“If that’s supposed to be a Yorkshire accent, you need to work on it.”
“Nevertheless.”
“If you wanner know —” he had to stop saying that, it sounded defensive “— I’m looking for a lass. A girl.”
“Then you’ve come to the wrong shop. You’ll have noticed, none of us are lasses here.”
Yeh yeh yeh, he had noticed all right, but he hadn’t got the Princess of Teck down as a gay pub, they all looked too butch for that, including this beefy bugger. Alex knew a gay pub when he saw one, they had them in Leeds. The Ironmaster in Vicar Lane for one, known as the Aintree Ironmaster.
He had definitely seen this bloke before, knew him from somewhere. He put the thought into words. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
“I should bloody well hope so, otherwise my living has been in vain.”
Alex had got the bugger now. It was him, wasn’t it? Whatwerehecalled? Him on that programme.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” he said, as many had said before him.
“It is me, or should I say it is I? Grammar was never my strong point.”
It was already too late to ask this famous bloke, and he certainly was famous, for his name. Alex would have to go back to the Metro Union bar and say: “Tell you who I had a long chat with down there, bloke who used to do that programme Sunday nights, Books and Persons. Norrer bad bloke, bought me a drink.”
Brendan Barton was in the act of signalling the bar staff for just that. He reached out a podgy hand bedecked with heavy rings like the knuckleduster jewellery of the chucker-out at the bed show club.
“And your name is …?”
“Alex. Don’t have to ask you yours” — although he did.
“You’d be forgiven if you did, since I haven’t been on air for the last nine months.” Oh, Christ, yeh yeh yeh, Alex had gorrim now. The stupid sod had done an interview with some famous writer or other completely rat-arsed, and they hadn’t renewed his contract. What was his soddin name?
“So what did you make of the programme, such as it was?” asked Brendan Barton.
“I only ever watched it coupler times, but tell you the honest truth, I thought it was shite.” Alex believed, erroneously, that as a Yorkshireman he was expected to be blunt. He didn’t really think the programme was shite, he had no opinion about it one way or the other.
But the TV personality did not seem in any way offended. Inscrutably, and purring to himself, he said: “I’m sorry not to have pleased you. I can see that I must be penalised for that.”
Was the bugger being sarky, or what? But Alex was not to be enlightened, for at this point a diversion was created by the entry of Old Jakie the news-vendor from across the street, or rather of the late Old Jakie’s limp body, carried in by two of the flymen from the Prince Edward Theatre.
“Where shall we put him, Ronnie?” called one of them.
Emerging from a back room, the bad-tempered-looking landlord did a double-take at the sight of Old Jakie’s body and uttered: “Jesus Christ Almighty, is he dead?”
“Looks like it to me, Ronaldo,” said the other volunteer pallbearer.
“Sod me, what was wrong with him, was he ill?” asked a whisky drinker at the other side of Brendan Barton.
“Course he was fackin ill, he’s fackin dead, isn’t he?” snapped the landlord. To the flymen, who were holding Old Jakie like a sack of vegetables they had come to deliver to the kitchen: “So what happened?”
“Just dishing out an Evening Standard to Michael here and he keeled over. Minds me, Michael, had you paid him?”
“No, course I hadn’t, what was I supposed to do, put pennies over his eyes?”
“So what was his problem?” asked the landlord.
“You mean apart from being dead? Dicky heart, I’d say.”
“All right, and so why have you brought him in here? This is a pub, not a flaming morgue.”
“We thought it was what he would have wanted, Ronaldo. After all, he’s been coming here for how long?”
“Too bloody long. Go on, then, sling him along the bar counter and I’ll ring for an ambulance.”
As willing hands cleared ashtrays and glasses off the bar, and the two flymen respectfully laid out Old Jakie as in the undertaker’s parlour where he should more properly have been put to rest, Alex, speaking from medical knowledge gleaned from Selby, piped up: “They won’t come.”
“Who won’t come?” asked the landlord aggressively.
“The ambulance service. They won’t take away dead bodies.”
“Oh yes, and how many dead bodies have you seen being left to rot in whatever pub you grace with your presence, which certainly isn’t this one? Practising coroner, are we?”
“No, but I do know what I’m talking about.”
“You know sod all, son. This’ll be the fifth stiff to leave these premises in my time, and they’ve all left by ambulance.”
“Mickey Ryan, dropped dead where I’m standing now, Boris the Boxer, keeled over down in the bog, Nellie that used to pose for that what was his bloody name, John Minton, fell off her bar stool and never got up again, and who was the other one?” intoned a glum-looking Scotch-drinker who evidently regarded himself as the pub archivist.
“Complete stranger, knocked back three triple brandies, fell back on his head like a planker wood, never seen him before or since.”
“You certainly wouldn’t have seen him since, Ronnie, unless you went to the funeral,” put in Brendan Barton.
“Which I didn’t, and I shan’t be going to this bugger’s neither, money he owes me,” the landlord said.
“Bitter respect, Ron, he ain’t even cold yet,” said the pub chronicler. “And could be your oldest customer we’re talking about.”
“Oldest customer here, Coach, French, anywhere between the Crown and Two Chairmen and the Pillars of Hercules,” said another.
“Makes one wish for a hat, so that one could doff it,” said Brendan Barton.
“How long had he been coming in, Ronaldo?” asked one of the flymen, acknowledging with a tip of his glass a complimentary half of bitter for services rendered.
“Christ knows. He was a fixture when I moved in, and we’re talking 1963 now. Used to be in your liner work that time, scene-shifter, sunnink. As he never stopped telling us.” The landlord gazed with something approaching fondness at the body laid out on the bar. One of the flymen had folded Jakie’s arms in the approved laying-out manner, so that without his cap he would have looked like one of the stone effigies in Leeds Parish Church graveyard, where Alex used to go snogging. “Gor, you could bore for England, couldn’t you, Jakie?”
“But you never barred him, Ronaldo, unlike some licensed premises we could name.”
“Couldn’t afford to, he had too much on the slate. By Christ, though, he could knock it back, couldn’t you, Jakoh?”
This was definitely one for the lads back at the Metro. Blurry pub turned into a blurry mortuary, stroll on, you wouldn’t get this at the Miners Arms.
“Member time he had that ruck with who was it having a go at him that time, you barred him, Ron, didn’t you?”
“Too bloody true, cheeky sod. Charlie Fish, works in Berwick Street market. Why he used to drink here insteader the King of Corsica bang next to his stall we shall never know.”
“He was barred from the King of Corsica,” the second flyman said.
“More than likely. Anyway, this time we’re talking about, Jakie here had a bundler late Standards under his arm and he wouldn’t let Charlie look at one to see what had won the last at Sandown. He goes, ‘If you want a free read, get down Westminster Public Library.’ So Charlie goes —”