The North of England Home Service

by Gordon Burn

  Another quirk of Marzena’s was that, although she had enough money to buy whatever might catch her eye, she generally preferred to wear other women’s cast-offs. It particularly rankled with Ray that the original wearer of many of his own wife’s clothes was the wife of his business partner and his principal backer at Bobby’s, Ronnie Cornish.

  Marzena had been going out to clean for Mrs Cornish for quite a while before she ever met Ray, and she had always found her to be very charming lady, friendly and very nice. The Cornishes lived in a beautiful twenty-four-room, early eighteenth-century house with idyllic views stretching for miles across the surrounding countryside. Completed in 1738, Coldside Hall had a stone-and-stucco, neo-Palladian exterior, mullioned windows and all the rooms were filled with English and American furniture, oriental rugs, silver, paintings, prints, powder horns, antique globes, sea charts, early maps, rare books – and Ronnie’s mother’s mangle, restored and polished and put on display in the casement window of one of the grand apartments on the piano nobile, where the original proprietor had shmoozed and entertained tenants, voters, parsons, gentlemen and other local worthies, much as Ronnie was doing more than two hundred and fifty years later: Hope and Ronnie Cornish’s lavish parties at the Hall were famous across the North of England, and invitations to them were shamelessly wheedled after and highly prized.

  A team of women from the village came in to maintain Cold-side Hall. Marzena’s tasks were now confined to the Cornishes’ apartment in the football-stadium complex, which was mainly kept for business use – entertaining business colleagues, clients, and so on – and which his wife always referred to jokingly as Ronnie’s ‘bunny hutch’ or ‘love shack’.

  The house facing the Moor where Marzena had lived with Ray for the three years that they had been married was good – it was a pleasant house; comfortable. Many rooms. It was OK. But it was old. The stairs and the old boards at Moor Edge moaned and creaked. The water pipes banged as though somebody was beating them with a hammer. Marzena came across evidence of mice in the kitchen sometimes; mouse droppings on the floor and on the bread board. The doors and windows had shrunk or buckled over the years and let in cold and draught. Wiring was old – big switches that went off with loud click; dusty, fabric-covered flex. All this there was more than plenty of in the old country. Plus Ray was crazy careful about the heating and bills; he liked her to have individual heaters on in whichever room she happened to be, at those times when she was in the house on her own. She would hear him going around feeling the radiators looking for signs that they had been in use, very late at night, after Jackie had dropped him back from the club. Ray wasn’t terrible man. Ray was kind man, thoughtful man, apart from this cratchety Puritan streak.

  But the apartment the Cornishes owned! It was Mr and Mrs Cornish’s apartment in the new multi-million-pound development at the football ground with the high decorative arch and the marble concourse of fountains and the fashionable wine bars and the health clubs where you could see straight in through the plate-glass windows and the uniformed staff with the discrete little TV monitors at the desk who said ‘good day’ and ‘a bit brighter today’ and sometimes stepped around the desk to touch the button which called the lift although it was no trouble to do this (it was a pleasure to do this – no static shocks from the friction of any treacherous nylon carpets) yourself – it was this place that Marzena, picturing her mother’s incredulity, her constant calling out to Teo, Marzena’s father, pressed close up to the baking oven in the next room, would describe in drooling detail in her letters home.

  Turning the key and stepping into the apartment in West Stand Tower she immediately felt like glamorous television lady or model in the fashion magazines. She only had to touch a button and blinds came out of the wall and slowly screened off the room’s wrap-around floor-to-ceiling windows with a mechanical hum and a jerky motion which (she had to admit) reminded her a little of the crematorium near the city boundary at Tarnow. There were chaises longues and foot-rest armchairs and leather sofas and pony-skin day beds – so many chairs in so many designs and so many finishes she could never decide where to sit. Wafer-thin televisions with surround-sound speakers, and not one but two hi-fi systems that fitted flush against the wall. Designer directional lights and soft indirect lighting. Walls whose colour could be made to change from orange to pale violet to aqua blue at the flick of a switch. The tractional drag of the close carpeting; the deep fleeciness of the towels and robes.

