Free The North of England Home Service by Gordon Burn Page A

and a man’s voice intoning the same words over and over – ’s all for this time seeee you next time ’ s all for this time seeee you next time ’ s all for this time seeee you next time –which Jackie of course knew was Ray taken from his live in-performance video, Ray Cruddas Live at Bobby ’ s Back Yem.
    As Jackie and the dogs emerged from the woods into Back Church Lane he saw that white-overalled officials from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food – it announced thison a sign attached to the side of a rented van: ‘MAFF’ – were in the process of sealing off the path. They were holding back the tape to allow an elderly man to transfer some bottles from the basket on the handlebar of his old bike to one of a row of big metal recycling bins as Jackie approached, feeling like somebody going into the Nothing-to-Declare channel with a kilo of Chinese heroin hidden in a secret compartment in his suitcase. He knew he shouldn’t have been in the country where he had just been walking the dogs. It was selfish and stupid, and one of the MAFF men seemed about to say something along these lines as Jackie cut through their little group, but the man in the white Baby-gro held himself in check at the last minute.
    The route Jackie had taken had brought him in nearly a full circle around the back of the village. A succession of pale rendered bungalows on the main road screened off the houses of a pre-war council estate. The bank in the village was open only two mornings a week now, and the cashpoint that had been installed was protected by two metal reinforced-concrete bollards against the ram-raid attacks that were an everyday hazard round there.
    Until recently there had been three shops in the village: one had been converted into a private dwelling, with witchy lace curtains across the plate window; another was an estate agent’s. Most people did their shopping at the giant superstore a few miles down the motorway. Now there was just a Nice Price huddled behind metal grilles with coils of razor wire glinting on the roof. As Jackie stepped up to the door – the dogs were tethered to the broken-down remains of a horse trough – the door opened and a woman wearing a candlewick dressing-gown and carpet slippers came out clutching a four-pack of Scandinavian lager close to her chest.
    Nice Price had been taken over by the Khans, and Mrs Khan, who wore the traditional vermilion mark in the centre of her forehead as well as bright lipstick and Western clothes, wassprinkling fish food into a large, floor-level plastic pond as Jackie came into the shop. The fish were clouded and lugubrious and rather sinister-looking, but the Khans had inherited them from the previous owner who specialized in koi and small household pets such as terrapins and gerbils, and the Khans, to the surprise of most of their customers, had kept this part of the business up. The back part of the shop was devoted to everyday hardware requirements and pets; the front part to groceries and confectionery . Jackie took his usual newspaper off the counter and walked over to the plastic Lottery lectern to do his lines for the Wednesday draw.
    It was standing here the previous week that he had overheard three light-complexioned black girls and a darker black man he assumed was their pimp buying condoms, cottonwool, vodka and microwave meals. He had experienced the dull pang of excitement he’d imagined you’d get from writing something indiscreet or disgustingly explicit on a lavatory wall. He had gone close enough to smell the funky/musky scent of their skin and the stiffening gloop on their fruits-of-the-forest-smelling hanks of shiny hair and to establish that under their coats they were wearing bare midriffs and thin scooped-neck tops in February.
    He tried to blank this from his mind as he handed Mrs Khan the Lottery slip and watched as she fed it efficiently into the machine. An inconsequential exchange on the chances of winning would have