Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  Central Cutz is not a barber’s: this is an important distinction to make. Central Cutz is what is still called in our town a Unisex Hair Salon, although it’s perhaps not immediately clear from the outside that they do, in fact, cater to men as well as women: only the presence of a pile of GQ magazines next to the Cosmopolitans and People’s Friends on the little curly-wrought-iron coffee table by the window indicates that indeed they do. The walls inside Central Cutz are painted a rich terracotta and feature stencilled rustic motifs and découpage picked out by recessed spotlights, a quease-making effect that Francie himself had previously only seen demonstrated by tanned, skinny women on house make-over programmes on TV. It is not the interior of a barber’s shop.

  After settling into a chair and waiting for twenty minutes, reading a magazine featuring an interview with an actress and singer he’d never heard of called Jennifer Lopez, who rather reminded him of Bobbie Dylan – which unnerved him – Francie eventually plucked up the courage to speak to the receptionist and ask if he could go next, but apparently you’re supposed to book an appointment for a consultation in Central Cutz, you don’t just sit and queue, which he hadn’t known, and no one had told him, but he was told there’d been a cancellation and he could have an appointment with a senior stylist, someone called Jackie, or Jacky, or possibly even Jacqui. Francie wasn’t sure whether to expect a man or a woman.

  Jackie turned out, in fact, to be a man, although a man sporting pencil-thin sideburns, like the go-faster stripes on an old Ford Capri, or the markings on a basketball, tapering to a point and a halt just short of his mouth, and with no hair whatsoever round the back and sides and a sort of short wet-look bubble perm on top. Francie tried never to judge on first impressions, but he did not like the look of Jackie. Jackie did not look like a barber. He did not look like Tommy Morris.

  Jackie guided Francie to a chair, which was the kind of fold-up director’s chair you see in films about Hollywood and also in Habitat, and not a barber’s chair at all of the kind that Francie was used to, and he asked Francie what he wanted done, and Francie said he wanted a haircut – he’d never really had to instruct Tommy – and Jackie said, in a voice crisp with sarcasm, ‘Right! Any preferences at all? You want to give me a clue?’ and Francie said that he wasn’t really sure, he hadn’t thought about it, and Jackie said, in what was quite clearly a patronising tone, ‘OK, what I’ll do is go round the back and sides, bring it in really nice and short, and then I’ll wash your hair and cut on top by hand, does that sound all right?’ Francie agreed that that would be OK.

  Jackie picked up his scissors and Francie closed his eyes and started to regret having given in to Bobbie Dylan’s entreaties. He tried not to think about it. He reflected instead on what had been a long and difficult year, full of ups and downs.

  After the split with Cherith, Francie had experienced a long dark night of the soul, and he’d gone before his congregation to try to explain. God had spoken to him, he said, and He wished Francie to lay a fleece before Him, and so that was what Francie was going to do: if the majority of the congregation did not feel they could support him as minister, he would resign from the position.

  In the end Francie lost about fifteen members of the congregation – young families, mostly, and he could understand that. A young family does not wish to see on a Sunday morning a reminder of everything they were missing out on as a young family on a Sunday morning – the sight of a man who had shrugged his shoulders and walked away from the difficulties and responsibilities of family life, and walked straight into something a lot more interesting. So the young families had gone. The singles, the spinsters, the elderly couples, the young and the mad had mostly stayed on, and that was enough.

  Jackie was pushing Francie forward: having never had his hair washed in a barber’s before, Francie wasn’t sure what was happening and resisted, and Jackie said, ‘Wash your hair, yes?’ as he might to a child or a senile old man, and when he leant forward towards the basin Francie thought for a moment he was going to be sick. He let the water wash over him.

