The North of England Home Service (6 page)

Jackie still had the margarine carton inside his jacket. And when Telfer, who had quickly lost ground to the others,
tentatively
lifted his leg against one of several dozen blue plastic tree tubes that this part of the field was bristling with, he grabbed his chance. He transferred the unhealthily sluggish sample to the plastic bottle and buried the carton in nearby bushes while Telfer hobbled away in pursuit of Ellis and Stella, who had hared off in the direction of a perfectly bone-shaped pond, developed from a settling pond used to trap silt from rainwater run off during open-casting and newly colonized by dragonflies (an illustrated board explained all this). Telfer’s rich sable tail was tucked
miserably
into his blond hindquarters and he was moving in a way that couldn’t help but remind Jackie of himself.

There was an old saying among the fraternity of punchateers: First your legs go, and then your money, and then your friends. Jackie’s legs had gone and his career had hit the buffers in another age, on another planet, more than half a century earlier, on the night of 11 December 1951.

It was in a British lightweight title eliminator at the Empress Hall, Earls Court. He was on the undercard of Arthur Danahar vs. Omar Kouidri. His opponent was Alby Ash, a Hackney plumber
who boxed under the name ‘Kid Bostock’. Jackie knew he wasn’t fit at the time of the fight, but he was boracic, as everybody seemed to be in those days, and needed to be earning. Six weeks earlier he had been doing some sparring with the European and Empire featherweight champion, Al Phillips, who was known as ‘The Aldgate Tiger’, at Jack Solomons’ gym in Soho, his home from home, when Jackie had felt his knee go. He felt it pop. But he had kept on going and afterwards the Tiger had taken him
downstairs
to the billiard hall, where there was a coffee bar, and bought him a cup of tea, a cheese roll and five Woodbines. The next day Jackie had been back for more punishment, and a couple of weeks later had even sparred for two rounds and eight pounds with Sandy Saddler, the featherweight champion of the world. In the run-up to the eliminator with Alby Ash, instead of resting the knee, he had punished it by running up and down the terraces at West Ham’s ground at Upton Park, where one of his hundreds of cousins from the Fens had signed papers as a junior. He spent hours alone on the terraces, high-stepping up and down,
punishing
himself; up and down.

On the night, he began by giving Alby Ash a boxing lesson and was ending by handing him a large-size hiding when, about a minute into the fourth round, he threw a left hook at the hapless Hackney plumber. Jackie’s foot got caught on something loose in the canvas. His body went with the punch but his leg didn’t move. His knee made a terrible pop, and split like it had been sawn in half. He got up and kept hopping on one knee, throwing punches. And then he blacked out. They took him off on a stretcher. The cruciate ligament was torn and repair proved to be out of the question. The hospital operated on the medial as well as the cruciate ligament, and his leg was set in plaster from the ankle to the groin, with the knee in a bent position. That’s the way it had to be for three months. But at the end of that time Jackie knew it was over for him, even if other people didn’t. He remembered
telling Mr Solomons, who was his manager, of his belief that it was all over. Mr Solomons was rotating a cigar between his lips to light it evenly. Jackie heard the
sip
sip
of his pull on the cigar and watched the flame flare up on Mr Solomons’, the very powerful operator’s, cheeks and brow. Naturally Jackie was
tearful
. It was a difficult moment. But Mr Solomons stood and walked over to the fan-backed green-leather club chair where Jackie was sitting and kissed him lightly first on one cheek, and then on the other. Jackie felt the yellow tea-rose Mr Solomons habitually wore in the buttonhole of his jacket touching his face. When Mr Solomons had kissed him on both cheeks he also kissed him lightly on the top of the head. Jackie understood this to be a kind of anointing, and so it proved.

Jackie’s duties from then on might have involved only
gym-bum
duties and general dogsbodying, acting as
bucket-and-sponge
man on fight nights, seeing to it that Mrs Solomons and her party had everything they needed before and after fights (Mrs Solomons was a champion eater and always required three hot-dogs, one before and two after, with a triple serving of onions with each dog), but Jackie was
mishpochah.
Kosher.
Jackie was family, and into the bargain a well-respected, fondly regarded lifetime member of the fraternity of the thick ear.

