Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  That was Exhibit A. Michael, Paul’s uncle – or the criminal mastermind, as he was described in court – got six months’ suspended for that. Paul was lucky: he only had to see a social worker.

  Joanne’s mum didn’t know about the charity bag fiasco. Or about Paul’s disorderly behaviour and obstructing police when he was seventeen (six months’ suspended), his driving without due care and attention (£250), his driving without a licence, without insurance and without an MOT certificate (£275), or even his driving while disqualified (four months’ detention and £150) and his unlawfully damaging a police car (£175). She only knew about his causing criminal damage to property (£200 for smashing a window at Paradise Lost, plus £75 compensation), which had recently been prominently featured in the Impartial Recorder. Paul wasn’t proud of it himself, but he couldn’t see what she got so upset about. It was a minor offence and they had it coming to them, sacking him just because he was going on honeymoon, and anyway he was drunk, which is hardly a sin.

  One day soon, though, Paul is going to prove them all wrong – he’s going to be a big success – but in the meantime he drinks his cup of tea and goes through to the front room, or at least he gets down on his hands and knees and crawls into the front room. On the far side of the room is the window, and he crawls over and crouches below the sill and peeps out.

  It is odd behaviour, but there’s a reason for it: the woman living opposite is watching Paul, waiting to catch him out. She’s spying on him. He’s sure of it.

  You see, Paul, like a lot of people in our town, is paranoid. It’s not clear whether it’s the drugs or being unemployed, or what it is that’s done it to him. He has taken a lot of drugs in his time, but it could just be the effect of being married. Marriage affects a lot of us that way – it can make you want to duck for cover. Marriage can mess with your head in much the same way as a class A drug: it’s a kind of neurotoxin, marriage. The first few weeks Paul had coped with it fine, but as time passed and he realised he was actually going to be living with Joanne every day, and in perpetuity, he started to feel a little jittery and restless. He began to get depressed. He became withdrawn and uncommunicative. He came to resemble the rest of us.

  Paul missed the DJ-ing. He dreamed of another life. He used to tell himself that he was going to be massive: that was the word he used in his head, all the time, when he was practising his music.

  ‘Massive,’ he would say to himself, ‘I am going to be massive.’

  It had started out as a challenge, but had turned into a comfort and then a kind of mockery: he knew that he was never going to be massive. He wasn’t able to stick with it. He wasn’t able to stick with anything. That’s what his teachers and his social worker had said.

  He didn’t even know if he was going to be able to stick it with Joanne. It had seemed like a good idea at first, getting married, then coming to town, getting a little house, so they could be near Joanne’s family. It seemed like the kind of life that Paul had always wanted. Joanne was all right, he loved Joanne, but he found it hard getting on with her family. He tried to get on with them, but he didn’t share their interests and they didn’t share his: they had never heard of drum‘n’bass, or ragga, or big beat, and jungle to them is a place with trees. Joanne’s family’s interests were restricted pretty much to Joanne’s family, and Paul was never going to be a part of that. He hadn’t realised that when you got married to someone you were marrying into their family: it had never occurred to him. He didn’t know that was how families worked. No one had told him.*

  He tried working on his decks during the day, but he found himself quickly getting bored and then he realised he was frittering his time away, hanging around the job centre and the shops, always restless, and like a caged animal at home. Which is when the woman across the road started getting on his nerves. He became convinced that she was watching him. She watched him every day, nine to five, settling into her armchair first thing in the morning, her small table next to her with her tea things and a pile of magazines and library books. An hour for lunch and then back in the afternoon. Paul knew what she was doing: he’d seen her.

  Paul did not want to give her the satisfaction of seeing him unemployed. It was none of her business. He’d bought some net curtains and put them up in the front room and the bedroom. Joanne had complained that they made the rooms too dark. He said that they needed their privacy, that he didn’t want the neighbours to see what they were up to. One Sunday he got Joanne to go outside and check if it was possible to see him behind the curtains.

  ‘Just a shadow,’ said Joanne. He decided then he’d have to keep down during the day, so that nobody would be able to see him. They wouldn’t even be able to see his shadow.

