The North of England Home Service (12 page)

From conversations he had had in his village, Jackie knew that the job everybody dreaded when they went to work at the
colliery
was being put on the belts – the conveyors from which the stone was picked from the coal before it was loaded into railway wagons and taken to the docks. When the belts started up at five in the morning you could hear them all over Rusty Lane, and it was a wet, filthy, demeaning and most of all a head-wreckingly noisy job. The noise was so great and incessantly terrible that speech was impossible. ‘That’s why you had the
deaf-and-dumb
people working there,’ a man he met on his walks had told
Jackie once. ‘Then you had subnormal people, criminals, child molesters, very ugly people, outcasts – the sort of people who couldn’t get a job anywhere else. You’d be standing there, black, freezing, surrounded by these people. You were fourteen, and you wondered what you’d done to deserve it.’

And perhaps because of some folk memory, sleeping but not extinguished, which associated deaf people with criminals and outcasts, Jackie could tell that the presence of the deaf-mute club bothered certain of the hearing customers, who had mostly come dressed not in costume, but in their normal going-out clothes. As the communal hum, the strange fluctuating excited moan of the Ephphatha people grew louder, these were the ones going small and tight in their seats.

On his pad Jackie stabbed out, ‘Scuse pise - back in a seed.’ He held this up to show Mark Douglas and then aimed himself at the clown waiter Alexis who he had just seen was about to jolt the elbow of a man on the point of taking his first glug of a big
welcome
gin and tonic at the far end of the bar. He got a hand to his arm just in time and was able to explain to Alexis that he was being retired for the night. There was no resistance, just a shrug. ‘You am de boss, boss. As a matter of fact I’ve just rolled a number.’ Alexis indicated his jacket pocket. ‘Two fat numbers, to be precise. This stuff is pretty mellow. Dope you can reason with. If you want me I’ll be in the bar.’ Then he executed a pratfall over Jackie’s left foot.

Ray was gargling with mouthwash when Jackie got back. He was wearing a striped towelling dressing-gown over his shirt and trousers and touching his dress-hair with the fingers of one hand as he tipped his head back.

‘How did that old Monkhouse opener go?’ Jackie said.’ “How do you open a cabaret act …”’

‘“… when you’d rather open a vein?”’

The band was just finishing a Joe Wilson medley. Ray’s play-on music was next. Jackie checked his watch, kicked some balled-up
socks under the sofa with the side of his foot, and freshened Ray’s drink. He took a small swig from the bottle himself then wiped the top of it with the palm of his hand. He sprayed powder
deodorant
into Ray’s shoes. ‘Funny teeth in? OK. You’re on in three.’

The anxiety of playing a half-filled house on a dead matinée in one of the lesser halls in one of the smaller towns had never left Ray: walking on to the sound of his own footsteps, talking for ten minutes into the echo of his own voice, and walking off covered in flop-sweat. It was at these times, dying in front of a small and apathetic or actively hostile audience, in a depressed mill town in Lancashire or a filthy smelting centre in the Black Country, that he would travel in his mind to the Moor and the trees and the slow-moving, unchanging life being lived within and without the little grove, and for a while rest there as if that place could speak to him and begin to carry a meaning other than the simple fact of its existence. ‘If I had to live my life over, I’d live over a decent Chinese restaurant,’ he’d find himself saying – and nothing. The fat man in the third row passing the bag of sweets to his very fat wife. The door at the back of the stalls flipping open briefly to show a bus passing; a woman stooping to pick up a baby’s dummy; a slice of light, and the raindrops bouncing merrily.

As a young comic, like all learner comedians, Ray had tended to talk too fast and rush his gags. Lapel-grabbing was never his style; he was never a gagster or a zany or one of the Loony Lunatics. His natural style was to underplay, and aim for a
low-pressure
success – that ‘carefully studied nonchalance’. But as an apprentice he tended to charge towards the end of his jokes and stampede all over the punchlines. The reason he did it was simple: it was fear. The fear of going for a minute, more than a minute, without a laugh. To play for one minute without a laugh was murder. He got the dry lip then. The incipient panic. The more he pushed to make an audience laugh, the more they
would calm up on him. He was dying from trying, as the saying went.

