Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  By Easter the school will be closed, the school that Mr Swallow has presided over for thirteen years: long enough to see the first of the sons and daughters of former pupils returning to years 1 and 2, pupils who, like all the others, must now be reschooled, who must make the trek out to the new school with its squeaky-clean anti-climb – and anti-graffiti-painted walls separated from the rest of the town by four lanes of traffic and a few quick-growing conifers. Miss Raine will be going into teacher training, where she belongs. But Mr Swallow is doing the honourable thing. He’s going down with the school. He’ll be taking early retirement, to lick his wounds and to mend his broken heart. A school can break your heart, if you let it. A school is capable of exciting every human emotion and fulfilling none. A school will take everything you’ve got and show you no mercy. It knows no sympathy, cares nothing for your cares and grants no favours. Central was Mr Swallow’s first headship and it will be his last, and he knows that he has failed himself and the children, which is a terrible knowledge. He doesn’t say anything about it, because he is not a man given to self-pity and he does not have the time, but his wife knows how he feels, he doesn’t have to tell her, and once the school has closed she wants them to move away from town and make a new start. She has a sister in Australia whom she hasn’t seen for twenty years and she’s suggesting a three-month trip away, with a stopover in Singapore going out and Los Angeles on the way back, and spend the money and worry about it later. She’s had enough of responsibility. She’s had enough of a grumpy husband with hair going greyer every day, made a scapegoat and a laughing stock by people who didn’t know the meaning of hard work and dedication. The man she married, the man who was appointed head, was a young man with big ideas, and enough skills and enthusiasm to fire people up and make the place work, even a place like Central. But he had been betrayed by the times and it had aged them both, and she doesn’t want to be around in the aftermath: there is already speculation in the Impartial Recorder that the site will be sold off for redevelopment as another multi-storey car park, in an attempt to regenerate the town centre, which is a bit like trying to revive a failing marriage by taking other lovers. What the town centre needs no one can give it back. What the town centre needs is its past. It needs its heart. What it needs is its school.

  It was the big farewell concert last week. Former pupils were invited to return and the school band was re-formed specially for the occasion.* There were speeches and an auction, with proceeds going to the very education authority which had forced the place to close, an auction at which Mr Swallow himself was expected to wield the gavel. It was the final humiliation and it stuck in the throat. A headmaster selling off his own school’s tables and chairs: the Impartial Recorder published the picture on its front cover. Even Joe Finnegan, the lensman, felt uncomfortable with that one. Mr McGee’s pickled snake fetched £50. Blackboards were going for £40. Music stands were £5 apiece, trophies and shields and school uniforms were sold in sets and boxes, and the piano went to Dot McLaughlin’s Happy Feet dance studio for £150. A set of four Duralex glasses cost Billy Nibbs £1.

  A lot of people managed to make it for the ceremony, and this in a town where it can sometimes be difficult to gather enough people together for a party, even if you’re offering free drink and nibbles: it just depends what’s on the telly. We are people who are averse to gatherings of any kind, suspicious of the motives of anyone who organises or enthuses outside the traditional 11-till-1 slot on a Sunday morning, and distrustful equally of politicians, amateur theatricals, joggers and people shaking tins for charity. Even the Freemasons have never really got a hold in our town – you could wait a long time here for a funny handshake. This is a town where people who play bowls are viewed as radicals. Young people are allowed out until they’re twenty-one and then they’re expected to knuckle down, draw the curtains by 6 p.m. and watch television until retirement, when some tea dancing or perhaps a long-awaited cruise will be permitted.

  But last week there were cars parked the length and the breadth of High Street and some people, they say, came from as far afield as London, people who are known to have second homes and who are on to their second husbands or wives, and who’d heard the news on the grapevine, or on the telephone from their ageing parents, and had decided to make one last journey to lay memories to rest, and perhaps to marvel at the sight of older and fatter and less successful friends and their clearly unsuitable spouses. Cards of commiseration and best wishes were read out from former pupils who couldn’t make it, those who have escaped entirely – the lucky citizens of America and Australia, and some of the former Soviet republics. It seems people are prepared to go a long way to get away, and then they spend half their time wishing they were back.

