Industrial Waste

By Minglu Jiang

With fuel prices skyrocketing and rubbish piling in the streets and “CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS?” scrawled in bold black letters on newspaper headlines, with his father on strike with TGWU and mine laid off, you’d think we’d be doing anything but kissing outside the Leeds Register Office. But it was my eighteenth birthday, the day Keith and I had planned long ago, and even a national crisis couldn’t stop us from tying the knot. We had no wedding bands on our fingers, no suit or silk dress, but we didn’t care. We needed nothing but ourselves and our unbridled joy.

Some months later, after the Tories swept the election and my dad got his job back and the TGWU strike ended, Keith came home gleaming with sweat and hope. He’d gotten a factory job. I kissed his warm cheek as he told me. “That’s not all, Antonia,” he said whilst melting my butter heart with that smile of his. “I found a place for us. So we can be a real married couple.” I didn’t see why living with my father made us any less married. But Keith only kept smiling. “It’ll be like our dream,” he said. “We’ll make our life together.”

The place Keith had found was a flat out in Chapeltown, the last place our parents wanted us to go, but we were eighteen so they couldn’t stop us. I didn’t like the idea of Chapeltown much either, but a life with Keith—a life of our own—shone brighter.

I remember the two-bedroom flat as the decayed brick form of a bygone Victorian era, gothically romantic. We had a bed moved from my dad’s flat and a nightstand hauled from a second-hand furniture store in our bedroom. Keith placed his tin of campaign buttons gingerly into the nightstand’s drawer. He loved collecting those things, and I loved watching him. He always wore one Labour button and one Tory on the breast of his flight jacket. Before the end, he added SDP, too. As for me, I put my pair of cherry-red Doc Martens in the closet, right underneath where his jacket hung. The second bedroom we saved for the future kids.

We were very young and very in love. Or maybe just foolish. When Keith came home, we tangled into each other, whispering each others’ names where only we and the campaign buttons could hear us. Keith. Antonia. Keith. Antonia. Then, the present was as bright as the past when we snuck out of school, walked hand in hand to the park and talked for hours about everything and nothing at all. When we climbed onto the roof of our block, dizzyingly high, and tried to see the stars beyond the blaring city lights and smog. We never did see them but we pretended we did, pointing out wisps of clouds and overhead airplanes as fabricated constellations.

As summer dawned warm and crisp over our heads, I found a job cleaning up the grocery store after it closed.

When I told Keith, he said, “You’re sure?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

Keith looked at me as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. And maybe it was. “Because we’ll have less time together.”

I mirrored his expression back at him. “We’ve done everything together, haven’t we? Don’t make me stop now.”

We tangled into each other on the weekends, sitting on the stoop or walking along the cracked asphalt, calloused hands knitted together. Sometimes we went back to Lovell Park to see our parents, but soon enough we settled for calling—they never did stop begging us to stay. But we were too enamored with our new life to listen. We went back once on our first anniversary.

On our second anniversary, our parents gifted us wedding bands. We put the rings on our fingers and kissed each other over a chocolate cake.

When the headlines trickled in, we ignored them. The unemployment surge in faraway places meant nothing to us. Sure, some of those places were Leeds. But Keith and I didn’t live in Chapeltown in Leeds. We lived in our little bubble, where jobs and steady income and a good life still existed.

That is, until the bold black letters of the newspapers cried, “BRIXTON BURNING.” The discarded paper sat in the rubbish bin, mocking me, as Keith came home and announced that like all those strangers in the papers, he no longer had a job.

“I’ll get me another job,” he said when he saw my worried look. He smiled wearily. “I’ll be employed again before you even know it.”

I nodded and continued to wash the dishes. Keith pulled a chair over to the kitchen counter to sit beside me while Elvis Costello played on the Victrola in the living room.

Two weeks later, Keith still hadn’t found a job. He went to the dole office and filed a claim. “Don’t worry,” he said as he brought home the first check. “Soon enough, we won’t be seeing none of these. We’re gonna be alright.”

I believed him, but day after day I came home from the grocery store to the sharp fragrance of cigarette smoke and an empty pack of Benson and Hedges on the kitchen table.

Prince Charles and Lady Di’s pristine faces took over the papers. The front pages split down the middle between the beautiful couple and the jobless crisis. 

