Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  * It’s a rare individual who doesn’t feature in a cutting somewhere, but there are some, a few, people who live lives even quieter than the average here, which is already of course quite a way below the national average, and which may even compare with the average excitements in the lives of hermits, say, or anchorites, or prisoners in solitary confinement, or vegetarians in primitive tribal societies. There is Clarence Kemp, for example, who lives alone on Prospect Road, near the crematorium, and who has never married, who was an only child and who is retired now, but who worked all his life as a cleaner at the council offices. Clarence drinks only Bovril and eats only ready-meals – years ago we would probably have called Clarence simple, but these days you might say he has special needs. You’d think that Clarence would hardly have any story to tell, but he has a big collection of beer mats, and he knows a lot about Tamla Motown, and when he was fifteen years (Id his father hit him so hard that he broke Clarence’s jaw, and Clarence had to have it wired up for two months, and he couldn’t clean his teeth, and when the dentist, P. W. Grieve, took the brace off and took a look in Clarence’s mouth, he decided it would be just as easy to whip out all Clarence’s teeth rather than try to repair the damage, making Clarence the youngest possessor of a set of false teeth in town, and possibly in the county, quite an achievement, in a place as fond of sweets as we are. This is a true story and clearly of some human interest, but even the Impartial Recorder would have had trouble knowing exactly what to do with it, a story which is neither exactly happy nor exactly sad, and which just goes to show that there’s a surfeit out there, more stories than we can ever know what to do with, and even a paper is only just scratching the surface. The cuttings are not a summary. The cuttings are only the beginning.

  * And it’s not completely unfeasible: we do feature in the New Yorker, after all, or we have done in the past, just the once, admittedly, but that’s better than nothing, courtesy of the tap-dancing McLaughlin twins, who got a mention in a ‘Notes and Comments’ in August 1943, the great E. B. White comparing the McLaughlins’ ‘bouncy little dance’ in the Broadway musical Hold on to Your Hats with the frantic mating rituals of the natural world. Two of our local boys, two of us, exciting a lovely little bit of thistledown prose from a master of the form with their soft-shoe shuffle; that certainly put us on the map. The cutting still survives, framed in gilt, on the wall of Dot McLaughlin’s Happy Feet Tap and Ballet School, and ‘That’s what can happen, if you practise, ’ Dot tells her pupils, tapping the frame: she means it as an encouragement, but a lot of her pupils look at the fading yellow scrap and regard it as a warning. ‘That’s it?’ they think. ‘That’s as good as it gets?’ Well, yes, it is.

  * Alex, their son, was a merchant banker who’d attended Barneville House and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and who had a Harvard MBA and who’d lived for some years in New York and who thought he was pretty smart, actually, all things considered, and who moved to London to ride the crest of the dotcom wave, back in 1999, and who’d persuaded his parents and some venture capitalists to plough vast amounts of money into his can’t-fail on-line dating business, and who was bankrupt within a year. He’s bounced back, though, of course – you can’t keep the likes of Alex down. He’s in Moscow now, working for Coutts, and he owns his own dacha and at weekends he drinks vodka until he can’t see and he entertains young Russians in his private banya, beating them with twigs. Life’s not so bad, for Alex – he lives a life not dissimilar to his ancestors – but, alas, relations with his parents have irretrievably broken down.

  21

  Christmas Eve

  A concluding cyclorama

  The snow, when it came, started as a flurry, hardly enough to worry even the most anxious of bookmakers – in our case here the Cuddys, Hugh and Eamonn, twins, two men in grey suits who look like greyhounds but who enjoy all the human vices, or at least all those available to the middle-aged man of means here in town. They like to smoke whatever they can lay their hands on and to drink to excess at home and at length in public bars, and to use just a touch of gel on their thinning hair and a dab too much cologne in the mornings. They like to do these things, to commit these small-town sins, almost as much as they like to gamble. The Cuddys are men for whom a day has almost never gone by without them placing, accepting, collecting or paying out on a bet. They were racing snails at the age of three, they ran a poker school pretty much full-time at St Gall’s, worked as tick-tack men down south in their teens, and once they’d reached their twenties they’d travelled the length and breadth of the country and been back and forth to America, surviving only on bar bets and working their system in clubs and casinos. They’d been barred from more places than the average punter could even dream of visiting, and they only retired from full-time gambling when Eamonn broke both his hips when he was thrown down some concrete stairs by bouncers acting on the instructions of the management at a casino in Reno. These days you can tell the difference between the twins quite easily. Eamonn’s the one who walks with the sticks and Hugh is starting to get a little heavy – his wife, Patti, is American, from Toledo, Ohio. Hugh met her in an all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant in Chicago, where she served him big bowls of chowder and half a dozen plates of lobster and langoustine, and she’s a great cook, renowned for her generous hand with the butter and spices, and in the evenings, after dinner and before bed, she and Hugh play poker, which makes her pretty much the perfect partner according to Hugh, and according to Eamonn also, who just wishes that Patti had a sister.

