The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher
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poor suffering infant who they loved better than anyone else in the world? They just left the baby bear to die in a plane crash? This isn’t a funny story at all. It’s deeply moving and tragic.’
‘No, wait, because they go down, they go down in their parachutes, I mean, and then at the bottom, when they get to the bottom, there’s baby bear anyway.’
‘I’ve heard this before,’ Jane said. ‘It’s crap.’
‘And they say, “Oh, baby bear oh, kissy kissy, how did you get down safe and everything?” And the baby bear says, “Me not stupid, me not silly. Me hold on to daddy’s willy.”’
There was a lengthy silence. Daniel and Jane exchanged a sorrowing look.
‘That’s it, that’s the joke,’ Tim said. ‘It was funny, I mean, it’s funny if you don’t ask stupid questions all the time.’
‘What I don’t understand,’ Jane said, ‘is why they have to be bears. They could be anything. They could be people, or they could be donkeys. It wouldn’t make any difference to the joke.’
‘They couldn’t be donkeys, though, could they?’ Daniel said pensively. ‘If you think about it.’
‘Why couldn’t they be donkeys?’ Jane said.
‘Well, you couldn’t hold a cock with your hooves,’ Daniel said. ‘If you were a donkey. Have some sense, woman.’
‘You could try,’ Jane said.
Tim was crying now, fat tears amassing at his already reddened lids. The other two watched the familiar phenomenon. ‘It’s not fair,’ he finally said. ‘No one ever listens to anything I say. I don’t want to talk to you any more.’
‘I wish,’ Jane said, in her mother’s posh or telephone voice, ‘I wish you two would stop making Timothy cry. It’s not kind or clever.’
‘Do you want to go and watch Why Don’t You?’ Daniel said. ‘I’m bored of this.’
It was at least another hour after Leicester Forest East before the car felt normal again. It felt to Francis like a bubble of discomfort taking its time to rise upwards in him and burst. It was no one’s fault; whatever Sandra had done or said, it had been forgiven by the family without inquiry. Bernie’s affability towards the men had not crumbled, but his posture had stiffened, a protective, resentful attitude with which there was no argument. But in time the atmosphere cleared; in an hour Francis thought only he was trembling with that strange Francis-dread, the sort of fear that could be stirred in him by what had happened to someone else, or by events that were not about to transpire, that, imagined, could end in some catastrophe, none worse to contemplate than being shouted at. Sandra had been shouted at, in some way, yet she, his mother and father had passed from a stiff front of bravery to a real sense of being in the right. If, indeed, they hadn’t forgotten about it.
That Francis-dread came with a smell, a taste in his mouth as of sour clashing metals; it came from inside, and took time to go. He wondered sometimes if he gave off the smell of fear; animals, they said, always knew when you were frightened. Aunt Judith with her dog, making a beeline for him, making him cringe, because the dog could smell the emotion in his mouth. Yes.
But that smell and taste, so strong to him but unnoticeable, he guessed, to the other three in the car, was now being beaten down by a smell of the earth. The landscape had been changing, presenting familiar sights in unfamiliar arrangements – those bald, hopeful trees – as well as the unfamiliar, the monstrous. Hills were rising up, black and softly yielding, the great dunes of a black Sahara; and here, a building, a huge black box on sort of was it stilts, there were windows – were they? – but white, opaque, just a grid of white squares. It looked like something you would draw if you couldn’t draw, the idea of a big house but just a big black and white square. And out of the side, like a giant lolling arm, an immense conveyor belt. You could see the wheels running, carrying something, some kind of rubble up or down. The most terrible thing: there were no men. It was just a huge machine, a factory – a factory? – like a big black flimsy box, a black hill both flimsy and vast, and that terrible motion of the belt and wheels. Puking out, or forcing down the throat, an endless motion of forced ingestion or rejection, stone and gullet. It would carry on all night, all day. You could see that. The only thing human about it was the retching smell.
It was vivid and complicated, and it went by so fast that in a moment Francis was closing his eyes and trying to see it again, a moment after that, wondering if he had seen it at all. But there was that smell. And it seemed there were people, too, who lived in this smell, because there was a town, an estate, of matching red-brick houses. Just below the motorway. But they had somehow left the motorway now. A sign came up: City Centre.
‘What city?’ Francis said. His voice croaked a little.
‘This is Sheffield,’ Bernie said. ‘We’re almost there. New home. Did you see that factory – the works – some kind of, I don’t knew, coking plant? Is that right?’
‘How on earth do you expect me to know?’ Alice said, smiling.
‘You know everything,’ Bernie said.
‘I hate this,’ Sandra said. ‘I don’t want to come here.’
Francis was shocked at her bad manners: she shouldn’t say what he was thinking.
After they had returned from Sheffield the first time, when they had found the house, Francis had written to the magazine Sandra liked to read. He liked to read it, too, though it was less use to him. Jackie, it was called, with the kindly fashion advice that coloured girls could get away with wearing lovely bright shades, and the page of brisk nice answers from Cathy and Claire to girls who worried about what they should let their boyfriends do to their faces, mouths, breasts, vaginas. (Francis was horrified, not about to need the information.) He wrote, not to decent Cathy and Claire, but to the page before the appeals for foreign pen-pals, the place where readers described their home towns. He was egging himself on, he acknowledged that now, sitting in the back of the Simca with the choking smell of the coking plant in his throat. ‘When my friends first heard that we were moving to Sheffield…’ he began, then ran through the events of their week in the Hallam Towers Hotel, blithely equating them with what might be judged the principal attractions of the town. ‘Don’t forget to spend a morning browsing in Broomhill,’ Francis advised. He had read similar sentiments in his father’s Sunday Express.
He had not posted what he had written. And now he was glad of it. It seemed as if the Sheffield he had experienced had been created at the tip of a blue biro and had never truly existed. That city of hotels and attentive waiters, of dense Victorian villas dispersed through a verdant forest, breaking out like the frilled edges of amateur maternal pancakes into lavender moorland. It had been replaced by this stinking black city of vast boxes and artificial black hills and unattended vast machinery.
They went on. And poor Francis’s selfish focus and fear stopped him seeing the city he was entering, in 1974, its greatness, its sweep, the reason for those black hills and the stink. It was entering on the last phase of its industrial greatness, and Francis, in his little selfish fear, did not see it.
There it was: Sheffield, 1974. Francis saw the artificial black hills, the slag heaps piled up by the side of the motorway. But there were seven red hills in Sheffield too. The city was founded on them. The six rivers, too, the black-running Don, the Sheaf, naming the city, the Porter, the Rivelin, the Meersbrook, the Loxley. Each had its valley, some green and lovely, some lined with grimy warehouses, but all ran together, and they were the reason for the city. The waters, long before, had been harnessed to power forges, small hammering enclaves in dells; the steel masters had built their works, outgrowing the forces of the rivers, and the city had locked its blaze and fire inside those huge blank buildings, rising up on either side of those narrow streets like cliffs. The great noise, mysterious in the streets, continued day and night; those blast furnaces could never be shut down, and men poured in and out at unexpected times. Each man had his fiery function, and as they left their work, their eyes seemed soft, dazzled by the white-hot glare even through