The North of England Home Service

by Gordon Burn

  Ray’s ‘dress-hair’ was waiting to be fitted at the club. The hair of his own that he had left was a deep chestnut brown, and a small patch of hair of a similar colour had been stitched into the ‘D’ at the back of his baseball hat where a half-moon of white scalp would otherwise have been framed. It was one of the demands of the job, as he saw it, to stay trim and presentable. He had weights and a tanning bed in his dressing-room.

  But he had a recent history of letting himself go. This had happened when the TV work had eventually dried up and the phone stopped ringing and he slipped into the show-business shadows, just doing the odd after-dinner appearance and Rotary Round Table and living in a ranch-style house backing on to a golf course in Devon. His second wife had taken up with a man who made a decent living wearing a wetsuit and flippers to retrieve golf balls from the course’s ponds and water hazards, the biggest of which was near the end of their garden, and had moved in with him.

  He’d given in to lassitude, gloom and resignation then. Let the grey come through in his hair. Piled the weight on. Eating the same food sitting at the same window table in the My Blue Heaven village Italian six nights a week while Tony and Aldo and Giuseppe smoked and fingered their watches and watched ear-splitting football on the television. Seafood linguine and escalope of veal every night for he didn’t want to remember how long. Bottle of the house red. Glass of limoncello with the sharp-as-hell almond biscuit things that shredded his gums.

  It was the first time for years that he hadn’t had Jackie there to deflect attention and at least simulate conversation. At that time, for the first time in all the years they had been together, Jackie was having to earn his own living. He opened a caravan park for short-stay vans. He built the lavatory block and put down the soil pipe himself; but they kept disappearing without paying, even when he padlocked the main gate overnight. That had cleaned him out. Next he’d gone on the road, peddling bar sundries and colour-coded boning knives and the new regulation anti-bacterial chopping boards to pubs and restaurants, with second-hand books at car-boot sales as a sideline. He would come round to Ray’s and sit at the kitchen table over a beer, stacking his takings in columns.

  This is not something that would have happened if Charmian had still been there. Charmian had never got on with Jackie. She never saw the point of him; Charmian had always refused to be able to see what Jackie was for. And as she found her place in the gin-and-Jaguar hierarchy slipping as Ray’s face faded from the television and the invitations to high-profile occasions trickled to a halt, things came to a head.

  Ray had built up a reputation for being a big tipper. ‘When you’ve got nothing, act like you’ve got loads’ had been his motto when he set out, and it was what he still believed now that, after a lifetime of free spending, he was having to pull his horns in. It had always been their arrangement that Jackie carried a substantial float of cash to tip the maître d’, tip the waiter, tip the cloakroom girl, tip the taxi driver. Tip, tip, tip, with Charmian, when she was there, scowling blackly in the background at all times.

  Ray was always telling Jackie to pick up theatre tickets for this one, send a bottle of Jack to that one, collect one of the cars from the garage, send flowers to somebody else. And then Charmian grabbed her moment when she saw Jackie taking a note from a stack of several notes wedged under a framed photograph in their bedroom and accused him of stealing from the house. Pointless to say he was only doing what Ray had told him to do (which Ray confirmed). Equally pointless, when Charmian demanded to know why he hadn’t come and asked her, to remind her that she questioned every purchase and every expense, wanting to know why it was bought, where, for how much, and for whom.

  But Charmian, it turned out, was already having secret moonlight meetings in the bunkers with Gavin, her flippered golf-ball retriever, by then. So Jackie was soon back round, letting himself in with his key, counting his coins at the kitchen table like a back-street busker; while Ray, greying, balding and surplus to requirements, slumped disconsolately inside his neon tan. Not so much Don Juan and Sancho Panza, more Bob and Terry (or Terry and June, as Jackie liked to say). Coram and Jennie, a knife-throwing act they used to tour with. (He ended up winging her with a tomahawk one night at the Palace of Varieties, Leicester, after too much to drink at the end of the first house.) Mutt and Jeff. Both of them running on the rims.

  It was soon after this, with nowhere left to go, that Ray had come home.

  His route took him up to the end of his terrace, then sharp left through a heavy sprung gate whose banging sometimes kept him awake, on to the Moor. To his right, over towards the allotments, the old man continued to discuss the price of corned beef with the cows. The light was still flat and grey, but the weather was lifting. It would soon be lunchtime, and the day had been aired, as his mother used to like to say.

