Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  Thinking about it now, what Cherith had admired about Francie, the reason she’d married him, was that he was prepared to make himself into a kind of holy fool: he was willing to take risks and he knew it was OK to make mistakes, because he knew he was a miserable sinner. Francie was not scared of the world and its ways: his only judge was God. Cherith knew him to be essentially a decent person seeking to work out his salvation. Unfortunately, she knew him also to be hypocritical, treacherous, unreliable and a shameless adulterer.

  But as for Sammy, well, Cherith wasn’t sure that she knew him at all, who he was, what made him tick, or what he wanted. She’d become increasingly concerned about all the time he was spending in the spa pool. He used to disappear in there for a couple of hours on a Wednesday night when she was taking her classes in ‘Emotional Intelligence for Couples (Gays and Lesbians Welcome)’ and she used to wonder what he was doing while she was talking about the waves and cycles of relationships, and encouraging people to open up to each other and share. When she asked Sammy what he’d been up to, he’d always say, ‘Oh, nothing much’ and that was it, end of conversation. At least with Francie he’d have claimed to have been praying to bring in the Kingdom of God. She was beginning to feel that she could have done with doing the course in ‘Emotional Intelligence for Couples (Gays and Lesbians Welcome)’ herself.

  To her surprise the course had indeed attracted a middle-aged couple from out of town, two women, Wenda and Clare, who didn’t actually say they were lesbians – they didn’t wear badges – but who Cherith could only assume were lesbians, because they both wore matching car coats and mannish shoes, and one of them had her nose pierced. Wenda, the pierced one, is fifty and works in the in-store bakery at the supermarket up in Bloom’s. She’d been married for over twenty years and raised two children before she had the nerve to give it up and follow her heart. Her heart had led her out of town and into the country and to Clare, who is ten years older and a full foot shorter and wider than Wenda, and who is a woman who seems never to have entertained any doubts about herself or anything else. She had been a civil servant at one time, and then-she’d helped found and run our local Credit Union, the first in the county, up there on the Longfields Estate, which has brought to many of us here our own affordable three-piece suites, reasonable loan terms and taught us how to consolidate our debts. In any realm or endeavour Clare is not a woman to be argued with – a former senior clerical officer with a strong social conscience, a demon of efficiency – and the cottage she now shares with Wenda out at the Six Road Ends is both cosy and immaculate, decorated with photos of Wenda’s children, old civil rights posters and other things that reminded Clare of the 1970s: rattan furniture, Joan Baez record covers and macramé, mostly. In the 1970s Clare had been at perhaps her most beautiful and most determined. A photograph of her in a silver frame which stands on the telly shows her holding an ‘Official Picket’ sign outside the Department of Health and Social Security, looking for all the world like our own local Yoko Ono, in a duffel coat and glasses. Wenda and Clare had no real place in Cherith’s class: they didn’t belong there. They already seemed to know all the answers.

  Yet even they had been going through a rough patch recently – even they, who are lesbians, probably, and who you might have thought, therefore, had already ruled out half the problems in any relationship. They’d been arguing, which they had never done before, and so they weren’t quite sure how to do it; they’d not established any ground rules. Wenda believed storming out and door-slamming to be acceptable, but Clare did not, while Clare favoured sulking and silences, which offended Wenda. Their arguments stemmed from little things, mostly, and they were having to face up to the complications and strains of any long-term relationship. Clare had been trying to give up smoking, at Wenda’s insistence, and Wenda was unhappy at work in the in-store bakery, work which she felt was demeaning for someone who’d read Jeanette Winterson, and she had been trying to resolve her relationship with her elder daughter, who’d never come to terms with her mother’s decision to announce herself as a lesbian. Just the usual.

  Another couple on the course, Louise and Stephen, were thirty-somethings with a twelve-year-old son with autism who was destroying their relationship. It wasn’t his fault, they knew, but was it theirs? There was also Gertie, who had married a much younger man, Jim, after her husband had died of throat cancer, and now Jim had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Was this bad luck? wondered Gertie. Pete and Joan, meanwhile, were coming to terms with their children leaving home and with the consequent middle-aged dissatisfaction and spread, and they were asking themselves, well, now what?

