The North of England Home Service (2 page)

In many ways the Cruddases were typical of their neighbours – the people who stayed in their own neighbourhood, loving it, enjoying the closeness, the friendliness, the familiarity, and trying to save enough money to move out. In this last respect, Tommy Cruddas was doing better than most. He worked as a costing clerk at the ABLE machine shop just across the road from their house –
ALWAYS BETTER LASTING EQUIPMENT
; it ran along the side of the building in fiery red letters.

But he had a part-time evening job as leader of a seven-piece dance band and played Hawaiian guitar. The main point of their trip into the town that day had been to buy a piece of sheet music from the big lavender-polish-smelling music place in the arcade which Ray always liked visiting because he was allowed to play with the latest, inner-illuminated mahogany-cabinet radios that stood in the window.

The piece of music that his father bought that day, and that he cast his eye over as they waited out of the rain under the trees, had a peach-tinted photographic cover of a dark-skinned young woman with hibiscus in her hair and what Ray now knew to be plumeria leis covering her breasts because he spent his second honeymoon at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, dining alfresco with his new wife Charmian amid date palms hung with Chinese lanterns on Kuhio Beach, serenaded by guitars and ukeleles.

(Following his father’s death, a woman he had been living with at the end sent Ray a hula-skirt-clad figure sixteen inches tall which, when you turned the key in her back, went through the movements of the hula dance and the shimmy. As a PS to her brief, badly written accompanying note she said it was worth a considerable amount in the sale rooms, but he left it behind where he was appearing, in a hotel or a car or a dressing-room somewhere.)

But in his memory none of the bad things had yet happened. He was Raymond Cruddas. He was three and a half. His father was Tommy Cruddas, twenty-four; his mother was Eliza Cruddas, twenty-two, known as ‘Betty’. They lived together in the thick of the little black-brick terraces that some people regarded as
monuments
of mean ugliness and beastly, but that they regarded as secure and home. It was summer. It was 1936. They had not been beaten down by the Depression; money was coming into their pockets; they loved one another.

As his father hummed the simple melody off the page, the sun started to spread from the allotments where it had been lighting up the cracked glass of the huddled buildings with a furious glowing, and swept across the Moor to where they were standing like an empty spotlight.

When he was that age, Raymond thought the movement of the branches of trees caused the wind.

Now Ray did two laps of the trees on Allotment Field every day. Much to his surprise, he was a jogger. During his decades away, the trees had been like a dream he kept having in which nothing occurred. Now he mostly saw them through a scrim of sweat with the sound of his own heart hammering between his ears.

It was part of his routine. He rose late and ate whatever Marzena had left for him to have. Then he did two circuits of the Moor and waited at the tea van outside the main gate of the Park for his old oppo Jackie Mabe to collect him and take him to Bobby’s, the club they ran, where he spent the whole of the rest of the very long day. It would be the early hours and sometimes later before Jackie delivered him back home again.

The jogging had started after a health scare, of course:
furred-up
arteries, high cholesterol, just what you would expect for a man of his age. What he hadn’t at all expected was that you could enjoy it. He hadn’t yet experienced what they called a runner’s high: the ecstasy-inducing rush of endorphins to the brain. But he wasn’t one of the sad cases with the dowager’s humps and
Walkmen
that he saw dragging their poor arteriosclerotic carcasses across the Moor. He was quite quick. He could be at any rate. He still experienced the novice’s pleasure from propelling himself on big metallic, light-trapping trainers, with the advanced
shock-absorbers
and the fluorescent flashes and panels. (‘Bigged up’, along with ‘respeck’ and ‘well wicked’, were some of the phrases he’d recently picked up from the kitchen porters and young waiting staff at work. He liked to stay abreast: ‘The Thief of Bad Gags’, as he used to be known – ‘He was laughing so hard he dropped his pencil,’ one of Ray’s local rivals used to regularly joke about him in those days – hadn’t lost his habit of vigilant earwigging for up-to-date and potentially useful material.)

Ray’s ‘dress-hair’ was waiting to be fitted at the club. The hair of his own that he had left was a deep chestnut brown, and a small patch of hair of a similar colour had been stitched into the
‘D’ at the back of his baseball hat where a half-moon of white scalp would otherwise have been framed. It was one of the demands of the job, as he saw it, to stay trim and presentable. He had weights and a tanning bed in his dressing-room.

