Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  ‘Davey, listen,’ he said.

  Bob often told people to listen, even though such an instruction was not usually necessary in the context of a conversation, but Bob always felt the reminder was a help.

  ‘I’ve a wee favour I need you to do for me.’

  ‘Well, big fella,’ said Davey, who had taken to addressing all his friends as big fellas, although strictly speaking, at six foot two, he was by far the biggest among most of us fellas. The phrase was a kind of verbal stoop. ‘It depends what it is. If it’s money you’re after’ – and he patted his pockets –‘I’m afraid I’m a little short at the moment.’

  Money was the big joke between Bob and Davey. Bob had so much of it and Davey none, the disparity was so large that the only way they could make sense of it was to laugh about it.

  ‘No, it’s not about money,’ said Bob. ‘But it is something I’d like to pay you for.’

  Now, Davey did not much like the way this conversation was going. You don’t pay a friend for a favour, even Bob Savory should have known that. But that was the whole trouble with Bob these days – he no longer seemed to be able to tell the difference between favours and business. In any small town there is a point at which favours and business inevitably begin to merge and this point is often on the golf course, or in the golf club bar, which is also the place where right and wrong frequently decide to give up their differences over a gin and tonic, and agree to find a more congenial and common way forward. Also – and you often notice this on the golf course as well – the rich have a kind of Tourette’s syndrome when it comes to money. They can’t help but talk about it. They no longer have control over it. The money begins to control them, like their spoilt and unruly children, invading every conversation.

  ‘I’ll come to the point,’ said Bob, while Davey finished the dregs of an instant coffee. ‘You know the Quality Hotel?’

  Davey did indeed know the Quality Hotel. Like everyone else in town, the hotel held fond memories for him, in Davey’s case memories of being sick in the toilets, from drinking too many Jack Daniel’s and Coke, and of head-butting a reveller on the steps of the concrete basement disco. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, we need to get rid of it.’

  ‘Right,’ said Davey vaguely. ‘Do we?’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Uh-huh. You’re losing me here, Bob.’

  ‘Listen, Davey.’ Davey was listening. ‘I’ve heard that there are small fires in there sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yeah. You know, you get dossers down there, sometimes, sleeping in some of the old rooms?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know how it happens exactly, but I suppose sometimes one of them might have been smoking and their cigarette end might not have been disposed of properly.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And whoosh!’

  ‘Whoosh.’

  ‘Yes. Might happen again. Any time. A big fire.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

  ‘Good. Well, let’s shake on it.’

  Davey was absent-mindedly extending his hand before he caught himself on.

  He noticed Frank Gilbey loitering by the headmaster’s office, listening in to their conversation.

  ‘Hold on, mate. Do you mean &’ He glanced at Frank Gilbey. ‘You mean you want me to …?’

  Bob raised an eyebrow.

  ‘No,’ said Davey. ‘No, no, no. Come on. I’m not getting involved in anything like that.’

  ‘OK,’ said Bob in businesslike fashion, wrapping up the conversation. ‘That’s fine. We need never speak of it again.’

  ‘Fine. Do you want another coffee?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘It’ll be like that other thing we never need speak of.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think’ – and Bob smiled at this point, relishing the sentence – ‘we both know what I’m talking about.’

  What Bob was talking about was the reason for Davey’s departure all those years ago, the reason he left town and never returned. The reason why Davey Quinn had left and which he’d thought he’d put behind him.

  * They struggled, the band, with an ambitious – some might say over-ambitious – programme including the William Tell Overture, ‘El Capitan’, ‘Trumpets Wild’, ‘Colonel Bogey’, ‘Amparito Roca’, ‘Hootenanny’, ‘I’m Getting Sentimental Over You’, ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ and an arrangement of themes from TV soaps. It was quite a racket, from a band who in their heyday were twice runners-up in the highly competitive annual regional schools brass and woodwind competition. Alan Netteswell – known as ‘Wobble Tit’ to band members – was conducting once again, though rather half-heartedly. Alan was our town’s peripatetic brass teacher for twenty-five years and he used to sweat buckets, thrashing the brass players into shape on Mondays after school, and Wednesdays from 7 till 9, but peripatetic music teachers were among the first to go in the local authority job cuts back in the 1990s, along with playing fields and sports, and Alan now works as a night supervisor at our local secure unit for young offenders, along with the school’s former groundsman and the part-time rugby coach. Alan hasn’t picked up his trumpet for years.

