Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  It was a feeling and a warmth which had more or less worn off by nine o’clock the next morning, however, when arriving at a house in his dad’s van, with ‘Davey Quinn and Sons’ painted on the sides, to announce himself to the owners.

  It was a couple, the job – a Mr and Mrs Wilson, and just one room. The Wilsons are new to town and their house is one of the old houses, up near the golf course, one of the few remaining houses we have with the original sash windows, which Mr and Mrs Wilson are determined to retain and maintain, and which afford pleasant views of the all-new, strictly-uPVC development, Woodsides, whose name is something of a misnomer, since they had to cut down the wood to build the houses.

  Mr Wilson enjoys his elevated aspect and mature landscaped gardens to front and rear, and is a senior manager with Solly Wiseman’s industrial and contract cleaning firm, CleenEezy, which has its offices on the industrial estate, up there off the ring road, near to Bloom’s. The couple have a baby on the way – just weeks away, in fact – so they don’t have the time to do the decorating themselves, as Mr Wilson is at pains to explain to Davey, implying that he would have been more than capable of doing it himself, actually, and probably better, under normal circumstances. In our town, even if your wife is about to have a child and you work in middle management and you can afford to have people in to do work for you, you still have to pretend that you would and could do it yourself, if it weren’t for mitigating circumstances. You have to do a lot of face-saving in our town: as a people, we are not natural employers. All our middle classes here clean for their cleaners and we have turned the necessity of DIY into a virtue.

  Mr Wilson was busy and on his way to work, wearing one of those shirts with the cutaway collar and the bone inserts – shirts which he loves and he has one for every day of the week, plus some in reserve – and a big fat tie in blue and yellow chevrons. He probably has some of the best ties in town: he orders them from London, from the pages of the Sunday Times magazine. Mrs Wilson is wearing black, has not a dyed-blonde hair out of place and is on maternity leave.

  The Wilsons are undoubtedly the future of our town and not its past: they are proud of their leather sofa and their wide-screen TV, and quite right, since there is really nothing like relaxing on your own leather sofa at the end of a hard day, a glass of Czech-style beer in hand and satellite sport on the telly. Mr Wilson was thinking about it already, in fact, as he made his excuses and left for work.

  They’d done most of the major work now, Mrs Wilson was explaining to Davey, touching her bump. Now they just wanted to get started on the decorating: her mother was going to be staying for a few weeks after the baby was born and so they wanted to begin with the spare room. Quinn and Sons had been recommended to them, ‘by word of mouth,’ she said, with a barely suppressed smile of satisfaction and knowing, ‘word of mouth’ appearing to her to be almost as good as a lifetime guarantee, a shibboleth, or access to the secrets of some cabalistic organisation or cult. Which is pretty much what it’s like, actually, which is the reality of living in a small town. You need the inside information in order to survive: you have to have the knowledge. Cities are full of amateurs – you can get by on a lot of bluffing in a city – but a small town is full of adepts.

  Davey hauled his stuff in from the van and was shown upstairs to a large room whose walls were covered with a thick embossed paper and a built-in wardrobe. Mrs Wilson didn’t think the room had been touched since the house was built – Edwardian, she said. 1928, reckoned Davey – you get an eye for these things. Davey Senior could date decorative effects to within a year – flocks, swags, Anaglypta, floral wallpapers, dados, rag-rolling – and it was an eye for detail, and for other people’s mistakes, that Davey had inherited. This particular room, he guessed, had been gussied up in some haste, in about 1989 by the look of it, with a voile at the window and curtains with tie-backs on a long pine pole, but the wallpaper was old, and original, and painted thick: it was probably the wallpaper that had gone up when the house was built, said Davey, unable to hide what he was surprised to hear sounded like regret in his voice.

  ‘But that’s not a problem?’ asked Mrs Wilson hopefully, hesitating by the door.

