Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  Well, if Mr Donelly knew one thing for certain it was this: he was not going to be moving to the United States of America. He’d have had to leave the dog behind for starters, because Mark’s wife Molly didn’t like dogs. She was allergic. Mr Donelly had never met anyone who was allergic to dogs before – he supposed it was an American thing, she was also wheat-intolerant – but the dog was a good excuse and Mr Donelly was happy to use the dog as his excuse. Mark got quite upset about that. The bloody dog means more to him than his grandchildren, he told Molly on the phone. But that wasn’t true. The dog was just a dog, even though he was The Dog With The Kindliest Expression. Mr Donelly just wanted to be left in peace, to stay on in town, but he couldn’t think of a simple way of explaining that, and he didn’t really see why he should have to explain it, since it seemed obvious and so simple, so the dog became his explanation. The dog represented his life here, in a way, and if Mark couldn’t see that, well, fine, he was better off in America anyway, where he had his own life to manage – hypodermic needle incinerators didn’t sell themselves, after all – and Mr Donelly had his own life to get on with. Mr Donelly still had a lot of the friends he’d known since school, and there was always the Castle Arms. It felt rather like becoming a child again, actually, Mrs Donelly’s dying, like the beginning of the school holidays, but he could hardly have explained this to his children. He knew his friends in the Castle Arms would have understood, and the dog. He was staying.

  Brona and Michael had been arguing. Brona had gone and had her tan topped up for the funeral, and Michael didn’t agree with that. Brona had said, ‘Just because your mother’s died doesn’t mean I have to go around wearing sackcloth and ashes.’ It did not, agreed Michael. On the contrary. But Brona had gone and bought a £300 black suit up in the city and she’d also bought the children new outfits – two little black dresses for Emma and Amber, with matching Alice bands and black patent shoes. Michael thought that was going a bit too far. He didn’t like the fact that Brona had turned the death of his mother into an excuse for more shopping.

  Jackie, meanwhile, was angry that she hadn’t been told about her mother’s illness – she was a nurse, after all. Actually, all the children were angry about that. Why hadn’t Mr Donelly told them she was ill? He had difficulty explaining. He felt it was none of their business. But they obviously felt it was their business: Mrs Donelly was their mother. But she was a lot of other things too. She was his wife for starters, and she was his wife before she was their mother, and if the two of them had decided between themselves that they weren’t going to tell anyone about her illness, well, it was up to them, as man and wife. It was their decision. Of course, Mr Donelly didn’t say this to his children.

  Of all the children it was Tim who seemed to be taking things hardest. Mrs Donelly’s death had come at a bad time for Tim. It had cut short his trip of a lifetime, which Mr Donelly had hoped might have given him some kind of a clue as to where he wanted to be, and with whom, and what he wanted to do with his life. By the time he was Tim’s age Mr Donelly was the father of four children, a man of responsibilities. Tim, on the other hand, before he went away, had spent most of his time listening to music alone in his room and going out with girls with multiple piercings, and had worked five days a week at McDonald’s and weekends at Oscar’s, the video shop, and had spent three years saving up to go away because he couldn’t really think of anything else to do, and so he did rather begrudge his mother’s death bringing him back home, and partly out of spite he’d got straight back into a routine of going out with his mates, drinking till the early morning and sleeping in till midday. He’d been secretly hoping that his trip away might have helped him to get his head together and he was disappointed that it hadn’t. He was still the same old Tim in Thailand, it turned out, which was a shame. He’d quite fancied becoming Leonardo DiCaprio.

  Anyway, Mr Donelly was sitting up in bed, by himself, waiting for the post, waiting for further condolences, thinking about his children. Or, actually, he wasn’t thinking about them, because he never really thought about them. He counted them, rather, and wondered at them and was grateful for them: much as a man might enjoy his own butterfly collection, or his stamps, or his pet Pomeranians. Mr Donelly could not easily describe thoughts and emotions to himself, and had never really attempted to do so: thoughts and emotions that you couldn’t or chose not to describe to yourself you couldn’t feel; that was his theory, and it worked. Sadness, loss, doubt, depression – these were things that had never much troubled Mr Donelly. His refusal to give in to himself, his self-discipline, had helped see him through four children, and the usual ups and downs of a lifetime.

  But as he lay there, holding on for as long as he could before the urge to go to the toilet became overwhelming, he found himself full of feelings and he didn’t know what to do with them. He didn’t have anyone any more to tell him what to do with them, or to annoy and distract him, to help him chase them away.

  He pulled back the blankets and the sheet a little and looked at the space where Mrs Donelly had once lain. It was Mrs Donelly who’d always taken care of things in the bedroom department: as far as he could remember he’d never turned the mattress, had hardly ever made the bed, and after the necessary excitements of their first few years together he had rarely initiated sexual relations. He thought probably that Mrs Donelly had gone off it. He looked now at the imprinted outline of his wife’s body, her empty trough, and he thought: it might be useful for keeping the paper in at night and his glasses. The bedside table was too small – a glass of water and a lamp, that was all there was room for, and he hated putting things on the floor. He thought – and he was amazed at thinking it, but there you are – he thought, well, there’s always a silver lining.

