Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  They’d bought the house off-plan, so they’d been able to choose a lot of their own fittings and there was, to all intents and purposes, nothing to be done to the place when they moved in. It was an instant home. Thus, the garden had become Lorraine’s obsession.

  Frank had offered to pay for his own gardener – Little Mickey Matchett, who used to work for the council parks department, when there was a council parks department – to come and sort it out, but Lorraine wanted the garden to be the outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible grace of a married relationship, and she believed that her planting designs should be carried out by a dedicated husband, attending garden centres and nurseries with her on a Saturday, and happily planting and tending all day Sunday. In fact, the Scotsman spent Saturdays watching sport and Sundays recovering from a hangover and preparing for another week’s drinking.

  So Lorraine had gone to work on the garden herself. She’d had delivered enough bedding plants to maintain every roundabout on the ring road and beyond, and it was a Saturday when a trailer load of farmyard manure had been deposited on the front drive that finally did it for the Scotsman.

  He’d arrived home from the golf club in his BMW saloon, about halfway through the day’s drinking timetable, post gin and tonics and beer, and pre wine and spirits, and he saw the manure piled in the drive. He saw Lorraine inside the house, a pair of Marigolds on, gazing anxiously at the clock, and suddenly he saw his life flash before him: the mulch of years to come, the plants, the children, the pets, the elderly parents requiring care, and he suddenly turned the car round, and headed for the ring road and out on to the motorway. He retuned from Classic FM to Radio 1 and he never looked back.

  Lorraine couldn’t understand what had happened. He’d written after a few months – no return address – to apologise and said it was the drink. ‘Don’t blame yourself, ’ he wrote, but it was too late, Lorraine had already blamed herself. She’d tormented herself going over every little detail, looking for signs, and suddenly she saw the signs everywhere. Looking at the Scotsman now, in her mind’s eye, all day and every day, more than she’d ever even noticed him when he was around, she saw what she’d never noticed before: behind the sweet accent, beneath the sweet breath and the smart-casual clothing, she saw a selfish, lying, lazy, pathetic, hypocritical brute. And looking at herself she recognised what she’d always known and what she’d now had confirmed: she was a naïve, gullible, weak, needy, timid, ugly, fat, desperate thirty-something who’d probably have fallen for the first serial killer to take an interest in her.

  Everything they’d done together, she realised, was a sham. Every moment they’d shared was a waste. Their vows were meaningless. Each kiss was a mocking insult. He was laughing at her when they made love, sniggering at everything she said. She could still see him sometimes in the mirrors, mocking her: how could anyone love that?! Huh? How could anyone respect that? All those fabrics and soft furnishings. The sofas. She told herself she should have seen it coming, that anyone else would have guessed it, or would have done something to sort it out. Anyone else, even an idiot, the most stupid person in the world, could have worked out that the Scotsman would prove to be a bad bet. She saw it all now, in full focus.

  A few weeks before he’d disappeared, for example, they’d attended his work’s Hallowe’en party together, which had been arranged by his new PA, Angie, who was unmarried and who had arrived at the party dressed as a Renaissance sorceress, a costume which involved her having her blonde hair dyed black, and wearing a bustier, black leather boots and a free-flowing see-through chiffon skirt. The Scotsman had gone as Count Dracula, wearing a tuxedo, with a set of false teeth. Lorraine had gone as the Bride of Frankenstein. She’d worn her wedding dress – which she adored – and attached a plastic novelty knife dripping plastic blood. She’d thought it was funny at the time – a kind of a joke, and a good way to get some further use out of the dress. Now she realised it was a premonition. The Scotsman had spent all evening by the cocktails, chatting to Angie. Lorraine had assumed it was about work, but then she lost sight of them both for about half an hour and when she saw them again she’d noticed that the Scotsman was without his false teeth and the Renaissance sorceress had let her hair down. At the time she thought nothing of it. But now … It was terrible, the thought of it, her sheer stupidity. It tormented her. Anyone else, anyone except her, would have noticed.

