Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  If she ever did try to explain to herself why she enjoyed performing so much, Bobbie would describe it as a simple desire and an ability and a willingness to entertain others, to bring pleasure to them and frankly, in our town, there are not that many people who are prepared to do that.* It’s a risk, making people happy, and we are generally averse to risk taking here: fluctuations in the stock market, for example, have never worried us too much, because hardly anyone has stocks and shares; there’s still quite a lot of money kept in tin boxes under beds, or in building society current accounts, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. Risk is not something we admire.

  We have had, of course, our professional risk takers and entertainers over the years – Wee Willie Gibson, the ‘Laughing Dwarf, for example, was from here originally, and he really pushed the boat out and made it on to the bill of a Royal Variety Performance back in the late 1950s, but Willie was really only funny because he was short. He didn’t have much of a routine as such. He performed a double act with a woman called Millie Strecker, who was over six feet tall, and most of the act consisted of some clumsy physical theatre and double entendres. Wee Willie was four foot eleven tall, exactly one inch too big to count as a dwarf, medically, and he retired from the stage when he and Millie divorced: without Millie there really was no Willie. People in town said he never got over having failed in auditions for a role as a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz back in the late Thirties: that extra inch had done for him and he’d walked with a stoop ever since.

  We have the usual amateur magicians as well, of course, in town, some of them even members of the Magic Circle, and children’s entertainers, karaoke enthusiasts, folk singers, Big Tom Tyrone – who if not a country music legend is certainly a persistent rumour – and Barry McSweeney, who’s a twenty-stone window cleaner but who also does a nice Meatloaf tribute, ‘A Slice of the Loaf, and who has featured on national TV a couple of times, wearing his wig and sitting on a motorbike, holding his ladder.* But it’s Suzie Ferguson who’s probably our all-time most famous showbiz export, the lady who got out and took the most risks. Suzie was born plain Susan on the Georgetown Road here, but she had elocution lessons with Miss McCormack and got out of town and into drama college, and ended up touring in rep and doing some stand-up, and then moving to California and landing herself with a big cocaine habit and a small part in Joanie Loves Chachi, a spin-off series from the TV programme Happy Days, which was pretty popular back in the 1970s. Suzie lives alone now, with her dogs, in Borehamwood, and is not generally considered to have been a good example to the young aspiring actors and actresses of our town. Only Miss McCormack – who is retired and who has abandoned herself to the pleasures of daytime television – still remembers Suzie fondly. She still keeps a signed photo on top of the piano which says, ‘To Eileen, Who taught me everything I know, With Love, Suzie’. If a family here gets stuck with a show-off or a joker then the name of Suzie Ferguson is often spoken in warning and alternative career plans are made. Bobbie is, in fact, one of the few locals who has weathered the warnings and comparisons and stayed put, ignoring the knockers and singing her little heart out for us, although, frankly, when she’s rehearsing the Worship Band she really does wonder why she ever bothered.

  She didn’t just do it for other people’s amusement, that was for sure, or she’d have given up long ago. It was God who remained Bobbie’s prime target audience – and He was a permanent audience, obviously, a bit like having broadband, or your radio tuned permanently to the BBC World Service. The good thing about God as an audience, Bobbie found, apart from the fact that He was always attentive, was that He was also open-minded, pleasant and prepared to accept whatever she brought before Him. God, in fact, in her mind, was not unlike Eileen McCormack, right down to the brooch and the ballerina pumps: she imagined God as having excellent three-tone resonance and no glottal stopping. Bobbie was a Bible-believing Christian but she’d never really had any use for Jesus in her work as a singer/songwriter/actor/performer, because she suspected he might be a critical and fidgety audience, who’d attempt to upstage her and who probably spoke with a whiney voice.

