The North of England Home Service (25 page)

The Marcus Price Suite was the biggest of the big corporate blow-out facilities, and it was already humming when Ray got there. The whole of one long wall was glass facing the pitch and it took a while for his eyes to adjust to the glare. He spotted Mighty chatting to a table which was unusual in that most of the people sitting around it were women. Several of them were young, most of them looked as if they had arrived fresh from the hairdresser and nearly all of them were barricaded in behind stiff, rope-handled shopping bags with luxury labels and names. There was a kind of pride in whose wife or/and girlfriend was more spendthrift, bankrupting and shopaholic, and the men liked to amuse each other boasting about the damage being done to their current accounts.

A lot of men wore caps when they went outside to watch the match. Lately some of them had started wearing old-style caps of the kind that people dug out to wear at Bobby’s, although, unlike Ray, most of the cap-wearers were too young to remember the time when, sartorially, there was nothing more impressive than a rakish cap worn with a smart blue suit. Traditionally, caps had been part of the hunger for the outdoors after a grinding hard shift – the hunger for the allotment, the pigeon ducket or the open field. So it was ironic that, until the tragedies of the eighties and the realization that most stadiums were death-traps, flat caps had been worn to football grounds, which were sport’s version of the cavernous, cheerless factories for whose workers they were built.

Ray’s first job of the day was going to be to introduce the five members of the latest pop group to be voted into existence by the
viewers of a reality-television show. One of the winners was a local girl, and they were there to do a personal appearance, miming to their record before kick-off. A young man in leather trousers who worked for them in some capacity was sent to find Ray and take him to the private box where the group were being ‘mothballed’ to meet them briefly before bringing them on.

‘You know, it’s amazing the immediate public that comes around you, and takes you in, and accepts you, and gives you success, and everything‚’ one of the boy members was telling an interviewer eagerly when Ray stuck his head around the door. ‘Oooo, me nana used to love you! She thought you were dead funny!’ the Geordie girl squealed when he stepped forward briefly to shake her hand.

The journalist was a woman from the morning paper who had written nice things about Ray and Bobby’s. The tabloids, though, had already bolted with stories about the black boy in the group being gay, and had hinted that two of the girls were sleeping with each other. Here already was the familiar style from success to anguish, without a record being sold. The more they were on
television
, the more famous they became; the more famous they were, the more a target of criticism they became; the more they were criticized, the more they felt misunderstood; the more
misunderstood
they felt, the more anguish they carried.

‘Without that little television box, you’re nobody‚’ the chancer in the leather trousers whispered to Ray. ‘With it, you’re a king in our society – a television personality.’ It was because of situations like this that Ray liked to have Jackie around him on football days. Their code often came in very useful. ‘This chap’s tall enough to be a policeman‚’ Ray might say to Jackie, which meant ‘He’s a total bloody idiot, get me away from here.’ ‘I’m just going to check the hamper, Jackie’ translated as ‘I’ll swing for this bastard if I have to listen to any more of his inane horseshit! He better be gone when I get back.’

‘There are people that don’t particularly
need
to be special. There are those of us that are nuts enough to
have
to be special. And we do everything we can‚’ Ray said to the group’s manager or whoever he was. ‘One thing worth remembering: in this business, when one door shuts, they all bloody shut.’

In the restaurants and executive boxes girls were going around collecting completed Lottery slips from the tables and taking them to be processed in the machines. Television was in, and a few famous faces off the box were keeping the day on the boil. ‘Delegates’ as they were always called in the literature, the club’s expensively laminated folders, were raucously repeating
snippets
and bits of sporting gossip that they’d read in the morning papers, and working hard at convincing themselves and each other that their hard-boiled, transactional, buyer-supplier
relationships
were a species of friendship.

Through the fug of blue cigar smoke turning lazily in the
softening
light, Ray noticed Ronnie Cornish sitting nose to nose at a corner table with a younger man with a streaky peroxide haircut. This was Lee Yeardye (‘How many E’s in Lee Yeardye?’ used to be the long-running terrace joke), a journeyman midfielder pushing up into his thirties and fast approaching the end of his career – he hadn’t started a game in the first team all season: most of his energies appeared to be going into the wine bar he had opened in town with Ronnie’s, and Warren Oliver’s, backing.

