The North of England Home Service
Page 7
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’.
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.
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 kn
ew 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.
3
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.