  He needed a wee.

  He went downstairs and made the tea. Within just a few days, he’d found, he was able to remember to put out only one cup. He’d given up on leaf tea too, had gone straight on to tea bags. Mrs Donelly had opinions about tea bags. But tea bags were more efficient according to Mr Donelly. You could get at least three cups out of one bag. He was going to be making quite a lot of savings on his living expenses, actually. A lightbulb had gone in the hall yesterday and he’d put in a 60 watt rather than a 100, something he had been wanting to do for almost forty years. About a watt a year. To be in charge of the household after all that time – it was a strange feeling, like a retired captain put back in charge of his ship. It was power and he didn’t quite know what to do with it. He felt a little rusty.

  He got dressed and went out back into the garden, into the cold and the dark, eating the other half of the Cornish pastie he hadn’t finished for his lunch yesterday, and he had another wee by the single silver birch which was supposed to shield them from their neighbours and which didn’t. It was only 6 a.m. and there was no one to tell him not to. Tim was the only child left in the house now, the others had all gone back to their lives.

  As he licked the Cornish pastie crumbs from his fingers Mr Donelly stared up at the back of the house, at the boarded-up window. He was going to have to try to get that fixed. He needed to get himself organised.

  The funeral had taken it out of all of them. Mrs Donelly had stated in her will that she wanted open casket. Sid Rodgers had advised against it, but Mr Donelly wanted her wishes complied with and they’d had her laid out on the dining-room table, a fine, mahogany-effect table that Mrs Donelly had bought on credit from the big warehouse showroom, Jackson’s Economic Furnishings, ‘Strong, Substantial and Elegant Furniture and Furnishing Requisites at Exceptionally Low Prices’, which used to be up on Moira Avenue. It had nearly bankrupted them at the time, that table – if you added up all the monthly payments you could have bought an actual mahogany table, or even an antique. Mr Donelly had polished it once a week ever since – his only household tasks being polishing, winding the clock and setting the fire – so you could almost see your face in the shine. They’d had to have the extending leaves fully out to accommodate the ca
sket, but they had nowhere to put all the chairs, so it looked as if they were about to sit down to Christmas dinner.

  Mrs Donelly had a look on her face when she was in the casket – it was difficult to say what it was. Not bemusement, exactly, nor perplexity, not amusement – it was a face of curious repose, as though she had recently been to the toilet. There was a smell, actually. It was a smell that reminded Mr Donelly of his own mother.

  Mark had handled the oration very well. He was good at that sort of thing, what with living in America. He spoke a kind of middle management, which made it sound as though he were recommending some line of stock that was being discontinued. It was a nice talk, though.

  And the burial itself was as burials are: so strange, so dramatic, that it managed your emotions for you. You hardly had to think about it.

  Afterwards, Mickey had driven Mr Donelly back to the house for the wake and when he went to open the door Mr Donelly realised that he had no key.

  Mrs Donelly had always looked after the keys – she looked after keys and cash and the bills. It was the way they worked things: he did the garden, the DIY, brought home the money. She did pretty much everything else. It was a workable arrangement: they had good clean gutters and the woodwork round the windows was freshly painted, and he didn’t have to check the compound interest on their savings account at the building society, but now the system had broken down.

  Mr Donelly checked all around to see if he’d left any windows open. He had not. He looked in the front room, where until that morning Mrs Donelly had been, but now she was gone, with the house keys, probably, and he suddenly realised that’s what she was smiling about.

  There was only one thing for it: he’d have to smash a window to get in.

  Mr Donelly didn’t want the embarrassment of all the mourners seeing the smashed window, so it would have to be a back bedroom window, where no one would see it unless they were out in the garden for a smoke.

  Mickey had gone off to start ferrying everyone back, so Mr Donelly didn’t have long. He was going to have to climb up himself. He didn’t want to trouble anyone else with it.

  Mr Donelly hadn’t climbed up a building in a long time: fifty years probably, since he’d climbed on the roof of the Assumption with his friend Big Dessie, and they were beaten for it by a priest who came in specially once a day to beat bad children – strange job, when you thought about it, the priesthood.

  Using a combination of windowsill, coal bunker, fence and the next door neighbour’s flat-roof extension, he managed to reach the first-floor windowsill, but he’d forgotten that he’d need to smash the window so he had to climb down again, take off his shoe and then climb back up. It took just a couple of knocks. He was glad they’d only double-glazed the front. This was easy and it was quite good fun – it wasn’t something Mr Donelly would have wanted to take up professionally, but he could see how someone might begin to enjoy it. He reached in for the latch, opened up the window and climbed in.

  The house looked different somehow. Coming in at a window changed everything: it was a bit like those aerial photos you sometimes see of people’s houses. There was a company that did them. They took the photos and then came round selling them door-to-door. Dessie had bought one of his house: it didn’t look like Dessie’s house at all. It looked like an open prison.

