The North of England Home Service by Gordon Burn Read Free Book Online

framed print of it had hung at the back of the classroom in Ray’s last year at junior school) A Bar at the Folies-Bergères. The photographer obviously had the painting in mind when he made his composition, ironically substituting the carefully wiped-down sauce and malt-vinegar bottles for Manet’s green absinthe and sweating bottles of champagne.
    Mighty’s customers brought her flowers off the allotments – daffodils and tulips and the russet pom-pom dahlias that they knew she particularly liked; and every year on her birthday she was snowed under with cards. People she might not have seen since the same day the previous year made the trip to see her especially, sometimes bringing forty cigarettes or a small box of chocolates as well as a card.
    She had women friends who came and stood at the side door and enjoyed a cigarette with her, their loaded carrier bags propped against the steps, the uniforms of their jobs as supermarket shelf-fillers and nursing auxiliaries and cleaners showing at the necks and the hems of their coats. But there was only one woman regular among the men at the van. They called her ‘Dolly’ on account of her being ‘a bit Dolly Dimple’, meaning simple. But she had a cultivated speaking voice and wore tweed jackets and big groundsheet headscarves like the Queen’s, knotted under her chin. She also wore wing glasses whose lenses, Ray had noticed, were clouded and scratched. Mighty always made her eggs the way she liked them, boiled and then mashed up with butter in a tea-cup, which she ate with ‘soldiers’ and a spoon. Dolly was sometimes there and sometimes she wasn’t, with nothing to explain where she went when she went away.
    The young policeman had spoken into his collar to summon anambulance, and the ambulance arrived with its roof light flashing and its siren whooping a blood-curdling two-note scream. It swung to a halt tight in behind the police vehicle, and the paramedics – another man-woman team – threw the back doors open and hauled out a stretcher on wheels. The siren had stopped slowly like a winding-down toy. With the siren silenced it was as if there had been a high wind which had dropped suddenly. The stretcher wheels juddered as they were pushed towards the Chinese woman who was still sitting with the borrowed coat around her shoulders on the bench and looking startled as the thing came towards her. She started shaking again inside the black silk cloth of her slacks.
    Where he was sitting, Ray had an excellent view – better than he actually wanted – straight into the interior of the ambulance. Another lonely place to have to go. He could see a plastic leather bench (for easy wiping) and a number of draw-string bags and coiled black rubber and a black rubber oxygen mask on the wall. He felt profoundly happy not to be the person getting into it.
    The Chinese woman was still resisting getting on to the stretcher and protesting that she was able to walk. Then, as if at a signal he hadn’t noticed, the male stretcher attendant touched a lever that dropped it down to her level and the two uniformed women, each taking an arm, steered her firmly on to it. The female paramedic, a substantial woman in a green V-neck and pressed green trousers, bent down quickly and swung the woman’s legs over so she was in a semi-prone position. There was a paper-covered pillow on the stretcher, and tough restraining straps hanging down, and a waffle-textured coverlet which they threw over the Chinese woman’s thin trembling legs.
    The stretcher trolley jolted as they negotiated the kerb, and at that the patient levered herself half up and commenced to do stiff little oriental bows from the waist all round, like an actress leaving the stage. The effort of doing this caused her jacket to comeopen and exposed a lurid, rubberized, tattoo design and the name of a rock band splashed across the front of her T-shirt.
    It was another detail, though, that wrenched Ray as the woman glided past