Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  It had turned out that the two had much in common. They were both great readers and they were both writers, in a way. They certainly both wanted to be writers, and they both harboured huge and entirely unrealistic literary ambitions, which is often the next best thing to being a writer, certainly in our town, where every middle-class housewife would be the next J. K. Rowling, if only she had the time and someone to do the cleaning. Baseless hopes and fantasies of any kind can quickly cement a relationship, particularly between bitter, middle-aged men, as in the mutual admiring of powerboats or younger women – you can usually spot the desperate shared enthusiasm in the glinting hollows of another man’s eyes, in the soft sag of the belly against the shirt and in the emerging capillaries around the nose; and of course what usually happens in our town is that you learn to recognise and overcome these desires by taking up golf and gin and tonic, or rediscovering football, and laughing too loudly at other men’s jokes. But Billy and Colin were not natural joiners, or golfers, or laughers. They had taken instead the long alternative route to friendship – via books.

  Billy himself had abandoned poetry for the moment, had kissed goodbye to the Muse, crushed by his experience with his publisher, but Colin was still working on his magnum opus, late into the night and early in the mornings, before work. Billy is one of the few people in town who knows about it, but it’s not a secret: one day it’ll all be out in the open, so I don’t think I’m breaking a confidence to reveal that Colin has been writing, has been for a long time, a novel about a character called Derek, a novel which is provisionally titled Derek and which is modelled loosely on Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, a book which came as a revelation to Colin when he first read it in his teens and which has remained for him the absolute, undisputed example of what a good book should be: funny, satirical and the work of an absolute misery.

  In Colin’s Derek, Derek is a brilliant, shabby, but immensely lovable and wise-cracking journalist who runs a local newspaper, and who is spectacularly and hilariously unsuccessful with women.

  Colin had come up with the idea for his book and had found the time to write it when his wife, Lisa, had left him, with their children, the twins, shortly after he’d been appointed editor of the Impartial Recorder, when he was working eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. Lisa had left Colin for an architect called Stephen, a man who paid her some attention and who liked to climb mountains at weekends, and who’d designed and built his own house, and Lisa had moved up to the city to be with him and to pursue her own career as a teacher of the deaf.

  ‘I can get through to them better than I can get through to you,’ was Lisa’s parting shot to Colin, after a crockery-cracking row.

  In Colin’s novel Derek, Derek is married to a woman called Louise, who is a teacher of the blind, and they have triplets. In the novel Louise falls in love with a structural engineer called Martin. Martin is killed while paragliding. He turns out to have been a bigamist and a credit card fraudster, and he is not good in bed.*

  The book was going OK, but Colin was having problems with the plot. Having spent years peering behind the scenes of everyday small-town life, he found that he had an excess of story: he had become overcome by story, in fact, and was unable to make any sense of it. He’d become befuddled. The book seemed to be going nowhere. It lacked a climax. Also, he had a problem with character. He didn’t seem able to write a character who was not himself, which was proving to be a disadvantage for a budding novelist. What he really needed, he knew, was more drama and more catharsis.†

  In Billy’s little hut at the dump Colin and Billy would talk literature and drama and catharsis, trading names in much the same way boys at school trade sweets or sandwiches. Having swapped and traded D. H. Lawrence against William Gibson over a number of months, and Tolkien, and J. G. Ballard, and John Irving, and many of the other authors beloved worldwide by teenagers and autodidacts, Billy and Colin had finally come together in agreement that The Catcher in the Rye was probably the greatest work of twentieth-century fiction. Billy had actually made quite a strong case for Franny and Zooey, but it was so obviously one of those books that Colin was only pretending to have read that Billy soon abandoned his position. This often happened, Billy allowing Colin the benefit of the doubt, despite Colin’s considerable seniority – he was in his mid-forties now, if anyone asked, although he had actually passed the mid-point some years ago. Colin had to admit that he was a little in awe of Billy, even though Billy sported a beard, because Billy did seem to have read everything ever written, all the greats, all the way from Shakespeare through to Nick Hornby – all those years working at the dump had not been wasted – and Billy could also quote chunks of poetry from memory, which Colin found immensely impressive, despite himself. Colin was actually thinking of introducing a poetry-quoting sidekick into his novel, as a kind of foil for Derek. He thought that might jazz things up a bit, maybe give things a bit of momentum.

