The North of England Home Service (10 page)

Now that he was not so young Ray filled most of his dead dressing-room hours with routines connected to his health and his appearance. He was coming to learn, as so many others of his age had come to learn before him, that at no other time of life is existence so intensely physical. A small infarction caused by some interference in the blood supply and resulting in the
right-hand
side of his face going south for a week or two had brought on the jogging and a new, rigidly observed low-cholesterol,
high-protein
diet. (The admonitions about his drinking he was largely ignoring.) He took vitamin
B12
complex in capsule form and
sixteen
drops of oil of echinacea in his second drink (ruining the taste but not the kick) and zinc and calcium supplements and put on restful music and lay on his sun-bed for thirty-five minutes
every afternoon. He did a gentle work-out using leg weights and barbells. Jackie came in some time after that and massaged warm olive oil into his back, pressing into the flesh to find the knots of tiredness and stress. He had his remaining hair cut and coloured and blow-dried in a way that cleverly disguised its uneven thinning condition. It was washed and styled for him every afternoon by Julie, one of the front-of-house staff, who returned later to help him fix his hairpiece correctly and do a finishing comb-over at the sides and back to ensure that no joins were showing. Jackie, who knew to the millilitre how to pace him, kept drip-feeding him drink.

Calm and quiet, that was the idea.
The
silence
that
is
in
the
starry
sky
,
the
sleep
that
is
among
the
lonely
hills.
Except that today, all day, he kept having his quiet time eaten into by extraneous noise and interruptions and what he considered unreasonable demands on his time. The band was auditioning a new singer, which he had forgotten was going to happen, and so the soothing music on his CD was drowned out by a voice that could strip paint, belting out club concert-room standards like ‘New York, New York’ and ‘Mack the Knife’. He had had to skip his massage when Alan Harries, the brewery rep, overran by nearly an hour, bending his ear with his tale of woe about how his wife was leaving him for another woman, the mother of his daughter’s best friend, and how their affair had been going on for years under his nose
without
him realizing, de-dah-de-dah. (Jackie had got it in the neck for this. ‘If he wants to talk, he should see a priest,’ Jackie said. ‘That’s all you had to tell him.’ ‘Don’t make me use rude
obscenities
, Jackie, you know it gives me indigestion.’)

And then in the late afternoon he had had to jam his baseball cap on over his still-unpolymerized hair in an attempt to put out Typhoon Eddie, which was blowing through the kitchen. The chef, ‘Eddie’ Edmunds, was a big man in all directions, with a proud stomach and a broad red floreted nose which turned white when he got angry, which was often. (His nose had earned him
the nickname ‘Traffic Light’ among the younger kitchen workers, a fact he didn’t know.) He wore his thinning hair in a
pony-tai
l-with
-scrunchie with two fuzzy brackets of hair, which turned into lank
hasidim
-like ringlets in the wet heat, framing his ears.

Some of the waiting staff were folding cutlery into paper napkins and watching an afternoon soap on the big scroll-down television: the drilling Australian accents boomed around the empty room and even a door opening or closing cracked like thunder. ‘Chef’s off on one,’ a voice called to Ray from out of the gloaming. But Ray could already hear him, roaring and erupting and violently banging about.

‘Whichever yi lay yor hands on forst, hinny. Aa divvent mek a pet o’ me stummick,’ an elderly woman had said a few nights earlier when she was asked if she would be having the tripe and onions or the Tweed salmon. Her family and the waitress serving her had thought that was very funny, but when it was reported back to him in the kitchen Eddie Edmunds had just grunted that it was typical. The menu at Bobby’s mainly consisted of cow-heel brawn, saveloy dips, leek-and-bacon roly-poly, sheep’s-head broth (‘the eyes will see you through the week’), stotty cake, pease pudden and other authentic local dishes which the chef took pride in preparing. But recently rumours had been flying about a plan to add the kind of eat-all-you-want Chinese hot table that was proving to be such a popular draw in the restaurants of Chinatown, and Eddie Edmunds had already resigned twice that month.