  People say that alcoholics should never run pubs and that gamblers should never run a bookies, but who else would bother? Here in town, as elsewhere, you don’t so much choose a profession as it chooses you: here we are lived by our lives rather than the other way around.

  The Cuddys have to pay out for a white Christmas only if flakes are actually falling on Christmas Day, so a chilly wind and some sleet on Christmas Eve are nothing for them to worry about. Even snow on the ground on Christmas Day, deep and crisp and even, doesn’t count – it actually has to be coming down on the day itself and the chances of that, as the Cuddys could tell you, are pretty slim – so they were comfortable in the Castle Arms, the pair of them, as was their wont on Christmas Eve, their frowns and stoops as yet unsoothed and undiminished by drink and tobacco, smoothing their hair, straightening their ties, preparing themselves for some serious end-of-season drinking and reflecting on another good year.

  We like to gamble here in town as much as anyone else, although we probably gamble smaller sums of money and with a lot less expertise – Wonderland, the big new Bingo hall up at Bloom’s is the closest thing we have to a casino – and the brothers Cuddy have done well out of us. It’s horses for most of us, of course, but we have also been known to throw away our money on football and dogs, and every other kind of game, race, fight, or pointless endeavour that humans can possibly have a punt on. The Cuddys had opened a book on the Third World War a while back, and there was even some money coming in from that. Not at Christmas, though: people tend to lose interest in wars around Christmas. They have their families to think about.

  The flurries had started around eight, just as Margaret was pulling Hugh his first pint and Eamonn was tucking into the first of his double whiskeys, which he drank several of daily, medicinally, for the sake of his hips. They were drinking the proceeds from the annual White Christmas bets – people never seemed to learn. When the pint had settled, Hugh raised his glass and proposed a toast to the ghost of Charles Dickens. They have a lot to thank Dickens for, the Cuddys: the idea of snow in particular.

  Mr Donelly – a Dickensian figure if ever we had one, a man despairing of decency and who might well have suited a frock coat and beard, had he been born a couple of hundred years earlier, which frankly he wished he had – was himself setting out for the pub that selfsame evening, at around the same time, at the beginning of the flurry, stone-cold sober but completely befuddled, with his dog, Rusty, who like all good dogs is a thoroughly Dickens
ian dog, generous in every way, limited only in intelligence, and shabby-genteel in the style of a cross-breed and the lower middle classes. Recently the dog has not been well. She’s incontinent, and Mr Donelly wondered also if she was going senile – she hadn’t been behaving the best. There’d been lots of rages and barking, and her coat was turning grey. Mr Donelly was already having to give her anti-inflammatory drugs for her arthritis, and the poor thing had been bitten by another dog a few months back and her left ear had been stitched back on, a bit wonky, by Becky Badger in her Animal Centre and Pet Surgery. It broke Mr Donelly’s heart these days to see the dog shuffling along in front of him and himself shuffling along behind. He’d nearly skipped the walk tonight, but he didn’t want to be in an empty house on Christmas Eve.

