Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  His brothers were gone already. They were out in the van. They were working on a couple of the big contracts – the new Collegiate School up on the ring road and some new apartment complex on North Street, where the old telephone exchange used to be. They’re calling the new apartments the Tel-Ex – strictly speaking, of course, it should be the Ex-Tel-Ex, but that sounds more like a young person’s drug, or a laxative, and the Tel-Ex was a good month’s worth of work to Davey Quinn and Sons, so they weren’t complaining, even if it was a daft name for a building. This is not New York and sometimes people need reminding: it’s easy to get carried away here, like anywhere else. People watch a few too many episodes of Friends on the telly and suddenly they’re into Mr Hemon in Scarpetti’s, asking for flavoured decaff cappuccinos and blueberry muffins. But change here comes slowly and we’re not there yet, and progress means more than being able to get a feather-cut hairdo, or the occasional availability of exotic fruit and veg.*

  They had divided up, over the years, the Quinn brothers who’d gone into the business, and each one had found his niche and his forte. Danny was the man for the paper hanging, and the cutting-in. He was the closest thing to Davey Senior, a perfectionist. Gerry was the best for the coverage – he was a demon with the roller. He was the workhorse. He shifted and moved stuff, and he was also the one who sorted out problems and negotiated. He was big. You didn’t argue with Gerry. He was also good outside and in tricky staircase areas. Craig was the creative one. He handled all the decorative finishes.

  Davey didn’t have a niche, or a role, which suited him fine. It had never been his ambition to play a part within the family business and he had never tried to fit in. If Davey took after anyone in the family it was probably his mother, Mrs Quinn, who remained an outsider, the only woman among many men, and she was a distant, thin, dreamy kind of a person, with frazzled hair, good at playing games and smoking, and imagining. It was she, after all, who had agreed to marry Davey Senior, the seventh son, which must have taken quite a leap of faith, when you think about it, and a willingness to perform in the great Quinn family drama, taking on the responsibility for fulfilling the dream, for providing seven sons for a seventh son.

  In those days, though, it didn’t seem like that big a challenge. Seven children was not uncommon for families in our town, whichever church they attended and even among those who did not. Even atheists used to have big families in those days. Mr Gait, for example, who was a teacher at Central and who was famous around town as a bearded, duffel-coat-wearing, bicycle-riding socialist who refused to sing hymns in the school assembly and who was a member of CND, had five children of his own with his wife, Mrs Gait, who was the town’s part-time registrar of births, deaths and marriages, and who therefore knew just about everyone, and they’d adopted two more children, a brother and a sister, two babies, Peter and Laura, whom Mr Gait always described as being ‘of mixed race parentage’ but whom older people in town always referred to as ‘the wee darkies’. Peter, wisely, has long gone and is a policeman, apparently, in London, which probably has his bearded father turning, duffel-coated, in his grave, but Laura has stayed put and is a veterinary nurse at Becky Badger’s Animal Centre and Pet Surgery on Windsor Avenue, and she looks after the woman she calls mother, Mrs Gait, who hasn’t got long left, probably, who’s in her eighties and who’s soon going to complete her own trio of town hall certificates. It’ll be down to someone else now, of course, to sign her off: Alex King, the son of Ernie King, who used to run the music shop on High Street, is the registrar these days, his impressive name and signature, a big florid A. King, which Alex has practised for years to the point of perfection, lending a certain glamour and dignity to what are otherwise always rather dull and disappointing proceedings. There’s really nothing worse than arriving for one of the most important days of your life only to be greeted with a damp handshake from a fat man with a goatee in a sagging polyester suit attempting to look pleased to see you. Alex is no Angel Gabriel: in our town, with our dentists, it’s hard to pull off a very convincing beatific smile and, frankly, if this was the kind of greeting you could expect in heaven a lot of people would have chosen right there and then to give the other place a try.

  Mrs Quinn herself was of course from a good Catholic family of eight, four sisters and four brothers, perfectly balanced. But seven boys – she had wondered how she’d cope with that, if she succeeded. She’d worried most about the Quinn succession with her second son, with Gerry – he’d set the trend, really, and had made all the rest possible, like the second line of a poem, or the difficult second album, which is supposed either to confirm your early promise and set the rhythm, or to prove the doubters correct and to begin the long decline. Gerry was a triumph, though, a boy, and Mrs Quinn hadn’t worried again about completing the set, getting all seven, staying in the groove, until it came to the last one, the seventh, to Davey himself, and then she had prayed and prayed, and tried to do everything exactly the same as she had for her previous pregnancies. She just couldn’t have coped with six sons and a daughter: that would have looked like carelessness. With Davey she could not afford to slip up, or to skip a beat: Davey had to be a boy.

