The North of England Home Service

by Gordon Burn

  ‘Is it true?’ It was all Ray could think to say. His throat was dry.

  ‘Oh, he’s got it in for you, I mean really got it in, no error. Going to slit your eyeballs is what I hear. But hold on, the wheels here grind pretty fast. I’ve already squared it for one of my boys to babysit you for a while until this blows over. Either that, or until you’re laid away in the bottom drawer with lavender. Sorry. I know it’s not a joking matter … It isn’t funny. But this boy I’m putting with you is one of the best. I’d trust him with my own mother. OK? Bell me later. You look out.’

  It was half an hour before Ray heard the door. ‘Mr Cruddas?’ The voice on the intercom was high-pitched like a boy’s. ‘Jackie from Mr Solomons’ office. Said to say the word “Booba” so you’d know.’

  Ray was shaken. He was in shock. He was shaking. His finger trembled on the buzzer when he buzzed Jackie in.

  By the time he unmortised and unbolted the door he could feel himself coming apart. His body was liquid. His muscles were convulsed. His body was spasming and there was nothing he could do. He was like something stricken by a roadside, lame and fluttering; like a tree when the winds blow and the seasons change, his whole body fluttering and trembling.

  Jackie recognized this. He had seen it before. He had seen boxers get like this in dressing-rooms before fights, go to pieces, unmanned with dread and fear and vivid premonitions of having their noses crushed and choking on their own blood. Just lose it. He did then what he had sometimes done in the past. He did what his Ely ancestors had done to settle some wild-eyed, ready-to-bolt pure-bred, when the trick was to stay close to the horse’s flailing hoofs and sweating creeping flanks.

  He embraced Ray. He encircled him with his arms, put his body close to his body and held on to him tightly, Ray’s arms fast to his sides, his legs going, his breathing uneven, calming him in the throes of his fear convulsion, the naked shaking animal.

  He often felt he learned everything he was going to know about him in that moment, his weak places and his ambition, and how much uncertainty and how much vigour, and how much generosity and how much spite. It was the way you got all the important information about your opponent in the first clinch. Where his eyes were and how true his legs felt; the smell coming off his skin.

  Ray went on shivering, and Jackie went on holding him in the poky hall of his beleaguered new flat. Ray didn’t resist. He behaved as if this was a perfectly normal thing for a stranger to do, a Samaritan act like lending your coat to somebody who has just been hit by a car or felled by a bomb, the world calamitously changed; everything unwinding in silence. The sound of Ray’s teeth chattering drummed loudly in Jackie’s head.

  After a while Jackie went into the kitchen, boiled water, found the tea, tipped a good measure of brandy in both cups. The bottom of Ray’s cup rattled against the edge of the saucer when he started drinking, but as the alcohol and sugar took effect he started to come back to himself.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No need to apologize. I’m your shadow, for a little while anyway. Till Mr Solomons whistles me home. You OK?’

  It was then that Jackie started to give Ray the background on the situation involving this Soledad Hart, always known as ‘Sugar’, whose interests extended to gambling rackets, strip joints, protection, property, drugs – ‘all sorts of nastiness’. Jackie had occasionally come across Hart on his travels – ‘not all that big of a man but well assembled, always well turned out, with a massive neck and a razor-blade parting’ – and had first heard from the doorman of a club in Kingly Street who also owned an all-night drinker in West London where Hart and the Pauline girl went that the knives were out for Mr Cruddas, who Sugar Hart was making no bones he wanted to see topped.

  Ray was supposed to put in an appearance at a ladies’ luncheon in Richmond that afternoon, a booking that Jackie persuaded him to keep. He drove him there and drove him back. He drove him to the theatre that evening, escorted him inside, parked the car, and found a place in the bar where he could see everybody coming in, his routine for the next six months.

  He slept on the sofa in the living room that night and next morning went out and bought bread, milk, orange juice, eggs. He made wholemeal toast and poached the eggs. ‘Nan‚’ he said when he saw Ray getting ready to go out for lunch with a senior television executive at Isow’s, ‘you don’t want to wear that with that.’

