The North of England Home Service (5 page)

Pancake Tuesday – Mardi Gras in other places: ‘Fat Tuesday’, a big carnival – was the day before Lent. It was the day to use up all the rich things – eggs, fats, cheese. Ash Wednesday was the first day of Lent, a forty-day period of self-denial; of retreat and
austerity
leading up to the death of Christ. In some cultures it was a period of scourging and self-flagellation. But in the First World it was increasingly just a convenient framework in which to try to get healthy or lose weight by giving up cigarettes or spirits or Chicken Whoppers.

‘I always like to get Easter behind me,’ Ray remembered Mighty saying yesterday as she broke eggs for the new batch of pancake mix she was making in a chipped blue enamel jug. ‘I always have. I don’t know why that should be. All those bright colours. It feels like a weight’s lifted.’

It felt strange to Ray to imagine Mighty and the policeman
getting
up and going to church this morning, leaving their houses when it was still dark, only a few lights on in the street. And then he wondered whether, unknown to each other, they had both been kneeling before the same altar while the same priest in the purple intoned the same age-old liturgy as he pressed a thumb dusted in ashes against their heads. ‘Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.’ It struck him suddenly as a very lonely thing to do.

Ray had grown up in the same street as Mighty. He had known her parents, Iris and George. George had had a fish barrow that he pushed around the back lanes selling kippers, soused herrings, freshly caught haddock and cod, and he had a good reputation: people used to look forward to him coming, and to hearing his familiar cry and the clatter of his bell. He used to allow the children to play with the bell, which was engraved brass with a polished wooden handle, and with the lead weights
for his scales, while he wrapped their mothers’ purchases up in newspapers.

Ray had been to school with Mighty’s brother, Arthur, a good footballer who, after a protracted illness (it was cancer, a word never mentioned in those days), had died when he was still a very young man, shortly after the war.

Mighty’s given name was ‘Merle’ after Merle Oberon, who her father had seen playing Anne Boleyn in
The
Private
Life
of
Henry
VIII
on his first ever visit to the cinema. But although as a baby she was dark, Mighty had grown up petite and blonde. Now that she was older, she had sun-streaks applied to her hair, which she wore short, in an easily manageable style. She wore very little make-up. Apart from a wind-burned flush high across her cheeks, her skin had an opalescent sheen like the inside of a shell; bright days picked out the transparent blues and greens under her eyes. Mighty wore several swagged brass ear-rings around the rim of her right ear, and a broad wedding ring on a chain around her neck. The slender link chain she wore around one ankle, and her usually crimson orange toe-nails, added to her healthy, outdoors, Mediterranean appearance.

But the knuckles of her hands were starting to show the first signs of arthritis; they were inflamed and slightly swollen-looking and Ray noticed she was having to use two hands for many simple lifting tasks now where previously she used one. Under the laminate counter were a row of plastic bottles containing homeopathic remedies, plus ginkgo biloba for her memory (‘Now where did I put them again?’), and DHEA, a hormone that ‘fools the body into thinking you’re only forty’.

Many years earlier a local photographer had spent some time taking a picture of Mighty in a characteristic pose at the serving window of the van. The photograph had later appeared at an exhibition and in the evening paper, and the piece of yellowed newsprint was still taped to the back wall adjacent to the
hot-water 
geyser above the sink. Staring out of it, standing behind a row of squeezable dispensers filled with mustard, and brown and red sauce, was a fresh-faced girl with more than a passing resemblance to the girl in Manet’s popular painting (a framed print of it had hung at the back of the classroom in Ray’s last year at junior school)
A
Bar
at
the
Folies-Bergères.
The photographer
obviously
had the painting in mind when he made his composition, ironically substituting the carefully wiped-down sauce and
malt-vinegar
bottles for Manet’s green absinthe and sweating bottles of champagne.

Mighty’s customers brought her flowers off the allotments – daffodils and tulips and the russet pom-pom dahlias that they knew she particularly liked; and every year on her birthday she was snowed under with cards. People she might not have seen since the same day the previous year made the trip to see her especially, sometimes bringing forty cigarettes or a small box of chocolates as well as a card.

