Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  It was when she suggested that they spend Christmas in Tenerife, though, that Francie had to put his foot down. She’d tempted him with the idea of langoustine pool-side on Christmas Day.

  ‘Sure, ’ she said, ‘isn’t God there in Tenerife just the same as he’s here?’

  ‘Yes, ’ Francie had had to agree, but that was hardly the point. He was a minister and he had responsibilities.

  Bobbie had granted him that, but she insisted that they needed something to look forward to at Christmas, which is how Francie had ended up agreeing to her idea for the big Christmas Eve concert. She was calling it on the posters ‘The People’s Fellowship Annual Big Night Out, Featuring Bobbie Dylan and the Band’ in big font, and noting, in smaller font, ‘Featuring Also the Wise Men, the Virgin and the Little Baby J’.

  Francie ran his fingers through his gelled hair and looked up at the sky. God forgive him.

  * Central Avenue also now boasts our first and probably last sex or ‘adult’ shop – Sensations – on the site of what used to be Ted Ainley’s confectionery and tobacconist, Hi, Sweetie!, and before that, the Temperance Café (‘Dinners etc. Can Be Had on the Shortest Notice’). The Sensations window display features pink and silver balloons and streamers, suggesting that the façade might merely conceal a slightly offbeat Clinton Cards. Pastor Boyd Mann of the Bethel Free Baptist Church on Fork Hill has committed himself to standing vigil outside the shop until it’s closed down. Boyd sports leaflets and wears an old-fashioned ‘The Wages of Sin Is Death (Romans 6:23)’ sandwich board, which he picked up from a clearance sale up in the city, at a Baptist church which is now a cappuccino bar, but he has never in fact had the pleasure of confronting any of Sensations’ customers with leaflets or sandwich board, since they tend to wait until he’s gone for a coffee at Scarpetti’s before entering and buying their pink and silver balloons and streamers, or whatever it is that’s available inside. Trish Legge, the shop’s manager, simply avoids Boyd by using the entrance at the rear. Boyd’s wife, Lizzie, would quite like him to pack up the vigil and come home and help her out with their three young children, Japheth, Shem and Ham, but Boyd is actually quite enjoying himself – the vigil makes a nice change from door-to-door visiting and preaching sermons, and it’s a lot more fun than changing nappies.

  * Bobbie’s vision for the church, revealed in the interview, was a vision which resembled in large part and in almost exact detail the television programme Friends – a vision of comfortable intimacy, of good taste and good humour, the church as a kind of spiritual coffee shop with sofas. She believed in what she called a more ‘seeker-sensitive’ church, a church which responded to the needs of the person seeking God, a church which was ‘real’ and which ministered to each individual’s ‘inner child’.

  * Not everyone, however, approves. The People’s Fellowship has, in fact, recently come under fierce attack for its methods from Pastor Boyd Mann of the breakaway Bethel Free Baptist Church on Fork Hill. In his pamphlet, The Spiritual War for the Souls of Men, Pastor Mann – a former Hell’s Angel and motorcycle courier from Newtownstewart – groups the Fellowship together with Mormons, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, Scientology and Satanism, in presenting a threat to orthodox Christian teaching. The pamphlet is available from the Bethel Free Baptist Church, or from Boyd himself outside Sensations on Central Avenue, price £1.

  13

  Deep Freeze

  Containing a revelation

  The sky, Mrs Donelly herself might have said, was the colour of the back of a used teaspoon. It was a day already drunk to the dregs and all washed out. A typical day here: nothing much to report and nothing much on the horizon, only clouds, and biscuits.

  Mrs Donelly had led a quiet life, a used-teaspoon kind of a life, even by her own estimation. Anything she’d achieved she’d always dismissed, from a good apple pie with custard to the birth of her children to the chairing of a difficult council committee, and she always treated praise with the same ironic raising of a thin, pencilled-in eyebrow, whether it was praise from her children, from her colleagues, her employers, her husband, or even, as she sometimes liked to think, from the good Lord Himself. ‘Well, ’ she would say, ‘there you are now.’

