And the Land Lay Still (78 page)

The worst thing was being sure what it was. She felt things. There was a lump in one breast, there was something else that didn’t feel right under her arm. Why had she not done anything before? The answer was simple: fear. She’d seen it take her own mother, quick as anything, and that ought to have made her act but it had had the opposite effect, it made her incapable of action. Maybe if she and Don had been talking more she’d have had more courage. Maybe if she told him, even now, it could still be all right.

Mrs Cotter – Elaine – had turned grey in an elegant, sophisticated kind of way. But when Liz looked at herself the greyness was anything but sophisticated. It was the grey of sickness. Sometimes Elaine said, ‘Are you all right, Liz?’ And she always replied that she was fine, just a little tired.

And Mr Cotter was a surgeon. His job was cutting into bodies like hers. She couldn’t bear the thought of it.

She left the window and sat on the piano stool. It was a quarter to twelve. An hour to go. All she wanted to do was sleep. She pressed the white keys, one, two, one, two, three, and heard the start of a tune. By accident, because she didn’t know how to play, she’d struck the first few notes of a song. What was it? She tried to think of the words. Then she tried to play the notes again but they were gone, she couldn’t get them in the right order.

Oh my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch …

She hadn’t had a letter from Charlie for months.

She just wanted to put her head down and sleep.

§

Adam and Mike lay awake at night, talking. They would have sex then talk, or they would talk then have sex. They talked about everything. They were the best times they had, some of the best hours of Mike’s life. The intimacy of shared bodies, shared thoughts. They played word games to induce sleep, but the words would stimulate more words and they’d stay awake. They talked about survival – which one of them would survive out in the desert or lost in the hills, which one would have survived in a concentration camp. Adam was physically tougher but he thought Mike was more stoical, therefore more resilient. ‘You survived in that school,’ he said. ‘You survived being gay in a mining town in the 1950s,’ Mike said.
‘Up on the bings.’ And they would wrap themselves around one another, and maybe one or both of them would be thinking of those distant times.

They both learned about survival afresh in the 1980s. Something began to seep into their lives around the middle of the decade. They heard rumours, then more detailed stories, then definite news, emanating from California, from New York, from London. They weren’t in any kind of scene. They knew where in Edinburgh to go if they wanted it, but they didn’t want it. Mike didn’t anyway. They kept themselves, mostly, to themselves. But even so they couldn’t avoid it when people started talking about ‘the plague’. It was supposed to be about gay men, so they couldn’t ignore it – but to begin with in Edinburgh it wasn’t about gay men at all. It was about a different scene altogether, involving people they hardly saw, hardly knew existed, out in the peripheral schemes, heroin users sharing needles. That was where HIV flourished in Edinburgh at first, but eventually it touched everybody.

If Mike liked someone enough to want to have sex, then he probably wanted more than sex with him. That was how he felt. It’s how he still feels. It had been his objection to Sam, the biker. It wasn’t the sex that put him off, it was Sam. When he was with Adam, he didn’t want sex with anyone else but him. He believed Adam felt the same.

They ran into Sam now and then, on rare occasions when they were out on the town, and each meeting reinforced for Mike the way he felt. Sam reminded him of what he didn’t want. There was even something reassuring about Sam’s strutting, peacock personality. Mike had grown to like him, in spite of his reservations. And – the worst kind of complacency – he felt sorry for him. It seemed to him that Sam had aged rapidly since their first encounter in Sandy Bell’s. He worked out a lot, but he looked haggard, not healthy. He still tried to get off with Mike, and when he saw that he was with Adam he tried to get off with them both. To avoid difficulties they made a joke of it, until finally, one night in the Marquis, Sam conceded defeat. ‘You can only take no for an answer so often,’ he said, ‘before your ego starts to protest. I was made for sex. It’s what I’m here for. I’m not sure what you’re here for, but you’re missing out, darlings. I mean, if you want to play mummies and daddies, why
come here?’ ‘It’s an education,’ Adam said coolly. ‘No offence,’ Sam said, ‘but I’ve been trying to educate this one for years. He has to learn to separate this’ – he tapped Mike’s chest above his heart – ‘from this.’ He reached forward and briefly cradled his crotch in his hand. ‘Don’t you think?’

Adam looked for a moment as if he wanted to punch him and then he smiled at Mike. ‘Aye, maybe,’ he said. ‘But no the night.’