The recognition had dawned on Ray early on that he wasn’t going to be loved. He had always been too afraid of audiences for that, and had always protected himself against them, even as he craved their attention. When a comic loved an audience, they knew it. Ray didn’t love them and they could sense it. He was afraid of them and so he wanted to outsmart them, to convince himself he was smarter than they were. In the end he had settled for simply being personable and commercial: a pro comic telling pro-comic jokes who still had a terror of corpsing.

Because of the shortfall in numbers, body heat hadn’t warmed the club as effectively as it usually did. It was significantly cooler than it usually was, and Ray could sense that. Maybe something about his voice. His voice sounded thinner or more remote or in some way different to him when it found its way back after perhaps a tenth-of-a-second delay over the PA.

He had mentally disconnected, but he knew that he was still talking because in his peripheral vision he could see that the woman was still signing, standing several feet to the rear of him on the far side of the stage. A pin spot illuminated her hands so what she was saying with them could be clearly seen. And the spectre of the signer’s hands, soft-edged and swooping and
magnified
, played across the gallery of framed ancestor portraits along the left-hand wall. The light from a ring the signer was wearing sprayed out coloured rays and all this unaccustomed movement was caught and held in the smoked mirror behind the bar, where Jackie was sitting on a high stool, swivelling. Jackie was sitting at the bar, discreetly yawning.

Ray had got off to what he considered a well-judged start with a joke that seemed to him to address the situation in an unsqueamish, but not a callous or a crass way. ‘The last time I worked in a place as quiet as this they drew back the curtains and
buried my grandad.’ Nothing. The sign for curtains is both hands raised, palms inward. Projected on to the wall, the translation looked sombrely literal.

‘I walked by a funeral parlour the other day. They had a sign in the window that read: “Closed because of a birth in the family”.’ A sound of crashing came from the kitchen. Then chef’s voice. Then more crashing of pans and trays. In the dark recesses of the club, movement sensors glowed red and then dimmed again, something Ray had never had occasion to notice in the past. They came on red, just pinpoints of light, and dimmed.

A waiter passed in front of the stage, carrying a tray of drinks. ‘Evening, Ted. Some men are built like Greek gods. Ted’s built like a Greek restaurant.’ This raised a jeer from the band. ‘Oh.’ Ray did a half-turn, bringing the microphone lead with him. ‘So rigor mortis hasn’t set in … Have you met the band? One on
keyboards
, one on bass, one on drums, two on cannabis and all three on probation.’ Boom-boom on the kick-drum and the kind of loud scoffing laughter from the band that greeted this joke every night. The laughter from the members of the deaf-mutes’ club, who were seated at the long tables, was involuntarily subdued – a kind of strangulated, breathless ululating or wailing, mirthless and agonized-seeming. But they were smiling and signing and many of them were clapping enthusiastically.

But it took Ray to a cheerless place, and he was present only in a physical sense after that, spilling out the jokes and doing the bits of corny stage business he’d done ten thousand times in his life while the translator signed and Jackie yawned and chef raved and ranted and the mirror continued to throw sooty shadows like a television, and the Ephphatha Club – it meant ‘Be opened’ – opened their hearts and their throats and released a sound Ray knew he would be happy never to have to hear again but also knew he was going to have to hear again in his second set in just over an hour.

‘What an amazing audience – you have fantastic self-control.
As I call your names please pick up your belongings and get on the truck.’ An extended drumroll from ‘Dodgy’ Rodge Dyer, followed by a crash of the hi-hat which only a small fraction of the audience could hear.

About ten minutes into his flat-capped and raggy-ganzied Little Waster routine Ray had seen Ronnie Cornish come in. He often came in around that time after he’d wined and dined elsewhere, quite often with people in tow, and a table on the upper tier was always kept open for him. Keeping an eye on his investment is how ‘Big Ron’, as he was generally known, liked to explain his fondness for the nightlife at Bobby’s. But the truth was that, after a lifetime in the construction industry, which he had spent breathing in brick dust and being covered in dust – he owned a brick-making company that had diversified into demolition and architectural salvage – he was attracted by the glamour that, late in life, the club had come to represent to him. This also partly explained Ronnie’s involvement with the football club, where he was a director, and which had similarly opened up doors that previously would have remained closed to him. In recent years he had extended his circle to include sports stars and show people, industrialists, entrepreneurs, journalists and politicians. He had become something of a powerhouse locally, which he didn’t feel he needed to apologize about to anybody. He was pleased with his success. He wanted it, he worked for it (more or less) honestly, and he’d got there eventually.