  As they all sat around problem solving and creatively visualising, and using the whiteboard in one of the convector-heated meeting rooms at the Oasis, what they called the Steiner Room, these confused, sad, genuine people reminded Cherith a little of her and Sammy, except with one important difference. You could tell that they loved each other, instantly, the moment they arrived, the moment you set eyes upon them. There was something about it, in the way that Wenda and Clare looked at each other, or the way that Gertie and Jim held hands. It was beautiful to see, people so much in love, and it made Cherith panic. On a Wednesday night, after the class, when they’d shut up shop and returned home, and when she’d kissed Sammy goodnight and switched out the light, she would lie awake in bed and all she would feel was lonely, and the silence seemed to echo between them.

  Sammy would also be awake, actually, but he never heard the echo: he was somewhere else. He had never talked to Cherith about this, but the evenings were the time he devoted to thinking about his son, every night when he was in bed, and when he was in the spa pool. This was his special time with him, when he checked out of this sad, dark world and checked into this wonderful, secret, other world, to get an update on how he was, his little boy. Sammy saw his son every day, in the light of the bright imaginings in his head, and it was almost as if he were alive.

  It was a trick he’d stumbled upon by accident one night, when he was still drinking. It was Josh’s birthday, 14 August – he’d have been five years old – and Sammy had been lying out in the People’s Park, sprawled on the grass near the war memorial, full of super-lager and Thunderbird wine, and he missed his son so much, and he wanted to wish him Happy Birthday, and when he closed his eyes he found he could just about see him, looming over him, tall and proud, almost as if he were really there, and he looked just a little older than Sammy remembered him, as if he really were still alive, growing up and growing old. By practising, Sammy found that he was able to imagine his son almost entirely lifelike. He found it best in the spa pool, obviously, because there were no distractions. But in bed at night was the next best thing.

  He tried not to do it too much – he knew it was wrong – but he couldn’t give it up. He’d tried other things. He tried just praying, but that didn’t work. And he tried this Buddhist practice that he’d read about in a book from the shop, a practice called metta bhavana, friendliness development, where you meditate on your own positive qualities, then those of others, and you chant, ‘May you be happy’ and ‘May you be well’. It was supposed to release you from the burden of responsibility for others. But he couldn’t keep that up. He couldn’t release his son. He wanted him there, with him. He wanted to be responsible for him.

  He tried to limit himself. He calculated that if Josh were alive, if he’d been at school, and Sammy were still plumbing, Sammy’d maybe have seen him for just a couple of hours every morning, and a couple every evening, but then all weekend pretty much, or at least twelve hours each day, give or take the odd hour for emergency call-outs. So if he added up all the hours – 2 + 2 x 5 + 12 + 12 = 44 – that was how many hours he might have spent with his son every week. If you divided that by seven it gave you just over six, an average of six hours a day, which he then divided in half, to be reasonable, which meant that he could afford to spend three hours a day with his son.

  The only unreasonable thing, of cours
e, was that Josh was dead.

  But in Sammy’s mind, in his imagination, he was alive and well, and growing up fast. He got on really well at primary school – Sammy had taken on extra work so that he could have piano lessons and he played midfield for the school football team. Sammy got to take him to quite a few matches. Josh’s favourite food was sausages and beans, and he liked playing with his friends. For his eighth birthday Sammy took him to see the new Harry Potter film, and they went on holiday once a year to Disneyland. He lost a front tooth falling off his bike, but he was OK. He did well in the transfer tests at school and went on to the grammar, where he excelled in both the sciences and the arts. He loved Lego and then he loved his bike. And finally, of course, he loved girls. Sammy vetted his girlfriends. He’d helped him buy his first car. The wedding had been lovely. And then there were the grandchildren, three of them, all of them gorgeous, just like their dad. Josh coped well with the strains of being a father and in time he became a grandfather himself.

