The Northern Clemency Read Online Free PDF Page B

space. (She had no faith in the Sheffield estate agent’s measurements. The woman bred Labradors, which she’d mentioned more than once when she ought to have been paying attention.) The unit for the sitting room, a new bold speculation, white Formica with smoked brown glass doors, the Reader’s Digest books, the china ladies, the perpetual flowers under glass; the mahogany-veneer sideboard, a wedding present, once grand and solitary in the sitting room before furniture started to be possible for them; curtains, yellow for the kitchen, purple Paisley in the sitting room, red in their bedroom, the rainbow pattern Sandra had chosen …
    “Look on the bright side,” Bernie said. “If they do get lost, or if they steal it and run away to South America, Orchard’s can buy us a whole new houseful of furniture. Insurance.”
    “They aren’t going to lose it, are they?” A voice came from the back seat. It was Francis; even at nine, his knees were pressing hard into his mother. Goodness knew how tall he’d grow.
    “No, love,” Alice said. Her own worry disappeared in her love for her son. He worried about these things, as she did. Once, on an aeroplane, she had found her own nervousness about flying vanished as she did her duty and comforted him. “They won’t lose it, and if they did steal it, they wouldn’t get far on the proceeds. Do you think they’d get much for Sandra? She’s up there with them, keeping an eye on things.”
    “I wouldn’t give you two hundred quid for Sandra,” Bernie said, concentrating on the road. “Maybe if she’d had a wash first. What do you reckon, son?”
    “I don’t know where you go to buy and sell people,” Francis said. “There aren’t people shops, are there?”
    She hadn’t told Francis they were going to move to Sheffield until it was certain. She wasn’t sure, herself, how it had happened. Bernie had worked for the Electricity Board for years, the only member of his fast-talking family not to make money in irregular, unpredictable ways. They were at the outer edges of respectability, in most cases only having their churchgoing to take the edge off their quickness. Alice had first met Bernie at church, him and his family in their Sunday best. If it had been a deft illusion, it hadn’t been a long-lasting one; you couldn’t be surprised with Bernie—he was as open to view as an Ordnance Survey map. His family were proud of him and his proper job, his steadily rising salary, at head office, and Bernie paid back their pride by not renouncing his own quick ways, his broad mother’s broad manners.
    But in the last couple of years, the job, London, had worn away at him. The series of strikes—every power-cut had driven him to a personal sense of grievance. “Don’t say that,” Alice had said, the first time the house had gone dark, the television fading slowest, giving out a couple more seconds of ghostly blue light before the four of them were in pitch darkness, Bernie swearing.
    “Don’t say what?” Bernie said, almost shouting.
    “You know what you said,” Alice said.
    “I can’t think of a better word for them,” Bernie said, getting up and groping for the fucking candles.
    Though the power-cuts, random and savage, affected and infuriated every adult in the country—not the children, who across the nation took to it with delight, like camping, and in later years were to ask their parents when the power-cuts would start again, as if it were a traditional,seasonal thing—they affected Bernie worst. In part, it was the way neighbours, like the Griffithses, or the regular commuters on Bernie’s train would inquire pointedly when Bernie and his colleagues were going to get a grip on the situation. Everyone had a story of the power coming on and sparking up an abandoned iron, still plugged in, in the middle of the night, waking up Mrs. Griffiths, as it happened, with a stench of burning, which proved to be her husband’s best shirt for the morning. “And