by Gordon Burn
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.
His watch was one he had had for many years, with an antiquated, slightly unsteady digital display. He pushed the button and the digits went from green to orange: 28:02:01. And back to green again: 10:12. He knew that Ray would be standing at his bedroom window with his breakfast by now, taking in the passing show on the Moor. He knew that he would be showered but unshaved and in a grump because of the horse manure, as Ray never failed to refer to it, that was in the diary for the afternoon (a decision on new carpet tiles, wrinkles in the new rota-shift system to iron out, the meeting with Alan Harries, the former outside left known to supporters as ‘Gladys’, to discuss pool table revenues and wet sales). Jackie knew all this because it was his job to know it. And yet he also knew he was going to call Ray (it was now 10:14) the way he did at exactly this time every morning to make double sure he was up and about. But he felt his heart lurch when he reached around to the part of his belt where he normally carried his mobile phone and realized instantly the phone wasn’t there. He felt the blood rush to his face, and then he felt it ebb away again as soon as he remembered he’d left it behind at the house to get some juice in it because his shtarka, shit-for-brains DJ son Barry had been speaking on it and texting on it and playing zombified games on it all night.
Barry was a ‘mixmaster’ or ‘trancemeister’ DJ, according to the druggy clubbing magazines with, to Jackie, incomprehensible titles like XLR8R, which he left scattered around the house. The captions to the pictures in these magazines – Barry ‘bang on it’; Barry ‘really having it off’ – identified him as ‘Jaxon’, which was how he was known professionally and to his loyal followers in the house and techno clubs that apparently (it was true, but Jackie found this personally hard to believe) were always a sell-out whenever he appeared.
‘Jaxon’ was what Barry was also called by the under-age girls Jackie had started to find at the house. He had arrived back from work at three that morning to find a sharp-spined, skinny figure curled up asleep on the sofa in the living room and a local girl he had seen around sitting up at the table with Barry. Their thumbs were working overtime on the pads of their respective phones, and their eyes were out on stalks. Playing low in the background was music that seemed to incorporate church organ music and baby gurgles with crowd chants and the bloops and bleeps of a nuclear power plant or a NASA launch; at intervals this was punctuated with a line of commentary from a natural-history film – When lava flows underwater it flows differently – and Hannibal Lecter’s sibilant tssss-tssss-tssss salivating-over-human-liver sound.
Barry Mabe was thirty-seven, and as much of a stranger to his father as his father was to him. After an ill-judged night in a private London square with a woman and another man, he had been arrested and charged with rape (which he denied). After two-and-a-half months in Wandsworth Prison, he had been given police bail and had then immediately fled northwards to his father’s house to ‘chill’ until the trial. For the first six weeks he had shut himself away in his room, where he guzzled Coco-Pops and illicit chemicals (‘the illicits’ as he called them) and took care to make sure that, even when he was wearing headphones, all the walls pounded evenly with a deep blood pulse to relentless programmed music, like an artificial lung. He had emerged under cover of darkness in those first weeks only to take possession of the telephone and to have his weekly shower. So the current state of affairs, give or take the odd teenage crackhead and schoolgirl runaway, as far as Jackie was concerned, showed movement in the right direction from there.
An hour earlier when he’d left the house, Barry and his little friend had still been up and wide awake. A grainy, black-and-white documentary about shipbuilding was on the television, with Barry twiddling knobs and spinning decks, spinning the records back, chop-mixing them to supply his own soundtrack of electronic bleats and cascading strings. Interspersed with these were gales of recorded drunken laughter and a man’s voice intoning the same words over and over – ’s all for this time seeee you next time’s all for this time seeee you next time’s all for this time seeee you next time – which Jackie of course knew was Ray taken from his live in-performance video, Ray Cruddas Live at Bobby’s Back Yem.
