“He could have told me directly. I’d’ve postponed it. But that greedy bugger would’ve seen a loss of earnings elsewhere on his packed schedule!”
“He is close to her, you know, Donald. He was only eight when his father left.”
“You swallow that d’you, May? The absconding pater familias, the old lady taking in washing and doing cleaning to keep Saint Bill in school? Jesus, May…”
“As a matter of fact, Donald, yes, I do,” asserted May Onions. “And he just said he’d be breaking the speed limit to come and finish the prog, so give him a break, OK?”
Donald Thomas shook his bushy head from side to side. Incredulous, rather than denying her plea he slumped back into his seat. May tapped on the window. She gave Mickey Britt and Geraint Owen the ubiquitous thumbs up – waiting time over soon.
Inside the chain-link fence dumper trucks were using their shovels to cut avenues of access between the piled up refuse. Mickey Britt took a few more GVs without his producer needing to ask. The man who’d played Nat King Cole in the pub was clumping unsteadily up the steep dirt-track road to the site. He nodded to the camera more than to its operator and walked up to the Volvo where Donald Thomas, his eyes closed, still sat. He rapped hard on the window. May Onions put her chewed-up biro and clipboard down on the next seat and pressed the button to open the electric window on her side.
“Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?”
The man at the open window was in his late seventies. He wore a thin black mackintosh over a grey polo-neck jumper. He was unshaven, a grey stubble pocking his scrawny neck. His breath was a waft of inhaled, re-routed and exhaled untipped cigarettes and the woody, sweet afternote of draught bitter.
“Ay,” he said. “Perhaps you can. They told me, back in the pub, that you’re filmin’ up ’ere ’bout that tip, and stuff. S’right?”
Donald Thomas had opened his eyes. He leaned slightly across his PA. In a protective manner, not sure where this was leading.
“You ’aven’t got Council permission, ’ave you?” the old man said. “Permits ’n ’at.”
Donald moved his hand closer to the window. “Hang on mate,” he said. “Hang on. That’s not entirely fair, you know. And, besides, I think you’ll find we’re here to help.”
“Help? Help? You’re jokin’ are you?” said the man. “Don’t talk to me ’bout help. This will be another side show, a circus, a news story. A joke.”
In the distance, beyond the old man’s grizzled head, Donald Thomas could see Bailey trudging up the road. The old man shifted his own stance to follow the producer’s eye-line.
“Is that that Bailey, then?” he asked.
“Yes”, said Donald Thomas wearily. “That is indeed that Bailey.”
“Well, I’d bloody well like to have a word or two with him as well then, right?” growled the stranger. “He needs telling something he does, if he’s with you, that is.”
“Yes, fine,” said Donald Thomas. “Fine. You give him, my friend, if I may be so bold, the benefit of your considerable experience, and clearly your correct and entitled opinion. Go ahead. Be my guest. Just give it to him… preferably with both barrels.”
Bailey was yelling, “Sorry, Boys” as he approached the camera position. He offered May Onions a hand wave as thanks. May Onions scrambled out of the car. She said, loudly, enough to be heard, “Sorry to hear about your mum’s fall, A.J… hope she’ll be all right.” Bailey made a puzzled frown. “Eh?” he said and then, recovering, “Yes. Ta, she’s OK, I think. Last time I looked anyway.” Then he almost bumped into Donald Thomas and the producer’s new-found friend, both standing in the road and in his way so that Bailey said, genially enough for him, “Move over, chaps… we’ve got to do this pretty quick, eh… before the light goes. All in my head, Donnie, no worries… don’t you fret… here I am… will be word-perfect… as agreed… just for you, mon General.”
The old man did not move. He jabbed out a nicotine stained finger at Bailey. The distended knuckle wobbled as he waggled it in Baileys’s blank face.
“I’ve been wanting to meet you for years, I ’ave.”
“Really?” said Bailey. Why’s that then, Tosh?”
“I’ll tell you why,” said the old man, and he wiped a work-swollen hand across the spittle of his lips.
“I’ll tell you why,” he repeated as Bailey waited.