  ‘No,’ said Davey, ‘it’s not a problem’, and did his best to radiate confidence, which seemed to work: Mrs Wilson could, of course, have no idea that Davey had spent no more time painting and decorating in the past twenty years than he had flossing his teeth. But he looked the part. He had borrowed his dad’s old bib and braces.

  ‘I’ll just have to …’ he began, by which time Mrs Wilson was away downstairs. Despite his height, at six foot two, Davey had become instantly reduced, like his father and his grandfather before him, to being just another little man in a big house. Nothing changes.

  He manhandled all the furniture into the centre of the room – a large antique chest of drawers, inherited, Davey guessed, two large lamps, a couple of bedside tables, the double bed – and he covered them all with a dust sheet. Or almost with a dust sheet. The dust sheet he’d brought in from the van wasn’t quite big enough.

  First he dismantled the built-in wardrobe – a pathetic effort, made of plywood nailed to some 2″ x 2″, with badly fitting louver doors.

  ‘What are the only essential tools for painting and decorating?’ his father had asked him when he was young. Paintbrushes, Davey had guessed, wrongly. A scraper and scoring knife? No. A papering table? Nope.

  ‘The only essential tools for painting and decorating – like all jobs – don’t forget this – are a large screwdriver and an even larger hammer.’

  The wardrobe had been fitted straight on top of the paper, so Davey just hammered away to his heart’s content, and once he had a nice square room he could begin.

  Undoubtedly Davey Senior’s favourite bit of kit, when it came to stripping, his best investment, was an industrial wallpaper steamer, the Earlex SteamMaster®, a beautiful machine, imported from America, of course, a work of art almost, like a big fat metal toaster, enclosed in a metal cage so strong you could stand on it, with a two-gallon water tank, lightweight steam pan, and over two hours of stripping time. Davey Senior loved that machine and now his son was growing to love it too. For the professional painter and decorator, the SteamMaster® was just about the best thing to have happened since lead-free paint. When Davey used to help his dad, of course, when he was young, it was still just the three Ss – Score and Soak and Strip – and the only gear you needed to prep a room was a bucket of water, some Fairy Liquid and a stripping knife, or if it was really tough a bottle of vinegar. Those days were long gone.

  The water in the SteamMaster® took thirty-five minutes to heat and when the light went out the machine was ready and Davey held the steam plate up against the wall, held it with his left hand up in the far right-hand corner, just like his father had taught him as a child, and started stripping with his right. You had to keep the plate moving, otherwise it blew the top layer of plaster. As Davey held the steam plate to the paper, the adhesive dissolved beneath.

  Davey worked for two hours without stopping, steaming and scraping, the paper coming away all gluey in his hands. As he peeled back paper and scraped down to the plaster, it felt like stripping the skin from a fish, like taking a clean edge to life and scraping it back to its beginnings, to guts and bones. He’d forgotten how much he enjoyed it. The wallpaper stuck to his skin in tiny wet scraps and patches, so that eventually his hands and face were covered. He’d gone all crinkly. He felt like an old man.

  Davey’s grandfather, Old Davey, had established the business in 1924. Davey never knew him, and knew of him only through photos and old family stories – a bull-necked man with eyes brown like mahogany, a man who liked his pints, apparently, but who worked hard, and not a bad man – self-taught, a good singer, second tenor in the town’s male-voice choir, the son of a farmer from up-country, a man who had fought in two world wars and made his own way in life.

  His grandfather represented to Davey his whole idea of history
– there was no history further back, nothing before him, the man whose wife had borne the seven sons. It was his grandfather who had determined Davey’s name, and his life, and when Davey left town twenty years ago it wasn’t really his father he was escaping, or himself, it was this man he’d never met and his influence, reaching out to him across the years.

  Just to the right of the window, as he was tugging at the paper, thinking about his grandfather, Davey saw what looked at first like some cracks in the plaster.

  But it wasn’t cracks. It was writing on the wall.