It was just what Mike
didn’t
want to do, separate love and sex. He wanted a relationship, deep and abiding, and he thought that was what he had. Adam’s smile was kind but it was patronising too. Mike should have paid more attention to it.

Sam was restless, relentless. He went on crazy sex-filled holidays to Spanish islands, he went to London, he went to Amsterdam. And he got greyer and gaunter. And then they didn’t see him any more. Months went by without a sight of him. Mike didn’t think about it much. It wasn’t as if he missed him. And then one day he did. He hadn’t been in the Marquis for months, and he went in and asked someone about Sam. ‘Oh, you’ve not heard?’ And so he discovered that Sam was gone, wiped out, killed by devotion to his own desire. It was shocking and upsetting. He was the first AIDS victim Mike knew personally. He remembered him in the shadows at Greyfriars, telling him what he wanted, what
Mike
wanted, and he felt a terrible emptiness because Sam wasn’t there, would never be there again.

§

There were other issues to contend with. Every month, sometimes it seemed almost every week, there was another rally or march or demo in opposition to something. Nuclear weapons, nuclear power, factory closures, privatisations – the Thatcher government had opened up so many fronts that it ran the opposition, official or otherwise, ragged. Once, Mike remembers, they marched in support of unemployment benefit, because claimants were being penalised if they didn’t sign up for some useless training scheme or other. How mad that seems now, that they were cornered into defending the right not to work. But it didn’t seem mad at the time. It felt necessary to resist, like M. Lucas, at all levels and every opportunity.

Whenever Mike began to flag, Adam would urge him on again. In his own way Adam was as relentless as Sam. Mike struggled to keep
up. He can’t now remember all the places where bold pledges were made to keep factories open, but he can remember this: every one of those struggles ended in failure. British Leyland, British Steel, British Aluminium, Carron, Caterpillar, Singer – the names became a jumbled heap of rusting iron, broken concrete and junked machinery, and it seemed as if the corpses of thousands of workers lay crushed and trapped under it all. Bathgate, Linwood, Methil, Uddingston, Dundee, Falkirk, Clydebank – even when he checks the many photos he took of men gathered round braziers, of ragged marches snaking along grey streets, of chained-up gates and derelict sites, the details of who made what where don’t always come back. It was another country, and it is no more. And, for all the passion that was poured into defending it, he doesn’t miss it much. All that devastation is reduced now to the chorus of a pop song by the Proclaimers – a song that, even at the time, always sounded more sorrowful than angry.

§

Then came the miners’ strike. It was an explosion that had been waiting to detonate for years: the right wanted revenge for 1974, the left wanted to stop Thatcherism in its tracks. A confrontation between Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill was probably always inevitable. Class warriors, dogmatists, idealogues – they could have swapped roles and people would hardly have noticed. They even had similar hairstyles.

The miners’ strike kicked off in Scotland, a fact sometimes forgotten. The Coal Board wanted to close Polmaise Colliery as ‘uneconomic’ and the Scottish miners came out against it, and at the same time the Yorkshire miners came out over proposed closures in their area, and it spread from these two locations. There was never any question whose side Adam and Mike were on. You were either for the miners or for the Tories and that was it. And if you were for the miners then you believed in the rightness of the struggle, and that victory was possible. And if you couldn’t wholly subscribe to those articles of faith, as Mike couldn’t, you tried your best not to let it show. He always doubted that the miners could win, not because he doubted the miners, but because of their leader. Arthur Scargill made mistake after mistake with startling conviction. He refused to hold a national ballot, which would have legitimised the strike in
the eyes of the world, he alienated not just public opinion, which was largely sympathetic to the miners, but even union opinion, and his egomania was such that he doomed the miners to defeat. The contrast with the leaders of the Scottish NUM, Mick McGahey in particular, was stark. McGahey might have been Scargill’s loyal deputy throughout the strike, he might have talked dismissively of ‘ballotitis’ and said that the issue was not the holding of ballots but the justice of the cause, but somehow when he said these things he sounded like a man of principle, whereas when Scargill said them he sounded like a bully. McGahey was an honourable, straightforward, card-carrying Communist. He had dignity, nobility even, and he stood head and shoulders above Scargill even when he stood in his shadow. Mike would have gone on strike for Mick McGahey.