“With all we have to put up with… patronising buggers coming up ’ere when it suits… and only then. Patronising buggers, like your lot, coming up ’ere, as if from another planet, takin’ your bloody pictures, makin’ us all out to be ’opeless, dim-witted, doo-lally-tap, ’elpless left-overs, relics. As if we ’ad nothin’, done nothin’, ’ad no history to speak of, just remnants, to be sorry for. No idea most of the time of who we were, leave alone what we are now. What we actually may still be, ’cos there’s no clue in their ’eads, is there, of what might be in our ’eads, that we might be thinking, behind the closed doors of those ’ouses none of them ever thinks to enter and ask, when the curtains are drawn and we’re not being given parts to play, uh?”
The old man was shaking. He seemed to have run out of breath. Bailey set his lower lip into a Bailey jut.
“And your point is, soldier?” he said.
“My point is, Mister Bailey,” said the old man, “is that you, and I’d say only you, seem to understand the half of what I’ve just told you. I dunno much about you, but I’ve seen you giving those buggers set above us, by themselves most of the time, an ’ard time, whoever they are. I know you’re not from ’ere, not one of us, directly like, but you can’t ’elp yourself can you? From being with us, as well, to expose them, to chivvy the buggers, beat ’em up when they don’t answer the questions they don’t want to hear, and which you still ask. And, if you ’ave to, bring the fuckers down, uh?”
“Right-o,” said Bailey. “Couldn’t have put it better myself, could I Donald? Now, if it’s OK with you, Sunny Jim, I’ve what we in the business call A Piece to Camera to do. Stay and watch if you like. But behind the camera, please.”
Bailey shook an outstretched hand. He walked past the old man. He winked at a crestfallen Donald Thomas. Mickey Britt pointed to his marked position, and asked, “What the fuck was that all about?” Bailey took up his position in front of the camera. He said, quietly enough, “Fuck knows, Michael, some local paysan Donnie boy picked up. Shall we do this, then? Get it over with? I’ve got something on in town at five o’clock, got to change first.”
Bailey’s face was suddenly shadowed into seriousness by some inner mechanism he controlled when he needed it. Mickey Britt checked, and approved, the light. It was just sufficient, a glimmer which penetrated the whole and made a chiaroscuro cameo from which Bailey could shine out. Geraint Owen asked for a sound check. Bailey said, “Tiddley Tum, Tiddley Tum, what’s the price of a sack of coal nowadays. Down the hatch.” Mickey Britt respectfully raised an eyebrow for Donald Thomas to start proceedings officially, but the producer was gazing into another space and it was May Onions who said, “Go for it, then A.J..”
Bailey had not lost his concentration. He moved, but again only fractionally, to animate his stance, and he began, and ended, in one take.
“Here in this valley, indeed in all our industrial valleys, there have lived people of quality. Vintage communities, created out of appalling conditions, by the people themselves. Self-confident people, proud people, whose very existence has shaped our history, yes, the history of all our nation, like no other force in the past one hundred years. They deserve, in these latter days, better than this. To be dumped upon. Like this… thing behind me. You know, I have concluded that this is not a question of who’s right and who’s wrong, of statistics or efficiency savings, of managerial capability or scientific expertise. It is, quite simply, a question of common humanity, and of our duty, all of us, to that humanity, as it exists, on the ground, here. On their front doorsteps… in our backyard. There is only one feasible conclusion to draw from our in
vestigation in this programme. That Thing over there should be stopped. It will be stopped. It must be stopped. To let all who live here, who choose to live here, who have the right to live here, listen again to birdsong not diesel engines, to breathe fresh air not noxious fumes, to smell spring on the mountains, not scent death in their valleys.”
Bailey counted one-two-three to himself. He shifted his head, so that his eyes seemed to glitter with a new force.
“This programme has been, as always, a calling card on behalf of the people who matter. You. I’m A.J. Bailey, and you’ve been watching the Bailey Report. Thank you and, until next time, goodnight.”
* * * * *
Donald Thomas thought: “Christ… he thinks he’s a bloody American.” May Onions decided it was “cheesy”, even for A.J. Mickey Britt confirmed it was “a wrap”. Geraint Owen wandered off to record “some wild track”. The old man applauded, and slapped Bailey on the back as the presenter strode past him. Bailey, without looking back, waved a hand at them all as he left the scene.
