Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  The website had been quite a help for the children. According to the site, in any period of grieving there is first the stage of denial, which lasts a few weeks. This is when you keep trying to live the life you lived before. In Mr Donelly’s case this stage was apparent in his attempt to keep eating the same food he had always eaten, trying to re-create the meals Mrs Donelly used to cook. Unfortunately, he had no idea how to make a cottage pie, or how to do that thing she did with lamb cutlets and potatoes in the casserole, and after a few weeks there didn’t seem to be much point in trying, or putting out a place setting, or coming up with a different pudding for every night of the week, so he’d started eating his microwaveable ready-meals sitting on the sofa, watching TV.

  This represented the end of the stage of denial, after which, according to the website, comes the stage of shock and disbelief, which is when you find yourself sitting on your sofa watching Countdown, eating a Pot Noodle at four o’clock in the afternoon, completely alone, and you suddenly realise that your old life has vanished, has gone for ever and will never return. This is when you realise that you are not on holiday, that this thing, this sense of devastation and loss is permanent. This is when you cry.

  Which is bad enough, but then comes guilt and disorientation. Mr Donelly’s frequent visits to Bloom’s and his eating of frozen potato waffles might safely be said to have marked this stage in his grieving – every time he bit into the salty-sweet mush that was a toasted potato waffle, and every time he sat drinking his quart of coffee staring up at the video screen showing MTV and the wriggling teenagers, and all the people rushing about from supermarket to discount designer clothing outlet, he was reinforcing his complete and utter inability to understand who he was, where he was and what the hell he was doing.

  His son Mark had sent him a pack, from America, called The Book of Death, which was a kind of a scrapbook bound in imitation red vellum, where you were supposed to paste in your favourite photos of your dearly departed and make a note of special memories. It was a new thing, Mr Donelly supposed. The booklet that came with it said that The Book of Death would help the grieving individual to achieve something called ‘closure’. Mr Donelly wasn’t exactly sure what ‘closure’ meant. All he knew was that he didn’t have it. He was open all hours at the moment, frankly, Mr Donelly, like the petrol stations on the ring road and like Bloom’s itself – his emotions were open to all comers and to all traffic, and seemed to be illuminated by those same sodium lights that gave the town at night its horrible flat yellowish tinge. He was sick from his twenty-four-hour grieving.

  What was really strange, though, and what was horrid was that he couldn’t seem to get Mrs Donelly clear in his mind at all any more, and what he could remember came to him only in sudden vivid bursts, huge arousals of memory, which seemed to loom up within him several times a day and sometimes at night, flooding him with emotion, leaving him shaken and exhausted. Washing his socks, for example, one day, loading them into the washing machine out in the garage at 7 in the morning, he remembered their old twin tub, and he suddenly saw Mrs Donelly standing there, in his memory, with a big pair of wooden tongs in her hand, and he just started blubbing like a baby, right there, about to put on a cool wash with some bicarbonate of soda instead of washing powder, unable to control himself. It was terrible. It was Mrs Donelly, but she was kind of mixed up with memories of his own mother as well. It was confusing.

  Another time he went to brush his teeth and the brush felt damp when he picked it up, and he remembered arguing with Mrs Donelly about her using his toothbrush once, and that set him off again, unable to control himself, wiping snot and tears on his pyjamas, and he had to watch TV and drink whiskey for hours afterwards to steady himself.

  They’d had the conversation, of course, him and Mrs Donelly, about what it was going to be like and how he was going to cope.

  ‘What am I going to do without you?’ he’d said.

  ‘You’ll be fine, ’ she’d said, ‘everything’ll be fine, ’ which is pretty much what she’d said to every difficulty and crisis over the years, and she’d been right, of course, and when she said it he just took it for granted that it was true.

  But there was no one there to tell him now, he had to tell himself, and unfortunately it wasn’t true any longer: everything was not going to be fine. Everything was not going to be all right.

  He was thinking about her now, walking the dog through the sleet. He was wondering what to put on the headstone. How to remember her. How not to remember her.