  He peeps out of the window and sees her there, reading, sipping tea. An inquisitive old lady with nothing better to do than to look out of her window all day. Paul felt bad enough without people checking up on him all the time. He knew by the way people looked at him. He knew Joanne’s family thought he was a shirker. He thought Joanne probably thought he was a shirker too.

  ‘But I didn’t marry you for your money,’ she says sometimes, joking. It didn’t exactly make him feel any better. She never really said what she’d married him for, actually, and he had no real idea either.

  Paul lies down on his stomach in the front room and turns on the telly. He does his best to be quiet during the daytime. If he listens to the radio or watches television he turns the volume right down, and he uses headphones on his decks, so no one can hear him. Not that there’s anyone else around to hear him. The fella next door is at work, of course, and the people on the other side. He watches TV and smokes a cigarette. He’s given up smoking dope: it’s too expensive and Joanne didn’t like the smell, and it made him tired.

  It was difficult to say what had given Paul the most pleasure in his life, what had made him happy. He thought about this a lot at the moment, believing it might unlock the secret of what he should do next. They were mostly little things that had made him happy. Silly things. There was the time he’d won at the county Rabbit and Cavy Club event, for example – a silly wee things looking back on it, but it had meant a lot to him then. He’d won it with his black-and-tan buck, Bucky. They’d won the Junior Any Colour Tan class and Paul had imagined himself as a respected professional breeder, sweeping the board at rabbit shows worldwide. London: ‘And the Winner of the All-English Fancy Challenge is … Paul McKee!’ Paris: ‘And the winner of thé European Fancy Grand Challenge is … Paul McKee!’ Singapore: ‘And the winner of the Asian and Pan-Pacific Best in Show Award is … Paul McKee!’ He’d have liked to have moved on to French lops: he liked their big long ears that dropped down the sides of their faces.

  But it had all gone wrong: Bucky had come to a bad end. Paul used to keep Bucky on the landing of the flat, and there were some older boys on the same floor who’d got into drugs and Paul’s mum had had to speak to them a few times, and then one night, when he was eating his tea in the kitchen by himself – sausage and chips that his mum had left in the oven for him when he got home from school, while she went out to work – he looked outside and he saw two of the boys, smiling and laughing, they were totally off their heads, and they took Bucky from his hutch and threw him over the balcony. They were on the fifth floor. Paul was about eleven, and he ran outside and the boys just laughed at him. That seemed inexplicable at the time. Paul had cried for hours and when his mum came back from work, exhausted, she just said to him, ‘Well, life’s hard,’ which was irrefutable.

  At lunchtime he eats two packets of crisps, an apple and some crackers, and at 12.30 he goes upstairs. He peeps out of the window. There’s nothing happening. The postman has done his rounds, the builders have knocked off, the man on the corner with the garden has gone in. Even the old woman is probably on her lunch break.

  He decides to lie down on the bed and have a think. He thinks maybe he’ll have a nap.

  Paul doesn’t sleep well at night, now that he’s started
sleeping during the day. He doesn’t like sleeping during the day, but it has become a habit. He always dribbles and wakes up with a headache.

  So he lay there, dozing, and trying to keep himself awake, trying not to think of all the things he could have done that day, like working and having weekends off, like normal people. He tried again to think about what he was going to do with his life. What he really wants to do is something spectacular – but who doesn’t? He wants to create his own thing, be his own person. When he was at the Institute he cut some dub plates of his own and they played it, only in the studio there, but still, to have your music played, to be somebody. That was a buzz. Being married, on the other hand, is not a buzz, on the whole, he has found. Or being in our town. These things are ruts and a rut is pretty much the opposite of a buzz.

  The only person Paul has talked to about his plans is his best friend from the Institute, Scunty, who is pretty much as his name suggests, and who has a mohawk haircut and a pierced lip, and who is into computers and who works in the Big Banana, the independent record shop up at the top of High Street, and who has promised that he will design some flyers for Paul – all Paul has to do is decide what he needs the flyers for.