  Mr Donelly went downstairs into the kitchen to find the front-door key, but it wasn’t hanging with the others. Then he checked the jar in the front room, where the many sausage rolls and quiches and tarts that Mrs Donelly had pre-prepared and frozen were now sitting ready, gathered in and fully defrosted from the many freezers of friends, on the mahogany-effect table, in place of the coffin.* But no keys there either.

  She did sometimes have the keys in her purse, though, which she kept in the bedside drawer, so Mr Donelly went back upstairs to try.

  Mrs Donelly’s bedside drawer had remained a mystery to Mr Donelly for years. Privacy had been very important to them, largely because they did not have that much to be private about, or much space to be private in. His shed, for example, was sacrosanct and Mrs Donelly was in charge of all the cupboards. So he was a bit nervous about going into the bedside drawer. He was worried what he might find in there.

  He was certainly surprised to find a boxed set of black silk underwear.*

  But he was even more surprised to find a birth certificate for Mrs Donelly’s eldest son.

  The boy’s name was Colin.

  * But then that’s the kind of person he is: Jerome is a gentle giant and an absolute dear, according to the many older ladies on his round, for whom and with whom he always has a kind word. He is a born-again Christian, Jerome, and he works as a postman because it means he can share with his wife Marion the considerable burdens of home schooling their five children, maintaining their tumbledown house and half-acre smallholding just off the ring road, and fixing up their perpetually leaky VW combi-van. Jerome and Marion are not hippies, but they take the Sermon on the Mount at face value, which amounts to pretty much the same thing, although without the need for tie-dye or the Grateful Dead. (Jerome, for example, favours corduroy and the music of Keith Green; Marion wears no make-up or adornment; and their children are not much good at queuing or putting up their hands but they are very good at reading; Daniel, their youngest, who is only four, can recite large parts of Doctor Seuss unaided and several poems by Robert Frost, and Genesis chapter 1, in the Good News translation of the Bible.)

  * Mr Donelly is pre texting and e-mail, and is not even that keen on the phone. Nor does he send postcards, or write letters. There is a strict limit, therefore, to his understanding of how modern communication works. He gets all the information he needs from the Impartial Recorder and gets to have his own say in the Castle Arms, and pretty much everything else is waffle, according to Mr Donelly. He might benefit from the new Senior Citizen ‘Pop-In Introduction to IT’ at the library, or even perhaps one of the many part-time Media Studies courses at the Institute, except he’s not a great one for classes.

  * There was a nice lattice-work apple pie, however, conspicuous by its absence, which had been in Mrs Donelly’s friend Pat’s freezer, and which Pat and her husband Henry had eaten by mistake one night some months previously. Pat had tried to make up for it by substituting an apple pie of her own, but she never really had the hand for pastry and you could tell, even from a distance, that it was not one of Mrs Donelly’s.

  * From Frank Gilbey’s ‘Romance’ range – camisole, knickers and bra, a set – available from all Gilbey’s ladies’ lingerie shops and by mail order (catalogue available, £3.50). See p.39.

  18

  The Bridal Salon

  In which Lorraine overcomes her difficulties and goes to the Garden Centre, and Davey Quinn goes with her

  The wind was battling at the door, howling through the metal grilles over the windows like a little cold wet dog trying to get in and nip you around the ankles and leap up at you. It was annoying, like a little cold wet dog is annoying. Mr Donelly had a little cold wet dog once, a Jack Russell, which he had nicknamed Windy, as it happens, but that was for another reason. It was annoying, then, the wind, but it wasn’t terrible by any means. There were no trees down. No one was going to fall over in the street – and this had happened, on several occasions, on Main Street, in big winds. Flushed with excitement, coming from the market on their way to Tom Hines for a chop, or a floury bap at the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop, some of our old-age pensioners get up a little too much steam, lean a little too far into the headwind and before they know it they’re down, and they’re out, and they’re making the long journey round the ring road and up to the city to the hospital, with their sprained wrist and their blue plastic carrier bags full of cabbages and onions, and the chops and the baps have to wait until next week, if they can remember. That wasn’t going to happen today: you – might have ended up with a lot of crisp packets and paper litter in your backyard and your washing twisted round your line, but you weren’t going to l
ose any roof tiles or chip your teeth. It was just gusty and annoying and unsettled, and no warmth to be had anywhere. It was big boots weather, woolly hat and fingerless gloves weather, and Davey Quinn had his big boots on, and his woolly hat, and his fingerless gloves, and jeans, fresh socks, a T-shirt, a pullover, a pair of bib and braces, and one of his many quilted shirts. He could have done with a smoke and a sausage in a buttered roll with a strong cup of tea from Deidre and Siobhan in the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop, but he was in the lock-up doing a stock check. It sounded like the wind was checking up on him.

  The shelves all around him were filled with industrial quantities of paint and he went along slowly with the stock check book, checking things off: standard primers, undercoats, eggshell, gloss, emulsion, metal finish, sundries, wood preservers, stains, varnishes, wallpaper paste. Tick, tick, tick. An Aladdin’s cave of every kind of covering and finish. There was probably enough here to redo the whole town – you couldn’t have painted it red, but you could definitely have done it magnolia.