by Ian Sansom
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).*
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.*
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.*
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.* 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.