(A strange postscript to this affair was that, although his
immediate
family was allowed in to visit Jackie at the hospital, Tina, his wife at the time, didn’t appear. Tina was a vivacious bubble [bubble-and-squeak = Greek] who waitressed for her father in his café in what Soho
habitu
é
s
knew as Frying Pan Alley. They had been married for only a few months at the time of the accident, but whenever Jackie asked about his ‘child bride’ [Tina was seventeen], they changed the subject. Eventually she arrived after about four, maybe five, days, and her normally dark skin was drained of all colour. Jackie attempted a joke about her looking paler than the sheet that was draped over him. But she floored
him with something he’d never expected to hear: ‘I’m afraid I’ve had a miscarriage.’ He hadn’t even been aware she was pregnant. ‘Well,’ Jackie would say when he related the story in later years, ‘you didn’t ask at that time.’)

Jackie hated everything about getting old. The twinge in his knee was something he had come to be more conscious of, and his limp, although still only slight, had become more noticeable now than when he was a younger man. When he breasted the hill, he saw Telfer limping towards the lake and he could see Ellis was in the lake making contrails on the otherwise still surface with Stella tearing up and down the foreshore but staying well clear of the water. There was a wood beyond the lake with a dry stream-bed path leading uphill to Back Church Lane and the village.

This was land that had been repeatedly mined, cultivated, stripped bare and restored for three centuries. There had been an aerial ropeway bringing coal from Spylaw Colliery to the screens at Rusty Lane 2, a distance of over three miles – 32 tonnes of coal an hour, 23 hours a day. Its high pylons had marched across this field, but there was no sign of them now. Now the blades of a row of tall white wind turbines turned in unison in the distance, churning the wind. The lake here had originally been formed by subsidence. Then it broke through into old mine workings and, after an interval of many years, the lake had been relined with red clay and refilled. When the clay had been laid it was pressed into place with the revival of a tradition dating back to the first Industrial Revolution. This involved driving a herd of cows up and down and around the lake basin until, like the case for a muslin-wrapped suet pudding, it was judged watertight and uniformly thick. There had been a carnival-like atmosphere on the day the cows had been brought to do a job at the lake,
pounding
down footprints like fish scales that might still be there, and people had travelled from miles around to see it.

The interpenetratedness of the life that had been lived under
ground for generations and the modern lives currently being lived above ground was something that was constantly making itself felt. The previous summer large numbers of homes in Rusty Lane had had to be evacuated when polluted mine water from the old mines flooded the main street, slicking it ferrous orange. More recently a pensioner had died from inhaling stythe – mine gas pushed to the surface and expelled by the rising rank water. Jackie was always aware that wherever he walked there were complex networks of roadways and tunnels below him where day after day for a hundred years men had gone to work in the closed body of the earth.

Much in the way that Ray, in his new commitment to being more outward as a person, had fallen right in with the regulars at the Scran Van, so Jackie, blow-in as he was, felt a strong affinity with the former coal-hewers and tub-menders he was obliged to rub along with at this latest (quite possibly the last) staging post in his life. Just as he had been marked up by his job, so they carried the marks of theirs in the form of missing fingers and eyes and coal dust worked into worm shapes and spirals and blackly fused with the contours of old accident scars under the skin.

One day, flicking the pages of a Spanish-language pin-up magazine already hundreds of customers old while he waited his turn at Barnet Fair, the barber’s over the pork shop in West Allen, Jackie had fallen into conversation with a retired pitman, one of the old school who liked to be shaved with a freshly stropped
cutthroat
razor and expected to have the stiff hog hairs on the meat of his ears and at the base of his neck burned off with a wax taper. ‘If I was fowty years younger, lad,’ the old pitman had said,
indicating
a black model in Jackie’s magazine who was bending over a cocktail counter with a hot-pink thong pulled up in the cleft of her buttocks and smiling over her oiled ebony shoulder at the camera, ‘aa’d give haw some stick an’ aall, divven worry aboot that.’ They had gone on to talk about this and that – changes in
the district, the number of teenage pregnancies and crack dealers and the unemployment, always chronic and getting worse – and then by way of nothing the old pitman had suddenly said, ‘There’s nothing as dark as the darkness down a pit, the
blackness
that closes in on you if your lamp goes out. You’d think you would see some kind of shapes but you can see nothing, nothing but the inside of your head. The darkest place on orth.’