  She had only ever worked part-time, to fit in around the children. Hers was what she and Mr Donelly both referred to as the ‘little job’, her job as a receptionist at the Health Centre, even though it was often her little job that had kept the wolf from the door and their heads above water. A few extra pounds a week can make a big difference in the raising of a family. It can mean the difference between, say, one fish finger or two in a sandwich, and the difference between patching a patch and a new pair of trousers. Every penny she’d earned had gone on feeding and clothing and caring for the children, and even when the children had left home and things had taken off and she became a councillor and had to attend evening meetings, Mrs Donelly always tried to put others first. She always made sure that Mr Donelly had something ready for his tea, for example, even if it was only a slice or two of wafer-thin ham, some buttered bread and some shavings of iceberg lettuce: the important thing was that there was something on the plate. Mr Donelly, of course, appreciated her efforts, and felt it was only right and proper. He didn’t want her to get too carried away with all the council business and get too big-headed.

  Mr Donelly could not abide big-heads. In the Castle Arms, if they were discussing some young footballer, say, who was playing at the height of his powers and earning lots of money and going out on the town with beautiful young women, and Big Dessie and Little Mickey Matchett and Harry Lamb the Odd Job Man were saying fair play to him and how great it was, Mr Donelly would just give a slight tut and a shake of his head, and that was enough of a dampener, enough of a reminder, to him and to them, that there were no heroes any more, that the age of chivalry was over and that the rich or the powerful were no more deserving of respect than anyone else. Like a lot of people here in town, Mr Donelly wasn’t exactly a socialist but sometimes he sounded a lot like one: here, where we are, socialism and pessimism are pretty much the same thing.* It doesn’t matter how many goals you score, or how much money you make, or whatever you’ve achieved, everyone is basically the same according to Mr Donelly and, frankly, if you’re looking for a hero you’re better off with a dog, because people are bad, but dogs can at least be relied upon, as long as they’re properly trained. Here in town people tend to take a post-lapsarian, pre-millennial view on most things: these may not be the End Times exactly, but they’re certainly closer to the End than when we were all young.

  Mr and Mrs Donelly had met long ago, in a Golden Age, when Mr Donelly was an apprentice at the printworks up on Moira Avenue, when men still worked with hot metal, and Mrs Donelly was working in the Carlton Tea Rooms, where the waitresses still dressed as waitresses and the diners wore gloves, and there were pure white tablecloths and a three-tier cake stand on every table. They’d met at church; they used to see each other at Mass. Mrs Donelly had stopped going for a while in her teens, but then she’d been so shocked at what had happened between her and Frank Gilbey that she began attending again. She wanted a new start in life. She’d believed for a while that what she wanted was the fast life that Frank Gilbey had to offer, but then she had realised that the fast life involved all sorts of complications and difficulties for a young woman in our town in the 1950s, so she settled for Mr Donelly instead.

  Mr Donelly was not just Frank Gilbey’s replacement, but his opposite. Where Frank had been all hard edges and cheekbones and energy and a big quiff, Mr Donelly was soft and friendly, just like a big bear, really, with his hair all muzzed up and wearing his dad’s old cast-offs. He was shy, modest and apparently thoughtful. When they were courting he used to bring her presents of pats of butter wrapped in newspaper, and eggs, and the occasional chicken – his parents were from up-country and he had that country way of speaking, and that manner, that Mrs Donelly had liked so much and eventually had fallen in love w
ith.

  There had been a downside, of course, to Mr Donelly and his country ways: Frank Gilbey he most definitely was not, thank goodness, but Frank Gilbey he most definitely was not, alas. Mr Donelly was lacking in a certain keenness of spirit and he was not what you’d call adventurous. When it came to holidays, for example, Mr Donelly believed that abroad was probably overrated, and not that much different from here, except somewhere else. He liked plain food, plain speaking and he could sniff out the slightest sliver of garlic in one of Wong’s Chinese takeaways or the faintest hint of cant in the Impartial Recorder, and he was not what you’d call a conversationalist, and he didn’t eat fish, not even on Fridays; there was just something about it he didn’t like, the smell of it, largely. But fresh fish doesn’t smell, Mrs Donelly had always insisted. It only smells when it’s going off. If it’s fresh, she’d say, it doesn’t smell at all. It does to me, Mr Donelly had always replied.