  * Spam has fallen out of fashion in town, of course, along with other tinned meats, and has been replaced largely as a sandwich filling by wafer-thin ham (see Bob Savory, Bap Express!, pp.94–101), which is hardly an improvement, but while on holiday in Hawaii some years ago Frank and Mrs Gilbey were astonished to discover that Spam is still highly regarded there. They even visited a restaurant that was entirely devoted to the cooking of Spam and it took a long time for Mrs Gilbey to wash the taste and the memory of the house speciality – Hot ‘N’Spicy Spam and Rice – from her mouth.

  * Like Francie McGinn, and like Davey Quinn, and like many of us here in town of a certain age, Bob’s first experience of sex, or the first whiff of it, was at the home of Gary Carville. Gary is known around town these days as a good cheap electrician – which he is – but when he was younger he was known primarily because his parents had been blessed with three lovely daughters, and Gary was the only boy, the youngest, and so he and his dad Ronnie, outnumbered two to one, had always welcomed other boys and men into the house with great enthusiasm, and so for many of us Gary’s was the first place we got to taste whiskey and Coke, and to view the naked female form on the pages of glossy magazines. A night of under-age drinking in the Castle Arms would often end with the suggestion to go to Gary’s, which meant food, videos, access to a cupboard in the kitchen by the back door filled with an apparently inexhaustible supply of alcohol, and possibly the sight of Gary’s sisters’ underwear hanging to dry in the bathroom, which to most of us meant much more than the unimaginables pictured in Gary’s stash of magazines. Even in those days Bob had managed to go much further than the rest of us and had taken the opportunity to get to know one of Gary’s sisters – the lovely red-haired Patricia – with whom he claimed, and we had no reason to doubt him, that he had spent many interesting afternoons on her candlewick bedspread. When Ronnie discovered what was going on we were all barred, alas, from the Carville house, and it felt like God expelling us east of Eden.

  10

  Print

  In which Billy Nibbs and Colin Rimmer become instant and rewarding companions, and go in search of drama and catharsis

  In summer, at night, it can sometimes be hard to get to sleep here. Not because of the sound of the cicadas, or the late-night café culture and the revelling and the parties, or the heat even, but because of the sheets. We still prefer man-made fibres, most of us, for most purposes, both in bed and out, even though they make you sweat like a pig and leave you all sticky. They don’t take as much ironing, that’s the thing, that’s why we like them. And they do keep their colour.

  When he can’t sleep in the summer because of the sheets and because the window in his bedroom doesn’t open – t
he frame’s been painted over too many times – Billy Nibbs lies awake sweating the ham out of his system and thinking about his heroes. Billy’s heroes have always been, in no particular rank or order, Che Guevara, James Stewart, Bono, Xena Warrior Princess, Nelson Mandela, George Orwell and the two journalists who broke the Watergate scandal whose names he’d long ago forgotten. Billy was a thoroughgoing cynic with a propensity to idolise the worthy dead; he was a typical pessimist, with the pessimist’s secret bedtime hope that this is in fact a wonderful life and that ours is a wonderful world, whose great wonder and whose secret have only been temporarily mislaid and are just waiting to be discovered, probably by Billy himself, when he’s half awake and not really looking. Which is why he liked working at the dump and why now he was working for Colin Rimmer on the Impartial Recorder.

