by Gordon Burn
His errands, and the closeness they had established, continued to take Jackie back to Whitechapel and Booba, still in the Buildings, still observing the ways of the old country with the exception of the salty brown shrimps and slippery monster bull-whelks in mustard malt vinegar that Jackie went out of his way to bring for her whenever nostalgia or Mr Solomons’ nipping bad conscience put a visit to Booba on the programme.
Down the turning, into the court, up the stairs, on to the faintly urine-smelling landing into the warm encompassing murkiness, the familiar pall and penumbra and Booba’s tin boxes and little candles and gas mantels, a trail of wax collecting on her single treasured Meissen candlestick with the painted pattern of bud flowers, the flames dancing on the walls and leaning and shifting in the wind.
Booba who did not want many pleasures in life; who believed the more pleasure you got out of living, the more fear you had of dying. Booba who was still attached to the economy of scarcity, despite the growing evidence of abundance all around (a labour-saving electric Teasmade invention in a box she had never opened; chests full of Egypt cotton, silk and satin, the finest stiff linen; a mink stole, retail value forty guineas, moulting in the wardrobe). Booba who was so different from her son the big boxing man and loud presence in the world, always so unashamed, so colourful, so compulsive, and exhibiting such a lack of restraint. ‘This clouding-out ego‚’ she called him now, agitated, black eyes flashing, tough chapped shtetl fingers on the table smoothing and smoothing. ‘This bellying blister waiting to drop its dirty load over all our lives, mine and all his brothers and sisters. And yours too, Jackie. Jack was a happy baby. Jack had a normal life as far as I, his mother, is concerned. Never in criminal offences. But now with Jack is all big “I”s and little “you”s. He expects bow and scrape to his whims. Jackie, hear me, you are another being with another life to lead.’
It disturbed Jackie to hear Booba speak like this. Was she dying? Afflicted with an intractable ageing disease? Had something happened? (Every grain of Mr Solomons’ life, personal and business, was grist to the rumour mill, exchangeable currency, but Jackie had heard nothing.)
‘He thinks he is good man. He is rich man, but this is different. Finance terms, yes – money – when it comes to money, we are all on velvet‚’ the old lady said, speaking half in English and half in the Yiddish that Jackie had come increasingly to understand. ‘Pah!’
She had been shocked by the recognition that such uninhibition, if not exhibitionism, of her son’s was allowed in the world; that here a completely different and new content was expressing itself. ‘“All world is fiddle.” Hah! What you do comes back around to you. This I can say, lobbes Jackie. This I believe.’
Booba asked Jackie if he had heard of the Jewish legend of the golem; if he was familiar with this word. ‘Was an artificial man. Mechanical man in a human image which stood and lived. Golem had the gift of memory and would obey orders mechanic-like, without reflection, provided they came at regular intervals. Chop wood, sweep the street and the synagogue, all diversity of menial tasks. Golem was servant, and servant that does not answer back. But when rabbi wished to destroy his golem, rabbi had power to revert his golem – his! always me me me! – back to straw and wet clay.
‘I don’t like to be kibbitzer here‚’ Booba said, slowly easing herself out of her chair, ‘but boxing is over with you now. What is you do? You come with the bucket, you mop up the blood. You shmooze the mother. You prowl the night. You carry tales. Jack is Jack. Jack is his own story. But you are Jackie. Different story. What is Jackie’s story? Where does Jackie go? Are your dreams really your own dreams?’
Booba started for the scullery, supporting herself by the knuckles on large pieces of furniture as she went. Jackie stood at the door and looked at what had been Jack’s and Maxie’s and Barney’s and Asher’s room (the shiny rub of their bodies was still imprinted on the walls), and then his room. The openwork window curtain weighted with a single lapis bead which frequently made a light tapping in the night; the wallpaper faded to an almost sepia brown; the swan-neck gas bracket for the hissing light. He saw a pair of shoes he had forgotten he ever owned peeping out from under the bed.
Booba brought pink veal, gherkin pickles, challah bread – a little shmeck. The candles guttered at a slant, gouging crater holes in the wax. Booba cupped her hands around the candles closest to her to shut out the draught. He ate. The knife rang against the plate. So it was agreed. He would move back here.