“Look at that.” I chuckled as I showed Keith an article devoted to speculating about the dress. The adjacent article fawned over the extravagance of Diana’s wedding list. “Who even cares?”

Because Keith and I had the register office yard as our venue, our parents as the sole guests, our parkas and winter hats and two campaign buttons as our attire, no wedding list at all. And yet we loved each other twenty times more than they did.

He read with his thumb rested against his chin, a slender finger draped over his cigarette. Once, that gesture had me besotted. Now the image evokes the kind of memory that punctures softly but leaves a wound an inch deep. “I wish I could’ve given you that.”

The sadness tinging those words made me wish I never brought up the royals at all.

Keith kept searching for work because, if we wanted that dole check, he had to keep up the pretense. But he told me it was pointless. If there were jobs available, the numbers wouldn’t be so high.

I think he still held onto hope, though, because he searched as earnestly as before.

It wasn’t long before we realized that dole checks cannot buy much. I suggested asking our parents but Keith said if they knew, they’d make us move back. So we didn’t.

Summer came again, bright and golden-hued. Keith left early in the morning to look for a job. “We can’t be living off dole checks,” he said. I told him it was alright and he needed to rest but he said, “It ain’t the life I promised you,” and kept going. Sometimes Keith did not return until very late. Many days our only time together was collapsed beside each other in bed. The empty Benson and Hedges packs piled on the nightstand.

And then the civil service went on strike.

Usually, Keith sympathized with strikers, even when the public did not. After all, his dad’s strike with TGWU did not receive much love from anybody.

This one, he raged against. Lots of people up and down England couldn’t get their dole checks and sometimes Keith couldn’t get one either.

One day, he brought home a bottle of cheap whiskey. I had never drunk before, never wanted to. I’d seen too much of what drink did to people. But at that moment, a hazy nothingness was too good an offer to reject. We shared the bottle and passed out atop each other on the tiled kitchen floor.

Headlines announcing violent riots like the one that set Brixton aflame in Manchester and Liverpool covered the papers. Our flat perspired with a combination of the summer heat and our desperation. I began to love the weekday evenings I spent at the grocery store because it was air-conditioned and full of freshness. On the weekends, I opened every window in the flat and took meandering paths around the block, careful not to stray far.

As I circled back to the front door, I considered telling our parents the truth. The sunset yawned above me, an explosion of pink and gold. I would discuss it with Keith once he got home. I smoked and nibbled digestives and waited for his step to pound faintly in the hallway, the lock to turn, and him to walk in and kiss my cheek.

I did not receive Keith that night. I received a call from a woman with a clipped accent informing me that my husband was in the hospital for second-degree flash burns.

I gasped. “What happened?”

“Petrol bombs,” she replied matter-of-factly.

“What?” I had heard about petrol bombs in the papers and on the BBC. Rioters had a penchant for them. “Has there been a riot? Has he got caught in them?”

“Got caught in them?” She laughed as if it was all a casual joke. “Love, your husband was the riot. He’s been arrested.” With that, she hung up.

The phone slipped from my hand, banging on the kitchen counter. I slipped to the floor.

My Keith, rioting? Hurling petrol bombs like those hooligans in the papers? Surely, it was a different Keith Hall.

Morning, and Keith had not returned.

A day passed, the Chapeltown riot hit the papers, I saw the broken shop windows and charred streets with my own eyes. I still could not accept it. The next day, he called.

“Antonia?”

“Hiya.” I smiled just to hear his voice. And some naïve part of me still hoped my Keith was not a rioter.

“I—I—they’ve told you by now, haven’t they? I—I’m—” Keith’s voice broke, and through the static, I thought I heard crying. I squeezed the phone to my ear, unsure of whether to soothe him or shout at him. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so bloody sorry.” He repeated those words for a few minutes before a long, shrill breath. “Please don’t tell my parents,” he said. “I gave them our number so they wouldn’t tell them.”

Even as my mind tried frantically to accept reality, I still felt tenderness toward him as I had a few days ago. “I won’t.”

“Thank you. I love you, Antonia.”

“I love you, too, Keith.” I promised to visit once they let me.

I told myself they would release him soon because it was a mistake, Keith did not riot, he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and the coppers picked him up by accident.

Later, after they convicted and sentenced him to a year in prison, he admitted to me as I stood outside his cell that yes, he had rioted, yes, he had thrown around a petrol bomb, and he was so sorry but he’d been so frustrated and angry. “I love you,” he mumbled, his eyes on the wall.

