club was a simple industrial shed, a part-brick, part-prefabricated structure on a small industrial estate on the western fringe of the city centre. With the ‘ BOBBY’S BACK YEM ’ illuminated sign switched off in daylight hours, Bobby’s was indistinguishable from the other small businesses – mainly body shops and one-man-and-a-lad grease-monkey outfits – that occupied the unexceptional plain shells. The previous owner had been a sanitaryware manufacturer, which gave rise to the inevitablejokes, in the early days when Bobby’s was first being mooted, about pissing money up the wall and shit-for-brains and watching it all going down the pan. (To which it had since given Ray and his partners inordinate pleasure, whenever they ran into a disinvestor, to – with equal inevitability – go: ‘Have a drink. Have a bottle. I’m feeling flush.’ It was a line that Ronnie Cornish, in particular, couldn’t hear himself saying loud or often enough.) The club’s closest neighbours, separated from it by the car park on one side and a reinforcing wall of wire cages filled with rocks on the other, were Metal Morphosis, suppliers of quality jewellery and medical equipment for the piercing and tattooing industry, and Tip Top Light Vehicle Crash Repair.
Because of its exposed position on a bank high above the river, the fences on the industrial estate were constantly festooned with shredded plastic and rooted in an ever replenished build-up of refuse. Every day when Ray got out of his car he left instructions for Paddy the odd-job man to come with his broad broom and clear it away. And every day it was back, a deep drift of cigarette packets and rubber gloves and lager tins and syringes and dirty sculpted dunes of dog-ends, arrived, Ray could only suppose, on the wind. That day he had been able to ask Paddy to go and see to it himself: he had come across him on his way in, swilling out the row of brick toilets in the yard – the ‘ootside netties’ – which had originally been put in as a gimmick, but which had proved surprisingly popular, especially with women, who rhapsodized about the memories they brought back of lagged pipes and hanging icicles in winter and nipping in there late for a last cigarette and a snog. (And who, Ray had had pointed out to him, wrote far fruitier things on the walls than were ever found in the men’s toilets.)
On arrival, Jackie had changed into his blue janitor’s trousers and gone off to drain the dregs from the barrels in the cellar and stillage the beer that the brewery had delivered that morning. Ellis had crossed the yard, sniffed around for a long time in theplace where Telfer would normally be, and retired miserably to his kennel.
It often seemed to Ray that he’d spent two-thirds of his life in a state of stupefied suspension, just waiting. Like everybody in his business he had evolved strategies designed to cope with the empty, dragged-out time leading up to the brief time – an hour and frequently less – when he had to be ‘on’ and performing. At the height of his popularity, when it had been difficult to go anywhere without being recognized, he had whiled away the hours playing board games and endless hands of poker and rummy for matchsticks with Jackie. It was in the course of these long hours which turned into weeks and then years that they developed the ability to be alone together, da lontano. ‘Success is a peculiar thing because you stop living,’ one of the great stars of the day had told Ray when he was just starting to get a foot on the ladder. ‘You don’t tend to get into scrapes, and then where’s your material? Things don’t happen.’
At one point in his desperation Ray had even given needlepoint a go, encouraged in that direction by Dora Bryan during a summer season in Weston. But he had quickly come to feel that he might as well be sewing mailbags for sixpence a day and a snout ration, and that was the problem with all the sedentary pastimes
Because of its exposed position on a bank high above the river, the fences on the industrial estate were constantly festooned with shredded plastic and rooted in an ever replenished build-up of refuse. Every day when Ray got out of his car he left instructions for Paddy the odd-job man to come with his broad broom and clear it away. And every day it was back, a deep drift of cigarette packets and rubber gloves and lager tins and syringes and dirty sculpted dunes of dog-ends, arrived, Ray could only suppose, on the wind. That day he had been able to ask Paddy to go and see to it himself: he had come across him on his way in, swilling out the row of brick toilets in the yard – the ‘ootside netties’ – which had originally been put in as a gimmick, but which had proved surprisingly popular, especially with women, who rhapsodized about the memories they brought back of lagged pipes and hanging icicles in winter and nipping in there late for a last cigarette and a snog. (And who, Ray had had pointed out to him, wrote far fruitier things on the walls than were ever found in the men’s toilets.)
On arrival, Jackie had changed into his blue janitor’s trousers and gone off to drain the dregs from the barrels in the cellar and stillage the beer that the brewery had delivered that morning. Ellis had crossed the yard, sniffed around for a long time in theplace where Telfer would normally be, and retired miserably to his kennel.
It often seemed to Ray that he’d spent two-thirds of his life in a state of stupefied suspension, just waiting. Like everybody in his business he had evolved strategies designed to cope with the empty, dragged-out time leading up to the brief time – an hour and frequently less – when he had to be ‘on’ and performing. At the height of his popularity, when it had been difficult to go anywhere without being recognized, he had whiled away the hours playing board games and endless hands of poker and rummy for matchsticks with Jackie. It was in the course of these long hours which turned into weeks and then years that they developed the ability to be alone together, da lontano. ‘Success is a peculiar thing because you stop living,’ one of the great stars of the day had told Ray when he was just starting to get a foot on the ladder. ‘You don’t tend to get into scrapes, and then where’s your material? Things don’t happen.’
At one point in his desperation Ray had even given needlepoint a go, encouraged in that direction by Dora Bryan during a summer season in Weston. But he had quickly come to feel that he might as well be sewing mailbags for sixpence a day and a snout ration, and that was the problem with all the sedentary pastimes
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