The North of England Home Service

by Gordon Burn

  6

  To improve the lay-out of the gardens and grounds at Coldside Hall, the house where Ronnie Cornish and his wife, Hope, lived and entertained unstintingly, the village had been removed and rebuilt in an Italian style in the early nineteenth century. Hills had been installed, a Gothic folly built, the river rerouted and widened. The landscaped grounds had been walled off and fenced in.

  A major trunk road had been driven through the resited village in the sixties and a concrete footbridge erected to enable the people who lived there to move from one part of the village to the other. But first one half of Coldside withered and died, and then the villagers from the other side eventually either died or moved away. On the Sunday that Jackie drove up to collect Ray from a party at the Hall, the pedestrian bridge was in the process of being demolished.

  Jackie could see the ribbon of road from the slope that rose up at the back of Ronnie’s house. In another month or so the road would be screened by the trees, which also helped to muffle the drone of the traffic. But it wasn’t yet May, and the trees were just coming into leaf. It was its proximity to the road that had allowed Ronnie to acquire Coldside Hall at what now looked like a giveaway price. If anybody knew that Ronnie had an interest in the company that had won the contract to build the trunk road, it was a point that was never raised at the time.

  It was nearly dusk. Car headlights were clicking through the trees. Occasionally the lights of the television crews flared briefly to indicate that there was some activity at the end of the lane leading to the Hall. The police had erected barriers there, and Jackie had had his identity checked turning into the lane and again at the main gate at the head of the drive.

  Demonstrators were out in force. They were protesting against the Government’s handling of the foot-and-mouth crisis. There was a lot of anger. One woman attached to the department with the main responsibility for managing the culls and carcass disposal claimed she had had acid mine-water aimed at her face and raw meat nailed to the bonnet of her car.

  The protesters’ chief target was the Deputy Prime Minister, who had travelled to the North East to launch ‘UK is OK’, a Government-backed, damage-limitation campaign whose aim was to bring back those overseas tourists who had been frightened off after a picture had gone out of the Prime Minister wearing a bright-yellow contamination suit. Entertainers, celebrity athletes and others had been recruited to reassure potential foreign visitors that the English countryside was open for business, and that they didn’t either have to bring their own food in with them, or leave their clothes behind to be burned when they left.

  There was a stone terrace at the back of the Hall, but it was deserted. A row of windows at the lower service level was brightly lit. The light spilling out of the windows in the rest of the house was pink and softly glowing, with the guests only an indistinct, barely moving shadow under the high ceilings, like syrup in the base of a tall drink.

  Below Jackie was a garden with box animals and obelisks. Two men had stopped by a spouting marble fountain for a smoke. Jackie was watching, but he was also aware of being watched. In addition to the dozens of uniformed officers, the grounds were crawling with Special Branch. Each time he felt himself coming into the field of vision of one of these expressionless, civilian-suited men, Jackie instinctively tried to compensate for the unevenness in his stride caused by his bum knee.

  Lights came on in a house on the other side of the valley. They came on in different rooms at the same time, a sure indication that they were on a timer and the owners were away. An invitation, if you happened to be a burglar.

  The pyres were still burning, lending, in patches, a crimson and orange glow to the sky. A row of winches for lifting carcasses was lined up hidden behind a hedge. Fields patched the valley beyond the road, crossed with power lines and dotted here and there with square, solid-looking buildings, but nothing was moving except the car lights through the darkened trees. The fields were eerily empty.

  A gravel path curved down to the house. As he descended the path, Jackie could hear a string quartet playing American show tunes and light classics and the steady burble of conversation. A woman and a man in white chefs’ hats had come out of the kitchen to take the air. From somewhere above them came a tinkling theatrical laugh of the kind you would expect at a very bad play.

  Jackie’s feet crunched on the gravel. He stepped on to the grass. Soon he was able to make out individual faces at the windows, which were framed with heavy swags of curtain. He thought he knew the window where Ronnie’s mother’s old mangle was on show like the Parthenon marbles, and pictured Ronnie telling the tale to his distinguished guests, while his guests smiled and nodded and looked around for more stimulating conversation or a waiter to freshen their drink.

  Suddenly then, out of the blue, Jackie thought of Jimmy and the night very many years ago when they had been the side show at another celebrity mix-and-mingle. Jimmy Li had died, but he had only just died, at the turn of the year. Against the odds, Jimmy had had a long and, so far as Jackie knew, a fulfilled and happy life. He had been taken on by a capable, dedicated Jamaican nurse called Elva, and Jimmy and Elva had lived snug as bugs for the past twenty years on the thirteenth floor of a high-rise in the middle of Birmingham, where Jackie occasionally visited them. Jimmy was crippled, and confined to a wheelchair, but they enjoyed some good times. The veteran Jamaican jazz musician Terrance Wilkins and other friends would sometimes call in for a meal when Ronnie Scott’s Club on the nearby canal had closed. Jimmy would rustle up oxtail with red beans, a chicken curry or crab in a black-bean sauce and they would reminisce far into the night.