“Love you, too.” My skin grew cold though I already knew. I had simply denied it until he told me himself.

It did not take long for me to realize that without Keith, I could not have his dole check.

Without Keith, I was left with my meager £10-a-week paycheck.

I dreaded the next visitation day because I would have to face him and pretend I did not hate him.

How could he? How could he go and throw everything away on a moment of morbid indulgence? Did he even think of his wife?

Where did he even get a petrol bomb?

And what was I to do?

Keith betrayed me so I betrayed him. I called first my dad and then his mum and dad. I told them what had happened and asked for money. Keith’s parents gave me their entire combined paycheck for that week. My dad told me to move back. “Divorce that hooligan,” he said.

For all my anger, that I would not do. Keith and I had pledged this life together. Maybe he was locked up, but I would make this life for us. I’d make a life for him to walk out of prison to.

The Employment Secretary’s infuriatingly cool voice never appealed to me, but occasionally he had a point. I borrowed my dad’s bike, as he so flippantly suggested, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the vagaries of public transport and went to look for a job to occupy my non-evening hours.

I found it in a diner all the way across town. I would wait tables and wash dishes in the morning and afternoon. I accepted the weekend shifts, too, in a hurry.

I went back to the prison to tell Keith.

“Good for you,” he said frigidly. He did not look at me.

“I’m gonna make us the life we wanted,” I said, keeping the cheer in my voice.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Keith, what’s wrong?”

He looked at me then, his eyes fiery and not in a particularly romantic manner. “My parents came,” he said.

“I’m sorry, I needed—”

Keith cut off the speech I had prepared. “They said you were planning to divorce.”

My father would get an earful as soon as I got home. “My father—”

“I don’t want to hear it!” Keith snapped. “Get away.” A scowl marred his lovely face. “Tell my parents they ain’t welcome here, neither.”

I choked up on the way out.

I told myself it was because prison could not have a good effect on his mood and probably neither could his parents’ chagrin.

For my twenty-first birthday, my dad gave me a fat envelope of ten-pound notes amounting to £150. I did not know what sacrifices he had made to get that. I kissed his cheek and cried into his shoulder and nearly returned to Lovell Park with him.

Between my shifts, I found time to visit Keith. Sometimes, he laughed at something I said and I laughed too and it was as if there were no bars separating us. But those came few and far between the shrugged answers and defeated stares.

I counted the days to August 7th with unrelenting anticipation.

Once he got out, he would be better.

Once he got out, we would have our dreams again.

In the weeks before the 7th, I went around Chapeltown and bought campaign buttons from everyone who had them. Labour, Liberal, SDP, you name it. It took me especially long to find a Tory button, and the person who had it wouldn’t fork it over until I gave him £5. I wrapped them in colorful paper, tied it with a pink ribbon, and waited as time crawled like molasses.

I presented the package to Keith the moment he walked out.

“Oh,” he said, taking it from me. “Antonia…”

“Open it.” I prodded him onto the train home and found our seats at the end of the aisle. 

Keith smiled weakly. “Alright.” He tugged at the ribbon. It was stubborn, and his fingers so delicate, that he didn’t get it off until our stop. “Chapeltown?” he said as I led him onto the platform.

“Yeah, our flat?” I was grinning like a fool speeding through the station, pulling Keith along like a kite. “Come on! Aren’t you excited?”

“Yeah,” he said, faintly, so I had to strain to hear it above the noise of the station.

We opened the door to the dinner I had made before leaving. I sat Keith in his chair. He smiled again, if a slight lift at the ends of his lips could be called a smile. “Thanks, Antonia,” he said. “What’s this, a homecoming for a prince?”

“Exactly.” I pointed at the gift. “Open it.”

“Alright.” Keith tore open the paper and the buttons clattered onto the table. “Antonia, you didn’t have to…”

I leaned toward him. “Do you like it?”

He smiled a full smile this time, though something about it felt brittle. “I love it.” Keith pushed the buttons to the edge of the table and dug into the steak I had made. Or perhaps that is too generous a description. He barely picked at his food.

“What, they feed you better in prison?”

Keith flushed as red as my Doc Martens. “I’m sorry, I just, I’m so bloody happy.”