  After he had rededicated himself to the Lord’s work before his diminished congregation, Bobbie had begun to encourage Francie to introduce all sorts of innovations, and within a few months numbers had picked up again to what they were before his split with Cherith. Bobbie herself had settled into a regular slot during the Sunday morning services, and under her guidance and encouragement the People’s Fellowship Worship Band – or just the Band, as Bobbie called them – had begun to play a little more up-tempo, a little tighter and a little louder. She felt that the music had been stuck in a 1970s M OR praise and worship mode – too many ballads – and it needed updating. It was her idea to start using pop songs and replacing the words with Christian lyrics. This was a massive success: the Band’s sanctified version of Eminem’s ‘The Real Slim Shady’ (chorus: ‘Will the real Saviour please stand up?/I repeat, will the real Saviour please stand up?’) bringing them to the attention of the Impartial Recorder, and then the local commercial radio station, Hitz!FM, where Bobbie was interviewed at length about her vision for the church.*

  Bobbie did have her misses, though, as well as her hits. She didn’t always get it right. She had rechristened the Young People’s Group, calling it Can Teen, and that seemed to work, but her Drive-In Services were not a success. The Drive-Ins were something she’d seen when she’d been to Nashville for a Christian country music convention a few years ago, and she thought it would be worth a try here. She had persuaded Francie to hire the main car park in front of the Quality Hotel from the council for a month of Sunday nights, and the council were more than happy, since it prevented boy-racers gathering there, burning rubber, and throwing beer bottles at the police and passers-by. Francie had then managed to borrow a cab and a trailer from T. P. McArdle, a big name in trucking locally, whose wife is a member of the congregation, and they brought down the church’s PA, and the electric piano, set it up on the back of one of T. P.’s lorries and held their services. You had to wind down your window to hear and there was an order of service for every car, and it was quite a novelty. The first week they attracted about sixty vehicles in all, ranging from an old Datsun Sunny to a couple of BMWs. The Hegartys, Jerome and his wife, who have five children all under ten, and who are the closest thing we have here in town to actual hippies, came in their VW combi-van and blocked the view. They cooked sausages and beans during the hymn singing and ate them during the sermon, and Francie did find the smell of frying a little off-putting – but then, that’s open-air preaching for you. Jesus probably had the same problem with the fish and loaves. By the second week the numbers had dropped right down, and by the third week the boy-racers had started to appear back again at the car park, turning up the volume on their stereos, pumping their horns, and drinking Smirnoff Ice and tequila slammers while Francie was trying to preach the gospel. It would have tried the patience of a saint. The fourth week, fortunately, it rained, the PA shorted and Francie insisted that they call the whole thing off.

  But by now Bobbie had the bit between her teeth, and she suggested that Francie needed to update and improve and generally overhaul his entire preaching style. Francie wasn’t used to anyone, apart from God, offering him advice on his sermons, but he was more than happy to listen to what Bobbie was saying: he’d never really felt comfortable in the deeper waters of interpretation and explication and exegesis, and now here was Bobbie offering him a lifeline and a way back to the comforts and shallows of a simple faith, which is where he’d begun, after all, and where he felt more comfortable. She suggested he might like to lighten up a bit and try telling a few jokes, and that he maybe take a theme sometimes rather than just a text, and instead of only announcing the times of services in the Impartial Recorder along with all the other churches, she encouraged him to advertise. The first of his new-style sermons – ‘God, Is that You Talking, Or Was It Just the Cheese?’ – was advertised prominently in the Impartial Recorder, next to an ad for the Woodflooring Wa
rehouse Super Sale (BUY! BUY! BUY!) and a Happy Hour at the Armada Bar (DOUBLE SPIRITS £1’), and was backed up by a feature, with a photo, based on a press release that Bobbie had put together on the Fellowship computer. It made quite an impact. Francie’s next sermon, ‘Jesus: Bling Bling, or BaDaBaDaBooom?’, brought in a few more of the curious and the under-thirties, as did ‘Does God Ever Say ‘Oops″?’, on the problem of evil, and ‘Cheer Up! Some Day You’ll Be Dead’, on the Second Coming and the Book of Revelation. But by far the biggest crowds had been for a gospel meeting that Bobbie had persuaded Francie not to announce, as usual, as simply ‘A Gospel Meeting’, but to advertise instead with posters and flyers asking, ‘Is This Really My Life, or Has There Been Some Kind of Mistake?’ Six people gave their lives to Christ that night, a record for the People’s Fellowship and possibly for the town. There were murmurs within other churches about a revival at the People’s Fellowship, something we haven’t seen here since 1959, the year of the Great Revival, when the Spirit descended upon the Baptists during a week of meetings held by a travelling evangelist from Stockton-on-Tees called Maynard Rogers, whose name lives on in our town in legend and in the name of the Baptists’ coffee bar and meeting rooms on Mountjoy Street, the Maynard Rogers Rooms (which are currently in the process of being converted into a Christian Internet café). Baptists, of course, are known to be both prone and partial to revival, and some of them had started sneaking down to the evening services at the People’s Fellowship in search of the Spirit, who seems increasingly fickle these days and who no longer seems to favour the mainline denominations.*