  Davey Senior had also looked forward to the birth of his seventh son all those years ago, but he hadn’t been that worried about it. He felt it was not his responsibility. All he’d had to do was what he always did, which wasn’t really that difficult. When Davey was actually born, though, when the little fella was actually there in the flesh, the all-important number seven, and all the newspapers and the TV cameras started arriving, that was special. That had confirmed it for Davey Senior, his sense of destiny. He felt he had fulfilled what his father and mother had wanted him to achieve and now he could relax a little, now it was up to his son. For the first few years Mr and Mrs Quinn had watched Davey closely for any signs of supernaturalness. They didn’t really know what to expect and Davey failed all their expectations. He walked late, he talked late and at school he was just OK. He seemed entirely without any of the powers one might have hoped for from the seventh son of a seventh son. He couldn’t even charm a wart.

  And Davey knew it. He knew from an early age that he was special, marked out, and yet somehow not quite special enough. Old men in the street would press money into his hands and pat him on the head, and they would look deep into his eyes, as if there might be some wisdom contained within there that they might be able to fish out – like the salmon of knowledge, swimming around in there, in the pools of his eyes, in the depths of his very being, waiting to be seen and comprehended and grasped. And old women, old women would want to hold him and kiss him, as if some of his good luck might rub off on to them as easily as their lipstick rubbed off on to him. And with all the patting and holding, Davey had grown big and fat and shy, and failed to flourish, and he vowed at an early age that he was going to leave our town and he was not going to have any children of his own. The seventh son of the seventh son had had enough.

  As a teenager he’d tried to joke about it and to laugh it off, but all the time he’d been angry, boiling up all bitter inside, cooking up dark thoughts and fantasies at every mention of this irrelevance, this annoyance that was his life, this life that had been imposed upon him. He was waiting for the moment to make someone suffer for it, make someone regret having made him what he was, to let fly and spit it all out, to get it off his chest. And finally, when he was seventeen, the opportunity had arisen.

  They’d been to a boxing match, him, Bob Savory and Billy Nibbs. None of them had ever been to a boxing match before. Billy had got the tickets from his dad, Hugh, the butcher, who’d got them from his friend the greengrocer, Johnny ‘The Boxer’ Mathers, who owed Hugh a favour. Their shops, the butcher’s and the grocer’s, used to be opposite on the High Street, up the top, near Dot McLaughlin’s Happy Feet Dancing School, and Johnny had always supplied Hugh with parsley, and Hugh had kept Johnny in sausages, and on a warm day, if business was slow, they’d stand outside their shops and shout acros
s the road and talk about football, and boxing, and Johnny would talk about the great featherweights he’d fought, and Hugh would compare the heavyweights. And this was in our lifetimes, remember, in our town: shopkeepers, with actual shops, in actual aprons, in the actual centre of town, talking to each other across a road which these days you’d be lucky to get across in the slack hours between 3 a.m. and 7 in the morning, some time after the final conclusive vomitings outside the club, Paradise Lost, and before the first of the council’s electric street sweepers arriving to scoop up the polystyrene burger boxes, the beer bottles and yesterday’s papers.

  Davey and Bob and Billy had driven up to the city in Billy’s dad’s van, the meat van, with its cheery picture on the side of a bearded butcher, a plucked chicken in one hand and a cleaver about to enter into the head of a grinning pig in the other, and Davey had brought his cassette recorder and they were listening to loud music and they were singing along, in a way that teenage boys rarely do, because they’re usually too self-conscious, and they’d parked up, and got a feed of drink into them, and then they made it to the big hall where all the men and women were screaming, and there was this fantastic chaos of tiny figures far away, grappling with each other, and they felt an excitement they could barely understand or contain. These were boys, really, who had hardly known a woman in any intimate sense, who had never been to war, who were young and strong and who wanted to be big, but who knew no excitements other than drinking beer and hanging around in the car park opposite the Quality Hotel. And after the boxing they came out into the street throwing punches at each other, and then in the pub they couldn’t get served. There were too many people in, and Davey was signalling to the barman, his hand up, and he made eye contact, but the barman ignored him and he turned instead to serve someone to the left of Davey, a man with a shaven head, not much older than Davey himself, and about a foot shorter, and he’d turned, the shaven-headed one, as he put in his order, and he smirked.

  And that was all it was, a smirk, nothing else. That was the thing that had finally driven Davey Quinn away from our town and which had taken him twenty years to get over. Smirks, sneers, mumbles, those little laughs behind the hand: these are things that can destroy a man.* Of course, this wasn’t just any smirk, this smirk, this was the smirk that Davey Quinn had been seeing all his life, it was Life’s Smirk, if you like, the very quintessence of smirk, the same smirk that he’d imagined seeing smeared on the faces of all those cameramen and photographers when he was born, taking pictures, as if he mattered, knowing that he was just a little kid, who knew nothing about myths and superstitions and who hadn’t asked to be born. It was the smirk of the old people on the streets, and his teachers, and his friends, and his family, who all knew that he was nothing special, that he was just a wee boy born into a big family with a lot to live up to, and no way of knowing how. It was a smirk that let Davey Quinn know who he was and what he was: a travesty of himself.

  Davey had gone berserk. Once he’d got him outside he was punching the shaven-headed man hard in the face, fists clenched, with a left hook and a right hook, swinging just like a boxer, using his height to his advantage, except it hurt more than Davey had imagined from seeing it in the ring, but suddenly the man’s legs were going and then he was down, and then Bob Savory and Billy Nibbs were pulling him off, before he could do any more damage. Davey suddenly felt heavy and as light as a feather, and he could feel his heart beating, and he looked at his bleeding hands and he wished he’d been wearing boxing gloves. He had never been in a fight in his life. He’d only ever fought with his brothers and with his dad. He hadn’t meant to do any harm to the fella. He’d just lost his temper. That was all.

  And then there were all these other people outside the pub, and someone had phoned for the police, and Bob and Billy and Davey were running away down streets they didn’t know, until finally they found Billy’s dad’s van, the meat van, and they hid Davey in the back, amidst the stench of all the meat, and Billy drove so fast back to town in silence they might have been driving to catch a funeral: it felt like they were in the presence of death.

  They might as well have been. When he got home Davey packed his grip and he went first thing in the morning, without even leaving a note or saying goodbye to anyone, and he was so terrified, and so relieved, and he felt so blank, that he never came back for twenty years. Billy and Bob kept an eye out for news in the Impartial Recorder, and Bob rang the hospital, pretending he was a friend, and it turned out that the shaven-headed man was OK. Broken teeth. Broken nose. Stitches in his head. It was nothing serious. Nobody died.

  Not that it would have made any difference to Davey Quinn. The outcome for Davey Quinn was assured: he knew he would have killed the man if he’d had the chance. He would have kept at him until there was nothing left. And that was the sad truth about Davey, which he’d discovered that night, aged seventeen. He had realised what he really was: a nasty, no-good shrivelled-up specimen of humanity. Just like everyone else, like he’d always known he was. Nothing special. He was the seventh son of a seventh son. And it meant nothing.

  Once Davey had done the deed, once he’d let himself down, he found he could begin to face up to himself. He didn’t have to impersonate himself any more, or pretend to be what he couldn’t be and couldn’t understand. As the seventh son of the seventh son he’d always struggled and tried not to stand out. If his brothers were behaving he behaved. If they misbehaved he misbehaved. He was, his teachers at school had said, easily led. He allowed other people to set the trend, to determine the tone, and he’d just copied, because he’d had no idea how to be himself. But now, defeated, and far away from our town, he was able to make himself up, however he wanted to be, to put himself together as a new person. He was doing his own thing. And he did – gloriously, for years, all over the globe, in all sorts of jobs and in all sorts of places – but in the end, of course, he knew he’d have to come back and try to be himself back home. Also, in the end it had meant coming back because he’d got a beating in a pub in London, when he’d started singing ‘Danny Boy’ after a football match on the big screen, and some blökes in England tops had taken exception and had set upon him, and the next thing he knew he had a ruptured kidney and he was pissing blood, and he was in hospital, and it was time to come home. He’d served his time. He was free to start over.

  But as soon as he came back he’d been caught. He’d been suckered back into the family business and had started to lose his way. After the disaster with the stripping he could feel his brothers start smirking at him again. And his grandfather, speaking to him through the writing on the wall. Everyone wanting to catch up on where he’d been and what he’d done, and what he was going to do next, and everyone with an opinion. Davey Quinn Senior only allowed him to work on new properties on the estates round the ring road and he wasn’t allowed to strip – stripping was definitely off the menu. Painting and papering, and fresh walls only. Doing the stock-take he realised that this was his life, this was going to be his life: calculating paint amounts, applying coats. He was the seventh son again and he was a nobody.

  So by the time he shut the lock-up on that wind dog of a morning he’d decided.

  There was no place for him here. He wasn’t going to be hanging around.

  He had no real friends here any more. Billy Nibbs had his head so far into his books that he was unreachable. And as for Bob Savory … Bob had become a parody of a businessman, who thought he could blackmail Davey and get him to do whatever he wanted. Which, of course, he couldn’t.

  Although. He had given Davey a way out, if he wanted it. Davey really didn’t care about the Quality Hotel, or why Bob and Frank Gilbey wanted it out of the way. It meant nothing to him.

  So he’d decided to do the job for Bob. He’d decided he was going to take the money and run.

  And this time he would not be coming back.

  But first he had to go and price a job for his dad.

  It was Lorraine. She’d decided to redecorate. Sh
e needed a change. She wanted carpets instead of the laminate floors. She wanted new curtains. It was time she treated herself to a new duvet cover. It was time she washed away all memories of the Scotsman. She’d had a tartan biscuit tin, but that was away already.

  Her brief marriage to the Scotsman, whose name had not been mentioned since he’d gone, had been the embarrassment that Lorraine had been waiting for all her life. The Scotsman was an alcoholic when he met her, but he never drank in company, or in the house, so Lorraine had never really noticed: he ate a lot of mints and he wore an expensive aftershave, so he always smelt nice; in fact, it was one of the things she liked about him. She’d never much liked the smell of men she’d been with before – smoke and beer and urine. The Scotsman smelt fresh in comparison. Compared with most of the men in our town the Scotsman was ambrosial. Her dad, Frank, had liked him a lot.

  When they married, the Scotsman had taken to drinking secretly in the car, or in the garden shed, where he would stare out at a patch of grassed-over builder’s rubble that he knew he was never going to plant as a garden. He used a mouthwash, actually, as well as the mints and the cologne – Lorraine never knew. And when he gargled, he swallowed. He got a buzz off the alcohol.

  The crunch had come one night in November. They’d been married for three months and Lorraine was determined they should plant a garden before Christmas. In her mind she needed something to show for the first few months of marriage. The Scotsman had made it clear that he wasn’t ready for them to start a family.

  Lorraine loved her gardening magazines and books, and watching the television make-over programmes. Theirs was a new house on the biggest, most prestigious estate built outside the ring road, Woodsides. The houses there are all pretty high spec, despite the usual cost cuttings and obligatory subcontracted shoddy workmanship – they’re all maple kitchens with under-heated Italian tiled floors and hotel-style bathrooms with slightly dribbly taps and wonky fittings. * Double garages come as standard. All the houses are sold now, but the main contractor’s big blue van is rarely off site, replacing warped doors or cracked tiles, rewiring, reroofing and even, in some cases, reboring the drains. ‘If You Live in WOODSIDES,’ according to the estate agents and developers’ exclusive, full-colour, typographically insistent promotional information packs, ‘You Expect the Best’ but to be honest, if you do Expect the Best, you’d do better not to Live There: most of our town’s new-builds are a sure sign that Standards Are Slipping. A house built here in, say, 1995 has aged a whole lot quicker than a house built here in 1905, halogen spots or no halogen spots. Lorraine liked the house, though. She liked the double-length combined living and dining room, which was large enough to accommodate two white leather sofas and an eight-seater dining table which she’d covered with white damask. The sofas had been a gift from Frank and Irene to the young marrieds, and ever since the wedding Lorraine had been itching to get friends round to admire the sofas and the stainless steel and all their shared good taste, but somehow they hadn’t got round to doing much entertaining. The Scotsman said he wanted them to get settled in a bit first, so Lorraine spent her evenings fussing over fabric books and catalogues. The four bedrooms would give them plenty of room for the children when they arrived, as they inevitably would, as surely as the fashion for curtain fabrics swung from swags to blinds and back again.