  The manure stood out front of the house for months, in humiliation. In the end, Frank had insisted that Little Mickey Matchett go round to clear it away and start work on the garden, but Lorraine had lost interest. She had always had a difficult relationship with her own body, but she now abandoned herself fully to bulimia and the music of solo female artistes. She’d got sick. The garden remained unplanted.

  And then Frank had set her up in the Bridal and Tan Shop.

  It was the shop that had saved Lorraine. It was the shop that had brought her back from the brink: the thought of all those dresses, and the lovely accessories, and the tanning bed, the responsibility of making other people’s dreams a reality. She’d had to suspend trading a few times, because she just couldn’t cope, but the beauty of it all kept bringing her back. ‘A wide range of dresses to suit all tastes’ read her advertisement in the Impartial Recorder. ‘Whether you’re looking for the cutting-edge modern styles or the traditional, we can provide you with everything for your perfect day.’ As well as the clothes and the tanning she did a full bridal package: the wedding music, the wedding favours, musicians, the rings, the flowers, the hair and the make-up. If you wanted her to, Lorraine could arrange just about everything for you, and she’d be there on the day to see you through, from the moment you woke up in the morning to the minute you slipped away to your secret honeymoon location, or at least the hotel room upstairs. She loved all that.

  But it was the clothes that she really cared about. She loved the clothes more than anything. Just the smell of the clothes – when there was no one in the shop she’d sometimes take deep breaths, breathing it all in, burying her face in the ivory chiffon and the antique lace, and the tulle skirts. The shoes as well, of course, she loved the shoes. All the shoes she sold were special shoes. She’d never have wanted to work in a regular shoe shop, like Irvine’s, or Orr’s, having to sell trainers and other awful things. She only sold slingbacks, and kitten heels, and ivory silk satin stilettos with T-bars. Princess shoes.

  The shop has done well, surprisingly. Over the past couple of years there’s hardly been a wedding in town that Lorraine hasn’t played some small part in. The blue garters she sells by the bucket-load. In our town, Lorraine Gilbey is weddings. She is the Bridal Salon and Tan Shop. It’s taken a while, but after the bad Scotsman she has managed to reinvent herself.

  And now, finally, she’s ready to tackle the house and the garden.

  When they’d first moved in they’d had the house decorated almost entirely white. That was the Scotsman’s idea. He’d wanted white walls and he didn’t want anything on the white walls. He wanted it blank: he even refused to let Lorraine put up her photos in her favourite silver frames. Which was another warning sign, really, when you thought about it. When he went, he left Lorraine with nothing but white walls and all her photos still packed in a box, and genital warts. That’d hurt.

  She’d been through the books and chosen her colours. She loved going through fabric books and the paint brochures – she was very much a colour person, actually, despite all the time she spent in the shop amidst white. She has deep mahogany skin, Lorraine, and french-polished nails, which look like tiny ivory handles on a large dresser. Her teeth have been whitened, and her hair is expertly highlighted and straightened. But her clothes – her clothes really were radiant – they were what set it all off. She’d had her colours done years ago in a Colour Me Beautiful™ session with her old school friend Kim Collins, who is a colour analysis consultant up in the city and who’s doing very well with it, not just with individuals but with corporate accounts, and some m
en even, these days, and once Kim had done her colours Lorraine had never again strayed outside her colour palette. Lorraine is Light Spring, which means she looks best in pink, teal, salmon and periwinkle, and her best neutrals are gold and camel, and she knows a thing or two when it comes to matching separates and pulling together a co-ordinating outfit from a messy wardrobe. And now, she had decided, she was going to apply these principles to the house, and to her life.

  When Davey arrived to price up the job he managed to dissuade her from paint effects. No rag-rolling, scumbling, or stencilling: very outdated, he said. He was quite firm about that. He was scared she’d make him do it, so he insisted it was the wrong thing to do. She’d agreed with him on that, but she refused his suggestion of magnolia for the walls. The Quinns kept a lot of magnolia in the lock-up and they called it different things to different people – ‘Ivory White’ was always very popular, and ‘Lime White’, ‘Off-White’, ‘Old White’, ‘Pale White’, ‘Sand’, ‘Sugar Barley’, ‘Frosted Apricot’, ‘Almond Cream’. ‘Nomad Trail’, that was a good one. They just made them up. Davey was doing his bit to get it shifted. But it was pink and periwinkle for Lorraine, or nothing at all.