  Once his wife had been decently buried and his children had returned to their former lives, briefly interrupted, Mr Donelly found himself alone with his dog and living the life of an indigent gentleman. He would wake early in the morning and dress straight away, in clothes he had left folded on the end of the bed, clothes which he had to admit he no longer changed every day. He’d always felt that fresh, clean clothes were an extravagance, like embossed toilet tissue, and he felt he had now been proved right. Constant washing, of the self, of one’s clothes and of the house, was a kind of conspiracy, according to Mr Donelly, like so much else in modern life. Mr Donelly believed that democracy was a chimera; he believed that if voting changed anything they would have abolished it; that the European Union was an unmitigated evil; that modern washing powder rotted clothes; that cleaning products were a waste of money; and that for most chores and grooming purposes you’d be better off using some bicarbonate of soda mixed with a little vinegar. If the worst came to the worst, a bit of borax did for most things. He had never been able to convince Mrs Donelly of these obvious truths, but he hadn’t bought a single bottle of bleach now since she’d died and the toilet looked just fine, and he could easily stretch his clothes for a week, if not more, and no one ever noticed, or at least no one commented. And Europe was a mess and the country was going to the dogs. So.

  He’d quickly established a new routine. Routine was everything when you were living alone. He would get up, put on his stinky clothes, use the rimey toilet, and go and walk the dog, and buy a newspaper from Eva in Wine’s, and then go into Scarpetti’s, where he would drink boiled tea and eat cold toast and occasionally have the fry, although the Parmesan cheese was not to his taste early in the morning or indeed at any other time of day, and he stuck to brown sauce. He sometimes sat with Billy Nibbs if he was in – he’d known Billy’s father, Hugh, and like every other decent dog owner in town he was sad when Hugh had died, the death of our last real and jolly butcher, with the consequent loss of a ready supply of free scraps and bones. Tom Hines, the remaining so-called and miserable butcher, charges for bones, which is outrageous, clearly, and a sure sign of a civilisation, or at least a small town in decline. So Rusty was back on the Pedigree Chum. She seemed not to mind. It was Mr Donelly who minded. Feeding the dog from the butcher’s had always appealed to Mr Donelly’s great sense of the tragedy of life, life as a series of bloody scraps and bones thrown down into the sawdust from the butcher’s block. But you get no real sense of pathos from a can, and the sight of a two-kilo bag of multicoloured doggy biscuits just about summed up what the world had come to for Mr Donelly.

  After his cup of tea and his toast in Scarpetti’s, Mr Donelly would take a stroll home and potter around in the garden or in the house until lunchtime, which was any time between about 10.30 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. Sometimes he skipped lunch, in fact, and went straight from breakfast to a kind of high tea around 4, plus a late-night supper, or an early-morning breakfast and an early lunch and a full dinner later on, but sometimes breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner and supper all just seemed to segue from one into another, to merge into one vast unregulated day-long snack. He was surviving like a dog on scraps, in fact, eating when he wanted to, whatever he wanted to. He was eating a lot of frozen potato waffles at the moment, actually, having worked his way through everything else that was in the cupboards and the freezer, and he couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t eat them, they were so easy: you just pop them in the toaster and they’re done, and you can have anything you like on them. He liked a fried egg himself, or a couple of tinned sardines – he could eat that any time of the day or night. It was a movable feast.*

  In the afternoon he sometimes watched TV: the TV was great company, he’d found. Mrs Donelly had always been a great one for the quiz programmes and the soaps, and Mr Donelly had never really bothered with them, he’d always stuck to sport and documentaries and films. But actually some of the quiz programmes on in the afternoons were quite good, he was surprised. You got a sense from some of them that the presenters actually knew you, which was nice. He was even coming round to the soaps. You could get quite involved in the stories after a while. In fact, Mr Donelly had ended up watching nearly all of Mrs Donelly’s programmes, as if he had somehow inherited them from her. Maybe this is what people mean when they say that an individual lives on through the lives of others. All good things must come to an end, but TV goes on and on, and now, with videos and satellite and cable, your love for Fawlty Towers, say, or the early episodes of Countdown need never die.

  Mr Donelly was also spending more and more time up at Bloom’s. He probably spent at least two days a week up there, and he would pop in first to see people he knew when he was working in the delivery warehouse, and then he’d go to one of the coffee shops – to Café Kilimanjaro, which does a nice caramel square, made properly, the old-fashioned way with condensed milk, or to Bradley’s, which is designed more for the young people, with big sofas and video screens but which does free coffee refills, an innovation Mr Donelly would have liked to see copied across town. He’d mentioned it to Mr Hemon in Scarpetti’s, but Mr Hemon had just laughed.

