Flood (3 page)

No, she thought when he had gone. She could not go back to school so soon. But it was true: the summer was already over. She would be ill. She would be ill until her hair turned black again. She could not go to school when she was so very ill. Her friends would visit her in her bedroom and would not comment upon her hair, because hair that colour suited someone so very ill.

When her mother wakened her with a shout next morning, Mary leapt out of bed and rubbed her eyes. She whistled as she dressed. Tom was still asleep, and she hit him with his own pillow, reminding him of the new term, and that he was starting at secondary school today and wasn't he excited? He groaned with his head beneath his pillow.

At the breakfast table her mother sat with a beautiful shawl around her shoulders. Mary sat down and took a bite from a slice of toast on her plate. Her mother smiled warily.

'How are you this morning, pet?' she said. Only then, in that scalding second, did Mary remember: the hot burn; her silver hair; her illness. She spat out the grey lumps of toast and ran upstairs to be sick.

Mary learned quickly the rules of the game. To defeat the disability she had first to ride with it and make a casual joke of it in company, never admitting the pain inside, turning it to her advantage. In this way, she soon found her friends to be much the same as ever, and discovered that people accepted her, though with pity.

There was still some suspicion, naturally, though few doubted the ability of a shock such as she had had to turn a person's hair white. Actually, some black did reappear in her hair. She became accustomed to brushing it in front of her new mirror. In a school full of nonentities, she found her identity easier to achieve than most. She was a kind of celebrity. Her mother did not take her back to see Dr McNeill and his purple jars.

Two weeks after school restarted, however, there was a horrible accident at the pit. Matty Duncan had been working there for a single day. On that first day he had been knocked almost unconscious by Mary's father. He had expected it, of course, and assumed that would be the end of it. He went to work on the second day with a careful smile on his shifting face. He was a wage-earner now. His parents were pleased that some more money would be coming in, and Matty himself was only too glad to be out of school at long last and in his rightful place beside the other men of the village. He watched the wheel turning above the pit-cage as it creaked and brought the iron cage to the surface. He stepped in with the others and muttered the usual comments with them, careful to be respectful at all times. He descended into the scoured earth, slipping below ground level, deeper than the open-cast quarry, deeper, it seemed, than everything in the world. The descent took an age, the ropes creaking and shuddering. Matty thought of his first wages, and then, with a horrible opening of some door which he quickly closed, of the many days and weeks and years he could spend descending this shaft. A lifetime of burrowing, of coughing and spluttering and getting dead drunk on a Saturday. No, he thought, that's not for me. This was just pin money.

When he had saved enough he would go to England, or even America. He would not be trapped into living an underground life like the poor buggers around him. First things first, though. Before he began saving he had to buy himself a record-player and a motorbike and get together some money for a holiday at Butlins with Tarn Corrie.

The cage jolted to a stop. Someone pulled the gate back and they stepped out into the cold, dripping darkness. As he walked along the tunnel, Matty's head was full of other things he would do with his money. Cigarettes. Beer. No problem.

There was a rumbling from ahead. He peered in front of him, shining his torch along the tunnel. He moved to the front of the pack, showing his keenness. The others were mumbling.

'By Christ,' said one of them, 'that could be a cave-in up ahead.' They moved forwards a little, and the rumbling grew louder. Much louder.

'Get back to the fucking cage!'

They were running, and suddenly Matty was at the rear of a line that scurried too slowly towards the light at the end of the shaft. He could not get past the older, lumbering men.

The bags over their shoulders slapped against the sides of the narrow passage. Great shadows were being cast everywhere, as if their pit-lamps were searchlights shining into the night sky. Then the light was brighter, a sudden eruption of daylight. Matty turned towards the rumbling and the fireball hit him full in the face and body, before flying up the shaft towards the ascending and empty cage.

They stood around the young man's body. Their backs and hair were singed, some badly, but the boy had taken the brunt of it.

His whole front was black, charred as if he had spent an infernal lifetime digging coal. The smell of burnt flesh was overpowering. His hair was nothing, a few curled and brittle stalks. His face had melted back to the raw flesh.

One man retched quietly in the corner while the cage descended and a crowd at the surface shouted anxiously through the smoke down the echoing shaft of sunlight.

'The boy saved my life,' said Mary's father later. 'I was right behind him when he fell. If it hadn't been him, it would have been me. I knocked him out one day, he saved my life the next. It doesn't seem right somehow.'

It was after Matty's death that the rumours began and Mary, who had survived a drowning and whose hair had turned silver overnight, found herself as marked by the accident as did the miners with their scorched backs and their memories of that hot, crisp smell.

Mary's hair turned no darker and no lighter. She grew up like her friends, and in five years seemed to have put the events of her childhood behind her. Her eyes took on glints of female knowledge and her speech modulated to the knowing tones of those who stood against the wall of the village cafe to discuss dating and pop music. Mary's hair was thick and long, and her eyebrows were as dark as her eyes.

She had a sensual quality which many boys admired, and her boyfriends were many. Never did she think back to that night when she had told herself that no boy would ever look at her in her ugliness.

She did not really notice that Carsden was slowly fading in strength as she grew. It was the most insidious and subtle of changes, and she was not alone in ignoring the fact and its consequences. The miners were looking around them for other, productive pits. The mine at Carsden was proving difficult. The seams of coal were fragmented and thus hard to mine at a keen rate. Economics became a new word on the lips of the women shopping in the recently opened supermarket.

This was 1968. Far away there was talk of revolution and radical change. The world was slipping and sliding on the edge of a new era of communication. Carsden slept longer and deeper than most. The houses were still furnished in the non-style of the late 1950s, and the men and women still wore the same period clothes. They talked about and thought the same things as they had always done.