  For their wedding anniversary one year Mrs Donelly had booked them into a little French place up in the city: one of the girls at the Health Centre had recommended it. It was a gourmet night, where you ate whatever the chef prepared, and it was quite expensive, but Mrs Donelly thought they might push the boat out just for once. It wasn’t every day, as she’d had to explain to Mr Donelly, justifying the taxi fare and persuading him into his smart jacket, it wasn’t every day that you’ve been married for thirty years. The chef did fish soup as a starter. Followed by salmon. And then wild boar. Wild boar, it turned out, was one of the other things Mr Donelly did not much like. The evening was not a great success. After that, they stuck to Scarpetti’s and the occasional Set Menu B from Wong’s, without the garlic.

  (Just for the record, though, so that he doesn’t sound small-minded, which he is not – he’s just sure of his opinions, which is a welcome privilege of middle and old age, after all the embarrassments and uncertainties of youth – Mr Donelly, it should be said, also dislikes politicians, cat lovers, litter louts, whom he calls ‘litter louts’, men who wear earrings and children who are rude, precocious, or noisy.)

  Mr and Mrs Donelly’s own children had not been rude, precocious, or noisy. Well, rude, maybe, when they were younger, and noisy, but definitely not precocious. None of them had been a big-head, which was a major achievement, in Mr Donelly’s book. Preventing big-headedness: this was an important aim and intention of parenting, according to Mr Donelly. None of Mr Donelly’s children thought that they were better than they were. They knew their place. And as it turned out their place was far from here: one of them was in America, one of them was in London and one of them was travelling the world. Mickey lives in town, of course, but he is married to Brona, who clearly has her eyes set elsewhere: once she’s done her training as a beautician and the children have to start school, she’d quite like them to move to Huddersfield, to be near her parents, or even to Manchester.

  Mrs Donelly had been thinking a lot about her children recently, all of them. She was sorting out her will. She’d been very well organised. She had all the documentation carefully arranged in a manila folder. She’d started sorting things out as soon as she’d known. She was diagnosed in the November of last year and by March she had all her personal effects sorted. She’d started going through her wardrobe, throwing out anything she hadn’t worn for a year or more: she certainly wasn’t going to be needing it now. She cleared her drawers and began using up old tins in the cupboards – good-intentioned foods, mostly, like kidney beans. They ate a lot of chilli con carne.

  She’d started on the baking back in May, after they’d given up on the chemo. She didn’t want to leave anything too late, to chance, or to Brona, who’d be happy with a shop-bought cake and a couple of quiches from Marks. She made tarts and pies and cakes and some sausage rolls. She filled her own freezer, and then she had to ask Pat to take one or two items. And Brenda. And Big Anne. She didn’t tell any of them she was leaving food with any of the others and she didn’t tell them what the food was for. She just said she was getting ready for Christmas early and she’d run out of room in her freezer. They all had grown-up children now, so they all had spare capacity, and they understood. None of them refused. None of them asked questions. In our town, even when the children have all grown up and gone away, the women still plan Christmas like it’s a military campaign, so no one was surprised when Mrs Donelly said she was stocking up early, getting a few bits done in advance. Indeed, what happened was that they all started stocking up too, adding to the usual store of crackers and wrapping paper and Christmas napkins bought half-price in the January sales and tucked under the bed, so that by October there were enough trays of mince pies on ice around our town to feed Santa and all his elves for a month.

  So the food was prepared and frozen, and Mrs Donelly was ready, pretty much. She knew she was going to be in hospital by about September, so in August she went to see Martin Phillips to deal with a few last things.

  Martin Phillips keeps his offices in one of the less salubrious areas of town, down the end of the optimistically named Sunnyside Terrace, which is tucked just within the ring road and which backs on to scrubland, and which is a street where the pubs have no windows and where a lot of the windows have no glass and where the floodlit petrol station on the other side of the ring road serves as the only local amenity and corner shop. Martin Phillips keeps offices there because it’s cheaper and it’s good for business, because he’s closer to his clients.