  There were eight of them in the Worship Band, including Bobbie – two guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, a horn section comprising a single trumpet and a percussionist/tambourine player who doubled up as a backing singer. Their ages ranged from fifteen to seventy and the best musician, apart from Gary on drums, was probably the youngest, the guitarist, Phil, who was still at school and who played lead. The other guitarist is Nick, who is somewhere in his thirties and stuck on rhythm. Chick, in his fifties, plays bass without distinction but with his eyes closed and Brian is the eldest band member, aged seventy, the trumpeter and a trad jazz fan. Johnny, a recovering addict – though from what no one is sure, although he looks like he’s tried most things – shakes with the tambourine and sings with gusto. And finally keyboards was Samantha, a witchy-looking woman in her early twenties who is a legal secretary and who needed a make-over, and Bobbie would have been happy to oblige, but she sensed some hostility there – Bobbie had come in and taken over as queen bee, after all, and Samantha didn’t seem to like it. Samantha was used to being the special lady among all the drones, and once Bobbie had muscled in, Samantha had started to skip rehearsals. Bobbie would gladly have sacked her, but Francie wouldn’t allow it. Bobbie had her eye on a fella in the congregation called Adam as Samantha’s replacement – he was a primary schoolteacher with long fingers – and she figured it probably wouldn’t be long before she got her way. Which would mean that it would be Bobbie plus an all-male backing band, which is what she was used to and what she was most comfortable with. Bobbie had always preferred the company of men to the company of women – that’s just the way she was and she made no apologies for it. She had lived with her mother, Ivy, for years after her parents had divorced, until finally she’d managed to save up and buy her own little flat on Kilmore Avenue, with its velux windows which gave a view of the People’s Park, if you stood on a stool, and she felt she knew enough about women. Women did not greatly interest her. Men interested her more.

  The Band, then, was a challenge. They were rehearsing now three or four times a week in the hall at the People’s Fellowship, for about two hours per session, and they always began with a time of prayer, and after their various intercessions and invocations they’d kick in with ‘Green Onions’, just to get them loosened up and in the mood, with Bobbie herself subbing on keyboards if Samantha didn’t show. They were working on the basis of an hour-long set for the Christmas Eve concert. They’d be performing a number of Bobbie’s own songs – ‘Lord, Rein Me In’, ‘I Am Yours’, ‘It’s Risin″, and ‘True Surrender’ – but she knew that what was really going to draw in the kids was the covers with the alternative Christian lyrics. They were working hard on them. Their version of Katrina and the Waves’ ‘Walkin’ on Sunshine’ – ‘Let the Son Shine’ – was a show stopper, if only they could get the instrumental breaks right. Brian, the horn section, didn’t like being told what to do: he had a problem with women in authority. He thought it was unscriptural. Bobbie would point him towards Lydia, and Sapphira, and Tabitha, in the Book of Acts, and Brian would bring up the stuff in Corinthians and 1 Timothy about silence and submissiveness, and then Bobbie would suggest they discuss it outside rehearsals, and would ask him to please concentrate on the music please, thank you, Brian.

  But Bobbie had to admit it, her mind wasn’t entirely on the music either. There were problems at home with Francie – problems of a personal nature.

  Francie had never had any problems before in that department – quite the contrary. Francie’s views about sex had largely been formed during his Catholic upbringing, when he was taught that man was diseased by lust, so as a teenager he had, of course, been consumed with feelings of guilt and self-loathing. But in becoming a charismatic evangelical Bible-believing Christian – what the sign at the front of the People’s Fellowship called ‘Pentecostal, Evangelical, Trinitarian’ – he
believed he had escaped for ever such legalism and strictures, and had entered into a personal relationship with Christ, and had embraced a theology which emphasised the goodness of God’s creation and the freedom of the human will. Unfortunately, Francie had exercised his human will to enter into a relationship with a woman who was not his wife, and pretty soon feelings he had last known in his teens were returning in droves to torment him, and these feelings wore Roman collars and held rosaries.* It was enough for him to wake up and see Roberta’s leather trousers on the chair at the end of the bed for him to lose confidence in his heretical ministry and to crawl back under the sheets, and to the Holy Roman Church. Francie was not feeling good about himself.