  There were couples there that night in the school who had come to visit the sites of earlier conquests and romances, and the changing rooms and the bike sheds, it is said, echoed to the sounds of passions past and present. There were also people who wished simply to walk down dark corridors, and to stand at the front of empty classrooms, and to remember how much they hated The Canterbury Tales and the periodic table. People were lining up in front of blackboards to do impressions of Miss McCormack and Gerry Malone, and there was much sitting on radiators and reckless smoking, and the staff room, of course, was packed all night, as was the headmaster’s office. Many people lay down on the bed in the nurse’s room, and there was the general unscrewing of room numbers and coat pegs – there was even an attempt to remove a water fountain from outside the science block.

  Frank Gilbey cut through the crowds that night and of course everyone was pleased to see him, teachers and former pupils alike, although he had been an unremarkable student nearly half a century ago: he was in the ‘listeners’ group in the choir, which meant he wasn’t allowed to sing; he was never chosen for any teams; and he was in neither the top nor the bottom streams in any of his subjects. You would hardly have noticed Frank at school, in fact. Not like now.

  Frank, these days, is unmissable. He is quite a character. That’s how Frank describes himself to himself when he looks in the mirror – ‘quite a character’. He has the maturity now, the strength to carry it off, his character, to shoulder the weight of his own personality. Frank’s character these days weighs about eighteen stone, give or take a few pounds, is balding and sixty, and it wears a vicuna overcoat, a tailored shirt and jacket, smart slacks and the proverbial tasselled loafers. Frank’s character has grown in direct proportion to his wealth, which is now substantial and which in a town like ours goes a long, long way.

  Frank actually refers to himself, disarmingly and in company, as ‘Big’ Frank Gilbey, for obvious reasons. He looks a bit like the Incredible Hulk grown old – although he isn’t green, obviously, he’s more a grey-brown-salmon sort of colour, a colour somewhere between pink pebbles and concrete. He was a handsome youth, Big Frank Gilbey, pretty, almost, pale and fine-featured, features which have, of course, coarsened and grown thick with time, and which these days look like they have been painted on with wide, heavy brush strokes. He has the look of a self-portrait in oils, a look that can only be achieved through years of heavy smoking, fried food and wilful self-neglect. He has what one might almost call an upholstered face, a face, in fact, like the sourdough bread in the River Café Cook Book (One), a book which Frank bought Mrs Gilbey after one of their weekend city breaks to London, after they had enjoyed a classic meal of zuppa di cannellini con pasta, risotto al tartufo bianco, and torta di polenta con pere e miele (Mrs Gilbey had kept the menu), overlooking the River Thames, and ‘Well,’ Frank had said, as he often did when he was enjoying himself, so as not to forget, ‘this is the life’ and Mrs Gilbey had agreed, although she couldn’t really see the point of London, to be honest.

  Frank likes London, but he loves New York. New York is Frank’s kind of city. He was telling people, at the school closure, who were asking him how he was and what he was up to, about his recent trip to New York with Mrs Gilbey, for one of their city bre
aks, for which they are renowned, and which are considered the height of sophistication in our town. A city break, for us, is the equivalent of a Grand Tour, available only to couples on double incomes, the rich retired, or the independently wealthy, of whom we have few.

  ‘New York,’ Frank was telling anyone who asked, after he’d told them all about his theories about 9/11, ‘is my kind of city’ and everybody knew what that meant.

  Frank loves everything about New York, but then he loves America in general – the attitude, the clothes, the rock‘n’roll music, the large portions. He had a plate of nachos once – this is funny – just as a starter, on holiday in Florida, and the plate was so big, and it was piled so high, he got Mrs Gilbey to take a photo of him trying to eat it, and it’s there, in another book of the photos that they never look at, but which Mrs Gilbey continues to buy and to fill and to label, year on year, cheap photograph albums documenting the life and the good times of Mr Frank and Mrs Irene Gilbey (née Nicholson), and their lovely daughter, Lorraine. Frank’s little pink head is peeking over a small mountain of tortilla chips topped with bright yellow melted cheese, his little red eyes sparkling in the flash.

