The North of England Home Service (9 page)

Jackie had switched the radio on briefly, and then switched it off again. Having Barry around had made him appreciate silence, and it was in silence that he stalled and hiccuped towards Ray.

A drive-through KFC with a modesty screen of plaited willow around it to protect the blushes of the suburb where it was sited was his personal marker for the beginning of the city. Then the tracts of new budget-opulent business parks; and then quite suddenly the tubular metal trusses of the football stadium rose importantly on the horizon and he knew he was nearly there, exactly an hour and ten minutes late.

There were only a few of the regulars camped outside the tea van when Jackie came to a halt at the place where a little while earlier the ambulance had been. Ray was on his feet and pacing, his blue baseball cap pulled low, his face grey and pinched in a way that Jackie had long ago come to recognize: Ray’s do-
you-know-
who-I-am-this-had-better-be-good face. Jackie leaned across and opened the passenger door.

‘Watch out, flower, he’s worked up to top doh,’ Mighty called to Jackie from the window of the Scran Van. She was laughing. ‘Look at the face on it. Berra be careful the day mind, Jackie. He’s got a face like a well-slapped arse.’

Ray got in the car and said nothing. After a while he twisted round and examined the collars of some shirts which were hanging under plastic covers in the back; his shirts went to the laundry every day because of the make-up he wore; they must never be starched. There had always been these rules: 23 sports jackets that he liked to have hanging a certain way, shirts that had to be carefully
laundered
and exactly folded, 21 pairs of shoes he insisted on lining up in a long, even row on the floor. He pushed aside a newspaper and a clipboard and some other clutter on the rear bench seat.

‘I’m looking for socks. I hope you didn’t forget the socks I asked you to bring.’ Ray had a perspiration problem. Very bad foot odour, exacerbated by the trainers he had taken to wearing. He got through a lot of socks.

‘I forgot the socks,’ Jackie said, slowing at some lights. They were in one of the main shopping streets in the city centre and pedestrians coursed off the pavement on to the road, intent on their deep-filled sandwiches and good-intention, calorie-counter meals. It was the first day of Lent. The lights changed and Ray directed his attention to the front of the car and the phone which was still connected by a cable to the dashboard – Jackie’s phone, claimable as a business expense, paid for by Ray. Ray put it against his ear and heard what he expected: nothing. He had spotted the gluey drink mark on it straightaway.

‘Fucken Barry. Excuse me – “
Jaxon
”,’ he said. ‘The sooner his frickin’ trial comes up and they send him down the happier I’ll be. Bang him up.’ Jackie ignored this. It was nothing he hadn’t heard before. They sat in the silence that they both regarded as the natural condition of them being together. The two of them could sit there together, saying nothing, savouring the darkness, as Dean Martin once said of himself and one of his close Cosa Nostra companions, of one another’s solitude, in a silence more comfortable, and in a way more expressive, than conversation. They had evolved a way of communicating that didn’t involve
talk. When they were working, they were able to turn this to their practical advantage. For example, Ray playing with his tie
indicated
that a complimentary bottle of wine should be brought to that table; Ray toying with his pocket handkerchief indicated that there would be no bill; Ray running his hand through his syrup alerted Jackie to the fact that he wanted to be relieved from having to talk to the bores who had buttonholed him.

As they drove along Jackie dug into his pocket and brought out a tight ball of notes and coins which he gave to Ray.

‘What’s this?’

‘Lottery. I thought I told you. We had five numbers come up Saturday. Another one and we would have had it away.’

Ray said nothing, but the mood of gloom that had been sitting over him lifted slightly. ‘I’ve thought of a way to turn your Barry’s frown upside-down,’ he said eventually. ‘Tell him the one about the acid-bollocks-for-brains-house DJ who was arrested for rape. He went on an identity parade and, as the victim was led into the room, your man shouted, “That’s her!”’ Jackie had heard it before. He knew it was originally about an Irishman, and a Polack in America. But it was still funny. Jackie could be Ray’s best audience.

They drove on. It occurred to Ray for the first time to wonder about the dogs. With Telfer and Ellis both absent from the club overnight he had had to put an extra body in, at added cost. At the mention of his name, Ellis’s tail thudded dully a few times against the hollow tyre cavity, and then stopped.

