Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  Sammy came in to find Billy getting dressed – he’d finished stocking the shelves downstairs with little books of calm. ‘Did you enjoy that?’ he asked.

  ‘I did, actually,’ said Billy. ‘I feel much better.’

  8

  The Steam Master

  Containing several shocks and surprises for the Quinns, both father and son

  It’s been blue skies for nearly a week now, and temperatures hot enough for young men to strip down to T-shirts and tattoos, and women to lie out in the People’s Park in bikini tops, sipping Bacardi Breezers and listening to the radio. It’s positively Mediterranean, though with more techno, maybe, and not as much garlic. Davey Quinn Senior has been house painting and he’s as brown as a berry: Mrs Quinn says he looks like a black man. He’s so brown, in fact, that his tattoos have virtually disappeared: they look like shadows, or large areas of skin cancer possibly.

  Despite being up the ladder and out in the sun ten hours a day, Davey Quinn Senior has not been applying sun cream, much to Mrs Quinn’s disapproval: his old bald head is peeling so badly it looks like a hot chestnut and he leaves flakes behind him in bed. Davey Senior does not really believe in sun cream, although unknown to Mrs Quinn he has been using a lot of Deep Heat recently: he’s been suffering pains in his hands and in his knees and in his hips again.

  Davey Quinn Senior is sixty-three years old now and built like a boxer: hands like mangles, a chest like a barrel, arms like joints of meat and a back almost as broad as it is stiff. His knees are thick and swollen, and almost entirely without cartilage. When he bends down to pick up a paint pot these days there is a grinding of his joints, like a machine without oil. He drinks about triple the recommended units per week, takes three sugars in his tea and six in a flask, but he doesn’t eat like he used to. He sleeps for no more than five hours a night, often waking at 4 a.m. with back pain and a terrible need to piss. He had trouble with his prostate a few years ago – he pronounces it ‘prostrate’, deliberately, to annoy Mrs Quinn, successfully – and he has cut down on the beer and now drinks mostly wine and spirits. He’d never drunk wine until he was in his mid-fifties – most of the men he knew still didn’t, but Davey was not a stick-in-the-mud in his drinking habits and he liked to keep up to date. There was even a time, during the early 1970s, when he drank martinis, but that was just a phase, everyone was doing it – even in the Castle Arms and the Hercules Bar there were grown men drinking sweet drinks from small glasses, with olives and slices of lemon. Davey Senior fancied himself now as something of a connoisseur, if not a wine buff exactly. Mrs Quinn would occasionally take a glass of chardonnay, or a rosé, but Mr Quinn preferred the red wine – you couldn’t beat a nice New World Shiraz, in his opinion. He gave up smoking five years ago – having first down-shifted to low-tar – after his friend Jacky had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Davey Senior had found it hard giving up: it took him two years to stop completely, but he’d been determined. He didn’t want the same to happen to him as had happened to Jacky. Jacky had died and he was only fifty-six years old, and in Davey’s terms this meant Jacky was a young man, a baby almost: Davey, at the time, was fifty-seven. Jacky had been in the year below him at St Gall’s. It was a shock and a sadness to see him go – of course, you always wonder who’s going to be the first among you to go, and when they go you can’t help feeling that somehow it was the right thing, that it was never really meant to be you, that you were always the one destined to hang around for a little longer than the others, even if it was only to apply a few more coats of paint to your crumbling walls and to enjoy a little extra elbow room at the bar. It’s a terrible truth and one you can’t live with for ever, but when an old-friend dies, you draw a little strength from their passing.

  Davey Senior had learnt his lesson from Jacky and had tried an acupuncturist for the smoking, a Chinese fella, Doctor Ye, recommended to him by Little Mickey Matchett, whom Davey used to play football with and who’s had terrible trouble with his cartilage – the old footballer’s disease – and who now swears by what he calls the ‘foreign medicine’.