  He was getting these terrible stomach cramps and ceaseless rumblings, like someone was playing tom-toms in his belly, and he was on the toilet half the day, and his wee was bright yellow, and it was either because he was drinking too much black coffee or it was God’s judgement, or maybe both, he couldn’t decide. Francie had always believed that when a man and woman were joined together in holy matrimony they became one flesh, and that this joining was indissoluble. But he had broken that bond. He had committed a sin. And 500 years of Reformation theology seemed to have gone straight out of his mind.

  He couldn’t deny that he’d had a good time with Bobbie – that it had been, in one of Bobbie’s favourite phrases, ‘life-affirming’. She had helped turn the church around. There was no doubt about that. She’d been an inspiration, in many ways: they’d done a lot of good things together. They’d gone up to the city, once, and eaten sushi in a Japanese restaurant – that was something. He’d only ever had Chinese takeaways before, from Wong’s. He liked the sushi so much Bobbie sometimes brought some home from a supermarket up in the city, an unbelievable extravagance for a minister of a church in our town: priests and pastors here are supposed to be able to subsist pretty much on an unvarying diet of tea and biscuits, plus an evening meal of lentil soup, maybe with a ham shank thrown in, if you’re a Catholic. Francie had also enjoyed seeing the director’s cut of Blade Runner, several times. It was Bobbie’s favourite film. During the course of his ministry Francie had missed out on years of films: the last time he’d seen a film Tom Hanks wasn’t even invented, and Leonardo DiCaprio was still in short trousers. He couldn’t believe how old Robert De Niro was looking these days. Bobbie brought home videos for the weekends, and sometimes, on a Saturday night, when he should have been working on his sermon for the next day, she would drag him into the front room and they’d sit and watch a romantic comedy, and one thing would lead to another, and the next day he wouldn’t perhaps go into Thessalonians quite as thoroughly as he had intended. They’d also been to a hotel together. Midweek, though: Francie had said no to a Saturday night. A Saturday night had seemed wrong, for a minister of the gospel. It was a hotel with a swimming pool. He would never have done that with Cherith. With Cherith they only ever went on caravan holidays, once a year, with other members of the congregation. He had allowed Bobbie to become his chaperone into this whole other world and it had turned out that she had led him somewhere he should never have been: a dead-end street. He had even allowed her to persuade him to remove the sign from outside the church that said, ‘The People’s Fellowship – Pentecostal, Evangelical, Trinitarian’, and replace it with a sign that said, ‘The People’s Fellowship – the Happy Church’. He couldn’t believe he’d agreed to that.

  He couldn’t imagine, either, the example he was setting to his daughter Bethany.* Whenever he got to see her – and Cherith had granted him very generous visiting rights – she always just said she was fine, and she was really enjoying living with Cherith and Sammy, which made Francie feel about this big.† Francie always tried to quiz her – very, very gently and very carefully – to see how she was doing at school and he’d ask her about her friends, and she’d be cool about that too and say fine, everyone was fine, no problems, Dad, fine, fine, fine. But he knew she wasn’t doing fine. He’d seen her around town hanging out with skaters and smoking. He had no idea what she was smoking and he didn’t want to know. He saw her once giving a boy a kiss – in public, at the car park in front of the Quality Hotel. It was extraordinary. It was like Sodom and Gomorrah down there, with these young people skating along walls and jumping over little ramps, and trampling on the flower beds, and Francie had abandoned his daughter to this, but he was in no position to do anything about it: he was a man living in the proverbial glass house. He was no better than them. He didn’t have a leg to stand on. He might as well have been wearing hooded tops and flared trousers himself, and chains, and spray-painting his tag all over town. He might as well be performing flip tricks on a skateboard in the car park in front of the Quality Hotel.