  These dreams and fantasies were by far the sweetest part of Sammy’s days, the clearest and the most refreshing, and he saw nothing wrong with them, apart from the obvious.

  So this was the problem, the silence that lay between Cherith and Sammy, though Cherith didn’t know it, and there was nothing she could have done about it, even if she’d known, nothing she could have done to help Sammy. Because Sammy didn’t need her help, or anybody else’s. He was fine.

  His son was still alive.

  * This should not be taken, of course, as a recommendation for high-tar cigarettes. These days fewer people smoke in our town, as elsewhere, although this is not primarily for health reasons: most of us simply cannot justify the expense, so we’re all eating more crisps and sweets, which are cheaper, but which provide a similar satisfaction and give us something to do with our hands. Bob Savory’s chip-flavour hand-cooked crisps, Chip Crisps (They’re not Chips, They’re not Crisps, They’re Chip-Crisps!’) and his mini-sandwich range, Chunky Butts, are currently his best-performing product lines. Judging by the litter on High Street and Main Street, and the average backside, most of us now seem to be eating a fairly substantial snack about once an hour, every hour. But it’s better than smoking.

  * Barbara specialises in athlete’s foot and fungal nail infections, actually, ailments so common here in town that they barely merit a mention, even among friends of long standing – most of us never even bother to get them treated, passing them around freely among family members and fellow swimmers at the Leisure Centre. But when they get really bad, when the skin is rubbed raw and the nails are all black and thick and crumbly, or when we can no longer walk, that’s when we beat a path to Barbara’s door, and she works her magic with her clippers and ointments and creams. Barbara has arguably done more for the well-being of the people of our town than all our councillors and churchmen and do-gooders put together. Young people tend not to think of chiropody as a career – it suffers from something of an image problem – but if you or your young person are interested in going into the caring professions you could do a lot worse than considering your feet. Barbara loves her job, keeps her own hours and she drives a Mercedes.

  15

  Line Dancing

  In which Mrs Gilbey puts on her chaps and discovers pleasure, and Mr Gilbey sucks on a Chupa-Chup

  The warm interior of a car on a cold evening: this is the closest that most of us in our town are ever going to get, or would want to get, to regression therapy.* With temperatures low and the winds high, the fan heater on, the knob turned all the way round to red and the stereo playing classic rock – if it all comes together just right, if it’s cold enough outside and the roads are clear enough, this is worth about a month of twice-weekly counselling sessions to us here in town. This is true demisting. If Sigmund Freud had owned a nice little hot-hatch or a supermini with heated seats and he had friends he needed to get to see on the other side of town, you can’t help thinking that the world would have been saved a whole lot of time and trouble. A warm car on a cold night can of course cause problems – and you see some of them walking around town every day. But it can solve a lot of problems too.

  Frank was waiting in the car. It was the Jaguar. Frank admired American cars the most, of course, in terms of the Styling, but a Jag was more sensible for his purposes, tootling around town, keeping up appearances. The Jag was his run-around. He also owned an M G GT coupé with a V8 engine – a beautiful little thing with a top speed of 125 mph, and only a couple of thousand of them made. It was not a good car for cold weather, though; not a good car for our climate generally. He had a BMW as well, for Mrs Gilbey, and a Range Rover – and of course you get a lovely ride in a Range Rover. But Frank liked the Jag best, partly because an old friend of his had the dealership up in the city – Buchanan’s, Ken Buchanan – and Frank believed in doing business with friends if at all possible, plus Ken organised a nice little owners’ club, run by his lovely daughter, Trisha, which offered a free car wash and valet every Saturday morning, and Frank liked to drive up early on the motorway, drop the car in, chat to Trisha, who was always polite and nicely made-up, and who laughed at Frank’s jokes, and then he would hit the streets. Manhattan it most certainly was not, or Baltimore even, or Manchester, but it wasn’t bad. It was better than nothing. It was a better start to the weekend than waking up beside Mrs Gilbey and having to discuss with her what to have for dinner that night – meat or fish. It made no difference. Going up to the car wash made a change. He’d walk a couple of times round the block – that was his exercise for the week – and then he’d stop for a coffee, a proper coffee, not like the chicory widdle you get in town, and a nice Danish at a little place he knew, run by a guy called Christodoulous. Frank always called him Christy, and actually Christy’s real name was Cormac, but Cormac’d given up explaining the ins and outs to people – Greek father, Irish mother – and Frank wouldn’t have been interested anyway. Every customer had a different name for Cormac – in a city you can be an Everyman to every man, but in a town you’re just little old you – and Frank was a big tipper, so he could have called Cormac anything he liked and Cormac wouldn’t have minded.