The last time Ray had seen the pair of them together, Ronnie was holding a cigarette-lighter to Lee Yeardye’s nose. Ronnie had bet Yeardye £500 he couldn’t take the heat of a cigarette-lighter on his nose for three seconds, but the player had won the bet and earned himself a second £500 for doing it a second time. The two of them were always taking each other on at arm-wrestling or single-arm press-up endurance contests in their lounge suits in hotels and bars. Although Ronnie was giving away thirty years, he was usually able to acquit himself well and at least hold his own.

The cigarette-lighter incident had taken place in Ronnie Cornish’s office in a former warehouse building close to the river. He had bought five out of seven buildings on the then derelict Newbridge Quays site in the eighties, and developed the area in stages, aided by a raft of local-government and government regeneration grants.

Newbridge Quays was where he put his Ralph Hedley
paintings
on show and stored his other Hedley booty. Ray had gone in to see the painting called
The
Brickfield,
which had been given pride of place, gilt-framed and illuminated, above the
mantelpiece
in Ronnie’s inner office. Ronnie had been trying to persuade him for a long time to come in and see it, but for various reasons – learning how the interior of his house at Moor Edge Terrace had been covertly stripped out was one of them – Ray hadn’t found a way to be able to make it until that night.

It was after seven. Most of the people working in the building had gone home. Ronnie’s assistant had stayed long enough to buzz him in and meet him at the lift, and then she had also left for home.

The lighting was intimate. Up-lighters gently played light on the robin’s-egg-blue walls. The paintings glowed under their burnished-brass picture lights. Hedley’s decorative wood
carvings
– around the door and bookcases, in the wall panels and the fireplace, around the base of Ronnie’s vast, catafalque-like desk – had been lightened using a liming process in which the original dark-wood veneers were preserved unharmed underneath. The building had originally been used to store butter and other groceries, and a large port-hole window high up in a corner wall was surmounted by carved festoons overflowing with flowers, fruit, dead game.

‘Are you just winding … Are you just joking me? Are you joking me? … You’ve got till nine tomorra morning to come back with a
realistic
and that means not pulling my pisser pissing
price …’ Ronnie eventually finished on the phone. ‘Can’t trust that cunt further than you can throw a bull by the prick‚’ he said. And then, as if he was just noticing Ray for the first time: ‘Ray! How are you!’ He barrelled over to a heavy ball-and-claw table inlaid with embossed leather where rows of bottles were glinting. ‘Jackie D. Big one. Am aa right?’ He made a performance of tonging ice out of a lidded bucket with a leather stirrups design. ‘Booze is constant proof that God likes to see us happy‚’ Ronnie said. ‘I’m not wrong. Am aa not right?’

Ray and Ronnie were more or less the same age. Sixty years earlier they had been at school together. Ronnie was one of the hard lads. Ray wasn’t. For two years, between the ages of about nine and eleven, Ronnie had subjected Ray to a sustained reign of terror. It all happened as a result of Ronnie going to clout Ray in the playground lavatory one day and his foot slipping (he was wearing shoes with the yellow-rubber crêpe soles that became slimy in the wet) and Ronnie falling and cracking his head on the urinal trough which happened to be blocked and overflowing, with the consequence that Ronnie’s hair and his jacket and trousers were wet through and already rank and smelling by the time he eventually scrambled up.

He lay in wait for Raymond outside the back gate at nights, hung around on the street corner near his house where he could see him, chalked up names, got boys who wanted to be in his gang to trip him up and throw sticks and dirt at him, and
persecuted
him relentlessly from then on. The time Ray hit a timber that had been thrown in his path and came off his pram-wheel ‘bogie’ travelling at some speed down a banked back lane and ended up in hospital with a split lip and suffering serious
concussion
– that had been a typical piece of Ronnie
Cornish-inspired
devilry.

