The North of England Home Service

by Gordon Burn

  Ray was still a light sleeper. He had woken up several times during the night thinking he heard wind gusting through the trees – more noise, with, it seemed to him, an odd desolate note, than he had heard the stand of trees on the Moor ever make before. In fact it was the strips of police caution tape quarantining the trees, snapping and humming in a sustained, unearthly way in the wind.

  There was still a wind now. He was aware of it rattling the windows, which were the original windows that had been put in when the house was built. The panes in the bedroom were still the original Victorian panes which, when light reflected on them, seemed still to be in the process of setting. The surface had a volatile look, as if it was sliding and bunching; it had the tallowy droop and inelasticity of ageing skin. When Ray lay in bed watching the light play on the windows sometimes they reminded him of his own skin. He examined the underside of his upper arms now to see if he could spot any sign of growing ‘bingo flaps’, as he had heard them called at work – a reference, he gathered, to the swaying underarms of the women who waved winning cards in the air at bingo halls to claim the ‘house’.

  Moor Edge Terrace was built in the 1870s. One of the original owners of number 19 had been a painter and woodcarver called Ralph Hedley, and the house had stayed within the Hedley family for generations. It had come on to the market for the first time only in the 1990s, and as soon as he heard that the Hedley house (as nobody other than himself thought of it) was for sale, Ronnie Cornish had made a pre-emptive offer and scarfed it up.

  Ronnie was an unlikely fine-art aficionado. But the peculiar fact was that he knew more about the life and work of Ralph Hedley than anybody living. Ronnie had a number of collections. He had a library of rare atlases by Blaeu, Mercator and Ortelius, and collected Early American natural-history renderings by Audubon, Catesbury and Wilson; John Gould’s birds; the illustrations of the voyages and explorations of Cook, Wilkes and La Perousse. He had amassed a strong collection of hand-coloured, sixteenth-century county maps of Cumberland and Westmorland, Durham and Northumberland, and the Border Country, made by Saxton, Speed, Norden and other seminal English map-makers. But Ronnie’s special collecting passion was for the oil paintings – especially the paintings showing the daily lives of working people in the North of England – of Ralph Hedley.

  A cheap print of a painting of Hedley’s called The Brickfield, originally issued as a promotional gimmick with the 1903 Christmas number of the Weekly Chronicle, had hung in the lean-to building – part doss-house, part out-house – that Ronnie’s father called an office at the original family brickworks under the railway arches at Hetton. The print had faded over the years, and become dirt-ingrained and mildewed; it was chewed away at the corners and patched in a couple of places with tape. But when the old works closed, and the old workers and Kidda, the nag who had been used to haul wagons of clay through the factory, had been put out to pasture, Ronnie resolved that, whatever it took, he would buy Hedley’s original Brickfield painting as soon as the profits that the new mechanized processes were supposed to generate started flowing in. As it turned out, it didn’t take a lot. He got a dealer he knew to put out feelers, and The Brickfield was soon tracked down and acquired, along with some preparatory sketches and Hedley drawings in colour pastels. From then on, though, it stopped being so easy. Ronnie wanted more Hedleys – he wanted to be the Hedley collector; he wanted the pleasure of absolute possession – but the supply had quickly dried up.

  Paintings by Hedley rarely appeared on the art market. Most of his best work had stayed within his own family or the families of the local industrialists and others who had originally commissioned the paintings. Many of the owners were elderly people, and Ronnie was accused on more than one occasion of putting undue pressure on them to sell when they had made it clear they didn’t want to sell to him, and even of ambulance-chasing, and he didn’t deny it. He wasn’t ashamed; he was a collector, with all the paranoid, irrational, sociopathic, controlling tendencies that implied.

  Meanwhile, starved of the paintings, Ronnie turned his attention to other areas of Hedley’s work. One of the ancillary Cornish businesses was a demolition contractors. And Ronnie, like his competitors in the architectural salvage trade, was not known for his scrupulous observance of listed buildings consequent procedures. If architraves, friezes, pediments, stone cornices, Georgian fireplaces, even doors were there for the taking, then they were taken, regardless of whether a building was in use or abandoned: cherrypicked with permission or without, legitimately or not.

