Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  People had underestimated Frank Gilbey all his life. His father had underestimated him, but then his father had underestimated himself as well and had ended up drinking his life away. Frank’s father was one of life’s losers and Frank hadn’t spared a thought for him in thirty years. He still worshipped at the shrine of his mother, though, of course, every day, who’d taught him everything he knew. Frank was an only child. His was the typical CV of the overachiever.

  He had not excelled at school. He wasn’t interested in school learning. He didn’t want to get a job as a postman, like his father, who was known around town as the ‘Drunken Postman’ (even today some of our more senior citizens still refer to Frank as ‘the Son of the Drunken Postman’, not a nickname that Frank relishes). He didn’t want to become a civil servant either, which was just about the height of what his family could imagine for him, a job in the council offices, filing. Frank had his eyes set on bigger prizes. He’d started up his first business when he was seven years old. He’d discovered by accident that if you removed ball-bearings from a pair of roller skates you could make a very satisfying rattling noise. He loved that rattling noise and he figured that other people might love it too. So he offered to fix their skates for them. Noisy skates were suddenly what everyone wanted. Once he’d fixed everyone’s skates in school and around town, he then mentioned to a couple of people that in fact the really cool thing was silent skates. And so, eventually, everyone paid him to put the ball-bearings back in their skates. He made enough money from that one job to buy himself a bike, a Raleigh, second-hand, and a transistor radio, new, a Decca, for his mother. That was sweet, for a boy from the Georgetown Road: having money in your pocket, being able to spend it. That was a good feeling.

  The roller skates were Frank’s first experience of a very important business lesson, and one which he had never forgotten: you create demand. You may not think you do. You may think you only control supply. You may think that demand simply exists. But it doesn’t. You create it. You tell people they want something – a ring road, say, or a shopping mall, or luxury apartments – and they might never have thought they wanted it before, they might never have conceived in a million years that this thing might be a good thing to have, but suddenly they’ll all want it and they’ll pay you good money to get it.

  According to this principle you could sell people any old rubbish.

  And he had.*

  By the time he was forty he had the big house, the cars, the companies, the properties, the lovely wife and the darling child, and his monthly cash flow from investments alone exceeded his monthly expenses. That was another good feeling. That was better than sex, actually, the realisation that if necessary he never need work again. Although, of course, he did work again. Seven days a week, in fact. Frank worked like a dog and organised his life like a Mafia don. If you treated people right, Frank believed, they treated you right. If you saw them right, they’d see you right. Councillors, for example, who enjoyed their golf were always glad of a gift of golf balls, or clubs, from a friend. Councillors who enjoyed their food and drink were glad of a Fortnum & Mason hamper at Christmas, with a nice pot of gentleman’s relish, or an invitation to one of Frank’s legendary parties, or a barbecue, where whole pigs were spit-roasted and a jazz band was bussed in from the city, to add a touch of class. Councillors are of course supposed to declare any interests, but everyone in our town has interests in everything and in everybody – our town is one big happy family, according to Frank, and he couldn’t help whom he knew, or the fact that he was a generous man. There are lots of ways to get things done among friends in a town like ours and Frank had done them all.

  He had run into trouble, though, with the Quality Hotel and the trouble he had run into had been with the kind of mealy-mouthed, pen-pushing, do-gooding gainsayers who didn’t enjoy jumbo grilled steaks and trad jazz and golf, the finer things in life. These people were Guardian readers, Frank suspected, and fans of Classic FM. Vegetarians too, probably, and homosexual. First they had denied Frank planning permission, but fortunately he knew the Development Control Officer and the Divisional Planning Officer, so that was sorted. Then he was refused building regulations approval, but he knew the Building Regulations Control Officer, so that was sorted too. But then there’d been this ridiculous final thing that had come up: the conservation area consent. That’s what had held him up. That’s what had given him all the trouble.

