The North of England Home Service (26 page)

Persian rugs lay around overlapping one another on the floor of the office. There was the heady sweet smell from a bowl of fully mature fleshy pink lilies. The fender in front of the fire was made of the rim of a railway wagon wheel. In front of it was a clippy mat made from pieces of rag cut from old clothes.

Ronnie went over to the table to make more drinks. ‘Still a lot of Hedley paintings oot there neebody can trace‚’ he said. ‘That’s the choker.’ And it was at that point that Lee Yeardye had arrived. Ronnie had evidently been expecting him because he just bellowed, ‘Come on up, sonner!’ into the entryphone without the preliminary of asking who it was.

With Lee was Warren Oliver, who Ray knew shared ownership of a luxury cruiser called
Petrarch
with Ronnie. They also shared vanity number plates – 2
BE
on Ronnie’s Bentley,
NOT 2B
on Warren’s Merc – which they said they’d bought as a joke.

The three of them – Ronnie, Lee and Warren – were part of a consortium which had plans for moving into the casino trade at Blackpool. They were bidding to build the 400-bed, £130-million, 2,500-slot-machines Caesar’s Forum Resort (‘Lavish with gleaming statuary, gorgeous gardens and fabulous fountains!’
according to their prospectus, which Ray had seen), helping turn Blackpool into the Las Vegas of Lancashire – or the ‘Lost Wages’ as Ronnie, Lee and Warren called it whenever talk turned, as it inevitably did, to this latest licence to print money.

They had recently returned from a flying, ‘fact-finding’ visit to Las Vegas and were still reliving their adventures. ‘Yi cunt yi‚’ Ronnie said to Lee, ‘pissed as a rat, stottin all ower the place the whole fucken time … You were that pissed, if a fly had farted you would have fallen ower … Forst thing he did when he woke up every mornin’, nee geein’, was make himself a “Chaos”. Southern Comfort and Bailey’s. Caalls ’esell a footbaaller. Get a few of them inside yi. Blow your fucken heed off.’

‘We had a top chuckle though, didn’t we?’ Lee said, draining his drink. ‘Frickin hilarious. Saw Steve Martin at the what’s-its Palace.’

‘Dean Martin‚’ Warren said. ‘Fucking toppers‚’

‘Is he dead now, him?’ Lee wanted to know.

‘I hope so‚’ Ronnie said. ‘They buried the cunt.’

Lee had arrived carrying an expensive black briefcase with lots of external cargo pockets and silver clasps and straps, and Ronnie had opened it and was delving in one of the pockets. Eventually he produced the wad of Cup Final tickets that Lee had been given the task of black-marketeering on behalf of the other players in the squad. He and Lee had a brief, suddenly serious conversation, and money changed hands. Their business completed, Ronnie reached into the bag, the joker again, and spun a video across the room directly into Ray’s lap.

‘Fantastic Facials!’ it said over several pictures of red-lipped women giving black men blow-jobs. ‘Face-blastin’ action! Hot gooey loads of sticky cum!’ ‘What yi after, like?’ Ronnie said, coming over and standing next to Ray. ‘Whatever yi fancy, Lee can get. He can get yi owt yi like. Cunt’s hung like a fucken yak.’

‘Ron‚’ Lee said, lying back with his feet up on Ronnie’s desk, ‘if you went out with your mate to a party and you got pissed, really
pissed, blacking out, and you woke up the next morning sleeping next to your mate, and your arse was really sore, would you tell anybody about it?’

‘No‚’ Ronnie said.

‘Do you want to come to a party tomorrow night?’

They laughed. Warren coloured up. Lee passed him the note and Warren took his line of cocaine from the desk. He offered the rolled note to Ray, but Ray shook his head. He indicated his fibrillated heart, opening his jacket and patting the place where his heart was with his hand.

‘Fucken puff!’ Ronnie said. And then: ‘More drinks! Let’s get radged! Fucken radgerated! No going back!’ He brought the bottle and splashed Jack Daniels in Ray’s glass. He helped Warren and Lee to more Rémy, and then some for himself, a good four fingers. He bent briefly over the desk and beat his chest
theatrically
with both fists when he stood up.

