The Northern Clemency (54 page)

Tim turned and took a step or two down.

“I expect you’re going to say that you’ll happily work down the coal mines when they’re run by the People for the People, aren’t you?” Malcolm said. He was getting to the point in this argument beyond happy enjoyment, and was starting to fume.

“And you?” Tim said. “What did you do today? Make lots of money, did you?”

“Personally, you mean?” Malcolm said. “The usual amount, the amount that pays for your food and keep, I suppose. No, I’ll tell you what I did today—I made a couple very happy. Listen to this, son, you might learn something. This couple, they’ve been living in their council house for years. It’s their own house, in their own minds, but they’ve only ever rented it from the council. And today I helped them take out a mortgage so they could buy it, and then it’ll be theirs properly, and they can pass it on to their children. I don’t suppose you’d like to live in a council house, but they loved their house. You know something? It’s really quite satisfying when you help people to fulfil their dreams like that.”

“Christ, you fucking fascist,” Tim said. “Does it never cross your mind, the struggles ordinary working-class people face, and then participating in flogging off public assets for a cheap profit, bribing people like that to keep fucking Thatcher in power?”

“Well, oddly enough, that’s exactly what Margaret was saying on the
subject. Not Thatcher, my Margaret, my secretary. No, it didn’t occur to me.”

“Well, it’s all just false fucking consciousness,” Tim said. “And they’ll wake up one day.”

“They’ve woken up,” Malcolm said. “That’s what you and your friends don’t realize. They haven’t a clue. Call a coal strike in May? What a pack of idiots. They haven’t a clue.”

“Fascist,” Tim said, stomping upstairs, and slamming his bedroom door.

Malcolm hummed a little tune to keep himself calm. False consciousness all right. He pretended to everyone, even to Katherine, that these nightly confrontations amused him as much as anything. It was really the only way he could explain why he didn’t let Tim sulk in his room, silently, but goaded him into name-calling. It wasn’t as if he even cared that much. But he didn’t, honestly, find them that funny. When it had all started, the summer after Tim’s O levels, he’d at first been easily infuriated by beliefs only acquired to hang adolescent tantrums on. Then they’d carried on, and he had managed to find a little amusement in the predictable course of Tim’s assertions. But always, as the argument went on—and it was always the same argument, night after night, starting from a raw expression of total personal contempt—he found himself full of rage. He tried his best to keep the whole thing as a joke.

“Tim’s come in?” Katherine said, coming through the front door.

“He’s upstairs,” Malcolm said. “I’d leave it a while, if I were you.”

“I wish he’d learn to put his own swimming stuff in the washing-machine,” Katherine said, picking the wet towel out of the abandoned bag. “And he gets so annoyed if it doesn’t get done overnight. You haven’t had a row already, have you? You’ve only been in twenty minutes, the pair of you. I saw you come in—I’ve been over at Alice’s.”

“Only a little one,” Malcolm said. “Hello, love,” and he kissed her quickly, negotiating the wet fat sausage in her right hand. Besieged, they were finding consolations in each other these days; maintained the rituals of love and the fronts of amusement for each other’s benefit.

“You’re as bad as he is,” Katherine said, disentangling herself. “I honestly believe you start them deliberately.”

“He talks such a load of codswallop,” Malcolm said.

“He’ll grow out of it,” Katherine said. “Eventually.”

“That’s the trouble,” Malcolm said. “I just wish he’d find a job.”

“And move out,” Katherine said heartlessly. It had taken time for
them to come to that acknowledged point, but once they’d reached it, said openly to each other that they wished Tim would move out, they enjoyed repeating it. To most other people, they managed to go on saying that they were happy for him to go on living at home, it was quite nice still to have one child with them now that the others were gone, Daniel in a flat in Crookes and doing well at his job in the estate agent’s, Jane, after three years’ university thoroughly independent, sharing a flat in London. But they didn’t say that to each other, or to people who knew, like Alice and Bernie. To them, they said quite openly that they looked forward to the day when Tim moved out, and both of them thought of Kenneth Warner, up the road, his thirty-year-old son still at home, and drifting from job to job, and nothing Kenneth could do about it. And at least Kenneth Warner’s son was only a gormless lump; he didn’t go on about the petty bourgeoisie all day long at the top of his voice.