  ‘Why not?’ Mr Donelly had asked.

  ‘Coffee costs money, ’ replied Mr Hemon, before plating up another fry.

  There was no answer to that and it got Mr Donelly to wondering how Bradley’s could afford to do it. It was probably because, while Mr Hemon charged 40p for a cup of coffee, Bradley’s charged £1.50. To get his money’s worth from Bradley’s Mr Donelly had therefore started drinking up to five cups of coffee at a sitting, which was no mean feat for a man of his age and with his bladder. You got to watch a lot of MTV on five cups of coffee; five cups of coffee represents an awful lot of flesh and jiggling around.

  If he was spending the day up at Bloom’s, after his coffee and his tray bake and the toilet Mr Donelly would wander around the shops, in a kind of caffeine-and-sugar-and-MTV daze, refreshed and tingling, not buying anything, just looking at all the nice bright clothes in Gap, and the shiny new glasses in Specsavers. Lovely stuff, all of it. He particularly liked a shop called Fine Things, which sold the full range of fine things, including Lilliput Lane, and the Harmony, Kingdom and Sherratt ranges of whimsies and figurines, Royal Doulton, Tyrone Crystal, Swarovski, and a whole lot of other sorts of china and glassware. He could spend hours browsing, which was strange because he’d never have done anything like it before with Mrs Donelly. He used to leave all the shopping to her – he took no interest in or responsibility for things like shopping. To his knowledge he’d never even bought anyone a birthday or Christmas present, not even Mrs Donelly herself. He just used to give her the money and she’d spend it in the January sales, usually buying herself a new nightie: Mr Donelly had never known a woman like it with the nighties. A new one every year, at least, by his calculation, while he’d been running the same two pairs of pyjamas in tandem since the early 1970s. He’d miss the new nighties, though. He looked at them in Marks, trying to guess which Mrs Donelly would have chosen – she was quite daring, actually, right into her sixties. She’d probably have gone for the one with the puffy sleeves and the plunging neckline.

  He wished he’d known about browsing round the s
hops, that it was so relaxing. When he’d worked in the warehouse at Bloom’s it was just like working in a warehouse anywhere, and he’d hardly ever set foot in the mall, but now he’d really come to appreciate the atmosphere and the environment – warm and welcoming, without being too stuffy. He’d turned off all the radiators in the house because he didn’t agree with central heating, so it was nice to go somewhere where there was a bit of heat and no draughts, a nice, safe, controlled, constant environment, where the unpredictable had been all but eliminated. Uniform temperature. Uniform light. Men in uniforms at the door. Mr Donelly had used to think it was like a morgue, Bloom’s, like you see on the telly in detective programmes about serial killers and psychopaths, and it was, a bit: the temperature, the humidity, the cleanliness. No windows. No street noise or dirt. He used to think it was all artificial and he didn’t like it. But now it suited him and he didn’t think it was like a morgue at all any more. It was the opposite, in fact: Bloom’s seemed to him full of all of the possibilities of life. Youth, warmth, companionship. It was absolutely true, the slogan: ‘Every Day a Good Day, Regardless of the Weather’. He had to leave the dog outside, but that was OK. Bloom’s was clearly no place for an incontinent Dickensian mongrel like Rusty. The only dogs you ever saw in Bloom’s were guidedogs for the blind, stately Labradors, dogs which looked like they only ever ate from Marks & Spencer’s.

  While he was wandering round Bloom’s, Mr Donelly was busy working through the stages of grief, although he didn’t know it. His children knew it, of course. Mark had e-mailed Jackie and Tim with a link to a website that explained the processes of grieving. Mr Donelly had missed out on the website, obviously – he didn’t even have a mobile phone, let alone a computer. He didn’t even really agree with the cordless phone, which Mrs Donelly had bought to replace their perfectly good trimphone with an excellent long curly flex. You knew where you were with a phone with a cord: cordless phones were a menace, according to Mr Donelly. Mrs Donelly never used to put it back on its stand – one time she left it in the pocket of her cardigan and it went in the wash. It was lucky it was only woollens.