The strikes, when the miners are marching, the men he’s grown up with – police batons on their backs. They even had gay protestors come out in Wales to support them – Ivor heard the wives were all making them tea and warning the boys not to say the wrong thing. Five thousand miners fought about the same in police in Rotherham. They arrested over 11,000 miners up and down the country, there’s hundreds ended up in prison and it was just the state flexing their muscles. Letting them know. They could take the very infrastructure and living out from under them and that protest or even solidarity of any kind against the government will be met with annihilation. Everywhere, it’s all unrest! Brixton riots. Marches against the National Front since the seventies. Racist cunts marching for their right to hatred. Poll tax. Nuclear disarmament. Women’s rights over their bodies, their right to equal pay, their right to not be raped by their husband which is still legal in the UK. The Irish hunger strike, going all the way back to the fucking Radical War in Scotland. The policymakers have much to answer for, deaths and ruin all on their soft pink fingers and Britain claims after all of it that there is freedom of the press! What a fucking joke! Rich people own papers and they work fir their other rich pals who run the whole fucking joint. They have systematically shut down mines across every town that has had them for hundreds of years – it is a deliberate attack. Thatcher is after the enemy within: trade unions. Moonlight casts a blue glow on the living room. Ivor picks up Rhona’s tramadol. Sits holding them. It’s so tempting. So, so, so fucking tempting. Fucking Thatcher! Those who have inherited take all they can from those who will never inherit. They can’t take enough! Austerity! She described the miners as a danger to liberty. Refused any concessions through the strikes. Privatised the few pits that are left. Let the Irish go on hunger strike in the Maze and didn’t change tack until ten were dead. Even then, she did it solely to save face. All they wanted was for their rights as paramilitary prisoners to be restored. Rights! There’s nae rights for most humans. There’s only rights for the rich. Thatcher wants capital punishment. Archaic divorce laws. She objects to immigrants. Saw the National Front lose their voters to her they were so convinced by her racism. Makes endless cuts to education as a deliberate way to keep opportunity among the elite or middle classes as much as possible. Allow those you oppress to think? No, sorry, not happening! Or even worse – challenge you in your own arenas? Fuck off. He runs his finger over the packet and picks up his sister’s vodka. Taps the painkillers on his leg. Rhona opens her eyes and stares at him. Ivor does nothing. Just stares back until she goes to sleep. She will think it was just a weird, barbiturate dream. He is shaking. What is he thinking? He puts the tablets up high in the kitchen cabinet. Ivor sits there for hours next to his sister just like he used to do when they were kids. Back then he was watching out for her. Now he needs to watch out for Esme and Rhona and he just feels fucking useless. His shoulders shake. Tears burn at the back of his eyes. If he didn’t know better he’d be away down the miners’ club tomorrow night to batter someone, anyone – get the pain out via his fists, but he’s too old now to play that game.