Jackie had turned and looked at the man’s head and wondered about the darkness in it. The customer in the barber’s chair with the plastic sheet tented up to his chin and the Kleenexes stuffed in his collar gave him a strange look in the mirror then. The old man’s cranium stuck out quite unpleasantly far at the back. Jackie noticed the faintest trace of a scar, like the tramline on a tennis ball, just beneath his already short silver crop. He remembered a fight of his where the outcome had been about sixty staples in his head, and his head had been half shaved and swollen. All he could think about was looking normal again.

He had got caught in the first round of the fight and didn’t box the same after that. To begin with, he thought he was just having a bad day at the office. But they let him out for the twelfth and he got hit with three or four shots straight away, and then, when he went down, he knew there was a problem. He began to experience the dull euphoria, that carelessness, the giggly
incomprehension
. He thought about that: the blackness that closes in on you if your lamp goes out. ‘In boxing,’ Jackie told the old man, ‘they say when you get hit and hurt bad you see black lights – the black lights of unconsciousness.’

‘I think everybody should go down the pit at least once to leam what darkness is,’ the customer who was currently in the chair said, belligerently, as if Jackie hadn’t spoken. The man had had his hair washed, which didn’t happen at Barnet Fair very often. His face was still blotched and raw-looking. He had backed up to the sink and Tony, the owner, had worked up a lather on his scalp, and
then massaged it and rinsed it, cradling the man’s neck in his arm, expertly sifting his hair through his fingers, and Jackie had reflected on what an intimate thing this was to happen. ‘Are yi on a promise the neet like, Norman?’ the older man had asked, and the man called Norman had winked back at him gruesomely in the mirror.

Jackie had grown up knowing the curious close intimacy of the gym and the training camp, the camaraderie of the changing room. On a number of occasions, gloved up and ready for a fight, and finding he needed to make another visit to the bathroom, he had had to rely on somebody from his corner to do the necessary for him, to aim him, to wipe him like a father tending a child. In one fight his second, a man he trusted more than his father, had been forced to lance a swelling under his eye with a razor blade and suck out the clotting blood to save him from blindness.

The longer he had lived in the village the more Jackie had become aware of the parallels between the two old, virtually extinct, worlds of the pits and boxing. In both worlds there was the ever present possibility of unexpected and violent death. And the continual presence of danger made the physical and
instinctive
contact between men very highly developed. It also brought them together to drink. Then as now champion boxers used their prize winnings to buy public houses, which usually proved their ruin. It is the way with a lot of fighters, as Jackie hardly needed to be told: he had seen it all, and many times over; from the Café Royal and the Regent Palace to sleeping rough and drinking wine at bonfires. He had seen men he could remember being as quick and sleek as greyhounds blotto on boiled-up shoe polish and flagons of cheap scent. Up from the carnival booths and back to the booths and the only end then being a pauper’s grave. Most fighters led foolish private lives.

‘Taking the cage down into the pit and being lamped in front of two thousand people,’ Jackie had said in the barber’s that day, speaking aloud something he’d only just thought, ‘they’re both
about going into yourself. You can never be sure you’re going to like what you see.’

Ellis was still wet from the lake and leaving a trail of water behind him all the way up the path through the woods. Telfer was lagging behind, limping, and Stella had also developed a limp which disappeared as soon as Jackie used his finger to prise out a stone that had lodged itself in the pad of one of the terrier’s shilling-sized front paws. Jackie looked at his watch: 10:11. A time of the morning when, back in the years of full employment and never-had-it-so-good when you could job-hop on a whim, not many men would be around. Ray and Jackie had always been aware of their unusualness in that – of keeping hours not usual for a man. Of keeping hours
inappropriate
for men is how they sometimes used to feel, especially in the northern industrial towns where masculinity was identified with grime and hard graft and Jackie would stop the car at a chemist’s to stock up on things they needed (razor blades, make-up remover, Vaseline – his purchases were often far from hairy-chested), or at a baker’s for fresh rolls for their lunch, and experience a sense of unease at being the only man at large in a landscape entirely populated by women. In an area where nearly half the men were ‘economically inactive’ though, as they were around Rusty Lane and West Allen, Jackie had no reason to feel out of place at all.