Free Birthday by Alan Sillitoe

mills forsaken, and factories boarded up. ‘The pavements used to be crowded, but the area’s dead to what it was. They didn’t get paid much, but at least they had work.’
    Arthur went on to say how, motoring around the coalfields during the great Scargill strike, he had sided with the colliers every bit of the way, yet knew they couldn’t win, because not only had the strike started in the summer, when fuel stocks were huge, but the Nottinghamshire men hadn’t been balloted, as if their views didn’t matter and they could be ordered about like the poor bloody infantry. Maybe Scargill knew they wouldn’t vote for the strike but hoped to shame them in when the action began. The Notts miners had their own ideas, and worked on full pelt, so it was only a matter of time before the strike collapsed, though Scargill said that if the Yorkshire men lost everybody would lose. They did. Ten years later even the Notts miners, who thought it could never happen to them, had been paid off.
    Brian noted the placid Derwent coiling its way to Derby, and fields bordered by greystone walls, land uprising to either side. Rage against the fate by which people lived dissolved in such scenery, even the diminishing years of life not worth thinking about. He could remember as far back as if he had lived forever, but an existence far easier than Arthur’s long stint in heavy industry.
    He parked by the chalet style railway station at Matlock Bath and bought tickets for the aerial ropeway. Neither had taken it before, but Arthur agreed they should give it a try: ‘As long as the ropes weren’t made on a Monday.’
    The valley seemed more gorge like from above, the main road winding along by the Derwent, choice houses among clumps of green uphill to the right. ‘If I win the lottery I’ll buy one, then you can stay in it to write your scripts.’
    The cableway stopped halfway, over the highest, point of the crossing, Brian noting with binoculars the hotel he had stayed at with a girlfriend, while his wife went off on one of her affairs. They had laughed at the system, which he called ‘mutual indemnity’, but back in London she made a fuss as if her tryst hadn’t gone as well as expected. She created a morally indefensible screen to stop him seeing his girlfriend again, perhaps out of revenge, or in the belief that control was sweeter than loyalty or love. Such miserable quarrels didn’t go on too long before, discovering that she hadn’t stopped his affair, they separated and were divorced.
    Such a memorable experience taught him never to get married to, or have an affair with, someone who had been psychoanalysed or taken LSD, and she had done both. Her soul hadn’t been her own, so how could she lovingly share her life? From then on, dealing with other women had been like swimming through calm water after dogpaddling in the Sargasso Sea.
    His divorce had just been made final when he saw Jenny getting on the train to visit her damaged husband in Sheffield. There had been enough of the young woman in her features for him to pull her close and say: ‘Forget your husband. They’ll take care of him in hospital. Come away with me to a new life, just as you are. Leave your kids as well. Don’t even go home. Let’s save ourselves by doing what we should have done all those years ago. We have a right to happiness before it’s too late, so don’t get on this train. We’ll take the next one south.’
    The screed of a madman, because he wouldn’t have been sincere, never had been, didn’t know what the word meant (he did, but it couldn’t get a look in) he was all impulse, fell in love with every woman going by in the street, burning with madness, a fire that never went out.
    Jenny would have been appalled and enraged. She would have told him not to be a bastard, to stop tormenting her at such a time, to be his age, and maybe pushed him on