  What Paul has in mind at the moment is some thing – he can’t be more specific – some kind of thing, some kind of thing like the things he’s read about in books. He’s read about the rave scene in the 1980s and the 1990s, but he was hardly even born then, so it’s all academic to him. He’d studied it at the Institute, where for two years he learnt the theory and practice of music technology, all about channels and monitors and gates and compressors, and attended seminars and lectures with titles like ‘Smashed Hits’, in which tutors like Wally Lee – sad, unmarried, middle-aged men not originally from our town with creative facial hair and skaters’ T-shirts – would examine issues of musical freedom of expression, beginning with Elvis Presley and ending with Puff Daddy, and Paul would sit there transfixed, listening to people talk about Frankie Knuckles and Marshall Jefferson, men who took an art form, shook it up and made it into something new. That’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to make something happen. He wrote a long essay once about acid house and another one about the invention of breakbeat. They were good essays. He got nearly 60 per cent for those – they were his highest marks.

  He dozes off to this ambient mix of memories and ambitions in his head, and he doesn’t wake up until four o’clock, the whole afternoon wasted and almost time to make the tea.

  He checks to see if she’s still there, the old woman opposite. She is. He feels exhausted after the sleep. Sometimes he’s sure he can actually feel himself getting older, actually physically older by the day – his life draining away. He used to exercise, but he couldn’t really be bothered with that either these days. (After Bucky, he’d started going to the gym, straight from school. He trained for a while at the All Saints boxing club, up there in the city. There were loads of big names who’d started out there: Micky McCann; the Monaghans, the boxing dynasty; Mickey Hillen; Tom McCorry. He told himself that he was going to be a great boxer. He was going to be like Barry McGuigan. He was going to be a Great White Hope. But he couldn’t stick that either. He didn’t like getting hit. Or having to get the buses. In the winter he’d rather go home and watch the telly.)

  He goes downstairs and while he gets the tea ready he switches on the radio.

  It’s the local station, HitzîFM, a phone-in, and there’s a woman on from town complaining about the high prices charged by vets. She’s had to pay £150 for her dog to have a hysterectomy, she says. The DJ on the radio, he’s called Julian Johns, he thinks he’s hilarious. He thinks he’s some kind of a shock-jock. He says that if the woman were to go into a private hospital to have a hysterectomy it would cost her – what? – about £3500, what with the anaesthetist’s fees and everything. So what on earth is she complaining about? She’s getting a bargain. Paul laughs for the first time that day. It was ridiculous to compare a human with a dog.

  The programme ended and Paul got some peas out of the freezer compartment, and another programme came on, a panel discussion about the protection of the county’s historic architecture, and they had on a local councillor, a woman, Mrs Donelly, talking about the need to preserve our heritage, the usual stuff, and then suddenly she mentioned the derelict Quality Hotel, which was just round the corner from where Paul was standing peeling potatoes. Mrs Donelly says she can remember when they used to have big show bands at the hotel in the old days, and dances, and people came from miles around to enjoy themselves. ‘We had,’ she says, ‘the time of our lives.’

  This rings a bell with Paul. He has been looking for somewhere to have the time of his life all his life. He’s been thinking about a venue for ages: whatever it is he’s going to do he’s going to need somewhere to do it, and he knows it needs to be somewhere big. Which rules out most places in our town, unless it’s the People’s Park, but he doubts the council will grant permission, since they even stopped the circus coming a few years ago, because of all the horse shit and the damage to the flower beds and the grass.

  Potatoes peeled, he crawls into the lounge to watch TV and wait for Joanne to come home.

  It’s a lovely sunny evening.

  He thinks, maybe when Joanne gets home they’ll go for a walk, down to the Quality Hotel, just to have a look.

  * For a full account of Frank’s business interests, see the Impartial Recorder, 20 June 2003.

  * See note in Chapter 12

  * See Chapter 18.

  * He should have attended the ‘How to Be a Family’ seminar series at the Oasis, based largely on Cherith’s reading of Robin Skinner and John Cleese, and Freud for Beginners, and her admiration for The Forsyte Saga in the BBC adaptation, and Roseanne, and Butterflies with Wendy Craig.