  It was over a strong cup of tea in Billy’s hut one day at the dump, during a heated debate about the problem of evil in the work of Philip Pullman, that the subject turned – as it often does in our town – to the question of Frank Gilbey.

  Billy Nibbs had many reasons for disliking Frank Gilbey and not just because he was his landlord. Frank had become increasingly identified in Billy’s mind with Them, the many enemies with whom Billy was engaged in fighting. These enemies, like the Romans, Angles, Saxons and Jutes of old, seemed to keep on coming, in waves, again and again, except they now consisted mostly of the legions and galleys of the Rude, the Dishonest, the Unhelpful and the Lazy, not to mention the many brute barbarian Consumers whose appetite for consumer goods and for remodelling their homes kept them coming back to the dump, day after day, year in, year out, raping the land and depositing their spoils. For Billy, Frank Gilbey was undoubtedly one of Them: in Billy’s Inferno, landlords ranked just above the panderers and seducers, and just below those who had given in to unnatural lust.

  Colin had other, more complex reasons for disliking Frank Gilbey.

  It has to be said that Colin is not someone who makes friends easily and when he did make friends it usually wasn’t long before he came to despise them. If someone was his friend, Colin believed, there was probably something wrong with them, or why would they want to be his friend in the first place? Did they not have enough friends already? Colin was not what you would call a positive thinker.

  If he’d ever attended one of the personality workshops at the Oasis, run by Sammy and Cherith, Colin would probably have been identified as having a self-esteem problem and he might have tried to do something about it. Of course, for Colin to have been attending one of Sammy’s and Cherith’s personality workshops in the first place he’d have had to have been a different sort of person – he wouldn’t have been Colin. He’d have had to have been the kind of person who attends personality workshops. If he had been more like someone else, though, he might eventually have gone into counselling or psychoanalysis, and if he had done, his counsellor or analyst would probably have made a big deal of the fact that Colin Rimmer had never known his real parents.

  Colin himself had never made much of this fact. Very few people in town even knew that he’d been adopted because it seemed to Colin an irrelevance and not something he chose to talk about.

  Colin had been brought up by a couple named Felicity and Philip Rimmer, and he had treated them, for better and for worse and in every way, as though they were his parents: indeed, they were to him his real parents. There were no others waiting in the wings to claim him as their own. Philip and Felicity were the real thing; they were not impostors. Felicity – who was called Fee by everyone, including Colin – had at one time been an actress in rep and was big in amateur dramatics in and around town, and Philip had taught at Barneville House, the private school, out there on the Old Green Road, and they were good, kind, cultured people, the kind of people who hardly exist here any more, who seem all of a sudden to have disappeared and nobody knows where they’ve gone, t
he kind of people who subscribe to the National Geographic magazine and who attend classical concerts in the city at weekends, who smoke and drink in moderation, who always read the Booker-nominated novels, who are sceptical about television, and who have dinner parties at which they always have an amusing story to tell about themselves and about their amusing week, and who can’t have children of their own.

  So Colin had grown up among books and music and a piano in the drawing room, and napkins rather than serviettes, and there was a tree house in the back garden, which had trees and a shed with a window, which Fee called the summer house.

  Fee had been perfectly straight and up front about things, and when Colin was sixteen she had told him that he was adopted, and she had offered to help him trace his birth mother, but Colin wasn’t interested in tracing his birth mother. Indeed, he hated the term birth mother: he thought it made him sound like some kind of wild animal, like a feral child, like he’d been suckled by wolves and brought up among native tribespeople. Colin’s friends at school didn’t have birth mothers, they just had mothers, and everyone knew what a mother was and what she did, and Colin was perfectly happy with Fee as his mother, who fulfilled all his criteria, thank you very much. She was all the mother he needed. He didn’t need an extra helping of mother. He couldn’t care less about his birth mother. He didn’t want to know anything about her. His birth mother remained only a rumour, and Colin was a journalist and was only interested in facts.