  Ralph Hedley had used his house, which was now Ray’s house, as a workshop and a showplace for his talents. It had been the place where he was able to refine the skills that were to earn him a reputation for being the most gifted architectural carver in his part of England.

  Hedley was heavily in demand during Tyneside’s biggest boom in building in the 1880s. Building contractors ordered decorative carving in hotels, banks and shops, and the Hedley workshop provided mantelpieces and wooden moulds for plasterwork in new houses, as well as innumerable brackets, festoons, and balusters, and huge lengths of egg-and-dart moulding.

  Excellent examples of his work in all these areas were to be found from cellar to attic at Moor Edge Terrace. For the dining room he had produced a huge sideboard showing scenes from the Northumberland battle, the Chevy Chase. There were decorative balusters rising through the house, scalloped corner niches, and columnettes. He had installed fine wooden panels in the master bedroom, together with a frieze of cornucopias overflowing with fruit, with a ceiling rose of similar design. All of it now gone, stripped out between Ronnie Cornish acquiring the house and Ray and Marzena moving in.

  From his bed Ray was able to see where the frieze and the plaster cornices had been removed. The room had been replastered and expertly skimmed, but the marks still showed. In certain lights he could see the scars around the perimeter of the ceiling and near the tops of the walls. Shadow indentations of how the room might have looked in its Victorian heyday were still there. The room itself had been transferred intact and in its entirety to Ronnie’s office, or one of his homes.

  For the first year or thereabouts that he lived in the house Ray had been unaware of the Hedley connection until a neighbour, a lecturer at the University, conversationally pointed it out.

  He didn’t suppose he minded the fact that, in effect, he was living in a denuded, scooped-out shell. And he was pragmatic enough to know that, even if he did, there wasn’t a lot he could do about it. He was in hock to Ronnie. Ronnie advanced him the money to buy the house. (This was nominal, of course, as Ronnie owned the house.) Ronnie had put up the start money for Bobby’s, and Ronnie was swallowing the losses the club was incurring since foot-and-mouth. Ray was paid a salary, plus an incremental (so far notional) share of any profits earned.

  Ray owned – he was paying the mortgage on – Jackie’s house. Jackie’s house was in Ray’s name. Jackie was seventy and might have expected to own something, but he owned nothing. Both Ray and Jackie had to jump when Ronnie said jump. They were dependent to an unhealthy degree on Ronnie’s whim. When light washed the walls, throwing the scarring into relief, Ray, in his half-awake state, was often reminded of this truth.

  He got up, ran the razor over his face and went for his run, following the bucking blue-and-white streamers and the boundary path around the Moor.

  He saw the old man some mornings, leaning on the iron gate, mooning after his Daisy and Bessy and Flossie, his Bella and Flora-dora, his Minehaha and Jill. This morning, though, he wasn’t there.

  *

  Every Saturday when there was a home game Jackie came and collected Ray and delivered him to United’s ground. It was a short trip, in fact only around the corner, but the milling crowd and swelling stream of people made it simpler to get there by car.

  He had an arrangement where he stood on his hind legs and read the team sheet out, introduced the manager and did a stint for the corporate crowd in one of the big, bright new clangorou
s executive entertainment suites on match days. And this was another thing Ray supposed he owed to Ronnie Cornish, Ronnie being a big-noise director.

  It was early when they set off. It was a few minutes after twelve, and the game didn’t start until three. The programme vendors, ‘swag’ sellers and portable canteens were just setting up, and the carnival was just getting going. The first hint of onions frying was starting to drift on the air. When there was a game, Mighty put on a blue-gingham uniform and a lace-trimmed blue-gingham apron and waited on in one of the maze of upper-tier bars and restaurants at the ground that were part of the ‘hospitality experience’.

  On those days when Mighty was earning at the football, the Scran Van was taken over by her daughter, Andrea, and Andrea’s young teenage daughter, Kelly. Ray always looked out for their ‘HOME COOKEN AND HOMEMADE PIES’ sign set up against the Park gates and the big fist with the felt hammer in it which was fixed to the crown of Andrea’s cap, and Jackie always gave them a wave and a friendly toot as they were passing. The last time they’d seen Kelly, she had had white strings hanging from the lobes of her ears, and Ray asked her what they signified. ‘Just dental floss‚’ she said. ‘I had my ears pierced for ear-rings, and the man told me to keep the piercings open with floss. It might look unusual, but it doesn’t hurt.’