‘Haddaway, man, I’ve enough meat here to feed the fucken five thousand and still have enough left over for half the Hoppins.’ Eddie was fulminating by the pastry station in the centre of the kitchen. He was wearing a tabard top which was heavily, almost heroically, soiled, and red-and-white (his team’s colours) chessboard trousers. Sweat coursed down the back of his neck into his collar; his strawberry nose glowed white. But while
Eddie continued to blow his stack, all around him was an oasis of uninterested calm: two acned youths were hunched over a board game that Ray could see was called ‘Social Insecurity’; a dreamy, dark-haired girl was sitting cross-legged on the floor, caressing one of the satinized industrial surfaces with a
mutton-cloth
duster and baby oil; another girl – plainer, plumper – was idly pushing the orders carousel round and round with her finger.

‘Whoa,’ Ray said. ‘Whoa there.
Whoa!
Hey, Eddie, why don’t you just shut your mouth for a minute and give your arse a chance?’ What was exercising Eddie, it seemed, was the fact that the wholesale cancellation by the farmers’ group had left him with a meat mountain to get rid of. What Eddie couldn’t say was that it was ‘moody’ meat bought off a pal for a fifth of the price he would claim for it and that it was already a day past its sell-by.

Ray talked a good fight. He had put-downs to deal with any kind of heckler situation or audience loudmouth. But he hated confrontation. ‘Pagga! Pagga!’ – the cry that went around the playground when a fight was brewing – had always made him feel physically sick as a boy. It set off a loud alarm in his fear centre, right in his gut. He could feel his heart race and his legs weaken underneath him; a dry throat and his heart going crazy. He felt that standing in the kitchen’s thick-walled, room-size refrigerator where Eddie Edmunds had brought him, surveying the hanging carcasses of sheep and pigs, registering the blood smell in the air, listening to the generator fan running. He looked at the larded tattooed sides of beef and thought of Daisy and Dolly roaming Allotment Field, responding when their names were called, harried by dogs, mechanically cropping grass. And then his thoughts had turned to gory gangster films and heavies using beef carcasses as punch-bags and bodies hanging from hooks on moving pulleys, and at that moment somebody had started singing in the club.

He had noticed that Eddie was wearing wooden-soled clogs and that the tight cuffs of his trousers made his feet look like pig’s trotters in them. He noticed the rime of sweat around his chef’s paper hat and the pitted, grapefruit-like texture of his skin; the fact that his neck was thick with fat.

Ray realized he had been gradually manoeuvred into a place where his view of the door was blocked and that the animal bodies hanging within a foot of where he was standing had residual hairs that you didn’t notice from a distance and were giving off what seemed to him a sour bad smell. And he had just gained the impression that Eddie was about to snatch at his cap, exposing the even grid of scars that he had been left with as the result of an early, failed hair transplant (the crown of his head looked like a scrubbing brush that had been worn down to the wood and the stubbiest bristles – a domino with chickenpox, as Jackie described it), when he heard Jackie’s voice in the kitchen and felt time whirr back up to real time and heard cheers and a smattering of ironic applause as the Presley impersonator – he had an idea it was one of the young waiters – came to the end of his song. ‘
Thankyouverramush
.’
Something solid – a head or a hand – collided with the microphone, sending out a loud
amplified
crack followed by a squeal of feedback.

‘Is everything OK here?’ Jackie was standing with his legs
under him the width of his shoulders instead of spread wide and dug in, which is the mistake that many amateur fighters make. It was all about balance. Balance meant leverage; leverage meant speed; speed meant power. Jackie’s strength as a boxer had always been in his determination, his courage, his will to carry on. It wore opponents down.