  Frank has been to America many times – New York, and LA, and Toronto, which doesn’t really count, but Mrs Gilbey had insisted, because she thought she might prefer it, because it was supposed to be cleaner and more like Europe, but it wasn’t and she didn’t. It’s Florida they’ve been to mostly, doing fly-drive holidays with Lorraine. Sometimes Frank wishes he had been born American, but he’s done his best to make himself over. As a young man he loved Elvis, and he’d stuck with him right through the Las Vegas years, sporting a quiff and sideburns until about 1987, when Elvis was decent in his grave and Frank’s property business had started to grow, and he’d moved on to the town council and he needed a new image, and he started to model himself more on Marlon Brando in The Godfather. Mrs Gilbey told him once, on one of their city breaks, to Edinburgh, where they stayed in a nice four-star hotel with a pool, that as he grew older he reminded her a little bit of Gene Hackman – she didn’t say in which film, but Gene Hackman was pretty close to Marlon Brando, and about as close as Frank was ever going to get, and he really thought that was one of the nicest things his wife had ever said to him. Frank drinks vodkatinis in the golf club, and at home at the weekends he eats pastrami sandwiches, ‘on rye’, as he likes to say to Mrs Gilbey, although you can’t actually get rye bread in our town, but the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop does a nice wheaten, which is a close approximation, at least in terms of density, and Mrs Gilbey always tries to have one for him in the house, in case he takes the fancy. Pastrami you can get, of course, fresh off the shelves at the supermarket up in Bloom’s, but Mrs Gilbey is not a fan. She says pastrami is just Spam with a fancy name.* Frank and Mrs Gilbey maintain separate space in the fridge: she has her low-fat ready-meals and her cottage cheese and her Philadelphia Light, and the medicine she has to take for her diverticulitis, and Frank has his pastrami and his salami and his stinky cheeses. They share a taste only for gassy lager and Australian chardonnay, which they keep next to the milk and help themselves to. And as in the fridge, so in bed: Mr and Mrs Gilbey have slept singly for about twenty years, coming together only occasionally when they have shared enough of the lager and the chardonnay for them to forget and for it not to matter. Mrs Gilbey tells Frank it’s because of his snoring, but actually, right from when Lorraine was little, she’d wanted her privacy at night – she couldn’t stand him going on about all his deals and his plans and the intrigues – and she really can’t stand to see him naked any more. She’d never truly enjoyed that side of the marriage.

  At the school closure Frank was not dressed, as he was usually, like a mafia don. He was dressed more like somebody out of an L.L. Bean catalogue – button-down shirt, a V-neck jumper, chinos and a braided leather belt. Frank recommends L.L. Bean to all his friends at the golf club and L.L. Bean is now quite big around here, among those who drive company cars and are in the know, making Frank responsible for what the town looks like in several senses. With his property companies and all his power, and his hairdressers, lingerie shops and his elegance, Frank has determined both our architecture, our women’s hairstyles and underwear, and our gentlemen’s attire. Frank also uses words like ‘movie’ and ‘ass’ and ‘gas’ when the English equivalents would do, but this has not caught on. On the whole people here still prefer to use English.

  Frank’s casual clothes that night, though, were a disguise, because he was at the school strictly on business. Like most of the people who were there, Frank was looking for closure. He wanted to keep an eye on Bob Savory, who had kindly agreed to undertake some business on his behalf.

  Bob was trying to strike a deal with Davey Quinn. Bob and Davey go way back – to football, mostly, but also to school, and before that, even, to BB. The aim and purpose of the BB, the Boys’ Brigade, an aim and purpose which Bob and Davey had learnt and recited as children, was ‘The Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom Among Boys and the Promotion of Habits of Obedience, Reverence, Discipline, Self-Respect and All that Tends Towards True Christian Manliness’. In practice, the promotion of the habits of True Christian Manliness involved playing Kim’s Game, marching around a large hall in a blue uniform on a Tuesday night and learning how to cook pineapple upside-down cake. In our town, this is what we mean when we talk about Advancing Christ’s Kingdom.

