The North of England Home Service (8 page)

Barry, already calling himself ‘Jaxon’, had started out DJ-ing at
the first acid-house parties towards the end of the eighties, never thinking that the simple act of putting one record on after another could take him where it had taken him. Up to that time disc jockeys had been regarded as the sherpas and pack animals of the music business – or as juke-boxes with chest wigs, as Barry liked to say. But the ‘rave revolution’ brought huge, instant changes, mostly reflecting how easy it had become to get ripped and wrecked and really messed up – ‘Getting dressed up to get messed up’ enjoyed some popularity as a slogan for a time – on increasingly ingenious permutations of drugs.

On more than one occasion Barry, who was always looking for ground on which to build a good relationship with his father, had tried to tell him that there were connections between the rave scene and prize-fighting in
its
pioneer days. Prize-fighting was unlawful, and zealous magistrates sometimes took considerable trouble to prevent matches being held and to arrest the organizers, Barry said. Important prize-fights might be widely advertised but the venue was announced only at the last minute, and the crowds were forced to race across the country,
exactly
(Barry argued) like acid-house parties in the nineties.

Jackie had protested, but Barry had stood his ground. He knew that several times his father had fought out in the open, once in a fight that was famous in its day. It took place in the meadows of the Isle of Ely in the flat country of the Fens where Jackie had grown up in an unruly sprawling family who much later had taken Barry in and looked after him when it was his turn. The fight had happened on a summer night at dusk with the
twelfth-century
crenellated towers of the Cathedral as a backdrop and naphthalene flares burning around the ring and stewards (some of them the welcomers and vergers of the Cathedral) with naphthalene-doused, bare-flame torches to guide people to their places on the bales of hay that had been brought in for seating in the darkling sweet-smelling pasture.

Barry had watched jerky ciné film of his father taken on that night, shadow-boxing in his corner as he waited to be called to the middle of the ring to touch gloves with an opponent announced as ‘a good clean-living man and one of the gamest fighters to ever enter a ring’. (Jackie’s footwork on that occasion by common consent was beautiful; his feet skipped sweetly; he moved lithely; he punched fast and hard and won a marvellous victory on points.) Barry had watched the flickering film of his father waiting for the call of ‘seconds out’ in a field on the watery edge of England, skipping on the spot, determined and muscled and very young, ducking and feinting and loosening up, all alone up there surrounded by family and neighbours and supporters who had come out together to cheer on ‘Nipper’, the local boy.

And Barry had been forcefully reminded of those images on the morning of his arrest, brought to a police station and ordered to strip naked and step on to the big square of white paper that had been opened on the floor and requested to jump up on the spot with first his legs apart and then his arms so that any debris or forensic evidence relating to the serious charge of rape (the woman’s pubic hairs and imperceptible particles of skin and so on as well as his own) could be loosened and fall away from his body and be collected by the police doctor who was present throughout this humiliating ordeal, and witnessed by the female officer who was also in the room and the prying eyes and sniggers which he was sure – he was
sure
–
lurked behind the mirrored strips of the fly-blown, nearly-wall-sized two-way mirror.

Instead of a sickle moon and a cooling breeze sifting over from Wicken Fen on to his sweating body and the admiration and even love of strangers that his father had enjoyed, for Barry only this: a fetid windowless room with dirty stain patterns on the carpet and waxy dirt and grease in the mouthpieces of the phones and his genitals providing mirthless entertainment for hidden
strangers. As his unoffending (he was quite sure of this) penis slapped up and down and the black imprints of his feet blotted off on to the stiff white paper, Barry encouraged his mind to stray to a tale he had heard from many sources about his father on that faraway fight night in the Cambridgeshire fens. As the time approached to announce the fight, it was established that his father had gone missing. At first the powerful promoter, Mr Solomons, had put on a cigar and tried to look unconcerned. But as the time grew nearer with still no sign of the star of the evening, Mr Solomons and his partner in this venture, Mr Hulls, had begun blustering around, blowing their tops. Eventually, running out of places to look, Mr Solomons snuck behind the bales at the end of the meadow and approached the main turnstile. And there, lo and behold, sitting on the top of a gate, scanning the faces of the people as they came in, was the ‘Nipper’. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ Mr Solomons yelled at him, which was unusual because Mr Solomons was not known as a yeller. But the relief at seeing Jackie was so great that the powerful promoter, usually as bland as butter and so affable he had become known to one and all as ‘Jolly Jack’, almost lost control of himself. ‘I’m
waiting
for my pals,’ Jackie said. He had asked permission to invite two boys from his village he had been at school with to see him fight, and was waiting to give them their tickets.

