The North of England Home Service

by Gordon Burn

  People didn’t mark the site of traffic accidents with flowers in those days. But very many years later, when that was the custom, Ray went with a small bunch of white roses and fixed them to a post on Shaftesbury Avenue close to the place where Celia had died. It was the Silver Jubilee, what would have been their twenty-third anniversary, and the streets were thronged and noisy, and he didn’t suppose anybody saw.

  The opening night of Startime had been a great success and the Blacks’ celebration party went on into the early hours and was showing no signs of winding down when Ray agreed to go with Pauline to another place she knew. The Rio was a black café on Westbourne Park Road where a few white trailblazers like Pauline had started to go to eat foo-foo and rice and chicken and other night-snack sober-up food. These white ‘night people’ had also started to go to the Rio to score. And the first thing Ray noticed after the blur of Caribbean and African faces, which was the most he had ever seen gathered together in one place, was the heavy sweet smell of the drug.

  Pauline was clearly no stranger at the Rio and was soon the centre of interest, causing small good-humoured hubbubs to ripple out around her wherever she went in the room. There was a juke-box and African high-life music was playing and Pauline danced a little and said ‘hi’ to this one and that one wearing a version of the same shabby well-cut suit and moved among the plastic-topped tables giving cigarettes around. In return she was invited to take a generous pinch of ‘tea’ as they all called it and rolled Ray his first, and just about his last ever, drug cigarette.

  Soon Pauline was in the middle of the room improvising the words of a deodorant commercial to a bluebeat tune – ‘My armpits are charmpits‚’ she warbled, revealing her armpits at the climax – and Ray, his throat scorched and feeling strange and slightly nauseous, a sickening pulse in the balls of his feet, the alcohol curdling in his stomach, used that as his opportunity to unobtrusively slip away.

  It was a few days later when he visited Pauline at the flat in Bayswater where she lived and again found himself somewhere that was totally outside his usual experience. It was a large porticoed house in a long curving terrace of peeling, grey-stuccoed, down-at-heel houses. An echoing entrance hall with a marble console table, several prams and a round, dilapidated plaster-gilt mirror led to a wide staircase with old and faded lino on the stairs. It was a sort of slum, and yet not really. It was moneyed people living in a self-imposed impoverished way – poverty as a living choice. A flap of paper loaded with plaster hung down from the ceiling and a small cloud of gnats hovered in a once-grand corner.

  Pauline occupied a room on the first floor of the house which ran all the way from the front to the back. There was a large bed with an ivory satin cover, a beaten-up armchair and a gas ring on a shelf by the sink. It took a while though for these conventional pieces to establish themselves and come through the murk and the nearly blacked-out chaos of Victorian and Edwardian bric-a-brac and bewildering layers of clutter. A child’s penny-farthing bicycle leaned against one wall next to a tailor’s dummy with a battered ‘Anthony Eden’ hat perched on top of it. There was a ceramic phrenologist’s head and an old gramophone with a horn and a Deccola radiogram and several packets of Oxydol lined up on a table like something to be looked at and chin-stroked over rather than opened and used for getting grease and stains out of dirty clothes. She used a stack of books instead of a bedside table and had a painted paper parasol hanging upside-down from the ceiling rose where you would expect a lampshade to be.

  It was early afternoon but it was obvious Pauline hadn’t long been out of bed. Clothes were strewn on the floor and draped across the chair. Records were lying on the floor out of their sleeves. She had borrowed a couple of shillings from Ray for the meter and set about brewing some Heinz alphabet soup on the ring. The meter kept up a regular tick which Pauline drowned out eventually with one of the records that she picked up off the floor, blew on casually and dropped on the Deccola. It was a modern jazz group with a vibraphone in the foreground playing the kind of long-hair, whinging neurot music that never failed to give Ray the willies.

  He strolled around, like a visitor in a gallery, which in a sense is what he was. The walls had been covered with hundreds of images from comics and magazines and gone over with coats of semi-clear varnish. Posters advertising films and art exhibitions had been pinned up on top of this along with many pictures of African and West Indian men which Pauline had evidently taken herself. The pictures were black and white, and the men in them were sometimes naked or nearly naked and staring gravely into the camera.