As they turned out of Trimdon Street on to the Quay, Ray wound his window down and looped the useless mobile over a line of parked cars with expert aim, arcing high and dropping clean into the river.

In turn-of-me-century New York it became fashionable to ‘honour’ the poor. At palaces on Madison Avenue and on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Park, the walls covered in red silk damask,
old-master
paintings glowing behind glass in heavy frames, people gave poverty balls. Guests came dressed in rags and ate from tin plates and drank from chipped mugs. Ballrooms were decorated to look like mines with beams, iron tracks and miners’ lamps. Theatrical scenery firms were hired to make outdoor gardens look like dirt farms and dining rooms like cotton mills. Guests smoked cigar butts offered them on silver trays. One hostess, according to accounts written at the time, invited everyone to a stockyard ball. Guests were wrapped in long aprons and their heads covered with white caps. They dined and danced while hanging carcasses of bloody beef trailed around the walls on moving pulleys. Entrails spilled on the floor. The proceeds were for charity.

Mondays at Bobby’s had a ‘washday’ theme: bed sheets,
frequently
darned and patched, and long-johns and lumpy elasticated knickers, similarly worn and darned, were hung low from
washing-lines
stretched across the club, and hatpins with gnarled
decorative
heads were provided to keep the ‘washing’ pinned back out of the food and the faces of the diners, who were greasy-chopped and fiery-eared and dressed in drab austerity suits and
broken-nebbed
caps and, in the case of the women, serviceable aprons and knotted Aertex turbans and other garb associated with the impoverished working class.

Bottles of white wine at Bobby’s, on Monday nights as on every
night, were brought to the table in handsome Edwardian chamber pots replete with gilding and transfer prints of the old King and Queen and the Royal Standards, and traditional
old-rose
patterns. Wine and beer were kept cooling behind the bar in pot-bellied zinc poss-tubs packed with ice. The heavy-headed wooden possers that would have been used to pound the dirty washing in the tubs, in dark backyards and poky sculleries, were also in evidence as part of the decor at Bobby’s, along with three-legged crackets and clippy mats and several sets of heavy mangles.

None of this had been done, however, in an excessively
knowing
or cynical way, or in a spirit of mean parody. Ronnie Cornish, Ray’s principal financial backer in the club, had had his own mother’s well-worn mangle stripped down and reconditioned and installed in pride of place in the drawing room of the pilastered country mansion which his business success had bought him. The mangle – at which he had watched his mother toil, bringing her full body weight to bear on the broad wooden handle in order to inch leaden sheets all the way through the rollers, which over the years began to bear the imprint of this struggle, becoming withered and indented in the middle – this back-breaking washday aid, framed now by lofty casement windows and many metres of bunched and swagged William Morris fabric, had become the emblem of how far Ronnie Cornish had travelled: from respectable poverty to a home helipad, a Bentley Azure, local eminence and a quote he claimed was from Rudyard Kipling that always tripped easily off his tongue: ‘Like he said, “You can play among princes, but always keep your feet on the ground.” I don’t forget where I came from.’

In this, Ronnie Cornish was no different from the hundreds who came to Bobby’s every week to be reminded, when the circumstances of their lives sometimes seemed to be conspiring to make them forget it – the ninety-five channels, the call-waiting,
the multi-tasking, the compound interest accruing on the
credit-card
bill – that they came from a specific place with a long history and a unique identity and were not in fact unrooted particulate individuals free-floating in infinite space.

It was the great rush to rediscover roots and the sedulous
piecing
together, in local libraries and over the Internet, of family trees that had originally given Ray the idea for a club that would celebrate a communal identity and a frankly romanticized Geordie past. The aim – in addition of course to getting the tills ringing and the profits flowing – had been to provide a place dripping with the texture and particularity that had been largely drained out of the modern world, and to allow the paying customers to reconnect with a missing vital part of themselves. People were no longer embarrassed about their humble origins, as they once were (as Ray had once been), but boastful of any connection they were able to make between themselves and their rough, long-disappeared proletarian backgrounds. ‘My
great-grandfather
committed a murder on the Shields Road,’ a man (admittedly well in his cups) had recently told Ray: well-dressed and well-spoken, he had tears in his eyes as he spoke.