Counteractual
The old man watched Bailey retreat down the street. He saw Pigeon slide off the low cream-coloured concrete window sill of a garishly painted terraced house. Bubble-gum pink for the walls and baby blue for the woodwork. He saw Pigeon flip a half-smoked cigarette in Bailey’s direction and wave him away with a vigorously waggled V-sign and a muttered, “Piss-off outahere.”
He waited for Pigeon to turn on his heel to walk towards him. The old man looked past Pigeon to check that Bailey had reached his car. He had. He had paid Pigeon no attention. The car, with the TV Presenter at the wheel, moved off in a hurry. The old man walked slowly towards Pigeon. When they stood face to face on the pavement in the middle of the street Pigeon looked down at the old man, ready for him to speak first. In the silence between them Pigeon was impatient. He shouted loud enough for an audience.
“Wassa ’bout butt? He’s offa telly innee? a tossa there. ’Ee can fuck off forrastart, an all. Saaright, butt?”
The old man tilted his creased and pallid face up towards Pigeon, so closely that his stubble almost scratched the teenager’s scrawny throat.
“Yes, he is,” the old man said. “And there’s no real requirement for you to speak like that now that he’s gone and they’ve finished filming. And they are out of hearing so long as you desist from shouting.”
“Sorry,” said Pigeon. “It’s just that I thought you’d said we had to keep it up… under all circumstances.”
“Yes, by all and every means. But only when it is necessary for them. Not between ourselves, eh?”
Pigeon took off his NYC back-to-front baseball cap. He looked back up the street where the TV crew were packing up their gear.
“Are they really that thick?” he asked.
The old man sighed. “No, not thick exactly. Just a trifle obtuse, where other people are concerned. They can’t read our signals so readily. We don’t go around with coal-black faces anymore. Our politics no longer frightens them. We are no visible threat to their own conception of society, though that, of course, we hope, may change one day, again. You see, we are, in their eyes, poor. So we must be lesser. We stay here by choice, so we cannot be, oh, sacred word, aspirational. You can see why, then, it would not be helpful in the firmament of their fixed universe if we were to be discovered enjoying Beethoven, discussing Matisse’s cut-outs, or reading Updike and Mailer. Or indeed, as you do yourself, be found grappling with Foucauldism as a metaphor for our auto-incarceration. We speak as we do before them only for them. It is necessary to sustain their illusion by deluding them.”
Pigeon sighed in his turn. He sucked on his lower lip and gave the old man a petulant look, one that hinted at having heard something very similar from him a number of times. He decided to try another tack.
“I know it’s a waiting game. I do know that. But what exactly, whilst we wait, do we get out of it?”
“Ah,” said the old man to whom, over the years, this query had been put in the public, yet secret, meetings that had been held, in closed session, since the set-back of the Great Strike a quarter of a century earlier.
“What is at stake, my boy,” he said, “is not what we currently get – the grants, the funding, subsidiarity, inward investment, regeneration projects, public works of art, entrepreneurial pods, electrification of the rail network, touring concerts and opera, visits from our national drama companies, and every other species of economic and cultural munificence we can garner – no, what is at stake is, first, why and how we get it. And the answer to that is by being, stubbornly, us and by staying, very much bloody minded, where we are. Think of it this way, too,” he said. “Imagine if the Sioux had not gone, quietly in the end, with Red Cloud onto the reservation. Imagine if they had been able to stay out on the Great Plains with the resurgent spirit of Crazy Horse in their veins. Well, we have managed that, haven’t we? Inside our own heads, I mean. Together, still, in ways they are not. Nor have ever been.”
“But then?” said Pigeon. “After all this, then what?”
The old man clasped the young man around his shoulders. “The values which validate us, our past into our future through this present vale, cannot be allowed to shrivel up. To become, if you like, the clichés a Bailey will spin about us as tight-knit communities and the heart-warming victim syndrome. Because a pit closes, all of them in fact, or a factory closes, or even if a generation disappears like mine will soon, it does not mean that we cannot live as if the normal, our particular human contribution to history and morality, cannot be, for us, the norm.”
Pigeon moved in step as the old man took his elbow and began guiding him back down the street.
