The North of England Home Service

by Gordon Burn

  The Chinese woman was still sitting on the end of the bench where she had been sitting when Ray first saw her. She was holding a napkin as a pad against her knee. The wound around her throat had darkened but she had stopped shaking so violently. A few new customers had arrived at the van, and Mighty had served them. People on the buses had stopped craning their necks to follow what was happening as they passed. The Red Lion opposite had opened. The day had slowed back into its own momentum. But now the police siren tore it open.

  The police car slowed almost to a halt outside the Red Lion and then accelerated into a tight U-turn that halted the on-coming traffic and made the tyres squeal on the asphalt road surface. ‘Fucken Fangio,’ the man said, as all heads turned to watch the car and the young officers – one male, one female – who quickly emerged from it. They were wearing sleeveless, official-issue black quilted jackets over crisp white shirts, and as they moved away from the car they took their caps off and clamped them up in their armpits. Mighty came down the wooden steps pushed up against the door at the side of the van and assumed responsibility for relating what had happened.

  The female officer knelt down on the right-hand side of the Chinese woman just as Mighty had earlier. Her colleague, meanwhile, remained upright with his notebook in one hand and his pencil poised, scanning the faces on the benches and at the tables in a half-amused, knowing kind of fashion. ‘It is my duty to warn you that anything you say may be taken down, totally fucken twisted and used to nail you,’ the man near to Ray said in a carrying voice. When the male constable had first got out of the car Ray thought he’d noticed something unusual about him. Now that he had turned to face in their direction Ray could see that he had an ash mark thumbed on his forehead. Its shape was more distinct than the starter moustache he was growing. Mighty had a similar mark, although part dissolved in grease and perspiration and consequently much fainter, in the same place on her head. Ray had thought it was a smudge from the kitchen or to do with the commotion surrounding the woman, but now he remembered: Ash Wednesday. The day before, Mighty had had pancakes on the board and, seeing people tucking into jam pancakes, and pancakes served with lemon juice and sugar, he had seriously wavered.

  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.’

  2

  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.