  There was the usual queue snaking around the souvenir superstore and the notice was in its usual place just inside the atriumed main Reception: ‘SMART CASUAL – STRICTLY NO TRAINERS, DENIM OR FOOTBALL SHIRTS’. Ray signed the book (always a difficult moment because the man keeping Reception had a toupé that in cut and colour closely resembled his) and rode the glass-pod lift to Level 4. ‘It couldn’t look phonier if it had a chin strap‚’ he had recently heard somebody joke about the steward on Reception’s hairpiece, which had given Ray pause for thought about his own. He made a conscious effort to unglue his eyes from the man’s dense, unbreathing comb-over as the lift carried him up through the building, and looked south across the old green-patinated buildings made of the hard local stone, and the new multi-coloured chrome-and-plexiglass towers of the shining regenerated city, in the direction of the river.

  It was Ray’s second season of this Saturday routine, and it never varied: drinks in the Chairman’s Suite, lunch, a few jokes from Ray, team changes and parish-pump announcements, the manager’s stroking of the faithful, the match, player appearances, more drinks in the Vice Presidents’ Suite, drinks in the Directors’ Suite, one for the road, home. ‘The only place round here that sells more vodka than us on a Saturday is Asda‚’ the Entertainments Director had told Ray, and he believed him. The Business Club level (always welcome news to Ray) was awash with drink.

  The first person he saw when he got out of the lift was Thomas Saint, a United hero of the seventies, bald now, middle-aged and thickened, but still known to one and all by his tabloid tag of ‘Saint Tommy’. Tommy, in the age-old tradition, had taken his lumps. He was a relic of the legendary drinking days, when players would go off on a Thursday bender and turn up for the match on Saturday still drunk. He had eventually been arrested for exposing himself in a Little Chef car park near Scotch Corner and been sentenced to twelve months’ community service. But the North East is a forgiving place, famous for collecting those who have strayed back to its bosom. And now Tommy was rehabilitated, a role model and model citizen, and generally regarded as having a heart as big as a bucket.

  He had been given a job as a living exhibit in the club’s memorabilia museum and also, drifting through the various hospitality facilities, worked as a presser-of-the-flesh and meeter-and-greeter on match days. And, true to the job description, that was what he did to Ray now – took Ray’s hand in his great mit and offered him a hearty greeting: ‘How’s tricks, me old marrer! Hey, I’ve got a cracker forya. I was walking along the street the other day and I met a man coming towards me with a sheep under each arm. “Sheering?” I said. “Fuck off,” he said. “Find your own.”’ Ray laughed out of relief at first, and then because he found the joke funny. They shared something for a moment. A throat-clearer on an overcast Saturday morning. A small community of two.

  ‘I was walking along the street the other day‚’ Ray said, breaking his own rule of never performing for nothing, ‘and I met a man who had a pelican on a lead. “Are you taking him to the zoo?” I said. “No,” he said. “I took him to the zoo yesterday. We’re going to the pictures.”’ More laughter. Another connection. Saint Tommy seemed set up for the day. The sound of his laughter boomed in the nearly empty corridors. ‘Have a good one‚’ he said, laughing into his fist, the laughter eventually thickening into a dubious-sounding chesty cough.

  The club crest in shades of blue repeated itself to infinity in the carpet. Ray glanced into a steamy kitchen and into the windowless cell that was the Press Lounge – dingy chairs, fractured ceiling tiles, burn-pocked tables. All the Function Suites opened on to a view of the pitch and, walking into any of them from the enclosure of the corridor, it was always a shock to be confronted by the canyon of the playing area and the seating tiers and the reckless vertiginous sense of falling away.

  As soon as Ray appeared in the doorway of the Chairman’s Suite, a waitress stepped forward with a tray of champagne and juices, but he shook his head and walked over to the bar. Although it was new, the Suite had been retro-fitted with the trappings of a previous era and had a smoky, fusty, fifties feel: the walls were covered with pale-blue watered silk and hung with a job lot of action portraits in oil of heroes of the glorious past.