  In the car Frank was working his way through a word puzzler book and sucking on a lolly. He kept the lollies and the word puzzler books in the glove compartment, and he would not be unique in this habit, in our town. Here, word puzzler books and Chupa-Chup lollies perform the same function that, say, cannabis and cocaine do for wealthy and artistic people seeking enlightenment or social ease in cities like London or New York, or so we’ve heard. Frank found they helped take his mind off things. They helped him relax, but they also helped him think. He’d tried crosswords, but he found them too difficult. Crosswords are a much harder drug, really, like heroin, which doesn’t make any sense to people who aren’t addicted.* The lollies and the word puzzler books are just the job, though: they helped Frank to free his mind.

  Frank was sucking on a problem and the problem was the Quality Hotel. What frustrated him was that people didn’t realise that the Quality Hotel was basically his pension. Frank didn’t do what other people did. He did not save money. He invested – and the value of investments can, of course, go down as well as up. At the moment they were a little down – actually, they were more than a little down – and Frank could have done with a cash injection, just to pep things up a bit, and the Quality Hotel, when demolished, was just the sort of thing that would give him the boost he needed. This was going to be a prime piece of real estate; ‘Absolutely primo,’ said Frank, out loud, to himself. He liked to practise his New Jersey mobster talk in the car, trying it out on himself before risking it with others.

  ‘Look, buddy,’ he was saying to himself, ‘the great thing about the Quality Hotel is that the services are there already: you’ve got your drainage, your electrics, your gas, your access and a huge freaking car park out front.’

  Frank already had offers coming in: luxury apartments with a leisure club, needless to say, and some hig
h-street developers who wanted to acquire a presence. And Bob Savory, of course, who wanted his new flagship store, the first Speedy Bap!, to have a central site.

  People were beginning to understand that the tide was turning against out-of-town retail parks, against the likes of Bloom’s. Frank had been saying this for years and now people were coming round to his way of thinking. The redevelopment of the town centre was something that everyone would approve of – and if Frank played his cards right he would be responsible for the shift. He imagined a town centre arcade: Gilbey’s, perhaps, they could call it, to match his roundabout on the ring road. Bringing people back into the centre to shop, providing an alternative to the shopping experience at Bloom’s: that was Frank’s aim and intention. And the Quality Hotel was the only thing that stood in the way – why people couldn’t understand that he didn’t know. It was short-sighted of them. Frank could see a bright future for the town centre. He could even imagine pedestrianisation. That was how things were going. Something a bit more Continental. He’d seen it on his city breaks with Mrs Gilbey: Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels. He’d even seen it in America – places that sold themselves as places, as ‘downtown experiences’. This was Frank’s vision for our town and he wanted everyone to share it. He was like a prophet.

  You see, Frank could get you to believe that black was white and white was black. Because it was Frank who had been responsible for the destruction of the town centre in the first place. It was Frank who’d cut the ribbon on the ring road. Frank who’d rubber-stamped Bloom’s. Frank who’d taken a slice out of every development and so-called improvement around town over the past twenty years. But Frank had enough charm to make you forget what he wanted you to forget and to remember things that you didn’t even know you knew. This was quite a talent, the kind of talent you only really get with dictators, with artists and with very wealthy businessmen, and Frank was the closest thing we were ever going to get in our town to a Picasso, or a General Franco.*