She had women friends who came and stood at the side door and enjoyed a cigarette with her, their loaded carrier bags propped against the steps, the uniforms of their jobs as
supermarket
shelf-fillers and nursing auxiliaries and cleaners showing at the necks and the hems of their coats. But there was only one woman regular among the men at the van. They called her ‘Dolly’ on account of her being ‘a bit Dolly Dimple’, meaning simple. But she had a cultivated speaking voice and wore tweed jackets and big groundsheet headscarves like the Queen’s, knotted under her chin. She also wore wing glasses whose lenses, Ray had noticed, were clouded and scratched. Mighty always made her eggs the way she liked them, boiled and then mashed up with butter in a tea-cup, which she ate with ‘soldiers’ and a spoon. Dolly was sometimes there and sometimes she wasn’t, with nothing to explain where she went when she went away.

The young policeman had spoken into his collar to summon an
ambulance, and the ambulance arrived with its roof light flashing and its siren whooping a blood-curdling two-note scream. It swung to a halt tight in behind the police vehicle, and the paramedics – another man-woman team – threw the back doors open and hauled out a stretcher on wheels. The siren had stopped slowly like a winding-down toy. With the siren silenced it was as if there had been a high wind which had dropped suddenly. The stretcher wheels juddered as they were pushed towards the Chinese woman who was still sitting with the borrowed coat around her shoulders on the bench and looking startled as the thing came towards her. She started shaking again inside the black silk cloth of her slacks.

Where he was sitting, Ray had an excellent view – better than he actually wanted – straight into the interior of the ambulance. Another lonely place to have to go. He could see a plastic leather bench (for easy wiping) and a number of draw-string bags and coiled black rubber and a black rubber oxygen mask on the wall. He felt profoundly happy not to be the person getting into it.

The Chinese woman was still resisting getting on to the
stretcher
and protesting that she was able to walk. Then, as if at a signal he hadn’t noticed, the male stretcher attendant touched a lever that dropped it down to her level and the two uniformed women, each taking an arm, steered her firmly on to it. The female paramedic, a substantial woman in a green V-neck and pressed green trousers, bent down quickly and swung the woman’s legs over so she was in a semi-prone position. There was a
paper-covered
pillow on the stretcher, and tough restraining straps hanging down, and a waffle-textured coverlet which they threw over the Chinese woman’s thin trembling legs.

The stretcher trolley jolted as they negotiated the kerb, and at that the patient levered herself half up and commenced to do stiff little oriental bows from the waist all round, like an actress
leaving
the stage. The effort of doing this caused her jacket to come
open and exposed a lurid, rubberized, tattoo design and the name of a rock band splashed across the front of her T-shirt.

It was another detail, though, that wrenched Ray as the woman glided past him on her way to who knew where. Her tiny feet were poking out of the blanket and he could see how, on either side of the round-toed black leather shoes she was wearing, a careful razor cut had been made. This brought back a rush of memories of his own poor old mother who, in order to relieve the terrible
pressure
on her bunions, would take a single-bladed carpentry razor and carefully mutilate each new pair of shoes that she bought.

The legs under the stretcher automatically lifted as it was guided into the ambulance and folded themselves away. The policewoman followed the stretcher in and the male attendant tipped the retracting steps in after her. Her silhouette was visible briefly behind the opaque white window and then it
disappeared
. The siren started as the ambulance claimed priority in the traffic and sped away.

The policeman gave them all the benefit of another knowing look as he walked round to the driver’s side and got in the car. Ray saw that the two old boys who usually sat there had reclaimed the bench. One of them waved sarcastically and the police car toot-tooted in reply as it pulled away.

Ray checked his watch again. Jackie was now very late.

Mighty was back in the van, squirting some aerosol cleaner at a glass case with rolls and sandwiches and small pieces of green plastic parsley in it when Ray shouted over to ask if she would mind giving Jackie a call on her mobile. He didn’t need to tell her the number.

‘Tell him not to forget those shirts. And the videos for tonight,’ Ray said. ‘Oh and my new socks.’

‘You two,’ Mighty said, screwing up her eyes to look at the
illuminated
panel on the phone. ‘The pair yiz. Warra yous like.’

