Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  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.*

  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.*

  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.

  * 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.

  * See Bob Savory’s Speedy Bap!, chapter 12, ‘Sandwiches à la Turque’.

  * 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 Nîmes, 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.

  * 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 Fiddler on 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.

  * For a full account of the ongoing dog-fouling controversy, see the Impartial Recorder, ‘Letters to the Editor’, 1982–Present.

  * 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 (née 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).

  * 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 hym
ns, 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 2½ inches.

  Change to size 8 needles and continue to double rib until work measures 9½ 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).