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

a sample in the scoured-out margarine carton that he was rather self-consciously holding. The idea was to get it down in time to catch enough urine to transfer to the small plastic bottle he had in his pocket. The dog had anyway toppled over when his other leg failed to support him and ended up in a disconsolate, sorry-looking mess on the ground.
    Telfer was one of two Belgian shepherds who were usually left to guard Bobby’s overnight; Ellis was his working partner, and over time the two dogs had grown inseparable. At four years old, Telfer was the younger by two years. But a congenital condition had caused the tendons of his hind legs to contract, and as a result he sometimes had to half drag his legs behind him. He didn’t seem to be in pain and it wasn’t irreversible; with surgery the tendons could be cut and lengthened, and that had been due to happen in a fortnight. But then recently Telfer had started spotting blood. Jackie had noticed it on the floor of the yard at the club, and then he had seen blood beading blades of grass the dog hovered over on their walks. The vet had asked Jackie to bring a sample in, and he was intending to deliver it that morning before picking Ray up at the Park.
    Jackie’s own dog, who lived permanently at the house, was Stella, a small rough-haired terrier from a long working line bred originally for catching rabbits and ratting. ‘As in the lager, not the song,’ Jackie would tell anybody who asked him why he hadgiven a girl’s name to a boisterous, apparently normal young male dog. (By ‘the song’ Jackie meant ‘Stella by Starlight’, one from his own era that he used to slow dance to at Johnny Cooney’s and the London in the old East End and, later, at the Café Anglais when Harry Roy’s band was resident, and Jo Longman’s Club du Cinq in Paris. In the end, somewhere deep, deep down – too deep to usefully fathom: a sweet unsignalled and unexpected piano run; a pretty smell; a never-known or long-forgotten association – the song was probably the real reason for Stella being called Stella anyway. It was a joke that he was stuck with.)
    Jackie had been a boxer. He bore none of the obvious signs of being an old pug – some slight build-up of scar tissue around the eyes and the almost imperceptible drooping of one eyelid due to the dead nerve in the lid (this was more pronounced in pictures and when he had had a drink) was all he had to show for his career in the ring. But most people were able to guess without being told that that was what his background had been. Boxing as ‘Nipper’ Jackie Mabe, first as a featherweight and then latterly as a ‘lightie’ in the lightweight division, he was still only about half a stone heavier than his best fighting weight of nine to nine and a half stone. He gave the impression of compactness and solidity at the same time as being light and quick on his feet. Like many boxers, his hands were surprisingly small and, because of the years of being steamed in gauze and leather and sweat, unexpectedly soft. The letters ‘ WORK ’ were still just visible, tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand; ‘ PLAY ’ was tattooed across the knuckles of his left. His hair had faded to a pale nicotine yellow, but he still wore it combed back at the sides and nodding forward at the front in a cheerful cockateel quiff.
    ‘You were on the floor so often you should have a cauliflower arse,’ Ray used to joke Jackie. (‘If bullshit was music, you’d be a brass band’ was Jackie’s habitual comeback to this. Either that, or:‘If your life was a fight they’d have stopped it by now.’ The two things that people often remembered best about Jackie were the lack of deference he was prepared to show that star of stage, screen and the labour exchange, the great Ray Cruddas, and the strangulated high pitch of his voice.) But the truth was that Jackie was good. Gaining his licence at the age of fifteen in 1945, although claiming to be a year older