Jackie had been in traffic snarl-ups all morning. The roads around Rusty Lane, the former mining village five miles north of the city, where he lived, usually deserted at that time of the year apart from the hourly ‘hopper’ buses and the occasional muck-encrusted farm vehicle, had been filled with activity connected to the
outbreak
of foot-and-mouth disease. The first case had been reported not many miles away just six days earlier, and foot-and-mouth confirmed as a national emergency – an almost certain catastrophe, with millions upon millions of sheep and cattle facing slaughter – on the Monday of that week. Now it was Wednesday, and the countryside was awash with representatives of the many agencies who had been given the task of shutting it down.

Jackie had been prevented from taking his turning at Townfoot by a convoy of transporters bringing in temporary barrier fencing. Traffic on the coast road had been brought to a halt by a wagon carrying disinfectant footbaths and sprays that had spilled its load. The road was covered in a convex pearlescent green slick which turned into a scum of evil yellow bubbles where it drained off the ragged edge of the road surface, steaming into the ditches. Seagulls circling overhead were reflected in it, and the long stratus clouds in the sky. Road maps were open across the steering wheels of most of the backed-up traffic. Nobody seemed to know where they were going, or where they were.

The first indication Jackie had had that the day would call for a change of plan was when he walked the dogs down to the stile at Stantonfence which usually took him on to the Lonnings, the old opencast workings, and then down along Bassett Burn into the
woods. There was a plastic-wrapped ‘
DO NOT ENTER
’ sign on the stile and a barrier made of wide black-and-yellow caution tape. The sign was dense with writing like a pamphlet about Jesus and antiquated-looking in its lack of design. And Jackie was reading the small print enumerating the reasons for the footpath’s closure, the murderous transmittability of foot-and-mouth, and the serious consequences of ignoring the warning when Telfer the shepherd lifted his leg against the hawthorn hedge where they were standing and Jackie remembered too late to try and take a sample in the scoured-out margarine carton that he was rather self-consciously holding. The idea was to get it down in time to catch enough urine to transfer to the small plastic bottle he had in his pocket. The dog had anyway toppled over when his other leg failed to support him and ended up in a disconsolate, sorry-looking mess on the ground.

Telfer was one of two Belgian shepherds who were usually left to guard Bobby’s overnight; Ellis was his working partner, and over time the two dogs had grown inseparable. At four years old, Telfer was the younger by two years. But a congenital condition had caused the tendons of his hind legs to contract, and as a result he sometimes had to half drag his legs behind him. He didn’t seem to be in pain and it wasn’t irreversible; with surgery the tendons could be cut and lengthened, and that had been due to happen in a fortnight. But then recently Telfer had started spotting blood. Jackie had noticed it on the floor of the yard at the club, and then he had seen blood beading blades of grass the dog hovered over on their walks. The vet had asked Jackie to bring a sample in, and he was intending to deliver it that morning before picking Ray up at the Park.

Jackie’s own dog, who lived permanently at the house, was Stella, a small rough-haired terrier from a long working line bred originally for catching rabbits and ratting. ‘As in the lager, not the song,’ Jackie would tell anybody who asked him why he had
given a girl’s name to a boisterous, apparently normal young male dog. (By ‘the song’ Jackie meant ‘Stella by Starlight’, one from his own era that he used to slow dance to at Johnny Cooney’s and the London in the old East End and, later, at the Café Anglais when Harry Roy’s band was resident, and Jo Longman’s Club du Cinq in Paris. In the end, somewhere deep, deep down – too deep to usefully fathom: a sweet unsignalled and unexpected piano run; a pretty smell; a never-known or long-forgotten association – the song was probably the real reason for Stella being called Stella anyway. It was a joke that he was stuck with.)