  He couldn’t see what her interest in him meant. He had heard the word ‘loyal’ used when he was with Pauline at the Rio. The groups of men milling outside on Westbourne Park Road and the blanked-out windows were meant ‘to keep the loyals out’. Loyal meant ‘white bread’ or ‘square’ and Ray was in no doubt that a loyal was what he was. That night it had been the American tab-collar shirt and Italian-look Cecil Gee suit he was wearing that had allowed him to ‘pass’. A sprightly African with the blocky look of the men in Pauline’s pictures and the tribal scars had commented approvingly on his ‘natty suiting’. He looked up to date and in tune with the new feeling of youthful modernity and adventure that was supposedly about to sweep the country and had found its emblem in Startime’s top of the bill, Tommy Steele. In fact Ray would be one of the people who walked out on Lenny Bruce when Bruce performed his ‘sick’ act in London four years later, incensed by his jokes about cancer and snot – he actually blew his nose in his hand and smeared the contents across the club’s back wall – and his demented drug addict’s meanderings and disgusting diarrhoea of the mouth. He stood four-square with the citizens – the ‘loyals’ if that’s what you wanted to call them – who backed the Home Secretary’s decision to ban Bruce from coming back into the country in 1963.

  He couldn’t see what Pauline’s interest in him meant. And then slowly he thought perhaps he started to see. At the north-facing window at the garden end of the room was a wheel-mounted painter’s easel and a series of small framed portraits she had done. Some were of people he recognized immediately, others of people he didn’t recognize at all. Some were sportsmen – the former world welterweight champion, Randolph Turpin; the world’s first four-minute miler, Roger Bannister; the South African boxer turned society hairdresser, Johnny Rust. Many, to Ray’s bemusement, were comedians he had worked with and knew well – Max Bygraves, Jewell and Warriss, Norman Wisdom, Tommy Trinder; a group portrait of the Goons. What floored him wasn’t the fact that she had chosen to paint them but that she had painted them in an intent and quiet, old-masterly way as though she had divined in them a seriousness nobody else had been able to see.

  There was Malcolm Vaughan, a balladeer Ray had appeared in pantomime with the previous season, currently in the hit parade with a tear-jerker called ‘Chapel of the Roses’. A teddy-boy in drainpipe trousers, a bootlace tie and four-inch brothel-creeper shoes. Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice in The Entertainer with the caption: ‘Let me know where you’re working tomorrow night and I’ll come and see you.’ (The paint was still drying on this one.) Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys. Diana Dors.

  When he moved to a worktop where drifts of reference material were in the process of being sorted, he was unsurprised by then to come across some pictures of himself. They had been taken for a fashion feature in the previous month’s issue of a magazine called Man About Town. At the end of the session he had been invited to take two of the items he’d been modelling away with him. One of the things he’d chosen was the canary yellow Shetland sweater he had been wearing on the night he first ran into Pauline and which he had picked out to wear that morning. ‘I recognized it‚’ Pauline, who was now standing beside him, said. ‘In Beak Street with Dervla the first time I saw you. Under the street lamp in the dark. I recognized the sweater. I’m a fool for yellow. It’s so hard to get that beautiful, rich eggy yellow. That’s a very good dye. And then I recognized you.’ She cleaned up a l
ast spoonful of soup from the mug and removed the soupy moustache that had formed on her upper lip with her tongue.

  A change came over Pauline when she began to tell him about her work; she grew serious, which had the effect of making her seem younger, and yet at the same time the flighty callowness she assumed fell away. The commercial vernacular of consumer culture was her inspiration, she said; trying to give legitimacy to things that had been regarded as illegitimate in an art sense until then. Working at Murray’s Cabaret Club and being a showgirl was part of that: she found it interesting being an object, a piece of meat on the market, getting spangled up, being weighed up by men. ‘And anyway “nice” middle-class girls are just whores, selling themselves for security like my mother!’

