Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  And now Bob’s mother Maureen has Alzheimer’s. Bob can’t believe it. Sometimes he’ll shout and rage at her, when no one else is there: he can’t believe she’s really ill. A part of him thinks she’s putting it on. Silly woman, he calls her. Silly bitch. Stupid cow. Challenging her. Words he remembers saying to her only once before, when he was a child, after they’d had some argument or other and his mother had said to him, ‘You’re not too old for me to give you a good hiding, you know,’ and he smirked at her and so she did, she smacked him, right across the backside, and he felt the full force of her wedding ring and he never said the words again. Until now. When Maureen deteriorated one of the nurses recommended a book to Bob, to help him cope, but Bob doesn’t read books. He does not admire book learning: what Bob admires is expertise. So he buys in twenty-four-hour care. It’s the least he can do.

  At night when he gets home from work, he lets the nurse take a few hours to herself, and he sits down with his mother in front of the wide-screen TV, in his TV room. He’s had the place fitted out with a DVD player and a complete home cinema system – which he’d had to order specially from America. He’d gone to considerable trouble, had got in Harry Lamb the Odd Job Man to help him fix the screen to the joists in the ceiling – but he didn’t enjoy watching the home cinema with his mother. It didn’t feel natural. He only watched it now with the waitresses. With his mum he preferred to watch TV, like they used to when Bob was a child. They watch anything, Bob and his mum. Films. Football. News. Documentaries. It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. It’s not the content. It’s the act of watching that counts. It is a huge comfort to them both.

  Before they go to bed at night, during the adverts, Bob always makes them something to eat. He tends to get hungry around about ten, the same every night, before the news, but it always seems to surprise him, his own hunger. He never seems prepared for it. Sometimes he roams around the kitchen in the semi-darkness, opening cupboards, ransacking for food. Bob is a rich man, but he can find no food in his own house which he would want to eat. What he could really manage would be one of his mum’s roast dinners. He could eat a tray of those roast potatoes. A whole tray. They were always so good. The beef dripping – that was the secret. He knows how to do it, of course – you have to get the beef dripping nice and hot in â saucepan, and then you bash the parboiled potatoes around in there for a bit, and season them with salt and pepper, and then slide them on the tray into the oven, and one hour later, perfect roast potatoes. But he could never be bothered to do it himself. It just wouldn’t be the same.

  The rare roast beef, though. He could definitely eat some of his mum’s rare roast beef. And maybe some carrots. And a nice gravy.*

  He goes from cupboard to cupboard – chocolates, biscuits, crisps, nuts, crackers. None of it is any good. It’s all manufactured. It’s all rubbish. He knows it’s rubbish. Sometimes the rubbish in his cupboards makes him so angry that he throws it all away, just chucks it in the bin. And then he buys more. He buys more rubbish. This is what happens when you’re a rich man in our town. You don’t necessarily buy better. You just buy more. Because there isn’t anything else to buy. You want something more fancy, you have to leave: you have to go to London, or somewhere else where they do funny spaghetti and truffle oils, and novelty cheeses.

  Bob’s mother used to make lasagne. And she used to make a salmon soufflé, on special occasions, using a whole tin of salmon – that was good too. And sausage rolls. Macaroni cheese. Pies and pastries. And cakes. The smell of baking. The smell of fresh bread. The food then seemed so different. It was all so good. Bob’s favourite meal, of all the meals his mother used to make … after all these years, he still has no doubt what was his favourite, and every night, between the adverts, he ends up trying to re-create it.

  When he used to come home from school he would be just so tired sometimes, and he’d be so hungry, before his dad got home from the works, and so he and his mum would sit down together, his mum drinking her coffee with two sugars and smoking, and him eating the sandwich that she’d made him: white bread and margarine and Cheddar cheese, or sometimes a slice of ham, if they had it in the house, which was not often.

  ‘How was school?’ she’d ask.

  ‘Fine,’ he’d say. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘OK,’ she’d say and that would be fine. They didn’t have to talk: they were mother and son.

