The North of England Home Service (3 page)

Now from the same window you could almost reach out and take hold of the scaffolding ribs of the recently erected skeleton structure which supported a cantilevered roof roughly equal in area to the pitch. This was a landmark visible from every part of the city. It was separated from Ray’s house by the length of a narrow garden, and a cobbled alley, designed originally for horse traffic, which the ribby white superstructure of the Ned Corvan Stand overhung like a cataract of snow about to slide off a roof.

On match days, the physical sensation of noise leaped the gap between the great metal skeleton of the stadium and the houses of the terrace, adrenalizing them from basement to roof joists, like a current: windows shook in their frames; bottles hummed in unison in bathroom cabinets; cups would rattle in their saucers.

Although the ground itself had gradually, and then very quickly, mutated, the football club’s role had never changed: it gave people a way of identifying with the city that was their home. It was the kind of identifying Ray had never experienced during his first distant life there, and that he thought he could make up for now.

When he had lurched past his house to begin his second lap of the Moor, he had wondered if he only imagined that he could hear a phone ringing inside. Twenty minutes earlier, just as he had been about to open the front door, he had heard the phone and had gone back in to take a call that turned out to be about one of the thousand niggling details connected with Bobby’s that dogged his existence. Did he know that hand-drier in the Gents that turned itself on every time somebody walked past it? (Did he!) Well, they had had an engineer looking at it all morning and
it still kept happening; it was a persistent fault that seemed to resist fixing. What to do?

The administrative chores involved in running a business, and the constant stream of decisions he was called on to make, the petty arithmetic, tightened Ray’s skull. Most of the previous three days had been taken up investigating the matter of some cheques that had been stolen – three cheques clipped out of the middle of a new cheque book sitting in a drawer in his dressing-room/office, stubs included. This only a matter of days after picking up the phone to hear a young woman telling him that his platinum card had been what he believed she called ‘skimmed’, and just ten minutes before had been used in a transaction involving the purchase of cigarettes and petrol on the forecourt of a garage in somewhere called Semdinli on the border between Turkey and Iran. Could he also confirm (he heard the spongey click of
practised
fingers on a computer keyboard) that neither he nor his wife had earlier that week been staying in the Hotel Resort Ariston in Tirebolu on the Black Sea coast, paying for the hire of a car with driver, and running up a room-service bill to the total of
£
878.00?

This was his life. He was having lessons twice a week to try to familiarize him with e-mail and the Internet. There was the bitter struggle to get on top of the new spreadsheet software. His first appointment of the day he knew was with a former player for United who now worked as a traveller for the brewery and was coming in to discuss income from the club’s pool tables (further implications of sticky fingers) and to update target figures for ‘wet sales’. (Alan Harries was an outside left whose dislike for blatant physical confrontation had earned him the unfortunate nickname of ‘Gladys’ and the regular taunt from the terraces: ‘Where’s your handbag?’) There were the inevitable, on-going sagas of personnel in-fighting and staffing problems lying in wait. Carpet tiles to look at. A new rota shift system to throw in his two penn’orth on. Plans for an extension to the kitchen (chef,
a rough-tongued Mackem, was threatening to leave unless he was given more space). What did it have to do with walking on, making people laugh for half an hour, and getting off again?

As the time approached for him to be collected by Jackie, he realized he was rushing towards an engagement with these
responsibilities
when all he really wanted was to turn round and start running in the opposite direction and keep going and running until the endorphins flooded his brain and he hit that high that was the highest high and from which he might never come down. Like everybody, he had always been wanting to blow the doors off his life.

A broad, downward-sloping path brought him off the Moor past the boundary fence of the allotment gardens to the main gate of the Park. But before he got there he reached under his clothing to tear at the bin-liner he had been wearing and, when he had succeeded in dragging it away from his skin, stuffed it in a bin which occasionally contained gory pornography, but not today. The act of disposing of the clammy black plastic was something he always did in a furtive, guilty-looking way, because of the risk of appearing to be involved in something indecent. The possibility was increased by the way he had to hold his chest away from his lower body in order to avoid getting his trousers and his trainers drenched in sweat.