*
Life in London was such a rich density of living – so densely textured and closely packed with the tight unpickable weave of detail and incident: the hanging yellow smogs of the traffic and the frying-onion smells drifting from the new hamburger bars that were now starting to spring up all over; the visual crash and commotion, the roar and racket non-stop from neon-rise to neon-set.
It made that other life that Ray had been used to until then feel like a thin thing, thin as the sheets he liked to have his mother tuck in tightly around him at night while pretending to be asleep and unaware she was there. These sheets he remembered from childhood were frictionless and shabby and rubbed away to a slippy pilled near-transparency which was beyond patching. (‘Even the patches had patches’ – an old joke of Bobby Thompson’s – for a while had been literally true in Ray’s case. In Ray and Betty Cruddas’s case: many times his mother would sleep with only a hessian-like rough blanket next to her body, or a dyed Service coat, coarse against the satin slip she slept in, and no sheet at all.) Every so often an elbow or a knee or a ragged toenail would catch in a sheet and Ray would become aware of a rasping tearing sensation which would briefly wake him up. The next morning his mother would rip conclusively through the sheet using her fists and (he particularly remembered) her teeth, demonstrating unsuspected pent-up strength, and he would recognize the colour or the pattern with a start or a pang some time later when she started using the sheet pieces for dusting and polishing and other tasks about the house.
The place Ray was always most likely to entertain thoughts about the interesting thickening of his life and the encouraging course it was taking was a small drinking club on the ground floor in Denman Street in Soho; the Mazurka it was called. It was also known as ‘Ginnie’s Club’ after the woman who ran it and who had been a Windmill girl once: Denman Street was a narrow rat-run almost directly opposite the Windmill Theatre, and a lot of the girls from the show would get down there. Solomons Gym was around the corner, and the boxing fraternity came in to ‘Ginnie’s’. Occasionally it was the champions themselves, but more usually the managers and the sharpies and other supernumeries of the fight game. Mac’s Rehearsal Room was in the basement of the Jack Solomons building, and the cool hip-hep jazz types from Mac’s would also crowd in with their hair cut short in Perry Como ‘college-boy’ styles, duffel coats, pointed, elegant shoes, and skinny, horizontally banded ties. What you also had in Ginnie’s at this point in the mid-to-late fifties was a group of ex-Guards officers who camply called each other names such as ‘Miss Ann’ and ‘Belinda’ and shouted ‘Abyssinia!’ at each other when they parted, and leggy gorgeous chorus girls who waved around Princess Margaret-style cigarette holders and addressed each other as, for instance, ‘Brian’.
Standing on the good side of a stiff Scotch, Ray would loiter in the Mazurka and try to get to grips with this new world he was entering, in which nothing was ever totally what it seemed, or even close to what he would have imagined it to be just a few weeks earlier. There was a code to be broken, and he was intent on breaking it. The sense of things seemed upside-down. A curtain made of strips of garish coloured plastic hung in front of the door at the Mazurka. Where he came from, these curtains were put up in the summer to protect the outer paintwork from the sun and were generally considered common. Here, though, the plastic strips were out in all weathers and seemed to denote something witty or clever (‘infra dig’ was the vogue expression then), like the rum-and-peps and the brandy-and-Babychams Ginnie’s regulars ordere
d, the Tia Marias and Rémy-on-the-rocks which Ray had believed were vulgar, unfashionable things to drink. It was like a joke everybody was in on but nobody ever mentioned.
The Mazurka Club was a single room with a utility bar and a star walnut upright piano; rose lights glowed dimly on the worn ‘tapestry’-pattern upholstery of an oak wood and a drover bringing the cows home and fish swam in a tank above the old bronze-metal cash register which rang up every sale with a grating ding. The Mazurka would enjoy a brief notoriety four or five years later when it became identified as a regular haunt of the vicious property racketeer, Rachman, and Ward, the society osteopath at the heart of the sensational Profumo scandal. Ray apparently met both of these characters in his days going to Ginnie’s, but he met so many people in those days he could claim no memory of them. Even when he saw their pictures in the paper, brooding and notorious, they meant nothing.
