Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  Not that the world of Christian rock didn’t have its excitements. Roberta had toured extensively throughout Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales, and had been to many Christian rock festivals throughout Europe – in Germany, for example, and in Holland. She had released no fewer than five CDs of her own original material and although she hadn’t yet had a breakthrough in America, where the competition was pretty fierce in its own Christian way, she was already big in Korea, where Christians seemed to appreciate her work, which was influenced by the many traditions of Christian and sacred music: gospel, soul, country and mid-period Bob Dylan.

  Like Bob Dylan, and like many another rock musician, Roberta had been tempted at times by rock‘n’roll’s inevitable accompaniments and attractions. There were times when she feared that sitting in recording studios late at night with unshaven men drinking beer would prove her undoing.

  But when it came to Francie’s Good Friday Carvery and Gospel Night Roberta’s mind was set firmly on her music and her ministry. She had showered and washed her hair, and laid out her best clothes: a pair of black leather trousers, a white long-sleeved blouse and a pair of black boots with a slight heel. She had straightened her hair with straightening irons, put on a little lipstick – a sheer glossy rose – and applied some kohl and some mascara round her dark-brown eyes. The look was a combination of rock chick and bride of Christ which she hoped was pleasing both in the eyes of God and of man.

  As for Francie, he was wearing his usual minister’s outfit: a brown car coat with pockets large enough to accommodate a Good News bible, a range of tracts and a Scripture Union diary; a pair of grey sta-prest casual trousers, the pockets jangling, full of keys and small change for emergencies (Francie does not possess or carry credit or charge cards, and encourages his congregation to cut up their own); a blue bobbled V-neck pullover thinning around the elbows; a check shirt with blue and red biros tucked in the breast pocket; and a good plain pair of Clark’s shoes from Irvine’s (‘Clark’s, Norvic and Bective Brands for Ladies, Kiltie Shoes for Children, Savile Row for Gentlemen’), the laces securely double knotted. He looked, in fact, like most of us do here, both the men and the women: the unmistakable look of people who are not in full charge of their own wardrobes, people who get dressed once a year by Father Christmas and who do not feel any further need to add to or to accessorise their festive knitwear, or to worry about some small thing like a wrong-sized shirt collar or polyester pants. Francie had gone straight from being dressed by his mother to being dressed by his wife, both of whom were more interested in questions of value for money than any considerations of style or current fashions, but fortunately clothes had never been important to Francie. Apart from a couple of troublesome years in his teens when he had rebelled against hand-me-down duffel coats and had insisted on a red harrington and dealer boots, he did not dress to impress. It was not necessary. Francie was not setting out to attract the attentions of the opposite sex. He had never kissed another woman apart from his wife and, indeed, he could probably count every kiss he had bestowed upon her, in every place and everywhere, although, actually, recently the kisses had become rather scarce.

  Not that Francie’s and Cherith’s was a loveless marriage. On the contrary. Their lives were fulfilled in many ways. They enjoyed the fellowship of the congregation and they both regarded it as a privilege to be able to minister together: this was their role and their mission in life, and they desired little else, although sometimes, if he were honest, Francie would have to admit to entertaining improper thoughts. Sometimes, for example, he wondered if he’d have been better off as a Catholic priest. He liked the idea of a sacramental role, something that involved a little less Doing – fewer committees and less street evangelism – and a bit more good old-fashioned Being. Sometimes he thought he wouldn’t at all have minded a Roman collar, or wearing a soutane. And sometimes he imagined female members of his congregation modelling swimwear.

  On that Good Friday, though, such thoughts were far from Francie’s mind. On that fateful night Francie was worrying about the kitchen.