There was little place for discussion and change in a place which was concerned with survival at the most basic level.

Soon, however, it became clear that the good days, such as they had been, were over, even for communities like Carsden who refused to accept that this was the case. The local colliery was mined out. Kaput. Nothing could be said which would have improved things, and nothing would have been said in any case, so nobody said anything. They just muttered under their breath conspiratorially, blaming everything that came to hand in cold, dull voices - everything except themselves.

The lie of the land was indeed the cause of it all, so the local paper said. The strata of rock around the village had been squeezed into awkward layers through the course of millennia, to the point where seams were narrow and often only ten or so feet long anyway. The National Coal Board said that coal was more expensive to mine in Carsden than its selling price per ton.

So people looked to the elements and cursed the economics which had robbed them of their livelihoods. Coal was the life force, the king of the land, and when the king died there was nothing left but the anarchic struggle to find new jobs, the rush to emigrate. And emigrate they did. Many of Carsden's younger inhabitants just packed up and moved the twelve or so miles that would ensure them a job in light engineering or electronics. The older ones, the unemployable ones, were left to watch the first wave of children move out. They had to realise that a bus ride would now separate them from their grandchildren. Drained of these lives, the old town became dry and cracked and hardened, its buildings seeming to frown at every passing car.

Moving, however, caused problems for the emigrants.

They found it hard to make friends in the pioneer New Towns. They had been born in Carsden with their family around them like a tribe. They had been educated there, had met their friends at school there, had married there.

Suddenly they were in strange territories, where the harling was white on the walls and the shopping centre was under cover and spacious and little factories opened up all around the houses offering work on production lines. There seemed no security in these kinds of job. These were readymade societies all right, but they lacked the essential womb-like warmth which had been the mainstay of the old village.

Suddenly neighbours did not know one another. There was room only for cold nods of the head in passing, and the occasional argument when a party or a television was too noisy. Still, the streets were relatively clean, and the facilities were good, if impersonal: created for rather than by the community.

And all this caring was in place of something opaque, intangible, something the migrant families knew they missed but were unable to express in words.

Soon a few of the earliest colonists had even straggled back to the village, to ponder the imponderable and wheel the baby's pram round to the parents' house again at weekends. They all had similar tales to tell of life outside Carsden: it was an unfriendly world. The furthest most of them ever travelled thereafter was to Blackpool in July.

Still, the trend was towards getting out, and if they could not get away for ever then they got away at weekends, visiting the same growth towns they had despised and spending their money on the week's food from the vast, spotless supermarkets. They bought knick-knacks from the large stores, and drank in pubs promising something better, more upmarket than those back home.

Buses departed on the hour to Kirkcaldy and Glenrothes, and Mary watched in fascination the sunken faces that rode the red vehicles towards the coast or the interior. Their eyes were pink and vacant, their skin sallow. The old ones wore cheap clothes and chatted mindlessly about the television and the neighbours. The young families snapped at each other like lions beneath a parched tree. The teenagers were dressed as the magazines told them to, but their hair was lank, slick. Their voices were loud as their eyes grinned at the pathos around them into which they were so keen to grow. They could be seen like this any Saturday, sitting with the rest in the tight seats, jerking whenever the driver changed gear.

This was the Carsden Mary inherited when she was fifteen and at the vital stage of growth. Her father sat in his chair much of the time.

He had been made redundant a short time before and was bitter, cursing his inability to

make manifest his innermost feelings. Mary's mother still crocheted shawls and clothes, and they still sold well. They were well made. But even she was suffering, was going blind slowly and making mistakes she would not have made five years before. Mary saw all this, but thought little of it. She was a teenager, and had to be out of the house straight after the evening meal in order to go down to the park for a smoke and a chat with some boys and friends of hers. If she had to go near the murky trickle of water that had once been the hot burn, she did so with scarcely a thought, laughing off any remembrance of the day. She would chat in the grocer's with the new Asian family, despite her father's protestations, and would buy sweets from Mr Patterson at the Soda Fountain, though there was a better selection at the supermarket. She made choices consciously now, for she was growing up.

And she was still close to her brother Tom, who was working in a light engineering firm in Glenrothes but stayed at home still, being just seventeen. She would be leaving school in nine months or so. The prospect excited her, though Tom shook his head when she enthused about it. He looked less cheerful now than when he had still been at school. A gradual process of disaffection had led him to argue a few times with his father. Mary did not usually understand the cause or substance of these fights, but would take Tom's side against the wheezing, ruddy-faced man anyway, and then feel guilty afterwards. Her father would be in a sullen mood for days, and she would make him cups of tea and try to smile him into cheerfulness. She thought that she might like to be a nurse one day.

She had a boyfriend too: a friend of Tom's, though a year younger than him. She was not sure that she liked the boy, but he was older than her so she persisted with him. He would talk with Tom about emigrating, and Tom would listen keenly. When Tom said one evening at the dinner table that he was emigrating to Canada, Mary ran upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom. Tom sat the whole evening at the kitchen table talking with his parents. His father brought out a bottle of whisky and two of the good glasses so that they could discuss things in the proper tones.

Tom's mother was pale and silent. She studied her hands for most of the evening. The boy looked at her hands, hands capable of intricate weavings, and felt about to give in to their silent pressure. But this was not a decision that he had made easily. He had gone into it with various people, and had been in touch with an old family friend, Jimmy Gallacher, who worked in Canada and would put Tom up and see that he got a job in one of the sections of his own factory. A Scot, it was said, could always get a start in Canada. All Tom wanted now was the chance to try. He needed his parents' consent, though, or the leaving would be all the harder. His father conceded to most of his points, while Mary coughed out her sobs as she sat in the bathroom.