  And the fact was both Fee and Philip had been good parents to him and they were long dead now. They’d been in their late thirties when they’d adopted Colin, and by the time he was twenty they were both gone, Fee riding her Norton 500cc motorbike – a fiftieth birthday present from Philip – and then Philip himself, in grief and guilt, a year later. They’d left a terrible financial mess behind them: unpaid credit card bills and multiple bank accounts, insurance policies which refused to pay out and a house with a leaky roof. Colin had known that things were bad even when he was a child: they’d had to withdraw him from the Barneville House prep school when he was eleven and send him to Central instead, but it was only in death that the full extent of their financial problems became apparent, and Colin had been forced to sell the big leaky house to pay the debts, and all he was left with was a dozen tea chests filled with junk and mementoes, a lot of crinkling paperback books and a quite ridiculous baby grand piano, Fee’s pride and joy, which he’d refused to sell and had managed to manoeuvre through the french windows of his terraced house on the Brunswick Road, and which now took pride of place in his back room: you couldn’t actually open the door to the room to get in; you had to enter through the french windows, and then slide underneath the piano and squeeze up on to the stool to play. Colin stuck mostly to scales.

  It was when they’d died that Colin had moved back to town. He’d worked all over and he could have gone anywhere, could have left the town behind, but he somehow felt he owed it to them, to stick around and let people see that they hadn’t been forgotten or their memory abandoned, that he remained as evidence of their having lived rich and fulfilling lives. Also, to be honest, he did feel that if he moved too far away he’d somehow lose contact with some part of himself, his history and his sense of belonging. At least if he remained in town there might still be someone out there who belonged to him, and he to them, though they might pass each other in the street and not know it. So, barring some serious psychoanalysis, Colin wasn’t going anywhere: he was here for the duration. He felt like he owned the place, but also that the place owned him; they were co-dependent.

  Colin had probably inherited his strong sense of ownership from Philip who, as well as being the geography master at Barneville House, was once our town’s most famous amateur film maker and archivist. Philip used to show his cine-films at the Quality Hotel – one week’s full performances once a year, for over twenty years, in the week between Christmas and New Year, matinées every day at 2.30 – and people would pay to come and see them, and the money would help pay off a few debts. Philip filmed scenes of everyday life – people at work and play, annual local events – and then he used to splice them together into a full hour of viewing, and halfway through the screenings Fee would strap on a tray and walk down the aisle, selling home-made fudge and toffees in paper bags. The shows were an institution, when our town still had institutions: what we have now, of course, is more convenient shopping.

  All of Philip’s old film was upstairs rotting in the tea chests in Colin’s loft. Colin had never gone through them or looked at them: he’d seen the films so many times he didn’t need to see them again. He could screen them any time and anywhere without difficulty in his memory, where he was guaranteed the best seat in the house. He was always there in the films somewhere: somewhere on the periphery, part of a larger drama. He could see himself now: there he was with Fee, in short trousers at the start of the 1969 county cycle race, silently calling out to the face behind the camera, waving and smiling; there he was again with Fee, at the first drive-in car wash, up on Moira Avenue, before the ring road. And there he was, pointing at a duchess, and there again, gazing at a snow drift, or looking at a fallen tree at the top of South Street. Colin’s image of himself as a child was of a child observing rather than participating, watching history in the making, rather than making history. Maybe this was why as an adult he despised anyone who tried to make him a spectator, or who denied his right to act as and when and however he felt like it. Colin did not need to pay a psychiatrist to tell him what he already knew.