The next morning, Keith took his flight jacket out of the closet, the one that I had dusted and ironed for a year. “I’ll put some of those buttons you got for me on here,” he said. He picked up the Labour button and opened the pin delicately before jabbing it into the fabric. “Where’d you get them?”

“I asked people around here,” I said.

“Surprised you found a Tory, then,” he said. For a moment, I thought I detected his old levity.

“It’s a vintage one. Bloke made me pay five quid.”

Keith laughed. It sounded like wooden blocks tumbling down a staircase. “I’d think you were the fanatical collector, not me.”

I hugged Keith around the neck. I couldn’t care about the rioting or the prison sentence or the hardships afterward, only that my best friend was in my arms again.

“Bloody hell, Antonia, I’m no saint’s image.”

I stepped away from him awkwardly. “Oh.”

He told me he was sorry that night. I forgave him, kissed him, and we made love with the lights off and curtains drawn open to imaginary stars.

I awoke early in the morning before light cracked the sky into twilight. Keith’s body sprawled over the sheets, gleaming in the moonlight. I kissed his bare chest and then rushed out to catch my train.

We went on like this. He found the sporadic odd job, nothing big. Work was scarce as is and the blot on Keith’s record wouldn’t be erased for nine years. He could join the Army and tote a gun around Belfast like thousands of jobless boys, but I didn’t want him away again. Plus, IRA bombings and dead British boys decorated too many front pages for my comfort. I went to work before he woke and returned to his ghost. Sometimes he gazed out the empty second bedroom’s window with a cigarette he’d forgotten to light between his teeth. Sometimes he turned his buttons over in his palm, inspecting them for I know not what. He always wore one Labour, one Tory, and one SDP now.

We took turns lying to our parents.

We always kissed and made love before sleeping. We were wonderful at pretending nothing had changed.

“Tell me what happened,” Keith said, “when I—when—”

“I missed you.”

“Mum said you had to ask her for money.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I promised to take care of you.” Keith shook his head. “Now look at me.”

I began to wake up swimming in nausea. During the days, a beehive took up residence in my stomach, the bees stinging my body swollen.

I attributed it to fatigue and stress, but by first snow, I knew exactly what it was.

I told Keith immediately in the hopes it would get his mind on something else for once.

“We’ll finally get to use that second bedroom,” he said. He kissed my forehead. “You should rest, love.”

Two days later, I found his body hanging like a limp doll from the doorframe, a torn bed sheet twisted around his mottled throat. A pristine white envelope was pinned to his jacket in place of the campaign buttons.

Antonia,

I’m sorry. I can’t.

K.H.

I tore up the note after reading it, but in the end, I could not scrub his words from my memory. In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to cremate the pieces.

After I gave up trying to cry, I got the neighbor to cut Keith down and dial his parents while I curled in the corner and wished I could throw myself through the window and fall in a luminescent shower of snow and glass shards.

I moved back to Lovell Park after the funeral. A month after that, I got dragged to the coroner’s inquest, where they spent hours concluding what had taken me seconds. It is all a blurry memory. I only remember the train ride back where Keith’s parents and I bickered over who got to keep his things. Whenever I think of it now, it seems very silly to row over Elvis Costello albums and campaign buttons when the boy who made those things matter is gone.

A week after that, the day after my twenty-second birthday, my father decided I had had enough time to get over the shock. “You should’ve walked out sooner,” he said. “Then we wouldn’t’ve got into this whole mess.”

I stared out the window from where I lay on our loveseat. I missed the nearness of the ground in Chapeltown, how passersby seemed so close to my feet, rather than so far down they looked like bread crumbs.

“Antonia.”

“Then who would’ve looked after him?” The words slurred out before I realized I had even opened my mouth. Lately, I perceived through frosted glass. I couldn’t wait for the labor pains to jerk me out of that fogginess.

“You really loved that kid, didn’t you?”

I had never doubted it until then.

I had held my breath for so long I’d forgotten how to breathe.

My head spun, and not from morning sickness. I couldn’t decide whether Keith was a bad memory or a sad memory, whether I blamed him or loved him or pitied him, or why it even mattered to delineate at all.

“I don’t know.”

THE END

Author Bio: Minglu Jiang is a high school student from Detroit, MI. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and has appeared in the Copperfield Review Quarterly and Voyage YA Journal. You can find her on Twitter at @jiang_minglu.

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