“I’m going to watch the news,” Malcolm said.

“It’s all the coal strike,” Katherine said. “I’m sick of it.”

“All the same,” Malcolm said, going into the sitting room and picking up the remote control from the white unit. They really ought to get rid of it—they couldn’t remember why they’d liked it, with its white plastic surfaces, and now one of the smoked-glass doors was gone, smashed after Tim had gone too far and hurled a mug straight past his dad’s head late one night. They’d been on the point of throwing it out when Alice and Bernie’s identical one had appeared on the pavement for the dustmen to take away. (They wouldn’t, either, so it stayed there for five whole days.) So, of course, they’d had to hang on to it for a while longer. It would just look stupid, otherwise.

Katherine was right: it was all about the coal strike. There was a shot of the prime minister, then a shot of the miners’ man, while the reporter talked over the top about the day’s particular failure. The pair of them looked far too pleased with themselves; Malcolm wondered, too, and not for the first time, which of them got through more Elnett to keep their hair in place. He had voted for her, twice now—or, rather, for Osborne, a son of the steel-makers, a man he’d never seen round here and didn’t believe he’d think much of if he ever did. The news shifted to film of men on strike outside a Pontefract mine. They were in T-shirts; the weather was nice. It might have been the same film they’d used yesterday. It would have looked better if they’d been able to stand outside the mines in donkey jackets round a hissing brazier, rubbing their hands to keep out the winter chill. As it was, anyone
could see that no one was urgently in need of coal at the moment, and now, when Scargill came on to say that the mines that the Government wanted to close down, they’d do better to supply pensioners with fuel for nothing, he looked an idiot.

“Taking an interest,” Tim said. He’d come downstairs quietly, in his socks; his white big toe was poking out of one like a potato out of a bag.

“It’s all a bit ugly,” Malcolm conceded.

“You won’t find the truth out by watching the news on television. It’s all staged.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, as everyone knows, the television companies, they’re going down to the picket lines and paying people at the back of the crowd to throw bricks at the police. It makes a better picture.”

“That can’t be true,” Malcolm said. “That’s crazy.”

“Of course it’s crazy,” Tim said, sitting down in the brown armchair, the survivor from the last three-piece suite, his hands chopping at the air in explanation. “But the media’s stirring up trouble, and the Government’s paying people to infiltrate and start up violence so that the police can charge the legitimate strikers and beat them up. It’s true. Not that you’ll find any of that on the television news or in your
Daily Telegraph
.”

“Is that a fact?” Malcolm said.

“The fact is—” Tim began, picking at his socks, but then his mother came in.

“I don’t know what you’d like for your dinner,” she said. “There’s some pork chops, or I could get some cod out of the freezer. Did I tell you, Tim, I was talking to Alice and she said she’s just had a letter today from Sandra in Australia? Go over and find out what she’s up to some time.”

“Sandra?” Tim said. “Over the road? Why should she have anything special to say to me?” He was fiddling with his sock, pulling it out to cover his big toe, twisting it round to make a little knot. “She never had anything to say to me while she was living there. I don’t know why she should suddenly be interested in me now.” There was a sharp tone, almost of anger, in his voice.

“I always thought you were great friends,” Katherine said. “No, I remember, it was Daniel who was great friends with her—” She looked away, suppressing something that promised to have been a smile; she might have been remembering those hungry wet-eyed gazes, unmodified by shame or experience of the response such things got, that Tim used to direct at Sandra over their dining-table. “I don’t know why I
thought it was you. Of course it was Daniel, we all thought they were going out together, and then, of course, they weren’t, they were just friends.”

“You never knew where you stood with Daniel, did you?” Malcolm said.

“Still don’t,” Katherine said. “Don’t start off reminiscing at your age, Malcolm, nothing so likely to turn you into an old man. I ought to give Daniel a ring, tell him, he’d be interested at what Sandra’s up to. She calls herself Alex now, Alice said.”

“Confusing,” Malcolm said. “Alex and Alice.”

“Well, they’re twelve thousand miles apart,” Katherine said. “Anyway, he’ll be up before long, I haven’t washed any clothes from him for a week and he’ll want his best jeans for the weekend. Now, I still haven’t had an answer to my question about dinner.”

