Ring Road: There’s no place like home

Ring Road: There’s no place like home Ian Sansom A warm, humane, and sharply observed tale of small town life that is by equal turns hilarious and moving.Big Davey Jones is coming home. He's been gone almost 20 years now, but nobody's forgotten him. Davey's a local hero – his miracle birth as the seventh son of a seventh son brought fame to this little town and they've been grateful ever since. But Davey's home town has changed much in the intervening years. The traditional family business like Billy Finlay's Auto-Supplies and Calton's Bakery and Tea Rooms have been replaced with 'Exciting New Housing Developments!' and even a nightclub called 'Paradise Lost'.The locals haven't changed much though. Bob Savory, who always had it in him, has made a million with his company Sandwich Classics, and he's branching out now, with an Irish themed restaurant on the ring road. Francie McGinn, the divorced minister at The People's Fellowship, is still trying to convert the town through his Fish-and-Chip Biblical Quiz Nights and his Good Friday Carvery & Gospel Night. And Sammy, the town's best plumber, is depressed as ever and looking for solace at the bottom of the whisky bottle.Clever, touching and, above all, utterly spot-on in its depiction of small town life, Ring Road is confirms Ian Sansom’s status as one of our most perceptive authors working today. RING ROAD There’s no place like home IAN SANSOM For my family Contents Cover (#ue71d221b-a854-544d-b1b3-4e0241bc2469) Title Page (#uceb1399d-091c-581b-b740-796bebe6e32b) Preface (#ud0ef4378-e965-5197-b0ce-c2809f244ab1) 1 The Seventh Son (#u24a2ce13-e177-5659-8176-03b9f64a722d) 2 Sandwiches (#ua26e7f16-fe5d-5070-87a5-3e781be7390d) 3 Jesus, Mary and Joseph (#ub07f9327-deae-52f2-897e-3b7b4501d9ae) 4 The Dump (#ua7b6e07e-b8ab-5179-af0f-cfba9dc630a4) 5 Fellowship (#u2f79f940-9c67-51a6-b9f2-93b442f97724) 6 Massive (#uc20f0830-e73c-5352-8604-cb82ae71a2e0) 7 Plumbing (#litres_trial_promo) 8 The Steam Master (#litres_trial_promo) 9 Closure (#litres_trial_promo) 10 Print (#litres_trial_promo) 11 The Quality Hotel (#litres_trial_promo) 12 Unisex (#litres_trial_promo) 13 Deep Freeze (#litres_trial_promo) 14 Self-Help (#litres_trial_promo) 15 Line Dancing (#litres_trial_promo) 16 Speedy Bap! (#litres_trial_promo) 17 Condolences (#litres_trial_promo) 18 The Bridal Salon (#litres_trial_promo) 19 Country Gospel (#litres_trial_promo) 20 Cigars (#litres_trial_promo) 21 Christmas Eve (#litres_trial_promo) Index of Key Words, Phrases and Concepts (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) P.S. Ideas, interviews & features … (#litres_trial_promo) About the author (#litres_trial_promo) Q & A Life at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo) Favourite Books/Authors (#litres_trial_promo) About the book (#litres_trial_promo) A Critical Eye Sandwich Spread (#litres_trial_promo) Read on (#litres_trial_promo) Have You Read? If You Loved This, You’ll Like … (#litres_trial_promo) Find Out More (#litres_trial_promo) By the same author (#litres_trial_promo) Praise (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Preface (#ulink_f9e64cab-f8df-5d9a-af1f-cf8b9143e02d) Containing the customary avowals, apologies, concealments of artistry, confidences, explanations and precepts, and a note on the tipping of winks I worked on a farm once, when I was first married, in County Antrim, and one of the men I worked with had been in London doing the roads, during the early Seventies, at the beginning of the Troubles, and he claimed that things were so bad in those days that he would post ham in an envelope back home to his family in Belfast. I was never sure if he was having me on or not – it’s always difficult to tune in to another nation’s sense of humour, and I was an Englishman abroad – but I always thought it was a nice idea, and I like to think of this book as similar in some way, as the equivalent of some ham in an envelope, posted in reverse, from me here to you elsewhere, wherever you are. It’s probably like ham in other ways too, some people would say. When I published my first book, The Truth about Babies (Granta, 2002), my wife said she’d only read the next one if I managed to make no mention of vomit, diarrhoea, urine, sperm and other bodily fluids, and I’ve done my best, although she may wish to skip a few pages… The index is designed for those with similar aversions or inclinations. When I sent my mum a copy of the baby book she said, ‘That’s nice, dear,’ which is pretty much what she’s said to me since I first brought drawings home from school, and which still seems to me about the right response to anyone claiming to be an artist. These days, reticence is easily underrated. But then so is enthusiasm. When we were growing up my mum and dad provided for us children, they cooked good food for us to eat, they made sure we brushed our teeth and were polite, and didn’t watch too much television, they taught us how to make our own beds, helped us with our homework and pointed out interesting things when we were on long car journeys. Perhaps this last explains the footnotes. The rest of the mechanics of the book are obvious, I hope, and require no further admissions or explanation. (Apart, perhaps, from the brief chapter summaries and epigraphs, which seem to me a mere practical courtesy but which I’m aware are currently out of fashion, and so may seem avowed and unusual rather than commonsensical or natural, like wearing spats, or clogs, or a smock. But fashions come and go – maybe if you keep the book in a cupboard in a few years’ time it’ll all be back in again.) Writers are, of course, wilful and selfish individuals who only get away with writing because other people allow them the privilege, but I know from long experience that listening to writers saying their thank yous is a bit like listening to people pray or talking about sex – it’s not necessarily unpleasant and everyone does it sometimes, but you do wonder if maybe they could learn to do it in their own heads and in the privacy of their own homes. So I have left all my acknowledgements until the end. They are an apology as much as an explanation. Anyway, I do hope you enjoy the book – it’s meant for you to enjoy. It would be presumptuous of me to say what it’s all about, or even to pretend that I know, although maybe you’ll understand if I say that as a child on summer evenings, on Sundays, our parents would often have relatives over for tea – this was before barbecues had arrived and when family lived close by – and my aunts and uncles would come and we would sit around the dining table, which now serves me as a desk, and we would eat sandwiches and salads, and we would talk and play games, and I would fight with my cousins, and I can remember that I was amazed that these people were supposed to be my relatives, people with whom I seemed to have nothing whatsoever in common. It was a long and painful lesson, undiminished even by crab paste and trifle, and I thought it would be good to write a book that somehow reflected those Sunday teatimes, and which would remind me of the many different ways in which people live their lives, which is what makes our lives possible. It would be self-serving of me to say anything else, except perhaps that the town is not meant to be a replica of any particular place, although I believe it does exist, and that I’ve never met any of the people, although there are equivalents, and that each chapter can be read on its own as well as in relation to all the others, although I hope, of course, that you’ll read them all. There are no themes that I’m aware of and any obscurities are unintentional. It seems necessary, finally, to apologise to the busy reader for this, a preface, which suggests either an uncertainty or an unnecessary formality on the part of the author, or perhaps both. Writers are traditionally opposed to explanation, since it diminishes the effect of the masterly voice and style, but I have always found it a hardship not to be helpful, which is a failing, I know, but it’s still better, I think, even now, with the effects of excess everywhere apparent, to be told too much rather than too little. Arrogance, bullying, puffery, rapacity, self-awe and the tipping of winks can get you a long way in life, and it seems to get a lot of authors further than most, but in the end I believe it’s better simply to be honest and to try to be explicit. And if you can’t be, you should at least try and pretend. Thank you, again. Bangor – Belfast – Donaghadee, 2003 1 The Seventh Son (#ulink_895be20b-4c6f-5cc2-902e-d7ab7036471b) In which there is scenery and Davey Quinn returns to his home town, with some considerable determination, and is shocked at what he finds ‘That’s some weather we’ve been having.’ That’s what people say where I come from, when they don’t know what else to say, which is most of the time. Once we get going we’re OK, but it can take us a while to warm up to a conversation – about five years is the average. In fact, in most instances conversation never quite catches fire, but that doesn’t stop us laying down the kindling, stating our good intentions, preparing for something that in all likelihood may never happen. We may never get round to the big blaze, we may never exchange a confidence or share a secret or speak out of turn, not even when fuelled by drink, which tends to leave us speechless and starry-eyed, stupefied rather than garrulous and overflowing, but still every day we will happily talk about the weather, and about our children, and about births and deaths and marriages, and thus recently, of course, about the return of big Davey Quinn, after nearly twenty years away. Davey is famous in our town because he is the seventh son of a seventh son, which is a rare distinction anywhere but nothing short of a miracle here, where the population has been growing for as long as anyone can remember but where the family size is getting smaller – these days a seventh son seems not so much a hopeless indulgence as a sheer impossibility, or an embarrassment, even among the most devout of the dwindling and ageing congregation at the Church of the Cross and the Passion, where Davey’s parents still attend regularly and still give thanks for the fact of his wonderful birth, long after the event. Davey, needless to say, does not share his parents’ enthusiasm and never has done. His is a distinction that he did not earn, and did not ask for, and it has proved to be a heavy burden for which he was quite unprepared. It would probably be fair to say that Davey Quinn has found his position in life more difficult to bear than most: his fame has taken its toll. The famous photographs that appeared in the local paper, the Impartial Recorder, can still be found framed in pubs and bars around town, places that like to fill their walls with the faces of local celebrities, as a warning and a witness, perhaps, to the meaninglessness and transitoriness of human life, for who now remembers our champion high-diver, Don Kennedy, who competed at the 1936 Munich Olympics, and who walked around town on his hands every morning and did marathon push-up demonstrations in the old market place (which is now the multi-storey)? Or even Barbara McAlesee, the Impartial Recorder’s ‘Woman of the Week’ as recently as 1979, who knitted scarves and hats from the fur of dead pets, and who appeared on the once popular Sunday night television programme That’s Life, and who exists now only in a faded newspaper cutting behind the counter at Scarpetti’s, alongside an example of her handiwork, a muffler, framed, made from the fur of the late Mrs Scarpetti’s terrier, Massimo? Or the McLaughlin brothers, the tap-dancing twins who danced their way out of town and into Broadway success in the chorus of the musical Hold on to Your Hats in 1943, which starred Al Jolson and Martha Raye singing ‘She Came, She Saw, She Cancanned’? The most popular and much reproduced photograph of Davey shows him with his eyes sealed shut, wrapped tight in a blanket and stranded in the arms of his suited and black-spectacled father, with his six brothers in duffel coats and parkas crowding around in front, looking utterly fed-up, standing outside the old cottage hospital – formerly the soap-works – on Union Street, which is where all the Quinn brothers were born, two generations of them, and which is long since demolished, which has made way for an extension to what used to be the Technical College and is now the Institute of Higher and Further Education, and which may some day become a university, if the Principal, Hugh Scullion, has his way, which he usually does.* (#ulink_cce71bd9-9041-5b91-9657-4f60145be9c8) From this great seat of learning, then, what was once that little cottage hospital, Davey Quinn made not only our local news, but the national news, and the international – within a week of his birth he had straddled the globe as evidence of God’s amusement and of the wonder of fornication. The midwife’s slap – Miss Carroll’s, as it happens, a lovely, jolly woman, who committed suicide a few years ago, the day after her retirement, a terrible tragedy and a loss which was felt by the whole town, many of whom she had brought to life with her own bare hands, with her renowned firm slap – and Davey’s cold cry seemed to carry from earth to heaven, and far across land and sea, as far, they say, as America, where his tiny features could be seen on news-stands from state to state and on the televisions of the nation. These days parents might grow rich on the proceeds of such an extraordinary birth, but back then we were all innocent and little Davey was not regarded as a commodity – he was, rather, and to all of us, a gift. A commodity can at least be bought and sold – it is a free exchange. But a gift implies obligations: it is therefore difficult to refuse or to return. Poor Davey, the runt of the litter, a little miracle, an excitement in all four corners of the globe, was the fulfilment of a life’s ambition for his father, Davey Senior, as he became known, and he was therefore, naturally, a huge disappointment to him and hence to himself. Babies, if only they knew the dismal realms they were about to enter, would probably never heed the call and never leave those remote gold and silver coasts from whence they come and have their lodgings. They would pause, consider the darkness, and sit right back down again on their fat little hunkers and never cross the waters into memory and oblivion. Surely no being rushes to embrace its own apotheosis? Unless, of course, that being be man. Some years ago Davey left to travel the world and to try to escape his unique privilege and responsibilities, to try to escape photographs of himself in pubs and bars, to find riches and even, perhaps, he told himself then, believing such to be possible, to find himself. He got as far as London, where no one believed him – they thought he was joking – if he told them he was the seventh son of a seventh son, even if they stayed around long enough to hear him tell, which was not often and certainly never when he or they were sober or during the hours of daylight, and so in the end it ceased to matter. The wonderful and the terrible, his colossal, inescapable self, became first hilarious and then irrelevant, and finally unmentionable. He found refuge in work and in friendships, and in all the usual and time-honoured traditions. He drank the cup to the lees and there was a vast blur, and in the crowd he became successfully, magnificently anonymous. Among the millions of other talebearers, he lost himself and disappeared. I don’t know the exact circumstances which brought him to the point of return – there are rumours, of course – but he’s back and it’s good to have him back, and what people are saying is this. He woke up, they say, and urinated bright red, which was a shock, I guess. Urine is usually yellow, wherever you’re from and wherever you’re living; it is one of life’s few constants, sometimes perhaps a little darker, sometimes perhaps a little lighter, but always yellow, even for the likes of little Annie Wallace and her family, and the Buckles, and the Hawkinses, and the Delargys, our town’s Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have long since forsaken the wicked pigmenting tints of tea and coffee and alcohol, and birthdays, yet whose holy and clean-living wee is still distinctly yellow. Davey Quinn’s urine that morning was a red-wine kind of a red, a welcome colour in a fine-cut crystal glass over a nice evening meal in a favourite restaurant, but never good on porcelain first thing in the morning, and so it was that Davey decided that it was time to come home. He’d been away long enough. His kidney was ruptured. They’d read him his last rites in the hospital, apparently, but he was out and about and fighting fit six weeks later – Davey is nothing if not a fighter – and the very next day he booked his ticket home. He made it back via our so-called International Airport, which, it has to be said, is not noticeably International – there are tray bakes on sale in the gift shop, for example, and more copies of the Impartial Recorder than there are business books in the newsagent – but it has a reciprocal arrangement with a similar airport in the south of France and there’s a flight once a week, to and from, which grants them both their titles. So Davey made it back safely and in some style, but alas his luggage did not make it. It’s always touch and go flying in here, whether you’ll arrive with what you left with. Most of us in our time have lost something in transit, even if it’s only our nerves or our resolve, usually because of the final descent, which requires a steep bank round and a sudden drop of altitude, when suddenly you see home and your stomach is in your mouth and you realise exactly how tiny it is, how small, your town, and your street, and your little house in your little street, how insignificant in the great scheme of things: it can be a sobering experience for someone just returning from business, or a weekend shopping trip or visiting relatives in a city, full of themselves and the complimentary drinks and the bag of nuts. Cities exist in and of themselves, and require no explanation, they just are. In a city you can kick back and relax, and you need only concern yourself with questions of who you are and what you are, and how you’re going to be more, and bigger, and better: if you’d ever attended the Philosophy for Beginners evening classes with Barry McClean at the Institute you would probably have called these empirical questions of essence and existence.* (#ulink_f07282ac-bd11-5e74-b414-0e829b11ab4f) A city, in other words, makes you a utilitarian. But when you look at our town you just straight away think to yourself: why? A small town can make you metaphysical.† (#ulink_7a0bf723-93c9-51d9-b4d3-0999e6a80f99) Marie Kincaid, who lives in town and who commutes up to the airport, sees people facing up to this question every day, as they step off planes on to the tarmac and into the drizzle, and wonder exactly how they got here and whether there might possibly be a chance to go back. Marie is a Baggage Reclaim Supervisor: she calls the loading bay her Bermuda Triangle and her life is spent attempting to discover its many mysteries. Despite closed-circuit television and X-rays and searches, there’s still a lot of theft and loss of baggage: it’s almost as if the luggage knows something that the passengers don’t, and when they pass through on the conveyor belt at the point of departure they think, well, actually, I quite like it here, thank you very much, and I think I’ll stay. There is luggage belonging to people from our town in all the major cities of the world, living under an assumed name. Davey had set off with two suitcases, which he’d somehow acquired over the years, graduating first from a grip to a rucksack. They were suitcases which Davey had never in fact used except to store his CDs and cassettes, which he’d sold before returning. He’d found it hard to part with some of them, not so much because he wanted to be able to listen to the music, but because he didn’t want to forget what it was once like wanting to listen to music, but then he thought, well, I have a working radio, what more do I need?* (#ulink_56745388-e04a-5c43-ad47-c58e54a6fbf2) What he needed was the money, so he sold his memories, and he reclaimed the suitcases from under his bed and packed. In the airport, when everyone else had claimed their luggage and the carousel had shut down and his cases hadn’t arrived, Davey went to see Marie at the Baggage Reclaim desk and Marie smiled her widest, most uncompromising and half-humorous smile and said, ‘Nothing we can do about it, I’m afraid.’ Marie has had the opportunity to practise this particular smile over a number of years now, and it hardly ever failed to work its magic, even on non-native speakers of English. It was a philosophical smile, a smile that suggested that although the loss of luggage obviously caused her pain, she understood from a wider and longer perspective that it was a small matter and that you, the unfortunate but undoubtedly reasonable passenger, should regard it as a small matter also, for thus and this way, the smile implied, lay the path to enlightenment. Davey interpreted this complex smile correctly and filled in a pink form without protest under Marie’s benign gaze. The luggage, said Marie, might be over on the next flight. Or it might not. And then she checked Davey’s name and signature on the form, which was when it happened. ‘I know you,’ she said. ‘You do?’ ‘Of course. I know you.’ ‘Right,’ said Davey. ‘David Quinn?’ She wagged a finger at him. ‘Yes,’ said Davey. She’d caught him: she had him bang to rights. ‘The son of David Quinn?’ ‘Yes,’ he agreed mournfully. He knew what was coming. ‘The seventh son of the seventh son?’ What could he say? They were words that he hadn’t heard for twenty years and he could live without hearing for another twenty more. But he couldn’t deny it, although he’d hoped that perhaps he could have got away with it. He’d thought that if he stayed away long enough he might have become unrecognisable to the past, but it was not to be so; the past has a very long memory. For most of us, for those of us who return home out of necessity, or in mere shame or pity, rather than in triumph and trailing clouds of glory or with our reputations preceding us, the journey home is always a disappointment. For most of us there’s never going to be ticker tape and no free pint, no surprise pick-up at the station or the airport, and the best we can hope for is a mild handshake from our father and a teary hug from mum. Which is never enough. But Davey had wanted nothing more. He’d have been happy to creep back unannounced and unnoticed – a quick pat on the back, then pick up the car from the Short Stay car park and home for a nice cup of tea. That would have been just fine. They say that everybody wants secretly to be recognised, but Davey Quinn really had wanted to be left alone and it had suited him, the years of anonymity, it had given him space to breathe and to get to know himself. Living away, he thought he’d finally begun to grow into his face, the jut of his own chin, the set of his own nose, the furrows of his own brow: he felt pretty sure that they all reflected his new, different, more secure sense of himself. He thought that he’d found the perfect disguise. ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ said Marie, hand on hip. ‘Really?’ ‘You get back a lot?’ ‘I haven’t been back in twenty years,’ he said. ‘Living in London?’ ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘You’ll see a lot of changes.’ ‘Uh-huh,’ he said. ‘Right.’ ‘I’ll see what I can do about the luggage,’ said Marie, picking up her walkie-talkie. ‘Thanks,’ said Davey, turning to walk away. ‘Honest to God, you look just the same,’ repeated Marie. ‘Good,’ said Davey. ‘And that extra bit of weight suits you.’ And then she spoke into the walkie-talkie. ‘Maureen?’ she said. ‘You’ll never guess who I’ve got here.’ There was a crackle. ‘David Quinn.’ And then more crackle. ‘Yes. Him.’ And then crackle again. ‘Maureen says welcome home. And Happy Christmas.’ ‘Thanks,’ said Davey. ‘The same to you.’ It was getting late and he caught a cab. The driver was humming along to a tune on the radio, a typical piece of bowel-softening Country and Western, sung in an accent yearning for America but tethered firmly here to home. Davey sat down heavily in the back, dazed, and stared out of the window. So this was it. Home. Marie was totally wrong. There weren’t a lot of changes. In fact, everything looked exactly the same: the same rolling hills, the same patches of fields and houses, the same roundabouts, the motorway. It was all just as he remembered it. A landscape doesn’t change that much in twenty years. Or the weather. It had been fine when they left the airport, but now the rain was sheeting down and about twenty miles along the motorway one of the windscreen wipers popped off – the whole arm, like someone had just reached down and plucked it away, like God Himself was plucking at an eyebrow. ‘Jesus!’ screamed the driver, having lost all vision through the windscreen in what seemed to be a massive and magic stream of liquid pouring down from the heavens, as if God, or Jesus, were now pissing directly on to the car, as if He were getting ready for an evening out, and they swerved across three lanes and pulled over on to the hard shoulder. ‘Did you see that?’ ‘I did,’ said Davey. ‘Jesus Christ. Blinded me.’ ‘You OK?’ ‘Yeah, thanks. Yeah. I’m fine.’ The car was rocking now, as lorries passed by, and then there was a sudden clap of thunder in the distance. ‘You wouldn’t be any good at repairs, would you?’ asked the driver, turning round. ‘No, not really,’ said Davey. ‘Would you mind having a look, though? It’s just, I don’t know anything about cars. And this asthma.’ The man coughed, in evidence. ‘It gets bad in the rain.’ He reached for a cigarette, put it in his mouth ready to light it and waited, his hand shaking slightly. ‘Right,’ said Davey, who did look as though he knew about cars and who felt sorry for the man, who reminded him of his father: it was the shakes, and the cigarette, and the thickset back of the neck; the profile of most men here over forty, actually. ‘I’ll just go ahead then, shall I?’ ‘I’d be grateful, if you would.’ Davey got out. The cars on the inside lane were inches from him, flank to flank, and the rain was busy pasting his clothes to him, and the wind was getting up, turning him instantly from safe passenger into a sailor rolling on the forecastle in the high seas. He checked first round the front. The whole of the wiper’s arm had gone – just the metal stump remained – so he then made his way round to the rear and started pulling off the back windscreen wiper, in the hope he might be able to use it as a replacement. He managed to cut his hands on the fittings and the spray from the road was whipping up his back, but in the end, with a twist and a wrench, he managed to get the wiper off. And in so doing he dropped the little plastic lugs that had held it in place – they rolled on to the road – so there he was, big Davey Quinn, not an hour back home, down on his knees, soaked to the skin in the pouring rain, reaching out a bloodied hand into a sea of oncoming traffic. It was no good. They were out too far and the traffic was too heavy. He gave up. He got back into the back seat, drenched, defeated, and dripping wet and blood. The driver was smoking. ‘Good swim?’ he asked, chuckling at his own joke. ‘No luck?’ ‘No.’ Davey reached forward and gave the driver the back wiper. ‘Sorry about that.’ ‘You’re all right.’ The driver called into his office on the radio. They’d send someone along with a spare. It might take a while, maybe an hour or so. An hour. Davey thought about it. Davey had been thinking about coming home for as long as he’d been away – there was not a day went past when he didn’t think about it – but it was a journey in which irresolution might still easily overtake him. He had enough money in his wallet and on his cards to be able to go back to the airport right now and get the next plane out, and maybe wait another twenty years before returning. He was, therefore, a man who could not afford to hesitate. The time was now or never. He’d come this far: he was going to have to keep going. He was going to have to maintain his velocity. He said he’d walk the rest of the way. ‘Walk?’ said the driver. ‘Yeah,’ said Davey. ‘As in, on your feet?’ ‘Yeah,’ repeated Davey. ‘Walking? In this rain?’ ‘Yes,’ said Davey one more time. ‘Are you joking?’ ‘No. It’s not far from here, is it?’ ‘Next exit. He won’t be long, though, with the spare.’ ‘No, I’ll push on, I think.’ ‘Well, it’s your decision, pal. What’s the hurry?’ ‘I just …’ Davey couldn’t explain it. ‘I need to get back. What do I owe you?’ ‘Well, I’ll have to charge you full fare and extra for the damage to the wiper.’ ‘Right,’ said Davey. He believed him. ‘No, I’m having you on!’ said the driver. ‘Jesus! Where have you been?’ ‘London,’ admitted Davey. ‘Well,’ said the driver philosophically. ‘I’ll tell you what. This isn’t London. We’ll call it quits. OK?’ ‘OK,’ said Davey. ‘Cheers.’ People at home, he thought: they were the salt of the earth. ‘Happy Christmas,’ said the man as Davey slipped out. ‘And good luck.’ Davey had made it about half a mile and halfway down the slip road in the squall and rain before he realised that he’d left his little rucksack, his only hand luggage, in the car. The rucksack contained a bottle of whiskey for his parents, a bottle for himself and his wallet, stuffed with cash and cards. He turned and walked back towards the car, in the face of the traffic spitting up fountains in his face. The car had gone – there was just a wiper on the hard shoulder to mark where once it had been. So this was how it was going to have to be. He was going to have to return, as he had left, with nothing and in ruin. He put one foot in front of the other and set off in the wake of the cars’ slipstream. It’s a long walk from the motorway to the outskirts of our town – an hour, maybe two, I’m not sure, it’s not a walk I’d care to take myself – but eventually in the distance, on that profound horizon, Davey saw the golf club, the outskirts, with its big stone sleeping lions and its 20-foot forbidding hedges, and there was probably a good half-inch of water in his shoes by this time, and his clothes were like wet canvas as he stood and rested his hand on the head of one of the lions and gazed at the entire grey town down below him. A lot can change in a small town in twenty years. In twenty years men and women can do a lot of damage. There is no mildness in the hearts of small-town councillors and planners, and you should never underestimate what small-town people are capable of. You can double it and double it again, and keep on going with your calculations until you think you’ve achieved the unimaginable, and still you’d never come close. Any estimate will never match up to the extraordinary outstretched reality. The people of my home town have outdone themselves. We have exceeded all expectations. We have gone further than was absolutely necessary. We have confounded probability and ignored all the maths. We have been reckless and we have been greedy, we have eaten ourselves alive, sucked the very marrow from our bones, and spat out the remaining pieces. Davey was amazed. He was heading straight for the centre of town, past all the old landmarks – Treavy’s second-hand cars, Pickering’s the monumental masons, McKenzie’s broom factory and the old planing mill, where they used to stack the sashes and doors outside under a huge tarpaulin canopy, and J. W. John’s, the big coal depot, where the coal would sometimes fall over the wall, and we’d go to collect it and bring it home, or dig pits in the woods and gather kindling and try to make fires. They’re all gone, of course – Treavy’s, Pickering’s, McKenzie’s, John’s. There is nothing of them remaining at all. It’s been quite a clearance. Even the long steep road Davey was coming in on, shin-deep in mud and puddles, what used to be Moira Avenue, a mazy S-shaped road flanked with trees and the cast-iron railings protecting the town’s little light industry, is now a straight flat dual carriageway with housing developments tucked up tight behind vast sheets of panel fencing on either side, a good quarter of a mile of soft verges and For Sale signs. At the very end of the road, a road Davey no longer recognised but which he now alas knew, every foot-aching inch of it, at a big new junction with four sets of lights where the water had formed in deeper puddles, was the Kincaid furniture factory. Or rather, was the Kincaid furniture factory. There’s nothing there at all now. Just mud, and sprouting weeds, and a sign, ‘COMING SOON: EXCITING NEW DEVELOPMENT OF TWO AND THREE BED HIGH-SPEC TURNKEY FINISH TOWN HOUSES’, with a high-spec view, it should be noted, of the health centre car park, Macey’s the chemists, and Tommy Tucker’s chipper, which have all survived the clearances. Molested by the remorseless rain, Davey Quinn waited for the little green man to tip him the wink, then he crossed over into the centre proper. The old fire station is still there, but it has been converted into apartments – ‘LUXURY, FULLY FITTED APARTMENTS’, apparently, and two of them still for sale. The big tower where you used to see the long red hose hanging down to dry – what we called God’s Condom – is long gone. Some things, though, remain. Down Bridge Street, past the bus station and the train station and the Chinese takeaways, the old Quality Hotel, our landmark, our claim to fame, still sits on the corner of Main Street and High Street, in all its glorious six storeys, with its balustraded parapet, its castellations and gables, its mullioned windows and square corner turrets, and its flat-roofed concrete back-bar extension and basement disco, the site of so many breathless adolescent fumbles and embraces, a place where so many relationships in this town were formed and celebrated, and where so many of them faltered. It is completely derelict, of course, the hotel, just a shell these days, a red, rain-soaked crust held up by rusty scaffolding poles and a big 10-foot sign on one of the crumbling turrets announcing that it has been ‘ACQUIRED FOR MAJOR REDEVELOPMENT’, no one knows exactly what. The peeling red stucco is stained with pigeon shit. It’s a wreck, but at least it’s still there. Like a lot of us, in fact. Sitting, as if in commentary and judgement upon it and upon us, directly opposite the hotel and facing our only remaining free car park, are the new offices of the Impartial Recorder, our local paper, a journal of record, housed in a three-storey concrete building in the popular brutalist manner, with its red neon sign announcing both its name and the additional words, ’COMMERCIAL PRINTERS’. Shaking now, with the cold and the shock, Davey set his face against the prevailing winds and the haze of rain, and prepared for the final drag before home, up Main Street. Past Duncan McGregor’s, the tailor and staunch Methodist and gentleman’s outfitter. Past the five bakeries, each offering its own speciality: the lovely treacle soda bread in the art deco Adele’s; the Wheaten’s miniature barnbracks; the ginger scones in Carlton’s Bakery and Tea Rooms; the big cheese-and-onion pasties in McCann’s; the town’s best fruit cake in Spencer’s. Past the four butchers, including Billy Nibbs’s dad, Hugh, ‘H.NIBBS, BUTCHER AND POULTERER’, with its large stained-glass frontage and its mechanical butcher forever cleaving a calf’s head in two, and McCullough’s, ’ALSO LICENSED TO SELL GAME’, with its hand-painted legend, ‘Pleased to Meet You, Meat to Please You’. Past the nameless paint shop that everyone called the Paint Shop; and Orr’s the shoe shop, and McMartens’, their competitors; past the small bookshop, known as the Red Front because of its pillar box flaky frontage; and Peter Harris Stationery; and Noah’s Ark the toy shop; Maxwell’s photographers; the entrance to the old Sunrise Dairy; King’s Music, run by Ernie King and his son Charlie; Priscilla’s Ladies Separates and Luxury Hair Styling; Gemini the Jewellers; Finlay’s Auto-Supplies; Carpenter’s tobacconists; the Frosty Queen, the ice cream parlour, which featured an all-year-round window display of a plastic snow-woman; and the Bide-A-While tea shop, famous for its cinnamon scones and its sign promising ‘Customers Attended in the Latest Rapid Service Manner’. All of them absent without leave. Gone. Disappeared. Destroyed. And in their place? Charity shops for old people, and blind people, and poor children, and other poor children, and people with bad hearts, and cancer, and dogs; amusement arcades; chip shops; kebab shops; minicab offices; and a new club called Paradise Lost whose entrance features fibreglass Grecian columns and a crude naked eighteen-foot Adam and Eve, hands joined above the doorway and Eve mid-bite of an apple the size of a watermelon; and deep, deep piles of rubbish in the doorways of shuttered shops. Just what you’d expect. A street of bright plastic and neon shop fascia, holes, gaps, clearances and metal-fenced absences. Main Street had once been called what it was. But now, what could you call it? It hardly deserved a name. The old cast-iron street sign has long since vanished. Virtually drowning now, breathing water and no part of him left dry, Davey managed to accelerate his march and reached the brow of the hill. The Quinn family bungalow used to be on the edge of town, an outpost, past the People’s Park and the old council offices, part of a small estate looking proudly over its own patch of green with swings and a slide and a see-saw, and a small football pitch with its own goalposts, which was marked out twice a year by the council, and looking out back over trees and fields. It’s still there. The family home remains. It hasn’t gone anywhere. But it no longer sits as a promontory and is no longer proud. It has been humbled and made small, bleached and filthied not only by the passing of time and the fading of memory, but by the ring road, which has stretched and uncoiled itself around our town, its street lights like tail fins or trunks uplifted over and above in a triumphal arch, leading to mile upon mile of pavementless houses – good houses, with their own internal garages – and to our shopping mall, Bloom’s, the diamond in the ring, our new town centre, the place to be, forever open and forever welcoming, the twenty-four-hour lights from its twenty-four-hour car park effacing the night sky, ‘Every Day a Good Day Regardless of the Weather’. The sky was erased and empty, high above the red-brick new estates, as Davey Quinn pushed open the rusty gate – which used to be red – and went to ring on the door of his family home, the prodigal returning. The varnish on the poker-worked wooden sign by the door has long since peeled away, revealing the natural grain of the wood, made pale by the sun and the wind, and swollen by rain, but the house name is scorched deep enough and black enough, and you can still see it clearly from the road: Dun Roamin’. * (#ulink_91eed8e9-2a8a-526a-b45e-8809b5d1e40e)Hugh Scullion, it should be explained, for those from out of town, is a man with a mission and a man with a mission statement (see the Impartial Recorder, 4 December 1999, ‘Principal’s Millennium Message’). Hugh has many, many chins and he wears novelty socks. He has a B.Ed, and an M.A., and twenty years solid in RE. behind him, but most importantly he has energy and he has opinions, and he has made our Institute what it is today, a county-wide centre of excellence, a ‘provider of a full portfolio of Higher and Further Education programmes’ according to its prospectus, and where once the Quinns were pushed and squeezed and forced out into the world it is now possible to take a night class in Computing or in Accounting or in various Beauty Therapies, taught by accredited professionals, and with concessionary fees available. Early booking advised. Enrolment throughout the year. Some of the Institute’s courses are, of course, more popular than others: Conversational Italian, for example (Thursdays, 7.30–9, in the Union building), taught by the town’s remaining Italian, Francesca, daughter of the Scarpettis, who themselves returned to Italy long ago, while Francesca remained and married a local man, Tommy Kahan, a local police officer and the proud possessor of what is almost certainly the town’s only degree in sociology. Francesca herself is now of a certain age but of undiminished charms and her class is always oversubscribed. Philosophy for Beginners, on the other hand (Wednesdays, 7.30–9, in the demountable behind the main Union building), taught by Barry McClean, the local United Reformed Church minister, is consistently cancelled, due to lack of interest: he’s under pressure to change the course title in the Institute brochure to something like ‘Money, Sex and Power’, which should draw in the crowds, and then he could teach them the Nicomachean Ethics, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil just the same. Class numbers would probably fall off in the first couple of weeks, but all fees are paid up front, so by the time the students realised it’d be too late. This raises an ethical dilemma for Barry, but Hugh Scullion has pointed out that the only ethical dilemma he’s facing at the moment is whether or not to do away with the teaching of philosophy altogether and to replace it with more courses in subjects that people actually want to study, such as Leisure and Hospitality Management, and Music Technology. Barry is currently seeking advice and consolation in the pre-Socratics. His wife is encouraging him to take more of an interest in gardening. Fortunately, the Institute runs courses and Barry is entitled to a discount. * (#ulink_3ee3410d-9882-5ac4-9be1-32b81120b6f3) Philosophy for Beginners, Week 1, ‘Ethics’. † (#ulink_3ee3410d-9882-5ac4-9be1-32b81120b6f3) Philosophy for Beginners, Week 2, ‘Metaphysics’. * (#ulink_ae1d41c1-547c-5538-a195-36b8b818e0d3) He certainly did not need Prince’s Lovesexy, he realised, or Deacon Blue’s Raintown, or the Smiths’ World Won’t Listen, or Simple Minds’ Once Upon a Time, or Marillion, or the Fatima Mansions, or Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, or Blue Oyster Cult, or the Cult, or John Cougar Mellencamp’s The Lonesome Jubilee, or Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians’ Shooting Rubber Bands at the Stars, CDs he could not possibly imagine or remember himself ever having wanted or set out to buy, nor any of the dozens of home-made compilation tapes marked simply ‘Various’, or ‘Happy Daze’, or ‘Paul and Keith’s Rave Spesh’, on grubby BASF Chrome Extra II (90), and SONY HF and BHF (90), and red and white TDK D90, and Memorex dBS+, and AGFA F-DXI-90 and featuring almost exclusively the music of James, the Stone Roses, the Wonder Stuff, REM, and the Housemartins, and also, invariably, Primal Scream’s ‘Loaded’, The Farm’s ‘Groovy Train’ and Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine’s ‘Sheriff Fatman’. 2 Sandwiches (#ulink_cafac21e-70ee-5400-ba6e-fdb9bfe5c5d2) A short account of Bob Savory – his life, his times, his knives, his mother, his capacity for self-enriching, self-reproach and his famous bill of fare The wind would near have knocked you over. It was gale-force. Bob Savory lost two trees in his grounds: an oak that was older even than the house, and a silver birch by the far pond. Bob has grounds and an old house. He has ponds both near and far. Bob is an old friend and, much more than any of the rest of us, Bob has made it. Bob has it all. Bob has trees that are not leylandii. Bob has done what seems so difficult to us, but which seems so natural to him: he has made money. Bob is a successful local businessman, possibly the most successful local businessman around here since the titled landowners and gentlemen farmers and the great whiskered industrialists of centuries past, when our town used to make all its own and look after itself, when you might be able to sit down in your local after a long day’s work and eat local cheese with your local bread and your local pint in your local tweeds and your local linens round a roaring fire made from the local logs and then nip upstairs to get a good old-fashioned seeing-to and a local disease from a good old local girl, and you’d probably be dead by the time you were forty. There were reminders of those good old days everywhere when we were growing up, from the big brick warehouses up on Moira Avenue and the polished red granite-fronted offices on High Street, with their huge carved bearded heads over the ornate archways, right down to the hole-in-the-wall boot scrapers and the cast-iron corner bollards and the old drinking fountains at the bottom of Main Street by the Quality Hotel, served by taps in beautiful shell-shaped niches, and the big stone trough for horses, which were all removed for the car park and road-widening scheme years ago, and which no one has seen since – although some people say they now sit as ornaments in the garden of our ex-mayor and council chairman, Frank Gilbey, a man who presided over twenty years of unrestrained and unrestricted planning and development during the last decades of the twentieth century, a man whose name will live on as the mayor who cut the ribbon on the ring road and opened Bloom’s, the mall, and changed for ever the face of our town. Everyone knows the name of Frank Gilbey, a man who owns a chain of hairdressers and lingerie shops throughout the county, and who has a roundabout on the ring road named after him. His name will live on, Councillor Frank Gilbey, while the names of those nineteenth-century giants, the great entrepreneurs and philanthropists of the past, which once were everywhere – Joseph King and Samuel Jelly and James Whisker, written above offices and shops, and given to parks and streets and community halls, and on all our school cups and certificates – are now hidden and obliterated. Bob Savory’s fame and fortune may not last for ever but for the moment he is rich and famous and successful, an intimate even of Frank Gilbey’s, a business associate, a partner with Frank, in fact, in a number of prestigious developments, a local son to be proud of, and when people ask him what is the secret of his success – which they do, about once a month, in the Impartial Recorder, our local paper, which likes to do its best for local business and for whom Bob is about the closest thing we have to a living, breathing, home-grown celebrity, with all his own hair and an actual jawline – he smiles his big perfect white smile, the result of years of expensive cosmetic dentistry and worth every penny, he says, and he looks straight at the camera and he says just one word: sandwiches. Sandwiches, sandwiches. White or brown, hot or cold, rolls, baps, tortilla wraps, subs and bagels, croissants, pittas, panini, it really doesn’t matter what to Bob, as long as you can eat it with one hand and the filling doesn’t drip down on to your shirt. So no hot cheese or scrambled egg, and no loose meat, but just about everything else: Brie, bacon and avocado, turkey and ham, egg and onion, tuna and onion, tuna and anything, all-day breakfasts, double – and triple-deckers, roast beef and horseradish, roast vegetables and mozzarella, chicken and prawn and cold sausage, every imaginable combination of cheese and meat and bread, smothered in every kind of mayo and mustard and sauce known to man, and some unknown, some made to a secret recipe known, they say, only to Bob, and handed down from generation to generation. Bob knows everything there is to know about sandwiches. He is our sandwich king, the prince, the lord, our contemporary Earl of Sandwich. When it comes to sandwiches Bob just seems to know what people like. He has a sixth sense. He has an instinct.