He knew that Mighty would have his orange energy drink ready and waiting, and his anticipation was high: in his mind he could already taste it exploding on his tongue. It was as he began to allow the gradient and his earned exhaustion to carry him forward that he got his first sense of disturbance or perturbation – of something out of the ordinary happening that was exactly the opposite of the few minutes of nothing happening that he came here every day to enjoy.

Mighty’s Scran Van had been parked in the same place outside the main Park gates for about as long as anybody could remember.
The gates themselves had long disappeared: rust stains on the square stone columns where the bolus hinges had once been fixed were the only sign they had ever been there. The broad slope that Ray had just run down had once been a carriage drive. The gateway to it was recessed from the road in a wide half-moon shape, and two slat-backed corporation benches, recently given a lick of
emerald-green
paint, squatted in the curves either side. The van itself was tucked in beside the bench to the left of the gate, gaudy with
handwritten
Day-Glo signs, plus a wipeboard with the day’s specials on it. In addition to the benches, there were a few battered tin tables and some mismatched old chairs scattered around.

It was nowhere. It was nothing. It reminded Ray of a picket encampment outside a factory, or the navvies huddled around their overnight braziers that he recalled watching from his
bedroom
window when he was a boy. (It had seemed a romantic life, being a navvy, with a corrugated-iron shelter and pals to share confidences with and a billy-can, and his first ambition had been to be one.) And yet the Scran Van was one of those nothing places, hardly noticed by the hundreds who drove past it every day, that had become vital to the small community of regulars who washed up there to eat Mighty’s home-made pies and drink Mighty’s famous tea, but mostly just to have the light of Mighty’s beneficence, a port in every storm, shine upon them.

The focus of the unusual amount of activity was the bench on the other side of the gate from the tea van. Two old boys with proud kettle-drum pot bellies and shot faces could usually be counted on to be sitting there at that time of day. But all Ray could see as he drew close were a number of milling figures, with Mighty at the centre of them wearing a wrap-around apron and carpet slippers and leaning forward in a way that made it clear she was trying to comfort somebody. He instinctively stopped running, and approached at what he hoped looked like a
nonchalant
stroll.

‘Diwen cry, lover,’ Mighty was telling a tiny, bird-like Chinese woman. ‘They’re bastards. That’s all they are, bloody bastards. Young’ins. If they were mine aa naa what aa’d do. Tan their arses till they were red raw. There yar, chicken,’ she said, taking the small gill bottle of brandy that had been offered by a man Ray knew was called Stanley (never Stan) and tipping it into the hot drink that the woman was clutching on her knee. ‘Steady the norves, hinny,’ Stanley said as Mighty handed him the bottle back.

The woman was dressed all in black with inch-wide margins of grey either side of the parting in her otherwise raven hair. Somebody had brought one of the big puffed-out jackets and put it around her shoulders, but she was still shivering convulsively from the shock. There was a red weal around her neck where her necklace had cut her flesh before it snapped. Ray knew this
without
even having to ask. He quickly learned that a mobile phone had also been taken from the woman.

‘Arreet, John.’

‘Canny.’

‘All right, John.’

‘Canna grumble.’

Ray brought his drink from the Formica counter and found a place to sit. Only men who had known each other back to their schooldays – fifty and sixty years in some cases – called each other by their given names. Everybody else, to everybody else, was ‘John’.

Ray hadn’t lost the habit, instilled in him after years of dodging the attention of autograph-seekers and, in recent years, of the didn’t-you-used-to-be-ers, of sitting where he was able to see without being seen. (Unless being seen was the point of being somewhere – a charity event, a restaurant – which was different.) He chose a table where he was shielded from the road and looked around on the ground for the wadded Marlboro packet that he
knew was usually jammed under one of the legs of the chair he was sitting on to stop it rocking.

