Chapter 13 The Bank of Carbide Creek

## Gordy The Alburn Alloys works shut in 2004. I was there on the last day. Everybody in that town was there on the last day and half of us were pretending it was a ceremony. I want to say some things about the works because nobody who prints a paragraph about a missing girl in 1998 ever prints a word about the works, and the two things are the same thing and cannot be separated, and anybody who separates them has not been to Carbide Creek. It was built in 1891. That is not a date, that is a fact about a valley. There are four valleys in this country where you can stand and look at the ground and see that somebody made a decision about iron in about 1870 and there is going to be iron there for ever, and Carbide Creek is one of them, and the water comes off the moors and it is soft, and it is exactly the water you want for the first stages of making steel, and there is nowhere else within forty miles where you could put a works. So the works was there because of the water, and the town was there because of the works, and by 1998 there were nine hundred people in Carbide Creek and about six hundred of them depended, directly or in some other way that the phrase directly or in some other way does not really cover, on the place on the Aldergate road where my mother took me in a car when I was six. And here is the thing about a mill town in the last decade of its life, and I have thought about this a great deal, and I have never been able to get it down to one thing. It was a bad place to be a woman in a dispute. That is what I mean. That is the whole content of twenty-eight years. Because Collard could move you to a gate. That is the mechanism, and it is in the tape, and she recorded it, and she was right. It is a four-hour job in a doorway in the dark in the winter, and it is not a punishment in the sense that anybody would recognise, and there is nothing anybody can do about it, and if you are a woman with a bad week and a father with a bad leg and a sister of nine, then a cold gate is the end of your working life, and everybody in that yard knows it, and nobody says it, and it is arranged. And I want to say the other thing, and this is the part that will get me a letter. I never believed Collard moved her to the gate because of the car park. I know that is what everybody assumes, and I know that is what a man from a newspaper wrote in about 1999, and I know that a man who telephoned me in 2001 gave me a version of it that had a woman in it, and I did not use his version, and I would like it printed that I did not use his version. Here is what I believe and I cannot prove. I believe she was moved because she had become good at her job. That is what the works did, in the last decade, to about forty people. It could see them. If you are good and you are a woman and you have a bad week, then the gate is what happens, because you have to go somewhere with her, and the gate is somewhere, and there is a list. And I have never said that to anybody in twenty-eight years because it sounds like I am making excuses, and I have spent twenty-eight years refusing to make excuses, and I would not start now. So I will say both of them and let a reader decide. I believe she was moved because she was good at her job, and I do not know what was said in a car park in March 1997, and I have asked myself about the car park about four thousand times and I cannot get a single thing back, and I have got a receipt for a green coat from a shop in Ardwick and a tape that says a person was angry for nine months about a car park, and that is the whole of what anybody has, and I would put that to anybody in a jury and I would lose. Now. The closure. They did it in 2004 and they did it the way they do it, which is eighteen months of consultation in which everybody attended every meeting and everybody said they understood and everybody knew, and then a morning in September when the letters went out, and the letters went out at about eight in the morning on a Thursday, and I got mine at twenty past eight because I walked in, because I had not been told not to. I was forty-five. I had been at the Alburn Alloys for twenty-nine years. I got the redundancy. I want to put the figure in because nobody in this town has ever had it printed and it is the number that explains everything about what people did afterwards. Nine thousand four hundred pounds, after tax, after the pension buyout they took out of it, after a legal costs deduction of two hundred and ten pounds that I did not have a lawyer for and did not contest. Nine thousand four hundred pounds in September 2004. And the house on the Aldergate road that I bought in 1996 for thirty-one thousand with a mortgage of twenty-two, and I paid that mortgage on nine thousand four hundred pounds and my wife's wages from the health centre, and we sold it in 2011 for fifty-two thousand because we could not keep it, and that is a twenty-one thousand pound loss on a four-year holding period and I have never been able to explain that to anybody who was not there. The compensation scheme came in 2008. I got a further eleven hundred and something. My wife's name was not on it, which I did not know was possible, and I still do not know whether it was possible. What I want to say is this. There is a version of this story where a man in a works in 1998 is a suspect because a girl went missing and there were four or five men in the building and one of them had been in an argument with her, and that version is easy to print and it is nearly entirely false and it has been printed twice, once in 1999 and once in about 2004, and both times the man it printed was me. And there is another version, which is that a girl of twenty-four in January 1998 was moved to a cold gate for being good at her job, and recorded twenty-two minutes of it on a dictaphone in a boiler room, and said the sentence to her sister that she did not want her to tell their father, and then went out on a Thursday evening in a new green coat to buy a wage packet, and did not want to be late. And that version is in a locker. And that version has been in a locker since the sixteenth of January 1998, and there is no charge against anybody for having taken it off her and put it there.