“Look at that,” Tim said, rising from his seat and pointing, wraithlike, at the television. It had wended its way through the day’s other news, picturing disasters in other parts of the world. The violence might have visited parts of the world in strictly alphabetical order, and today it was Iran and Iraq and India, with a shot of a badger-haired woman who might as well have been Mrs. Thatcher in a sari. Now it had returned, in its last minutes of summary, to the miners, and to shots of a dense, dusty crowd throwing bricks. “Do you think there’s any point in getting a job when none of this—” he waved his arm around at the sitting room, its one wallpapered side, its three cream walls, and the three-piece suite and coffee-table with three books in a neat pile on it, the vase filled with lilies scenting the room “—is going to last? Why buy into a system that’s on its last legs?”

“I thought you said all that was staged by the television,” Katherine said.

“It is,” Tim said. “But they’re still angry, the people of this country.”

“Just not angry enough to throw bricks,” Katherine said. “I see, I think. Did I ever get an answer about what you want for dinner?”

“The fact of the matter is,” Tim began, but Katherine had given up, and gone back to the kitchen to start cooking whatever she felt like.

“The pork’d be nice,” Malcolm called. “Or whatever you feel like, really.” And in a moment
Nationwide
started, which he couldn’t stick, and he had an excuse to get up and leave Tim addressing an empty room, Frank Bough and a dog that liked to drink beer.

.   .   .

Halfway through dinner, the telephone rang. Tim left off what he was saying, and went to get it. It was usually for him around this time, and usually it was Stig. He’d been supporting the miners all day with Trudy, and had something to pass on: CND were holding a big meeting in ten days’ time. There was going to be some kind of rally in London, and this was a planning meeting.

“They’ll be handing out puppet-making duties,” Stig said. “And painting their stupid banners. Trudy wants to go along and smash it up. Are you on for it?”

“Yeah,” Tim said. “It’s just a stupid distraction.”

“That’s right,” Stig said. Their feelings didn’t go further than this; they listened with awed respect to Trudy’s view that a nuclear war would smash capitalism once and for all.

“Are you coming down tomorrow?” Stig said in the end. “It was good today, we achieved a lot.”

“Yeah, I will,” Tim said.

“There’s another thing,” Stig said. “But I won’t tell you over the phone. There’s a meeting of minds taking place later this week we ought to be at.” A meeting of minds was their term for a confrontation, one the listening police and MI5 wouldn’t understand. At the moment it meant a flashpoint of the miners’ strike.

“Where is it?” Tim said naïvely.

“I can tell you tomorrow,” Stig said. “We’re still trying to arrange—” stressing these last words, as if he knew quite well how stupid the euphemism was “—a venue.”

Stig had been at the forefront of resistance since the fifth form at school. Tim had sort of known him, skulking at the back of the class and answering questions in a bored, parodic way when directly appealed to; he couldn’t be disciplined, since he usually knew the answers, but the teachers didn’t like his tone of voice, or the look on his face, or that he wouldn’t make an effort, and sometimes hilariously said so. Tim’s proper admiration began on the day of the dinner-ticket protest. Dinner tickets were obtained from machines or, if you were on free dinners, handed out by the school secretary; they were identical, and you weren’t supposed to know who paid and who didn’t, but everyone knew anyway. It was a rule that once you had your little sludge-green ticket—it was supposed to change colour day by day, yellow Tuesday, blue Wednesdays, but in reality it was always sludge-green—you had to write your name on the back in case you lost it. Their form teacher, Mr. Kay, always liked to tell them something important on the
mornings they didn’t have Assembly and were stuck with him for half an hour before lessons began. One morning, in the stuffy form room in the geography block, lined with maps where an engorged yellow America, a shrunken grey Africa were supposed to demonstrate the world’s riches in graphic terms, Kay started on the importance of this rule. Stig—then still Simon—put his hand up. “But why do we have to do it?” he said.

“So that if you lose it no one else can use it.”

“But the dinner ladies don’t know who we are.”

“They can certainly check if you report your ticket lost.”

“But isn’t it our right to lose it?”