‘Group hug!’ Ronnie demanded. ‘Group hug!’ he shouted. And then when they were all standing in the middle of the room with their arms around each other and their heads together: ‘Four-way kiss! In a non-gay way!’

When they were separated, Lee reached down and cupped the crotch of Ronnie’s trousers. ‘Just checking.’

Ray tapped the microphone to confirm it was working. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if I may have your attention, it’s that time, once again, when it is my pleasure to introduce the manager of the greatest team in Britain, the lifeblood of the Geordie nation …’

The manager bounded on to the stage, took a piece of paper with his prompt notes on it out of his breast pocket, and began to address the faithful. ‘As nobody in this room needs reminding, we haven’t even been at the races for much of this season. The good news, apart from the twelve points we’ve picked up from
the last four games, is that Paulo’s back in light training. Martin’s groin strain is responding to treatment … deserved the three points … one unit together … light at the end of the tunnel …’

Every platitude. But platitudinous is what it had to be, like putting a watch wrapped in a sock in a basket with a new puppy. Reassuring. Restful. Monotonous. Soothing. ‘Everybody’s
bubbling
and lively down there and I feel confident we’re going to go out today and do a job for you. I’m expecting one-hundred-
and-ten
-per-cent commitment from the boys. We’ve made the final of the Cup. They know that. But they also know that that means nothing unless we go on and drastically improve our position in the League. They know …’

Ray couldn’t believe it. He beheld their uplifted faces. They were transported; transfixed. The room was filled with the sound of contented purring. He, on the other hand, perhaps because he was on stage behind him rather sitting out in front, wasn’t
susceptible
to the hypnotic powers of Great Mogadon, the manager.

Lunch was still being served to late-comers at the rear of the room, and Ray diverted himself watching the comings and goings of waiting staff and trolleys, the wafting of the service doors, the private jokes, the near-collisions. And as he watched he witnessed one of those slow-motion accidents – when time slows down and everything that happens happens in swimming slow motion.

Mighty had been serving soup to a smartly, even flashily,
suited-up
man – a ‘suit’ – when the ladle slipped, and slipped and
skittered
through the swollen knuckles of her arthritic fingers when she tried to catch it.

Ray waited to see how the man was going to react. The answer was: not sympathetically or with restraint. The answer was: not well.

Kevin Arlen had hit the jackpot with a sandwich factory catering for the take-out lunchtime trade. He was also a city councillor. He sat on a number of key committees crucial to Ronnie’s business.

He was on his feet. The thin green soup was distributing itself
from the corner of his jacket to his trousers. Mighty, who had grown very pale, was using a cloth to dab at the stains, but Arlen dashed her hand away.

Ray chose this moment to stop looking. By making a
quarter-turn
he could see behind him out of the window while still appearing to be hanging on every stilling word the manager was saying. The stands had started to fill up now; the logo created from the seat backs was beginning to disappear; but the final wedding of the day was still being processed through.

As he looked, giant eyes seemed to be appraising Ray from the big screen over the pitch. The eyelashes were dotted with
football-size
pearl decorations, the eyelids metallically striped in the team colours. The appearance of the bride’s face on the screen brought a half-hearted ironic cheer. Then whistling and clapping started, and then what to Ray sounded like obscene chants.

The new pitch had been laid in strips. You could still see the unincorporated seams and joins. He felt his head then, worked his fingers along the line where the fake hair met what was left of his own. Then he stopped that when he realized he was doing it in plain view of everyone in the room.

When Ray turned and faced the front again he saw that Mighty had pressed the cleaning rag to her face and that Jackie had
introduced
himself into the picture. It was a tableau that had attracted the interest of only the nearest tables. The room was still held in the spell of the manager’s soothing, sleepytime stories.

The manager was a decent man. Ray believed so anyway. He stepped forward and led the applause when he had completed his flannel.

As soon as he came off the stage, Ray slipped behind a utilities column to gather himself for a few seconds. This was ritual. It was what he always did when he had been up in front of an
audience
. He’d been doing it since he first stepped on a stage. He allowed himself a deferred blush – the redness that experience
had taught him how to hold at bay while he was performing; a purgative flushing of the face. It lasted a few seconds and then was gone. Then he felt fine.