Ginnie’s prided itself on being untrammelled and inclusive and madcaply come-as-you-are. ‘The great thing about here is that no one, not a soul, cares what your class is, or what your income, or whether you’re nobody or famous, or a boy or a girl, or bent, or versatile, or what you are so long as you can hold a drink and behave yourself and have left all that crap behind you when you come in the door.’ Ray heard this, or something like this, on any number of visits to Ginnie’s. In practice, of course, it actually wasn’t the kind of place you could just walk into off the street unless you were with somebody who was already known there or you came with an introduction from a member.
Ray’s open-Sesame to the Mazurka and the underlife of Soho had been a beautiful but rather strange girl called Pauline. Pauline – ‘Reeves’ was her second name, although almost nobody who knew her would have been able to tell you that; even her first name varied according to which special clique or demi-monde she was in: ‘Christice’ and ‘Ruby’ were among her aliases – ‘Pauline’, as Ray knew her and would always think of her, came from an ordinary, respectable, professional background in Buckinghamshire or Berkshire or somewhere else that he could never remember in the Home Counties. She had scandalized her parents by telling them when she was sixteen that she wanted to be an art student (a ‘famous artist’ she actually said) rather than apply for teachers’ training or go to an approved secretarial college as her mother had, to learn shorthand and typing and begin the long task of scouting for a husband.
The stake would have been driven into their hearts even deeper if they had ever discovered that she was supporting herself and earning the college fees they refused to give her by working as a showgirl in a Beak Street club. The rules at the Cabaret Club, as it happens, were unusually strict. Discipline was in the hands of two ‘matrons’. They were assisted by two ‘head girls’ who were helped by ‘prefects’. The main offences were being late, missing a cue, or taking time off without permission. Lesser offences included forgetting to wear nail varnish, missing the free weekly visit to the hairdresser, and failing to cover light patches left by swimsuit straps after sunbathing. All this struck Pauline – as most of life did then – as being hilarious. She was sparky and fearless. (‘Plenty of fun and gaiety but no sex silliness‚’ she would quote old man Murray who owned the club, collapsing in laughter.) But none of this could disguise the fact that she was living a hazardous life.
Many of the Cabaret Club’s forty-five ‘young ladies’ were housed on the opposite side of Beak Street to the club. One of the familiar sights of Soho in those days was the girls tripping across the street in their exotic costumes to go to work, like the famous ducks at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis waddling in file across the lobby at a set time every morning to frolic in the hotel fountain. And, coming across it one night without warning, Ray was as riveted by this little Soho side-show as any of the northern businessmen and American tourists and Arabs and other gawpers who could always be found lurking in the vicinity of the club.
It was something imprinted on his memory. He was disoriented. It was dark. He was slightly drunk. He was just starting to find his way around. He turned the corner of Kingly Street and almost walked straight into the two Amazons who emerged arm in arm and chatting from a deeply recessed door. They wore tall silver head-dresses and silver sandals with high spiked heels and long, full-skirted street coats over their showgirl costumes. Pauline had a pale face and heavily mascara’d eyes and pouting lips and a big tumble of savage blond hair in the style of Brigitte Bardot. (There was a poster of Bardot in Mam’zelle Striptease, Ray would discover, pinned to a wall in Pauline’s flat.) Her friend was a bottle blonde, taller, fuller figured and more conventionally pretty in the bathing-beauty mould. As they arrived at the edge of the red glow cast by the Cabaret Club sign, Dervla, as the friend was called, turned and unexpectedly flashed her tits at Ray by quickly opening and closing her coat. She was wearing a glittering stiff-ribbed costume which stopped just short of her breasts. Pauline bent down to pick up something she’d dropped and glanced quickly back at Ray and then a frock-coated doorman he hadn’t noticed until then stepped from the shadows and ushered the girls inside.
On 20 July 1957, at an open-air rally at Bedford, Mr Macmillan, in his first year as Prime Minister, was reviewing the country’s economy. He said: ‘Let’s be frank about it. Most of our people have never had it so good.’ It was a phrase that caught the national imagination and even, perhaps, people said, its lust.
