Free The North of England Home Service by Gordon Burn

breakfast by now, taking in the passing show on the Moor. He knew that he would be showered but unshaved and in a grump because of the horse manure, as Ray never failed to refer to it, that was in the diary for the afternoon (a decision on new carpet tiles, wrinkles in the new rota-shift system to iron out, the meeting with Alan Harries, the formeroutside left known to supporters as ‘Gladys’, to discuss pool table revenues and wet sales). Jackie knew all this because it was his job to know it. And yet he also knew he was going to call Ray (it was now 10:14) the way he did at exactly this time every morning to make double sure he was up and about. But he felt his heart lurch when he reached around to the part of his belt where he normally carried his mobile phone and realized instantly the phone wasn’t there. He felt the blood rush to his face, and then he felt it ebb away again as soon as he remembered he’d left it behind at the house to get some juice in it because his shtarka , shit-for-brains DJ son Barry had been speaking on it and texting on it and playing zombified games on it all night.
    Barry was a ‘mixmaster’ or ‘trancemeister’ DJ, according to the druggy clubbing magazines with, to Jackie, incomprehensible titles like XLR8R ,which he left scattered around the house. The captions to the pictures in these magazines – Barry ‘bang on it’; Barry ‘really having it off’ – identified him as ‘Jaxon’, which was how he was known professionally and to his loyal followers in the house and techno clubs that apparently (it was true, but Jackie found this personally hard to believe) were always a sell-out whenever he appeared.
    ‘Jaxon’ was what Barry was also called by the under-age girls Jackie had started to find at the house. He had arrived back from work at three that morning to find a sharp-spined, skinny figure curled up asleep on the sofa in the living room and a local girl he had seen around sitting up at the table with Barry. Their thumbs were working overtime on the pads of their respective phones, and their eyes were out on stalks. Playing low in the background was music that seemed to incorporate church organ music and baby gurgles with crowd chants and the bloops and bleeps of a nuclear power plant or a NASA launch; at intervals this was punctuated with a line of commentary from a natural-history film – When lava flows underwater it flows differently –and HannibalLecter’s sibilant tssss-tssss-tssss salivating-over-human-liver sound.
    Barry Mabe was thirty-seven, and as much of a stranger to his father as his father was to him. After an ill-judged night in a private London square with a woman and another man, he had been arrested and charged with rape (which he denied). After two-and-a-half months in Wandsworth Prison, he had been given police bail and had then immediately fled northwards to his father’s house to ‘chill’ until the trial. For the first six weeks he had shut himself away in his room, where he guzzled Coco-Pops and illicit chemicals (‘the illicits’ as he called them) and took care to make sure that, even when he was wearing headphones, all the walls pounded evenly with a deep blood pulse to relentless programmed music, like an artificial lung. He had emerged under cover of darkness in those first weeks only to take possession of the telephone and to have his weekly shower. So the current state of affairs, give or take the odd teenage crackhead and schoolgirl runaway, as far as Jackie was concerned, showed movement in the right direction from there.
    An hour earlier when he’d left the house, Barry and his little friend had still been up and wide awake. A grainy, black-and-white documentary about shipbuilding was on the television, with Barry twiddling knobs and spinning decks, spinning the records back, chop-mixing them to supply his own soundtrack of electronic bleats and cascading strings. Interspersed with these were gales of recorded drunken laughter