  Jimmy had made it to seventy-nine. Jackie couldn’t walk in the small streets off Piccadilly without remembering the night the pair of them had gone into the tiny basement place in a gas-lit arcade to get their tattoos done, in Jimmy’s first week in England. Jackie had had ‘WORK’ and ‘PLAY’ on his fingers. Jimmy had gone for a baby bird between his left thumb and forefinger whose beak opened and closed as he flexed and unflexed his hand. On the inside of his left wrist he had had a cut dripping with blood. Jackie noticed many years later that the tattoo place had been incorporated into an expensive bar where the gossip-page photographers hung around outside, and he and Jimmy had had a good laugh about that.

  In their flat, Jimmy and Elva had a photo-mural of a Caribbean beach covering one wall. On his last visit to see them, Jimmy had accompanied Jackie in his wheelchair to the lift when he left. When he looked out through the tiny scratched window, through a hole in the graffiti, Jackie had seen Jimmy wheeling himself away, his arms still looking strong, back along the landing to where the music and his friends were.

  Ronnie Cornish’s brother-in-law, Hope’s brother, George Veitch, lived in the gate-house at the Hall, where he was employed as a groundsman/gardener. Jackie got on with George, who in his youth had boxed a little and always gave Jackie his due. In the failing light he saw George in his garden tying back runner beans, and reminded Jackie of his father, content in the solitary endeavour. George had grown up in the city, making machine parts for many years. But living out at Coldside had given him a countryman’s outlook and a weatherburned country face.

  ‘Hoo’s it gannin, Jackie?’

  ‘Not bad, George.’

  George was wearing a tweed cap and a new-looking quilted body-warmer that Jackie knew would almost certainly have been passed on from Ronnie. Nearly all George’s clothes were Ronnie’s cast-offs, altered, cut down, taken in.

  ‘Havven seen yee roond for a canny while‚’ George said, stopping work to talk. ‘Aa naa aal aboot yi stickin’ one on his nibs, like.’ He gave Jackie a sly look. ‘Aa divven naa what it was aboot, an’ aa divven want ti naa. Yi naa what thi say: hear everything, say nowt. That’s my policy. Aa stay oot on it, me.’

  The string quartet at the house stopped playing. Jackie became aware of it only when it stopped. There was just hubbub noise; the sound of somebody tipping ice. ‘What do you make of this Fraudley Ha
rrison, then?’ Jackie said. Boxing was always a safe gambit, a subject where there was little or no chance of saying anything that could get back, or be taken or interpreted in the wrong way. Ronnie could throw the switch and cut off the oxygen supply to both of them. They knew that. In his own case, Jackie suspected Ronnie already had. ‘Worra fuckin’ shame‚’ George said. ‘Fuckin’ scandal. Cunt couldn’t box his way oot of a paper bag if ’e’d pissed on it forst. I feel embarrassed for the lad.’

  Across the valley a faint blue mist was coming down, blackish at the edges and luridly streaked with yellow. George had gone back to his beans. ‘The stench hasn’t been so bad the day, like‚’ he said. ‘Can’t hardly tell it from the smell of the cigars.’ He looked towards the house. ‘Cigars usually means it’s Christmas roond here.’

  Neither of them said anything for a while. The string quartet started up again, playing what Jackie recognized as a selection from Carousel – ‘If I Loved You’, ‘Just My Bill’. Then some pigeons came over. They flew straight over where George and Jackie were standing, then made a sudden turn, all of them turning together, a grey bowed smear against the sky. ‘Fleein’ excellent‚’ George said. ‘Them younguns is mekkin’ the olduns flee.’

  They were still standing with their necks craned, watching the pigeons turn and wheel, when the ring-tone on Jackie’s mobile was the signal that Ray was ready to leave.

  ‘His master’s voice‚’ George said.

  ‘See you, George.’

  ‘Be seein’ you, Jackie. Watch how you go.’

  *

  Jackie knew as soon as he saw the way Ray was walking that he had had a skinful. He knew as soon as he spoke that the likelihood was that he had had more than that. ‘Bah, I’ve supped some ale toneet!’ Ray only fell into this music-hall Lancashire accent when he was palatic, as they said up there, an expression Jackie liked. ‘I love you but I wouldn’t tell you‚’ the other sign of his pissedness, was on the cards. An emergency pit-stop on the way home.