  That was Mrs Donelly’s doing, who was not a Guardian reader, actually. She only ever read the Daily Mail, or the Impartial Recorder, and she ate chops, and she slept with her husband, that was all the window on the world she needed, but she’d got the council to agree to make the town centre a conservation area, our town centre, where there is almost nothing worth preserving, because we destroyed it years ago. She must have been crazy, shutting the gate after the horse had bolted, or maybe there was method in her madness, Frank couldn’t decide. He wondered, looking back, if she’d been working up to it for years and he just hadn’t seen it coming. It was Mrs Donelly, after all, who’d been responsible for the Shopfront Improvements Scheme, when she was first elected to the council, which had prevented the big stores, or at least the many competing card, giftware and charity shops, from putting up bigger signs. That wa sher first move. And then there’d been the Town Centre Improvements Scheme, she’d got that going too, had co-opted all the remaining small businesses on to the committee. The scheme was run by Enda Tierney and Ivan Cuddy, two of the more useless members of the council in Frank’s opinion, who’d used all the power they’d had vested in them to plant a couple of birch trees down at the bottom of High Street, an initiative that had taken exactly eighteen months to see through, and in the meantime the carcass of the town had remained prey to marauding teenagers and unscrupulous developers, people like Frank, who just kept on knocking the old stuff down and putting new stuff up, ignoring Enda and Ivan completely, and the people who were caught in the middle were the small businesses, the people the scheme was supposed to help, who kept on paying rates in order to sustain Main Street and High Street for long enough for the bigger firms to come in and put them out of business. Frank couldn’t believe how stupid all these people were. He didn’t get it at all, what they thought they were doing, and what they were actually doing. They seemed to have no idea. They had no vision. They were certainly no match for Big Frank Gilbey. In his day, when he was mayor, Frank had widened roads and pulled down historic buildings – whole areas – in the time it took Enda and Ivan to agree on where to put a few dog litter bins.

  But now these same useless individuals were giving him terrible trouble over the Quality Hotel, the thing he most wanted, the thing he most needed. Him, Frank Gilbey, who more than anyone had helped shape the town over the past couple of decades. Frank had been responsible for drawing up the town’s first local plan, years ago, before anyone else had even thought of it – detailing policies, mapping out proposals, determining which sites should be developed. That was Frank, that was his doing. It was Frank who had helped draft the plan and who had made sure it was open to interpretation, so that it favoured his own interests, naturally. It was Frank who’d got people to start thinking of the town not as a corporation but as a business. It was Frank who’d got the council to start referring to citizens as ‘customers’ buying the council’s ‘products’ and he had, of course, made sure that many of those products were his own, his own properties, and his own property management companies, and his own property maintenance companies. You can’t possibly do that, people had said at the time. Yes you can, Frank had said. You can’t delegate civic responsibility to private companies and individuals, they’d said. Yes we can, Frank had said. And they did. And it had worked. And Frank had become very rich.

  And this was all the thanks he got.

  Frank had not done anything wrong. He had bought a lot of land around town, years ago, but that was simply because he’d had the foresight to do so. And as for his relationships with the council’s plann
ing officers, well, they really were his friends. He wasn’t pretending. And his own involvement as a councillor, well, if he didn’t get involved, who would? Shouldn’t we be encouraging participation in local democracy? Of course we should.

  And as for Bloom’s, well, yes, he had known there were plans afoot. After the ring road, it was logical. But anyone could have worked it out. Anyone with their eyes open and looking to the future. Frank had been to America enough times to be able to see the future: malls, vast car parks. Convenience, that’s what people wanted. And it rains here approximately 270 days a year, for God’s sake, so you’d have had to have been stupid not to see that malls were the way to go. And Frank wasn’t stupid, so he had gone about systematically buying up the land outlying the ring road, even before the plans were announced. Most of the deals had been straightforward, but there had been one or two problems. Miss McCormack’s father, the Scotsman, Dougal, had some land, for example, where he kept his piebald. Frank needed the land, but the land had been in the family a long time and Dougal didn’t want to move his horse. Frank knew everyone had a price, but the price wasn’t always money. So Frank got to know Dougal. He found out what his weaknesses were. Dougal’s only weakness was the horse. If there was no horse, there’d be no problem. So the piebald ate lavender one day and died. Simple. The horse’s dying broke Dougal’s heart and he sold the land within a month, he just wanted shot of it. And he moved further up-country, away from our town and from us, the townspeople, and our ambassador, Frank Gilbey. That’s the way the world worked. That’s the way Frank Gilbey did business.