Barry had gone to be brought up in the same village, and the gang of his friends and cousins had made their personal domain the castle mound and the meadow and the monastic precincts that crowded in around the Cathedral. Entry to the Cathedral itself was free and unticketed in those days, and a trippy thing, especially in the summer they all first discovered mushrooms, was to loll around in the polished seats they called misericords and gaze up into the Gothic dome of the famous octagon,
constructed
from the largest oaks available in England, and get off on the exalted light and mote-filled space and the freaky colours of
the probably prehistoric religious wall-paintings. There was a tall, table-top mirror on wheels to facilitate examination of the high-up artworks and ceiling frescos; you bowled it along the nave and looked down into the mirror instead of looking up for a view of what was directly overhead. And the best thing when you’d got a bit high was to stare down into the wriggling
psychedelic
depths with your spacey eyes until you believed you were really up there down in that lighted hollow lagoon, swimming with Judas and Jesus and all the Apostles.

Under the scrutiny of the arresting officer, Barry had continued to jump up and down, shaking loose all the unseemly evidence from his body, while he kept his eyes fixed on a certain tray of fluorescent light set into the suspended ceiling and in his mind in those direst circumstances travelled to Ely and the heart of the Cathedral and the timber lantern high atop the octagon and the small life-sized carving of Christ in Majesty that resided there, a representation of Christ drawing us upward towards Him, up and up and up and up, while our feet remain solidly on earth.

Barry had tried to convince his father that drugs and the
drugging
habit were now as English as fish and chips, but his father (no angel, it has to be said, and no stranger either in his younger days to the hit to be had from chewing the filling of a Vic nasal inhaler, or a bit of pot at the notorious all-nighters at Cy Laurie’s trad-jazz Mecca in Windmill Street, in Soho) – his father wasn’t having it.

‘I’ve boiled up some chicken to give to Stella with some rice if you can manage that,’ he said to Barry, as he gathered together his things in preparation for leaving the house to collect Ray.

‘Cool.’

‘I’m going to see if I can get this phone working in the car. I shouldn’t be too late in tonight. Wednesdays are pretty slow.’

‘Excellent. Whatever.’

The picture on the television had unfrozen and two men in
balaclava masks were staring up into the camera. Behind them people were lying face down on the floor.

Jackie, a young-looking older man who had known his way around a ring, had changed into a zip-up jacket and smart-casual light-grey slacks and trainers. The trainers, which he had acquired of course from ‘Magpie’ Jeff, were midnight blue with a pale blue plastic membrane like the veined surface of a haggis or blood sausage fused to the uppers.

On the television the villains were backing out of the door with their swag bag filled and their gun arms extended as if they were on television. Jackie could hear the shepherds quietly whining and whistling and sniffing in the space under the door. He heard their paws skidding frantically on the lino surface as he approached them, and was reminded that he had forgotten to pack the sick dog’s sample when he saw several patches of nearly black blood on the marbled tile squares. He turned to go to the kitchen to bring water and disinfectant, but Barry was right behind him and he had brought both of those things already. ‘Got it, Dad,’ he said, trying to get a focus with his fathomless dilated eyes on his father. ‘’S fine. All sorted.’ Stella tried to make a bolt for the door to follow them, but Barry grabbed him by his scrawny,
chicken-thigh
hindquarters and he let out a tired yelp.

The events of the morning had made Jackie late for his
appointment
with the vet. The practice was in the pedestrian shopping precinct in West Allen, sandwiched between a Cash Converters (‘Your personal cheque cashed today and not banked for up to eight weeks – no credit checks’) and Tanzmania. That part of the precinct was mainly tenanted by discount butchers’ shops and pawn shops whose windows glowed dimly with sovereign rings and watches and other unredeemed pledge ‘bargains’ set out on nylon-velvet trays.