  Doctor Ye is known to most people in town as ‘the other Chinaman’ – Mr Wong and his family from the takeaway being the first, the most important and the most popular.* Doctor Ye’s parents arrived here from China in the 1950s. They were actually from the same town in China as the Wongs, and when they heard over there how well the Wongs were doing and how much they liked it here – something, one suspects, had been lost in the translation – they thought they’d give it a try, and they managed to steal a passage and get out, and for years they ran a little upholstery business from home, a house on the Brunswick Road, full of bare naked chairs and vast blankets of fabric, and they kept themselves to themselves, quietly assimilating and getting on with the endless task of mending and making good. They got to like milk in their tea, and toast, and they got into pub and club refurbishments, big business here in the 1980s. The children were privately educated, at Barneville House, the old boarding school beyond the ring road, and they all made it to university. The eldest son, Stevie, Doctor Ye, now operates out of his own house on Cromac Street, where he eats macrobiotic, as much as is possible here, and has a little pagoda built from breeze blocks and rendered and painted in Dulux Weathershield ‘Golden Sunrise’ in the front garden, and a nice water feature – installed at enormous expense, but which was tax deductible – and he spends his days in his converted front room burning herbs and sticking long thin needles into the fat white fish-bellied bodies of the people of our town.

  Not a lot had changed, according to Stevie’s dad, Mr Ye. He did chairs: Stevie does people.

  The acupuncture hadn’t actually worked on Davey Senior’s smoking – he’d managed it in the end with gum – but while he was seeing Doctor Ye, Davey had mentioned the trouble he was having with his shoulder and Stevie had popped in a couple of extras, for free, and – bam! – it was like electric currents racing through Davey’s body.

  ‘It felt like being rewired,’ he told everyone down at the Castle Arms, including Georgie Hannigan, who is an electrician and who rather doubted it – he’s been electrocuted a couple of times himself and he knows it’s not something to boast about. Davey Senior had briefly become an acupuncture bore: talking about yin and yang, and energy channels and meridians, but he found that people’s eyes soon glazed over when he started talking about it and, without either the interest or the ability to pursue the subject further, he soon got bored with it himself. The needles became just a pleasant memory.

  He was thinking about acupuncture now, though, for the first time in a long while, and about private medical insurance, as he lay on the floor, the sharp point of a paintbrush, or something, possibly a body part, digging in his back. He had no idea what had happened to him.

  There’d been a touch of drizzle first thing in the morning and he’d moved inside on a job, and one minute, just a moment ago, he’d been up the ladder, quite high, cutting in, using one of those so-called ‘heritage’ colours that everyone was so keen on these days – and which all looked like bird shit if you asked him – in one of the big old houses on Fitzroy Avenue, with the thirteen-foot ceilings and the ornate plaster covings, and the next thing he knew he was lying on the floor, looking up at a freshly painted ceiling.

  Davey Senior did not panic. The worst thing you can do in a situation like that is to panic. For the self-employed, falling off ladders is something you come to expect now and again, like a letter from the taxman asking you to come in for an interview. As he lay there, Davey Senior remembered the many who had fallen before him, or at least the ones who’d admitted to it: Jacky, who’d lost two fingers when he was working in the steel plant and took a tumble from a gangway; Scotty, the big Scotsman, who was a glazier and who had the scars to show for it; and of course Davey’s old friend Dessie, Big Dessie Brown, a friend from way back. Dessie had had it the worst of all of them, of course, had suffered the biggest fall, but then look what had happened to him. Dessie was t
he living proof, in our town, that there were sometimes silver linings.

  Dessie had been a roofer and had broken his back when he fell off one of the new builds doing the slates on one of the first estates built outside the ring road. The injury nearly finished him off – he walked bent double, like a cripple, with a stick – but he always referred to the fall as his ‘lucky break’. He said that when he was lying there looking up at the sky, unable to move or to speak, it was like a revelation, a visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that what She was saying to him was clear and unambiguous, and it had changed his life for ever and in an instant. It might be better, the BVM seemed to be suggesting to Big Dessie, to pay someone else to climb roofs for you. From that moment on Dessie had never looked back. He never climbed another roof, and now he lived in a six-bedroom house with a swimming pool, tennis courts and views across open fields. He ran a full team right across the county – sparks, joiners, plumbers, plasterers, painters and decorators, the full works – and he paid no heed to niceties like tax and National Insurance, which the Blessed Virgin didn’t seem to have been too bothered about Herself, and he drove a specially modified Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, with a disabled badge, and he’d always stand Davey Senior a pint if he saw him down the pub, and they would reminisce about old goals and fixtures. Those were the days. He used to pay for his drink from a big roll of cash he carried around done up with an elastic band.*

  Davey Senior was thinking about that big wad of cash and he was looking for his own silver lining all the way to the hospital, where the doctors told him the worst: he’d cracked two ribs and three vertebrae. He was going to be off work for some time.