* (#ulink_4841842e-fe5d-529e-990d-3c7a20fbf859) I can remember when Bob was just getting into the catering business, or at least had gone into a restaurant and got himself a job, which is perhaps not quite the same thing, but it was a pretty big deal around here and in retrospect it was clearly the beginning of great things for Bob Savory. Most of us when we left school had ambitions only to get out of town and maybe go to London, to Soho, to get to see inside a sex shop, visit some record shops, and maybe get a place of our own with a few lifelong friends and be able to stay up all night, drinking and listening to loud music, and meeting girls we hadn’t been to school with, girls who maybe worked in the sex shops, or who, like us, were just in browsing and who weren’t going to be afraid to explore their sexuality. But when it came to it we were content to end up working at the local garage, or on the sites, or going on to the Tech if we had the grades, and living with our parents until they kicked us out, and marrying the sister of a friend, and losing touch with our ambitions and our record collections, but Bob always had a firm plan and a purpose, right from an early age, and he never changed his mind and he never got distracted. I remember seeing him the day he’d just bought his first set of knives and the look on his face, when he unwrapped them in the pub, to let us all admire: it was the look of a man who knew where he was going in life. It was the look of a man with a sharp knife in his hand and the future before him like a lamb to the slaughter. Bob’s knives were not like the knives our mothers had at home. Bob’s were German knives, made from high-carbon steel, with three beautiful silver rivets in the handles, not like they were ordinary rivets just holding the thing together, but like they were meant to be there, like they had been ordained, three perfect eternal rings, and Bob sat with us in the Castle Arms on the red velour, with these six-and ten-inch blades, and he rolled up his sleeves and he raised his hands, like the priest with the host, and he balanced the knives on his middle finger, one by one, and they perched there, like beautiful shiny birds come down to rest. They’d cost him his first month’s wages and then some, but he was as proud as you would be if you’d just met the woman of your dreams, and he handled those blades with exactly the same kind of care and attention, gazing at them fondly, and perhaps a little shyly, imagining their future life together. Bob told us you could get all sorts of different knives, knives of every size and for every purpose. He said there was even a knife called a tomato knife, for cutting tomatoes, and of course none of us had ever even heard of such a thing as a tomato knife, and we laughed at him and joked about all the other knives he should get: how about an egg knife, we said, where’s your cucumber knife, Bob, and your lettuce knife, and your knife for the cutting of toasted ham and cheese sandwiches, huh, and he rolled up his knives, in this brand-new beautiful thick green roll of material, and tied them up with their new strings, and we never saw them again, and that night we went back to our parents’ houses with their plastic-handled cutlery and tried to balance bread knives on our fingers. We were silly to scoff. These days Bob has his own catering company, Old-Fashioned Foods (Cooked the Traditional Way), and a subsidiary called Sandwich Classics. He has a fleet of vans he runs out of the industrial estate, up by the new fire station, and the motto on the side of the sandwich vans says it all. The signs read ’SANDWICH CLASSICS AND SNACK FOODS FOR THE DISCERNING PALET’.* (#ulink_3faf4a28-aa58-5753-88dc-a05928e14a6a) The sandwiches are Bob’s big earner. They go the whole of the length and breadth of the county. He’s talking about setting up a franchise. Bob also has a stake, a small but significant financial interest, in the big new Irish-themed restaurant out on the ring road – the Plough and the Stars they call it – which offers delicacies such as Turkey O’Toole, and Flannigan’s Fish Sandwich, and Banbridge Cajun Chicken Tagliatelle, ‘chunks of tender local chicken dusted with cajun spices and served on a bed of tagliatelle, covered in a creamy white wine sauce (vegetarian option available)’. It’s good. Or at least it’s profitable. People flock to it in their cars, on their way to or from Bloom’s, the shopping mall, and the DIY superstores and the big new private gym, the Works, which is right next door. The central feature in the Plough and the Stars – which was advertised on opening in a full-colour two-page centre spread in the Impartial Recorder as, ’AN ARCHITECT-DESIGNED WAREHOUSE-STYLE EATING EXPERIENCE’ – is a fibreglass whitewashed cottage with three-foot-high animatronic leprechauns who enter and exit on the quarter-, the half-hour and the hour, singing ‘Danny Boy’, ‘Galway City’ and ‘The Bard of Armagh’. The words of the songs are on the back of the laminated menus and most customers are happy to join in, as long as their mouths aren’t full of ‘The Kerryman’s Garlic Bread (made with fresh Kerry butter)’, or ‘Belfast City Trifle’ and sometimes even when they are. Bob lives outside town, far from the Plough and the Stars, beyond the ring road, in a house set in its own landscaped grounds, now minus two trees, with outbuildings, and its own jacuzzi, and a games room with a pool table, and table tennis, a minibar, genuine antique furniture and original art on the walls, and a hallway so vast that in the winter he lights a big fire and has carol singers, a twelve-foot Christmas tree, and he invites us all round with our children to play party games, and he sits on this antique chair he calls a gossip-seat – and who are we to argue? – dressed up like Santa, handing out presents, like the proverbial lord of the manor. Bob has definitely made it. But Bob is not a satisfied man. Of course, the secret of Bob, the glory of Bob, is that he’s not a satisfied man: if he were a satisfied man he’d be just like the rest of us, living in a semi off the ring road, treeless and jacuzziless, and those with a ‘discerning palet’ would be cheated of sandwich classics and old-fashioned foods (cooked the traditional way). Bob works seven days a week, fifteen, sixteen hours a day, talks endlessly on his mobile phone and he hasn’t taken a holiday in years, not since he paid for a group of us to go on holiday with him to a resort in Spain, which was not a success, which was a disaster, in fact – he paid our fares and our accommodation, but he made it clear that we would have to pay for our own food and drink and entertainment, and I think, to be honest, some of us felt cheated, as if Bob should have gone the whole hog and paid for everything, as if he owed us something, and those of us who didn’t feel that probably felt that we owed him something, so in the end everyone was dissatisfied. Generosity can be hard to bear and a generous friend can be a burden. Harry made a joke one night when we were in a club in Marbella that the whole thing was probably tax deductible anyway, so it didn’t really count, and Bob left the club, caught a cab straight to the airport and we didn’t see him for months afterwards. Not that Bob is lonely, or that he needs our company. He’s had relationships with many women over the years – many many women – and he’d like a family of his own, he says. He’d like a big family – a dozen children he reckons he could cope with – but he’s not yet found the right woman. He’s getting older, of course, like the rest of us, but the women seem to have stayed around about the same age – early twenties, which is undoubtedly a good age, nothing wrong with it at all, and none of us would wish to deny Bob or his female friends their various pleasures, but you can’t help but think that even the young can get stuck in a rut. In fact, the young may even be a rut. At the moment Bob is kind of stuck on waitresses – from the Plough and the Stars mostly. As well as his investment in the business, Bob is employed by the restaurant as something called a Menu Consultant, which seems to mean nothing except that he gets to hang out in the kitchens occasionally, and to meet the waitresses and drive them home – he drives a Porsche at weekends and a BMW during the week – and for the first few weeks everything goes fine, but after a while the young ladies always want to talk, and Bob never has much to say. Bob is a doer rather than a talker or a thinker and at the end of a day he just wants peace and quiet, and a little bit of rest and relaxation. He does not want to sit and talk about the state of the world or the state of play between man and woman. He is not a man who enjoys contemplating his own navel: he would rather be contemplating someone else’s. So pretty soon he finds himself driving someone else home from the restaurant and the waitresses find themselves waiting tables elsewhere. As a consequence, the Plough and the Stars enjoys a rather high staff turnover, and the loyal front-of-house manager, Alison, says one day they’re going to run out of young women in the town to employ and they’ll have to start importing them. Bob thinks that this would not be such a bad idea. Now Bob is, of course, a rich man, a millionaire, although, as he points out, being a millionaire these days is nothing special. Virtually everyone is a millionaire these days, according to Bob, or they could be. Bob reckons he needs at least another ?2 million to be really comfortable. He’s got it all worked out. With an extra ?2 million, maybe a little more, he could afford to live the rest of his life on about ?120,000 per annum. Which would be quite sufficient, as long as you’ve cleared all your major debts. And Bob has cleared nearly all his debts. Except for one. His mother. Bob is an only child and his dad, Sammy, Sam Savory, a wiry man with a thick head of hair and as thin as a whippet and as strong as an Irish wolfhound, died a few years ago. He was a sheet-metal worker. He worked hard all his life and then he got cancer and was dead within six months of retiring. Mesothelioma – a cancer caused only by exposure to asbestos. It was not a good death. It was an industrial death. Bob paid, of course, for private nursing, but it couldn’t save Sam, and Bob’s mum Maureen was ashamed: she felt her husband should somehow have known he was working with asbestos and should have been aware of the dangers, even before anyone knew there were dangers. She blamed him and so did Bob. They felt that it reflected badly on the family. It’s difficult sometimes to feel sympathy for the dead and the dying. Sometimes, when someone dies, even someone close to you – especially someone close to you – you just think, how dare you? And in Bob’s case, and for his mum, there was also the corollary: how dare you and how dare you die of such a stupid man-made disease, something which was so easily avoidable? If only you’d worn gloves and a mask and some protective clothing you would have been OK. None of this would have happened. None of us would have had to be so upset. It was your own fault. They didn’t even claim for compensation.* (#ulink_d02a591b-fffc-5eaf-9d12-43363efbb0fa) And now Bob’s mother Maureen has Alzheimer’s. Bob can’t believe it. Sometimes he’ll shout and rage at her, when no one else is there: he can’t believe she’s really ill. A part of him thinks she’s putting it on. Silly woman, he calls her. Silly bitch. Stupid cow. Challenging her. Words he remembers saying to her only once before, when he was a child, after they’d had some argument or other and his mother had said to him, ‘You’re not too old for me to give you a good hiding, you know,’ and he smirked at her and so she did, she smacked him, right across the backside, and he felt the full force of her wedding ring and he never said the words again. Until now. When Maureen deteriorated one of the nurses recommended a book to Bob, to help him cope, but Bob doesn’t read books. He does not admire book learning: what Bob admires is expertise. So he buys in twenty-four-hour care. It’s the least he can do. At night when he gets home from work, he lets the nurse take a few hours to herself, and he sits down with his mother in front of the wide-screen TV, in his TV room. He’s had the place fitted out with a DVD player and a complete home cinema system – which he’d had to order specially from America. He’d gone to considerable trouble, had got in Harry Lamb the Odd Job Man to help him fix the screen to the joists in the ceiling – but he didn’t enjoy watching the home cinema with his mother. It didn’t feel natural. He only watched it now with the waitresses. With his mum he preferred to watch TV, like they used to when Bob was a child. They watch anything, Bob and his mum. Films. Football. News. Documentaries. It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. It’s not the content. It’s the act of watching that counts. It is a huge comfort to them both. Before they go to bed at night, during the adverts, Bob always makes them something to eat. He tends to get hungry around about ten, the same every night, before the news, but it always seems to surprise him, his own hunger. He never seems prepared for it. Sometimes he roams around the kitchen in the semi-darkness, opening cupboards, ransacking for food. Bob is a rich man, but he can find no food in his own house which he would want to eat. What he could really manage would be one of his mum’s roast dinners. He could eat a tray of those roast potatoes. A whole tray. They were always so good. The beef dripping – that was the secret. He knows how to do it, of course – you have to get the beef dripping nice and hot in ? saucepan, and then you bash the parboiled potatoes around in there for a bit, and season them with salt and pepper, and then slide them on the tray into the oven, and one hour later, perfect roast potatoes. But he could never be bothered to do it himself. It just wouldn’t be the same. The rare roast beef, though. He could definitely eat some of his mum’s rare roast beef. And maybe some carrots. And a nice gravy.* (#ulink_7197d14c-3840-5e31-9b58-9f3150a2198b) He goes from cupboard to cupboard – chocolates, biscuits, crisps, nuts, crackers. None of it is any good. It’s all manufactured. It’s all rubbish. He knows it’s rubbish. Sometimes the rubbish in his cupboards makes him so angry that he throws it all away, just chucks it in the bin. And then he buys more. He buys more rubbish. This is what happens when you’re a rich man in our town. You don’t necessarily buy better. You just buy more. Because there isn’t anything else to buy. You want something more fancy, you have to leave: you have to go to London, or somewhere else where they do funny spaghetti and truffle oils, and novelty cheeses. Bob’s mother used to make lasagne. And she used to make a salmon souffl?, on special occasions, using a whole tin of salmon – that was good too. And sausage rolls. Macaroni cheese. Pies and pastries. And cakes. The smell of baking. The smell of fresh bread. The food then seemed so different. It was all so good. Bob’s favourite meal, of all the meals his mother used to make … after all these years, he still has no doubt what was his favourite, and every night, between the adverts, he ends up trying to re-create it. When he used to come home from school he would be just so tired sometimes, and he’d be so hungry, before his dad got home from the works, and so he and his mum would sit down together, his mum drinking her coffee with two sugars and smoking, and him eating the sandwich that she’d made him: white bread and margarine and Cheddar cheese, or sometimes a slice of ham, if they had it in the house, which was not often. ‘How was school?’ she’d ask. ‘Fine,’ he’d say. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ ‘OK,’ she’d say and that would be fine. They didn’t have to talk: they were mother and son. They would just sit there, the two of them, looking out of the window, eating cheese sandwiches and waiting for his dad to come home. So when Frank Gilbey rolled up at Bob’s late one night, just before Christmas, Bob ushered him in, asked him to sit down in the big kitchen equipped with every piece of gadgetry imaginable, and about half a mile of granite work surface and a foundry’s worth of stainless steel, put the kettle on and put a simple cheese sandwich down in front of him. ‘So?’ said Bob. ‘There’s a problem,’ said Frank. * (#ulink_adb81966-4791-5863-b4b6-e4496df21c47) He also has his own website now, and a cookbook, Speedy Bap!, which includes chapters on ‘Home-Made Burgers that Don’t Fall Apart’, ‘What Next with Tuna?’ and an appendix, ‘Mayo or Pickle?’, in which Bob comes down firmly on the side of chutney. The book is available locally from all good bookshops, or newsagents, price ?9.99. It’s been a runaway success county-wide. Bob is in demand all over the place for signings and sandwich-making demonstrations. A new updated edition of the book, Speedy Bap!!, which is guaranteed a lot of local press coverage and includes all-new chapters on low-fat cottage cheese and wafer-thin ham, is due out soon, with additional recipes gathered from Bob’s visits to various Women’s Institutes, Soroptomists, the Waterstones up in the city, and other local groups and associations. * (#ulink_397df15a-dc35-56ec-a366-1606b8394498) Bob’s old friend Terry Wilkinson, ‘Wilkie the Gut’ to many of us here in town – a man who has enjoyed perhaps a touch too much old-fashioned food (cooked the traditional way) in his time – runs a nice little business, The Gist, up on the industrial estate, specialising in vehicle graphics, and he took care of all the graphics on the vans for Bob. Terry left school with no qualifications and few prospects but he now lives in a five-bedroom house with Jacuzzi in the Woodsides development, and frankly a few slips in spelling and the odd wandering apostrophe are hardly going to worry him: as far as Terry is concerned a palette is a palet is a palate; just as long as you get – as Terry himself might say – the gist. * (#ulink_c4202638-3369-56e2-979c-1631e8d6fc98) Unlike a lot of people here in town. Martin Phillips, the solicitor on Sunnyside Terrace, has dealt with more than his fair share of vibration white finger, and asbestos exposure, and occupational asthma, and allergic rhinitis over the past few years – dealing with wheezy old and middle-aged men who spent their lives working on the roads, or on the sites, or on the railways, or out in the fields, or in the factories and the steelworks up in the city, which covers just about everyone here, actually, and all of whom are now seeking recompense for lives diminished and cut short, recompense which usually covers about two weeks in Florida with the grandchildren, a new sunlounger for the patio and a slightly better coffin. For further details and information on claiming for industrial diseases contact your local Citizens Advice Bureau or ring Industrial Diseases Compensation Ltd on 0800 454532. * (#ulink_68a05a1f-27f4-50d8-9bdf-d1bb87253321) Bob’s ‘Sunday Roastie Wedgie’ – cold roast beef, horseradish, English mustard and roasted vegetables in a granary bap – includes just about everything but the gravy (see Speedy Bap!, p.44). He did try experimenting with a cold gravy mayonnaise at one time but the combination of beef stock and whisked eggs was too cloying on the palate. It’s a simple lesson, but one worth repeating: gravy is best served hot. 3 Jesus, Mary and Joseph (#ulink_a5caf7ba-1b9a-517c-9633-6b64b8b02469) Introducing the Donellys, God, The Dog With The Kindliest Expression, some memories of cinemas long gone and many other attempted poignancies There hasn’t been snow here for Christmas since 1975, which seems like yesterday to some of us, but which is already ancient history to others – around about the time of the Punic Wars, in fact, to many of the children at Central School, for whom modern history begins at the end of the twentieth century and the advent of wide-screen TV and mobile phone text messaging. Gerry Malone, who teaches history at Central – who taught most of us in town our history, in fact – has to be careful not to assume that the students know too much. He cannot assume, for example, that they know anything about the Punic Wars, or that Hitler was a Nazi even, or that mobile phone text messaging was not a means of communication available to Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. Gerry likes to quote Santayana to his students – ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ – but he knows that actually it’s the opposite that’s true. Those who can remember the past are condemned to repeat it – again and again and again. It is the history teacher’s burden. People have been feverishly praying for snow at Christmas in our town for nearly thirty years, but God seems to have better things to do with His time than to attend to our prayers, although exactly what it is He’s been getting up to recently it’s difficult to see: since writing the Bible, He seems to have been on some kind of extended sabbatical. World peace, for example, does not seem to be too high on His list of priorities and, unless you count the weekly healing services at the People’s Fellowship, His work, at least around our town, seems to have come to an abrupt end. Gerry also likes to quote Nietzsche to his students and .he always writes up the name on the whiteboard first – the middle ‘z’ always tends to throw them. ‘Nietzsche,’ he explains, ‘rhymes with teacher.’ And then, ‘God,’ he tells his class, to audible gasps, ‘God, according to Nietzsche’ – and here he always pauses, with an omniscient smile – ‘Is Dead.’ Well. I don’t know. Maybe Gerry’s being too harsh. Maybe someone just needs to text Him, to remind Him that we’re all still here. W T F R U?* (#ulink_97b39dc8-9d62-5494-979d-662cae9d3422) The sleet and the cold have certainly not slowed up the Donellys, who are old friends and neighbours of the Quinns, and who live up by the ring road and who, like the rest of the town, have been busy making their Christmas preparations. It’s going to be a very special Christmas for the Donellys this year, snow or no snow – their first Christmas without any of the children, a kind of rite of passage and a relief in many ways, a return to a prelapsarian state, a time long before Mr Donelly’s pot belly and his cardies, and the advent of Mrs Donelly’s flat-soled shoes. This Christmas, if they wanted, Mr and Mrs Donelly could walk around all day naked, barefoot and freed from toil, the pain of childbirth but a distant memory, and freed also from the prying eyes of their offspring, so they could eat turkey sandwiches from morning till night, au naturel, on sliced white bread, with lots of salt and with butter, as God intended them to be.* (#ulink_db51f15b-9970-5fb2-83a0-9c7cd9de1d14) The Donellys’ youngest son, Mark, their baby, lives in America now, where he works for a firm of hypodermic needle incinerator manufacturers. He is married to Molly, has two lovely children, Nathan (five) and Ruth (three), and can’t afford the fare home. Jackie, meanwhile, the Donellys’ daughter, is in north London, a nurse, no boyfriend at the moment and knocking on a bit, but not without her suitors, so Mr and Mrs Donelly aren’t too worried. She is working shifts this Christmas and can’t get back either. Michael – Mickey – still lives in town, obviously, but this year he and Brona are going to her parents’ for Christmas: her parents live in Huddersfield. When Mickey told his parents that he and Brona and the children wouldn’t be around for Christmas Mr and Mrs Donelly both said fine, that’s great, although they didn’t really mean it. Mr and Mrs Donelly get to see their grandchildren all year round, so it’s really only fair to let the other lot have a go, but Christmas is Christmas. ‘It’s supposed to be a family time,’ said Mrs Donelly to Mr Donelly. Mr Donelly pointed out that Brona’s family in Huddersfield were family: they were Brona’s family. ‘But they’re in Huddersfield,’ insisted Mrs Donelly. ‘It’s not the same.’ The Donellys’ eldest boy, Tim, is travelling the world. He’s thirty-one and should know better but he’s working in a bar in Sydney at the moment, apparently, Sydney, Australia, if you can imagine that, and the Donellys are expecting a call on Christmas Day. Tim’s said he’s planning a barbie on the beach and a game of mixed volleyball with some workmates for Christmas Day, and Mr Donelly really cannot imagine what that might be like, although Mrs Donelly watches a number of Australian soaps on TV and he’s sat through them with her a couple of times, and he certainly likes the look of the lifestyle over there. It looks a bit more free and easy. More to do outside. No sleet. If he were forty years younger he might even have considered emigrating. But it’s too late for that now. Mr Donelly had offered to help his wife with the Christmas shopping this year – the first time ever – and she took him at his word and she gave him a list, and so he was down to Johnny ‘The Boxer’ Mathers, our last greengrocer, the only one remaining, by ten o’clock on Christmas Eve morning, looking for cheap nuts and tangerines, and then he was on to M & S up in Bloom’s after that, cursing Mrs Donelly’s handwriting all the way. After forty years of marriage she still can’t seem to shape her vowels properly – they’re too rounded, like the handwriting of a little girl, and you can’t tell the difference between an ‘a’ and an ‘o’. Oranges look like aronges and apples look like opples. Mind you, his is no better: he’d have made a good doctor, according to Mrs Donelly, who used to work as a receptionist at the Health Centre down by the People’s Park, so she should know. Mr Donelly was not a doctor, though: he’d been a warehouseman, up at Bloom’s, until he’d retired. He used to be a compositor, years ago, but the bottom fell out of the market. It’ll be a quiet Christmas for them without the children, but they’re still planning to have a few people round on Boxing Day – the Quinns, with Davey, their celebrated returnee, Mrs Skingle and her son Steve, the scaffolder, who earns a packet, according to Mr Donelly, and Mrs Donelly’s cousin Barbara, who is all alone – so Mr Donelly has stocked up, as instructed, on twenty-four Cocktail Pizza Squares (‘A fun selection of eight tomato & cheese, eight ham & cheese, and eight mushroom & cheese’), twelve Vol-au-Vents (‘Four creamy chicken & mushroom, four ham & cheese, and four succulent prawn’), some mini quiche (Traditional, Mediterranean and Vegetarian), some ‘small succulent’ pork cocktail sausages, ‘fully cooked and ready to serve’, needless to say, twelve Chicken Tikka Bites (‘Lightly grilled pieces of chicken in a traditional Indian-style marinade of spices, coriander and garlic’), some hand-cooked crisps, and six Chocolate Tartlets (‘Chocolate pastry tarts filled with white or milk chocolate mousse, decorated with chocolate curls’). A veritable feast. Mrs Donelly used to do the Boxing Day buffet herself when the children were younger, but she doesn’t have the time these days and since it’s going to be just the two of them she’s even skimping on their usual Christmas dinner: instead of the big bird, the roast potatoes and the mound of sprouts, Mr Donelly has picked up a Small Turkey Breast Joint (‘For 2–3, Butter Roasted’), a pack of baby new potatoes (‘hand-picked’), some mangetout (from Kenya), and a miniature ‘Luxury’ Christmas pudding (‘packed with plump, sun-ripened vine fruits’). It’s the Christmas of the future: their first Christmas alone. After the shopping Mr Donelly managed to squeeze in a quick pint at the Castle Arms, laden down with his shopping bags, much to the amusement of Little Mickey Matchett and Harry Lamb the Odd Job Man, and Big Dessie, who were all in gearing up for Christmas themselves, and who have never actually been into a supermarket unless accompanied by their wives, and only then to push the trolley. ‘All set, then?’ Mr Donelly asked Big Dessie, proud of his labours. ‘I don’t know,’ answered Dessie, mid-pint. ‘That’s all the wife’s department.’ Billy and Harry nodded in agreement with Dessie. It was hard to believe a big man like Joey Donelly doing the shopping for his wife on Christmas Eve. Times certainly were changing. Mr Donelly spent the afternoon at home on a chair, putting up decorations: he wouldn’t have bothered if it was down to himself, but Mrs Donelly had insisted. He didn’t put up as many as usual, though: it hardly seemed worth it without the children there, and he’d never liked those paper lanterns Mrs Donelly’s mother had given them when they were first married and which had remained their central festive decorative feature, their theme, as it were, for over thirty years. They were pink, originally, the lanterns, but they’d browned slightly with age, like raw meat left too long out of the fridge. He put them back in the cardboard box in the loft. He was trying to keep everything a bit more low-key. Christmas Day itself shouldn’t be too bad. It’d probably be pretty much the same as usual. Mrs Donelly would go to church and Mr Donelly would prefer to skip it. They’d have their lunch and maybe watch Morecambe and Wise on UK Gold. They used to play cards in the old days, and Monopoly, but they haven’t bothered with any of that for years, not since the children were little, although Mrs Donelly still liked to play a few hands of patience, for old times’ sake. Boxing Day’ll be the big day – it used to be a really big deal, years ago. They used to have everyone round, the parents and the grandparents, when they were alive, and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins, dead now a lot of them, or just too old, and yet at one time all of them living and breathing and in the here and now, and all piling their plates up high, and roaring their way through the afternoon and long and late into the evening, everyone laughing at everything, slowly filling up, up and away on the bottled beer and Mrs Donelly’s hand-made party food. Eaten, drunken, but not forgotten, the ghosts of Christmas past. In fact, in the old days the Donelly household was full not just at Christmas but all year round, with family and friends and family of friends popping in, drinking tea and talking, but now the children had grown up and moved out and moved on, and the party was over and the house was quiet, and Mr and Mrs Donelly had been busy these past few years trying to remake their lives. They had discovered to their surprise that remaking their lives was not something they could do very quickly or easily, and it was not something they could do within their own four walls, so the small home that had once housed at least six and was never empty was now too big and housed only two who were hardly ever there. When you want space, it seems, you can’t have it, and when you’ve got it you don’t need it. This was an irony not lost on Mrs Donelly, who was a religious woman and who could therefore appreciate irony and paradox. It always helped, she had found, in church as in life, if you could take a joke: Jesus, for example, as far as Mrs Donelly could tell, had spent most of His time on earth telling people jokes and winding them up. There was nothing wrong, she’d decided, with the teachings of the Catholic Church – after a period of doubt in her late forties, which had coincided with her going on to HRT – just as long as you took them with a pinch of salt. And as the mother of four, having grown accustomed to constant demands and frustrations and irritations, Mrs Donelly’s pinch of salt was maybe a little larger than most – more like a palm of salt, in fact. She had found that if you ignored a problem for long enough it usually went away – usually, but not always. Mrs Donelly did sometimes stay in just to enjoy the peace and quiet in the house: she’d been known to wash her hair and have a bath and draw the curtains and put on her towelling dressing gown at two o’clock on a midweek afternoon, and lie on the sofa in the front room watching television, eating Rich Tea biscuits like there was no tomorrow. But that was an exception: she usually preferred to keep active. There was all her council work, for starters, which took up most evenings and quite some time during the day. Mrs Donelly was never going to be the best councillor the town had ever seen, but she cares about our town and she is honest, and these are rare qualities, particularly among our elected representatives. If she were really honest, Mrs Donelly would have to admit that she had become a councillor partly because of the prestige – in her own mind, if not others’. She sometimes found herself saying out loud, as she sat in her little old Austin Allegro outside the town hall, waiting to go in to chair a committee, ‘Well, who’d have thought it?’ And who would have thought it? Mrs Donelly had left Central at fifteen without even completing her leaving certificate. She didn’t have a certificate to her name, actually, apart from something awarded for attendance at the Happy Feet Tap and Ballet School, which she attended for a brief period when her family were flush and she was fourteen, and which is still going – under the guidance of the mighty Dot McLaughlin, sister of the famous tap-dancing McLaughlin twins, and ninety-five this year and still a size eight – up at the top of High Street, over what’s now the Poundstretcher and which was once Storey’s, ‘Gifts, Novelties, Travel Goods, Jewellery and Coal’, a shop which reverberated for years to the sound of Dot McLaughlin calling out ‘Heel, Toe, Heel, Toe’ and Miss Buchanan banging out a polonaise on the piano. Mrs Donelly’s achievements may not have been certificated, but they were many: she had prepared three meals a day for a family of six for over twenty years, and continued to do the same for herself and Mr Donelly to the present and into the foreseeable future. She knew how to darn socks. She could sew, and had made curtains and bedspreads, and at one time had even made the clothes for the children. She paid the bills and balanced the budget. She had taken up and given up smoking, and she had seen every film made starring Paul Newman. When she was eight years old she’d read out a poem on the BBC, with Uncle Mac, on Children’s Hour. She was a good wife and mother – a good person and adventurous in her way. (A few years ago she had even bought, but never worn, some revealing underwear from a catalogue from one of Frank Gilbey’s lingerie shops, a catalogue which some of the younger girls had been passing around at the Health Centre. The garments remained in her bedside drawer, however. She was worried Mr Donelly might take a heart attack.) Above all, to her greatest satisfaction, she had become a councillor, elected in 1999, standing as an Independent, with a large – 1026 – majority, so even now, in her retirement, she was busy. On Mondays there were council meetings, and she liked to get her shopping done and clean the house, and then things really picked up on a Tuesday with more meetings and Aqua-Aerobics and a visit to her mother – Veronica, ninety and double incontinent, but her mind still as sharp as a razor – in the sheltered accommodation off Gilbey’s roundabout on the ring road. Wednesdays there weren’t usually any meetings so she might change her books at the library and meet her friend Greta for coffee in Scarpetti’s. Thursdays she had her Italian conversation class with Francesca Scarpetti at the Institute, a class Mrs Donelly had been attending now on and off for about five years, with no discernible improvement in her accent or any increase in vocabulary, and despite the fact that, like most of the class, she had never been and had no intention of ever going to Italy. People attended the class mostly to meet old friends and to listen to Francesca speaking Italian: it sounded so romantic, even when she was only asking the price of a pizza. When she opened her mouth and those sweet words came out, for a moment time seemed to stop, and you’d forget about your troubles and about our small town, and you could imagine you were somewhere else, somewhere bigger and better, with someone else, and possibly not even yourself. At the end of each course the class would all drive up to the city and go to an Italian restaurant, where Francesca insisted they order in Italian, and they would sit around drinking red wine and laughing, and they might as well have been in some piazza in Rome, or in a villa overlooking fields of sunflowers. The course was well worth the money, just for that one night. It was worth it just to be able to speak Italian to the waiters, unembarrassed, with no husbands around, to have the waiters lean forward, smiling at your accent, and have them nod and say si, si, signorina, and va bene, and desidera? On Fridays she had to miss council meetings because she took Emma and Amber for the day, her son Mickey’s two girls, aged just three and eighteen months, while his wife Brona went to the Institute, where she is training to be a beautician. Brona was always very well turned-out, and the children were too, and Mrs Donelly was proud to push the little ones round town, although she did not really approve of Brona’s spending so much on the children’s clothes – hers had always made do with second-hand and hand-me-downs – and she also wished that Brona would lay off a little on the tanning. Brona visited Lorraine’s Bridal Salon and Tan Shop once every six weeks for what Lorraine called the ‘St. Tropez’, the kind of tan usually only available on the Riviera in high season, but available in our town all year round. The St. Tropez is a full body treatment that involves exfoliation, body moisturisation, application of the cream and body buffing. It costs ?45 for a half-body and ?80 for the whole, and Mickey had been so appalled after the first time, when Brona had returned looking like someone had picked her up by the legs and dipped her in chocolate that he’d agreed to pay the extra for the full monty. The colour can be customised and Lorraine had got it about right after the first few treatments. Brona has explained to Mrs Donelly several times that the effect of the St. Tropez was more realistic – and thus more expensive – because it contained a special green pigment, which avoided the orange tinge of some cheaper, inferior tanning applications, and Mrs Donelly did not have the heart to disagree, or to tell Brona otherwise. On Saturdays Mrs Donelly always made it to the club with Mr Donelly for a few drinks and sometimes a meal, and on Sunday nights she liked to go to the cinema with her old friend Pat, just like they had done when they were teenagers, growing up in town together, before the children had got in the way and they’d missed about twenty-five years of films between them. Fortunately it wasn’t too difficult to pick it up again. In the old days, of course, they’d have gone to one of the three cinemas in the centre of town, the Salamanca, the Tontine, or the Troxy, and then they’d have visited a coffee bar afterwards, maybe the old ABC Espresso Bar on Bridge Street, which boasted the town’s first Gaggia espresso machine and offered not only coffee but also Ferrarelle mineral water and Hill’s Gingerette and West Indian Lime Juice. In the ABC they’d have then removed their coats to show off their tight-fitting pink cashmere jumpers to boys with quiffs wearing skinny ties, who would be listening to Frank Sinatra and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers on the jukebox. Now they wore mostly pastels and leisurewear, and went to the multiplex on the ring road – the Salamanca, the Tontine and the Troxy all having been demolished and replaced with a Supa Valu supermarket (the Salamanca), a car park which has recently, controversially, become Pay and Display (the Tontine), despite a campaign in the Impartial Recorder, and forty starter homes in a development called the Troxies (the Troxy).* (#ulink_3f0d1ede-1f7f-573b-982d-f961c69db3b7) It was the destruction of the cinemas, those sacred places, that really made Mrs Donelly sit up and take notice, and begin to take an interest in local politics. She was too late to save the cinemas and too late, probably, to save the town. By the time she was elected, the ring road had already been built and Bloom’s was under construction. Too late, Mrs Donelly realised that the town she loved was being torn apart and destroyed, and that behind its destruction was the man she had once loved: Frank Gilbey. Mrs Donelly and Frank Gilbey had been a courting couple, years ago. They were the couple that everyone talked about and everyone wanted to be. They used to go to the big dances at the Quality Hotel and Morelli’s, the dance hall at the top of High Street, which burnt down the year that man walked on the moon and which is now Roy’s Discount Designer Clothing Warehouse. Even in those days there was something special about Frank: he had a bigger quiff than the other boys and his drainpipe trousers were tighter. From a distance – a short distance, naturally, in our town – Mrs Donelly had watched Frank Gilbey’s inexorable rise, with his lovely wife, her old friend Irene, alongside him, and there were times, of course, when she wished it could have been her: the foreign cruises, the trips to America, their famous weekend city breaks, the beautiful clothes. She’d been into the church, once, when Frank’s and Irene’s daughter Lorraine had married the bad Scotsman, and the flowers! The flowers alone must have cost nearly ?1000. The town had never seen the like. Mrs Donelly sat at the back and imagined herself as the mother of the bride, dressed smartly, though not in the coral pink chosen by Irene, she thought. The two-inch heels were a mistake, also, for the larger lady. It would never have worked, though, Mrs Donelly and Frank. They were incompatible, not least because she was a Catholic and back then it still mattered. Frank was a Protestant, which is probably what she liked about him: his was definitely a Protestant quiff and Protestant trousers. Mrs Donelly saw a lot of him still, around town, although less so as the years went by and their paths diverged – hers into her little job at the Health Centre, and the children and holidays in a caravan by the sea, and his into property management and his homes in several counties and abroad. She didn’t exactly become a councillor because Frank Gilbey was a councillor, but it did give her pleasure to feel herself his equal and adversary, and she enjoyed seeing him at meetings and in committees. Frank Gilbey, of course, had other reasons for becoming involved in local politics: sentiment was not an issue for Big Frank Gilbey. Frank always described the town hall to Mrs Gilbey as ‘the best club in town’ and certainly it was more exclusive than the golf club, although it consisted largely of the same people. The difference was that in the golf club all you got to do was play golf: in the council you got to wield power. Sometimes Mrs Donelly and Frank got to sit on the same committees and wield power together, which was more fun than playing eighteen holes and a long way from necking in the back of the Troxy. These days, at the multiplex Pat and Mrs Donelly would buy their tickets from a machine, Pat would buy a tub of salted popcorn and never eat it all, and they’d sit close to the screen and watch the film, and then they would drive home again to their husbands, who preferred TV, or the pub. Some of the actors had changed on the big screen since the old days, and there was a lot more of what Mrs Donelly called ‘sexy talk’, which covered talk about both sex and violence, but the stories were pretty much the same as they had been back in the 1950s and 1960s.* (#ulink_05ecf746-59d7-522c-81d8-6bd1eea80806) Mrs Donelly wondered sometimes if being in the cinema was a bit like what it was going to be like being dead – watching other people’s lives unfold and everything always working out for the best. She hoped so. It was in the cinema that she’d first discovered the lump, a few months ago. She knew what it was straightaway. She was reaching across to get a handful of Pat’s popcorn and it was the angle of the reach that did it – her right arm stretching across to the left, hand outstretched. She wished she hadn’t now. She’d rather not have known. She wished she’d never reached for the popcorn. She’d never really approved of Pat’s popcorn anyway: she thought cinema popcorn was a waste of money. For years she’d been trying to persuade Pat to make her own at home and take it to the pictures in some Tupperware hidden in her handbag. But Pat said the popcorn was all part of the fun: Pat did not believe in stinting, even though she was a Protestant. Unlike Mrs Donelly, Pat was not the kind of person who set out on an adventure with a wrap of sandwiches. Pat was the kind of person who believed that on life’s journey you could always find a little place that would happily do some sandwiches for you. Mrs Donelly, having been on holiday several times to the Isle of Man with four children, knew this not to be the case, but she didn’t say anything. Mrs Donelly had not told Pat about the lump. She was starting the chemo the week after Christmas. They’d decided not to tell anyone. They weren’t going to tell the children for a bit. They didn’t want to spoil Christmas. While Mrs Donelly was at her emergency council committee meeting, Mr Donelly was out in the Christmas Eve sleet, walking the dog. He walks with her for about two hours every day, come rain or shine. After raising four children, Mr Donelly does not view a dog as a burden: on the contrary, he says, a dog, after children, is a pleasure. It’s a breeze. The worst a dog can do is bite and shit, and not usually at the same time, and a dog never asks you for money, and also you don’t have to wipe a dog’s arse, although the council would’ve liked you to: any attempt to get dog owners to poop-scoop in the People’s Park or to keep a dog on a leash was viewed with scorn by Mr Donelly. He regarded councillors as meddlers, on the whole, apart from his wife, of course, who was simply well-meaning. The whole point of having a dog, according to Mr Donelly, was that you could let it run around and shit anywhere: in a town where even the slightest misdemeanour could find you on the inside pages of the Impartial Recorder, dogs represented the wild side, the acceptable face of the animal in man, the beast inside, your only opportunity to act like a lord of misrule and to demonstrate to the rest of the world exactly what you thought of it: rubbish. Allowing your dog to cock its leg on a few council flowers was a means of self-expression for Mr Donelly, and clearly better than running amok around town mooning at police officers, breaking windows, fighting, scratching cars, stealing lawnmowers and bicycles, and weeing in shop doorways, which is what most of the town seemed to prefer to do these days to let off steam. Why the council couldn’t have focused more of their attention on that, rather than persecuting innocent dog owners, he did not know.* (#ulink_6cf8b7dd-7e81-5a92-9a2d-776d28b3a9d1) Mr Donelly had several times explained to his friend Davey Quinn – Davey Senior – his theory of the therapeutic effects of dog owning and he had even gone so far as to suggest giving pets to hardened criminals in prisons, in order to assist them in their rehabilitation. Davey Senior hadn’t owned a pet since he was a child growing up on the Georgetown Road, when he’d won a goldfish at the town fair, and on his return from the fair his brother Dennis – son number six to Davey’s number seven – had promptly flushed the fish down the outside toilet. When Davey Senior had protested, Dennis had fought with him and forced his head into the toilet bowl, to allow little Davey to try to save the poor fish, a fish which Davey had decided to call Lucky. Even now, fifty years later, when he drove past the sewage plant up past the ring road Davey found himself wondering about the fate of that fish: he wondered if maybe it had made it out into open seas.