  Once Jackie had shampooed and rinsed his hair, Francie said, through gathered phlegm, ‘The shampoo smells nice, like almonds.’

  And Jackie said, ‘Well, what did you expect it to smell like? Cat’s pee?’

  And Francie said no, he didn’t expect it to smell like cat’s pee, actually. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected it to smell like.

  ‘You know, ’ said Jackie, ‘it’s like when I cut some people’s hair and they say to me, ‘Wow, that’s really good″ and I think, like, well, yeah, what did they expect? I’m a hairdresser, not a butcher, d’you know what I mean? I’m not chopping up meat here, am I?’

  And just as he said that he nicked Francie’s ear with the razor. ‘Oops, sorry, ’ he said and Francie felt a tiny trickle of blood on his neck. He closed his eyes again.

  The cross had also been Bobbie’s idea. She’d been trying to persuade Francie for a long time that it would be good to erect something on the roof of the church, to put the place on the map. The People’s Fellowship is, of course, really just the old Johnson Hosiery Factory, done up a bit, and it still looks pretty much like a factory: there’s not a lot you can do on a tithing budget to transform a nineteenth-century industrial space into a modern, twenty-first-century place of praise and worship. As things began to pick up, though, and the Spirit definitely began to move, Bobbie felt that the church needed to make a more dramatic statement, that it needed to announce itself more clearly to the town as a holy place, and a happening place. Francie had said they couldn’t afford expensive signage or neon, so Bobbie had put on her thinking cap and had just gone ahead and asked Marion, one of the Fellowship’s many spinsters, to ask her brother Harry, Harry Lamb the Odd Job Man, if he wouldn’t mind knocking something up. Harry was more used to doing fiddly wee jobs around town – installing Slingsby loft ladders and clearing blocked guttering – and he hadn’t done a cross before, but he said he’d give it a go.

  A large cross is not, in fact, that difficult to make. If the Romans could do it, after all, with their primitive tools, it was hardly going to be much of a problem for Harry with his circular power saw, a rotary electric planer, some galvanised angle brackets and his tradesman’s discount at the World of Wood. Harry liked to think, actually, that he could probably improve on the original design, and he put together a few drawings for Bobbie to have a look at, sketching out crosses in all sorts of different shapes and sizes, using different joints and finishes which he thought might look quite impressive. But Bobbie felt that the cross needed to be like a real cross, a cross that a man might actually be crucified on, so in the end Harry had kept it simple and used some 4″ x 4″ tanalised timber, with a 6-foot crossbeam to accommodate a man’s outstretched arms, and a 12-foot upright. Harry was not a believer himself, but he had to admit that putting the cross together had made quite an impact on him. It was a pretty gruesome bit of kit, when you looked at it up close, and hardly something to be scoffed at or mocked. He went for belt and braces to connect the two beams, using a half-lap joint with a metal plate and bolts to secure it, and then the Young People’s Group – Can Teen – got to work on it, and had it primed, undercoated and finished with two coats of a pure white weatherproof gloss, guaranteed to last six years, sealing each coat under Francie’s guidance with a prayer and a blessing. Harry set the whole thing into a concrete base up on the roof of the People’s Fellowship and it looked pretty cool, the young people agreed.

  The problem was, though, on a sunny day, the cross whited out against the sky, and in the rain and mist you could hardly see it.

  So the Day-Glo paint had been Bobbie Dylan’s next idea.

  And then the floodlighting.

  Jackie was showing Francie the back of his head in a mirror, the haircut complete.

