumped-fist hand-shaking going on. “I’m Tim,” Tim said loudly, because you didn’t wait for people to say who you were, and the others introduced themselves, too—Johnny, Vikram, Billy, Kate, and half a dozen others. He’d come across two or three before, met them while selling the
Spartacist
, and knew the faces of most of the others.

There wasn’t much time, and Vikram, who seemed to be the leader, explained quickly. “We can’t stand around here,” he said. “They’ll spot us and take us in if they see us grouping. We’re all here now, I reckon. We’re going to drive off at five-minute intervals—you first, then us, then you, OK—and this is what you do. You stop outside Orgreave—
there’s a little car park by the community centre, you’ll see the pay-and-display sign on the toilet wall. Drop people off there and make a move pretty sharpish. Don’t wait for us. It’s about fifteen minutes’ walk from there, it should be OK. The men make their way to the site of the action as discreetly as you can. The women and me, we’ll take up viewing positions wherever we can. If you’re just sitting on a wall, not doing anything, they can’t tell you to move on.”

Everyone laughed at the policeman-like turn of phrase. Tim thought, on the whole, they could move you on, but out of curiosity just said, “Why are you staying with the women and not coming with us?”

“Come on, Timmy,” Trudy said.

“Do you think I look like a miner?” Vikram said. “Have you ever seen a black miner in South Yorkshire? They’d spot me as soon as look at me.”

“When do we meet up again?” one of the boys—Johnny, perhaps—said.

“This is an engagement,” Vikram said impressively. “It doesn’t run to a timetable. We’ll see how it goes. You might have to get out on your own.”

That was it. Perhaps the others had discussed more specific and military tactics, or perhaps they were expected to use their own initiative. Trudy took over the wheel, and they set off again, accelerating away down the ramp. It was a beautiful morning—you couldn’t help thinking that. The landscape was torn away in slag heaps and pylons and this fat grey slash of a motorway, but there were trees, too, and green hills as if it were the English countryside. Torn and scarred, it still swelled and dipped like Gloucestershire. Once, people might have come here to admire the scenery; the earth had been beautiful before it had proved useful. If they had their way, Tim thought with deliberation, it would only be beautiful all over again, and useless, and filled with the ragged foraging unemployed. But you couldn’t help responding to the lovely morning. There had been some early mist on the ground, and the sun was lifting it off by the minute, like a transparent child’s blanket. You could see the layers of air; still misty down in the dips, and thinning into a blue lucid heat, solid and tangible like crystal fifty metres up. The air seemed like a reflection, as in a still lake, of the dense layers of geology below, the mist like a white negative of the seams of coal beneath the thin surface of turf, under what might even have been lawn. It was a beautiful day for it. He could have got out and danced on the roof of the moving car.