  They would just sit there, the two of them, looking out of the window, eating cheese sandwiches and waiting for his dad to come home.

  So when Frank Gilbey rolled up at Bob’s late one night, just before Christmas, Bob ushered him in, asked him to sit down in the big kitchen equipped with every piece of gadgetry imaginable, and about half a mile of granite work surface and a foundry’s worth of stainless steel, put the kettle on and put a simple cheese sandwich down in front of him.

  ‘So?’ said Bob.

  ‘There’s a problem,’ said Frank.

  * He also has his own website now, and a cookbook, Speedy Bap!, which includes chapters on ‘Home-Made Burgers that Don’t Fall Apart’, ‘What Next with Tuna?’ and an appendix, ‘Mayo or Pickle?’, in which Bob comes down firmly on the side of chutney. The book is available locally from all good bookshops, or newsagents, price £9.99. It’s been a runaway success county-wide. Bob is in demand all over the place for signings and sandwich-making demonstrations. A new updated edition of the book, Speedy Bap!!, which is guaranteed a lot of local press coverage and includes all-new chapters on low-fat cottage cheese and wafer-thin ham, is due out soon, with additional recipes gathered from Bob’s visits to various Women’s Institutes, Soroptomists, the Waterstones up in the city, and other local groups and associations.

  * Bob’s old friend Terry Wilkinson, ‘Wilkie the Gut’ to many of us here in town – a man who has enjoyed perhaps a touch too much old-fashioned food (cooked the traditional way) in his time – runs a nice little business, The Gist, up on the industrial estate, specialising in vehicle graphics, and he took care of all the graphics on the vans for Bob. Terry left school with no qualifications and few prospects but he now lives in a five-bedroom house with Jacuzzi in the Woodsides development, and frankly a few slips in spelling and the odd wandering apostrophe are hardly going to worry him: as far as Terry is concerned a palette is a palet is a palate; just as long as you get – as Terry himself might say – the gist.

  * Unlike a lot of people here in town. Martin Phillips, the solicitor on Sunnyside Terrace, has dealt with more than his fair share of vibration white finger, and asbestos exposure, and occupational asthma, and allergic rhinitis over the past few years – dealing with wheezy old and middle-aged men who spent their lives working on the roads, or on the sites, or on the railways, or out in the fields, or in the factories and the steelworks up in the city, which covers just about everyone here, actually, and all of whom are now seeking recompense for lives diminished and cut short, recompense which usually covers about two weeks in Florida with the grandchildren, a new sunlounger for the patio and a slightly better coffin. For further details and information on claiming for industrial diseases contact your local Citizens Advice Bureau or ring Industrial Diseases Compensation Ltd on 0800 454532.

  * Bob’s ‘Sunday Roastie Wedgie’ – cold roast beef, horseradish, English mustard and roasted vegetables in a granary bap – includes just about everything but the gravy (see Speedy Bap!, p.44). He did try experimenting with a cold gravy mayonnaise at one time but the combination of beef stock and whisked eggs was too cloying on the palate. It’s a simple lesson, but one worth repeating: gravy is best served hot.

  3

  Jesus, Mary and Joseph

  Introducing the Donellys, God, The Dog With The Kindliest Expression, some memories of cinemas long gone and many other attempted poignancies

  There hasn’t been snow here for Christmas since 1975, which seems like yesterday to some of us, but which is already ancient history to others – around about the time of the Punic Wars, in fact
, to many of the children at Central School, for whom modern history begins at the end of the twentieth century and the advent of wide-screen TV and mobile phone text messaging. Gerry Malone, who teaches history at Central – who taught most of us in town our history, in fact – has to be careful not to assume that the students know too much. He cannot assume, for example, that they know anything about the Punic Wars, or that Hitler was a Nazi even, or that mobile phone text messaging was not a means of communication available to Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. Gerry likes to quote Santayana to his students – ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ – but he knows that actually it’s the opposite that’s true. Those who can remember the past are condemned to repeat it – again and again and again. It is the history teacher’s burden.