  He went through Ray’s wardrobe and picked him out a green brocade tie. He examined his feet and shook his head. He went and fetched a pair of expensively turned, pointed, hand-sewn shoes and a pair of subtly patterned brown silk socks.

  ‘And only the one whisky sour, you know they make you talk bollocks!’ he called after him when he dropped him in Soho. ‘And don’t forget you’ve got a show to do tonight!’ Ray hesitated on the pavement for a moment trying to decide if Jackie was being serious, and then they both laughed.

  *

  ‘When did I first realize I was a star? When I got my first death threat.’ It was a good line. He’d feed it to the interviewers and the interviewers would laugh and their editors would highlight it in enlarged letters on the page beside a picture of him looking urbane or moody or (less often) a picture of him laughing. He said it on Harty and many lower-rated television shows. It comes up in the clippings again and again.

  5

  All that spring Jackie arrived to collect Ray at the Scran Van with the smell of the cull pyres in his hair and on his clothing, and ash and white soot – ‘the dust of death‚’ Mighty rather dramatically called it; ‘the Devil’s dandruff’ (strangely the same name that Jackie’s son, Barry, gave to the powder he shoved up his nose) – coating his shoulders. Jackie scrubbed himself red every morning but still the smells seemed to stay on his breath and in his nostrils and he was reminded for the first time in a long time of the Billingsgate fish smell carried by brash Mr Solomons and which would linger about him like a rumour no matter what.

  During that spring the scenes in the countryside around Rusty Lane were hellish and other-worldly and reminded the people who lived there, especially at night times, of apocalyptic visions and infernal depictions in dark, dimmed old Bible paintings.

  Driving home at night from Bobby’s, Jackie would begin to be aware of the putrid smoky smell seeping in through the radiator and around the windows before he entered the area of the thick white smoke-fog made of powdered bone and hide and animal render, and lazy plumes of fat-saturated smoke blowing out to sea. There was a lot of traffic movement at that time of night, and driving along the coast road Jackie would pass army Land-Rovers and large container wagons queuing at the quarry entrance. (Some of the wagons, he knew, contained full loads of ash from the pyres, classified as hazardous waste. It made him think about things he wouldn’t choose to think about in the lonely early hours with the heater on and the radio playing and Ellis restless and sneezing behind the dog-guard. It made him think about the human ashes coming from the crematoria at Auschwitz and Birkenau and how they had been put to use as thermal insulation and fertilizer and, most horribly to Jackie, used instead of gravel to cover the paths of the SS villages located near the camps.) The pyres burned for weeks, glowing jewel-like and stinking in the dark, each of the hundreds of pyres feeding its own consistent, blue-orange blooming corona of flame.

  People witnessed terrible things in those months, and heard about terrible things, and went about their business every day trying not to breathe in the foul stench from the unburied, putrefying carcasses, a smell that they locally called ‘the honk’. These were sights and smells that were new and distressing not only to the recent townie blow-ins. A new sound filling the blanket silence was the sound of wagons reversing, the monotone beep-beep-beep which until that spring of the foot-and-mouth had never been heard in the fields and lanes round there.

  On some days there was a strange pink mist flushing the air, caused, as everybody knew although it was never mentioned, by the explosion of the unviscerated bodies. The wife of the farmer at Town
foot Farm where they had had the whole herd slaughtered had a Hindu gentleman come round to free the spirits of the animals in their terms, which she said made her feel less desolate spiritually.

  People worried about the carcinogenic compounds being released into the atmosphere by the cheap coal and creosoted railway sleepers brought in to set the pyres, and about the water table being poisoned through seepage. There were theories about the virus travelling as part of a huge haze cloud of man-made pollutants which had recently been spotted drifting in the upper atmosphere from the Asian continent, or blowing in on a massive plume of sand that satellites and research ships had tracked as it swirled out of northern Africa. Jackie had an improvised mask made of a handkerchief soaked in whisky, a tip he had picked up in the suffocating London fogs of the early fifties. And suddenly, too, in a landscape devoid of livestock you could hear the crows.