  With the Day-Glo paint and the floodlighting you could see the cross from about two miles away, even if you were wearing dark glasses, which of course no one in our town does, unless they’re Wally Lee, or one of the mothers of the children at Barneville House, or unless they’re actually blind or partially sighted, and even then they might have been able to make out a vague outline, or just felt it there, burning in the night. You could certainly see it, even on a grey day, from Bloom’s and the ring road. Which is when the council had got on to it: they wanted the Fellowship to take it down, or to pay £250 for an application for planning permission. And then the Impartial Recorder picked up on the story and started a campaign, prompted by Bobbie, ‘Save the Sign of Our Salvation’, and it looked for a while as though the cross might get to stay, for free and gratis, until someone who was visiting his mother in town, and who hadn’t been here for a long time, was momentarily distracted by the sight of what looked like the first sign of the Second Coming, and drove straight over a mini-roundabout on the ring road and into a municipal flower bed, taking out a lot of expensive bedding plants.

  So Harry Lamb was instructed to take a chainsaw to the cross, and he carved it up, and that was a sad day for Francie, a day of humiliation, and Harry sold the wood on to a friend who runs a stick and log business out of the industrial estate, and it has been used to light fires throughout town ever since.

  Francie was trying to smile at the face looking back at him in the mirror.

  ‘Well?’ said Jackie.

  ‘It’s nice, ’ said Francie. His teeth were a bit yellowy.

  ‘You look like a new man, ’ said Jackie.

  ‘Yes, ’ agreed Francie.

  ‘You never know, you might get lucky tonight!’ said Jackie, his tapering sideburns crinkling up into a smile.

  Which was really the moment, if he had to identify a moment, at which Francie realised that he did not belong here and that he had made a terrible mistake.

  Francie would not be getting lucky tonight. Just for the record, and for the sake of the congregation, Francie and Bobbie are in fact no longer sleeping in the same bed. They just weren’t compatible. Bobbie is always cold at night and Francie too hot, and they’d tried one of those dual-tog partner duvets, thirteen tog on one side, ten tog on the other, which have been on sale up at N’Hance, the furniture and interiors place in Bloom’s, but the duvet just didn’t do it. Bobbie wanted still more warmth, and she was piling the bed high with jumpers and dressing gowns, and in the end Francie had given up and gone to get some sleep downstairs, where he used to sit awake reading the Bible or watching late-night TV or Bobbie’s exercise videos.
She had a full range of pop and soap stars doing boxercise, yoga, aerobics and everything in between – they’d had to clear some shelf space to accommodate them all. Some of Francie’s devotional works had had to be shifted to under the bed.

  Also, at around the same time, Francie had been forced to move some of his clothes into a suitcase – Bobbie had so many clothes there wasn’t enough room for them all in just her half of the wardrobe. She kept on buying new clothes all the time; Francie had had no idea this was what women did. As far as he could remember Cherith could get by for years on a couple of sweatshirts and some elasticated skirts, and they’d shared socks (which may have explained the persistent athlete’s foot). But Bobbie just kept on buying and buying. She preferred cheap clothes, actually, for no moral or spiritual reason except that if she bought something cheap and only wore it a couple of times it didn’t matter so much. She had maybe two dozen pairs of shoes in constant rotation. And the make-up. Cherith had never really bothered with make-up except for special occasions – Christmas, say, or Easter, which usually merited some lipstick and a bit of blusher. But Bobbie had this big box – a large metal box – and because she was used to performing, she would wear a kind of stage make-up all the time, which Francie had to admit he found impressive, except perhaps at breakfast, when he did find it a little grisly, particularly if they were having a fry.

  The women in the congregation had all loved Cherith, who was like them, who was shy, who preferred slacks to skirts, and who wore the wrong bra size, just like they did. But now it was the men in the congregation who loved Bobbie. Francie couldn’t help but notice that the members of the Band seemed to be swelling week by week, male members of the congregation offering up their hitherto undisclosed talents as percussionists, backing singers, roadies, supporters and general encouragers. Bobbie’s position within the People’s Fellowship was becoming unassailable.