  Frank was lovely and cosy in the car, sucking his lolly, thinking his profound thoughts, and he didn’t notice his wife getting in – she was not someone he had ever really needed to attend to. He had enough other things to worry about without worrying about her. She looked after herself pretty much, under his supervision. That was the great thing about Mrs Gilbey – she was easy. She was straightforward. They had never argued, the pair of them, not really. They never had. He’d married her partly because he was aware there was no chance of her arguing with him. She wouldn’t have said boo to a goose.

  She coughed.

  ‘Right, ’ he said, starting up the car and setting off for home. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’ she said.

  She was not going to tell him. She never did. She was determined. She was not going to give him the satisfaction. He’d only laugh at it. She was not interested in his opinion anyway, or anyone else’s. If you’ve never tried it, don’t knock it. That was Mrs Gilbey’s new mantra. If you’ve never tried it, don’t knock it. That’s what she said to herself these days when she saw the look on the faces of her friends and the wives of some of Frank’s business colleagues when she told them about the line dancing. Like Frank, they all thought line dancing was common.

  ‘Oh, really, have you ever tried it?’ she’d ask them, as they held their little retroussé noses up in the air. Plastic surgery was the big thing these days with a lot of them, and what was that if not common, thought Mrs Gilbey. Trimming your nose and your neck fat, like you were the Sunday roast going to waste? Having someone siphon fat from your belly, or pump it into your thin little lips? Going out to lunch with her friends was starting to get like going to Madame Tussaud’s: they were all beginning to look like models of themselves, like they’d been freshly poured out of moulds and dressed up in lookalike clothing.

  Mrs Gilbey was not into remodelling. It was not her style. With Mrs Gilbey you got what you saw. Which was a lot. Mrs Gilbey knew exactly who she was and how much of her there was, thank you very much, and she did not intend messing around with her essentials, or reducing the size of the portions. She was the same now as she’d ever been, although every Thursday night at seven she did go to the ‘Dance Ranch’, which is actually the badminton courts at the Leisure Centre, which during the day and at night hosts the full range of what a good local council leisure services facility should be able to offer, including Step Aerobics, Boxercise, Pilâtes, Spinning, several martial arts, and Seventies Disco Turns and Bums. And badminton, of course. And every Thursday night the badminton court announced itself as ‘The Place for Foot Tappin’, Heel Stompin’, Clean Livin’ Honky Tonk Fun’, a claim that is entirely correct, as far as Mrs Gilbey is concerned, even though the place may still look like the badminton courts to you and me. In our town it helps if you can use a little imagination.

  Frank had tried, of course, during his time as a councillor and his tenure as mayor, to get all the council’s leisure services contracted out: he’d have happily seen the Leisure Centre taken over by a private company. He had tried, in fact, to get the council to make overtures to the Works, the private gym up on the ring road, to see if they might be interested in taking the place over, but he’d failed. People here in town seem to like fat, unattractive women behind the till, and graffiti on the walls, and wet floors in the changing rooms. Frank suspected that anyone who used the Leisure Centre was a socialist, and frankly they deserved verrucas and athlete’s foot.

  Mrs Gilbey was not a socialist, as far as she knew, but she had always liked country and western music, which was also suspect in Frank’s opinion: it was but a short step from country-and-western to folk music, Frank believed, and folk music opened the floodgates to all sorts of silliness. You get one man strumming on a guitar, and before you know it you’ve got a whole load of people growing beards and burning their bras and going down to Yasgur’s farm to demand equal pay for the disabled and single mothers. Mrs Gilbey was not keen on folk, but she had always liked Patsy Cline, ever since she was little, when her father had been a train driver, taking trains up to the city and back, and he used to do this country and western yodelling thing when he was driving the trains, and Mrs Gilbey used to travel up and down with him sometimes, at weekends, and she would sit and listen to him, and to the sound of the trains, and they’d eat hot pies and apples. And that’s about as close to a communist childhood as we come in this town. At home her father liked to listen to Hank Williams and he also played the ukulele, an instrument which seems to have fallen out of favour, here and elsewhere, but which at one time was the instrument of choice for the working man and woman in town.