  Jackie tended to bring the shepherds, Telfer and Ellis, in with him most mornings, and they also carried the smells of the mass burns and the heavily disinfected carcass heaps in their coats. Because of the restrictions, he had started driving the short distance to the coast and exercising the dogs in the dunes. Ironically, around that time there were some beautiful mornings, sunny and chill, the air coming in off the sea still salt and unpolluted. It was on one of these mornings that Jackie had come down the dune slacks where several patches of early yellow colt’s foot had already taken hold to find the two big dogs playing tug-of-war with what, from a distance, looked like a deflated football with the terrier Stella working up sand and yapping all around them. It was only as he drew nearer that he was able to see that the object they had between them was one of the pieces of half-burnt skin that had started wafting around, and that burned or stamped on to it were the first two digits of a cow’s cataloguing or identifying number.

  The bad news from Kevin Wilkinson in West Allen about Telfer had been that he had found a tumour in the bladder which in his opinion was inoperable. He wouldn’t commit himself to how long he believed the dog had left and said only that quality of life was the important consideration: he would have his up days and his down days, but when the time came when he obviously couldn’t struggle on any longer, Jackie would know. The dog was incontinent sometimes, but Jackie was quite happy to clean up after him and even reassure him that it was all right to soil the place where he lay. He had to get up in the night and sit with him sometimes, and often had to support his hind legs after he had helped him into the garden. There was a faith-healer Jackie had heard about who specialized in domestic animals and, although he would have laughed at anybody who had suggested such a thing two months earlier, it had come to the point where it was something he was starting to consider seriously. For some of the older people living in the town the smell of the pyres had a deep nostalgic association. By the time the honk and the charred mist travelled the five miles to the nostrils of Mighty’s regulars at the tea van, the death smell and the nasty gagging sweetness had been rinsed out of it, and much of the bitterness had abated. To them it was like a glimpse at the past – a welcome whiff of old industrial times and a last gasp of disappearing worlds. From the country the pyres sent a ghost smell of factory chimneys and booming heavy industries, smarting the eyes and furring the nostrils, like a million kettles left on to burn.

  The men who gathered at the Scran Van on those mornings were in noticeably good spirits, less taciturn and more talkative than usual. Some mornings some of the marksmen stopped off for a breakfast on their way through and brought news of other places. They had been called in from as far afield as Northamptonshire and Devon, where they had real-world jobs such as village butchers and publicans. They were happy to talk about the good money they were making and show off their rifles and bolt guns and say again – many of the men said it – that the difficulty with killing these animals was that they were so human-friendly. ‘This whole thing has torn the shit out of me, really‚’ one of the marksmen, an older man, said one morning, and that closed the subject. It blunted it of whatever edge or morbid interest it had held until then and, although the ashy fall-out went on falling more or less continuously, it fell from then on without comment.

  Invisibly, a fall-out of fat coated the plants and trees in the Park, and fell faintly on the yellow-green young leaves of the trees in the little grove, cordoned off and isolated now at the eastern end of the Moor.

  The cows had been rounded up on the sixth day of foot-and-mouth and herded away, and a tape barrier and ‘DO NOT ENTER’ signs had gone up around the whole perimeter of the Moor, making it a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in prison to set foot on it. Enclosed and inaccessible, the trees, which Ray could see from his window budding into another season, seemed, even when a breeze ruffled their branches, to make a silence.

  It was a situation that had left him feeling miserable and in a yearning, anxious state. He had a skin irritation which he hoped wasn’t a recurrence of shingles. He was getting nervous stomach aches at the club. He had started to wake up with nose-bleeds sometimes in the middle of the night.

  *

  Ray woke to the sound of honky-tonk piano music being played far away in the basement of the house. Marzena, his wife, liked to listen to this jangly, happy music while she worked. ‘Yes! Happy!’ Marzena sometimes said to Ray, leaning in to press her face against his face where he was slumped low in a chair. ‘That great tremendous word.’ Then she would give him a kiss.

  Winifred Atwell playing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby’. Joe ‘Mr Piano’ Henderson or another long-forgotten boxing-glove pianist banging out ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’, ‘Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me’, ‘Ain’t She Sweet’. On and on and around and around they went, these and other saloon-bar favourites, one tune dissolving into the other with a heart-in-the-belly hiatus of only half a beat, free-associating like thoughts.