  The Impartial Recorder was a newspaper which insisted on the simple goodness and simple Tightness of life, insisting upon it in the face of all the local evidence of wrong, all the graffiti, dog dirt, car crime and head-on crashes to the contrary. In the Impartial Recorder there were no big ideas, there were no ideologies and no purely evil days. There were only personal triumphs and tragedies, inconveniences rather than scandals, with a nice cup of tea always on the horizon and a boiled sweet in your pocket to keep you going. In the pages of the Impartial Recorder there was never any profanity, nor any superfine English, and nothing was incomprehensible. Even amidst the darkness there was always a Soroptomist’s meeting going on somewhere, an award being presented over a glass of sherry for sixty years of service to a voluntary organisation, an evening of old-time gospel music in a church hall, a charity trekker who’d lost twenty pounds and raised a thousand, or a civic delegation come to admire the way we do things here.* If a newspaper could be said to have a theme tune, the theme tune of the Impartial Recorder was Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes singing ‘Up Where We Belong’.

  But this was not necessarily what the paper’s editor, Colin Rimmer, felt it should be. He felt the paper’s theme tune should be something more like Bob Dylan singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, or the Clash playing ‘Police and Thieves’. Colin was a man who’d become the editor of an MOR newspaper which he despised, but which he’d been determined to transform; he’d set out to shake things up, like a young Elvis, or like Dylan going electric.

  ‘Journalism,’ he often told his staff, thinking this might impress them, ‘is the new rock‘n’roll.’

  Many of Colin’s staff have grown up with Eminem as a staple and it’s their grandfathers who listened to rock‘n’roll, but Colin was doing his best. He was the kind of editor who made a point of not wearing a tie, who read Private Eye and style magazines as well as The Economist, and who sometimes wore jeans to important meetings. He wasn’t exactly ripping up the rule book, but he was taking a stab at it. He was making an effort.

  On his appointment as editor, almost fifteen years ago, when he was still a young man, a young turk even, a tyro returned to town from stints with local papers outside the county and the occasional feature in a national, with a full head of hair and a set of Penguin Modern Classics to rival anyone’s in town, his own laptop and a whole load of newfangled ideas about tele-working, QuarkXPress™ and Photo-Shop™, Colin had set out his stall and made his changes. He’d managed to axe Spencer Bradley’s bat-watch column, and he’d decimated Blair Saunders’s weekly full-page bird-fanciers page and made it into a monthly. He’d also cut deep into the fat of the bowling and fishing pages, removing some of their vital organs, leaving them weak and incapacitated, but still just about functioning. He’d vetoed cricket and outlawed all mention of school football. He’d even managed to reduce the vast, swollen size of the weekly column written by Lesley Sanderson, the young wife of the newspaper’s grand and elderly proprietor, Sir George Sanderson, from 2000 words to 1000. Less, he had managed to convince her, was more. The magic word with Lesley – what had done the trick – was ‘minimalist’.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she’d agreed, her discreet diamonds and blonde highlights flashing in the fluorescence of Colin’s office, ‘like Philippe Starck?’

  ‘Exactly,’ he’d said. ‘Brevity is the soul of wit.’ And of lingerie, he’d thought to himself, but fortunately he’d had the self-discipline and foresight not to say so aloud. He might have had some absolutely bang-up-to-the-minute notions, but even he knew that it was not a good idea for a young editor to become involved with the proprietor’s wife.

  Apart from his initial changes, though, and despite all his big plans, the Impartial Recorder is substantially the same today as it was fifteen, or even fifty, years ago and for most of his readers that’s just what was wanted. There was still the one-page ‘Udder Bits’, the farming round-up page, and the stomach-churning, heavily sponsored ‘Forks and Corks’ bar and restaurant reviews, the weekly ‘Good Book’ bible study, and the interminable blurred photographs of weddings, anniversaries, eighteenth-birthday parties and charity events. Colin’s controversial editorial page – in which he had lambasted and attacked local businessmen and bureaucrats, farmers, doctors, teachers, social workers, church leaders, the police, celebrities, the nuclear family, gays, dog owners and the bearded – had proved a little too rock‘n’roll for our town and had lasted less than six months before the solicitors’ letters and letters of complaint had led to Sir George leaning on Colin to give it up, and so his opinions were now restricted, carefully leashed and legally vetted in his short column, ‘Rimmer’s Around’, and his dreams remained unfulfilled. He had imagined the paper as like a just and mighty lion, bestriding truth, protecting the pride and devouring those who sought to challenge it: instead, it was more like an earthworm passing mud. Rock‘n’roll the Impartial Recorder most definitely was not: a little bit country, maybe, and ever so slightly operatic, but mostly it was like old-time dancing. The Impartial Recorder remains a slow-foxtrot kind of a paper.