The ‘Big’ in ‘Big Ron’ referred to his height as well as his girth. He was on the tall side, and heavy set with silver hair worn in a youthful fringe that sat oddly with his facial features, which were as chipped and fissured as brick. Brick ran in the family. His
grandfather
and great-grandfather had been brickies; his father had run a brickworks where the clay had been hand-drawn and the moulds had been crafted from wood and the bricks – beautiful
bricks: tactile, textured and grainy; bricks that had built or been patched into some of the finest buildings in the city; brick that breathed easily and naturally and grew old gracefully; that matured and improved with the passage of the years – the bricks from the old Cornish factory had been hand-thrown,
hand-coloured
and hand-fired in a process that seemed to have been untouched by the Industrial Revolution. Now, under Ronnie, Cornish Bricks were thrown not by hand but by computer in the country’s most sophisticated plant.

Computer-designed bricks have the faults built into them. They can be programmed to look not only chipped and cracked, with the corners rubbed off, but also to give the appearance of being mildewed and streaked with soot marks. And, miraculously, Ronnie’s complexion, which for all the years he had worked with brick had remained dry and reddened and cracked like brick, now looked more like the computer-generated, synthetic product his company was putting out and shifting by the shedload; it was this post-industrial product that had bought him the Bentley and the two-door Mercedes 500
CL
and the chopper and all the other good things of life. After a concerted campaign conducted by Nikki, Ronnie’s daughter, and Hope, Ronnie’s wife, Ronnie had finally relented and recently had gone under the needle for a series of Botox treatments which had plumped out his frown lines and smoothed away other signs of wear and tear on his façade and all in all gentrified his appearance to the standard of the very popular, top-of-the-range, heather-mixtures brick.

‘Brick is the most English of the building materials‚’ Ronnie was apt to tell gatherings both intimate and international,
quoting
from his one great set speech. ‘Concrete, the wonder material of the age, turned out to be rocking-horse shit compared to brick. The age of brick began in this country –
this
country, England, not Ireland or Scotland or Wales – with the Fire of London in 1666 and it’s still going strong. Brick is English – honest and
down-to-earth, 
plain and unvarnished.’ Exactly, as Ronnie hardly needed to add, like himself.

Ray had come to join Ronnie as soon as he’d showered and changed and fixed his chestnut hairpiece back in place. ‘I hear you phoned your performance in the night, kidda‚’ Ronnie said as Ray dropped into a seat. With Ronnie was another man, a business associate called Warren Oliver. Warren, sometimes referred to as Ronnie Cornish’s ‘sleeping partner’ because of his quiet, almost shy, demeanour, was another, smaller investor in the club.

Ronnie had had bottles brought to the table. The waiter had brought brandy, vodka, sambuca and Ray’s favourite Jack Daniels, and Ronnie had indicated to leave the bottles there. He was in an expansive mood, as he tended to be by that point in the proceedings, and apparently not over concerned about the impact the restrictions brought in to contain foot-and-mouth disease were going to have on his business. He could see there was a killing to be made (‘Sorry, like! Nee pun intended’) in supplying the transporters that were going to be needed to move the bodies. Also in barrier mats (‘Load a coconut mattin’, splash the fucken stuff on the fucker, an’ Bob’s your uncle’) and
disinfectant
sprays.

They had been talking for about a quarter of an hour and the audience was singing along silently with their hands to ‘Cushie Butterfield’ when there was a flutter of excitement among the people sitting closest to the door, who had spotted five of the United players coming in. They were quietly ostentatious in designer clothes and in boisterous good spirits as they moved up through the bar. They sat a few tables away from where Ray and Ronnie were. Ronnie pantomimed some tick-tack signs in their direction, and a couple of them tick-tacked back. A big defender called Darren Easby pointed at the Ephphatha people and mouthed the question, ‘What the fuck?’