A disinfectant mat had been put down at the door because
Kevin Wilkinson, the vet, was on constant call in the current crisis and, in the days and weeks ahead, would relate to Jackie the horror stories involved in diagnosing and disposing of animals already suffering from, or judged to be in danger of catching, foot-and-mouth: the awkwardness of the marksmen waiting to be given the signal to begin the dirty work; the terror of the cattle, sensitive to the smell of death; the abjectness of the farmers and the farm families, forced to stand by and watch the work of several generations disappear on what were now officially
designated
‘Infected Premises’ – ‘dirty farms’.

Wilkinson had had to go out to a nearby farm that morning to condemn a dairy herd of 320 cows, and all his non-urgent appointments for the early surgery had been cancelled. The only other person waiting was a woman in a business suit with a
blue-and-white
plastic cat carrier on her knee who flinched visibly when Jackie came in with the big Belgian shepherd on a lead. But Telfer immediately cringed under Jackie’s chair, reducing himself to half his normal body volume, and Jackie gazed for a while at the mosaic that had been made of the snaps that grateful customers had sent in of their happy pets. He heard a telephone ringing downstairs where the kennels and recovery cages were, and then a door slamming. The smell of Jeyes Fluid was sharp in his nose. He idly picked up a leaflet which was a police appeal for information relating to a recent rash of attacks in which a total of fifty racing pigeons had died after their feet were cut off for their identity rings; the police, it said, believed the birds were mutilated by teenagers, who wear the rings.

After a while the surgery door opened and a teenage boy came out with a schnauzer that had a plastic-bucket-like contraption around its head. Jackie motioned to the woman, but it became clear she was only waiting for her pet to be destroyed. She became too upset to be able to finish telling him this and the receptionist indicated to him to just go in.

‘Let’s have him up,’ Wilkinson said, and once he had Telfer on the table inserted a thermometer into his rectum. ‘Just hold his head. That’s it … Good boy … He’s a good boy …’ The vet pressed his fingers deep into the tender places of the dog’s
stomach
and a single bead of blood splashed on to the rubber coating the top of the table. There was an information poster about the procedures for obtaining a dog passport on the partition wall and Jackie let his mind wander beyond the wall to where presumably, even on a winter Wednesday morning, people in bikini briefs and goggles were kebabbing themselves on tanning beds and in stand-and-tan booths, imparting that golden glow which speaks of vitality and health and fends off the journey of
degeneration
and ruin the genes are pre-programmed to make – the phenomenon of your body dying while your mind looks on, wondering why it’s all happening. ‘All life is a process of breaking down.’ Cancer, heart disease, arthritis, dementia: we gradually fall apart.

‘I’d like to keep him in for a while and get some pictures done. I’d like to see what’s going on in there,’ Wilkinson said. ‘Alrightee.’ He opened the surgery door and called for the
receptionist
, whose name seemed to be Shirleen. He handed her Telfer’s lead and the dog slunk silently away, turning briefly to give Jackie one last betrayed, beseeching look as he was led down the stairs and around a bend in the stairs and out of sight. Kevin Wilkinson had turned his attention to the now silently sobbing cat-carrier woman by the time Jackie reached the door, ‘
WE BUY, WE SELL
,
WE LOAN
’ a banner sign said on the opposite side of the precinct.

The accident involving the spillage of many thousands of gallons of disinfectant and the other hold-ups attributable to
foot-and-mouth
had all made Jackie uncharacteristically late. He had connected his phone to the cigarette lighter in the car, but it still wasn’t working and so he had been unable to warn Ray about the
delay. Less than two miles outside West Allen, traffic had been funnelled into a single slow-moving lane, and it had remained like that, bumper to bumper, most of the way.

Split up from his partner, Ellis had been restless and audibly unhappy in his space behind the dog guard, hyperventilating and changing position frequently with sighs and muffled hollow thuds. As far as Jackie could remember it was the first time Telfer and Ellis had been separated in their nearly four years together; it was why he had brought both dogs home to stay with him, rather than leaving Ellis alone to patrol the club. Now he worried about how the older dog was going to adjust, for the foreseeable future at least, to being on his own.