The North of England Home Service (24 page)

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 North 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
…’

As part of the push to ‘grow’ revenues, the old home
dressing-room
had been given a lick of rose-pink paint and had a
rose-patterned
frieze pasted on at the dado level and been converted into a chapel for civil weddings. These were proving to be extremely popular, and five or six weddings took place on the
average Saturday. As part of the package, the bride and groom and their friends and families were allowed to come out on the pitch once the ceremony was completed and pose for pictures. That is, the bride and groom were directed along a strip of carpet which had been extended a few yards on to the pitch while the rest of the wedding party stood on the sidelines, well clear of the hallowed turf, videoing and taking pictures. A video cameraman was employed by the club, and the public address pumped out wedding favourites such as ‘Evergreen’ and ‘This Is My Moment’, and the faces of the happy couple were put up on the giant screens, with banner messages from family and workmates streaming along the bottom of the frame, and cartoon graphics of kisses and bursting passion-pink hearts.

As Ray watched, the big screen filled with a close-up of a bride in traditional head-dress and lace-and-satin gown stealing a drag on a cigarette between pictures. The cigarette in her mouth was the size of an I-beam. Her make-up had not been put on with this level of magnification in mind. But when the people with her caught sight of Donna (her name floated in a caption heart), a cheer went up and everybody raised their cameras and pointed them at the bright electric mosaic image on the screen rather than at the flesh-and-blood Donna and Rob, her husband of less than ten minutes, standing arm in arm, deep in the mystery, several yards on to the field of play.

Many of the women had already taken off the cartwheel hats that they had rented for the occasion; some of the men were also in hired or borrowed clothes, occasionally fidgeting with their collars or shifting their shoulders uneasily in jackets that were either too small or too big for them. ‘For Donna and Rob‚’ a streamer message said, travelling from right to left across the screen, ‘This day will form a milestone in your lives. You will look back on it with love and happiness, as the start in a new phase of your life together – Love you lots, Mam and Dad.’

‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ played on the public address. High in the stands, teams of boys were going along the rows, robotically drying off the seats, apparently oblivious to anything going on anywhere else in the ground.

A waitress came and handed Ray and the other men
leather-bound
menus. Maurice was going on about it not being the same it not being Wembley for the Cup Final, now that he was going to get his hour in the Royal Box. He was always trying to pump Ray about Maggie Thatcher – ‘the Blessed Margaret’ – and Ray always tried to steer him clear of that subject. Had Ray ever met the Queen, Maurice wanted to know. ‘No‚’ Ray said, although he had. ‘No. I’ve not had that pleasure.’ Another drink arrived for Ray. ‘Here’s courage‚’ he said to Maurice, who raised his tankard of now tepid mineral water.

If the magazine write-ups were to be believed, a new spirit of pleasure had replaced the tendency to inwardness and the old suspicious doumess. An article in
Newsweek
had recently
christened
the city the ‘New Orleans of Europe’. The football was routinely lumped in with the happy mood of round-the-clock, leisure-and-pleasure hedonism. It counted as recreation – but for many of the corporate supporters it wasn’t. Most of those who assembled in the Marcus Price Suite on Saturdays were working. It was work, everybody either planning a deal, hatching a deal or looking for a deal. More deals got done in an afternoon at the football than in a week at the office. But for many people in the new climate of global-branding exercises and fleeting
entertainment
experiences, work was their fun; work was their recreation.

Many of the corporate season-ticket holders had cutlery, crockery, wine glasses, napkins imprinted with their names and company logos. The ballpoint pens that one firm of financial analysts handed out to their guests bore the slogan: ‘There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than
in getting money – Dr Johnson.’ Apart from football footage from vintage newsreels and out-takes from contemporary matches, the only other images playing on the screens in the bars on Level 4 were from violent natural-history shows like
Man-eating
Tigers
and
When
Animals
Attack,
or documentaries about malicious weather:
Avalanche!,
Tornado!,
When
Clouds
Turn
Nasty.