In an unlooked-for development, which had caught the public imagination and garnered a good deal of valuable coverage on television and in the local press, the walls at the club had turned into a gallery of ancestor portraits brought in to be hung there by the clientele. Instead of the wall enamels advertising meat extracts and ointments, shoe blackings and hair oil that had been put up originally, the walls at Bobby’s were now home to scores of vignetted portraits of bewhiskered fellows in stiff wing-collars and curl-brimmed hats, and ample women sharing the same stem, unwavering gaze – great-great-aunts employed as
rabbit-skinners
by a company that made hats for the quality of the city; the great-grandmother of a second cousin in a sandwich board advertising the suffragette journal,
The
Common
Cause.

Every night at Bobby’s brought people who had clearly come slumming; groups of businessmen, in particular, in the North for a bulling session or a sales conference, came prepared to smirk. But after half-a-dozen rousing choruses of ‘Keep Your Feet Still, Geordie Hinny’ or ‘The Gallowgate Lad’ and (especially) a dozen pitchers of Radgie Gadgie strong bitter, they tended like
everybody
else to be content to be cast back to a time when nobody spoke of ‘community’ and everybody belonged to one, and nearly always went away with a souvenir T-shirt or a video or a picture of themselves taken with the star of the show (
£
8.50 incl.
de-embossed
self-stand cardboard frame) at the end. Jackie was in charge of the merchandise, which he sold from a kiosk in the main foyer, where he was also occasionally asked, usually by a fellow former denizen of the boxing racket, to sign an autograph himself. Like most places of public entertainment, the club was cold and rather bleak-looking when it was empty. ‘Sharp warms up when people come in, like,’ Blanche, the general manager, would reassure new members of staff as they stood in the
hangar-like
, vaulted space with their collars up and their hands plunged deep in their pockets, watching Blanche’s breath pluming in the twilighted darkness. Voices echoed in the building in those
pre-opening
hours and something like a clattering ladder detonated with the shock of an explosion, and even the old-stagers
sometimes
allowed themselves to be teased by the thought: What if no one ever came? What if all the customers of Bobby’s had decided against it and found somewhere else to go in the future?

Normally it was a thought that could be immediately
dismissed
rather than morbidly chewed over. There was a thick bookings register made thicker by Post-its and business cards and elastic bands that Blanche fussed and clucked over, endlessly
entering
new names into it and rubbing old names out, briskly dusting the crumbs of rubber away with the heel of her hand. There was a bookings book and usually the book was full a month or so ahead.
But when she had got in just after ten that morning there had been messages on the machine from Bulls Hill Farm at Dunstan, and Emrick Farm at Yarm, cancelling their tables for that night. And all through the morning all the other farmers who had been coming in with their families for what was turning into a
much-looked
-forward-to, once-a-year occasion – Cleughfoot Farm, Cambo; High Highlaws Farm, Marlish; Startup Farm,
Halt-whistle
– had had to cancel their bookings on account of
foot-and
-mouth disease. (Blanche soon started to recognize the jumpiness in the voices and to appreciate that people were calling from already quarantined places where unknown, and possibly
unendurable
, circumstances lay ahead.) By the time Ray arrived, the page for that day was striped with rulered black lines. There were still some private bookings for couples and small groups of four or five. But the only block booking remaining was for a party of sixty associated with the Ephphatha League of the Deaf, a social club exclusively for deaf-mutes. It had already been agreed that a signer would stand at the side of the stage during Ray’s set, to sign the jokes.

‘Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker,’ Blanche said, poking her pencil into the airy pillow of hair at the side of her head.

‘This should be interesting,’ Ray said and headed for his dressing-room, where they both knew his first drink of the day – a generous Jack-and-ginger – would be waiting on the table by the sun-bed.

The club was a simple industrial shed, a part-brick,
part-prefabricated
structure on a small industrial estate on the western fringe of the city centre. With the ‘
BOBBY’S BACK YEM
’ illuminated sign switched off in daylight hours, Bobby’s was
indistinguishable
from the other small businesses – mainly body shops and one-man-and-a-lad grease-monkey outfits – that occupied the unexceptional plain shells. The previous owner had been a sanitaryware manufacturer, which gave rise to the inevitable
jokes, in the early days when Bobby’s was first being mooted, about pissing money up the wall and shit-for-brains and
watching
it all going down the pan. (To which it had since given Ray and his partners inordinate pleasure, whenever they ran into a disinvestor, to – with equal inevitability – go: ‘Have a drink. Have a bottle. I’m feeling flush.’ It was a line that Ronnie Cornish, in particular, couldn’t hear himself saying loud or often enough.) The club’s closest neighbours, separated from it by the car park on one side and a reinforcing wall of wire cages filled with rocks on the other, were Metal Morphosis, suppliers of quality jewellery and medical equipment for the piercing and tattooing industry, and Tip Top Light Vehicle Crash Repair.