Fifty-five years passed before they met each other again. Ray’s mother was dying, and he was taking whatever jobs came his
way in the North East. A bluff, powerful-looking, stare-
you-down
kind of man, silver-white hair worn in a pudding-basin Beatles fringe, face rawly inflamed, had come up to him at the end of a Rotary Club occasion when he was the after-dinner entertainment, and Ray had instantly recognized him as his former tormentor. He felt he would have recognized the bully in Ronnie Cornish even without the childhood misery he had brought him: he seemed to Ray to carry a sense of all the people who had been sacked, short-changed, bullied, abused, and stood on by him on his climb; his inexorable rise from rich to richer: the shadow of all those who bore him some ill will. Ray believed he saw this in Ronnie’s aura.

What Ronnie saw when he looked at Ray was only the milksop mother’s boy who somehow – it genuinely perplexed him, and at some deep level disquieted him – had gone on to get his face on the television and his name in the papers and become friends with film stars and singers and married high-maintenance pretty women and hung out with the high and mighty. He didn’t see the Raymond Cruddas he had glowered up at from a pool of
schoolyard
piss then. He didn’t see somebody who was paying his way by performing on cruise ships now – ‘grab-a-granny’ trips to the Canaries and around the Greek islands – and accepting
twopenny-halfpenny
jobs like the Chartered Association of Tax Accountants Annual Dinner and RAF Uphaven Sergeants’ Mess and the one he had just performed for Ronnie and his fellow Rotarian Big Steamers. For Ronnie, as for the old folks in Teresa Beard House, Ray still had the old special luminosity. Ronnie was still in thrall to the glamour he thought attached to people of the
entertainment
persuasion. He could still hear the crackle of the magnetic field of fame.

The night of the visit to his office, Ray noticed for the first time the trace shadow of a tattoo which had been lasered off Ronnie’s neck. He also saw that he had a concealant, a spot of something
flesh-toned borrowed from his wife, on the end of his nose where the broken capillaries were. At the side of his face, where the Botoxer had either missed or left showing for authenticity’s sake, were deltas, whole Ordnance Survey maps of red thread-veins, close to the surface and aggravated by the glasses Ronnie didn’t have on but which had left indentations in the well-cut silver hair above his ears.

They were standing in front of Ronnie’s prize possession,
The
Brickfield,
and Ronnie was explaining how the artist had posed the figures to depict the various stages of brick-making in the picture. The process began at the back of the image with digging the clay, and progressed towards the viewer as the clay was tipped from the wheelbarrow on to a bench, worked in the mould and tipped out to dry in the sun. ‘Worth a few bob, that, like. Worth a canny bit‚’ Ronnie said. ‘That was his speciality, like. Working people. Manual workers. Industrial craftsmen. Gets them very life-like. To my style of thinking, anyway. Hard honest labour that tires you out and makes you sleep. Clever feller.’

Ronnie was wearing the waistcoat and trousers of a light-grey suit. The waistcoat was cut straight at the waist, and kept riding up over his belly. Expanding metal arm-bands cinched the sleeves of his shirt. On his feet were the tan, elastic-sided Trickers boots which are a favourite with farmers on more formal
occasions
away from the farm.

He moved Ray on to another Hedley painting on the adjacent wall.
Weary
Waiting
showed a bedraggled wife carrying a small baby and accompanied by her young son. All three of them were waiting on the steps of a pub where the husband was visible through a lighted window drinking with his friends. ‘Wiv aal been there‚’ Ronnie said to Ray. ‘Aa remember me poor ma
waiting
with us for oors ootside the Big Lamp until the owld cunt give her the money to get some messages, some bread an’ some bits for us bairns to eat.’

But Ray sensed Ronnie hadn’t said all he wanted to say about
The
Brickfield,
and the pair of them drifted back there, the ice in their glasses clinking. ‘See that?’ Ronnie said, indicating the workbench covered in elephant-grey mud in the middleground of the
painting
with his thick, chipped finger. ‘When I was a laddie, probably nee more than aboot six, the owld man stood iz on a bench the dead spit of that doon at wor brickworks there an’ telt iz to jump. ’E put iz on the bench and said, “Jump and I’ll catch you,” and I jumped and he took his hands away and I fell on the floor. He picked me up and stroked me hair and said, “Never trust
anybody
in your life. Not even your own father.” He said, “Keep your friends close to you and your enemies even closer.” Very Victorian, the owld man. Well, you knew him. Very fucken strict.’