For many that kind of thinking was tantamount to betrayal. You had to take the whole package, including Scargill, and not deviate one inch from the true path. If you deviated you were suspect. Mike was suspect, and when he voiced his doubts Adam made no attempt to disguise his disappointment. ‘I don’t expect ye tae understand,’ he said, ‘but it’s like following your team. Ye stick wi them through the bad times as well as the good. That’s what it means, tae be a supporter.’ ‘Sorry,’ Mike said. ‘I’m not into football.’ ‘Even if ye were,’ Adam said, ‘maybe this just isna your team.’ There was a cruelty in the way he said it. It hurt Mike deeply: it opened up a space between them that, naively perhaps, until then he hadn’t realised existed.

There’s a photograph, taken near the end of the strike not by Mike but by Angus, that was widely used at the time. The NUM leaders have emerged from some meeting or other and are standing on an open bit of ground. Scargill is as defiant as ever: he is looking at the camera and his hand is making that characteristic chopping motion to emphasise whatever he is saying. But the figure your eye is drawn to is that of Mick McGahey. He is next to Scargill yet a little apart. His stance shows how weary he is of the strike, and there is a look in his eye, which Angus has captured though it must have been there only for a moment, that seems also to show how weary he is of his president’s voice. That’s what the photo says to Mike. Solidarity and despair combined. An old warrior staring defeat in the face. It is a tragic image.

It is also, Mike sees, yet another example of how Angus made better pictures than he ever could.

Meanwhile, in spite of their differences and along with thousands of others, Adam and Mike marched and chanted and sang and collected for the miners. Mostly Adam was involved on his own patch, at Borlanslogie. Things were peaceful there, because the strike was solid from first to last. Not a single miner crossed the picket line during the twelve months the strike lasted, though some must have been sorely tempted to do so. But, because of that very solidarity, there was much to be done in terms of fund-raising and supporting the Borlanslogie miners and their families. The difficulty for Mike was that Adam didn’t want him there. He went once but that space between them opened up immediately. Maybe, Mike wondered, Adam was worried in case they met one of his old lovers, but it wasn’t about that at all. It was simply that Mike didn’t fit. He embarrassed Adam. So after that one time he stayed away.

They went elsewhere together though. They went to the Ravenscraig steelworks at Motherwell to try to stop the lorries taking the coal in, and got caught up in a clash with mounted police. Adam was nearly trampled and Mike only just saved his camera from getting smashed. They heard of folk, heading to Hunterston to picket the coal depot there, being stopped at roadblocks, hauled out of their vehicles for questioning and prevented from travelling on, as if they were football casuals or drug smugglers. If you were a miner arrested on the picket line that was it, you never got your job back. Men were arrested for a gesture or a spit. And in the faces of some of the police you saw how much they hated what they were doing, how much it frightened or disturbed or dismayed them, and in the faces of others, as they slapped their truncheons into their gloved palms, you saw how much they were enjoying it. It was a violent, fearful time, and it ended in defeat and, a few years down the line, not a single deep pit left in the whole of Scotland.

§

The steelmen needed the miners needed the railwaymen. The steelmen needed the miners to supply coal to keep Ravenscraig operating. If the furnaces shut down, even temporarily, British Steel would have the excuse they wanted to close the whole plant. If
Ravenscraig closed then heavy industry in the west of Scotland would effectively be dead. The miners needed the railwaymen to carry the coal to Ravenscraig. The railwaymen needed the steelmen to keep Ravenscraig working or their jobs would go too. And the miners needed the steelmen because Ravenscraig was the sole customer for at least one of the few remaining Scottish pits.

Arthur Scargill wanted to bring Ravenscraig to a halt in order to win the strike, but the steelmen refused to be sacrificed on the altar of Arthur Scargill. So a deal was reached, brokered by the STUC, between the Scottish miners’ leader Mick McGahey, the steelmen and the railwaymen. Two trainloads of coal a day from the coal depot at Hunterston to Ravenscraig – theoretically enough to keep the ovens ticking over and the fabric of the plant intact, but in practice enough to go on making steel. Okay. But British Steel weren’t satisfied with the production rate, nor did they feel beholden to Scargill, McGahey or anybody else. They started adding trucks to the trains. Soon the trains had doubled in length and required two engines to pull them. The miners were furious and the railwaymen couldn’t pretend they hadn’t noticed. The deal was renegotiated: one train a day. Not enough, said British Steel. They switched to road haulage. They put the word out to haulage firms and non-union lorry drivers: £50 a trip for taking coal into Ravenscraig. Suddenly there were convoys of lorries laden with coal racing through Ayrshire and Lanarkshire from the coal depots to Motherwell. And there were mass pickets at the steel plant’s gates, trying to stop them getting in.