Jackie had been a boxer. He bore none of the obvious signs of being an old pug – some slight build-up of scar tissue around the eyes and the almost imperceptible drooping of one eyelid due to the dead nerve in the lid (this was more pronounced in pictures and when he had had a drink) was all he had to show for his career in the ring. But most people were able to guess without being told that that was what his background had been. Boxing as ‘Nipper’ Jackie Mabe, first as a featherweight and then latterly as a ‘lightie’ in the lightweight division, he was still only about half a stone heavier than his best fighting weight of nine to nine and a half stone. He gave the impression of compactness and solidity at the same time as being light and quick on his feet. Like many boxers, his hands were surprisingly small and, because of the years of being steamed in gauze and leather and sweat,
unexpectedly
soft. The letters ‘
WORK
’ were still just visible, tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand; ‘
PLAY
’ was tattooed across the knuckles of his left. His hair had faded to a pale nicotine yellow, but he still wore it combed back at the sides and nodding forward at the front in a cheerful cockateel quiff.

‘You were on the floor so often you should have a cauliflower arse,’ Ray used to joke Jackie. (‘If bullshit was music, you’d be a brass band’ was Jackie’s habitual comeback to this. Either that, or:
‘If your life was a fight they’d have stopped it by now.’ The two things that people often remembered best about Jackie were the lack of deference he was prepared to show that star of stage, screen and the labour exchange, the great Ray Cruddas, and the strangulated high pitch of his voice.) But the truth was that Jackie was good. Gaining his licence at the age of fifteen in 1945, although claiming to be a year older to comply with British Boxing Board of Control rules, he had made a more than promising start. After 43 fights his record read: 37 wins (18 by KO), 5 losses, 1 draw. He had given boxing a try and had, as
Reynolds
News
and the old
Mirror
of
Life
and
Sporting
World
(Jackie’s favourite literature) would have it, ‘been caught in the fistic net’. And then in a split second it was (Jackie liked to say) Goodnight Vienna. ‘Curtains. Boof! All over. Goodnight Vienna.’ He was twenty-one.

Jackie had started walking back from Stantonfence in the
direction
of the village. Telfer and Ellis, used to spending their lives cooped up, and unpredictable in traffic, were on short leads; Stella was free and running on ahead, stopping every so often to throw his head back and bark at them with what seemed a mixture of jealousy and delirious impatience. The day was cool and grey, with the long grey clouds moving slowly against the grey sky. There was a chance of rain, with bright periods forecast for later.

All three dogs took it in turn to leave their mark (the younger shepherd just managing to remain upright this time) against the zinc dustbin that had been put outside the main gate at Nettle Hill Farm for the benefit of the postman (somebody had written ‘
POST
’ on the lid). A second notice had been fixed to the gate: ‘
PLEASE
KEEP OUT. WE ARE NOT CONTAMINATED, WE WANT TO
KEEP OUR ANIMALS
.’

Stella was standing at the corner of Half Nichol Street with his tail whirlybirding nuttily in circles, waiting for the signal to tell him whether to continue straight on or turn right into what was
known locally as the Settlement. Old Nichol Street, New Nichol Street and Half Nichol Street were narrow cinder alleys cutting between rows of miners’ cottages. The Settlement was the oldest part of Rusty Lane. Jackie lived in the new part of the village along with most of the other ‘blow-ins’ in a modern development called Manor Grange (or ‘New Kennels’ to the locals, after a large sign with fluorescent arrows that had gone up on the trunk road pointing traffic in the direction of Jackie’s estate. The developer’s ‘traditionalizing’ elements at the New Kennels – cast-iron foot scrapes, decorative cobbles, ‘Victorian’ street lamps incorporating a make-believe flicker – had also been the target of considerable mockery.)

There had been two pits in Rusty Lane, but they had both been closed for over twenty years. The pit rows in the Settlement, once tithed to the colliery, were now occupied by retired miners and families with close mining connections. Without the renovations of recent years, the cottages would have been museum pieces. (Identical cottages from a nearby village had in fact been
transported
brick by brick to an open-air theme-park museum, where they formed part of a hands-on interactive display.) The cottages had had temporary-looking, semi-prefabricated structures added on front and rear: new kitchens and bathrooms at the back; glassed-in porches erected around the existing front doors. And, after the now nearly unimaginable privations of their
predecessors
, the people who lived there were proud at last to be able to consider themselves modern. The porches, which were sun-traps, were showcases for all styles of resort furniture – fatly padded recliners and loungers, and wrought-iron and bamboo occasional tables and sofas. Tinkling wind chimes were popular, as were tweeting budgerigars and lovebirds in domed cages. Many houses had vertical swivel blinds at the windows and most had a black, colander-like satellite dish probing the ether for sport and films round the clock.