  The Chairman’s guests were, as per usual, a group of crisp little men ‘a-swagger with assets’, a phrase Ray had heard or read once and remembered. They were members of the same Lodge, the same Rotary Club, the same Round Table, ego-driven and hard-bargaining, men with cautious, ordered lives. ‘Big Steamers’ was what Marzena called the football club directors, after a line from a poem of Kipling’s that she liked and which she and Ray quoted to each other and often laughed about: ‘Where are you going to, all you Big Steamers?’ ‘How were your Big Old Steamers?’ Marzena would sometimes ask Ray when he got home, well watered and very tired, and two shows to do later that night at Bobby’s. ‘Have they managed to bring back the hanging yet?’

  ‘Yes, but. Success on the pitch is the driver of our business. It’s all very well this talk about restructuring the debt. But if you look at profits after player-trading … Oh, aye-aye. You know what they say: never turn your back on a full-grown comedian. It might bite.’ Ray knew without turning round that the speaker was Maurice. Maurice was a long-standing member of the squirearchy, and old school. He was a sharp-featured, dapper man with white scimitar sideboards and vast aviator-style glasses which were wider than his head. Maurice’s glasses had turned cranberry-coloured in the concentrated stadium light.

  He was a polyurethane-foam millionaire, also the owner of a telephone-cleaning company, which he had just relinquished control of to his son. It was a relationship that was duplicated several times over in that company of worthies: a number of the middle-aged men having drinks were still having their strings jerked by their fathers, and the combination of resentment and dependency accounted for the underlying atmosphere of tightlipped rage and truculent aggression at these occasions. Maurice was a recovering alcoholic, but he still had his mineral water out of the pewter tankard engraved with his name. ‘I stopped drinking in 1980, but I didn’t get sober until 1985‚’ That was his one joke, his joke for all occasions, which he could hide behind when he found himself in the situation of being among strangers and having to say no to a drink, when the shame of all he did when he was brutally, rampantly off the wagon came flooding back.

  Maurice had informed Ray on more than one occasion that his life was governed by two simple acronyms: PMA and OPM – ‘positive mental attitude’ and ‘other people’s money’. He was a devotee of the inspirational writings of Norman Vincent Peale and a major local contributor to the coffers of New Labour. Government ministers visiting the N
orth East were given use of the company helicopter.

  Maurice tried to engage Ray in conversation about the prospects for the team, which had just struggled clear of the relegation zone with four successive wins, and five games left to play. It was a subject in which neither of them had any burning interest. ‘You’ve got to hand it to them, four wins on the stot … Steve did well for us on Wednesday, an’ he’s probably our fifth-choice centre half. But what we need is a strong, speedy, world-class defender, someone who can actually read the game …’

  Ray’s attention strayed to the pitch, where several men in tracksuits were carrying out the pre-match inspection. They walked with their heads bent, as if they were trying to find something one of them had dropped earlier. Occasionally one of the men tested the ground with a toe of his boot. It was a new pitch which hadn’t been played on until today. It had just been laid. It had been brought to the ground by lorry. A week ago it had been lying in a field in Lincolnshire, anonymous, unremarked. Then it had been cut and rolled like carpet and transported here, with police outriders accompanying the extra-long vehicle and reporters and television cameras waiting to record its arrival.

  Who would be first to have their ashes scattered on it, something that happened in private once or twice a season, although the club denied it ever happened? Had the integrity of the field been respected, or had the strips been laid in no particular order so that together they grew into a different field? How did uprooted grass go on growing? Ray, drink in hand, was pondering this, and Maurice, who now had been joined by another man, was still chitter-chattering, when a bride and groom emerged from the tunnel and wandered out into the darker greenery of the lower field, and love music started playing over the Tannoy.

  The windows in the Chairman’s Suite were angled outwards, which heightened the sensation of vertigo. The glass was thick, so any sound that penetrated it was strained and drowned out by the chatter. The music outside was faint – too faint to be identified – but almost anybody would have recognized it as a love song: ‘Tonight I celebrate my love for you …’