Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  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’.

  *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.

  * Philosophy for Beginners, Week 1, ‘Ethics’.

  † Philosophy for Beginners, Week 2, ‘Metaphysics’.

  * 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

  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 o
f 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.*

  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’.* 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 Porsch
e 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.*