  The flurry was getting heavier. He was walking down Main Street.

  Over there, where the old gas holder used to be, it had been waste ground for years, before it had been turned into the Pay and Display car park, and he could remember picking primroses there on the waste ground, on Good Friday, him and Mrs Donelly and the children, and it felt like yesterday, and he could still see Jackie falling over and hear her crying, and she must have been what, two years old?

  And over there he could remember standing outside what was once the Co-op and is now a building society, swapping fag cards with his friend Joe Mahon, who was dead twenty years now, who was crushed in an accident up at the quarry. Mr Donelly had swapped him a Jack Hobbs for a Larwood.

  And here, right here, right outside the Kentucky Fried Chicken, he could remember the rat he saw once when he was coming home from the Castle Arms one night, only recently – what, ten, fifteen years ago? It was as big as a dog, that rat. You could have put a leash round its neck and led it around town and had children riding on its back.

  And over there, running down Commercial Street towards Main Street, there used to be a little stream they called the Lea where he used to catch minnows and chubbies as a child. The stream had long since disappeared. God only knew where it had gone – underground.

  And here, here he could remember once when he’d been cycling home from work, long before they had a car, he was fined five shillings for riding his bike without lights. That was right here.

  He had no idea where it had all gone, all of that, the things he’d known.

  And now all these things he hadn’t known.

  He was keeping the birth certificate in his wallet.

  He had no idea what to do with that kind of knowledge.

  Nothing, probably – that’s what we tend to do with knowledge here in town, if we possibly can.

  Mr Donelly concentrated on making it to the pub. He noted that the traffic signals controlling the traffic exiting Commercial Street at the junction with Main Street had been altered: the timings had been changed. He always noticed such things out on his walks.

  Which is why, this evening, he noticed the Quality Hotel.

  So did Francie and Cherith, who were parked in the car park in front of the hotel. They were talking. Or, at least, Francie was talking and Cherith was listening, carefully and without excitement or resentment, to what he had to say. It was extraordinary, actually, she found it quite amazing, the mildness she felt these days towards Francie – a man who had once been her own husband. The man for whom she had once cooked and cleaned and kept house. The man she had prayed with twice a day, the man for whom and with whom she had given her life to Jesus, stepping into Eternity with him, and the man she now recognised as being an averagely weak-minded and merely typically feeble individual.

  He had a better haircut, though, she had to admit. But then so did she. They had both lost a lot in their divorce – each other specifically, obviously – but they had also gained something. Francie had gained a sex life, for example, and a new lease of life as a minister, and he wondered sometimes if these two things were connected, which worried him. And Cherith had gained the business and Sammy.

  Francie was talking now to Cherith about God, and about forgiveness, and about King David, which is pretty much what Cherith had expected him to talk about. She had been married to him, after all, for over ten years, so she knew pretty much what he was going to say at any particular moment and in any circumstanc
e. There were people in town – Francie clearly among them – who would have said that Francie and Cherith were destined to get back together. But Cherith did not believe in destiny. There was no way they could possibly have got back together, not really. Francie had not only been her husband, he had been her best friend, and he had cheated her. He had let her down. And besides, now she had Sammy.

  As they sat talking in the front of Cherith’s car, a Mercedes, a car which Cherith didn’t know she needed until she got it and which she could not now imagine living without, she thought about all the things she and Francie had had together – a second-hand Toyota Corolla and a house up on the Longfields Estate, and she thought, well, all things considered, I quite like what I have now. Sammy was going through a bit of a rough patch, admittedly, but they’d get through that together. Francie, meanwhile, was thinking entirely other things. He was convinced he was winning the argument. Strange how even here in our town, a place where we all went to the same schools, where we all wear the same kind of clothes, pretty much, give or take the occasional item of eccentric holiday headgear or party high heels, and where we watch the same television programmes, and eat the same kind of food at the same kind of time, and read the same papers, even here it’s possible for two people occupying the same space and time and the same brand of jeans and trainers to misunderstand each other completely and utterly. It does not bode well for the future of humankind – if we can’t read each other right around here, then where? We talk and nobody listens, and what we care about others despise: every day here we disprove the ideals of human communication.

