The North of England Home Service Read Free

had been living with at the end sent Ray a hula-skirt-clad figure sixteen inches tall which, when you turned the key in her back, went through the movements of the hula dance and the shimmy. As a PS to her brief, badly written accompanying note she said it was worth a considerable amount in the sale rooms, but he left it behind where he was appearing, in a hotel or a car or a dressing-room somewhere.)
    But in his memory none of the bad things had yet happened. He was Raymond Cruddas. He was three and a half. His father was Tommy Cruddas, twenty-four; his mother was Eliza Cruddas, twenty-two, known as ‘Betty’. They lived together in the thick of the little black-brick terraces that some people regarded as monuments of mean ugliness and beastly, but that they regarded as secure and home. It was summer. It was 1936. They had not been beaten down by the Depression; money was coming into their pockets; they loved one another.
    As his father hummed the simple melody off the page, the sun started to spread from the allotments where it had been lighting up the cracked glass of the huddled buildings with a furious glowing, and swept across the Moor to where they were standing like an empty spotlight.
    When he was that age, Raymond thought the movement of the branches of trees caused the wind.
    *
    Now Ray did two laps of the trees on Allotment Field every day. Much to his surprise, he was a jogger. During his decades away, the trees had been like a dream he kept having in which nothing occurred. Now he mostly saw them through a scrim of sweat with the sound of his own heart hammering between his ears.
    It was part of his routine. He rose late and ate whatever Marzena had left for him to have. Then he did two circuits of the Moor and waited at the tea van outside the main gate of the Park for his old oppo Jackie Mabe to collect him and take him to Bobby’s, the club they ran, where he spent the whole of the rest of the very long day. It would be the early hours and sometimes later before Jackie delivered him back home again.
    The jogging had started after a health scare, of course: furred-up arteries, high cholesterol, just what you would expect for a man of his age. What he hadn’t at all expected was that you could enjoy it. He hadn’t yet experienced what they called a runner’s high: the ecstasy-inducing rush of endorphins to the brain. But he wasn’t one of the sad cases with the dowager’s humps and Walkmen that he saw dragging their poor arteriosclerotic carcasses across the Moor. He was quite quick. He could be at any rate. He still experienced the novice’s pleasure from propelling himself on big metallic, light-trapping trainers, with the advanced shock-absorbers and the fluorescent flashes and panels. (‘Bigged up’, along with ‘respeck’ and ‘well wicked’, were some of the phrases he’d recently picked up from the kitchen porters and young waiting staff at work. He liked to stay abreast: ‘The Thief of Bad Gags’, as he used to be known – ‘He was laughing so hard he dropped his pencil,’ one of Ray’s local rivals used to regularly joke about him in those days – hadn’t lost his habit of vigilant earwigging for up-to-date and potentially useful material.)
    Ray’s ‘dress-hair’ was waiting to be fitted at the club. The hair of his own that he had left was a deep chestnut brown, and a small patch of hair of a similar colour had been stitched into the‘D’ at the back of his baseball hat where a half-moon of white scalp would otherwise have been framed. It was one of the demands of the job, as he saw it, to stay trim and presentable. He had weights and a tanning bed in his dressing-room.
    But he had a recent history of letting himself go. This had happened when the TV work had eventually dried up and the phone stopped ringing and he slipped into the show-business shadows, just doing the odd after-dinner appearance and Rotary Round Table and living in a ranch-style house backing on to a golf