  He and Cherith had argued before coming out – after they’d eaten their microwaveable quiche and a salad consisting of a small hard tomato, two sticks of celery, a pyramid of sweet-corn and half an iceberg lettuce, the barbecued meats at the Carvery being strictly prohibited to them. They had argued again – for it was not the first time – about what an appropriate work surface for the new kitchen might be. A laminate was cheapest, of course, which is what Jesus would have wanted, but Cherith had been trying to persuade Francie that a good hard solid wood or even a granite surface would wear better, and so in the long run it would please Jesus and the elders of the fellowship just as much. Francie quoted Scripture – ‘Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’, Luke 6:20 – and Cherith rejoindered with some verses of her own – ‘In the house of the righteous there is much treasure’, Proverbs 15:6 – which was something they only ever did when they were really annoyed with one another. In the end they had left the house having to agree to disagree.

  Cherith, of course, did all the cooking and food preparation, and most of the washing up, as was appropriate for a minister’s wife, so she spent a lot of time in the kitchen. But Francie was the expert. He had started out life with his father as a kitchen fitter – McGinn’s, which still has its small showroom up there on Union Street, near the old Kincaid furniture factory. McGinn’s specialise, and always have specialised, in kosher kitchens, but unfortunately for Mr McGinn there aren’t that many Jews in our town – only two, in fact, as far as Mr McGinn is aware, although there may be others who don’t keep kosher, and one can only pray for their souls and for God’s forgiveness. There are not even that many Jews further afield – the only synagogue in the county, a fine example of Victorian optimism, was knocked down twenty years ago, to be replaced by a garage, a Chinese takeaway and a joke shop, Joyland, offering ‘Jokes, Magic, Tricks’, which is now itself derelict, good clean fun these days being about as unfashionable as religious orthodoxy. This meant that Mr McGinn had to travel far and wide for business, which was not convenient, but it was worth it. He’d gone into kosher kitchens because kosher kitchens meant two sinks. ‘And two sinks,’ he would say, with the kind of mad and unassailable logic that Francie himself had inherited, ‘are always better than one.’

  Francie had met Cherith shortly after he’d given up the kitchen fitting, when God had called him away from installing kosher sinks with his father to the full-time saving of souls. It was not an easy calling. Francie had been brought up a good Catholic and he was the youngest of ten children, his parents having married when they were nineteen and his mother having been pregnant every year throughout her twenties. By the time she was thirty she looked fifty and Francie’s dad had finally put his foot down, told her it was time to shut up shop, pull down the shutters and put a stop to all the shenanigans: the house was never quiet, he said, and all the children were having to compete for attention. Some of Francie’s brothers competed for attention by drinking and staying out late at night with unsuitable girls, and his sisters were mostly given to tantrums, smoking, and bleaching their hair. Francie competed for attention by becoming very devout. He was a conspicuously good boy and when he grew up, he said, he wanted to be a priest. This made his mother happy.

  He gave up his priestly ambitions, however, when he was just sixteen and he attended a rally organised by the Assemblies of God. At the rally there was singing and dancing, and a full band with a drummer and percussionist and a six-piece horn section, most of whom were black and many of whom swayed as they played their wonderful, loud, joyful music. This was not the kind of colour or spectacle that Francie had ever seen at the Church of the Cross and the Passion, where it was regarded as pretty racy of Father Baird to persist in smoking his pipe on a Sunday and to claim to prefer the Mass in Latin, and where there had been much argument one year about the choir singing a modern setting of the Psalms. Attending the rally therefore had approximate
ly the same effect on Francie as seeing stars in the daytime sky, or the feel of a woman stroking your thigh, a favourite fantasy of Francie’s ever since his piano lessons with a certain Miss Buchanan, lessons which required Miss Buchanan to squeeze up unnaturally close to her pupils on a small piano stool.* It was a kind of ecstasy. From the Assemblies of God Francie soon moved on to the house church movement and by the time he was twenty-two he had left kitchen fitting to attend a bible college – a large old crumbling house in Hampshire with Portakabins in the grounds – where he had undertaken numerous feats of healing, many of them involving people with one leg mysteriously slightly shorter than the other, marathon sessions of speaking in tongues and the laying on of hands, and the studying of the Bible without the inconvenience of learning Greek and Hebrew. It was great fun. It was better than kitchen fitting. Francie preferred the Church to his family. He was no longer one out of ten. He was one in a million: he had been chosen by God. And by the time he returned home to set up a church of his own he was ready to choose a wife.†

  He met Cherith while evangelising on the street. She was with a group of friends going to a nightclub – Scruples, in the basement of the Quality Hotel’s back-bar extension, a club which is long gone but which many of us still remember fondly. Francie had spoken to the girls about Jesus, and Cherith said she was a Christian already.