The lunchers were starting to file out to claim their seats and sip the atmosphere. Ray began to make his way back through the crowd, nodding hellos, stopping to shake the odd hand. When he emerged into the now nearly empty rear part of the suite, he saw that Kevin Arlen was sprawled in his chair with the soup stains darkened on his jacket and trousers and an affronted look on his face, clearly pushed there by Jackie.

Mighty was being comforted by another waitress.

Jackie was standing eyeball to eyeball with Ronnie Cornish, whose face Ray could see was very red. ‘Bastard back off or I’m going to fucken chin you.’ Ray couldn’t say he had seen a person snarl until that moment, but Ronnie was snarling. All dog. The wad of neck behind his collar was purple. Jackie’s face on the other hand was cold, almost serene. Decreased facial expression – what they call in neurology a ‘masked face’; an intermittent tremor of his hands.

It had grown so quiet – all of them there were inside their own pocket of quiet – that you could hear the starched, valet-finish cuffs of Ronnie’s shirt make a scraping noise against the leathered backs of his hands.

Ronnie had never made any secret of the fact that he regarded Jackie as a hanger-on. It was a word that had been bandied about more than once in Jackie’s hearing since they had been yoked together in business with Cornish. In spite of himself he felt exactly as hurt every time he heard it as he did the first time he heard Ronnie Cornish calling him that.

Jackie’s belief was that everybody was hanging on to
something
, and sometimes it was another person, because all you had in life were other people. Ray wanted him there. He was employed. He had a job. He served a need, even if dickheads like
Cornish – even if Ray, and Jackie himself – didn’t exactly
understand
what that need was.

In their younger years, Jackie had encouraged Ray to get on, to be lucky and stay sharp. He had always offered sound counsel to Ray on who could be trusted, who should be steered clear of, what was a good or bad business scheme. Not counting the times Jackie had had to put his dukes up for Ray. The best way Jackie had come to think of it was that, in one way or another, he helped restore what the world drained out of Ray every day.

Now Jackie wanted Ronnie to call him that word again,
standing
right where they were. He hoped he would. It would give extra thump to his punch. It would bring added sweetness to the moment when he dropped him.

‘I think he only keeps you around to remind him if he forgets to zip up his pants when he comes out of the Gents‚’ Ronnie said, flyballs of spit spraying in Jackie’s face.

‘Oh‚’ Jackie said, ‘I think that’s much more your department than mine, pal.’ And then he remembered. It all came back to him: keep your thought processes clear and your reasoning ability good. Think perceptively and make appropriate decisions. He seemed only to bring his arm back a very short distance when he popped him, a nasty drilling little punch in the short ribs.

As Ronnie hit the deck a deafening roar greeted the teams coming out. Feet stamped on the bare boards overhead and all around the ground, and the noise rumbled and broke like a wave against the back of the house where Marzena was, and where she had her back bent trowelling mortar.

In her cellar studio, Marzena felt the crowd noise rather than heard it; it bellowed out and crashed against the rear wall of the house and rebounded down the long narrow garden. Marzena experienced the noise as a kind of blow-back – a hollow boom. She turned up the volume of the record she had on. It was Richter
playing Schumann. Sviatoslav Richter who was enslaved by obsessions. Richter who could recall the name of every person he had ever met and lost sleep when one escaped him. Who was driven nearly mad by a droning melody in his head, which he finally traced back to his childhood love of Rakhmaninov’s
Vocalise.
Who played at Stalin’s funeral.

She reserved the Richter for match days, and played him only when she was sure she was alone in the house. Sometimes then she would also take out her letters from her mother and the
clippings
from home and allow herself some moments of lonely melancholy, the oceanic feeling she liked in the bowels of the house, so close to two such disparate sources of noise.

Jackie returned to the ground later that night.

The mother of one of Barry’s glue-sniffing or fire-
extinguisher-’huffing
’ little friends from Rusty Lane, probably not even as old as himself, was getting married. And although it meant breaking the conditions of his bail, Barry – ‘Jaxon’ to them – had
volunteered
to turn up and be the DJ. Jackie was supposed to collect him and drive him home.

From the street, Jackie could see red and blue disco lights flashing in a window of an upper level of the otherwise darkened West Stand. It was a metallic, multi-masted structure poking up against the sky, changing in colour from yellow-black to pewter with the sodium lights and the clouds and looking weightless and light enough to rise and spin away.