* (#ulink_bba070ae-55a4-500e-8432-96902329c9ad) Davey’s brother Dennis had eventually ended up in prison and he remained altogether a bad lot, and Davey had therefore a rather pessimistic view about the relationship between man and beasts: he believed that Mr Donelly’s rehabilitation scheme was probably unworkable. But a pet was still an unequivocal good, according to Mr Donelly, and a doddle. ‘She’s easier to keep than your mother,’ he liked to joke, sometimes, to his children. She’s called Rusty, the dog – Mrs Donelly is Mary – and she’s sixteen and her eyesight’s gone, more or less, so Mr Donelly lets her watch TV with him in the evenings, with the Ceefax subtitles on, and he gives her a hot-water bottle in winter. She’s part of the family, part Airedale and part Irish Terrier, which is a cute combination, and a few years ago she won a rosette in our town dog show, in the category The Dog With The Kindliest Expression, and rightly so. Her expression is, in fact, much kinder than a lot of the people in our town, so she may not just be The Dog With The Kindliest Expression, she may, in fact, be in possession of our town’s Kindliest Expression, full stop – quite an achievement for a mongrel. Mrs Donelly wonders sometimes if Mr Donelly loves that dog more than he loves his own children. It’s possible. When he arrived back home from their customary walk – down to Bridge Street and Main Street, past the Quality Hotel, then up High Street and into the People’s Park – Mr Donelly settled the dog into its basket in the corner of the garage, a basket tucked in underneath all the jars and the tins and the tools and the wood offcuts of a lifetime, which might come in handy one day, squeezed in tight between a workbench that used to be the Donelly kitchen table, and Mr Donelly’s little Honda 50 with its grey and white trim and its seat bound with masking tape. Mr Donelly hasn’t been out on the Honda for nearly two years, since he’d taken a tumble on Gilbey’s roundabout. ‘The Nicest Things,’ they used to say, ‘Happen on a Honda,’ which may have been true thirty or forty years ago, but now there was so much traffic, even on the ring road, you were lucky if you made it unscathed up to the DIY stores or the Plough and the Stars, and then made it back home again safely. ‘I’m not identifying your body when you fall off that thing again and end up dead in hospital, all squashed,’ said Mrs Donelly. ‘It’s time to hang up your helmet, mister.’ You didn’t argue with Mrs Donelly. The helmet hung on a nail over the dog basket. Saying goodnight to the dog and locking up the garage, Mr Donelly made his way towards the house, his childless, empty house. He squeezed past the wheelie bin with its stick-on number – another ridiculous council regulation, as if anyone would want to steal it – and past the pile of flagstones that he’d borrowed, or requisitioned, in an act of defiance, from the council when they’d been doing the road-widening scheme at the bottom of Main Street, and he peered in at his kitchen window. The kitchen was spotless, as always, the way Mrs Donelly liked to leave it, almost as if no one lived there. The blue washing-up bowl was upended on the drainer, next to the sink, a residue of water and suds on the stainless steel the only sign of recent human activity. He then went round to the front of the house, to put the car up on the drive. The headlights lit up the windows – new windows, bay windows, which were uPVC and which he’d put in himself when they bought the place from the council. He hasn’t yet made good around the brickwork, but the windows look OK: they fit the hole. There’s a carriage lamp, and a few shrubs in pots but apart from that the place looks pretty much the same as when they’d moved in as a young family thirty years ago. He can still remember the day as if it were yesterday: their first house after all the flats. He remembered Mrs Donelly marching up and down the stairs with Tim and Jackie – they were babies then – laughing and singing. Their own staircase: that was something. He locked up the car and went to look through the front window, at his own front room, where hardly anything had changed in all that time: there were the same old ornaments on the windowsill and on the mantelpiece over the gas fire: a small mahogany elephant; a crystal vase; a miniature teapot; a Smurf; the ‘May Our Lady Watch Over Your Marriage’ imitation-mahogany-veneer plaque with a very attractive-looking BVM in gilt relief on the wall; the same three-piece suite, too big for the room; the same imitation Christmas tree. He noticed a curtain twitch next door: the new neighbours. For a moment he thought it was old Mrs Nesbit but Mrs Nesbit no longer lived next door – she’d gone first to live with her daughter and then on to the big sheltered accommodation in the sky. They hadn’t really got to know the new lot: they kept themselves to themselves. They’d let the garden go. He decided not to go into the house. Mrs Donelly wouldn’t be back from her meeting for another half an hour or so. He didn’t want to be in an empty house on Christmas Eve. So he walked on, down to the end of the road, and turned left. The Church of the Cross and the Passion is a big, ugly, modern building with an untended patch of scrubland out back and a social club with a car park with a wire fence and empty kegs piled up outside. It would have had a nice view of the People’s Park, if you could see out of any of the windows, but the stained glass gets in the way. Inside the church Mr Donelly sat down at a pew near the altar rail, where the crib was all set up, and there they were, the Holy Family, in that celebrated post-partum pose. Mr Donelly has lived all his life in our town. He was taught at the Assumption junior school – a tiny little Victorian building down Cromac Street, off High Street, with outside toilets and two demountables, a building which has only added graffiti since Mr Donelly attended. He was taught at the school that Jesus was born in a stable at the inn, and that oxen and asses dropped to their knees in worship, and that there were Three Wise Men, and shepherds – the traditional Christmas story with all the trimmings. His teacher at the Assumption was a nun called Sister Hughes and he loved her, as all the children loved her – a dear old lady telling wonderful stories to boys and girls who didn’t yet know the difference between fantasy and belief. Sister Hughes was a good person, a woman who knitted at break times and lunchtimes, making ecumenical woolly hats, mostly, for our town’s famous ecumenical charity, the Mission to Seamen, a charity founded by a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Thomas MacGeagh, and a Catholic priest, Father Thomas Barre, known locally as the Two Toms, who in 1912, after the sinking of the Titanic, had decided to found a charity which would minister to seamen of many denominations and faiths and of none, and which would demonstrate to them God’s care and love at a time when He Himself seemed to be absent from the high seas.* (#ulink_95fa7533-c5e7-5eac-8729-d2ce8015a333) Our town is thirty miles from the sea, far enough for us to think of ourselves as landlocked, but close enough for seagulls to make it into the dump for scavenging, and for most of us to enjoy at least one day trip in the summer. Sister Hughes had died mid-hat, when Mr Donelly was eight years old, and he was terribly upset. You might ask, what is death to an eight-year-old – what can he possibly understand about it? Well, death is presumably exactly the same for an eight-year-old as it is for the rest of us, nothing more and nothing less: it’s a complete shock. One of the other big shocks in Mr Donelly’s life was later to be told at secondary school that it wasn’t a stable at all and it may not even have been an inn, and that there is, in fact, no record of any oxen and asses dropping to their knees, and that the Three Wise Men were astrologers, and that the whole Nativity thing was put about by St Francis to lure ignorant and simple people into the Church. Mr Donelly had attended St Gall’s secondary school – a stone’s throw from his parents’ house on the Georgetown Road, a slum area, really, now demolished and the rubble used for infill on the ring road. His teacher of religious instruction at the school was a former priest, a bitter man called Conroy, who was married with a child and who had a mind like a cat’s, and who treated the boys like idiots. If Mr Donelly had ever wanted to date the beginnings of his confusion about the person of God and the mediating role of the priesthood then he could have identified Mr Conroy’s classes: first lesson on a Monday and last lesson on Fridays, back in the 1950s. Mr Conroy’s classes had begun the long slow withdrawing of Mr Donelly’s own personal sea of faith, which seemed to have left him washed up here and now, staring at the crib, looking hard at the figures of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. He looked hard at Joseph. Mr Donelly had always felt sorry for Joseph. He could identify with Joseph. Joseph was a minor player in the gospel story – he hardly got a look in at Christmas. Joseph’s beard and gown were all chipped, showing the white plaster underneath – he looked unkempt and uncared for. He had blank eyes and a doleful countenance. Mr Donelly tried to imagine what it would be like being Joseph – he must have had a pretty difficult time of it, when you think about it, human nature being what it is, probably having to put up with a lot of snide remarks and ribbing about Mary and the Spirit of God down a back alley. Mr Donelly read a book once, years ago, one of the only books he’d ever read, which had rather put him off – The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, or Chariots of the Gods, or The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, one of those books which he’d picked up at a church jumble sale – which claimed that Jesus was fathered by a Roman legionary called Pipus, or Titus, or Bob, or something. Mr Donelly didn’t want to believe it then and he doesn’t want to believe it now, and he hopes for Joseph’s sake that he never had to hear such ugly rumours and instinctively he leans forward over the crib – checking over his shoulder to make sure no one is watching – and he covers Joseph’s ears, pinching his plaster head between forefinger and thumb. Joseph’s head is tiny. Then Mr Donelly gazes up at the altar over the top of Joseph’s head and he imagines all the relics tucked away in there. He imagines all the visitors starting to turn up at the inn and pestering poor old Joseph – nutters, most of them, no doubt, and all of them looking for souvenirs. He looks at the Baby Jesus in the manger – the centrepiece, as it were, the Nativity’s cut-crystal vase on the sideboard. Jesus’s face has been touched up so many times with pink paint that his features are flaking and unrecognisable. And then he looks at Mary, who’s in good condition, hardly a mark on her, although her robes are a little faded, and Mr Donelly suddenly remembers all the other stories he was taught by Sister Hughes at school, about rosemary acquiring its fragrance after Mary supposedly hung out the Christ Child’s clothes on a rosemary bush and all the stuff about the Holy Babe being rocked in His cradle by angels while Mary got on with her needlework. It was all just folklore, of course, but still, staring at the pathetic figurines and remembering the stories, shaking with cold in the vast dry spaces of the church, Mr Donelly can understand why it’s all lasted, the whole Nativity thing, why it’s outdone all the pagan myths and all the other competing mumbo-jumbo. It’s because of the newborn Babe, and because of the poverty of the Holy Family and the slaughter of the Innocents, and all the supposed business in the stable, and the figure of Mary. It is the perfect image of warmth and shelter from what we know to be the cruelty and hatred and sheer indifference of the world, the same now as it was then. If nothing else, the Nativity was a nice idea.* (#ulink_8734bbb1-0676-54d4-9420-dd2dd35aeab1) Mr Donelly is not a man much given to self-reflection and he hasn’t allowed himself to worry too much about the future. But right now he wishes his children were here with him for Christmas. He wonders how many more Christmases they’ll all have together. He sits there for a long time, and for the first time in a long time, like all the children of our town at Christmas, Mr Donelly found himself praying. Mrs Donelly had long ago given up on prayer and she had just two wishes now before she died: she would have liked to have seen her daughter Jackie married; and she’d have liked to prevent Frank Gilbey from destroying any more of the town. The first of these wishes had yet to be fulfilled. But in the second she might just have succeeded. As chairman of the Planning Committee it was Mrs Donelly’s responsibility to examine all planning applications and she had taken great pleasure this evening in being able to turn down an application by Frank Gilbey for a change of use for the Quality Hotel, one of his companies’ recent acquisitions. In her opinion, and in the opinion of her committee, and even in the opinion of the town centre manager, the weak-jawed and usually pusillanimous Alan Burnside, a man with pure clear jelly for a spine and cream-thickened porridge for brains, the town did not need more luxury apartment blocks. What it needed was a meeting place and town centre space accessible to the public, where the public would want to gather as a community. What it needed, in other words, was what it had with the old Quality Hotel. Frank had already heard rumours from friends on the committee that this was going to be the decision, so he wasn’t shocked, and he’d already spoken to his partners, to Bob Savory and to the people who needed to know, and he had instructed his solicitor, Martin Phillips, to begin preparing the appeal, but on Christmas Eve, as Mr Donelly knelt up from his prayers and Mrs Donelly got into her Austin Allegro and looked up into the sky, and thanked her lucky stars, it felt to her, for a moment, like victory, if not a miracle. It would have been nice if I could tell you now that there’d been some snow, just to finish things off, but I cannot tell a lie, and God and the weather are not always answerable to our needs and desires, and I’m afraid sometimes sleet is as good as it gets. There was sleet. * (#ulink_e669fe4f-7913-514c-a613-9b519548ace8) Bobbie Dylan at the People’s Fellowship has been encouraging Francie McGinn to do some discussions with Can Teen, the young people’s group, on the question of whether texting can be Christian – a question that has troubled thinkers, in one way or another, as Barry McClean would be able to tell you, for many years. Plato addresses a similar problem, for example, in his Phaedrus, in the story of wise King Thamus of Egypt and the inventions of the god Theuth. Francie, however, has not read widely outside the Bible and devotional literature, so he is not familiar with what Barry in Philosophy for Beginners (Lecture 6: ‘Epistemology’) calls the ‘obvious connection between Phaedrus, commodity fetishism, and our symbolic lives and psychic habits’. Francie simply calls his discussions ‘FDFX?’ (Fully Devoted Followers of Christ), and is encouraging more prayerful texting. * (#ulink_9c75dbd4-d9e8-53ec-ab70-6dd1f60faf3c) See Bob Savory’s Speedy Bap!, chapter 12, ‘Sandwiches ? la Turque’. * (#ulink_9843944f-7028-5196-b80f-54d88b57d663) Victor Russell, a supercilious man with a Hitler moustache, who was the owner-manager of the Troxy and who wore a white tuxedo every day of his working life, was convicted in 1989 of arson and fraud: he’d torched the Troxy, trying to cash in on a ?25,000 insurance policy. He died in disgrace, in prison up in the city, his moustache intact but his tuxedo long since gone. His wife, Doreen, and daughter, Olivia, now live abroad, near N?mes, in France, where Olivia is a dealer in art deco antiques. Doreen tells her story in a moving interview with Minnie Mitchell in the Impartial Recorder, 22 August 2001. * (#ulink_0e620b25-d0cc-5952-ac61-331758db9ffc) She missed musicals, though – musicals seemed to have gone out of fashion. Hello, Dolly! she’d enjoyed, back in the old days, with Barbra Streisand, and Sweet Charity even, with Shirley MacLaine, although that was a bit weird. And Liza Minnelli, Cabaret, of course. They were classics. But you couldn’t get to see a good musical in our town these days for love nor money, unless you counted Colette Bradley’s amateur youth theatre productions of Fiddleron the Roof and Oliver! at the Good Templar Hall, which are OK but which are lacking in a certain something – lavish sets, for example, and costumes, lighting, full orchestras, Topol, Ron Moody; pretty much everything, in fact, that makes a good musical a good musical. * (#ulink_09d0e88f-bb6f-519b-a6b5-e1ba9daa9a18) For a full account of the ongoing dog-fouling controversy, see the Impartial Recorder, ‘Letters to the Editor’, 1982–Present. * (#ulink_d6083b9a-c091-58e7-b096-04afac4a8925) This, of course, seems unlikely, but it’s not impossible: there are happy endings, even for fish and the proverbial tin soldier. On 19 May 1991 the Impartial Recorder ran a story about Monica Hawkins (n?e Williams), from the Longfields Estate, who went on holiday to the Isle of Man in 1971, aged twenty-one. While swimming in the sea she lost a solid-silver locket which had been a gift to her from her mother, and which contained a small gold tooth, her father’s only mortal remains after he’d been cremated at what was then the town’s newly opened crematorium on Prospect Road. Twenty years later, at a car boot sale in the car park at the Church of the Cross and the Passion, not half a mile from the crematorium on Prospect Road, Mrs Hawkins, by that time twice married and twice widowed, happened to be going through a pile of costume jewellery in an old Quality Street tin when something caught her eye – a locket just like the one she’d lost all those years ago. And on opening the locket she found and yes, the gold tooth. The stallholder could offer no explanation of how she had acquired the locket – she bought bags of stuff from men in pubs – and after Mrs Hawkins’s death her daughter Joanne bequeathed the tooth to P. W. Grieve, the dentist who as a young man had made the gold tooth for Mr Williams in the first place, back in the 1960s, and who now has the tooth proudly on display in his waiting room, along with a bible open at the passage, ‘The law of thy mouth is better unto me than thousands of gold and silver’ (Psalms 119:72). * (#ulink_c72d2fc8-d331-509e-aef4-1def6c68591d) The Woolly Hat for Seamen Scheme has long since been abandoned: the Mission now seeks instead to provide every sailor of every nation with a small, waterproof, shockproof CD player and an evangelistic CD containing hymns, sermons and prayers. The original knitting patterns and accompanying pamphlets can, however, be consulted in the Mission to Seamen Special Collection at the library – contact Divisional Librarian Philomena Rocks for details. A typical 1952 pattern and outline reads thus: WOOLLY HAT FOR SEAMEN Ladies, keep up the good work! Not only do these colourful hats provide much needed protection from the harsh sea winds, but also a cover for many a bible smuggled on board ship bound for pagan lands. Every one of us can share in God’s ministry to the needy simply by picking up our knitting needles! So don’t hesitate, ladies, get knitting today, to advance the kingdom of God! Pattern for Hat: 3 balls 20g d.k. wool. Using No. 10 needles cast on 132 sts. 1st and every K.2 P.2. Continue until work measures 2? inches. Change to size 8 needles and continue to double rib until work measures 9? inches. Shape top: 1st row *K.3 tog. K.9 repeat from * to end (110 sts). 2nd and every alt. row Purl. 3rd row *K.3 tog. K.7 repeat from * to end (88 sts). 5th row *K.3 tog. K.5 repeat from * to end (66 sts). 7th row *K.3 tog. K.3 repeat from * to end (44 sts). 9th row *K.3 tog. K.1 repeat from * to end (22 sts). 11th row *K.2 tog to end (11 sts). Thread wool through sts, draw up and fasten. Sew seam. * (#ulink_19522134-0246-5005-ad24-46a61ed48ab4) An unorthodox view of the Virgin Birth which Mr Donelly happens to share with Barry McClean, the Gnostics, David Hume, Friedrich Schleiermacher, certain twentieth-century German theologians and the former Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins. 4 The Dump (#ulink_86768ba4-98ea-528a-af41-49daf1c737fd) Describing an auspicious occasion – a party in a pub – which demonstrates the wholesomeness of life amidst the usual waste and humiliation You wouldn’t have thought so, but the range of temperatures here in town can be pretty extreme. It can get all the way up to the seventies on occasion in July and even on a winter’s afternoon, when the sun’s out, you sometimes see young men sitting outside pubs in their shirtsleeves. In February, on a good day, on a bright day, outside the Castle Arms it’s like a playground: little groups, little huddles, jackets off, joking and having fun. In our town such an opportunity is not to be missed: the sun here always tends to go to our heads. But, alas, the unseasonably warm weather has not been good for my old friend Billy Nibbs: in the heat, the smell coming out of the skips and those big metal bins can be pretty stiff. In the summer you can actually smell the dump from the car park outside the Plough and the Stars, which is two roundabouts downwind, where all attempts at landscaping have failed to solve the problem. A few scented-leaf pelagoniums on the windowsills and some sweet william outside in huge terracotta-plastic planters are no match for the stench of the accumulated waste of our town. Goodness knows what people are putting in there: Billy spends half his time redirecting gardeners with grass cuttings to the GREEN WASTE ONLY bins, and the other half directing householders with stinking black plastic bags away from the NO FOOD WASTE bins. People do seem to be ashamed about their rubbish, or confused. There’s been talk of recycling – one of the town’s councillors, Mrs Donelly, no less, who has a cousin in Canada, is very keen; she says that’s what they do over there – but whether this will solve the problem of people’s shame or increase it, it’s difficult to say. No one wants to be reminded of their own waste: to have to separate it all out would simply be embarrassing. We’d rather future generations sort it all out for us – and Billy, of course. It may just be the sweat and the bins, then, that make Billy smell so, but it may also be the ham. Billy Nibbs is addicted to ham. Absolutely addicted; there’s no other way to describe it. He lives by himself and has never been that interested in cooking, and after a few years he found he’d got into a routine. Every night on the way home from work he buys his bacon for his breakfast from Tom Hines, our one remaining butcher, and every morning he eats it straight from the frying pan, mopping up the juices with a slice of bread, dispensing neatly with the need for a knife, or a plate and, indeed, for any washing up whatsoever, since the frying pan will always do for the next day, and the next; and then for lunch he has a ham sandwich with mustard, and for dinner he usually eats at his mum’s, or at Scarpetti’s, the Italian late-night caf? in Market Street, which is no longer owned and run by Italians, Mr Scarpetti and his family having eventually returned to their native land like most incomers within a short time of having arrived here, once they realise that our town is, in fact, like every other small town on the face of the earth and no better than what they’ve left behind, unless, of course, it’s a civil war or state torture, and even then it can be a tough decision to decide to stay. We have no actual culture to speak of and no cuisine, unless you count the tray bakes and the microwave morning sandwiches from the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop. We can boast no local beer even, let alone a wine, and we have no town square, our festivals extend only to the traditional half-hearted summer parade and fireworks – Frank Gilbey’s attempts to organise a jazz festival a few years ago having ended in disaster – and we are not known for the warmest of welcomes.* (#ulink_d83f4c6c-65ae-5827-86fd-8743a02e302c) But Mr Hemon, who now owns Scarpetti’s – and who is Bosnian – has stuck it out for eight years and it looks as though he’s going to stay, and he does a fair imitation of Billy’s mum’s sausage, chips and beans. In honour of his predecessors Mr Hemon offers espresso coffee – two heaps of instant instead of one – and keeps a bowl of Parmesan on each table, along with the usual condiments, and believe me, if you’ve never sprinkled grated hard Italian cheese on one of Scarpetti’s legendary big breakfasts with two fried slices, then you really haven’t lived, in our town.