In This Block There Lives a Slag…: And Other Yorkshire Fables. Bill Broady
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу In This Block There Lives a Slag…: And Other Yorkshire Fables - Bill Broady страница 11
Название: In This Block There Lives a Slag…: And Other Yorkshire Fables
Автор: Bill Broady
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
isbn: 9780007392537
isbn:
Tattooed on his chest
And all over the place!
Then a scanty-haired dodderer began to intone the signal before Trafalgar – ‘England expects that every man today will do his duty’ – only to reel away from his shipmates’ volleys of pillows, boots and brushes. His crew would have done that to Nelson too if they hadn’t loved him – as my father always said – because he upped their grog ration, fought polar bears, chased beautiful women and was clearly, heroically, off his head.
He’s here for a day
And then he’s away
He’s all over the place!
The music burst into a hornpipe and the sailors danced, wildly stamping on the decks. I imagined the officers up top getting nervous, hearing in that satyr rout their approaching nemesis, the revenge of the subhumans, revolution…only to be confronted at the last not by bloody Jack Cade but by Clem Attlee in his MCC tie.
He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere
He’s all over the place!
Tommy waved a huge baton over the swell of sound but kept delaying the climax: ‘He’s all over the – wait for it! wait for it! – place!!!’ After the last chord someone crashed a folded deckchair over his head but his ecstatic smile didn’t waver.
I pressed the freeze frame. My heart was pounding, I was running with sweat, like the first time I heard ‘Anarchy In The UK’ or ‘Straight to Hell’. My father clapped his hands: ‘That’s just how it was! Everyone went a bit crazy at sea, the best sort of crazy…I’m sounding like Stan! I mean it was fine if you didn’t mind the blood and guts.’
We rewound ‘All Over the Place’ and watched it again. My father recalled that it came from a film, Sailors Three, identifying the old man as Claude Hulbert and the young sailor with a mass of oiled curls as Michael Wilding, who married Liz Taylor. Senescence and youth flanking Trinder, the man: grandfather, father and son united in a magical triangle – all over the place, coffined in steel, with a head height of twenty feet…In the song’s final chorus it was obvious that they were surrounded by real sailors with bad skin, gappy teeth, tufting hair – chums with their arms around each other’s necks; their gaze, bold but shy, followed the camera as it swept by: I felt a jolt of contact as their eyes met mine, as if their souls were living on inside the celluloid.
We saw Trinder once, my father and I: at one of my first Halifax Town matches. When Fulham, led by the great Johnny Haynes, aureoled in brylcreem shine, scored the sixth of their eight we heard the unmistakable voice of chairman Tommy, his catchphrase, ‘O you lucky people!’ booming above our faltering cries of ‘Come on, you Shaymen.’ And my father remembered him guesting on the TV game show, The Golden Shot, rocking with cruel mirth as a sobbing Bob Monkhouse recounted the contestants’ increasingly heartrending and hilarious hard-luck stories, so that, unable to hold the crossbow steady on the prize target, he’d pinged the bolt into the studio ceiling.
‘I saw that!’ said Mr Siddiqui, who’d tacked gingerly across the ward to join us. ‘Bernie, the bolt!…Ann Ashton, the Golden Girl!!’ – he looked heavenwards, as if expecting her to appear.
The sound had drawn the ressies from the other wards. Even the smoking room emptied: a fat grey man covered in ash who I’d never seen before crashed down on to my father’s legs, but he didn’t seem to mind. I rewound it and played it again. And again. They began to tap their feet and to hum like drowsy bees and then, gradually, we – eleven dying men, the toothpaste nurse and myself – began to sing and then – on the slack, echoing lino – to stamp. The Pain Management Team appeared and started working out the hornpipe steps. My father – his hands steady again – was pouring everyone hits of Jesus Lethal into the bottle-cap.
The curtains around the next bed were thrown aside to reveal Coleridge in wrath at this army from Porlock that had apparently arrived. Index finger poised for the ‘off’ switch he shuffled agonizingly towards the screen, but then stopped as I froze Tommy again in that final transfigured pose. His face moved right up to Trinder’s, as if getting his scent. ‘That man,’ he said, ‘looks like a camel.’ At the volleys of laughter that greeted this he blushed, blood rushing back into his face, then smiled – his mouth widening and widening until it hit the jaw line – ‘A Bactrian.’
Those summer evenings My Hard Friend often called, to drive me back to the moors we’d walked as children. And so, that Sunday, after my usual struggle with the blank page, I heard his horn – on the last stroke of seven – sound out to save me.
‘Noddy’s come for Big Ears,’ said my wife, passing across her book, Adorno’s Minima Moralia. I read the passage she’d marked ready: ‘The refined are drawn to the unrefined, whose coarseness deceptively promises what their own culture denies’. I flicked on and riposted with another quote: ‘Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar’.
She hated him: he shrank from her like a snake from a mongoose. She said he was going to rip me off but I couldn’t see that we had anything he’d want – even our money somehow seemed to be the wrong tender. For a while she probed around – she’d heard all about English public schools’ crushes, beatings, hand-jobs in the shower – but concluded that my reversion was harmless, just one more vague disappointment: ‘He’s not exactly Le Grand Meaulnes.’
He’d got yet another car to wreck: already dented and sprayed with viridian grease, the floor shin-deep with ash, crumpled clothing and treadled maps, an arsenal of pills and bottles in the glove compartment. The tape was playing ‘Wooden Heart’ – Elvis, his hero, serenading a puppet in German, in GI Blues, made the year we were born. His hands, covered with indecipherable ink and pin prison tattoos, seemed hardly to touch the spinning wheel. He was supposed to be teaching me to drive, but we’d soon abandoned that: my arms were too long, my legs too short, my vision tunnelled in and out – whatever, I froze. From my schooldays I’d felt every word I read or wrote wasting my muscles, dulling my senses, scrambling my co-ordination – except perhaps for sex: my wife opined that only intellectuals know how to fuck.
I met My Friend on our first day at grammar school. We were the only two who reacted aggressively, moving towards each other through the white, frightened faces. My hip-throw riposted his corkscrew punch. Friends. There was something strangely familiar about the stumpy gait, the slab face with letterbox mouth and flat exiguous ears and nose, the straight or curling clumps of tow-coloured hair. We had much in common. When the boys sounded out each other’s loyalties – Beatles or Stones? United or City? – we went for Elvis – dethroned, in semi-retirement – and Park Avenue – forever at the bottom of the league. And we both hated TV, preferring the radio because the pictures were better, and loved Marvel Comics, though his favourite was The Thing, while mine was Dr Strange. We had similar scars on our foreheads, were both on council scholarships and lived near each other, in the inglorious debatable lands beyond suburbia, on the fringes of the moors.
Although in the same form, subject streaming meant that the only lesson we shared was Divinity, once a week: also allotted different lunch sittings, we hardly ever saw each other. It soon became apparent that his brute sporting potential had been noted: looking and sounding the way he did he’d had no chance. Teachers marked his work down, while opponents threw themselves under his trampling feet or ducked into his bouncers. I was classified as academic (Type 2: Arts) and slid from B to C to D team sheets. Occasionally I’d СКАЧАТЬ