  Although she didn’t smoke, sometimes during her break times Marzena would pretend to, feet up, with an unlit cigarette in her raised right hand, a coffee which she could sip as if it was a Long Slow Screw Against the Wall cocktail – she always got good laugh from these dirty English names, the English too embarrassed to say them until they are completely drunk – on the table beside her.

  She was doing this one day, stretched out on a chair shaped like a bolt of lightning when, looking down, she noticed for the first time some stunted trees trying to grow out of a few inches of muddy canal bank or unculverted stretch of river. Immediately above them was a sub-level car park for the use of the workers in a concrete office block. As she watched, a piece of feathered wildlife waddled out and grubbed around in the muck like a wind-up toy. It was like looking at a piece of petrified, medieval Northumberland still clinging to existence at the very edge of the modern city, and was many worlds away from international executive space. Rain rushed in flurries and slanted against the window with a pinging sound which she knew meant it was close to hail.

  *

  The first time Ray encountered Marzena she was shaving his mother. She was a care assistant in the nursing home where his mother was living, and she was bending over her with a disposable razor and a bowl of water, her back to the door, when he blundered in. He was still living in Devon then, and had come straight to the fearsome smells and polished surfaces and chronic overheating of Teresa Beard House (‘Quality care for the elderly’) from the train.

  ‘It is important to mirror them‚’ Marzena said that first time when she saw his face. It said her name on a laminated tag on her chest: her Christian name and a Polish surname he couldn’t pronounce. ‘Do you not think? It is important to be a mirror, and not turn away and pretend what is there is not there. You can’t live unless you are seen plain by someone. Seeing others plain is not a bad thing, but a good thing. Betty had a beard and also a very fine moustache, and so we had to shave the beard and moustache away because she’s lady not man, didn’t we, sweetheart?’

  He had brought with him what he usually brought – some fruit, some weekly women’s magazines bought in the station – and he put these down in the only space he could find on the top of the cabinet by the bed. He sat down and looked for the first time at the tiny, frail figure propped up on pillows in the small white bed. Her head was so light now it made no impression against the pillow. Her hair was thin and there was some unpleasant crusting around her eyes and around her mouth, which Marzena was gently trying to prise open between her thumb and her forefinger in order to get some pills and a sip of water in. ‘Pills to give her a happy head. They give her a happy head‚’ she said to Ray’s mother. ‘Don’t they, poppet?’ And then to Ray: ‘You must be Betty’s son. Look who’s here to see you, Betty. Look who’s come all this way to see you. Can you open your eyes today, precious? Look, Betty. It’s your son.’ And his mother opened her eyes and weakly smiled at Ray, and with her bony, bent fingers (with, for all the nurse’s efforts, Ray couldn’t help noticing, crescents of dark matter still encrusted under the nails), blew him a silent parched kiss.

  Except, It’s not me she’s seeing, he wanted to tell the Polish nurse Marzena, who was looking gratified and delighted in her green-and-white striped tabard uniform. Not Raymond Cruddas the son she brought up and worked hard for years to feed and clothe and take care of after her bastard husband my swine of a banjolele-playing father turned his back on the both of us and walked away. That’s not who she’s seeing sittin
g here. She’s seeing the other Ray. The one off the telly. The one with his face in the papers. Well, maybe not in the papers so much any more. But the one who never used to be off the telly and splashed all over the fishwrap papers, in their time. My mother’s seeing the Ray most of the other sad old desperate cases in here think they see. I’m not joking, old girls who don’t recognize their husbands, who can’t tell their sons from Burt Reynolds and answer ‘1901’ when you ask them what year they’re in, they all beam when they see me come in the door, like I’m their private friend. You’ve got to see them. Smiling like Christmas and laughing uproariously before I’ve even opened my mouth. Giving their cheek to be kissed; squeezing my hand; calling me ‘Ray’. People who don’t know up from down think I’ve been in their home, met their family, have good feelings about them and root for their being. They don’t know me from a bar of soap, but the point is they think they know me. Because I came into their houses with a smart wig on and a bright smile and a song and made them laugh – they chuck me under the chin and coo and gurgle and really think I give a shit.