  Francie knew that he could no longer sustain his relationship with Bobbie Dylan. She was destroying his ministry. He could no longer pray effectively, he was no longer seriously studying the Scriptures, and he was ashamed at some of the antics they’d got up to, in public and in private. He bitterly regretted dressing up in a gorilla suit, for example, for a children’s service about original sin, substituting a banana for Eve’s traditional apple – that was a mistake. Some of the younger children were so scared they became hysterical and wet themselves, and little Curtis Robinson had led the five-and six-year-olds in an act of collective assault, knocking Francie to the ground, pulling off his gorilla mask and engaging with him in hand-to-hand fighting in a pool of urine and banana mush. Persuading the congregation to take part in a sponsored head shave for Traidcraft, that was a mistake too: they looked like a bunch of Hare Krishnas, and people assumed they were all undergoing chemotherapy. The latest scheme Bobbie had dreamed up, which he had agreed to, unbelievably, was to preach a sermon called ‘Freedom from Bondage?’, which was really a straight gospel message, but which had been advertised on posters around town and in the Impartial Recorder with a blurred photograph featuring a woman in what was quite clearly a black leather jumpsuit (Bobbie had bought the suit from Sensations). There was something wrong with that, Francie knew. Even when he’d argued with Bobbie about it, and she had compromised by allowing him to soften up a bit and preach a sermon the following week called ‘Will My Bunny Go to Heaven?’, illustrated with a poster featuring the rabbit Thumper from the Disney film Bambi, he knew that things had gone too far. He’d lost his balance.

  And the only way Francie knew how to regain his balance was to get back with Cherith.

  ‘Well, ’ he began, in Cherith’s Mercedes, preparing for his final appeal to her, based largely on a reading of 1 Corinthians 10 and St Paul’s account of his thorn in the flesh.

  ‘Look, ’ said Cherith, pointing up towards the Quality Hotel.

  Mrs Gilbey saw it too, on her way out of town.

  By five o’clock that Christmas Eve Mrs Gilbey had completed everything that was expected of her as a wife and homemaker at this special time of year. She had been shopping for weeks, laying things down and laying them in: boxes of amaretti biscuits and macadamia nuts and special crackers, all the festive and exotic things that Frank had come to expect. Smoked salmon he liked at Christmas, and a nice ham done with cloves and demerara. Port and Stilton.

  She had followed, as usual, the instructions in Delia Smith’s Christmas – a book which, like her old Good Housekeeping recipe cards and her copy of the Reader’s Digest What to Do in an Emergency, had helped keep her and the household going in times of trouble. Mrs Gilbey loved her Catherine Cooksons, but if it had been a toss-up between Delia and Catherine, Delia would have won hands down. In the end, alas, experience will teach you everything you can ever read about in a novel, but no amount of experience will ever reveal to you the secrets of how to make Stollen: you have to be told; a thing like that doesn’t happen just by accident.*

  With Delia’s help she had her turkey and her vegetables all prepared, the trifle made, and the chestnut stuffing and cranberry sauce ready and waiting, enough food for a banquet in the court of a king, although there would, in fact, only be the three of them this Christmas, as there had been for many years, since both her and Frank’s parents had died, and Frank had fallen out with everyone else in the family. Mrs Gilbey, Frank and Lorraine, that was their family. Mrs Gilbey threw away a lot of food every year, which made her feel ashamed. She hated having leftovers.