Mighty was down on her knees, dabbing at the Chinese woman’s leg now with a paper napkin and Ray noticed that passengers on some of the buses, usually away with their own thoughts and oblivious to their existence, were craning their necks to see what was going on. He could see the woman had a bad gash on her right knee just above the flesh-toned half-stocking that Mighty was in the process of carefully rolling down. Under the bench, at her feet, was a pink nylon mesh bag with coloured flowers appliquéd to it which he hadn’t spotted until then. The Heavenly Terrace, a Chinese supermarket, had recently opened on a piece of spare ground behind the Texaco garage, and that had almost certainly been her destination when she was attacked. (By, he was prepared to bet, the pair of troglodyte pyromaniacs he had encountered earlier on the Moor.)

This piece of speculation, though, was purely Ray’s own. Nobody at the van was using the event as an excuse to stir up some small excitement or for gossip, or behaving in any way differently than they normally behaved. Only the two men who had given up their seats to the Chinese woman and had moved to a table where Ray had never seen them sitting before were giving any outward indication of being affected by the incident. Although they were trying not to be, they seemed resentful, and were braced for when they could reclaim their places, knee to knee on the bench. It was the displaced attitude of children who had arrived at school to find strangers sitting at their desk.

Most people, having weighed up the situation, had quickly gone back to doing what they were doing before it occurred: working out an accumulator or a ten-bob e/w on the 3.30 at
Lingfield
, or browsing in the paper, or trying to bring out a crossword. The habits of a lifetime are hard to break. But it wasn’t out of disregard for the distress of the Chinese woman, or callousness,
but rather as a show of good manners and a determination not to make a bad situation worse by adding to the woman’s
disorientation
and sense of shock at being set upon by foreign devils in a foreign city that they had made an effort to re-immerse
themselves
in the ordinary dull routine of an ordinary dull day.

Somebody had even turned the radio back on after a while. But it was low, and the banal songs and the cheap chatter were perfect for establishing a sense of nothing going on. (This, in fact, had been the Ray Cruddas show-business philosophy when he started out, before the times, and his personal circumstances, forced him to go blue: a few songs, a few laughs, an act that pays no attention to the facts of life but just goes down the road. It’s only how things were. Nobody’s idea of a good time then was to be scared witless or scarred for life when they went to the
pictures
or to see a concert party. In the British films of those times, the formula was tried and tested: simple tales, simply told,
dealing
in the main with nice people doing nice things.

It was first brought home to Ray how far the world had turned when the owner of the Villa Capri Casino Nightclub, Kettering, gave him the benefit of his showbiz credo one night in the early seventies: ‘Give ’em a gamble, bare tits and a laugh and the buggers’ll shit money all night.’ This same man kept his money packed in a very large concrete safe with a mattress on top where his children slept.)

‘Five letters. Begins with p and ends with p. Means clubby.’ Conversation at the Scran Van rarely extended beyond that, and the occasional reaction to some phone-in comment (‘Yi naa what you’re supposed to call shoplifters these days, divven yiz? “
Non-traditional
shoppers”’), or speculation on who had the
number-one
hit in August 1958 with ‘Carolina Moon’, or which famous screen actor’s real name was ‘Frederick Austerlitz’. (A: Fred Astaire. Ray knew it but didn’t pipe up.) Every Friday Big Alf went round depositing the monkey nuts and liquorice allsorts he
carried in his pockets in little piles in front of people he knew. Now and again somebody might offer Ray a joke they’d heard and were happy to pass on. Big issues were never addressed, and big thoughts were never spoken: it would be regarded as
breaking
the code somehow to speak them. Anything likely to provoke argument, such as a live broadcast of the Budget speech, or a
programme
about the relevance of the monarchy to modern life, was discreetly turned off. Mighty’s was no place for amateur priests, or preachers. The only issues to get debated were things like which has the most ache in it, a rum hangover or a gin hangover. The Scran Van was a place to go to briefly get away from life. A snug harbour.

Jackie Mabe had stood between Ray Cruddas and the world for more than thirty years. Jackie was Ray’s eyes and ears; he was his butler, gofer, personal assistant and wife. Jackie was the reason Ray couldn’t tell you the price of a newspaper or a pint of milk; why he didn’t know how to boil an egg, and why he hadn’t travelled on public transport (he liked to say) since Keir Hardie and the horse-drawn tram.