  7

  Plumbing

  An introduction to the Oasis, further miseries and tragedy, and a warm bath for Billy Nibbs

  It’s been raining, again, midsummer, and for a plumber rain is just another reminder that there will always be leaks and that we shall never be dry, that this life is a vale of tears, that we evolved from the slime, from the earth’s boiling soup, the bouillon of all existence, and that we shall eventually return to the same.

  A rainy day is not a good day for a plumber.

  But then again there are really no good days in plumbing, which is something that people who are not themselves plumbers tend to forget. People tend to call plumbers when things have gone badly wrong and plumbers do not therefore tend to see human nature at its best, or the world through rose-tinted glasses. There are only so many toilets you can put your hands into before you begin to doubt the idea of human perfectibility, and there is no sunshine and no soap strong enough to cleanse a man of such doubts once he has begun to entertain them, so in middle age the wise plumber starts to specialise in kitchen and bathroom refits – work which pays better and which, if you do it right, is guaranteed to put a smile on people’s faces. A new shower unit can do wonderful things for a person’s self-esteem. However much trouble you might have with your shower heater unit, or your wall brackets, or your curling sealant round the shower base, it is as nothing compared with the horror of a cracked cistern and the sight of a downstairs ceiling sagging like a huge pendulous breast, and a householder standing underneath it, like an idiot, with a bucket and a stick.

  Sammy had never exactly been a happy plumber, but he had accepted misery as an occupational hazard. He was a silent man whose misery and whose silence we had always tolerated and even admired, but which had deepened into a terrible depression a few years ago when his four-year-old son Josh got sick on New Year’s Eve. Sammy’s wife, Sharon, who was a woman who did not share her husband’s gloom, but who loved him nonetheless, had arranged to go out with a few friends for a girls’ night out, to see out the old year and see in the new, and Sammy, who had never really enjoyed New Year’s Eve and who always preferred to stay in and watch TV, had been more than happy to babysit.
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  Josh had complained before he went to bed of a slight headache, which Sammy had thought nothing of, and which he had put down to all the videos, but then the little fella had woken during the night with diarrhoea and vomiting, which Sammy put down to the fizzy drinks and sweets. Sammy was, of course, more equipped than most fathers to be able to deal with the mess, which he quickly cleared up, and afterwards he had treated himself to a couple of beers, to congratulate himself on his calm and his efficiency, and to welcome in the New Year. Over the next couple of hours, though, Josh’s sickness had developed into a fever and then unconsciousness, and by the time Sammy had got the boy to the hospital early next morning, after he’d tried to wake him from his sleep and failed, he was in a coma. He never recovered.

  Little Josh made the front page of the Impartial Recorder for three weeks running: first his coma, then his death and finally his funeral. There were full-colour photos – photographs of the grieving parents, of Sammy and Sharon, and a photo of Josh the paper had got hold of from his playgroup, down there on Russell Street. Joe Finnegan, the ‘lensman’, had refused an instruction from Colin Rimmer, the paper’s editor, to use a telephoto and focus on the parents’ tears, but the stuff Joe shot from a distance outside the hospital and of the funeral cortège was bad enough. It was not an auspicious moment in the newspaper’s history and not a story that anyone in town could feel proud of: there were letters of complaint. Colin Rimmer replied, refusing the charge of prurience in his column, ‘Rimmer’s Around’, invoking the Watergate scandal, the death of Princess Diana and other examples of the freedom of the press, where the public had a right to know. Even Bob Savory, a long-standing friend and supporter of Colin’s, felt that on this occasion he had gone too far. But the damage had been done.

  After the funeral, Sammy did not leave the house for about a month: he was too ashamed and often at night, for a long time afterwards, Josh would come to Sammy in his dreams, and he’d be sick again, and Sammy would carefully clean him up and put him to bed, and Josh would say again to Sammy the last words that Sammy had heard him speak – ‘Poo and pee myself, Daddy’ – and then Sammy would wipe the boy’s fevered brow and he’d fall off to sleep, and everything would be OK.