† (#ulink_2be8a12f-87aa-5fcf-9c1c-1dd91ba67500) I think maybe it is all the pork that gives Billy that funny smell, because he smells the same all year round, so it can’t just be the heat. As you get older there’s no doubt food can play havoc with your system: Davey Quinn, I know, for example, hasn’t eaten a Chinese takeaway for years, after a night out in south London which started in a pub, went on to a club, and ended up with a couple of tin-foil tubs of hot and spicy Cantonese which wouldn’t usually have bothered him, certainly not while in his teens or twenties, but which left him in his early thirties unable to breathe and writhing around, choking up whole sweet-and-sour pork balls, and he ended up in casualty having his stomach pumped, and he can only remember that the stuff they pumped in looked black and the stuff they pumped out was yellow, and he stank for weeks afterwards. He has never again touched chicken in a black-bean sauce: the food of all our youths denied for ever to him. I myself – like most of us – have had to give up kebabs. Davey waited a while after his return to town before calling in to see Billy Nibbs, and he hardly recognised him when he finally caught up with him – he had to do a double take. Billy these days looks exactly like his father, Hugh – right down to the thick black beard and the shiny steel-toe capped boots. Hugh ran one of the four butchers that used to exist on Main Street – not a single one remaining now, leaving only Tom Hines on High Street, who is not and never was the best, whose sausages are thin and greasy, whose chops and mince are too fatty, whose joints are overpriced and who has abandoned all pretence of providing dripping, black pudding, or the cheaper offal, the standard fare of the traditional family butcher, and who has opted instead to sell his butcher’s soul for the likes of hot and spicy Cantonese ribs, ready-stuffed chickens and pre-wrapped bacon from a wholesaler based in Swindon. Hugh was much the better butcher and famously bearded, a man who’d hung on to his facial hair right through the Seventies, when beards were still popular and even admired, when even Tom Hines had worn one, to hide his many opulent chins, and right on into the Eighties and through the Nineties, when beards became more scarce and rather frowned upon, certainly by people buying meat, perhaps because there was always the suspicion of some flecks, some tiny filaments stuck somewhere in there, although Hugh was scrupulous about washing the beard every night with Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo, to retain its softness and to try to be rid of that distinctive high, minty, slightly gamey smell of freshly butchered meat. Hugh’s dying wish, that he’d had written into his Last Will and Testament, was a surprise for his wife, Jean, who’d begged him for years to update his image: ‘I INSTRUCT,’ ran the rubric, ‘on the event of my predeceasing my wife, that my beard be shaved.’ It was not the strangest request or instruction that the family solicitor, Martin Phillips, had had to incorporate into a will – you’d be surprised what secrets you can hide from your family and what you might want eventually to reveal. Even us little people can keep big secrets. In his cups and among friends, when he’d loosened up after a few holes and a few gin and tonics in the golf club, Martin Phillips would sometimes boast of being the keeper of the keys to the skeleton closets of the town, but he never revealed his secrets and he never told tales.* (#ulink_4b94a43c-a3c9-5bd7-bfaa-adf6641e7a55) No one would have believed him anyway. When Hugh died, Martin Phillips carried out his instructions to the letter – he brought in Tommy Morris, the barber on Kilmore Avenue, our last proper barber, who refuses not only women but who won’t cut children’s hair either, not until they’re sixteen and old enough to decide themselves exactly how short they want to have it, and who usually charges ?2.50 for a wet shave with a cut-throat razor, although on this occasion he waived his fee – so when she visited her husband for the viewing, Jean was able to kiss Hugh’s smooth cheek for the first time in thirty years and her tears glistened upon his face. At the crematorium Billy had read a poem. There was not a dry eye in the house. Billy had always been a keen reader, Marvel comics mostly when we were young, but in his teens he had moved up to literature and it wasn’t long before he started writing the stuff himself. I can still remember clearly the first poem he ever showed me. We must have been about fifteen. It began: The sun doesn’t shine way down in the blue. In the deep sea of liquid dark memories come on cue. I’m no literary critic, but I didn’t think it was too bad and I told him, and he was encouraged, and so I feel now, on the publication of his first book, that I have in some small way been instrumental in the bringing to public attention of a new voice. The launch party was just recently, in the Castle Arms. Billy was there, of course. And his mum Jean was there. Davey Quinn was there. Bob Savory was there. Davey is effectively working for Bob now, in the kitchens at the Plough and the Stars, and it seems to be going OK. He’s only working as a kitchen porter, part-time, but it’s a start, it’s something to help him get back on his feet. Davey must have worked at two dozen different jobs during the twenty years he was away, and in a dozen different places, so he was used to starting over. He did a lot of bar work at first, way back when, and then he was in Berlin for a while, when there was a lot of work on the sites after the Wall came down, and then he was in Holland on the tulip farms, and then he had a go on the campsites in France, and then it was back to England and the usual casual jobs, the temporary, the unsuitable and the strictly cash-in-hand: he was variously a care assistant, a windscreen fitter, a supermarket shelf stacker, a warehouseman and a bouncer. He drove a bus, he did security, he did landscaping and he did ventilation installation. He preferred jobs where he didn’t have to think: he lasted only two weeks in tele-sales and he did his best to avoid computers. He worked for six months for Otis Elevators, which was a great job and was pretty much the summation of his career: full of ups and downs and going nowhere. It was a rootless existence and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Things haven’t been easy for Davey since he returned. He’s been staying with his parents, and it’s never good for a grown man to be thrown back upon the mercy of his parents. Mr and Mrs Quinn are good people but it’s hard not to judge your children when they’re under the same roof as you and you have to see them every day, and they’re old enough to make their own mistakes but should know better, and Mr Quinn, Davey Senior, has had to bite his tongue on many occasions, from the breakfast table to lunchtime, dinner and beyond, and he is not a man used to having to withhold his opinions. He has been trying to persuade Davey to join him in the business, a painting and decorating business, a business started by Davey Senior’s own father, Old Davey, way back in the 1920s, and a business which provides a good living for Davey Senior and no fewer than three of Davey’s brothers, Daniel, Gerry and Craig. But Davey is holding out. One of the good things about leaving town all those years ago was that he didn’t have to join the family business and now he’s back he has no intention of doing so. It’s been a difficult couple of months, then, but Davey has picked up with a lot of old friends and a lot of them were at the book launch. Sammy the plumber was there. Francie McGinn was there. Francie’s wife, Cherith, was hosting the Ladies’ Bible Night so she couldn’t make it, but Bobbie Dylan was there, chatting to Francie, and it was nice to see them both looking so happy. Bob was between waitresses, so he was there too. All the old crowd. There was also a photographer from the Impartial Recorder – actually, the photographer, Joe Finnegan. Joe calls himself a ‘lensman’ and he likes to say – to himself, if no one else – ‘I don’t take sides: I take photos.’ He’d turned to photography late in life, after the failure of his picture-framing business, a lovely quaint little place on Market Street, two doors down from Scarpetti’s, where Joe never seemed to do much actual picture framing but instead spent most of his time chatting to old friends, and so, of course, he couldn’t compete with the real professionals, with the much bigger and glitzier chain store, Picz ‘N’ Framz, when it opened up at Bloom’s, which has its own car park and a trained staff, and a wide range of ready-framed prints and posters, in many sizes, ready to hang. Also, to be honest, Joe liked a drink. So Joe was snapping away, half cut, with his Leica, which is not a hobby camera, but with which he somehow still managed to produce the standard hazy amateur mugshots for the paper: a grinning Billy with his arm draped round Frank Gilbey, our ex-mayor; a grinning Billy with his arm draped round Frank’s daughter Lorraine, shying away; Billy with his mum; and Billy with all of us. It made a full-page spread in the Impartial Recorder. My favourite photograph of the evening is one of Billy cheek to cheek with our old English teacher, Miss McCormack, who’d made it to the launch even though she’s moved up-country now to live with her sister, Eileen, and to look after their elderly father, the big Scotsman Dougal, in his declining years, even though she is strictly teetotal and claims not to have visited a pub since her sister’s engagement party over forty years ago, a party that famously ended with Dougal McCormack, a fervent Methodist, knocking out his prospective son-in-law when the young man had indulged in rough talk and ribaldry. The young man seems consequently to have thought twice about marrying into the family, for the two sisters became spinsters and were frozen in time. Miss McCormack looks exactly the same now as she did twenty years ago when she was teaching us, which may be proof, as she had always insisted, that literature is one of the higher virtues and is good for you, like classical music, and art, and Guinness, of which there was, of course, plenty at the party – draught and bottled – as well as sparkling white wine. It was a good evening. Everyone who was anyone was there. The only problem was: there were no books. There were plenty of sandwiches: egg, cheese and ham, laid on by Margaret, who runs the bar at the Castle Arms. (Bob Savory, needless to say, was not impressed with the spread and since he has made it a rule never to eat the competition he was stuck on cocktail sausages and crisps all night, which is hardly enough to sustain a man through a heavy evening’s drinking, and by eight o’clock he was drunk and bitter and complaining about the mere look of the sandwiches, about how presentation was everything in catering and how that was something that people round here had never really understood, how a chiffonade of parsley and a squeeze of lemon could make all the difference, and how we all got the food we deserved, which was certainly not Quality Food for the Discerning Palet, and if Billy had only asked, he said, he’d have done him a deal, and we could right now be eating chicken tikka with crisp lettuce and mayo on granary, or fresh buffalo mozzarella with roasted vegetables in a tortilla wrap, although to be honest most of us preferred plain ham and cheese with a pint, but we didn’t like to say so.) Billy had put ?100 behind the bar for drinks and Margaret, who’d known Billy since he was born, and who had always bought her meat from Billy’s dad, Hugh, twice a week all her adult life, had silently added another ?50 of her own, to keep the evening flowing. She’d always had a special place in her heart for Hugh, a strong man whose big forearms and black beard had reminded her of her husband, a merchant seaman who’d gone missing overboard in mountainous seas in the Atlantic, aged just twenty-seven. Margaret had never remarried, had never had children and she ran the best bar in town: there was hardly an adult male who hadn’t enjoyed his first under-age drink under her watchful gaze, and who in later years hadn’t felt the lash of her tongue and the threat to drink up and go home or have you no home to go to? Margaret was, everyone agreed, one of the old school. She’d had a cancer scare a couple of years ago, and regulars at the Castle Arms had raised over ?1000 and sent her on a Christmas Caribbean cruise, which she had to pretend she’d enjoyed, but which she’d hated. The sea reminded her of her husband and she’d spent most days sitting in the boat’s main bar – Bogart’s – telling people all about her own little pub back home. The ship’s bartenders, of course, grew to love her and showed her everything they knew about mixing cocktails, for which there had never been a big demand in the Castle Arms, but when she came back there was a brief fashion for Gimlets and Gibsons and Singapore Gin Slings, and for a time Margaret stocked almost as much angostura bitters as she did good Irish whiskey. Frank Gilbey liked to boast to his friends at the golf club that Margaret made a better dry martini than he had tasted anywhere in the world – and he had tasted a few. Margaret belonged in our town. She belonged behind the bar. Billy’s was the first book written by someone any one of us actually knew, the first book written by someone, from our town, in fact, in living memory, although we do, of course, have the usual roster of nineteenth-century hymn writers and minor poets, whose work for the most part expresses repressed sexual longings and deep theological confusion, and quite often the two at the same time. Fill thou our life, Lord, full in every part, That with our being we proclaim Thee, And the wonders of Thine Art. Come quickly, O Lord Jesus, That the world may know Thy Name, Fill our ears, Lord, and our eyes, Lord, That our hearts may know no shame. Fill the valleys and the mountains, Inspire us with Thy sweet breath, Till all Israel’s sons proclaim Thee, King of Glory, raised from death. (Nathan Hatchmore Perkins McAuley, 1844–1901) These were not words that any self-respecting teenage boy could sing in a school assembly without blushing or laughter. Nathan Hatchmore Perkins McAuley – a minister, apparently, who had lived in the old manse on Moira Avenue, which had gone with the ring road and which was now the site of eighteen starter homes – was inadvertently responsible for more detentions than any other single individual in the whole history of Central School. One former pupil at Central, Tom Boal – stage name, Big Tom Tyrone, even though he wasn’t actually from Tyrone – had obviously enjoyed and remembered the Reverend Mr McAuley’s deep apprehendings and had somehow ended up on the folk circuit in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, singing about longings of his own. Turning to Country, he had recorded several albums in Nashville in the 1970s and he toured occasionally and had returned one year to town, for his mother’s funeral, and had come in to school as a special favour to an old friend, our history teacher, the notorious motorbike-riding and leather-jacket-wearing Gerry Malone, a man who’d been known to do tapes of the Grateful Dead and the Band for favoured boys in the sixth form. Mr Malone introduced Big Tom Tyrone as a contemporary of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, people we all thought were dead, or hippies, or myths, like the Greeks and the Romans, and certainly it was a surprise for us to meet someone so obviously old and yet so utterly unlike our parents: he might as well have been Odysseus, or Elvis Presley. None of us who were there will ever forget Big Tom Tyrone’s long, thinning hair and his cowboy boots and his acoustic version of Nathan Hatchmore Perkins McAuley’s ‘Fill thou our life, Lord’, which he turned into a sleazy twelve-bar blues with a bottleneck middle section whose effect of longing and moaning came about the closest that most of us had ever heard to the sound of a woman in the act of lovemaking. The school’s headmaster, a Brylcreemed man, a Mr Crawford, the predecessor of the current incumbent, Mr Swallow, was furious and ended assembly early. Girls hung around after the assembly for autographs – some of the better-looking girls too – and Big Tom Tyrone happily signed, in exchange for a kiss, and he must have been in his fifties at the time, I suppose, the age of our own fathers. We couldn’t believe it. Billy and Bob and me had decided by that lunch break that we would form a band. We lasted about six months before we split, suffering from the usual musical differences and the lack of a drummer, and it was then that Billy turned seriously to poetry. Billy’s book was being published by a firm who had advertised in the Impartial Recorder, which Billy had foolishly taken to be a recommendation. The Impartial Recorder also carries advertisements for psychics, money trees, life coaches, ‘The Truth about Israel – the Key to World History’ booklets, and ‘Hard-To-Believe-But-It’s-True-We’re-Giving-It-Away-Today-And-Today-Only-Its-An-Unbelievable-And-Unrepeatable-Bargain-But-All-Stock-Must-Go!!!’ furniture stores, cut-price supermarkets and wood flooring specialists. Billy had submitted his work by post, enclosing a small fee, and he had received a letter in reply just a week later, much different from the replies he usually received from publishers: it described his work as ‘original’, ‘extraordinary’ and it went on to use the kind of adjectives which Billy had secretly known for many years might properly be applied to his work, but at which he had blushed on reading and rereading. As well as its obvious literary merits the book, he was told, in the opinion of the publishers, could be a major commercial success. The publishers believed that they could guarantee reviews in national newspapers, magazines and literary journals, and prominent displays in all the major bookshops. Because of the extra distribution and publicity costs that this would involve, they wondered if they could possibly ask Billy to contribute about ?1000? Out of this sum Billy would receive two free copies and he had an option to buy another 500 at a greatly reduced rate. The publishers said the initial print run was going to be about 1000: an enormous number for a first book by an unknown author. Billy had inherited some money from the sale of the butcher’s shop and its fittings after Hugh’s death, so he gladly paid up, sat back and waited, and he believed for a long time that he was actually going to see the book.* (#ulink_55972c34-947b-514e-b4f9-ba948514a6ef) But after the humiliation of the bookless book launch, days turned to weeks and then to months, and there were still no books received, and Billy’s letters and telephone calls went unanswered, and in the end Billy decided he was going to have to go and see his publishers personally. He wore a suit and tie, as for a business meeting, asked for a day’s leave from the dump and took the train. * (#ulink_f0fe172e-a1b0-52ab-865e-aa97d9af270e) We were renowned at one time, of course, for our annual Bicycle Polo tournament, held out on the fields that people called the Bleaches, which were used many years ago for bleaching linen, but which have long since been buried under the Frank Gilbey roundabout on the ring road. The tournament had been founded by Field Marshal Sir John Hillock in 1933. Like Tolstoy, the Field Marshal took to cycling in old age and became an enthusiastic advocate of the sport. His bicycle polo team, the Rovers, sponsored by Raleigh, had achieved some small national fame, and the tournament had brought crowds to the town every May Day until 1947, when tragedy struck: a young man, Elvin Thomas, just twenty-one years old, who had survived Tobruk, died from a punctured lung sustained from an injury caused by a loose spoke during the tournament finals. The Field Marshal disbanded the team and bicycle polo has never been played again in town. The highlight of Frank Gilbey’s inaugural and one-and-only week-long jazz festival, meanwhile, a few years ago, was a performance on the Saturday night by Chris Barber and his band, the keepers of the flame of British trad jazz. No one at all had turned up to hear them play and they went home without even opening their instrument cases. Frank had had to bail out the festival from his own pocket. † (#ulink_f0fe172e-a1b0-52ab-865e-aa97d9af270e) Tiberio Scarpetti and his family lasted here for nearly ten years, which is not a bad innings, actually, for incomers, but unfortunately they were ten years too late for the worldwide craze for espresso bars, which had orginally sent the older Scarpetti brothers out into the world to make their fortunes – Domenico to Australia, Bartolo to Los Angeles – and twenty years too early for the coffee shop revival, which meant that in the end Tiberio, the youngest of three brothers, who had a lot to prove but who had drawn the historical and geographical short straw, returned to his home town of Termoli in Italy with nothing except his Gaggia machine and a lot of unsold stock of fizzy mineral water and canned ravioli. Tiberio had worked like a dog for years, turning what was once Thomas Bell’s dank, dark little hardware shop, ‘Whistle and Bells: All Your Hardware Requirements’, on Market Street into our own local little Italy, all black-and-white tiled floors, indoor plants and mirrored walls, with a state-of-the-art red Formica counter. He held out for a long time against offering chips with everything and all-day frys, but in the end he gave in and lost heart. He’d kept a bowl on the counter for tips and when a decade had passed without a single person ever placing so much as a penny in the bowl he knew it was time to pack up and leave: this was not a place Tiberio intended to grow old. His daughter Francesca remains, of course, married to Tommy Kahan, but Tiberio has never been back to visit, has never even been tempted; he has sworn never to return. The sign above the door of the caf? still says Scarpetti’s, but apart from the Parmesan and the Nescaf? espressos there remains no other indication that this was ever the town’s Italian quarter: Pukka Pies™ have long since replaced the ravioli. Mr Hemon’s only improvement on Tiberio’s original decor has been to put up tourist board posters on the walls showing scenic sights in Bosnia, but all meals come with chips. * (#ulink_a1ea2396-9d34-535b-a909-a34c3d5571c2) Actually, there was one that he let slip, when he was on a camping holiday with the children in the south of France, many years ago, and he’d got into conversation one evening with an expat at a bar near the campsite, and somewhere into the second shared bottle of the local red he confessed that he was a solicitor and started complaining to the stranger that the worst thing about his job was always being asked to pad people’s insurance claims and become party to petty frauds, and he happened to mention to the expat the name of a client, Trevor Downs, from up there on the Longfields Estate, whom Martin believed to be faking his own whiplash injuries. Some time later the expat happened to mention this story on the telephone to his brother, who happened to be a minicab driver in Glasgow, who then happened to mention it in turn to someone in the back of his cab who turned out to be Trevor Downs’s wife, Tara, in Glasgow on a shopping spree funded by her husband’s considerable personal injury income. It may be a small world, but it’s also a messy one, thank goodness: in the retelling of the story the name Trevor had been translated into Terry and the Downs had disappeared, which is the only thing that kept Martin Phillips from being sued and out of hospital. These days compensation claim racketeering is so widespread and so common, even in our town, where everyone seems to have slipped and fallen, that Martin no longer even bothers to mention it, even when abroad. * (#ulink_c62b344a-b53f-538d-9f54-ef729e191ce8) It exists still only in typescript, the book. The only two poems of Billy’s ever to have seen the light of day were published in the first edition of the magazine The Enthusiast (PO Box 239, Bangor, BT20 5YB, www.theenthusiast.co.uk). The first of these poems, ‘To the Reader’, seems to be some kind of uncompromising envoi: Listen: you don’t like it, then leave. My aim has only ever been to be popular with the less sophisticated type of audience, especially in the suburbs and provinces. The second poem, ‘I’m Nobody, Who Are You?’, runs to over a hundred lines and considerations of space obviously preclude us from reprinting it here, but readers who have attended Robert McCrudden’s popular Creative Writing class (Poetry) I or II at the Institute, or similar, might be able to detect throughout this longer work the influences of Arthur Rimbaud, George Herbert, C. P. Cavafy, Geoffrey Chaucer, Hart Crane, Bertolt Brecht, John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, the Gawain Poet, William Blake, A. E. Housman, Francis Ponge, Marianne Moore, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, or Pam Ayres. 