What Jackie was always most struck by when he walked through the Settlement, though, was the way relics of the old industrial past had been reassigned a new use as hanging baskets and planters. All summer, French marigolds and nasturtiums and petunias frothed out of Davy lamps and pitmen’s helmets. Love-in-a-mist and sweet william grew in the old rusting tubs that half-blind, bow-legged ponies had once pulled along the tunnels of a busy underground town. (The ponies would be tossed on top of the coal and hauled to the surface themselves when they had outlived their usefulness. Jackie had heard tales of them being shot
en
masse
in the fields of Nettle Hill Farm after modern mining methods had made them redundant, and bulldozed into mass graves.) Strangest of all, pairs of pit boots that had once been put to warm against the kitchen fender in preparation for the beginning of a cold night shift were now home to busy lizzies and hardy annuals in a few of the Settlement gardens: it was as if the owner of the boots had been detonated out of them, like a scene in a Buster Keaton film, leaving a straggle of flowers instead of trouser tatters and trails of curling cartoon smoke.

The prettifying of industrial relics – turning miners’ helmets and steel-toe-capped boots into garden ornaments – was only a domestic version of the glut of ambitious landscaping and
reclamation
projects that had been instigated in the countryside around Rusty Lane in recent years. In this process, the scars of the mining past had been flooded with ponds and lakes, and planted with meadows and saplings. The slag heaps from the twin collieries had been levelled off and grassed over (and in the case of the spoil heap at the Lee, turned into a dry ski slope); the railway line the coal wagons had trundled along was now a nature trail; the headgear for the main shaft was a picnic area complete with a flushing toilet and scribbled-on, but as yet relatively
unvandalized
, comprehensively illustrated information panels. (Herons
and bitterns, little ringed plovers and reed warblers had come back to breed at the recently established deep sump lake.)

The countryside around Rusty Lane was blistered with
man-made
hills filled up with hundreds of tonnes of household rubbish and organic waste, where sheep and cattle grazed on the lower slopes. Vast tracts of disturbed land had been designated a Heritage Park. An unnerving silence lay over the area, whose new
orderliness
and cleanness, although representing a kind of progress, struck the people who had lived all their lives there as queer.

Before they reached the end of Half Nichol Street, Jackie called to Stella to come so he could put him on the lead. There were two horses on the scrap of spare ground at the end of the street, and the dog had yapped around worrying them in the past. Stella didn’t want to come and thought about it for a minute, but then did, with his tail down and his haunches low in submission and his belly almost scraping the ground.

The horses were piebalds, and they were tethered by heavy clinking chains, morosely cropping the thin litter-strewn grass. Rusty Lane was situated on a high ridge in sight of the coast. Sea coal from the coal seams that rose in the sea-bed was washed ashore all along the coast there and the horses were used to
collect
this in little carts. Blue plastic sacks lined with coal dirt had been split and opened and tied over their backs. They followed Jackie and the dogs gravely through their milky eyes and their curled pale lashes as they passed.

Jackie kept all the dogs with him as he skirted behind some modern school buildings at the edge of a playing field. He faintly heard a chord struck on a piano, then children’s voices singing, and the dogs in the nearby (canine) New Kennels baying for their morning feed; he tried to avoid starting the dogs off by not slamming his car door hard when he got home from Bobby’s in the middle of the night. Two-thirds of the way down the field, behind the metalwork room, which was emitting the smell of a
coke fire and melted solder, a hole had been torn in the wire mesh fence. It would have been easier to let the dogs off here, but there was a lane on the other side of the steep embankment that cars (driven by buzzed-up, showing-off ex-pupils) sometimes came tearing along too fast. Jackie put his foot through the fence on to a pile of cigarette ends and had to shoot a hand out to stop
himself
falling when the dogs started trying to scrabble all together to the top of the denuded muddy bank. When he was satisfied there was nothing coming he let them go, and followed them across the lane and over a stile on to a footpath which, as he suspected, the men from the Ministry hadn’t been able to get to to rule out of bounds yet.