‘I wanted to talk to the engineer, not the shitey rag,’ chef said to Jackie, but in a way that indicated he knew the fun was over, and Ray had taken that as his cue to escape from the cold, back into the kitchen where the two boys were still bent over their game and the girl with the duster was busy examining herself in the dimmed surface of an oven and it was as if whatever it was that had happened inside the big chilled room had never taken place. The other girl had momentarily
disappeared
.

‘I’ve got one forya on the mad-cow disease if you want‚’ the less crater-faced of the two crater-faced boys said to Ray when he was nearly out the door. He had turned red and his acne scars looked sore and livid. ‘There’s two cows in a field. One says to the other, “What d’you think of this mad-cow disease?” The other one says, “It doesn’t affect me. I’m a fucken duck.”’ His friend sniggered, and the boy who had told the joke, exceedingly red now, sniggered as well.
‘Fnarr.’

‘Eddie wanted to make it a BSE day,’ the friend said. ‘“Bit of Something Extra”.’ And they were off again, laughing with their mouths closed so that their shoulders rocked and tears welled in their innocent eyes. They reminded Ray of the two fire-lighters on the Moor that morning, which was already beginning to seem an awfully long time ago.

‘The mad-cow disease was last month, son‚’ Ray said, ‘haven’t you heard? Now it’s the foot-and-mouth. But thanks, I might be able to find a way to use it, you never know. Thanks anyway,’

It was nearly dark by half past five when the ‘
BOBBY’S BACK YEM
’ sign stuttered into lurid life, colouring up the dusk. Its blue and yellow neon flourish could be seen from the other side of the river. At quarter past seven a switch was flicked and the tape of an old wireless programme from the palaeolithic age of radio started to be streamed as background into the club.

In his dressing-room, Ray rose and touched a button near the Tannoy speaker which faded out the sound of his younger, starchier, painfully ingratiating self, strangely isolated in time.

When he was new to the business and still wet behind the ears, Ray had broadcast with Bobby Thompson from many working men’s clubs, works canteens, corporation halls and drill halls in the North East of England. And it had been his idea to name Bobby’s after the Geordie comedian whose trademarks were a flat cap, a tab that was continually dribbling ash down his sloppy jumper, and a style of comedy that was rooted in his own hard upbringing during the twenties and thirties, when you had to fight for your bite, as the saying went. ‘The Little Waster’, as Thompson became known for his jokes about running rings around the rent man and the Assistance and life on the dole, was bom in 1911 in the pit village of Penshaw Staithes in County Durham, and in a long life hardly ever left the North East.

He was a comic in the great eccentric tradition of Billy Merson, George Robey, Rob Wilton and Frank Randle in a way that Ray Cruddas, for all his national reputation, had never been. But the combination of an impenetrable accent and material that already had whiskers growing on it in the sixties meant that his comedy didn’t travel. He was given a chance to break out of the working men’s clubs when Tyne Tees Television gave him his own sixteen-week series in 1959, in its first ever season. But after a storming beginning,
The
Bobby
Thompson
Show
rapidly ran out of material and turned into a ratings calamity. It bombed
spectacularly
, the broadcasters looked like fools and he was an outcast after that, a pariah in the new world of slick patter and canned laughter in which Ray Cruddas was just beginning to establish himself. (It was the period when he was heavily in demand for judging beauty competitions, opening swimming pools in civic centres and giving bouquets to the most glamorous grannies of Hull or Gypsy Hill.)

But back in the mechanics’ institutes and the fag-end,
back-of-beyond
clubs, Bobby Thompson was welcome. Poor people would always laugh at his well-worn routines. When Bobby said of his wife, ‘Yes’dee I thowt she was havin’ a bubble bath an’ she’d been eatin’ mushy peas,’ he got howls. When he told the one about how he telephones Neville Chamberlain to see how he can help in the war effort, only to find himself talking to Mrs Chamberlain who responds with the epic line, ‘Can you haad on a minute, Bob, I’ve got a pan of chips on,’ they roared and banged on the tables.