  He wanted to tell her all this. But he didn’t. Not yet. Not that time. He decided to save it, because he was comfortable with the fact than she knew no more about what had happened in the sixty-five years of his existence before he walked through that door than he did about the kind of experience that the just over forty years (he was guessing) of her first life in Poland had taken in.

  In fact in her present circumstances Marzena struck him as much more ‘naturalized’ and far less of an outsider than himself. She spoke English with a quirky, pronounced Geordie twang that connected her to the area in a basic way that he could no longer claim.

  It was a voice that Ray was reassured to hear when he called the home. He started to ask for Marzena by name when he phoned to check on his mother’s condition, and on his trips back to the North East to visit his mother they began meeting up for a drink, a walk by the river, a brief unromantic Indian or Italian meal. She told him what had made her want to escape from Poland. He told her why he had chosen to leave the city where history or chance had located her and which she had come now to regard as her home. On one of the first occasions they saw each other on neutral ground, away from Teresa Beard House and its dark promises of ‘end-of-life care’ and ‘planned pain management’, he felt compelled to tell her that the weightless husk of a person sprouting hairs on her face and incapable of raising a spoon to her mouth and sometimes gibbering and drooling and smelling sometimes, his mother who she had to bathe and baby-talk and care for every day hadn’t always been that way. He told her that she had once been a hard-working, lively woman, saddened by the turn her life had taken, but with a kindly nature and a genuine love of people and a communicable appetite for the world. He told her that she used to have nice hair and nice clothes which she knitted and made herself on an old-fashioned treadle machine. He told her that she hadn’t always had to have help in the toilet or be constantly reminded of her name or have holes cut with a razor-blade in her ugly shapeless old lady’s shoes.

  She just said, ‘I know‚’ and poured wine into his glass and into her own glass, and they went on eating.

  Betty had been forty-three when Ray finally made his name with The Big Show on the television. The following year, with a showcase season in the West End in the offing, he had decided to make his life in London. Ray bought his mother a bungalow in a quiet suburb before his departure from the North East. There was everything in it Betty had never had before. But she found many of the modern conveniences burdensome and a challenge rather than bringing any lightening or improvement to her life. The first time he paid his mother a visit in her new house, Ray found the fridge empty and switched off. ‘Mam‚’ he called to her, ‘there’s nothing in this fridge.’ ‘That’s right, pet‚’ she said. ‘I don’t eat a lot and, anyway, it’s winter, so it’s a waste of electricity.’

  Betty hadn’t really been suited to the quieter rhythms of suburban life. Although it was an easy bus ride back to the streets where she grew up whose every scarred stone and dog-marked corner was familiar to her, she had grown to feel isolated and unnecessary – ‘a pointless article’. Very few people passed her window on Linden Avenue, and there were rarely any children out in the street. There was no pub and no shop on the corner that she could slip out to if she found herself short of bread or low on sugar or suddenly fancied a slice of ham for her tea. ‘I’m neither use nor ornament‚’ she’d tell Ray when he phoned at the appointed hour, because she was afraid to pick up the heavy ebonite phone squatting reproachfully in the corner unless she was sure who it was. Like many of her pleasant, strait-laced neighbours, she suspected, she had come to feel like a footnote to her own life.

  A wool shop on Stephenson Street back in the old neighbourhood had proved to be the answer – a cosy cave with a tinkling bell on the door and a two-bar overhead heater, packed full of knitting wools, patterns, stuffed knitted toys, baby clothes, satin ribbons, ‘layettes’ (Ray never found out what these were) and a constant through-traffic of pregnant women, women with babies, women with school-age children whom it became Betty’s pleasure to see grow up and return in time as customers with babies and children of their own.