“Look. Consider it this way,” said the old man. “The more we are perceived as different, impossible cases perhaps, the more we will receive the benefits due to our being disabled from any utility in their utlitarian world. Best to let us fester outside their city – region. Keep us quiet, quiescent you might say. The danger is if they decide not to leave us alone, to wallow pityingly about our benighted condition. For then we might be sucked into their soul-less, deracinated lives of get-and-go, into their look-alike pattern -book housing on their digitally-modelled estates, bombarded by their aimless electronic chatter, their faceless tweeting of trivia, their closed circuitry of surveillance and the overall tyranny of their de-humanising technological devices. If ever an Orwellian phrase was waiting to be coined in St. George’s dystopian name it was, surely, Social Media. A-social. Antisocial. Code for cod. Sharing by pairing. Paring the possible to the bone for the boneheaded.”
He stopped stock-still. A guru on his own patch. Not to be denied. Pigeon relaxed.
“If they think,” the old man said with some force applied to the young man’s arm, “If they think we cannot aspire to be them, prevented by our heritage, our genes, our tribalism, whatever, from being able to join them, then, with a brute equivalence of motive and silent condemnatory accusation, we must strive to ensure we do not, ever, sink below them. For that would be to drown in the shit of their making without even the compensation of being ourselves the defecators of such a tragic destiny as their’s surely is. So, you see, we require a holding strategy, a defence against the Midwichery of their Moonie herd. For they are the real tribalists, not us, and our togetherness, at its collective best, has always been about full individual liberation not the falsity of having to choose from a prescribed set of options. They think, as they view our limitations, real enough I grant you, that we are the ones who are imprisoned. On the contrary, we are the ones who can be free in ways they will never, for themselves, comprehend. What, therefore, we do together, increasingly into the future and as consenting adults, of course, as citizens if you will, is something they can no longer do, and which they would prevent us from doing if they knew: to relate the one to the other, to cohere, to have common purpose for common wealth, to inherit who we were so that we may create who we wish to be, to survive as ourselves in order to live on, as oursel
ves, not to live, even well, just in order to exist.”
Pigeon released his arm and elbow from the old man’s grip, and rubbed them. “Mmmm,” he said and stared into the distance. The sun had sunk even below the lowest of the darkened hills. The two walked in a slow lock-step towards the bus stop on the main road. Pigeon looked at his e-bay purchased wrist watch. A fiver. Brand guaranteed. He shook his wrist from side-to-side to start it up again. In the gathering gloom, they sheltered behind the cracked perspex shield of the bus-stop’s canopy against the wind scurrying up the valley. The old man decided that to clinch the argument, for the present, he needed another example to illustrate the necessity of defence before attack.
“D’you remember,” he reflected, “how we were almost caught out about a year ago? They’d come up, as usual, with their fold-away camera and hairy caterpillar mikes, to take some vox pop on the latest government announcement: What do the people here think – do they think is what they really mean – of the proposed shift to reduced and universal benefits? And what they wanted, so that neither they nor their viewers would themselves have to think, of course, was the usual know-nothing, chopsy, keeper of the slurred, glotally over-endowed and strictly incomprehensible local accent. Preferably a morbidly obese, blowsy woman in her late thirties, with a fag in one hand, a can of extra-strength in the other, and an ignored baby crying in its pram. And, naturally, we were, as ever, prepared, on the look-out, ready, and able to station Tracy, after just twenty minutes in make-up in the Centre, right in their path. Irresistible. And she was.”
“And we were rumbled?” asked Pigeon.
“Almost. Almost. Not quite. Tracy had been brilliant:
Lookewe. Owswegonna live, eh? Ows I gunna feed ‘er? And she’d gestured with the cigarette in the direction of the child we’d borrowed and blew some smoke, not very much of course, towards the baby’s face: If ew sods or them sods takeawaysee, ‘er rights, like, she’ll starve to death, she will, ‘onest. And I’m not ‘avin aat ?, see. There’ll be blood on the streets, innit? Like ah Miners’ Strike all over again. Only worse, men’l see to aat, don’t ew worry. Only worse. And , me personal like, I got a disability, aaan’t I? And my old man’s buggered off n’all, see. Some piece from Swansea. At that, dear old Tracy burst into tears and put her pudgy hand to her lipsticked mouth as she bawled. They ate it up. Made all the news bulletins, Welsh and national UK.”
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