  But Colin did not blame himself for failing to live up to his own expectations. It was not in his nature to do so. He was a journalist, so he blamed other people, particularly the paper’s proprietor, Sir George.

  Sir George and his lovely wife Lesley live in a big house – the big house, really, the Manor – far out from our town, in the country. The town is basically where all the middle-income earners live, those of us who work in shops or offices, schools, factories, those of us who buy second-hand or flat-pack furniture and do DIY at weekends with the wrong tools, while outside town, in the country, is where the people live who work up in the city, or in the vast sugar-beet fields, people who have inherited furniture and tools, or their brothers’ wives. They are, quite literally, a breed apart.

  Sir George Sanderson is the complete and utter countryman, from the tippy-tip-top of his Burberry cap to the dirty scored soles of his six-hole brogues. He is a gentleman farmer who likes to hunt and ride, who uses Latin abbreviations in conversation and who’d been something in the City – even his wife isn’t sure what – and who is now a non-executive board member of several companies, which means many lunches in London, and so he is hardly ever seen around town, and if he is seen it’s in his slightly mouldy heirloom three-piece tweeds and a four-wheel drive. The fragrant and ubiquitous Mrs Sanderson, on the other hand, wears chunky hand-knits made by people with learning difficulties, and knee-length wellies, and she rides a mountain bike into town twice a week, in fluorescent lycra, and she keeps dogs and horses, and smokes cheroots and writes a column extolling environmentally friendly farming methods, young artists and the work of Paulo Coelho. She believes in the Glastonbury Festival, and recycling, and in plastic surgery for those who can afford it. Between them, in fact, Sir George and his wife pretty much cover all the bases for Colin Rimmer. He despises everything they stand for.

  But Colin had had to learn to rub along with them. They paid the occasional surprise visit to the offices of the Impartial Recorder, where they insisted – ‘No! Absolutely!’ – on drinking the instant coffee along with everyone else and Sir George cracked jokes wi
th the secretaries, and Colin was expected to visit them out in the country every couple of months, to drink Fair-Trade tea with Mrs Sanderson and to empathise with the plight of indigenous peoples, and to take a drop of whiskey with Sir George, and to reassure him that sales were good, that they weren’t spending too much on luxuries like tea and coffee, and that advertising revenue was on the increase.

  In his long career as a journalist Colin had found that he could rub along with just about anyone if he wanted to – it was whether or not he wanted to that was the question. Colin was a divorcee, a man possessed of few friends, many enemies and a wide circle of acquaintances. He had always believed in cultivating contacts and his contacts now outweighed anything that might properly be said to be a relationship by about a hundred to one.

  Billy Nibbs, for example, was a contact.

  As a good newspaperman, Colin had taken the precaution of getting to know Billy, in case anything ever turned up at the dump that might be of interest. Colin had no idea what this anything might be, but it might be something: weapons-grade plutonium had turned up before now on municipal dumping grounds, and bodies, and stolen works of art by Old Masters. Not in our town, of course, where it’s mostly old fridges, and damp hardboard – and hedging, but there was always a first time, and when the first time happened, Colin wanted to be there. Colin popped in to see Billy every few weeks – he worked through his contacts using his Rolodex on a monthly schedule – and Billy would make Colin a cup of tea over the gas stove in his hut and they’d talk.