Because of its exposed position on a bank high above the river, the fences on the industrial estate were constantly festooned with shredded plastic and rooted in an ever replenished build-up of refuse. Every day when Ray got out of his car he left instructions for Paddy the odd-job man to come with his broad broom and clear it away. And every day it was back, a deep drift of cigarette packets and rubber gloves and lager tins and syringes and dirty sculpted dunes of dog-ends, arrived, Ray could only suppose, on the wind. That day he had been able to ask Paddy to go and see to it himself: he had come across him on his way in, swilling out the row of brick toilets in the yard – the ‘ootside netties’ – which had originally been put in as a gimmick, but which had proved surprisingly popular, especially with women, who rhapsodized about the memories they brought back of lagged pipes and hanging icicles in winter and nipping in there late for a last cigarette and a snog. (And who, Ray had had pointed out to him, wrote far fruitier things on the walls than were ever found in the men’s toilets.)

On arrival, Jackie had changed into his blue janitor’s trousers and gone off to drain the dregs from the barrels in the cellar and stillage the beer that the brewery had delivered that morning. Ellis had crossed the yard, sniffed around for a long time in the
place where Telfer would normally be, and retired miserably to his kennel.

It often seemed to Ray that he’d spent two-thirds of his life in a state of stupefied suspension, just waiting. Like everybody in his business he had evolved strategies designed to cope with the empty, dragged-out time leading up to the brief time – an hour and frequently less – when he had to be ‘on’ and performing. At the height of his popularity, when it had been difficult to go
anywhere
without being recognized, he had whiled away the hours playing board games and endless hands of poker and rummy for matchsticks with Jackie. It was in the course of these long hours which turned into weeks and then years that they developed the ability to be alone together,
da
lontano.
‘Success is a peculiar thing because you stop living,’ one of the great stars of the day had told Ray when he was just starting to get a foot on the ladder. ‘You don’t tend to get into scrapes, and then where’s your material? Things don’t happen.’

At one point in his desperation Ray had even given
needlepoint
a go, encouraged in that direction by Dora Bryan during a summer season in Weston. But he had quickly come to feel that he might as well be sewing mailbags for sixpence a day and a snout ration, and that was the problem with all the sedentary pastimes he’d dabbled in in the confines of his dressing-room cell: he felt like an old lag just noodling away his life until the parole board next met to decide that he continued to pose a threat to society and therefore to return him to his cell to go on rotting.

For one happy summer at Paignton on the ‘Devon Riviera’ he had learned the rudiments of bell-ringing from the theatre chaplain there. Most theatre chaplains, Ray had found, were just frustrated performers having to make do with camping around in their mitres and best frocks on Sundays, or elevated
autograph-hunters
looking for the sprinkle of Stardust to rub off. But Pastor Bernard was a former communist agitator and organizer of flying
pickets who had been gathered in by the Lord, as he put it, during a spell in solitary in Armley Gaol in Leeds. Encountering Ray in one of his periodic lows, he had extolled the virtues of bell-ringing on the body and the spirit and had persuaded Ray to join him and his happy band on their ringing trips into the outlying
countryside
, when they would do three or four churches in a day – off the coach, up the cobwebby stairs into a bell tower with a resident bat colony and gaps in the unrestored tiles showing the sky, sending a carillon across the sun-baked fields and – best of all – no need to talk because it was impossible to talk inside the confined
aeons-old
space choked with dust and banging with noise. Ray learned to play the changes from Pastor Bernard, and the reverberations seemed to stay in his arms and in the air for a long while
afterwards
, making pretty little picture-postcard villages such as Berry Pomeroy and Stoke Gabriel and Ipplepen feel as lonely and desolate as the Bay of Funday and the river Hooghly. His back ached and his hands trembled when the ringers gathered round a table tomb for tea and biscuits after the last bell had been rung out, but he looked back on those months from the perspective of his later years as a time of almost total contentment.