  “S’goin’, boss?’ Danny the soft lad said from his bench as Ray jogged past. Approaching, Ray had caught the glint of light through the ribbon of lager as it travelled the four inches from the lip of the tin through clean air straight to the back of Danny’s throat.

  ‘You’re here to sell it, not sup it,’ the bar manager at Bobby’s was always telling his staff, and it’s a rule that Ray often wished he could apply to himself. Many of the old theatre managers he’d known had felt very strongly that performers should stay on their side of the curtain and kept the pass door between the auditorium and backstage locked for that reason. If you wanted a drink you sent out for one and had it brought to the dressing-room. But in a club it didn’t work like that. The locals’ deeply rooted devotion to drink meant they took it as a personal insult if you refused one. ‘Aye, twist me arm, I think I can manage a pint.’ How many times a night did Ray hear himself saying that? And last night, which hadn’t been in any way an uproarious one, he had got on to ‘binoculars’ – two tall hundred-gram glasses of vodka, downed in one. Another night recently the trick drink at Bobby’s had been a Depth-charger, which involved letting go a heavy-bottomed glass of vodka into a pint glass of lager and drinking them off together. The customer who had treated Ray to the first of these had assured him that part of the attraction was the possibility of the shot glass gathering speed inside the pint glass and smashing your teeth.

  The difficulty of saying no, and saying it in time, was why Ray had taken to wearing a black bin-liner next to his body, under the satiny tracksuit top: to help sweat it out.

  A large-headed mongrel dog he had never seen before came yapping at his ankles as he pounded along a path that cut through tall weeds and brought him close to the stand of trees. The dog then veered away again as suddenly as it had arrived. The silence held by the trees amplified the echo of his footfalls on the compacted wet ground and the catch of his breathing. Then something in his peripheral vision, or maybe a sound, made him turn in time to see two boys setting fire to one of the benches on the Moor.

  He recognized them by their baggy jeans concertinaed around their ankles and their big baggy oversized shirts as the two boys who had called out something pissy-sounding to him when he had overtaken them a few minutes earlier. (He was pretty sure he’d heard the word ‘grandad’.) As he continued to jog backwards, he saw a brief blast of pure red flame as the plastic laminate covering the metal of the bench caught, followed by a dirty flowering of sooty black smoke. The two munchkins were already halfway across the Moor, body-charging each other and whooping and heading in the direction of the allotments, by the time he turned around and righted himself (nothing he could do) and started running in the direction of his own house once again.

  The roofs of the terrace were steeply pitched with dormer windows peeping out of them. Some houses were colour-washed in pale pinks and greens, but most of them had been stripped of their rendering in the past few years and brought back to the original brick. In the case of Ray’s house this had been done with a rather heavy hand: the grit-blasting had turned the façade an unnatural, too-bright nursery red he didn’t imagine it had ever been. The pointing had also co
me up too white and synthetic-looking, and the general effect was of a jealously protected but never-played-with doll’s house.

  He didn’t know any of his neighbours to speak to, but from their appearance and the hours they kept he supposed they worked in solid professions such as accountancy, insurance, local government, computers, the university of course. The bright, open aspect of their houses, their tacked-up children’s paintings and honeyed pine, was in marked contrast to the houses of the few remaining elderly residents whose dim interiors hid behind once dark and heavy, now faded and thin, chenille curtains and dust-laden window plants. Only one house in Moor Edge Terrace bore the signs of multi-occupation: batik-pattern and Indian bedspreads at all the windows; overturned black plastic dustbins with the flat numbers daubed in white paint rolling around the garden. It was the people in this house who Ray believed were responsible for the night-time slamming of the Moor access gate.

  The terrace had been erected at around the same time as the football ground. For most of their history a kind of parity had existed, but now Moor Edge was dwarfed and dominated by its closest neighbour. A hundred years earlier Ray could have stood in one of his back bedrooms, thirty feet above the heads of the spectators standing on an earth embankment raised at the south end of the ground, behind the goal, and watched teams of terrier-like, mostly pitmen players in heavy dubbined leather boots and baggy drawers ploughing up the mud. Many of them would have taken the motor bus and then the electric tram in from the outlying villages where they lived, crush-loaded with other miners who were corning to see them play. Even as late as the 1950s the top-floor bedrooms still commanded a view over the concrete terracing straight into what was already being referred to, sentimentally but not misleadingly, as the Theatre of Dreams.

  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.