As Jackie and the dogs emerged from the woods into Back Church Lane he saw that white-overalled officials from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food – it announced this on a sign attached to the side of a rented van: ‘MAFF’ – were in the process of sealing off the path. They were holding back the tape to allow an elderly man to transfer some bottles from the basket on the handlebar of his old bike to one of a row of big metal recycling bins as Jackie approached, feeling like somebody going into the Nothing-to-Declare channel with a kilo of Chinese heroin hidden in a secret compartment in his suitcase. He knew he shouldn’t have been in the country where he had just been walking the dogs. It was selfish and stupid, and one of the MAFF men seemed about to say something along these lines as Jackie cut through their little group, but the man in the white Baby-gro held himself in check at the last minute.
The route Jackie had taken had brought him in nearly a full circle around the back of th
e village. A succession of pale rendered bungalows on the main road screened off the houses of a pre-war council estate. The bank in the village was open only two mornings a week now, and the cashpoint that had been installed was protected by two metal reinforced-concrete bollards against the ram-raid attacks that were an everyday hazard round there.
Until recently there had been three shops in the village: one had been converted into a private dwelling, with witchy lace curtains across the plate window; another was an estate agent’s. Most people did their shopping at the giant superstore a few miles down the motorway. Now there was just a Nice Price huddled behind metal grilles with coils of razor wire glinting on the roof. As Jackie stepped up to the door – the dogs were tethered to the broken-down remains of a horse trough – the door opened and a woman wearing a candlewick dressing-gown and carpet slippers came out clutching a four-pack of Scandinavian lager close to her chest.
Nice Price had been taken over by the Khans, and Mrs Khan, who wore the traditional vermilion mark in the centre of her forehead as well as bright lipstick and Western clothes, was sprinkling fish food into a large, floor-level plastic pond as Jackie came into the shop. The fish were clouded and lugubrious and rather sinister-looking, but the Khans had inherited them from the previous owner who specialized in koi and small household pets such as terrapins and gerbils, and the Khans, to the surprise of most of their customers, had kept this part of the business up. The back part of the shop was devoted to everyday hardware requirements and pets; the front part to groceries and confectionery. Jackie took his usual newspaper off the counter and walked over to the plastic Lottery lectern to do his lines for the Wednesday draw.
It was standing here the previous week that he had overheard three light-complexioned black girls and a darker black man he assumed was their pimp buying condoms, cottonwool, vodka and microwave meals. He had experienced the dull pang of excitement he’d imagined you’d get from writing something indiscreet or disgustingly explicit on a lavatory wall. He had gone close enough to smell the funky/musky scent of their skin and the stiffening gloop on their fruits-of-the-forest-smelling hanks of shiny hair and to establish that under their coats they were wearing bare midriffs and thin scooped-neck tops in February.
He tried to blank this from his mind as he handed Mrs Khan the Lottery slip and watched as she fed it efficiently into the machine. An inconsequential exchange on the chances of winning would have been in order at this point, but unusually Jackie had winnings to collect: £36 for matching five of the six numbers, to be divided equally between Ray and himself. Mrs Khan counted the notes on to the flat of his hand and beamed as she did so. Jackie folded all of the notes into his wallet apart from the five-pound note, which he handed back to Mrs Khan with a gesture that indicated it was for her.
‘Good-luck money,’ he said, when she took a step away from him behind the barrier of the counter, aghast. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘It’s a tradition. It’s like … It’s a present. I’m giving some of the luck back to you.’
But Mrs Khan continued to look alarmed and, he thought, even slightly afraid. ‘Tell you what,’ Jackie said then, anxious to bring their relationship back to its former friendly but always formal footing. ‘I’ll buy another five cards with the money and go evens with you if any of them come up. Then you’d never have to sell another hamster again, God willing.’
‘You have heard the expression I am sure, Mr Mabe.’ (She sounded the ‘e’, pronouncing his name ‘maybe’.) ‘“Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.”’ Mrs Khan passed him the counterfoil with the numbers of his five new Lucky Dips. ‘Be lucky,’ Jackie said over the noise of the bell on the end of a strip of sprung metal that exploded into life when he jerked open the door.
