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

been in order at this point, but unusually Jackie had winnings to collect: £ 36 for matching five of the six numbers, to be divided equally between Ray and himself. Mrs Khan counted the notes on to the flat of his hand and beamed as she did so. Jackie folded all of the notes into his wallet apart from the five-pound note, which he handed back to Mrs Khan with a gesture that indicated it was for her.
    ‘Good-luck money,’ he said, when she took a step away fromhim behind the barrier of the counter, aghast. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘It’s a tradition. It’s like … It’s a present. I’m giving some of the luck back to you.’
    But Mrs Khan continued to look alarmed and, he thought, even slightly afraid. ‘Tell you what,’ Jackie said then, anxious to bring their relationship back to its former friendly but always formal footing. ‘I’ll buy another five cards with the money and go evens with you if any of them come up. Then you’d never have to sell another hamster again, God willing.’
    ‘You have heard the expression I am sure, Mr Mabe.’ (She sounded the ‘e’, pronouncing his name ‘maybe’.) ‘“Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.”’ Mrs Khan passed him the counterfoil with the numbers of his five new Lucky Dips. ‘Be lucky,’ Jackie said over the noise of the bell on the end of a strip of sprung metal that exploded into life when he jerked open the door.
    The Miners’ Club and Institute in Rusty Lane, a big building with a grandiloquent sandstone and granite Victorian façade, was somewhere Ray Cruddas had performed in the early fifties in sweetly old-fashioned light-entertainment concerts that had been recorded for radio transmission in the North of England only by the BBC. He had been the second-spot comic on bills that typically featured local choirs – the Low Fell Ladies’ Choir, conductor Molly Peacock; the Shildon Youth Choir, conductor Harold Pletts – singing popular favourites such as ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’ and “The Bells of St Mary’s’, and local songs like ‘Bobbie Shaftoe’ and ‘The Bonnie Pit Laddie’. As he had grown in experience, and his producers had come to appreciate that he was a performer with channellable domestic charm rather than larger-than-life appeal, Ray had been allowed to act as compère at the shows, which were put on in different working men’s clubs and miners’ welfare halls in the area every week. Standing at the black coffin-shaped radio microphone in his penguin suit, overhumming of ‘The Stars Look Down’, he would reassure audiences both in the hall and gathered round the radio hearth: ‘Whatever the change these modern days may bring, there’s no pleasure more lasting than that of voices combining in harmony. Tonight it’s our privilege to present seventy girls who are as lovely to listen to as they are to look at. Under its conductor, Bill Armstrong, here’s the Whitley Bay Girls’ Choir.’ And then Ray and the audience, in hearty unison: ‘The people sing !’
    The Rusty Lane Club and Institute had been gutted and was currently undergoing conversion to loft-style apartments and studio flats. Manor Grange – the New Kennels – the estate where Jackie lived, was situated behind the Institute in an interlinked series of culs-de-sacs which, if viewed from above, would have formed a uniform star ratchet shape. The houses were small and semi-detached, with leaded lattice windows and white weather-boarded fronts. The front garden plots were postage-stamp-sized and unfenced, although Jackie’s immediate neighbour (Barry’s bugbear) had made a Japanese meditation garden with purplish washed pebbles and a set of jagged slate standing stones.
    The house interiors had been fitted with a considerable amount of ornamental plasterwork and dado rails in the living rooms with timber panelling below and (usually) scumbled or floral-patterned wallpaper above. Jackie had some sepia mementoes of his