  Well, Davey Senior was a man who could not afford to be off work for some time. His three sons in the business, Daniel, Gerry and Craig, could keep things ticking over – they were good boys – but at the end of the day they were going to be a man down, and with all the contracts coming in they couldn’t afford to be. They had a school to do, the new Collegiate School up on the ring road; and houses; and shops; business premises. Davey was running a big small business and he was going to need someone he could trust to take care of some of the smaller jobs, a body, someone who knew the business, who could work unsupervised, and someone he could rely upon to uphold the standards of the Quinn name. Above all, he needed someone whom he didn’t need to pay.

  Davey Senior had not been to church in thirty years, and he no more believed in the Blessed Virgin Mary than he did in the tooth fairy and Father Christmas, but as he lay in bed in the hospital, considering his dilemma, eating his hospital food, he had an idea.

  On his first day back home, out of hospital, the first day of his convalescence, he asked Mrs Quinn to cook up a nice meal to celebrate his return: a good plain meat pie, maybe, with mashed potato and gravy, followed by a treacle pudding. If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, then Davey was determined to cut a swath, using all the complex carbohydrates at his disposal.

  Since his own return home Davey’s son, young Davey, the seventh son of the seventh son, has tried to avoid eating with his parents. He just couldn’t face the same meals he remembered from his childhood: he was amazed, in fact, that they were still eating the identical stuff, twenty years on, with only the occasional added variation of a microwave lasagne and a token bottle of olive oil in the kitchen cupboard to register the fact that this was not still 1976, that this was post-Ready, Steady, Cook, this was a new millennium and not the culinary Stone Age. It was pies still, mostly, in the Quinn household, and puddings for pudding, and Mr and Mrs Quinn were even using the same plates that Davey remembered, and the same crackle-plastic-handled cutlery, and the English hunting-scene place mats. His parents’ house depressed him in general and unutterably, but the kitchen – the kitchen depressed him more than anything, and in every detail, from the fake marble finish on its lonely brown breakfast bar, to its varnished tongue-and-groove on the walls, and its faded Venetian blind perpetually at half-mast, even though no direct sunlight penetrated through the leylandii which now shaded and protected the bungalow on all sides.

  No good things had ever happened in the Quinn family kitchen, as far as Davey could remember, it was just too small for anything except cooking and washing up, which of course is what a kitchen is for, except for the middle classes who, even in our town, tend to use their kitchens for the same varied purposes the Quinn family had always used the pub: in order to drink, and to argue, and to meet their friends. If the kitchen is the heart of the house, like people say, if that was really true, then the Quinn house had a serious coronary problem. The Quinn kitchen was not a place where family meals were shared, or problems discussed, where children did their homework while Mummy made muffins, or even where crockery was thrown, or cafetière coffee drunk late into the night while thrashing out personal or global political problems. It was simply a place, a narrow space, where for years the Quinns had eaten Findus Crispy Pancakes and Angel Delight, in rotation, all seven brothers taking turns on one of the two stools, only one of which – the TV stool – afforded a clear view of the television in the adjacent front room.

  In fact, the only interesting thing that had ever happened to Davey in that kitchen was that when his father or mother spoke to him at mealtimes, now as then, Davey always seemed to know exactly what they were about to say. His parents had induced in him from a young age a permanent sense of déjà vu, but this was not, alas, Davey realised early on, because he was an alien abductee or because in another life he’d been a Cherokee Indian and was blessed with the gift of second sight or the Third Eye – it was simply because his family repeated themselves. Endlessly.*

  Over the past few years Davey had grown accustomed to eating by himself, often in silence, or with his friends, when and where he wanted, usually in cheap curry houses or pizza places, and he only ate food he liked, with people he liked. In all his years away he had managed to develop for himself just one home-cooked speciality, chicken-celery soup, which when eaten with a slice, or preferably two, or even three, of wholemeal bread, Davey had found usefully combined both protein and roughage, and also those all-important vitamins and minerals that go to make up that all-important balanced diet that you always read so much about in the papers and on the side of cereal packets. There is a knack to soup-making – it’s all about balancing smoothness and acidity – and Davey Quinn believed that with his chicken and celery soup he had mastered the art. This is his secret recipe:

  CHICKEN-CELERY SOUP

  1 can chicken soup

  1 can celery soup

  Combine soups. Heat. Serves 4–6.