  ‘Light music, light heart!’ Marzena was aware that this also grated with Ray, but she found it fun occasionally to disgruntle him. ‘You don’t believe it, and it is your absolute choosing, but there is no rule that all life is emotional grappling.’

  ‘Heart of My Heart’. ‘My Old Dutch’. These were the sounds of Marzena’s childhood and young womanhood in Zalipie, in the southern border region of Poland near Tarnow. The music she would hear on the second-hand transistor radios laid out on cardboard on the ground among the cooking utensils, anoraks, shoes, suitcases, bleeping space toys and household gimmicks in the open-air market in the gardens opposite the old rusting hulk of the Dunajec Stadium. The backpack she brought with her when she first moved in with Ray came from the Tarnow market. A red plastic handbag. At least one pair of shoes.

  Joe ‘Mr Piano’ or Winnie Atwell played, and the babushkas, come down from their little two-room chatas in the mountains, wheeled wobbly trolleys around the coldly lit, cinderblock supermarket, a barrel-roofed supershed that was the hub of the rural community, lumpy red-faced men always with a cigarette going, the air thick with smoke, everybody smoking like chimneys, fistfuls of play-money zlotys, pickled cabbage from a barrel, pigeons in wooden pens, five or six to a cage, red radishes, knobby cucumbers, wild green asparagus that the children were sent to look for near the village cemetery, choosing Swedish matches because Polish matches tend not to ignite. Marzena’s father had been an underground-cable layer until the trouble with his legs; her mother was a cook at the local ball-bearing factory’s ‘house of culture’. The pantiled roofs of the Tarnow/Rzeszow tenements. The faceless buildings of functionalist state architecture all along Wieniewska Street, which had been rechristened with every new regime. ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay’ clanging through the supermarket Tannoy. ‘When Somebody Thinks You’re Wonderful’ on the plastic radios and stolen tape-cassette machines. ‘Volare’.

  This life of Marzena’s that she had left behind was symbolized for Ray by the small packet that arrived at Moor Edge Terrace for her from her mother on the second Tuesday of every month. It was addressed in heavy
, stubby pencil, tied with cheapest-quality string, and encrusted with many small-denomination stamps. It was Marzena’s habit to put the packet from her mother aside until an auspicious moment came to open it. Ray noticed that sometimes she would spend a long time examining the wrinkled outer wrapping and the postmark before she began slowly to pick apart the knots her mother had tied sitting on her bed with the religious paintings arranged above it in Zalipie six days earlier. Once this had been achieved Marzena very quickly scanned the letter and the cuttings from the Gazeta Wyborcza which were enclosed and, so far as Ray knew, never looked at them again. ‘Home is a feeling, nothing more‚’ Marzena had said to him on one of the first occasions they went out together. ‘Once you leave, you become a stranger. I lost my home and that’s for ever.’

  Marzena was a sculptor. Her chosen medium was brick – bricks and mortar. Blockish red Accrington brick was her favourite, and she toiled in the dust-laden air of the windowless basement of the house in Moor Edge Terrace making walls: crooked walls, tumble-down walls, plumb walls, walls with insulating materials and reinforcing cable left poking around the edges like sandwich filling, walls with ragged holes knocked through them, walls with private objects, their existence known only to Marzena, secreted in the concrete between the courses.

  The music played and she shovelled lime and mixed cement in delicious puddles and, her blond hair tied back from her thin planar face, she split her nails and ignored the dust and briskly broke bricks in half with a tap of the trowel handle and eventually emerged exhausted, face whitened, ears afire. She was absurdly happy. Ray didn’t pretend to understand.

  Something else he didn’t get was why Marzena continued to cross the city on buses several days a week, going out to work as a cleaner. It didn’t make sense to Ray: his wife went out to clean for other people, but they paid somebody else to come in and dust and skivvy for them. ‘Am cleaner‚’ Marzena would proudly tell anybody who asked what she did. ‘Give me scourer and Flash and dirty kitchen, oven full of caked-up crap, am happy as peeg in sheet.’