The Miners’ Club and Institute in Rusty Lane, a big building with a grandiloquent sandstone and granite Victorian façade, was somewhere Ray Cruddas had performed in the early fifties in sweetly old-fashioned light-entertainment concerts that had been recorded for radio transmission in the North of England only by the BBC. He had been the second-spot comic on bills that typically featured local choirs – the Low Fell Ladies’ Choir, conductor Molly Peacock; the Shildon Youth Choir, conductor Harold Pletts – singing popular favourites such as ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’ and “The Bells of St Mary’s’, and local songs like ‘Bobbie Shaftoe’ and ‘The Bonnie Pit Laddie’. As he had grown in experience, and his producers had come to appreciate that he was a performer with channellable domestic charm rather than larger-than-life appeal, Ray had been allowed to act as compère at the shows, which were put on in different working men’s clubs and miners’ welfare halls in the area every week. Standing at the black coffin-shaped radio microphone in his penguin suit, over humming of ‘The Stars Look Down’, he would reassure audiences both in the hall and gathered round the radio hearth: ‘Whatever the change these modern days may bring, there’s no pleasure more lasting than that of voices combining in harmony. Tonight it’s our privilege to present seventy girls who are as lovely to listen to as they are to look at. Under its conductor, Bill Armstrong, here’s the Whitley Bay Girls’ Choir.’ And then Ray and the audience, in hearty unison: ‘The people sing!’
The Rusty Lane Club and Institute had been gutted and was currently undergoing conversion to loft-style apartments and studio flats. Manor Grange – the New Kennels – the estate where Jackie lived, was situated behind the Institute in an interlinked series of culs-de-sacs which, if viewed from above, would have formed a uniform star ratchet shape. The houses were small and semi-detached, with leaded lattice windows and white weather-boarded fronts. The front garden plots were postage-stamp-sized and unfenced, although Jackie’s immediate neighbour (Barry’s bugbear) had made a Japanese meditation garden with purplish washed pebbles and a set of jagged slate standing stones.
The house interiors had been fitted with a considerable amount of ornamental plasterwork and dado rails in the living rooms with timber panelling below and (usually) scumbled or floral-patterned wallpaper above. Jackie had some sepia mementoes of his fighting life hanging from one of the picture rails on yellow brass chains.
His house stood on a corner plot with a small wetroom just inside the back door where he normally left his heavy shoes and his old waxed jacket. He was just turning into the space at the side of the house when his knees collided with a running three-year-old in a Spiderman mask and a Superman outfit. This was OJ, sprog offspring of Barry’s little gas-sniffer friend Eleanor, known as ‘Choo-Choo’, who Jackie knew had been sent round by Eleanor’s mother to fetch her home.
‘High-fives!’ OJ turned and screamed at Barry, who had stood back to let the dogs rush past him and was following Eleanor along the path barefooted. ‘Don’t leave me hangin‘!’ OJ had his little hand up in the air and Barry high-fived him. OJ whooped with delight. ‘Go some!’ Barry shouted as OJ and his mother, who was bedraggled and a little unsteady on her feet, tottered off in the direction of home.
Inside the house, Jackie tried Ray on the phone although he knew he would be out on his run by then, and there was no reply. He disconnected his mobile from the recharging cable and noticed for the first time the small, sticky patch where, sometime during the course of the night, the phone had been put down in a pool of drink or had had drink spilled into it. It was something – another thing – he would have to go into with Barry, but not now. Barry was too much out of his tree, simultaneously dead-eyed and agitated, gnawing on the knuckle of a thumb, jaw muscles popping. He was wearing jeans with holes ripped at the knees and what looked like a white cabled county cricket sweater except that the solid band of colour around the neck turned out under closer study to be a pattern of hundreds of tiny interlocking couples fornicating.
The video about shipbuilding that had been playing before Jackie left the house had been replaced by one showing muggers and robbers and other swamplife caught on police surveillance cameras: the pause button had been pushed and the screen was filled with angrily eff
ervescing streaks and smudges. Barry flicked a switch on his keyboard. Welcome, stranger, to the humble neighbourhoods, a voice said several times, reverberated for several seconds, and then desisted. This was followed by gentle ocean sounds and a blast of screaming white feedback. Then a sample from what Jackie recognized as one of the monologues of Joyce Grenfell: No, George, don’t do that … G–g–g–georrrrrrge, don’t do that. Then nothing.
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.