  A ukulele is cheap, it’s portable and you can learn to pick out a tune in an afternoon. It’s a bright, happy instrument, an instrument of innocent pleasures and of limited range. Bill Bell and his French wife Antonietta – whom he picked up and brought back after the Second World War, quite a souvenir, everyone agreed – used to duet on Sunday afternoons in the Palm Court at the Quality Hotel, Bill on tenor ukulele and Antonietta on soprano. They even made a record, The Two Little Fleas, and it was a pretty good record, one of the only records ever to have come out of our town.* Mrs Gilbey’s father had learned a lot from that record. Mrs Gilbey’s own all-time favourite performers were probably Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson – they were classics, obviously, and they reminded her of her dad, but she also liked some of these younger women who’d come up over the past few years. Mary Chapin Carpenter she liked, and Shelby Lynne. Frank called them Chafin’ Carper and Slippery Finn. Frank thought it was all very funny. Frank thought country music was a joke.

  This was because Frank was not interested in emotions. And he did not like sentimentality. He did not agree with it. Emotions and sentimentality were pretty much one and the same thing to Frank; he could not distinguish between the two, like it’s sometimes difficult to tell, just by looking at the light, whether it’s dawn or it’s dusk. Mrs Gilbey remembered once, a couple of years ago, she’d wanted to talk to him about Lorraine, when things were going wrong with the bad Scotsman – a necessary, difficult conversation – and he’d just said, ‘Let’s try not to have an emotional talk about this, shall we?’ And that had shut her up. She’d never spoken to him about it since.

  It was difficult to explain what she liked about the line dancing exactly; it wasn’t just the emotions. You could have emotions at home. What she liked was going out a
nd getting dressed up for it. Sometimes it can be good to have emotions outside the home, although it’s not a habit many of us here in town have acquired, street preachers, drunks and small children excepted. Mrs Gilbey liked the clothes, wearing her pre-faded jeans and her cherry-coloured waistcoat, and the stetson, and the lace-up boots. She liked tucking her thumbs into the top of her jeans. She liked doing the slides and the splits, the slappin’ leather. There was a period, a couple of years back, when everyone was mad on Toby Keith’s ‘A Little Less Talk and a Lot More Action’ – she loved that song – and they’d do the ski bumpus and there was something about that leaning to the right, and leaning to the left. It was very ... freeing is what it was. When she tried to explain it to Frank he just laughed. But – and she never said this to Frank, it was pointless talking to Frank about it – if you’ve never tried you’ll never know.

  Actually, what Mrs Gilbey really enjoyed about the line dancing was that you didn’t need a partner. You weren’t stuck with someone like Frank. When you were line dancing you could forget you wore a wedding ring.

  When they were young and she and Frank were courting they used to go to the dances, to the Quality Hotel and Morelli’s, and they used to dance rock‘n’roll, but Mrs Gilbey had never been keen on it. She couldn’t have identified what she didn’t like about it then, but now, now that she was older and wiser and she knew herself a bit better, she thought she knew what it was. It was partly that before she’d started stepping out with Frank he’d been courting this other woman – her old friend Mary, Mrs Donelly – and they were great dancers, Frank and Mary, the pair of them, and Mrs Gilbey just hadn’t been able to compete. She’d always been a little bit large around the hips, truth be told, and a bit heavy up top, so she was a bit self-conscious when she was dancing, and particularly with that style of dancing, the rock‘n’roll-style dancing, where the man stood still, pretty much, and the woman was supposed to jiggle all around him. She didn’t like that, the man giving the lead. Mrs Gilbey was not a feminist, but she always thought rock ‘n’roll dancing was just a formalised version of what went on in the home – the woman doing all the work, the man thinking he was in charge. Which was fine, but it wasn’t that … freeing for the woman. It was boy’s music, basically, rock‘n’roll. It certainly wasn’t ukulele music.