But he had a recent history of letting himself go. This had
happened
when the TV work had eventually dried up and the phone stopped ringing and he slipped into the show-business shadows, just doing the odd after-dinner appearance and Rotary Round Table and living in a ranch-style house backing on to a golf course in Devon. His second wife had taken up with a man who made a decent living wearing a wetsuit and flippers to retrieve golf balls from the course’s ponds and water hazards, the biggest of which was near the end of their garden, and had moved in with him.

He’d given in to lassitude, gloom and resignation then. Let the grey come through in his hair. Piled the weight on. Eating the same food sitting at the same window table in the My Blue Heaven village Italian six nights a week while Tony and Aldo and Giuseppe smoked and fingered their watches and watched ear-splitting football on the television. Seafood linguine and escalope of veal every night for he didn’t want to remember how long. Bottle of the house red. Glass of limoncello with the
sharp-as-hell
almond biscuit things that shredded his gums.

It was the first time for years that he hadn’t had Jackie there to deflect attention and at least simulate conversation. At that time, for the first time in all the years they had been together, Jackie was having to earn his own living. He opened a caravan park for short-stay vans. He built the lavatory block and put down the soil pipe himself; but they kept disappearing without paying, even when he padlocked the main gate overnight. That had cleaned him out. Next he’d gone on the road, peddling bar sundries and colour-coded boning knives and the new regulation anti-bacterial chopping boards to pubs and restaurants, with second-hand books at car-boot sales as a sideline. He would come round to
Ray’s and sit at the kitchen table over a beer, stacking his takings in columns.

This is not something that would have happened if Charmian had still been there. Charmian had never got on with Jackie. She never saw the point of him; Charmian had always refused to be able to see what Jackie was
for.
And as she found her place in the gin-and-Jaguar hierarchy slipping as Ray’s face faded from the television and the invitations to high-profile occasions trickled to a halt, things came to a head.

Ray had built up a reputation for being a big tipper. ‘When you’ve got nothing, act like you’ve got loads’ had been his motto when he set out, and it was what he still believed now that, after a lifetime of free spending, he was having to pull his horns in. It had always been their arrangement that Jackie carried a substantial float of cash to tip the maître d’, tip the waiter, tip the cloakroom girl, tip the taxi driver. Tip, tip, tip, with Charmian, when she was there, scowling blackly in the background at all times.

Ray was always telling Jackie to pick up theatre tickets for this one, send a bottle of Jack to that one, collect one of the cars from the garage, send flowers to somebody else. And then Charmian grabbed her moment when she saw Jackie taking a note from a stack of several notes wedged under a framed photograph in their bedroom and accused him of stealing from the house. Pointless to say he was only doing what Ray had told him to do (which Ray confirmed). Equally pointless, when Charmian demanded to know why he hadn’t come and asked her, to remind her that she questioned every purchase and every expense, wanting to know why it was bought, where, for how much, and for whom.

But Charmian, it turned out, was already having secret
moonlight
meetings in the bunkers with Gavin, her flippered golf-ball retriever, by then. So Jackie was soon back round, letting himself in with his key, counting his coins at the kitchen table like a
back-street busker; while Ray, greying, balding and surplus to requirements, slumped disconsolately inside his neon tan. Not so much Don Juan and Sancho Panza, more Bob and Terry (or Terry and June, as Jackie liked to say). Coram and Jennie, a
knife-throwing
act they used to tour with. (He ended up winging her with a tomahawk one night at the Palace of Varieties, Leicester, after too much to drink at the end of the first house.) Mutt and Jeff. Both of them running on the rims.

It was soon after this, with nowhere left to go, that Ray had come home.

His route took him up to the end of his terrace, then sharp left through a heavy sprung gate whose banging sometimes kept him awake, on to the Moor. To his right, over towards the allotments, the old man continued to discuss the price of corned beef with the cows. The light was still flat and grey, but the weather was lifting. It would soon be lunchtime, and the day had been aired, as his mother used to like to say.

“S’goin’, boss?’ Danny the soft lad said from his bench as Ray jogged past. Approaching, Ray had caught the glint of light through the ribbon of lager as it travelled the four inches from the lip of the tin through clean air straight to the back of Danny’s throat.