  You always sign the wall: that was another thing his father had taught him when he was young. That was what you did, if you were a good tradesman and proud of your profession. Paper or paint, it didn’t matter, you always signed and dated the wall. So that others knew you’d been there; proof of a job well done.

  The writing was a neat copperplate, in pencil, perfectly straight, each letter the size of a finger or a thumb, and in three scrapes Davey had the whole thing clear:

  David Quinn, 20 August 1929

  His grandfather. Old Davey. The first Davey Quinn. He’d been here first. He’d done the room.

  The hair stood up on the back of Davey’s neck, a sensation he had experienced only once before, when Angela Brown had grabbed him, pulled him towards her and kissed him, unexpectedly, his first real kiss, by the monument in the People’s Park.

  His grandfather’s hands – he couldn’t get the thought out of his head – had covered these same walls, the same space, hanging the paper, pasting this paper, the paper that lay in shreds all around him.

  And, just the same as Angela Brown’s kiss, Davey had no idea what this meant, but he knew that it meant something and that it had consequences, and he found he had to steady himself; and as he looked outside he saw that it had grown misty, that a thick fog had come rolling in, and then he realised that he had not ventilated the room and that it was not fog rolling in at all, it was condensation, and that the room he was in was now a very wet room indeed. He bent down and touched the dust sheets on the floor and the sodden carpet beneath, and as he glanced at the soaking dust sheet on the bed, he felt dizzy and he felt droplets on his head, and he looked up and saw that the steam from the mighty Steam-Master® had softened the lath-and-plaster ceiling, which was now hanging down, just inches above his head, and as he reached up, instinctively, and touched it the whole thing came tumbling down upon him.

  And when he came round what he saw was the pregnant Mrs Wilson standing over him and the writing on the wall.

  * The Wongs have been here for over fifty years now and they have made their contribution to society – the original Mr Wong, Huaning, or Hugh, as we called him, became chairman of the Old Green Road Allotment Holders’ Association, where he grew prize-winning chard and begonias, and his daughter Zhu, or Sue, is now headmistress at the Assumption primary school, where she insists on phonics and observing saint’s days. Through providing generations of us here with spring rolls and egg-fried rice the Wongs helped provide their family back in China with enough money for Flying Pigeon bicycles and Snowflake refrigerators, and more recently, enough for a car, a DVD player and Manchester United replica kits. Mr Wong got to visit his sister in Beijing before he died a few years ago, the first time he’d ever been back, and he was glad he made the trip although ‘it looks like Birmingham,’ he told the Impartial Recorder. There was standing room only for his funeral at the Church of the Cross and the Passion, and Hugh’s son Rao, or Ray, now runs the takeaway but it looks as though he’ll be the last in the line. Ray’s own children, Jonathan and Sally, are keen to break with tradition: Jonathan is still at school but he works weekends and evenings at Becky Badger’s Animal Surgery and Pet Centre, and would like to become a vet; Sally is studying for a degree in Art History up in the city and would like to be a TV presenter or, failing that, a lecturer.

  * Wallets, in our town, are still considered effeminate, a foreign practice, something you see people using on holiday in the Canary Islands, or the Balearics, or in America. Most men still prefer the jingle of loose coins in their pockets and the risk of losing the odd fiver in the wash – just to remind themselves of what it was like to be young and single. In our town it’s the ladies who tend to carry the cards in their purses – most men here cannot handle plastic. An elastic band or a metal money clip is about as far as most of us will go in the direction of organising our personal finances.

  * In summary, Quinn family conversation consists of little more than a dozen repeated phrases, like the language of a primitive tribespeople, the No-Hopi, perhaps, of the Back of Beyond. These phrases are: ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to’, ‘No’, ‘I said no’, ‘Oh, dear’, ‘Well’, ‘Sorry, what did you say?’, ‘Fine’, ‘What time will you be back?’, ‘What do you want it for?’, ‘What do you want to do that for?’, ‘Because it’s too expensive’, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’, ‘Would you like another cup of tea?’ and ‘I don’t know what that’s all about at all’. There are some variations according to time, place and the person speaking, but not many. Non-verbal communication between family members lacks the same subtlety and tends towards a single expressive raising of the eyebrow, although Mr Quinn does make occasional use of tutting and Mrs Quinn of desultory head-shaking.