  ‘But have you asked Jesus into your heart?’ asked Francie.

  It was not an obvious chat-up line, but Cherith liked the way he looked her straight in the eye when he spoke, and she liked his honest and open smile, and to be honest Francie rather liked her long blonde hair and her small firm breasts.

  At the time he was twenty-two and Cherith was just sixteen. Two years passed in chaste and secret engagement, with Cherith attending Francie’s church, first in the Central School hall and then in the community centre on Windsor Road, and on the day of Cherith’s eighteenth birthday Francie presented himself at her parents’ in his best and only suit and tie, and asked for her hand in marriage. Cherith’s mother Barbara thought it was wonderfully romantic, while Cherith’s father Ron said – in private, to Barbara – that he’d rather his daughter married a drug dealer or a criminal than some weird religious cradle-snatching nut who was running a church which didn’t have its own premises. But when he discovered that Francie was an heir to the McGinn kosher kitchen empire he relented, welcomed Francie into the bosom of the family, and he and Barbara toasted their good fortune with a bottle of sparkling white wine.

  Cherith and Francie were married in the People’s Fellowship, which had finally moved to its own premises in the old Johnson’s Hosiery Factory, where the paint was still wet and the plaster still drying, and where a new blue plastic banner hung across the main entrance over the words ‘STOCKINGS, NYLONS, TIGHTS AND FLESHINGS’ carved deep into the granite. The new banner read, in white on blue, with stylised orange flames licking around the edges of the words: ‘GEARED TO THE TIMES, ANCHORED TO THE ROCK’. At the wedding Francie preached a sermon which focused on some of the more lurid and explicit passages from the Song of Solomon, and the Worship Band played their sweet spiritual music. Bethany was born nine months later.

  Bethany was their first and last child – Francie and Cherith both felt that there were so many needy people in the world and that the Lord had called them to minister to them, and so Francie had gone and had the op. Sometimes Cherith felt that they should have gone on and had a big family, but Francie had had enough of big families and he was not the best with children: he was a serious man, with weighty matters always on his mind, and his eyes fixed firmly on the glory of God. Cherith admired her husband and thought he was a good person, but she did sometimes wish that he would lighten up a bit.

  As for Francie, he often wondered how he had ended up a minister, since he was clearly such a bad person. He frequently found himself tormented by his impure thoughts, but this was not something he felt he could discuss with Cherith, who was a good person and who always wore long skirts below the knee, who never lost her temper, and who was placid in all matters personal and physical. The closest they had ever come to a frank discussion of their sexual needs and preferences had been a couple of years before when Cherith had asked Francie what he would like for a birthday present and Francie had asked for a video of the singer Shania Twain. This seemed tantamount to requesting under-the-counter hard-core pornography to Cherith, who bought the video nonetheless and who had convinced herself that her husband obviously needed to keep up with popular culture and music in order to be able to communicate effectively to the church’s young people. Late at night, when he was supposed to be preparing a sermon, Francie would sometimes sit in the dark, with the curtains drawn, and watch the singer perform. And he would wish he were performing with her.

  That night, the night of the Good Friday Carvery, Bobbie Dylan sang about Jesus coming into people’s hearts and filling them with joy, and about love overflowing, and as she stood there at the microphone, the lights shining upon her, her backing band chugging away in the background, the smell and the smoke of Tom Hines’s barbecued meats hanging in the air, it seemed to Francie that Bobbie was the incarnation of everything he had ever dreamed of: a sanctified version of a rock goddess.

  Before his Preaching of the Word Francie went to the Disabled toilet – which was doubling as Bobbie’s changing room – to congratulate and thank Bobbie for her performance.