‘You’re here to sell it, not sup it,’ the bar manager at Bobby’s was always telling his staff, and it’s a rule that Ray often wished he could apply to himself. Many of the old theatre managers he’d known had felt very strongly that performers should stay on their side of the curtain and kept the pass door between the auditorium and backstage locked for that reason. If you wanted a drink you sent out for one and had it brought to the dressing-room. But in a club it didn’t work like that. The locals’ deeply rooted devotion to drink meant they took it as a personal insult if you refused one. ‘Aye, twist me arm, I think I can manage a pint.’ How many times a night did Ray hear himself saying that? And last night, which
hadn’t been in any way an uproarious one, he had got on to ‘binoculars’ – two tall hundred-gram glasses of vodka, downed in one. Another night recently the trick drink at Bobby’s had been a Depth-charger, which involved letting go a heavy-bottomed glass of vodka into a pint glass of lager and drinking them off together. The customer who had treated Ray to the first of these had assured him that part of the attraction was the possibility of the shot glass gathering speed inside the pint glass and smashing your teeth.

The difficulty of saying no, and saying it in time, was why Ray had taken to wearing a black bin-liner next to his body, under the satiny tracksuit top: to help sweat it out.

A large-headed mongrel dog he had never seen before came yapping at his ankles as he pounded along a path that cut through tall weeds and brought him close to the stand of trees. The dog then veered away again as suddenly as it had arrived. The silence held by the trees amplified the echo of his footfalls on the compacted wet ground and the catch of his breathing. Then something in his peripheral vision, or maybe a sound, made him turn in time to see two boys setting fire to one of the benches on the Moor.

He recognized them by their baggy jeans concertinaed around their ankles and their big baggy oversized shirts as the two boys who had called out something pissy-sounding to him when he had overtaken them a few minutes earlier. (He was pretty sure he’d heard the word ‘grandad’.) As he continued to jog backwards, he saw a brief blast of pure red flame as the plastic laminate
covering
the metal of the bench caught, followed by a dirty flowering of sooty black smoke. The two munchkins were already halfway across the Moor, body-charging each other and whooping and heading in the direction of the allotments, by the time he turned around and righted himself (nothing he could do) and started running in the direction of his own house once again.

The roofs of the terrace were steeply pitched with dormer windows peeping out of them. Some houses were colour-washed in pale pinks and greens, but most of them had been stripped of their rendering in the past few years and brought back to the original brick. In the case of Ray’s house this had been done with a rather heavy hand: the grit-blasting had turned the façade an unnatural, too-bright nursery red he didn’t imagine it had ever been. The pointing had also come up too white and
synthetic-looking
, and the general effect was of a jealously protected but never-played-with doll’s house.

He didn’t know any of his neighbours to speak to, but from their appearance and the hours they kept he supposed they worked in solid professions such as accountancy, insurance, local government, computers, the university of course. The bright, open aspect of their houses, their tacked-up children’s paintings and honeyed pine, was in marked contrast to the houses of the few remaining elderly residents whose dim interiors hid behind once dark and heavy, now faded and thin, chenille curtains and dust-laden window plants. Only one house in Moor Edge Terrace bore the signs of multi-occupation: batik-pattern and Indian
bedspreads
at all the windows; overturned black plastic dustbins with the flat numbers daubed in white paint rolling around the garden. It was the people in this house who Ray believed were responsible for the night-time slamming of the Moor access gate.

The terrace had been erected at around the same time as the football ground. For most of their history a kind of parity had existed, but now Moor Edge was dwarfed and dominated by its closest neighbour. A hundred years earlier Ray could have stood in one of his back bedrooms, thirty feet above the heads of the spectators standing on an earth embankment raised at the south end of the ground, behind the goal, and watched teams of
terrier-like
, mostly pitmen players in heavy dubbined leather boots and baggy drawers ploughing up the mud. Many of them would
have taken the motor bus and then the electric tram in from the outlying villages where they lived, crush-loaded with other miners who were corning to see them play. Even as late as the 1950s the top-floor bedrooms still commanded a view over the concrete terracing straight into what was already being referred to, sentimentally but not misleadingly, as the Theatre of Dreams.