  * Those who have attended Barry McClean’s ‘Philosophy for Beginners’ will perhaps recognise in Mrs Quinn’s pudding a reflection or shadow of the problem of Plato’s theory of forms and of various theories of identity through time, including Quine’s ‘no entity without identity’ and Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic.

  9

  Closure

  In which the rot sets in and Frank Gilbey wears L.L. Bean

  Monday night there was a red sky at sunset, the glow spreading right across towards the east. It was unusual – people remarked upon it as they were going into the school, many of them for the last time. Even the weather, they said, looked valedictory. Actually, they didn’t say it looked valedictory.

  ‘It looks bad,’ they said, ‘a red sky.’

  The school is closing. Central School. Our school. The place you went if you weren’t smart or you weren’t Catholic or your parents weren’t rich. They’ve been talking about it for a long time now, ever since the opening of the new Collegiate School out on the ring road and the changes in the post-primary selection procedures, but now it’s finally happening. The inspectors arrived at the end of last year. Their report – just two weeks in preparation and less than one hundred pages in length, a report like all reports, feeble and thin and white, and punching well above its weight and far below the belt – recommended immediate closure. There were, of course, the well-attended public meetings in response and a community delegation to the Secretary of State to put the case against closure. The High Court granted leave to move for judicial review. But still the school is closing. The falling attendance cannot be reversed and the failing standards cannot easily be remedied, despite all the valiant efforts of Mr Swallow and his staff.

  The rot set in with the stories being leaked to the Impartial Recorder about the building of a new school better to serve the community on the ring road: current provision, according to unnamed sources, was ‘inadequate’, and ‘radical proposals’ were being considered. From that moment Central was fighting a losing battle. No one wants to send their child to a school that’s about to close, or that’s rumoured to be about to close. No one wants to be associated with the inadequate, not even round here. We may be inadequate, but we don’t care to know it, thank you. Mr Swallow had meetings at the time with the editor of the Impartial Recorder, Colin Rimmer, a former pupil himself at Central, a man who as a boy played rugby for the school, who was a tight-head prop, but who was otherwise undistinguished and who hated most of his classmates almost as much as they hated him, a man who suffers from our common small-town delusion of grandeur, who seems to think he’s running a national paper and whose weekly column he calls ‘Rimmer’s Around’, in which
he mocks and satirises all that most of us here hold dear, including truth and beauty and scouting and people who write letters of complaint about dog fouling. Colin Rimmer told Mr Swallow, in no uncertain terms, to let him get on with running his paper and he’d let him get on with running his school. When Mr Swallow appealed to his better nature as a former pupil, Colin just laughed and then he wrote about the meeting in his column, suggesting Mr Swallow had lived up to his name and done it with his pride. It was first blood in the school’s long slow death from a thousand cuts.

  Mr Swallow has already lost most of his teachers – a massive haemorrhage: all the younger ones and anyone with remaining ambitions – but he doesn’t blame them, he has encouraged them to leave, in fact, and has offered them every assistance. They’re not rats, he has had to explain to his deputy, a bitter woman with a pudding-bowl haircut and lemon-sucking lips called Miss Raine, who is what people in our town would call a ‘career’ teacher, which is a euphemism, which means a woman aged over thirty who has not found a man and who is never likely to, a woman who wore stout shoes and pink acrylic and elastic-waisted skirts, and who believed that every teacher should be proud to stand on the prow while the ship went down. These people are not rats, he’d had to explain to her, they’re just human. We’re all human, he had to remind Miss Raine, and there’s nothing we can do about it.