  The two of them were deep in an embrace when Cherith walked in. There had been a long queue for the Ladies, as usual, and Cherith thought she could get away with using the Disabled.

  The Carvery went ahead as planned. Francie preached the Word. And Cherith went home and packed.

  * There are no sign-writing classes any more, of course – people like Wilkie the Gut, with his vinyls and self-adhesives, have put paid to them – and Colin himself has been reduced to mere painting and decorating in order to supplement his income. It’s been a comedown, for a craftsman. It took Colin about fifteen years to master the various skills of sign-writing, and these days he’s lucky if he gets to do the occasional bit of rag-rolling and marbling, or a Teletubby mural for a rich kid’s bedroom. He works out of a little shed in his back garden and over the door he’s painted the famous inscription from the entrance to hell in Dante’s Inferno, in a nice, simple, chiselled-edge Gothic: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter’.

  * Barry McClean, the United Reformed Church minister who teaches Philosophy for Beginners at the Institute and who does not actually believe in God as such, would have called Francie’s a ‘believer’s faith’. ‘‘Credo quia absurdum’, as he likes to tell the ever dwindling numbers in his classes, ‘To believe because it is absurd. The believer’s ultimate reassurance. The final abandonment of reason.’ Barry’s own studies in philosophy and religion have alas brought him no reassurance of any kind, and the exercise of his reason had led him only to several obvious and depressing conclusions: that two contradictory statements can be true; that there is no rational order of things; and that the mind is incapable of knowing truth. As a consequence, Barry’s sermons – or ‘talks’, as he likes to call them – are rather lacking in conviction. And his evening classes can be confusing.

  * Miss Buchanan did this with everyone, in fact, male and female, as many of us in town could testify – it was nothing to do with Francie McGinn. It was a piano stool, after all. Miss Buchanan had never married and was good friends with – was a companion to, indeed – Miss Carroll, the town’s midwife, who was Miss Buchanan’s senior by twenty years. As Miss Carroll’s retirement approached, however, Miss Buchanan decided to marry Thomas Odgers, the auctioneer, whose daughter by his first wife was one of her pupils. Odgers, an old-fashioned man with wild ginger hair and mutton-chop whiskers, was rumoured to be seeking a son and heir. As is well known, Miss Carroll committed suicide shortly after her retirement and Mrs Odgers (née Buchanan) bore no children. On her husband’s insistence she gave up teaching the piano.

  † God had told Fran
cie to choose a wife while Francie was at the bible college in Hampshire, by drawing Francie’s attention to a number of possible helpmeets among his fellow female bible students and tormenting him with 1 Corinthians 7 and constant thoughts of his filthy imaginings, and acts of self-arousal in his dormitory and the communal washrooms. Wisely, Francie had never allowed his own daughter, Bethany, to attend so much as a Youth Fellowship weekend away.

  6

  Massive

  In which Paul McKee, a hindered character, works from home, eats biscuits and attempts to unleash his enormous talent

  There’s been a lot more weather recently – masses of the stuff – but the rain held off for long enough last week for Irvine’s Footwear, ‘Always One Step Ahead’, to be able to put in their new shopfront. There was nothing wrong with the old shopfront, actually, but as Mr Irvine explained to Big Dessie Brown’s daughter Yvette, a cub reporter on the Impartial Recorder conducting her first big interview for the paper – which was a success, which was praised by everyone, even the editor, Colin Rimmer, and which Big Dessie now has proudly magneted to the fridge – ‘Bigger windows showing more shoes means more choice means more customers.’ Irvine’s old hand-painted fascia has gone, then, with the stained-glass fanlight and the cracked plastered niches: IRVINE’S is now spelt in red plastic on white, and there are the obligatory pull-down metal shutters. It took two men just two days to rip out the old and bring in the new, and Mr Irvine is delighted with the results. Mr Irvine is getting on a bit now but he still likes to think of himself as a go-ahead kind of guy: he had the town’s first electric cash register, years ago, and he accepts all the major credit cards today, still something of a rarity among our few remaining small businesses and sole traders.