  She went over to a full-length mirror and used a handle comb vigorously to tat up and bulk out her hair. She dipped her head and put her fingers over her eyes to protect them from the alcohol in the lacquer spray. She spat into a small dish of mascara, mixed it and applied it to her eyes. ‘What’s needed is an approach which doesn’t depend for its existence on the exclusion of the symbols most people live by‚’ Pauline said. ‘I love the city. One of my collections is postcards of Piccadilly Circus. I’ve got hundreds. My pleasures are the smell of carbon monoxide and to go out on the street at night. Noise. Clothes. I love waking up to the thunder of traffic. The glossy packaging of food.’

  When Ray agreed to sit for her, she got him a collapsible three-step ladder to perch on and played the American cast recording of Waiting for Godot as background: We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries … But habit is a great deadener … At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on … I can’t goon! … What have I said?

  ‘Oh, I love this‚’ Pauline said. ‘It’s so brilliant to listen to when you’re stoned.’

  ‘What’s it about?’ he said.

  ‘It’s about two tramps‚’ she said. ‘It’s about the love-hate relationship between two people trying to amuse themselves in their time here by playing jokes and little games. The two of them come together out of necessity and play a game to survive life. That’s how I hear it anyway. They grope towards each other, and pull away, and grope towards each other. But the closer they get, the nearer they come, the more impossible it is for them to unite. They’re both trapped in the cages of their skin.’

  ‘Sounds about as funny as a cry for help‚’ Ray said. (He would recall himself saying this exactly thirty years later, in 1987, and this room and this house, the gas fire’s impotent sputters, the damp, the meter eating up the pennies, the multitude of faces in the varnished mural staring down, when he was cast in a production of Waiting for Godot at the Connaught Theatre, Worthing, with Ernie Wise as the second tramp. Eric Morecambe, who Wise had played feed to for forty years, was three years dead. Ray had slipped down and almost completely off Mrs Thatcher’s list of invitees to smart and important events. They were both at a loss, adrift in their lives and careers. It was this perhaps that had prompted the producers to team them up as Vladimir and Estragon. It was certainly their personal circumstances the critics reviewed, not the play. The evening, according to one reviewer, was all about ‘the infinite pathos of being an “and”’. A writer in another paper quoted Ray back his own joke about the performer who replies to the question, ‘You can’t sing, you can’t dance, you’re not funny – as a matter of fact, you’ve got no talent at all. Why don’t you give up show business?’, by answering, ‘I can’t – I’m a star!’ The play closed ten days into what should have been a three-week run.)

  Pauline offered Ray the skinny joint she had been smoking while she was drawing, but he shook his head. There was a red glow from the clay elements in the gas fire. It had made her cheek and ear on one side, and the side of one leg, go hot and red.

  He gave her two box seats for Startime at the Hippodrome before he left and agreed to come back and sit for her again in a few days at the same time.

  He had started down the stairs when he heard Pauline shout his name. When he put his head round the door he felt a soft object hit it, and then a second, and a third. Pauline was shrieking, really laughing. Lying at his feet were the synthetic cottonwool ‘snowballs’ that the tubby bandleader, Billy Cotton, pelted the audience with during the closing credits of his hugely popular televised Band Show. Pauline had brought them away when she was part of the audience for a broadcast.

  Ray saved one in his pocket, said his goodbyes again, and clicked shut the door.

  *

  In 1957 Jackie was twenty-six. Not old, but old enough for a boxer with his active fighting life behind him and an incipient limp to begin looking at the life around him at the fights and in the gym and deciding that these weren’t places to be either poor or old. ‘Old George’. ‘Old Harry’. Sometimes just ‘Dad’. There were lots of them. Retired boxers, knackered, chap-fallen, doing the sweeper-up jobs as janitors and in the corners as seconds and cut men, going home to their stale empty flats in their sunny slum squares with their old smelly dogs and their radios that can’t be properly tuned in and telly pictures jumpy with snowy green ghosts.

  Booba had died in February 1956. It happened suddenly in the night in a high, tiled room with the best care and the most modern amenities her son could make available for her but which to the end Booba complained was like a public-house urinal with these ceramic festoons whose like she had never darkened.