  She lived in a two-room flat above the shop, which was next door to the double-fronted draper’s where Ray had spent so many hours in the winter when he was three staring at the unflinching family of mannequin models in the rain hats and the raincoats with the mysterious mechanical rain drizzling steadily down on them. By the time she retired, that shop had become a Slots o’ Fun with prizes of crystal rose bowls and decanters and reproduction revolving bookstands and trivet tables in the window. The shop on the other side had gone through many changes of use, from Wilson’s pork shop, to greasy-spoon, to laundryette, to betting shop, finishing up as a Booze Buster off-licence. The whole row had narrowly escaped being demolished in a road-widening scheme in the late sixties, when there was a lot of money sloshing about for projects of that kind and local politicians were well known to be as bent as corkscrews, getting rich on the skimmings of the municipal-construction game. (It was in those years that Ronnie Cornish, as the main manufacturer of bricks in the area and with a number of key place men on the Council, had begun the business of building up his considerable fortune.) Betty’s row had survived until 1985, the last small black stain on a clean field of popular modern redevelopment.

  The wool shop established Betty as a figure in the community. As well as providing continuity, she was one of the few people in the area who had a telephone in the early days, and she was happy to take messages and let people use the phone in the shop to make calls. A friend of Betty’s called Mrs Sudgeon also started to sit in the shop and tell fortunes. Hannah Sudgeon was blind; the sockets of both her eyes were empty and sealed with stitches, which frightened some of the children. But she claimed to be able to foretell the future by the sound of a person’s voice and by the message she received from a point on the arm just below the elbow. She could be found at the shop most days, often with her hands at the level of her low chest and a skein of wool stretched between them and Ray’s mother industriously rolling the wool into balls. The two of them would sit together knitting baby clothes, romper suits, bonnets, tiny cardigans, the needles monotonously clicking, and Mrs Sudgeon would repeat her frequently stated, truly frightening belief that death was a force of loneliness only hinted at by the most ravening loneliness we know in life: the soul does not leave the body but lingers with it through every stage of decomposition and neglect, through heat and cold and the long nights.

  Since her death, whenever Ray thought of his mother, he thought of her in the shop, with the brown shelves with the chipped underpainting, the cave-like atmosphere, the invitation to ‘Join Our Christmas Club’, the soft wool toys with their economic three-stitch noses and glass button eyes; the plaster Venus de Milo which stood for years on one of the shelves with a telephone number scribbled hastily in pencil along the back of the relaxed
right leg.

  An elderly man called Sullivan would come in to Teresa Beard House several days a week and sit at the piano and knock out some of the old songs. On a few occasions when Ray called Marzena at the home to ask after his mother he could hear the old people singing ‘Run, Rabbit’ or ‘When You’re Smiling’, the words miraculously returned through the addled haze of dementia, touching old cords, Sullivan thumping away. And now he heard the same songs as he was lying in bed some mornings, drifting up from the basement, the soundtrack of Tarnow market, one of those coincidences that are just part of the mysteriously connected random flow that constitutes life.

  *

  Over the years Jackie had accumulated a collection of floor plans for most of the chain hotels in the British Isles. On all of them he had marked up the structural walls in Biro or coloured pencil and made a list of the rooms that abutted a cement wall and were also away from the road, and away from the lift and the service lift. Ray was a fanatic about quiet, and it was one of Jackie’s responsibilities to see that he got it. Sometimes it meant exchanging rooms with Ray in the middle of the night. There’d be a knock at the door and Ray would be standing there without his wig, in his dressing-gown, looking beat and orphaned: ‘Would you change rooms with me?’

  ‘Let’s see‚’ Ray would invariably say, half an hour after they’d checked in somewhere. ‘You have the cement wall, but you’re close to the road … All these cars outside will be starting their engines to check out at 8 a.m. … Jesus! All those terrible hours that people get up! I know they’ll be waking me. Let’s see yours, Jackie.’