Ray had finally made the big move south that year. Over the previous few years he had established a solid reputation in the North through his long residency on Variety Parade which he recorded every two weeks for the BBC in Manchester. He did the clubs, a pantomime every year, a summer season in Blackpool or Scarborough. In 1953 he had been given a small part in one of the lousy pictures Frank Randle made for Mancunian Films in what was laughingly known as ‘Jollywood’. He had had a crash course in power-politicking and brass-neck showbiz bravura by watching the off-screen performance of Diana Dors, who was the sex interest in It’s a Grand Life. He had to learn to be more ‘pushful’ if he ever expected to get anywhere, she told him in their single, brief conversation. ‘And for chrissakes get rid of the child-pesterer’s haircut and that dopey goddam shirt and tie. Unless you like looking like the man who’s come to read the meter. Didn’t anybody tell you? The war’s over. Get with it. Is it Ray, Roy? Self-respecting modesty never buttered any potatoes. You’re in the business of show.’
It’s a Grand Life led to nothing, but Ray thought he looked OK in front of the camera. He appeared on television for the first time in 1955, presenting Top Town, a talent competition between teams from Sunderland and Blaydon. He was ‘discovered’ when he did The Good Old Days in a matinée scarf and muttonchop whiskers live from Leeds City Varieties. The impresarios George and Alfred Black had been looking for a young comedian to present a new television variety show that was to go out on Saturday nights from the Prince of Wales Theatre. And after his first appearance on The Big Show in October 1956, Ray’s career had caught fire. The Blacks (in association with the Delfonts) had booked him to appear with Tommy Steele, Dickie Henderson and the singer Jill Day in Startime at the Hippodrome in the West End, which opened in April 1957 and ran into the first weeks of the following year. He acquired an Austin Hereford, a flat in a portered thirties-modern block in Marylebone, and started to indulge his taste for hand-crafted, expensive bespoke shoes. He had to experiment with ways of using hats, scarves, heavy horn-rimmed glasses and other props in order to avoid being recognized and even chased in the street. He had a top West End agent who was quadrupling and quintupling his fees. Things looked swell; things looked great. Everything was coming up roses.
“‘Light Entertainment.” What is it meant to be the opposite of? Heavy Entertainment, or Dark Entertainment?’ This was the first thing Pauline ever said to Ray. He didn’t recognize her at first without the headpiece and the war paint and the trappings of her job at Murray’s Cabaret Club. She was dressed all in black, which was unusual for somebody so young then. Black lacy stockings, short black
skirt, little high-heeled black boots, high-collared black blouse, lots of black eye make-up, bushels of tumbling hair, pancaked white face, chalky white lipstick.
It was the first-night party for Startime, a week or so after he had seen her arm in arm with Dervla, jawing and clicking across Beak Street. The party was in a club close to the corner of Gerrard Street and Wardour Street, and the location was part of the reason for his air of lost abstraction that night, which he might rightly have regarded as a high point of his career. It was a corner Ray had gone out of his way to avoid during rehearsals and in his time in London. It was near here that Celia, his first wife – Celia Ann Finney – had stepped into the road and been hit by a taxi and killed instantly.
He had met Celia when she was appearing in a show with him as a member of the Whitley Bay Girls’ Choir. In her late teens, about the age Pauline was now, she had joined a close-harmony ‘sisters’ act called the Harvey Sisters who went out round the clubs as part of a package with Ray. They sang five or six songs in the first half; Ray did his stand-up act after the interval, and then the Harvey Sisters joined him to sing ‘Side by Side’ with top-hats and silver-topped canes at the end. They always went down well and had to turn away bookings.
Ray proposed to Celia on Coronation Day and they got married on the same day a year later, in 1954. The wedding was a quiet affair and they were on stage together eight hours later at the Hardwick Hartley Social Club in Stockton. Towards the end of the year one of the other girls in the Harvey Sisters left to get married and, encouraged by Ray, Celia replied to an advertisement to audition for the Stargazers, who were a very successful spin-off act from radio’s Mike Sammes Singers. Ray had a job in the North that day, and so Celia travelled to London, which she didn’t know and had always felt nervous in, on her own. She had been on her way to the audition at an address in Frith Street when she stepped off the kerb and was hit by the cab.