  Bob Savory did not himself believe in God, even at an early age. God did not figure large in the mind or the life of even the high-stepping, blue-shirted, five-year-old BB Bob Savory. Bob was an infant atheist: the world, as far as Bob could see, was a given and he saw no need to seek a cause. Bob himself was all the cause he needed: he was self-sufficient from an early age, going so far, as his mother had once liked to boast to her friends, as wiping his own bottom before the age of two, quite an achievement in our town, where until recently most of our mothers stayed at home tending to the personal needs of their infants, and where potty training was therefore quite often long postponed, especially for the boys, who never quite caught up with the girls in the long race to maturity. As he grew older, though, the precocious and bottom-wiping Bob became the determined, the driven and the self-starting Bob, the Bob of local sandwich legend, the Bob who did not suffer fools gladly, who always got what he wanted, and who saw the need to believe in God as a sign of weakness to which some of his more feeble-minded friends, colleagues and employees were ‘inevitably prone, just as some of them were prone to support Manchester United, or to commit acts of petty crime, stealing jars of mayonnaise, say, or remnants of ham-on-the-bone. Religion, Bob believed, was a kind of disease, a bug or a parasite that resided in the minds of the weak, the sad, the lonely, the merely salaried and the hopelessly unsuccessful. God was, to Bob, just a common nonsense, like the common cold and depression, and a strong will was enough to keep them all at bay. Even when his father was dying – indeed, particularly when his father was dying – Bob did not for a moment tolerate the idea of a God. He was appalled by his mother’s incredulity, which had become worse with her Alzheimer’s, a disease which Bob believed, like God, was a kind of weakness that people were either prone to or not.

  Bob was not prone. Bob was mentally fit and healthy, and he intended to stay that way. He read the Financial Times from cover to cover every day, and inspirational business books, which he bought by the dozen, and he avoided all weakness in his life – he did not smoke and never had, and he hardly drank, except in occasional lonely bouts of self-punishment. No one had ever seen Bob drunk: then again, no one had ever seen Bob smile. Bob did not indulge and did not imbibe. He firmly believed – and he believed that he had been proved right, on the clear evidence of his success – that at a business lunch, say, the refusal of even a social glass of wine marked a man out as an individual of peculiar strength of character.

  ‘You set the trend, Bobbie,’ his mother had told him when he was young, when boys at school had teased him because his blazer w
as of a cheap nylon and he received free school dinners. And Bob has set the trend. These days we’re all of us eating out of the palm of Bob’s hands. These days, at £2.99 for a triangle pack of deep-filled BLT, Bob is making us all pay. In the world of the sandwich Bob is like God Almighty, and in the world of the Irish-themed restaurant he is – as he had occasionally been heard to announce to the staff at the Plough and the Stars – Jesus H. Christ.

  The closest thing to a weakness – if you could call it a weakness – in Bob’s life was sex. Bob enjoyed sex in much the same way that other people enjoyed smoking or drinking, which is to say often, carelessly and at some personal expense.*

  Things had begun to go wrong for Bob recently, though, regarding sex, and he could pinpoint exactly when it had happened, when the problems had started, during a moment of passion with one of his waitresses, a girl called Christine, who had large thighs and was only filling in during the summer holidays, before going back to university to study Accountancy. Bob liked Christine – he joked with her that maybe when she was qualified she would like to come back to work as his accountant, an idea that appealed to Bob, who was excited by the idea of being able to combine his two favourite pursuits – sex and money. His own accountant, Finlay Maguire, had a moustache and played rugby at weekends, and Bob was many things, but he was not – as was sometimes rumoured around town, because of his age, and because he’s still unmarried, and because he wears clothes that fit – he was not a man who kicked with the proverbial other foot. Except that on that fateful night, during his close embrace with Christine, Bob had found himself thinking about Finlay Maguire, and it came as a moment of terrible shock to Bob and not something he could easily explain to himself. No one in town would have believed it, if they’d known, and certainly none of us would have suspected. Davey Quinn, for example, had no idea, even though he and Bob went back a long way, which is why Bob was allowed to – but was dreading to – ask Davey what he was about to ask him.