  People have been feverishly praying for snow at Christmas in our town for nearly thirty years, but God seems to have better things to do with His time than to attend to our prayers, although exactly what it is He’s been getting up to recently it’s difficult to see: since writing the Bible, He seems to have been on some kind of extended sabbatical. World peace, for example, does not seem to be too high on His list of priorities and, unless you count the weekly healing services at the People’s Fellowship, His work, at least around our town, seems to have come to an abrupt end.

  Gerry also likes to quote Nietzsche to his students and .he always writes up the name on the whiteboard first – the middle ‘z’ always tends to throw them. ‘Nietzsche,’ he explains, ‘rhymes with teacher.’ And then, ‘God,’ he tells his class, to audible gasps, ‘God, according to Nietzsche’ – and here he always pauses, with an omniscient smile – ‘Is Dead.’

  Well. I don’t know. Maybe Gerry’s being too harsh. Maybe someone just needs to text Him, to remind Him that we’re all still here. W T F R U?*

  The sleet and the cold have certainly not slowed up the Donellys, who are old friends and neighbours of the Quinns, and who live up by the ring road and who, like the rest of the town, have been busy making their Christmas preparations.

  It’s going to be a very special Christmas for the Donellys this year, snow or no snow – their first Christmas without any of the children, a kind of rite of passage and a relief in many ways, a return to a prelapsarian state, a time long before Mr Donelly’s pot belly and his cardies, and the advent of Mrs Donelly’s flat-soled shoes. This Christmas, if they wanted, Mr and Mrs Donelly could walk around all day naked, barefoot and freed from toil, the pain of childbirth but a distant memory, and freed also from the prying eyes of their offspring, so they could eat turkey sandwiches from morning till night, au naturel, on sliced white bread, with lots of salt and with butter, as God intended them to be.*

  The Donellys’ youngest son, Mark, their baby, lives in America now, where he works for a firm of hypodermic needle incinerator manufacturers. He is married to Molly, has two lovely children, Nathan (five) and Ruth (three), and can’t afford the fare home. Jackie, meanwhile, the Donellys’ daughter, is in north London, a nurse, no boyfriend at the moment and knocking on a bit, but not without her suitors, so Mr and Mrs Donelly aren’t too worried. She is working shifts this Christmas and can’t get back either. Michael – Mickey – still lives in town, obviously, but this year he and Brona are going to her parents’ for Christmas: her parents live in Huddersfield. When Mickey told his parents that he and Brona and the children wouldn’t be around for Christmas Mr and Mrs Donelly both said fine, that’s great, although they didn’t really mean it. Mr and Mrs Donelly get to see their grandchildren all year round, so it’s really only fair to let the other lot have a go, but Christmas is Christmas.

  ‘It’s supposed to be a family time,’ said Mrs Donelly to Mr Donelly. Mr Donelly pointed out that Brona’s family in Huddersfield were family: they were Brona’s family.

  ‘But they’re in Huddersfield,’ insisted Mrs Donelly. ‘It’s not the same.’

  The Donellys’ eldest boy, Tim, is travelling the world. He’s thirty-one and should know better but he’s working in a bar in Sydney at the moment, apparently, Sydney, Australia, if you can imagine that, and the Donellys are expecting a call on Christmas Day. Tim’s said he’s planning a barbie on the beach and a game of mixed volleyball with some workmates for Christmas Day, and Mr Donelly really cannot imagine what that might be like, although Mrs Donelly watches a number of Australian soaps on TV and he’s sat through them with her a couple of times, and he certainly likes the look of the lifestyle over there. It looks a bit more free and easy. More to do outside. No sleet. If he were forty years younger he might even have considered emigrating. But it’s too late for that now.