  Cherith he saw around town occasionally and he hardly recognised her. She looked slimmer, and fitter, and more confident than she ever had when she was married to him, and the Oasis was going from strength to strength. He’d even considered himself joining a class in Slim Yoga, but he was worried he might bump into Sammy – he had nothing against Sammy as such, but he couldn’t get over the feeling that Sammy was married to his wife. In fact, Sammy was married to his wife. People never tell you this about divorce, but when you get divorced it feels like other people are living your life, like they have become you and you have become them: it’s impossible to imagine other kinds of domestic arrangement. So, in his imagination, Francie had been replaced by Sammy. And Bobbie had replaced Cherith. It was as if they’d swapped. It was confusing.

  He turned to Scripture as a comfort in his confusion. Never theologically sophisticated, he relied upon God’s inspiration to lead him to the right passage, and thus he took the Bible in his hand, opened it up and stuck his finger in, and in his torment he found himself reading from the book of Isaiah: ‘But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.’ Francie was not so deranged, though, that he couldn’t figure out that this was probably a fluke, so he tried again, to see if God might like to rethink on the issue. And his finger found this: ‘Make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof (Romans 13:14). This was not what he wanted to hear either. He’d never felt that comfortable with St Paul, though, so he decided to give God the best of three and he flicked back through the New Testament, thinking he might find something a bit more cheering in the gospels. And he got this: ‘And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.’

  If that wasn’t a sign he didn’t know what was.

  * See the Impartial Recorder, 13 May 2001.

  * Bobbie may have inherited her inclination and ability, in fact, from her father, Ken, who rose from humble washer-upper to become maître d’ at the Quality Hotel Grill Room at the height of its fame and popularity, when people would come from miles around to enjoy its prawn cocktails with sauce Marie Rose and its scampi tails, and its medallions of pork, and Black Forest Gâteau, and to admire Ken’s skills in showing-to-table and elaborate napkin folding. He was a showman, in his way, Ken, and even though he’s in his late sixties now he still does some silver service at weekends, for weddings and banquets at the out-of-town banqueting and conference centre, Riversides (which is not actually beside a river, but which is close), instructing young people in the forgotten arts of place setting and tray carrying, ashtray clearing and the proper use of service cloths. Bobbie’s first memory of her father is of him putting on his tailcoat and white waistcoat, his wing collar and his black bow tie, ready for work. He used to scrub his hands every morning at the kitchen sink with a pumice stone and bleach, to remove nicotine stains, and apply brilliantine to his hair: ‘I must not disappoint my audience, ’ he would say. When his audience eventually moved on, to thick-crust pizza and chicken tikka masala, and the Grill Room closed, Ken was sacked, after thirty years’ ser
vice, and was reduced to serving behind the bar in the Castle Arms. He received no redundancy payment, but he took with him from the Grill Room a full set of silver cutlery, including fruit knives and forks and a lobster pick, some finger bowls and a solid-silver salver which he’d handled for over twenty-five years. As a child, Bobbie thought everyone measured the space between plates at table and ate with asparagus tongs and French mustard spoons. She can still fold a mean lotus blossom napkin, and a good neat bishop’s mitre.

  * Since writing, alas, Barry has died, from stomach cancer. He was only forty-two. See the Impartial Recorder, 12 June 2003. There was some controversy when the Reverend Griffiths at St Martin’s, the parish church, refused to allow ‘Bat Out of Hell’ to be played at the funeral service. ‘Celine Dion is one thing, ’ he is reported as saying, ‘but this is quite another.’ Barry’s family and the Reverend eventually arrived at a compromise, however, having haggled over ‘I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)’ and ‘Heaven Can Wait’, settling upon ‘Dead Ringer for Love’ as the most appropriate send-off for the big fella. Barry’s mother, June, made a huge meatloaf for the wake, in a giant-size turkey roasting tin, an old family recipe which consists in large part of tomato ketchup and bacon bits, and which Barry had always loved, and the talk at the wake was, of course, all about whether Barry had got into Meat Loaf because of the meatloaf or vice versa, and opinions differed, but either way ‘we did him proud’, according to Barry’s heartbroken father, George, and he was right. It was a good send-off.

  * And they were saying to him the catechism he had learnt at school: