Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  But now with line dancing everybody was equal, and you didn’t have to answer to your partner, or for your partner. It just made more sense to Mrs Gilbey: it was fun. Frank and Mrs Gilbey didn’t dance together these days. The most they’d ever do together now would be a last waltz at a golf club dinner.

  The line dancing was her lifeline, really; it was her breath of fresh air; it revived her at the end of a week; when she was tired it gave her strength. It had even helped with her diverticulitis, although she couldn’t say how. She was addicted now: she’d started to watch Country Music Television on satellite, and she would practise, in the bedroom, with the curtains drawn, doing the Electric Slide, or the Tush Push. She also watched Friends in the afternoons sometimes, on cable. That was the other thing she liked. Frank liked everything about America, but he couldn’t stand Friends: he said it was unrealistic and unbelievable, and yet then he watched all these films with Sylvester Stallone or whoever it was in them, films with lots of explosions and shooting and fights. At least Friends was funny – shooting people isn’t funny, Mrs Gilbey didn’t think. And Mrs Gilbey believed it could be quite revealing, Friends, actually: you could tell something about people if they preferred, say, Rachel to Monica, or Chandler to Joey. She liked Phoebe the best. Phoebe was her favourite. Frank would probably have liked Joey. If only, she thought, there were somewhere like Central Perk here in town. There was Scarpetti’s, of course, which hardly counted. So the next best thing was the Dance Ranch. You could get a cup of coffee from the machines after the session, and sit in the soft-seating area and talk to some of the others, if it wasn’t too busy with the fellas from the ju-jitsu drinking Lucozade.

  She’d had to give up drinking tea and coffee, though, Mrs Gilbey. There was something about tea and coffee. If she had a cup of tea or coffee, she had to have a cigarette. Or vice versa; she wasn’t sure which came first. She’d tried drinking more water every day, like they said in all the magazines, but she’d started to wonder if this was leaving her bloated. When she looked in the mirror these days she was amazed to see how puffy she was looking. It was horrible, looking at it. She wore turtlenecks, to hide her chicken-wattle neck. She wasn’t ashamed of it – she most definitely was not going for plastic surgery – but she didn’t want to flaunt it either.

  Frank had been encouraging her to have plastic surgery, just to lift the skin around her neck and her tired eyes a little, but she didn’t want to change the way she looked and she didn’t want Frank to want to change the way she looked. She wanted to change who she was, not what she looked like, although she knew that her face had become long-suffering. She could see it herself. It broke her heart to see herself in the mirror sometimes, the state of her. Her blonde hair and her blue eyes had always been her salvation – they’d got her a long way. Now her hair was dyed and her eyes were dull, like a dying animal’s. She remembered she’d left school without a certificate to her name and her teacher had said to her, ‘You are not suitable for anything but polishing your nails, ’ and she’d gone to work for Sloan’s, the old coal merchants (‘Group 1, Group 2, Group 3, Slack, Phurnacite, Wonderco, Coalite, and Glovoids’) on Commercial Street, in the office, and the coal dust had got under her nails – it got everywhere – and she thought that was it, she thought that was going to be her life. But that was where she met Frank. People used to come in to pay, which is how she’d met him, coming in to pay his mother’s bill. And she’d scrubbed up, scraped the coal dust from under her nails, and they’d started going to the dances together. She was a couple of years younger than the other girls he’d been going with.

  Good for nothing, the teacher had said. Well, Mrs Gilbey had been good for something: she’d got her man. And look at her now. She had everything: central heating, wall-to-wall carpets, a self-cleaning oven, beautiful nails. The house was perfect and spotless, although she did have a cleaner, of course, to help. Her own mother had had to do it all for herself, had had it all mapped out for her: Monday was washing; Tuesday ironing; Wednesday cleaning; Thursday was her night at the spiritualist church on Old Victoria Street; Friday was baking for the weekend. And she’d had a job at Carragher’s Drapery Warehouse up on Moira Avenue as well. And Mrs Gilbey had never heard her mother complain, not even once.

  Mrs Gilbey, on the other hand, had hardly any routine and she complained all the time. Shopping was her only routine. She hadn’t worked for years. She could do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. She and Frank had so much money they didn’t know what to do with it. Literally didn’t know what to do with it. It was just like people said. They never had to worry about spending money. For years, she’d bought the very best of food and clothes, but even that wasn’t enough. Frank had encouraged her to take up hobbies. She tried French classes for a while, but she was embarrassed by the accent: it was a young person’s game, the learning of the languages, she thought. She’d encouraged Lorraine to take it up, but she hadn’t stuck with it either. Then she did tapestry for a while, but everything she made went wrong somehow, and the stuff piled up in the corner of one of the spare bedrooms where no one ever stayed and it looked messy. She’d tried upholstery – she’d quite enjoyed upholstery, that wasn’t as tricky as the tapestry. She’d upholstered everything in the house, from top to bottom, and then there was nothing left to upholster. So she’d started doing the neighbours’, but there are only so many footstools you can re-cover, even in our town. Then she’d got into the collecting: pot-pourri vases, sauce and cream boats, scent bottles, cameos, treen, carriage clocks. Small stuff, stuff you could take home with you on the day, that you didn’t need to have delivered. She used to go up to the auction houses in the city. She’d enjoyed that. The excitement. It felt as though she were somebody. But as soon as she acquired a piece the excitement left her and she wasn’t interested any more. She stored the things away.

  Frank didn’t understand. He suggested to her that she start buying bigger stuff – furniture, or paintings. But she didn’t really want to collect the tangible. She didn’t want more things. She wanted to collect something else: experience was what she really wanted to collect, but even when she thought that to herself it sounded silly. Experience! This was her experience. This was it. Here and now, in our town, with Frank, and it was running out on her all the time, like in an egg timer, or rising up against her, like a flood. She felt like Kate Winslet in the film Titanic. Mrs Gilbey was working against the clock now. She still worked hard on her looks, had her hair done once a week, up at Noreen Fry’s new place, Fry’s, on Abbey Street, but keeping fit had been a problem until she discovered the line dancing. The line dancing had been her salvation. The line dancing was helping her hold back time. It was a kind of sandbagging.

  Frank had dominated and controlled her life for years. She cooked the food that Frank enjoyed. She wore the clothes that Frank liked. He expected her to look good all the time, a certain way. He was always saying these days that she shouldn’t wear skirts because of her legs. That’s why she liked the line-dancing clothes – she decided about the line-dancing clothes. In all other areas, her own likes and dislikes had ceased to matter, if they ever did. Her own likes and dislikes had gradually come to resemble Frank’s, so eventually she found it difficult to judge what she really liked and what she didn’t, what she saw as a duty and a chore, and what was a pleasure. It was Frank’s likes and dislikes that counted, that existed. Even her values: her values had become Frank’s values. She loved money, although she never really spoke about money. She called money ‘plastic’. She talked to her friends about ‘burning plastic’. That’s what she was doing, burning plastic. And it was killing her. She assumed that everyone felt the same, that everyone was choking from the stench of money, like the smell of burning fat, and not a smoke alarm in the house.

  The car was too hot. Frank liked it hot.

  She was looking forward to getting home and making herself some nice Philadelphia cheese-on-toast. And maybe a glass or two of Chardonnay. She’d left Frank his dinner out
earlier – some pastrami, some wheaten bread and a salad. He’d have binned the salad.

  They didn’t eat out much, her and Frank. Frank liked his food quite plain. A lot of her mornings were spent deciding what she was going to cook for him in the evening and then, once she’d decided, she’d go out and buy what she needed. Unlike virtually everyone else in our town Mrs Gilbey still does her shopping every day. She hated Bloom’s. She hated the mall: it was so tacky. There was nothing there she wanted to buy. She’d exhausted the mall. What she wanted was not available in Bloom’s. Actually, what she wanted was not available in our town. Mrs Gilbey wanted glamour. She wanted sophistication. And she usually bought lamb loin chops and floury potatoes – that’s as close as she could get.

  She didn’t really enjoy eating out anyway; it’s not as if that would have made much difference. She didn’t really like eating in front of other people. She didn’t know why. She was over sixty now, and she’d never liked it, and she was hardly going to start liking it now, when every mouthful made her fat and her whole face wobbled with every bite. She thought it was disgusting, actually, the sight of old people eating. Watching Frank eating – it was horrible. She preferred eating at home, in private. At mealtimes Frank always liked to offer his insights and opinions about the state of the world and his business philosophy, and at least if they were at home she could put the TV on, and she wouldn’t have to listen to him. A load of old nonsense he came out with and she’d heard it all before. ‘You don’t work for money, ’ he’d say, ‘you make money work for you.’ And, ‘The rich acquire assets, the middle classes acquire liabilities.’ ‘The bigger the elephant, the bigger the balls’ – Mrs Gilbey had no idea what that was supposed to mean. He was full of that sort of stuff. ‘You might make a better hamburger, ’ he’d say, eating his steak while Mrs Gilbey watched the news, ‘so why aren’t you McDonald’s?’ She could never decide if he was really talking to her or not, whether he’d have kept on if she weren’t there. A lot of it was just clichés and common sense that he liked to recite to himself, and he did these funny voices sometimes, these American gangster voices; it was awful. ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ ‘Money is only an idea.’ ‘The greatest losses are those from missed opportunities.’ ‘It’s a dog-eat-dog world’, that was one of his absolute favourites, which applied to just about everything and she hated it when he said that, which was at least once a week. She probably hated that one the most. Because saying that made him a dog. And her a dog. And everybody else: just dogs eating dogs. She didn’t like that at all. It made her feel quite sick.

  She’d thought she might have had grandchildren by now, naturally, to take up her time, to take her mind off things, to spend some money on. But there was no sign in that department from Lorraine, and not much chance either, now that she’d lost the bad Scotsman. It was what all Mrs Gilbey’s friends talked about, these days – their grandchildren and their plastic surgeons. It seemed to have come on so quickly: one minute they were all excited, talking about Elvis Presley and how to get a fella and stuffing tissues up their jumpers, and the next minute they were all tired out and talking about their children, and then their grandchildren, and a little nip here and a little tuck there, and who’d died, and how, and how sad it all was. It was strange: Mrs Gilbey never felt like she herself was getting old. It was more like she was observing someone very like her getting old, not her self as such, but her doppelgänger.

  It was the same feeling she had when she was reading a book. When she read a book she always felt like she was hearing a story that sounded like her life, but wasn’t quite, like something that might have happened to her, or which still might. Even with Stephen King she felt that.

  That was her other great escape, actually – books and the library. Frank always said he’d buy her the books, rather than her having to go to the library, but she liked going to the library. She liked the displays and the cracked lino and the public notices, and she didn’t really have much use for a book once she’d read it. She liked Margaret, one of the librarians, who’d keep things aside for her if she thought they might interest her. She had always been a very good borrower: she’d never had an overdue book in her life. She loved Catherine Cookson.* Reading those books was her education. She told it like it was, Catherine Cookson. She’d always have a good cry over a Catherine Cookson. Frank was very sniffy about the books, obviously. He wasn’t a great reader.

  When she was dancing and everyone was moving together, that was what it was like when she was reading a good book. She couldn’t explain it: things just seemed to make sense. It was like that feeling, sometimes, of driving round the ring road at night, when all the cars seemed to move in formation together. Or sometimes, when she looked outside on Fitzroy Avenue and she saw people going about their business, almost as if it was synchronised. There was a serenity there that was absent the rest of the time.

  Not that she really had any complaints about her life, or about Frank, which is what made it hard. What did she have to complain about? He’d been an excellent husband, really. And a good father to Lorraine. They’d wanted for nothing, either of them. He was very kind, very generous to everyone. But there was this other side to him, a side that other people didn’t really see. The way he’d talk about his colleagues, or competitors – she’d never liked that. He’d swear and shout about them – the language that came out of his mouth, you’d be surprised. He used the ‘f word a lot at home, and the ‘c’ word, if he thought he could get away with it. And sometimes he used the two in combination. That upset her.

  Frank was just like that, though. That’s what he was like. He could get quite abusive. He didn’t like her going to the line dancing – he got quite abusive about that. He didn’t mind her going to the market, or out to lunch with Ita, or Marjorie, that was fine. But he didn’t even like her going out to the library on late-night opening on a Thursday (until eight o’clock). She was never sure why: whether he was jealous, or possessive, or just afraid that one day she might slip away and never come back. He’d always been funny like that. He was very insecure, Frank Gilbey, when it came down to it. That’s what people didn’t realise. He took quite a bit of mothering, Frank. But Mrs Gilbey was over sixty now, and she was sick of mothering.

  There was a month left before line dancing shut up shop for Christmas, and Big Donna had been saying about this big evening up at Maxine’s on Christmas Eve. Maxine’s is a famous pub and club out in the country, ‘The Pub with a Club’. There were going to be line-dancing clubs going from all over. You had to sign up if you wanted to go.

  Mrs Gilbey really wanted to go. But she knew Frank wouldn’t approve. On Christmas Eve Frank would expect her to be at home baking and making things special for Christmas, for him and for her, and Lorraine. Their little family. That was what always came first.

  She’d waited for everyone else to leave the badminton courts, and while Big Donna was packing up, Mrs Gilbey quickly checked the list of names to see who’d signed up. Quite a few. Someone had taken the biro. She only had an eyebrow pencil in her handbag.

  Frank always dropped her off outside at exactly 7.00 and he always picked her up at exactly 9.30. He parked on the double yellows outside: he didn’t care. So she didn’t have much time. She’d had to decide.

  They were driving up the gravel drive, and Frank was parking and switching off the engine. ‘Frost tonight, ’ he said.

  And she’d taken the eyebrow pencil and written, in her tiny but legible hand, her name: Irene.

  * Although it is on offer at the Oasis, actually, a new course, along with ‘Humming to Heal’, ‘Rainbow Dancing’ and a new series of Reiki master-classes. Contact Cherith or Sammy at the Oasis for details.

  * And we do have a few people in town who are: Colin Rimmer, for example, can’t begin the day without at least having a go at The Times and he likes to tackle the Guardian at the weekend, although a Guardian can be hard to find here: people have been known to cross the county line for a pro
per broadsheet at weekends. Only the Sunday Times is guaranteed.

  * We have had our artists, though, of one kind and another: the work of ‘Diamond Annie’, Annie Coker, for example, who was a quilt maker back in the 1920s and a demon on the treadle machine, is now much sought after, by people from the city and abroad, the kind of people who like to hang old quilts on their walls rather than put them on their beds, which many of us here find difficult to understand, especially since the colours in Annie’s quilts have rather faded and the stuffing’s falling out, and you can get a perfectly good duvet and nylon cover from N’Hance at Bloom’s for less than £30; and Archie Hillock, of course, who attended the Royal College of Art in the early 1950s and who was briefly renowned as one of the ‘Kitchen Sink’ artists, most famous for his tiny thick-and-crusty painting of a turd in a toilet; and George McGuigan, our own home-grown Impressionist, who lived on Fitzroy Avenue and who was rumoured to have met Manet, and whose own bravura style of portrait painting, featuring much apparently slapdash pink and yellow brushwork, earned him the nickname of the ‘Egg-and-Bacon Artist’.