  Mr Donelly had offered to help his wife with the Christmas shopping this year – the first time ever – and she took him at his word and she gave him a list, and so he was down to Johnny ‘The Boxer’ Mathers, our last greengrocer, the only one remaining, by ten o’clock on Christmas Eve morning, looking for cheap nuts and tangerines, and then he was on to M & S up in Bloom’s after that, cursing Mrs Donelly’s handwriting all the way. After forty years of marriage she still can’t seem to shape her vowels properly – they’re too rounded, like the handwriting of a little girl, and you can’t tell the difference between an ‘a’ and an ‘o’. Oranges look like aronges and apples look like opples. Mind you, his is no better: he’d have made a good doctor, according to Mrs Donelly, who used to work as a receptionist at the Health Centre down by the People’s Park, so she should know. Mr Donelly was not a doctor, though: he’d been a warehouseman, up at Bloom’s, until he’d retired. He used to be a compositor, years ago, but the bottom fell out of the market.

  It’ll be a quiet Christmas for them without the children, but they’re still planning to have a few people round on Boxing Day – the Quinns, with Davey, their celebrated returnee, Mrs Skingle and her son Steve, the scaffolder, who earns a packet, according to Mr Donelly, and Mrs Donelly’s cousin Barbara, who is all alone – so Mr Donelly has stocked up, as instructed, on twenty-four Cocktail Pizza Squares (‘A fun selection of eight tomato & cheese, eight ham & cheese, and eight mushroom & cheese’), twelve Vol-au-Vents (‘Four creamy chicken & mushroom, four ham & cheese, and four succulent prawn’), some mini quiche (Traditional, Mediterranean and Vegetarian), some ‘small succulent’ pork cocktail sausages, ‘fully cooked and ready to serve’, needless to say, twelve Chicken Tikka Bites (‘Lightly grilled pieces of chicken in a traditional Indian-style marinade of spices, coriander and garlic’), some hand-cooked crisps, and six Chocolate Tartlets (‘Chocolate pastry tarts filled with white or milk chocolate mousse, decorated with chocolate curls’). A veritable feast. Mrs Donelly used to do the Boxing Day buffet herself when the children were younger, but she doesn’t have the time these days and since it’s going to be just the two of them she’s even skimping on their usual Christmas dinner: instead of the big bird, the roast potatoes and the mound of sprouts, Mr Donelly has picked up a Small Turkey Breast Joint (‘For 2–3, Butter Roasted’), a pack of baby new potatoes (‘hand-picked’), some mangetout (from Kenya), and a miniature ‘Luxury’ Christmas pudding (‘packed with plump, sun-ripened vine fruits’). It’s the Christmas of the future: their first Christmas alone.

  After the shopping Mr Donelly managed to squeeze in a quick pint at the Castle Arms, laden down with his shopping bags, much to the amusement of Little Mickey Matchett and Harry Lamb the Odd Job Man, and Big Dessie, who were all in gearing up for Christmas themselves, and who have never actually been into a supermarket unless accompanied by their wives, and only then to push the trolley.

  ‘All set, then?’ Mr Donelly asked Big Dessie, proud of his labours.

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Dessie, mid-pint. ‘That’s all the wife’s department.’

  Billy and Harry nodded in agreement with Dessie. It was hard to believe a big man like Joey Donelly doing the shopping for his wife on Christmas Eve. Times certainly were changing.

  Mr Donelly spent the afternoon at home on a chair, putting up decorat
ions: he wouldn’t have bothered if it was down to himself, but Mrs Donelly had insisted. He didn’t put up as many as usual, though: it hardly seemed worth it without the children there, and he’d never liked those paper lanterns Mrs Donelly’s mother had given them when they were first married and which had remained their central festive decorative feature, their theme, as it were, for over thirty years. They were pink, originally, the lanterns, but they’d browned slightly with age, like raw meat left too long out of the fridge. He put them back in the cardboard box in the loft. He was trying to keep everything a bit more low-key.

  Christmas Day itself shouldn’t be too bad. It’d probably be pretty much the same as usual. Mrs Donelly would go to church and Mr Donelly would prefer to skip it. They’d have their lunch and maybe watch Morecambe and Wise on UK Gold. They used to play cards in the old days, and Monopoly, but they haven’t bothered with any of that for years, not since the children were little, although Mrs Donelly still liked to play a few hands of patience, for old times’ sake.