by Gordon Burn
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 manufact
urer, 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.
Now that he was not so young Ray filled most of his dead dressing-room hours with routines connected to his health and his appearance. He was coming to learn, as so many others of his age had come to learn before him, that at no other time of life is existence so intensely physical. A small infarction caused by some interference in the blood supply and resulting in the right-hand side of his face going south for a week or two had brought on the jogging and a new, rigidly observed low-cholesterol, high-protein diet. (The admonitions about his drinking he was largely ignoring.) He took vitamin B12 complex in capsule form and sixteen drops of oil of echinacea in his second drink (ruining the taste but not the kick) and zinc and calcium supplements and put on restful music and lay on his sun-bed for thirty-five minutes every afternoon. He did a gentle work-out using leg weights and barbells. Jackie came in some time after that and massaged warm olive oil into his back, pressing into the flesh to find the knots of tiredness and stress. He had his remaining hair cut and coloured and blow-dried in a way that cleverly disguised its uneven thinning condition. It was washed and styled for him every afternoon by Julie, one of the front-of-house staff, who returned later to help him fix his hairpiece correctly and do a finishing comb-over at the sides and back to ensure that no joins were showing. Jackie, who knew to the millilitre how to pace him, kept drip-feeding him drink.
Calm and quiet, that was the idea. The silence that is in the starry sky, the sleep that is among the lonely hills. Except that today, all day, he kept having his quiet time eaten into by extraneous noise and interruptions and what he considered unreasonable demands on his time. The band was auditioning a new singer, which he had forgotten was going to happen, and so the soothing music on his CD was drowned out by a voice that could strip paint, belting out club concert-room standards like ‘New York, New York’ and ‘Mack the Knife’. He had had to skip his massage when Alan Harries, the brewery rep, overran by nearly an hour, bending his ear with his tale of woe about how his wife was leaving him for another woman, the mother of his daughter’s best friend, and how their affair had been going on for years under his nose without him realizing, de-dah-de-dah. (Jackie had got it in the neck for this. ‘If he wants to talk, he should see a priest,’ Jackie said. ‘That’s all you had to tell him.’ ‘Don’t make me use rude obscenities, Jackie, you know it gives me indigestion.’)
And then in the late afternoon he had had to jam his baseball cap on over his still-unpolymerized hair in an attempt to put out Typhoon Eddie, which was blowing through the kitchen. The chef, ‘Eddie’ Edmunds, was a big man in all directions, with a proud stomach and a broad red floreted nose which turned white when he got angry, which was often. (His nose had earned him the nickname ‘Traffic Light’ among the younger kitchen workers, a fact he didn’t know.) He wore his thinning hair in a pony-tail-with-scrunchie with two fuzzy brackets of hair, which turned into lank hasidim-like ringlets in the wet heat, framing his ears.
Some of the waiting staff were folding cutlery into paper na
pkins and watching an afternoon soap on the big scroll-down television: the drilling Australian accents boomed around the empty room and even a door opening or closing cracked like thunder. ‘Chef’s off on one,’ a voice called to Ray from out of the gloaming. But Ray could already hear him, roaring and erupting and violently banging about.
‘Whichever yi lay yor hands on forst, hinny. Aa divvent mek a pet o’ me stummick,’ an elderly woman had said a few nights earlier when she was asked if she would be having the tripe and onions or the Tweed salmon. Her family and the waitress serving her had thought that was very funny, but when it was reported back to him in the kitchen Eddie Edmunds had just grunted that it was typical. The menu at Bobby’s mainly consisted of cow-heel brawn, saveloy dips, leek-and-bacon roly-poly, sheep’s-head broth (‘the eyes will see you through the week’), stotty cake, pease pudden and other authentic local dishes which the chef took pride in preparing. But recently rumours had been flying about a plan to add the kind of eat-all-you-want Chinese hot table that was proving to be such a popular draw in the restaurants of Chinatown, and Eddie Edmunds had already resigned twice that month.
‘Haddaway, man, I’ve enough meat here to feed the fucken five thousand and still have enough left over for half the Hoppins.’ Eddie was fulminating by the pastry station in the centre of the kitchen. He was wearing a tabard top which was heavily, almost heroically, soiled, and red-and-white (his team’s colours) chessboard trousers. Sweat coursed down the back of his neck into his collar; his strawberry nose glowed white. But while Eddie continued to blow his stack, all around him was an oasis of uninterested calm: two acned youths were hunched over a board game that Ray could see was called ‘Social Insecurity’; a dreamy, dark-haired girl was sitting cross-legged on the floor, caressing one of the satinized industrial surfaces with a mutton-cloth duster and baby oil; another girl – plainer, plumper – was idly pushing the orders carousel round and round with her finger.