5 Fellowship (#ulink_882830b8-d6ac-5a0a-b3b2-d8eced66f523) A Good Friday Carvery and Gospel Night (Featuring the Preaching of the Word by Francie McGinn, Country Gospel Music by Bobbie Dylan and All-You-Can-Eat Barbecued Meats) The sun finally came out on Friday, breaking through after what seemed like months of gloom, what seemed like years of low grey cloud and drizzle, what seemed, in fact, to some of us here like the new Dark Ages, the return of the famous ‘black springs’ of the 1950s when there wasn’t a green vegetable till August and the only thing you could buy in the market throughout the summer was potatoes. When the cloud lifted, Francie McGinn turned his face to the big blurred halo in the sky and thanked the Lord. ‘Altostratus,’ he said. Francie has always been interested in the weather and he had gone into the ministry, the two things being somehow connected in his mind, something to do with storms and rainbows and the supernumerary. Francie would not have been your obvious choice as a minister, what with his lack of any obvious social skills, his terror of public speaking and his terrible psoriasis, which always tended to flare up when Francie had to address a congregation, but God does seem to have a sense of humour and so, when He called Francie, in His infinite wisdom He did not call him to a nice quiet life working in an office, as a filing clerk perhaps, or an assistant administrative officer in the local council – recently relocated, of course, from its fine old five-storey stucco building overlooking the People’s Park, with a girdled and globe-breasted Queen Victoria standing guard outside on a plinth, to a new purpose-built place on the ring road. No, God works in mysterious ways and He seems curiously uninterested in the workings and decisions of local councils, so when He called Francie – a sweet, shy, nervous man – He called him not to a life of pleasant quietness but to a life which involved a lot of standing up in front of large and not always sympathetic crowds speaking to them enthusiastically about Jesus. It was a calling which required certain skills of exposition and expostulation, and a certain amount of necessary hand-waving, which Francie, who had always been a little stiff in his manner, had never quite mastered. His sermons were examples of free association, in which he grappled with, and was often floored by, complex passages of Scripture and the use of the microphone. Just watching him up there at the front of his congregation was enough to break your heart. It was enough to bring you to tears, or to your knees. As if both to identify and to defy his own native lack of ability, Francie had had an alphabet painted around what in other churches would have been called a nave, but which in Francie’s church, the People’s Fellowship – a place on South Street, which used to be the old Johnson Hosiery Factory, round the back of the Quality Hotel – was just a blank back wall lit by halogen spots and uplighters. The alphabet read, in thick black letters three and four feet tall: ALL unsaved people are sinners. You must BELIEVE and CONFESS your sins to God. Christ DIED to save sinners. The Lord knows EVERY secret thing. We are saved through FAITH in Christ. GOOD Works alone will not save. Punishment and HELL await sinners. IMAGINE the darkness that will fall from on high when all men will be JUDGED by the Lord. You shall KNOW and LOVE the Lord, who in His MERCY is willing to save sinners. NOTHING can separate us from the love of God, and the Lord Jesus Christ is the ONLY way of salvation. The Lord will PARDON backsliders, but you must REPENT of your wrongdoing in order to be SAVED. There is joy in TESTIFYING to the Lord. WHOSOEVER WILL may be saved. The sign painter, Colin Crawford, who was a friend of a friend of a member of the congregation, and who had learnt his trade years ago in the Tech’s once renowned sign-writing classes, seems to have run into problems with some of the more difficult consonants – what good things does God do that begin with the letters Q and Z? – but the effect was impressive nonetheless.* (#ulink_4f61728a-6c5f-5486-b5fd-444e494163b1) When Francie stood up to preach, sweating into the microphone, at the front of that hall, you had the impression of a performing flea caught up in the pages of a vast Bible. From an early age, certainly from when I first knew him, Francie had described himself as a Bible-believing Christian. The Bible, to Francie, was a bit like God is to most other Christians: something to be relied upon and worshipped, but which nonetheless remains utterly inscrutable and not necessarily something you’d ever be able to understand.* (#ulink_c770e843-a9b3-5074-8605-26e9ab1c42df) Francie was naturally a quiet and modest man, but he was ambitious for Jesus, and was always coming up with exciting new schemes for promoting God’s Word in and around town. He would sometimes take a full-page advertisement in the local paper announcing forthcoming events and in the summer he held evening meetings in the car park in the centre of town, out in front of the Quality Hotel, near the new faux bandstand, with its brick podium and tarpaulin-effect sheet-steel covering, where every night he erected a large sign announcing an ‘Open Air Gospel Meeting’, just in case anyone was in doubt as to exactly what a group of twenty or thirty adults wearing Bermuda shorts and big grins and sunhats were doing, shaking their tambourines and playing guitars and handing out tracts to amused skateboarders and passers-by. Everyone knew it had to be something to do with Jesus – where we live, there’s no other excuse or explanation for such behaviour. This is not Miami Beach, or Brighton. In the winter Francie tried Fish-and-Chip Biblical Quiz Nights and Line Dancing, Ladies’ Pool Nights and Indoor Carpet Bowls for the over-sixties, and there were, of course, all the usual weekly Parenting Classes and Toddlers’ Groups and Bible Studies, but the highlight of every year was undoubtedly his Good Friday Carvery and Gospel Night, an evening which included the Preaching of the Word, Country Gospel Music by Bobbie Dylan and all-you-could-eat barbecued meats, provided by Tom Hines, who is a brother of a member of the congregation, all for a very reasonable ?5 per head. A couple of years back Francie’s wife, Cherith, was on a detox diet, which meant she couldn’t eat dairy products, bread, pasta, oranges and half a dozen other foodstuffs, including red meat, and in order to display solidarity with his wife Francie was doing the diet too, so they were both going to have to miss out on the Good Friday Carvery, something they usually looked forward to: the closest they usually got to meat was supermarket mince, which is at best an approximation. It was for her liver, Cherith said, the detox diet, but to be honest she could probably have done to lose some weight, as could their teenage daughter, Bethany, who had not been tempted by the diet, and who had also secretly started smoking cigarettes and going out with boys who were non-Christians, and who wore black eyeliner to church, and who, during her father’s sermons, sometimes sat sending text messages of a sexual nature to her friends. That Easter, the year of the diet, Francie and Cherith were also having a new kitchen put into their house on the estate – nothing too expensive, nothing too flash, but, as all the elders of the church agreed, it did need updating – and whether it was the stress of the kitchen, or the lack of protein and carbohydrates and the smell of the barbecued meats, or perhaps the manifold charms of Bobbie Dylan herself that did for Francie I do not know. Bobbie Dylan was christened Roberta and was not a fan of Bob Dylan until she heard the Saved album, and then it was but a short leap into the whole world – the admittedly small but pleasantly cosy world – of Christian rock, a world which the leather-trousered Roberta now bestrode like the proverbial colossus. Roberta had been converted at the age of twenty. There is probably no good or bad age to become a born-again Christian, but twenty is perhaps one of the worst. It meant that Roberta had enjoyed a few years of tasting the fruits of this world and now, as she emerged into her mid-thirties, she could still taste the many, the complex flavours on her tongue: the terrible sweetness of all those things that as a born-again Christian she knew it was right to deny herself. She tried not to think about it too much and it was not something she liked to admit, but sometimes she had a hankering after the world and its ways. Sometimes, for instance, at night, in her one-bedroom flat on Kilmore Avenue – with its lovely en suite, tiled and decorated by her own fair hand, with a nice fish motif and a power shower – she would drink several glasses of Chardonnay while watching American television programmes in which strong women with beautiful hair and clavicles and good upper-body strength boasted to each other of their sexual conquests, and their ability to please and to dominate men. Just watching them Roberta would feel ashamed and excited. Watching ER had the same effect, and also Sebastian Faulks’s novel Birdsong. Not that the world of Christian rock didn’t have its excitements. Roberta had toured extensively throughout Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales, and had been to many Christian rock festivals throughout Europe – in Germany, for example, and in Holland. She had released no fewer than five CDs of her own original material and although she hadn’t yet had a breakthrough in America, where the competition was pretty fierce in its own Christian way, she was already big in Korea, where Christians seemed to appreciate her work, which was influenced by the many traditions of Christian and sacred music: gospel, soul, country and mid-period Bob Dylan. Like Bob Dylan, and like many another rock musician, Roberta had been tempted at times by rock‘n’roll’s inevitable accompaniments and attractions. There were times when she feared that sitting in recording studios late at night with unshaven men drinking beer would prove her undoing. But when it came to Francie’s Good Friday Carvery and Gospel Night Roberta’s mind was set firmly on her music and her ministry. She had showered and washed her hair, and laid out her best clothes: a pair of black leather trousers, a white long-sleeved blouse and a pair of black boots with a slight heel. She had straightened her hair with straightening irons, put on a little lipstick – a sheer glossy rose – and applied some kohl and some mascara round her dark-brown eyes. The look was a combination of rock chick and bride of Christ which she hoped was pleasing both in the eyes of God and of man. As for Francie, he was wearing his usual minister’s outfit: a brown car coat with pockets large enough to accommodate a Good News bible, a range of tracts and a Scripture Union diary; a pair of grey sta-prest casual trousers, the pockets jangling, full of keys and small change for emergencies (Francie does not possess or carry credit or charge cards, and encourages his congregation to cut up their own); a blue bobbled V-neck pullover thinning around the elbows; a check shirt with blue and red biros tucked in the breast pocket; and a good plain pair of Clark’s shoes from Irvine’s (‘Clark’s, Norvic and Bective Brands for Ladies, Kiltie Shoes for Children, Savile Row for Gentlemen’), the laces securely double knotted. He looked, in fact, like most of us do here, both the men and the women: the unmistakable look of people who are not in full charge of their own wardrobes, people who get dressed once a year by Father Christmas and who do not feel any further need to add to or to accessorise their festive knitwear, or to worry about some small thing like a wrong-sized shirt collar or polyester pants. Francie had gone straight from being dressed by his mother to being dressed by his wife, both of whom were more interested in questions of value for money than any considerations of style or current fashions, but fortunately clothes had never been important to Francie. Apart from a couple of troublesome years in his teens when he had rebelled against hand-me-down duffel coats and had insisted on a red harrington and dealer boots, he did not dress to impress. It was not necessary. Francie was not setting out to attract the attentions of the opposite sex. He had never kissed another woman apart from his wife and, indeed, he could probably count every kiss he had bestowed upon her, in every place and everywhere, although, actually, recently the kisses had become rather scarce. Not that Francie’s and Cherith’s was a loveless marriage. On the contrary. Their lives were fulfilled in many ways. They enjoyed the fellowship of the congregation and they both regarded it as a privilege to be able to minister together: this was their role and their mission in life, and they desired little else, although sometimes, if he were honest, Francie would have to admit to entertaining improper thoughts. Sometimes, for example, he wondered if he’d have been better off as a Catholic priest. He liked the idea of a sacramental role, something that involved a little less Doing – fewer committees and less street evangelism – and a bit more good old-fashioned Being. Sometimes he thought he wouldn’t at all have minded a Roman collar, or wearing a soutane. And sometimes he imagined female members of his congregation modelling swimwear. On that Good Friday, though, such thoughts were far from Francie’s mind. On that fateful night Francie was worrying about the kitchen. He and Cherith had argued before coming out – after they’d eaten their microwaveable quiche and a salad consisting of a small hard tomato, two sticks of celery, a pyramid of sweet-corn and half an iceberg lettuce, the barbecued meats at the Carvery being strictly prohibited to them. They had argued again – for it was not the first time – about what an appropriate work surface for the new kitchen might be. A laminate was cheapest, of course, which is what Jesus would have wanted, but Cherith had been trying to persuade Francie that a good hard solid wood or even a granite surface would wear better, and so in the long run it would please Jesus and the elders of the fellowship just as much. Francie quoted Scripture – ‘Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’, Luke 6:20 – and Cherith rejoindered with some verses of her own – ‘In the house of the righteous there is much treasure’, Proverbs 15:6 – which was something they only ever did when they were really annoyed with one another. In the end they had left the house having to agree to disagree. Cherith, of course, did all the cooking and food preparation, and most of the washing up, as was appropriate for a minister’s wife, so she spent a lot of time in the kitchen. But Francie was the expert. He had started out life with his father as a kitchen fitter – McGinn’s, which still has its small showroom up there on Union Street, near the old Kincaid furniture factory. McGinn’s specialise, and always have specialised, in kosher kitchens, but unfortunately for Mr McGinn there aren’t that many Jews in our town – only two, in fact, as far as Mr McGinn is aware, although there may be others who don’t keep kosher, and one can only pray for their souls and for God’s forgiveness. There are not even that many Jews further afield – the only synagogue in the county, a fine example of Victorian optimism, was knocked down twenty years ago, to be replaced by a garage, a Chinese takeaway and a joke shop, Joyland, offering ‘Jokes, Magic, Tricks’, which is now itself derelict, good clean fun these days being about as unfashionable as religious orthodoxy. This meant that Mr McGinn had to travel far and wide for business, which was not convenient, but it was worth it. He’d gone into kosher kitchens because kosher kitchens meant two sinks. ‘And two sinks,’ he would say, with the kind of mad and unassailable logic that Francie himself had inherited, ‘are always better than one.’ Francie had met Cherith shortly after he’d given up the kitchen fitting, when God had called him away from installing kosher sinks with his father to the full-time saving of souls. It was not an easy calling. Francie had been brought up a good Catholic and he was the youngest of ten children, his parents having married when they were nineteen and his mother having been pregnant every year throughout her twenties. By the time she was thirty she looked fifty and Francie’s dad had finally put his foot down, told her it was time to shut up shop, pull down the shutters and put a stop to all the shenanigans: the house was never quiet, he said, and all the children were having to compete for attention. Some of Francie’s brothers competed for attention by drinking and staying out late at night with unsuitable girls, and his sisters were mostly given to tantrums, smoking, and bleaching their hair. Francie competed for attention by becoming very devout. He was a conspicuously good boy and when he grew up, he said, he wanted to be a priest. This made his mother happy. He gave up his priestly ambitions, however, when he was just sixteen and he attended a rally organised by the Assemblies of God. At the rally there was singing and dancing, and a full band with a drummer and percussionist and a six-piece horn section, most of whom were black and many of whom swayed as they played their wonderful, loud, joyful music. This was not the kind of colour or spectacle that Francie had ever seen at the Church of the Cross and the Passion, where it was regarded as pretty racy of Father Baird to persist in smoking his pipe on a Sunday and to claim to prefer the Mass in Latin, and where there had been much argument one year about the choir singing a modern setting of the Psalms. Attending the rally therefore had approximately the same effect on Francie as seeing stars in the daytime sky, or the feel of a woman stroking your thigh, a favourite fantasy of Francie’s ever since his piano lessons with a certain Miss Buchanan, lessons which required Miss Buchanan to squeeze up unnaturally close to her pupils on a small piano stool.* (#ulink_cf4c05c5-99ed-5a05-832e-1e8ce94209b5) It was a kind of ecstasy. From the Assemblies of God Francie soon moved on to the house church movement and by the time he was twenty-two he had left kitchen fitting to attend a bible college – a large old crumbling house in Hampshire with Portakabins in the grounds – where he had undertaken numerous feats of healing, many of them involving people with one leg mysteriously slightly shorter than the other, marathon sessions of speaking in tongues and the laying on of hands, and the studying of the Bible without the inconvenience of learning Greek and Hebrew. It was great fun. It was better than kitchen fitting. Francie preferred the Church to his family. He was no longer one out of ten. He was one in a million: he had been chosen by God. And by the time he returned home to set up a church of his own he was ready to choose a wife.† (#ulink_faac235d-9c5e-5496-86b8-d111949a2b58) He met Cherith while evangelising on the street. She was with a group of friends going to a nightclub – Scruples, in the basement of the Quality Hotel’s back-bar extension, a club which is long gone but which many of us still remember fondly. Francie had spoken to the girls about Jesus, and Cherith said she was a Christian already. ‘But have you asked Jesus into your heart?’ asked Francie. It was not an obvious chat-up line, but Cherith liked the way he looked her straight in the eye when he spoke, and she liked his honest and open smile, and to be honest Francie rather liked her long blonde hair and her small firm breasts. At the time he was twenty-two and Cherith was just sixteen. Two years passed in chaste and secret engagement, with Cherith attending Francie’s church, first in the Central School hall and then in the community centre on Windsor Road, and on the day of Cherith’s eighteenth birthday Francie presented himself at her parents’ in his best and only suit and tie, and asked for her hand in marriage. Cherith’s mother Barbara thought it was wonderfully romantic, while Cherith’s father Ron said – in private, to Barbara – that he’d rather his daughter married a drug dealer or a criminal than some weird religious cradle-snatching nut who was running a church which didn’t have its own premises. But when he discovered that Francie was an heir to the McGinn kosher kitchen empire he relented, welcomed Francie into the bosom of the family, and he and Barbara toasted their good fortune with a bottle of sparkling white wine. Cherith and Francie were married in the People’s Fellowship, which had finally moved to its own premises in the old Johnson’s Hosiery Factory, where the paint was still wet and the plaster still drying, and where a new blue plastic banner hung across the main entrance over the words ‘STOCKINGS, NYLONS, TIGHTS AND FLESHINGS’ carved deep into the granite. The new banner read, in white on blue, with stylised orange flames licking around the edges of the words: ‘GEARED TO THE TIMES, ANCHORED TO THE ROCK’. At the wedding Francie preached a sermon which focused on some of the more lurid and explicit passages from the Song of Solomon, and the Worship Band played their sweet spiritual music. Bethany was born nine months later. Bethany was their first and last child – Francie and Cherith both felt that there were so many needy people in the world and that the Lord had called them to minister to them, and so Francie had gone and had the op. Sometimes Cherith felt that they should have gone on and had a big family, but Francie had had enough of big families and he was not the best with children: he was a serious man, with weighty matters always on his mind, and his eyes fixed firmly on the glory of God. Cherith admired her husband and thought he was a good person, but she did sometimes wish that he would lighten up a bit. As for Francie, he often wondered how he had ended up a minister, since he was clearly such a bad person. He frequently found himself tormented by his impure thoughts, but this was not something he felt he could discuss with Cherith, who was a good person and who always wore long skirts below the knee, who never lost her temper, and who was placid in all matters personal and physical. The closest they had ever come to a frank discussion of their sexual needs and preferences had been a couple of years before when Cherith had asked Francie what he would like for a birthday present and Francie had asked for a video of the singer Shania Twain. This seemed tantamount to requesting under-the-counter hard-core pornography to Cherith, who bought the video nonetheless and who had convinced herself that her husband obviously needed to keep up with popular culture and music in order to be able to communicate effectively to the church’s young people. Late at night, when he was supposed to be preparing a sermon, Francie would sometimes sit in the dark, with the curtains drawn, and watch the singer perform. And he would wish he were performing with her. That night, the night of the Good Friday Carvery, Bobbie Dylan sang about Jesus coming into people’s hearts and filling them with joy, and about love overflowing, and as she stood there at the microphone, the lights shining upon her, her backing band chugging away in the background, the smell and the smoke of Tom Hines’s barbecued meats hanging in the air, it seemed to Francie that Bobbie was the incarnation of everything he had ever dreamed of: a sanctified version of a rock goddess. Before his Preaching of the Word Francie went to the Disabled toilet – which was doubling as Bobbie’s changing room – to congratulate and thank Bobbie for her performance. The two of them were deep in an embrace when Cherith walked in. There had been a long queue for the Ladies, as usual, and Cherith thought she could get away with using the Disabled. The Carvery went ahead as planned. Francie preached the Word. And Cherith went home and packed. * (#ulink_6a733e71-f353-5576-bbb3-8c82a50f3783) There are no sign-writing classes any more, of course – people like Wilkie the Gut, with his vinyls and self-adhesives, have put paid to them – and Colin himself has been reduced to mere painting and decorating in order to supplement his income. It’s been a comedown, for a craftsman. It took Colin about fifteen years to master the various skills of sign-writing, and these days he’s lucky if he gets to do the occasional bit of rag-rolling and marbling, or a Teletubby mural for a rich kid’s bedroom. He works out of a little shed in his back garden and over the door he’s painted the famous inscription from the entrance to hell in Dante’s Inferno, in a nice, simple, chiselled-edge Gothic: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter’. * (#ulink_ae6fcbb2-7978-5b2f-bd48-f257c0b3ab79) Barry McClean, the United Reformed Church minister who teaches Philosophy for Beginners at the Institute and who does not actually believe in God as such, would have called Francie’s a ‘believer’s faith’. ‘‘Credo quia absurdum’, as he likes to tell the ever dwindling numbers in his classes, ‘To believe because it is absurd. The believer’s ultimate reassurance. The final abandonment of reason.’ Barry’s own studies in philosophy and religion have alas brought him no reassurance of any kind, and the exercise of his reason had led him only to several obvious and depressing conclusions: that two contradictory statements can be true; that there is no rational order of things; and that the mind is incapable of knowing truth. As a consequence, Barry’s sermons – or ‘talks’, as he likes to call them – are rather lacking in conviction. And his evening classes can be confusing. * (#ulink_3fb66721-133f-573e-bbba-562488bd82dd) Miss Buchanan did this with everyone, in fact, male and female, as many of us in town could testify – it was nothing to do with Francie McGinn. It was a piano stool, after all. Miss Buchanan had never married and was good friends with – was a companion to, indeed – Miss Carroll, the town’s midwife, who was Miss Buchanan’s senior by twenty years. As Miss Carroll’s retirement approached, however, Miss Buchanan decided to marry Thomas Odgers, the auctioneer, whose daughter by his first wife was one of her pupils. Odgers, an old-fashioned man with wild ginger hair and mutton-chop whiskers, was rumoured to be seeking a son and heir. As is well known, Miss Carroll committed suicide shortly after her retirement and Mrs Odgers (n?e Buchanan) bore no children. On her husband’s insistence she gave up teaching the piano. † (#ulink_3fb66721-133f-573e-bbba-562488bd82dd) God had told Francie to choose a wife while Francie was at the bible college in Hampshire, by drawing Francie’s attention to a number of possible helpmeets among his fellow female bible students and tormenting him with 1 Corinthians 7 and constant thoughts of his filthy imaginings, and acts of self-arousal in his dormitory and the communal washrooms. Wisely, Francie had never allowed his own daughter, Bethany, to attend so much as a Youth Fellowship weekend away. 6 Massive (#ulink_6fc33793-322a-559b-bc71-076c19330cec) In which Paul McKee, a hindered character, works from home, eats biscuits and attempts to unleash his enormous talent There’s been a lot more weather recently – masses of the stuff – but the rain held off for long enough last week for Irvine’s Footwear, ‘Always One Step Ahead’, to be able to put in their new shopfront. There was nothing wrong with the old shopfront, actually, but as Mr Irvine explained to Big Dessie Brown’s daughter Yvette, a cub reporter on the Impartial Recorder conducting her first big interview for the paper – which was a success, which was praised by everyone, even the editor, Colin Rimmer, and which Big Dessie now has proudly magneted to the fridge – ‘Bigger windows showing more shoes means more choice means more customers.’ Irvine’s old hand-painted fascia has gone, then, with the stained-glass fanlight and the cracked plastered niches: IRVINE’S is now spelt in red plastic on white, and there are the obligatory pull-down metal shutters. It took two men just two days to rip out the old and bring in the new, and Mr Irvine is delighted with the results. Mr Irvine is getting on a bit now but he still likes to think of himself as a go-ahead kind of guy: he had the town’s first electric cash register, years ago, and he accepts all the major credit cards today, still something of a rarity among our few remaining small businesses and sole traders. Mr Irvine is a man who understands selling and who understands shoes: he has always had a feel for feet and Irvine’s has always been a popular shop, particularly among the wider-footed men and the narrower-footed women of our town. For a long time it was the best shoe shop around: now, of course, it’s the only one, if you don’t count the chain stores in Bloom’s, which we don’t. Irvine’s is the only shop between here and the great beyond where you can still buy all lengths of shoelaces and ladies’ brogues. Next door to Irvine’s is the old Brown and Yellow Cake Shop, which has retained its original wide windows, its little recessed entrance and its barley-sugar columns, and where, as well as the old brown and yellow cakes, they do baguettes and ready-to-bake garlic bread to take away, and hot and cold snacks, including a very popular bacon and egg morning sandwich – ‘Start the Day,’ says the handwritten fluorescent orange star-burst sign pinned to the front of the microwave, ‘the Right Way’, the right way in the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop being to load up your system with sugar and saturated fats and carbohydrates, and maybe a polystyrene cup or two of tea or instant coffee. The Lennons, Sean and Mary, who own the shop, like to keep their staff costs to a minimum, so they employ only two shop girls, Deidre, who is seventy-three and deaf, and Siobhan, who is seventeen and pretty typical. This leads inevitably to long queues, but in our town a long queue is not necessarily a disincentive to shop: indeed, it may be a recommendation. There are a lot of people around here who are more than happy to join the back of a long queue, and who feel a genuine sadness when they arrive somewhere and there’s no queue to latch on to: queuing in our town is a vital sign. If you’re queuing you’re still alive: you have something to be thankful for, you’re looking forward to the future, even if it’s only a nice tray bake for elevenses or a fresh floury bap with some soup for lunch. The Brown and Yellow Cake Shop is busy, then, as always, full with people on their way to work starting the day in the right way and celebrating their existence. Mr Irvine is buying a celebratory cream horn for later: he does love a cream horn and that new shopfront is certainly something to celebrate. Next along is Nelson’s Insurance, which always looks shut, and then Lorraine’s Bridal Salon and Tan Shop, which is shut and has been shut for some time because Lorraine has been in hospital again recovering from a mystery illness – they say it’s the slimmer’s disease and she certainly is thin, which should be an asset in her line of business, where every customer is watching weight and could do to lose some, but Lorraine is getting so thin now that people notice and comment, and not always favourably. It’s not good to be too fat or too thin in our town: about a maximum 38-inch waist and a 44-inch chest for a man and nothing below a size 10 for a lady. It’s not good to fall outside the average: it’s not good to stand out. We have noticeably few tall women in town, for example, and all our hairstyles lean towards the same, men and women. Even our ethnic minorities are not really large enough to be minorities: they are still individuals, which is just about OK. If you stray too far off the mean, or there’s too many of you, it’s best to move away: that’s what cities are for, after all. If you want to be different that’s fine, but we’d rather you did it somewhere we didn’t have to see you every day. Lorraine’s problem is the opposite, in fact, of her noticeably roly-poly father, Frank Gilbey, a man who stands out, but who can carry his weight, due to his age and his charm and his general assumption of seniority. If anyone in our town had ever used the word chutzpah – and the Kahans and the Wisemans may have done, but in private, so as not to shock, behind closed doors, tucked up in their kosher kitchens, provided by McGinn’s, our kosher kitchen specialists – they’d have used it about Frank Gilbey. Frank these days is a man under pressure – his appeal against the council’s refusal to allow him change of use for the Quality Hotel had become bogged down in the usual paperwork and bureaucracy, which Frank has no time for and which his solicitor, Martin Phillips, should have seen coming, and he’s facing a few cash flow problems as well, although nothing he can’t handle, he tells himself – but when he’s at his best, when he’s on form, you might say Frank is the kind of man who puts the ‘pah’ into chutzpah. Frank is a man whose influence and whose tentacles stretch far and wide in our town. In fact, there just aren’t enough local pies into which Frank can put his little fat fingers, so his grasp has reached as far as a share in a racehorse in Newmarket and a number of investment properties in southern Spain.* (#litres_trial_promo) Frank had set up Lorraine in the Bridal Salon and Tan Shop after her disastrous and painfully short marriage to the bad Scotsman, who said he was an actuary but who was also an alcoholic. It was a difficult time for Lorraine, who turned to sunbeds and to binge eating as a comfort, and for Frank, who was then still mayor, and for Frank’s wife, the town’s first lady, Irene. It was just lucky that Frank was such good friends with Sir George Sanderson, the proprietor of the Impartial Recorder, or the paper might have had a field day. On the opposite side of Main Street, the dark side, the opposite to the bridal side – what we call the Post Office side – an unnamed shop owned by an out-of-towner who may or may not be foreign and who employs sixteen-year-olds to run the place and who doesn’t seem to have invested too much in his staff training, sells cheap toilet rolls, king-size cigarette papers, novelty items and out-of-date foodstuffs. Next to them is what used to be Swine’s, the newsagent and sweetshop, which after fifty years of selling sweets from jars by the quarter has recently thrown in the towel and caved in to the inevitable tide of videos and instant microwave burgers. It was always a mystery to us as children how a man as miserable and as thoroughly unpleasant as the late Mr Ron Swine could preside over a place so magical and so beautiful and so full of delights. All those jars of liquorice and lemon drops and cherry flakes and dinosaur jellies seemed like treasures to us, locked up and kept in a palace by an evil giant, who begrudged handing over even the slightest of penny chew or gobstopper. The evil giant’s daughter, Eva, now runs the shop and she is a lovely sweet woman who waited until after her father’s death to change her name by deed poll, and she is patiently explaining to an old man who wants to buy a quarter of butterballs that Wine’s don’t do them any more. Eva had wanted to change her surname to something romantic and evocative, something like Monroe, or Hayworth, perhaps, but when it came to filling in the form she could hear the voice of her dead father nagging her about the cost of changing the shopfront, so she’d gone for the cheapest option and bought a pot of all-weather black gloss and gone out under cover of the night to erase the offensive initial. Of course, people from out of town sometimes get confused and locals have been known to set out to irritate and annoy Eva by going into the shop and asking for a bottle of Chardonnay or some cans of super-lager. Eva just shrugs it off: it’s a small price to pay for her freedom from the tyranny of some ancestor’s idea of a joke, or their job as a pig man. She suggests to the old man in search of butterballs that he try the Pick ‘N’ Mix up in Bleakley’s, the big department store in Bloom’s, the mall. The town’s only other old-fashioned sweetshop, and Wine’s only town centre competitor, Hi, Sweetie!, on Central Avenue, closed last year, on the site that is now Sensations.* (#litres_trial_promo) Next to Wine’s, where Main Street is slowly collapsing into the Quality Hotel, is the Select Launderette – motto, ‘Dirty Collars Are Not Becoming to You, They Should Be Coming to Us’ – which is full, today being Wednesday, half-price-for-pensioners day. Betty and Martha, who run the shop and who would, in fact, qualify for Wednesday’s generous discount themselves, if they’d ever admitted to their ages, or looked them, are just about run off their feet. Betty is known to Martha and to the regulars as Iron Betty, and Martha as Martha the Wash. The pair of them talk all day and listen to local radio, they have eighteen grandchildren between them, have recently both given up smoking and they have no intention of retiring, although they have started to shut up shop for an hour at lunchtime, so they can sit and nap in the room out back. They have worked together for thirty years, eight hours a day, and have never spoken a cross word. Just off Main Street, in South Street, builders are busy repointing brickwork, a postman delivers parcels, a dog squats at the side of the road and then trots on, and the man on the corner with a garden prunes his roses. Paul McKee watches them all from his bedroom window: Paul is unemployed. Paul is not from around here. He married Little Mickey Matchett’s daughter Joanne just over six months ago. It was a registry office job – presided over by Ernie King’s son Alex, who took over from Mrs Gait as registrar a few years ago now, and who has finally got the hang of it, the right kind of smile and the right signature* (#litres_trial_promo) – and it was close family only, and Paul had to hire a suit and he’s so skinny he couldn’t get one to fit. He looked pathetic, like a matchstick man, said Joanne’s mum, and not a groom. Joanne wore blue and did without a bridesmaid, but she had her little nephew Liam as a ring bearer. The reception was in the upstairs room at the Castle Arms, a venue which was not without its charms, as long as you overlooked the York Multigym and the punchbags, and the other boxing paraphernalia, including a three-quarter-size ring, which were used by the Castle Ward Amateur Boxing Club on Tuesdays and Thursdays. As long as you kept all the windows open the smell of the sweat wasn’t too bad. Paul and Joanne had met in Paradise Lost, where Paul was DJ-ing on Friday and Saturday nights: it was a handbag kind of a crowd, but Paul enjoyed doing it. The money was good and sometimes you do have to prostitute your art: his set list included the Jackson Five and James Brown for emergencies. Neither Paul nor Joanne believed in love at first sight, but it seemed to have happened to them, without the assistance even of mind-altering substances – which Joanne does not agree with – and they counted themselves lucky. Unfortunately, Paul lost the gig at Paradise Lost when he and Joanne went to Ibiza for their one-week honeymoon and he’s had trouble picking up anything since. He has big plans, though – he’s just in a period of transition at the moment. Joanne jokes at work that he’s a kept man, while Paul tells people that he is working from home, which he is, and he does, as much as anybody can: to be honest, he finds that there are too many distractions and too many biscuits for working at home to be a great success. Still, he’s working on a few things. He’s been trying to get a job in the music business, as a sound engineer or something, through a few contacts at the Institute. His tutor there was Wally Lee, a man with the occasional goatee and thinning hair swept back into a ponytail, a man in his fifties who wears stone-washed denim jeans and retro Adidas trainers, who sports a dangly earring, who wears sunglasses all year round and who has been known to wear leather trousers – in our town! – and who has no idea how he ended up here, who puts it down to amphetamines, who plays jazz at the Castle Arms on a Sunday lunchtime while people huddle over tiny wobbly tables and eat roast pork with boiled vegetables and mashed potatoes, and suffer Death by Chocolate, a man who has come a long way, who worked at one time as a keyboard technician on tours by Jean Michel Jarre and Chick Corea. Wally is an alcoholic, a dope fiend, and an incoherent and incompetent teacher, but he had inspired Paul, which can be a dangerous thing to do to young people in our town and which can lead to all sorts of trouble. Under Wally’s influence, Paul became determined that he was going to do something, that he was going to make something of his life. But first this morning he has to get up and make Joanne a cup of tea. It feels like a punishment, this, for Paul, a man who like many unemployed young men in our town only really comes alive around about midday, and who only begins to feel good when he has a beer in his hand after about six o’clock in the evening. He had a job as a fork-lift driver for about six months, but the hours were killing him – 7 till 6, five – days a week, for a measly ?200, through the books, which was the equivalent of just one night on the decks, cash in hand. Still, he put himself through it and he puts himself through this, the morning tea-making routine. Joanne has always said that she can get up and make her own tea – she’s only twenty-two years old, after all, and a feminist – but the one good thing Paul’s mum ever said about his dad was that he always used to make the tea in the mornings and so it seemed to Paul like the right and proper thing to do, a man’s job, an adult responsibility and no excuses. He listened to a lot of gangsta rap at home and tea making is not a big part of the whole gangsta rap worldview, but sometimes in life you have to make compromises. After tea in bed Paul actually gets up again, to set out the breakfast things: cereals, milk, toast, marg and jam, which is a one-up on his own absent father and more like the behaviour of a saint, frankly, than a DJ, let alone an Eminem in the making. While he’s sorting out the Shreddies, Joanne has a shower and gets dressed, and gets herself ready for work. Joanne has a job as a trainee catering supervisor at the hospital up in the city, which is long hours and shift work, but pretty good pay. When she’s on days she departs from the house at 7.30, leaving Paul ten hours before her return. When Joanne goes, Paul’s day can really begin: he goes back to bed for an hour, exhausted already from all the effort of tea making and breakfast. Then, around 9, he gets dressed and goes out to buy a newspaper. Eva’s rush hours are 7 to 9.30 in the mornings and 4 to 6 in the evenings, weekdays, and 9 till 12 on Saturdays. She shuts on Sundays, despite demand, because she is a committed Christian and has recently started to attend the People’s Fellowship, down round the back of the Quality Hotel. She likes the music and, like a lot of the older women in the congregation, she finds that she feels a motherly instinct towards Francie McGinn, particularly since his problems with his wife. She’s less keen on the speaking in tongues and the hand waving, but before taking up with the People’s Fellowship she’d been going to the Methodist for almost thirty-five years, during which time no one had said a kind word to her, she knew all the hymns back to front and upside-down, and she had grown tired of wearing long skirts and a hat – a knitted cloche that had belonged to her mother – so she was glad of the opportunity to wear jeans and a sweatshirt to services, and she figured that no church was going to be perfect. Eva doesn’t know Paul, but she doesn’t like the look of him – he seems to have this effect on many people. His eyes are close together, and his hair is shaved short, and he does wear gold chains and a sovereign ring, and sportswear, and a baseball cap pulled low, and she knows that this doesn’t necessarily make him a bad person, because she is a Christian and she tries to think the best of people, whatever they look like, but still she likes to keep an eye on him every morning when he comes in to choose which paper to buy – most people already know before they enter the shop, but Paul enjoys the privilege of being both unemployed and having had the benefits of a liberal education, having done the two-year course at the Institute in Music Technology with supplementary modules in Media Studies, so he likes to think he’s pretty media savvy. He takes a while choosing – suspiciously, in Eva’s eyes, who is unaware of his sophistication. Paul always considers, at least for a moment, the Financial Times, but he knows that that’s to come, a treat for later in life, when he’s big, somehow, and eventually he picks the Daily Mail. That’s enough of a stretch. He goes home the back way with his paper, along the lane between the houses, picking his way between the dog turds and the empty plastic cider bottles, and through the yard and in the back door, and goes into the kitchen. He spends a lot of time in the kitchen these days, smoking, making his plans, sitting at the breakfast bar staring out of the window, making cups of tea. One of the reasons why Joanne wants them to own their own place is so that they can have a nice big kitchen with fitted units and enough room for a table. Paul doesn’t mind the kitchen, actually – although there is a smell. Frank Gilbey, the landlord, claims he’s getting on to it. Joanne’s mother thinks it’s a disgrace: she thinks they should get on to the council. She does not agree with the standard of kitchens in private rented accommodation. She does not much agree with Joanne and Paul these days, in fact, and their life choices: she had hoped that her daughter might have had more sense than to marry an out-of-work DJ. Paul is not exactly the son-in-law she had imagined for Joanne, a bubbly, hard-working girl, with lots going for her and a good social life. Paul is pigeon-chested, a loner, has multiple body piercings and has been in trouble with the police several times, although fortunately Joanne’s mother does not know exactly how many times, or for how long. Paul was first in trouble when he was fourteen, when he was part of a scam involving bogus charity bags organised by his Uncle Michael. His Uncle Michael had seen the scam featured on an American daytime television talk show and he was so impressed that he decided to import it – Michael liked to think of himself as an entrepreneur. He bought a thousand heavy-duty black bin bags, got a mate to print up a few leaflets on his computer, dropped off the bags with the leaflets at homes all around the city, then just went back a few days later to collect the goodies, which he resold at markets and car boot sales throughout the county. It was like taking the proverbial candy from a baby. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/ian-sansom/ring-road-there-s-no-place-like-home/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.