  There was a microwave in the kitchen of the shared house in west London where Davey had eventually ended up before returning home, and his cooking had increasingly come to rely upon and revolve around the microwave’s limited capacities: so Mondays, for example, was usually baked potatoes with cheese and baked beans; Tuesdays was baked potatoes with anchovies; Wednesdays, chicken-celery soup; Thursdays, baked potato with pesto. Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays varied according to whereabouts, although it was often a meal out with friends, or a meal in with his housemates. (He also used to patronise an excellent kebab shop, called The Sultan’s Delight, on the Uxbridge Road, more than once a week, where the proprietor, Dimitri, had lost his left-hand forefinger in an accident with hot oil and where privileged regulars, among whom Davey was proud to count himself, got to call him One-Finger and were given a few more slices of meat and some extra chilli sauce, if Dimitri was in the mood.)

  The Tuesday-night baked potatoes with anchovies – Davey’s other claim to culinary innovation, apart from the chicken-celery soup – he liked to call his Mystery Potatoes. All you had to do was put the potato in the microwave for ten minutes, then scoop out the flesh from inside and mix it up with chopped anchovy fillets and then scoop it all back in and do the potato for about another five. And then … Surprise!

  The first time one of his housemates, Jane, had tried a Mystery Potato, she had cut into it, re
leasing that lovely strong, slightly constipated anchovy smell, and revealing the lovely dark mush inside, and had refused to eat it, had hurried to the bathroom, in fact, and had not returned for some time. No one else apart from Davey seemed to like it.

  The crust on Mrs Quinn’s meat pie, meanwhile, had been cooked to the point of explosion, the mincemeat inside dried stiff with Oxo, and the mashed potato was sober and cold. The carrots were chopped into chunks, the gravy was Bisto, and the New World Shiraz was fresh in from the shed and in contrast to the accompanying hot, strong cup of tea. Davey Senior kept on quietly refilling Davey’s wineglass and his mug with tea, and he waited until Davey had cleared his plate before he popped the question.

  Would Davey, he wondered, consider taking on some jobs while he recovered from his fall – would Davey, in other words, reconsider his long-standing opposition to working in the family business, and come and work for Quinn and Sons?

  Davey, of course, refused point-blank: it was a conversation they’d had enough times not to need a rehearsal, or even a pause for thought. Also, he had his work at the Plough and the Stars, as a kitchen porter, so it was out of the question.

  ‘But a kitchen porter,’ began Davey Senior.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Compared to the family business …’

  Mrs Quinn saw how things were going. She felt her husband should have known better and she tried to move the conversation along, but Davey Senior persisted and positions became entrenched.

  And then the treacle pudding arrived.

  It was not the pudding itself that mattered. The pudding was much like any other: dry and suety, and too much of it, in a sticky pool of treacle. The point of a pudding is not to be unique and special: the point of a pudding is to be like other puddings.* Also, there is no such thing as the single-serve pudding: no one is going to bother to steam a pudding just for themselves. A single man does not make himself puddings: a pudding requires a family or at the very least some guests. Without others a pudding simply does not exist. A pudding is proof that there is such a thing as society. Davey, who was struggling back at home, who had spent so many years alone and away from his family and from this town, and not all of them happy, away from puddings and pies, and whose idea of a dessert was a bar of Dairy Milk from the twenty-four-hour garage, or something not quite defrosted in an Indian restaurant, now found himself completely defenceless in the face of his mother’s sugar and suet, this little mound of family values, and the sight of it and the taste of it, and another large helping, and a glass or two of the brandy his father had been given for Christmas last year by a satisfied customer, warmed and softened his cold, cold heart.