  Davey got the job. Lorraine liked him, she liked the look of him, although he was not at all the kind of man she would normally go for. He was too tall, for starters, and he had large ears – but large ears, Lorraine believed, were a sign of intelligence. She’d read that in a magazine once. She wasn’t sure about the ponytail, but she liked the look of his bib and braces and his quilted shirt, and the fact that he smelt of damp tobacco. Also, he has that shy, lopsided grin that’s always been a big hit, right from when he was a child, the only winningly seventh-sonish thing about him. He reminded Lorraine of a big friendly dog.

  Davey, on the other hand, had hardly noticed what Lorraine looked like, even though she’d made quite an effort to get her look exactly right for meeting and greeting the prospective painters and decorators. He had other things on his mind – getting out of town, mostly. It was nothing too much, actually, the look she’d gone for, she hadn’t gone too far – a little bit of lipstick, a slight teasing of the hair, the little bubblegum pink cardigan, an old pair of jeans and her old tan cowboy boots. And she didn’t bother to put in her contacts, she’d kept her little square black glasses on instead. It was a perfect Colour Me Beautiful™ look, a look that said, Yes, workman, I am a woman, but be warned, do not try to take advantage of me, for I am also pretty tough, as is reflected, subtly but clearly, in the power colours of my colour palette, so don’t think for a moment you can overcharge me and mess me about, because if you do I will quite happily throw you out on your ear. It was a look that a Hollywood producer would have called feisty.

  Lorraine had spent years perfecting her looks – the Bridal Salon and Tan Studio was really just an extension of her own interests and obsessions, and this is true in our town generally. Tom Irvine, of Irvine’s Footwear, for example, he really is interested in shoes, he’s not pretending. He notices them on other people, still, after all these years, and he still can’t stand holes and scuffs and scratches – they make no sense to him. Tom himself would always have plumped for a nice pair of brogues, given the choice, and he had his doubts about slip-ons and suede. Similarly, at Priscilla’s Ladies Separates and Luxury Hairstyling it would have been impossible for Priscilla to conceive of a woman who wouldn’t have wanted her hair set nicely for the weekend and in just the way that Priscilla set it. At King’s Music, Ernie King’s and his son Charlie’s interest in music had always bordered on the obsessional: Ernie could have named you a Benny Goodman solo just from the sound of the maestro drawing breath, and his son could do the same for just about every guitar lick from the opening bars of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ to the closing notes of the legendary bootleg of Rainbow live at the Budokan. The butchers in our town all enjoyed their meat, from head to tail, and the grocers all loved vegetables, even turnips and the bitter little local apples. You had to. You had no choice. Your business was your life.

  At Bloom’s, on the other hand, up at the shopping mall, business has been successfully divorced from life, from obsession and from passion. Desire has been set free from its object, and has become a goal in itself, a realm of fantasy and constant stimulation, a place of ever tinkling fountains and frothing cappuccino carts. You could spend your whole life working in a shop up at Bloom’s and never have any idea exactly what it was you were selling, or why. Indeed, that seemed to be pretty much the case with most people working in the shops at Bloom’s. Of course, this new free-floating world of goods and services has its advantages. It means you’re not tethered to your job. It means you can live a rich, fulfilling life, while ostensibly working eight long hours a day in ladies’ clothes, or giftware. Little Steffie Hutchinson, for example, works on the meat counter in the supermarket and she’s a vegetarian (although she does eat fish), and she works a split shift so that she’s always home to pick up her children from school. Johnny Portek, son of the town’s only Pole, is pigeon-chested and has a peanut allergy, but he’s still able to work in the in-store bakery and to travel the length and breadth of the county at weekends, playing with his mod tribute band, the Kasuals. He’s the rhythm guitarist. You don’t owe all your allegiance to your job any more. And it doesn’t owe it to you. Everybody’s satisfied all the time and nobody knows what they want.