  He lives on the other side of town himself, naturally, and he likes to begin every day with a run round the golf course, and then back for a shower and a bowl of muesli. He’s a small, slim man of fifty-five with the body of a twenty-five-year-old – not bad for here, where the reverse is usually the case – and he still has a full head of hair which was last styled in the 1970s. He always wears smart-casual clothes, the same at home as at work: he’s aiming for, and achieving, the look of an off-duty pilot, with the assistance of his wife Lynn, who buys most of his clothes, except his novelty socks and boxer shorts, which he likes to choose himself. Lynn takes care of the children, children Martin had never really understood or particularly liked, and who felt exactly the same about him. Two daughters. He’d really have liked a son, and it’d been a great relief to him when the girls reached their teens and had started bringing boyfriends home, and he could talk to them about cars and motorbikes and football, and make manly jokes, often at the expense of his wife and daughters. His daughters’ boyfriends always got on well with Martin Phillips. His daughters and his wife, on the other hand, thought he was a creep.

  Martin was always in the office first. He made a point of that. It was a responsibility. Also, it meant that he could avoid the school run. Being stuck in the car with the children with nothing to say and having to listen to their music depressed him: it was a bad start to the day. Being in first to the office gave him the psychological advantage. He imagined that his receptionist and his secretary envied him. His business partner, ‘Big’ Jim McCartney, didn’t usually arrive until 10, having dropped off his own children at school. Unlike Martin’s children, who attended Barneville House, Jim’s attended Central, which suited Martin. He and Jim were equals in the partnership. But he felt – and he felt it was pretty obvious, actually, to anyone who cared to examine the evidence – that he was the de facto senior partner.

  Every morning, after opening up and putting on the coffee, Martin switched on his computer, flicked through the post and he was ready for the day. ‘Bring it on, ’ he would say to his secretary, Laura, when she arrived with the first set of briefs and documents. He said this to her every day. And then he always cracked his knuckles. It was driving her crazy.*

  On the morning of her trip to see Martin Phillips, Mrs Donelly had taken a long walk into town. The Buzy Bus was far too busy in the mornings for anyone except lazy schoolchildren to tolerate it and, anyway, Mrs Donelly had always resented the spelling. She strode in – and she could still stride, she was happy to report – past landmarks long gone. Past Carpe
nter’s the tobacconist’s, where her father used to buy his pipe tobacco for himself and the Gallaghers for her mother, both of them, alas, dead of cancer by the time they were sixty; and past Priscilla’s Ladies Separates and Luxury Hair Styling, where Priscilla herself had done her hair for twenty years; past Gemini the Jewellers, where Mr Donelly, after some prompting, had bought her an eternity ring for their thirtieth wedding anniversary; and Carlton’s Bakery and Tea Rooms, where she’d had her first proper job; and past good old Hugh Nibbs the butcher; and Noreen Orr’s dad’s shop, the shoe shop, Orr’s, where she’d bought the shoes for her wedding and Mr Orr had given her a discount, which is the kind of thing you never forgot; and then the Quality Hotel, still the town’s focal point, tethering High Street to Main Street, its domineering presence still helping to make sense of the mess the town had become.

  Mrs Donelly’s appointment was at 9.30. She had fifteen minutes. As far as she could remember she’d never been late for anything. She’d certainly never been late for Frank Gilbey. She always thought of him here, going past the Quality Hotel. Frank had been a man of such charms back then, and she’d been pursuing him for so long, at dance after dance, that when he finally suggested they walk home together she’d agreed, although she’d known, of course, where it was leading – leading towards the garden of the Quality Hotel. The gardens were surrounded by a high wall – the same wall she was passing now, which was covered in billboards advertising Bloom’s, ‘Every Day a Good Day Regardless of the Weather’, and which was now black with age and covered with graffiti, but which had once been whitewashed a pure white white. It had once been possible to penetrate these walls, on payment of a small sum to P. J. Bradley, who was one of the porters, and who ran a number of scams and schemes out of the hotel. It was possible for young lovers to gain access to the gardens, entering through the kitchen delivery entrance round on Tarry Lane. Three knocks, and a couple of shillings, and you were in. Mrs Donelly had never been into the gardens before. She’d heard other girls talk about it in hushed tones in the Carlton Tea Rooms, and at the dances in the hotel and at Morelli’s, but she could still remember the first night she entered, thinking it was one of the most beautiful places she’d ever seen.