  So perhaps there really was no true mystery as to why Colin so disliked Frank Gilbey. As a good friend and business associate of Sir George Sanderson, Frank had come to presume upon Colin’s good nature too many times. He had required Colin to observe and not to act, to behave as though the events he heard reported and witnessed were on some quaint, fading cine-film playing on a blank white wall at the Quality Hotel. Colin had not, for example, reported on Frank’s daughter Lorraine being admitted to the psychiatric unit, or to the clinic for her eating disorder, even though his contacts could offer proof and evidence. He did not report or follow up on persistent rumours that Frank was behind the mysterious demolition of at least a dozen houses of listed status around town. Even the road abandonment schemes and the awarding of the contract for the building of the ring road to a colleague and friend of Frank’s at the golf club had gone unmentioned. About all this Colin’s lips had been sealed, his eyes closed, and his fingers far from his keyboard and the keypad on his mobile phone. He had maintained a dignified silence, had gazed on in childish innocence, and turned his fire instead upon lazy traffic wardens and fly-posters, and utility companies digging up the roads.

  Frank Gilbey was one of the main reasons the Impartial Recorder had not turned out to be what Colin had hoped.

  Over their conversations about literature in Billy’s hut at the dump Colin realised that he had found in Billy someone who, like himself, was angry, frustrated and dogged in the pursuit of the truth. Truth can, of course, be a dangerous thing to pursue, since it is evanescent and very possibly nonexistent. Nonetheless, here in our town, as elsewhere, truth is a topic much discussed, and not just between Billy and Colin. Regularly, by nine o’clock on a Saturday night all sorts of truths are being discussed and emerging, and a Sunday, in many ways, is a day of recovering from the onslaught of truth on a Saturday night. On a Saturday night, right across our town, marriages were tested, friendships forged and broken, revelations made, calmnesses disturbed, as the effects of wine and beer made themselves felt and truth began to slip out and run amok. Church is actually the place where we go to hide from the truth, where we can pretend that we can manage ourselves and what we know of ourselves, and perhaps appeal to ourselves and to others and to God to assist us. Truth, naked, was more frequently seen and heard in the Castle Arms on a Saturday night than in the People’s Fellowship, just three doors down, on a Sunday morning – and this was something of which Colin Rimmer, among others, was well
aware.

  One morning in the hut Billy mentioned to Colin a rumour that Colin had heard many times before – the hoary old rumour that in Frank Gilbey’s back garden were the ornaments which had mysteriously disappeared with the road-widening scheme nearly ten years ago, the big stone trough and the beautiful water fountain from outside the Quality Hotel. It was a silly sort of a rumour and a nothingy sort of a story, but Colin knew it meant something: it was symbolic. If they could get Frank Gilbey for the garden ornaments, that would just be the beginning. Colin said that he would dearly like to know the truth about this rumour, and Billy had said that he reckoned anyone could find out the truth, if they set their mind to it. OK, said Colin. You can be my undercover reporter. Which is how Billy Nibbs ceased to be a poet and finally got into print.

  * To consult the Impartial Recorder archive at the library, contact Philomena Rocks. An entire run of papers, between the years 1965–73 are missing, though, unfortunately, because the then local librarian, Barry Devlin, was during that time under the influence of the Troggs, the Small Faces, the Rolling Stones, marijuana, acid, speed and a lot of Carling Black Label, and he took an executive decision not to bother to keep any local papers, using the library’s basement storage area instead as a rehearsal room for his band, the Tigers, who were a kind of cross between the Animals and the Beatles, and whose single, ‘Hello There!’, reached no. 39 in the UK charts in February 1967. The library archive does, however, boast an almost complete run of the New Musical Express covering the period, which is some small consolation: they reveal that the Kinks played here, apparently, at Morelli’s in 1966, as did Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, and the Wombles a little later. Barry Devlin has retired now and is divorced, after a high-profile court case in which he was found guilty of threatening his wife Julie with a knife after a marathon seventy-two-hour drinking binge, which began on a ferry to the Isle of Man and which ended up in Casualty, but he still has his popular and appropriately titled Sunday night slot, ‘Blues Unlimited’, on Hitz!FM.