  Davey got stuck into the decorating job at Lorraine’s and had been at it about a week, with Lorraine shutting up the Bridal Salon and Tan Shop at lunchtimes and coming home to make him a sandwich and a cup of tea, and to talk to him about her day and ask him about his. When Davey told Lorraine his stories about all the different places he’d been to and everything he’d done, it seemed to her that he had lived the life she’d always dreamed of, a life of wandering and drifting, far away from responsibilities and away from this town. She imagined all the different colours in all the different stories and all the different scenes – the big red splash of tulips in Holland, the profound winters of Berlin and the soft summer tones of the south of France.

  The basic problem with our town, actually, is its colour. It’s grey. Grey is the dominant colour all year round and it’s not a palette of grey – it’s not a range of fancy greys that you might see in one of Lorraine’s paint brochures. It’s just pure grey-grey, plus a kind of wet-grey when it rains. So our town is really the wrong place for someone who likes colour and Lorraine did like colour. Lorraine even likes colourful drinks and colourful foods. She would always take a glass of rosé over a glass of Chardonnay, for example, because the colour seems to her much more expressive, of what she does not know, but of something, she is sure. Rosé is within her colour palette and she just enjoys bringing a little colour into her life whenever she can.

  That’s why she loved working in the shop. The clothes were white, but it was all about colour, really. She loved advising women in the Bridal Salon, helping to put a little bit of colour and sparkle into their lives. She knew exactly what women wanted for their wedding day, or at least what they want in our town, which is usually something sexy, flouncy, something with a little bit of a heel, and something white. She did offer other colours apart from the white, but they were never popular. And the heels – well, she could always persuade people into heels, even women wearing Doc Martens.

  ‘I couldn’t possibly walk in those, ’ they’d say.

  ‘You’re not supposed to be able to walk in them, ’ Lorraine would say and, pausing for a moment, she’d add, ‘They’re not for walking in.’ Then she’d pause again, for a longer moment, and lower her voice, almost imperceptibly. ‘They’re for lying down in.’

  And that’d be a sale.

  Lorraine had always talked quietly, so you had to lean in a little to hear her, and she spoke a language of extreme diffidence, combined with an extreme, unexpected sauciness, which always worked with her customers, and it had worked also with the Scotsman, who had met her at a Rotary Club Christmas dinner at the Plough and
the Stars and who had fallen for her when she was calling out the raffle, when she’d made a glazed ham, a box of Milk Tray and a bottle of supermarket champagne sound like telephone sex. Her voice worked with most people.

  But it didn’t with Davey Quinn. Davey was used to working with women in all sorts of circumstances all over the world, women who had never had their colours done and who did not rely on sweet-talking in order to get their way. He’d worked with an Aussie spark in Berlin, for example, Margot she was called, and she was something: a tattoo on the inside of her upper lip, smoked roll-ups, and drank like a fish, worked harder than most of the men. There’d been androgynous fruit pickers from Uzbekistan, and Germans who used to finish a ten-hour day on the sites and go and lift weights for laughs. He’d worked for women bosses who pinched men’s arses and made sexist comments, women in hard hats and women who looked like they cut their own hair, women who were like fellas, most of them, and they did not behave in the way women here in town behaved, so Davey had grown accustomed over the years to treating women as equals, which is still something of a novelty here – it was only a few years ago, after all, that women started wearing slacks to church. Mrs Donelly had been a pioneer in this area: she gave up skirts on Sundays in 1977, the year of the Queen’s Jubilee and the Sex Pistols at number one in the charts, although it was not clear which of these two events, if either, had influenced her decision. But even though they now wore the trousers, women here on the whole still shopped, cleaned, and had the job that paid for the children’s clothes and the holidays, even if that job was as a head teacher or an independent financial adviser. That was the way it had always been and that was the way it would continue. A woman was expected to be either a daughter or a wife, without very much room for variation in between.