The North of England Home Service Read Free Page B

after this, with nowhere left to go, that Ray had come home.
    His route took him up to the end of his terrace, then sharp left through a heavy sprung gate whose banging sometimes kept him awake, on to the Moor. To his right, over towards the allotments, the old man continued to discuss the price of corned beef with the cows. The light was still flat and grey, but the weather was lifting. It would soon be lunchtime, and the day had been aired, as his mother used to like to say.
    “S’goin’, boss?’ Danny the soft lad said from his bench as Ray jogged past. Approaching, Ray had caught the glint of light through the ribbon of lager as it travelled the four inches from the lip of the tin through clean air straight to the back of Danny’s throat.
    ‘You’re here to sell it, not sup it,’ the bar manager at Bobby’s was always telling his staff, and it’s a rule that Ray often wished he could apply to himself. Many of the old theatre managers he’d known had felt very strongly that performers should stay on their side of the curtain and kept the pass door between the auditorium and backstage locked for that reason. If you wanted a drink you sent out for one and had it brought to the dressing-room. But in a club it didn’t work like that. The locals’ deeply rooted devotion to drink meant they took it as a personal insult if you refused one. ‘Aye, twist me arm, I think I can manage a pint.’ How many times a night did Ray hear himself saying that? And last night, whichhadn’t been in any way an uproarious one, he had got on to ‘binoculars’ – two tall hundred-gram glasses of vodka, downed in one. Another night recently the trick drink at Bobby’s had been a Depth-charger, which involved letting go a heavy-bottomed glass of vodka into a pint glass of lager and drinking them off together. The customer who had treated Ray to the first of these had assured him that part of the attraction was the possibility of the shot glass gathering speed inside the pint glass and smashing your teeth.
    The difficulty of saying no, and saying it in time, was why Ray had taken to wearing a black bin-liner next to his body, under the satiny tracksuit top: to help sweat it out.
    A large-headed mongrel dog he had never seen before came yapping at his ankles as he pounded along a path that cut through tall weeds and brought him close to the stand of trees. The dog then veered away again as suddenly as it had arrived. The silence held by the trees amplified the echo of his footfalls on the compacted wet ground and the catch of his breathing. Then something in his peripheral vision, or maybe a sound, made him turn in time to see two boys setting fire to one of the benches on the Moor.
    He recognized them by their baggy jeans concertinaed around their ankles and their big baggy oversized shirts as the two boys who had called out something pissy-sounding to him when he had overtaken them a few minutes earlier. (He was pretty sure he’d heard the word ‘grandad’.) As he continued to jog backwards, he saw a brief blast of pure red flame as the plastic laminate covering the metal of the bench caught, followed by a dirty flowering of sooty black smoke. The two munchkins were already halfway across the Moor, body-charging each other and whooping and heading in the direction of the allotments, by the time he turned around and righted himself (nothing he could do) and started running in the direction of his own house once again.
    The roofs of the terrace were steeply pitched with dormer windows peeping out of them. Some houses were colour-washed in pale pinks and greens, but most of them had been stripped of their rendering in the past few years and brought back to the original brick. In the case of Ray’s house this had been done with a rather heavy hand: the grit-blasting had turned the façade an unnatural, too-bright nursery red he didn’t imagine it had ever been. The pointing had also come up too white and synthetic-looking , and the