  Scraping the remains of sausagemeat stuffing and chestnuts from under her fingernails, Mrs Gilbey slipped upstairs and prepared herself. Tonight she had decided to wear her new chisel-toed lace-up white leather ankle boots with the tapestry side panels. They were a bit young-looking on her, but they really were quite something and it was Christmas, after all. She was also going with her imitation suede skirt, which she kept for special occasions, with the tasselled fringe and the diamante trim on the seams. And she was teaming that up with her sparkly red, white and blue round-neck sleeveless top: her arms weren’t as bad as her neck. It was quite an outfit, if she said so herself. She’d had her hair done that morning, in Fry’s, by Noreen Fry herself – who has lovely teeth, Mrs Gilbey noticed, for the first time. She’d had her hair cut and blow-dried, just the usual, but with a touch more colour, for the festive season.

  Tonight, on Christmas Eve, Frank would be going round town with the Rotary Club, dispensing his largesse, and he wouldn’t be home till midnight at the earliest, so he wouldn’t even notice that she hadn’t been there.

  After carefully laying out Delia on the granite work surface ready for the morning, she took a taxi to the Leisure Centre, where she saw her fellow dancers already on the coach and Big Donna standing up front, resplendent in sparkly red stetson and white leather chaps. She smiled a big smile when she saw Mrs Gilbey climbing on board. ‘Hello, pet, ’ she said. ‘We’d almost given up on you. I’m so glad you could make it.’

  And the whole coach clapped.

  Mrs Gilbey blushed to the roots of her Christmasy hair and as the coach set off she found herself seated next to a man wearing a plaid shirt, blue jeans and a fringed suede jacket. He was a pleasant enough sort of a fellow. He said his name was Spencer Bradley. He used to write a column for the Impartial Recorder, he said. She might have heard of him?

  ‘No, ’ said Mrs Gilbey, she didn’t think so.

  ‘The bat watch column?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, ’ said Mrs Gilbey, ‘the bat watch column.’

  He worked at the Spick and Span car wash up on the ring road these days, he said – did she know it? Yes, she knew it, although Frank refused to take any of their cars there. Spencer Bradley said that his real love was still for animals, even though he no longer wrote the bat watch column. He kept a smallholding just outside town, where he raised chickens and a few sheep. It wasn’t a bad life, he said. ‘But enough about me. Tell me about yourself.’

  ‘Well, ’ Mrs Gilbey began, as the coach made its way up Bridge Street, past Macey’s the chemists, and Tommy Tucker’s chipper, up towards the ring road, ‘I’m not a terribly interesting person actually.’

  ‘Come on, ’ said Spencer. ‘You look like a pretty interesting person to me.’

  That’s actually what he said, word for word, and Mrs Gilbey simply co
uld not believe it. My God, my God, my God! she thought, as Phoebe might say in Friends. Was this a compliment? Mrs Gilbey had almost forgotten what it was like, a man paying you a compliment. It was quite nice, actually, if rather shocking and a little OTT – a bit like a bird displaying its plumage in one of those nature programmes, or Delia’s recipe for the Christmas goose stuffed with prunes.

  ‘No, really, ’ she said, looking out at the big new purple call centre and Kwik-Fit, and becoming conscious of fingering her hair, ‘there’s not much to tell.’

  Oh. My. God!

  ‘Come on, ’ said Spencer, reaching into the bag beneath his feet, ‘I’ve told you all about myself. Maybe this’ll help loosen your tongue a bit.’ And he produced a miniature bottle of brandy and a couple of plastic cups. ‘Happy Christmas, ’ he said, pouring large measures and handing a cup to Mrs Gilbey. ‘Cheers!’

  ‘Cheers!’ she said, accepting. This could be fun.

  ‘Look, ’ said Big Donna, pointing back towards town, as they pulled up on to the ring road, heading for the motorway.

  Frank had seen it too.

  He’d been feeling pretty uncomfortable all night in his Santa suit, what with one thing and another, and now he was flaming red with itches. He’d acquired the suit some years ago, when he was maybe a stone or two lighter, and Mrs Gilbey had patched it since, adding a large piece of what had once been the red velvet curtains from the dining room into the crotch and sewing a large ‘V into the waistband, but at the end of the day nylon is nylon, and it was stretched tight across his belly and up under his armpits, and it was giving him hell, and his beard kept falling off, and he was freezing cold. Frank was not feeling very festive.