  In the event it was Telfer they had to stop for. Telfer was hanging on. He was frequently incontinent, and Jackie had to carry him up and down stairs and physically support him and coax him to eat, but he had good days as well. There had been only a rump of protesters waiting around at Coldside and they had bent their knees to get a look in the car and decide whether the passengers looked to them like people who deserved a boo, but they had found it easy to get away. As soon as they were on the motorway, though, Telfer started making pitiful whining noises and panting and Jackie pulled into the first services stop.

  There were two or three trucks in the section reserved for commercial vehicles, but the main car park was nearly empty. Jackie chose a spot close to some picnic tables and a children’s roundabout, near to a stand of trees. Ray was asleep in the front, snoring and whinnying, murmuring and crying out sometimes and making disturbed noises in his sleep.

  The dogs made straight for the trees. They were a variety of industrial spruce, deep in takeaway cartons and sweet wrappers and old tins. The needles on many of the lower branches had been stripped, as if many people had taken the path Jackie was taking, many times before.

  On the other side of the trees was a large industrial estate. The estate occupied the floor of a wide valley and was filled with larger and smaller, part-brick, part-prefabricated sheds. From where Jackie was standing, a gentle slope ran down to a wire-mesh fence, where the dogs were sniffing and running, Telfer seemingly more comfortable since he had been let out of the car.

  It was turning cold. Jackie pulled up his collar. He poked a Diet Pepsi can with the toe of his trainer. Then in the gathering darkness he saw a flock of ducks, maybe as many as thirty or forty of them – tufteds, he guessed, from the white undermarkings on their bellies – flying in a V-formation and coming down on what they took to be a lake, but which wasn’t a lake at all.

  It was the roof of a vast electronics warehouse, flat, translucent, corrugated, several football pitches long and wide and lit from underneath by patches of variously coloured lights. Jackie could see how, from the birds’ perspective, flying in from Israel or Lapland, it could look like a welcome expanse of standing water, shining like tinplate, glowing in the declivity, the perfect place to drop into cover.

  When they landed, they landed feet first, skidded a short distance, and then either stopped to investigate why the surface underneath them was solid rather than liquid, or kept on running in jerky little waddling steps until they had picked up enough impetus to rise and pitch into the wind and get airborne again. But a few of the ducks had come down close to an edge which, instead of ending in a sheer drop like the others, turned into a steep sloping porticoed roof. The ducks that landed near the sloping roof didn’t brake, but slalomed down it and then beat their wings to get them in the air again. And, as he watched, Jackie noticed that many of the ducks, far from being disconcerted by this new experience, were circling round and trying it a second, third, even a fourth time, until the entire flock, or so it seemed to Jackie, was joining in the game of dive-bombing the warehouse roof – washing-machines and refrigerators; televisions, personal stereos, computers, all made in Korea – squawking, and skidding and sliding on their rumps, like something dreamed up at Disney.

  After a while Telfer and Ellis decided to join in, excitedly running backwards and forwards along the length of the fence, standing up at the fence watching the ducks, crooning, crazily barking.

  *

  Jackie crouched down and put his arms around Telfer, one arm under his chest and the other arm around his hind legs, then straightened up and put him in the car. When he had settled, Jackie smoothed the creases out of an old jumper that had once been Ray’s and which had risen to the top of the jumble of layers he had put there to keep the dog comfortable.

  Before he started the car, Jackie reached over and straightened Ray’s hair, which had gone a bit skew-whiff.

  ‘Jackie‚’ Ray said.

  ‘I know. You love me but you wouldn’t tell me.’

  ‘No, no‚’ Ray said. ‘I just wanted to ask you what day it was. Where are we?’

  ‘Come on.’ Jackie released Ray’s shirt collar which had got caught under the seat belt. He undid his bow-tie. ‘Let’s be getting you home.’

  About the Author

  Gordon Burn was the author of four novels, Alma Cogan (winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize), Fullalove, The North of England Home Service and Born Yesterday. He was also the author of the non-fiction titles Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son, Pocket Money, Happy Like Murderers, On The Way to Work (with Damien Hirst) and Best and Edwards. His last book, Sex & Violence, Death and Silence, was a collection of his essays on art. Gordon Burn was the author of four novels, Alma Cogan (winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize), Fullalove, The North of England Home Service and Born Yesterday. He was also the author of the non-fiction titles Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son, Pocket Money, Happy Like Murderers, On The Way to Work (with Damien Hirst) and Best and Edwards. His last book, Sex & Violence, Death and Silence, was a collection of his essays on art.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition published in 2010

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Gordon Burn, 2003

  The right of Gordon Burn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law ac
cordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–26699–9