  She was buried at Golders Green alongside her husband, and very soon her home in the Buildings had been flushed of all evidence of her existence. None of her children wanted the furniture because it didn’t fit into their lives. It was too voluminous and dark and reminded them of what they had come from. They had filled their homes with low, lightweight, streamlined pieces which it didn’t take three men to carry. There was a wardrobe dealer at the top of Brick Lane who came with a pony and cart and took all Booba’s clothes and belongings, plants, ferns, china, away. A team of workmen from the Council moved in and boarded the fireplaces up, installed mains electricity, painted everywhere with the colour they called ‘mushroom’, a kind of neutral.

  After Booba’s death Mr Solomons seemed snappish to Jackie – grouchy, offhand, uneasy. He seemed uncomfortable having him around, as if he was a reminder or a reproach. He started treating him increasingly like the other shtoonks cluttering up his office and his life. There were new faces, new intelligences to gather in areas where Jackie had no means or right of ingress. For the first time since Jackie had caught on with the undisputed great-I-am of British boxing, Mr Solomons was being encroached on by a rival promoter, Harry Levene, known as ‘Harry the Hoarse’ after his gravel voice worn out by incessant shouting, who had started luring away backroom people and boxers from the Solomons camp. Jackie had recently been personally despatched with a message to a defector which read in its entirety: ‘Why don’t you come back to my place, spit in my face, put your hand on it, and wipe it all over?’ That was followed up by a present to the man’s wife in the post – a parcel containing four dead rats.

  This was the state of things when Nat Sellers at the gym called Jackie over one day and told him he was wanted by the boss on a special job. As soon as he heard the name ‘Ray Cruddas’, Jackie knew what it was. This was a bone he himself had carried home and dropped at his master’s feet right on the carpet.

  *

  Ray had discovered a Viennese pâtisserie he liked going to on Marylebone High Street latish every morning. He liked to take his place among the blue-rinse ladies and the dapper old émigrés with their patent hair and their patent-leather shoes and their pale watery eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance and enjoy a leisurely breakfast. They did a lovely poached egg there, it was civility itself and nobody ever bothered him.

  He had just arrived back from having breakfast one morning when the phone rang. He recognized the voice of Jolly Jack Solomons who he had done some emceeing for as well as a few charity appearances at Solomo
ns’ National Sporting Club at the Café Royal. He had gained the impression that the old shark was quite fond of him. ‘Ray, are you sitting down?’ Solomons said. ‘I think you should be sitting down for what I’ve got to tell you.

  ‘Does the name “Hart” ring any bells?’ Ray sensed him repositioning his cigar in his mouth without using his hands. ‘“Sugar Hart”? Bad man. Very bad man and dangerous company. Shvartzer from Notting Dale, if you know what I’m saying. One of our black brothers. The word going around is that you’ve been doing the naughty with his gel. Giving this Pauline some shvantz.

  ‘Bit of a looker by all accounts. Plenty of what it takes. Works down Murray’s Club as a hostess. Has to listen to all those old war heroes telling their stories from the war. Laugh at their jokes. Listen to their horseshit and gunpowder tales about how they singlehandedly did the Gerries, get them to fork out for another bottle of fake champagne. “Real pain for your sham friends, champagne for your real friends.” All that. But never does none of the other business, so I’m told. Never takes a punter home, never goes home with a Billy Bunter. Not the type who earns four pound a week and sends six pound home to mother, if you get me. Except it seems you’ve been seen making house visits to this girl.

  ‘… Nah, nah, nah, Ray, lissen. Strictly unter em tisch, her big, bad boyfriend is out to do you a mischief. You know I’ve got one or two naughty lads fighting for me, not above upsetting the law, you follow. Well, one of them’s been offered a pony to do you over, hospital job, and he might have bitten but for this Hart saying he’d cough up a monkey to see you finished. A beating’s one thing, but offing’s another, so the lad came to me, and I’ve come to you. Are you still there, my son?’