Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  With Davey, though, Lorraine behaved more as though they were friends, which is uncommon for men and women in town over the age of thirty, and so she didn’t bother much with the voice, or with the exercising of her feminine charms. Lorraine had been an only child and Davey was the seventh son of a seventh son, but the effect was pretty much the same; neither of them had ever really had an intimate; they had been expected to rely upon themselves and to work things out for themselves. So they enjoyed being friends and pretty soon they had little jokes going together. Lorraine started leaving Davey funny notes if she wasn’t going to make it back for lunch. They cheered each other up. They made each other laugh.

  Davey was certainly not like any man Lorraine had ever known before. She tended to measure men against her father, Frank, whom Davey was most unlike. He wasn’t nearly as competitive, or as aggressive. Frank would have wiped the floor with him. Lorraine’s first memory of her father was of him mowing the lawn and he even mowed the lawn as though he were in a race: he didn’t pause at either end, just swung it straight round and came haring back the same way. This was before he’d entered his vicuna overcoat phase, before they had a gardener. He was racing against himself, even then. He had been an absent but dominating presence in her childhood, a figure who had always embarrassed her and scared her, and she’d always thought that’s what men did. When he was angry he would shout so loud that it made her mother cry and when they went out to eat, as they increasingly did as he started making money on his property deals, he would always have to make a scene. One of his favourite phrases was ‘Let’s make an occasion of it’ and Lorraine hated him for always making an occasion of it. He was always wanting to make things happen, to let people know who he was. They used to go to the Quality Hotel, in the old days, to what was called the Grill Room and he would order a steak, but it had to be done right – always rare – and it was never quite rare enough and he’d send it back, and they’d have to cook him another. He would probably have preferred to eat the steak raw, actually, with his bare hands. Her mother, meanwhile, would always order a salad, and Lorraine could never understand that, as a child, but she felt she should order a salad also – to show solidarity. So she did. But it always left her hungry. So when she got home she’d raid the fridge, to fill herself up. And then she’d feel disgusted with herself, so she’d make herself sick. That was the effect men had on you, in Lorraine’s experience. They made you behave in ways that made you feel quite nauseous and unhappy.

  But not Davey. With Davey she would happily sit and eat a cheese-and-pickle sandwich, and talk about his travels and the meaning of life. She did not mention the Scotsman, but she did speak of seeking out new horizons, and needing to get her head together, and getting out of town. All the years he’d spent away Davey had really only talked to people under the influence and at night, in foreign countries, so it was shocking to be talking to someone about the meaning of life over a cup of tea, in our town, during the day. He liked it. As Davey got to know her, he became convinced that he had led a wonderful, colourful life, that he was not someone who had simply run away from his responsibilities as the seventh son of a seventh son. He was an adventurer. He was, to Lorraine, the person he had always known himself to be in his own head.

  He worked hard on the job. He made sure he touched up any spots and drops and drips. He tidied up after himself every evening. He ventilated the rooms properly. He made no mistakes and he made the job last. And when at last he’d finished, Lorraine asked him if he knew anything about gardening. A bit, he said, not much.

  Well, would he do her a favour, she asked. Would he like to join her in a trip to the garden centre, just to pick up some plants?

  He would, he said.

  The best and biggest garden centre around here is without doubt Gardenlands, out on the Old Green Road. Mr and Mrs Crolly, of course, run a little place they call the Shrubbery, at the back of their house, up on the edge of the industrial estate, but it’s really only for aficionados and lovers of hedging. They don’t sell Christmas decorations, for example, or whimsies, and they don’t do tray bakes, or provide a soft-play area for children. Gardenlands, on the other hand, is out beyond the ring road, where there’s enough room to begin to stretch out and provide not just plants and shrubs, but more of a garden centre experience.*

  It was a beautiful sunny day when Lorraine and Davey arrived and they spent a long time wandering around, bending over and sniffing at herbs together, and kneeling down to look at tiny little alpine plants, squeezing down aisles of pots and planters, and after they’d had a cup of coffee and a slice of apple Strudel in the garden centre café, Threshers, and Davey had got hold of a large trolley for Lorraine, and they were pushing it along together, he slipped his hand gently over hers – it was somewhere between the cotoneaster, Lorraine remembered, and the broad-leafed Indian bean trees.

  And it was only three o’clock when they got back to the house and unloaded, but they agreed they could plant up tomorrow.

  So it wasn’t until the next day, when Lorraine went to write Davey a cheque for the job and he glanced over it, just to make sure everything was in order, that he noticed her signature.

  Lorraine’s marriage to the Scotsman had lasted so short a time that she had never even had the chance to change the chequebooks, so it still bore her maiden name: Lorraine Gilbey. Frank’s daughter.

  The man for whom Davey Quinn was about to burn down the Quality Hotel.

  * There is still some debate here in town about the exact date of the appearance of our first avocado, an event which is generally considered to have marked the beginning of the end for our local turnip growers, a once prosperous group many of whom now run B&Bs or grow oilseed rape or live in Spain, or all three. No one in their right minds, not even here, is ever going to give up the sweet rich buttery flesh of a ripe Hass for the nostalgic pleasures of a plain boiled turnip. Some people date the beginning of our love affair with the avocado to the summer of 1974, when Johnny ‘The Boxer’ Mathers was forced to change his supplier to one of the big national companies, after his previous supplier, J. J. Farrelly, had been forced out of business by the first big supermarkets opening up in the city, who began importing fruit and vegetables from countries which remained a mere rumour to J. J., whose root vegetables simply could not compete with year-round sugarsnap peas and crispy iceberg lettuces. Certainly, prawn cocktails served on a bed of iceberg lettuce in the hollowed-out halves of avocado were a popular staple in the Quality Hotel Grill Room by the mid-1970s. The avocado and the Black Forest Gâteau, relative newcomers, have since become firmly rooted locally and have thrived and survived where garlic mushrooms with melted Brie, say, or warm Mediterranean goat’s cheese tartlets have withered on the vine. Aubergines also never caught on – just too weird – and fresh herbs apart from parsley remain a rumour.

  * The phrase ‘What are you looking at?’ is one that is often uttered here in town, both inside and outside clubs and pubs on a Friday and Saturday and Sunday night, and it is a phrase which is usually caused and prompted merely by a glance, and one which often leads straight to hospital – proving a direct causal link between a look and loss of blood.

  * Second phase, if you’re interested, soon on release. ‘Three Stunning New Designs of Detached Homes in this Prestigious Development: the Beech, the Hawthorn and the Oak. From Three to Five Bedrooms. All Designed to Suit Stylish Everyday Family Living! (Choice of kitchen doors and worktops as standard. Finishes to include moulded skirting and architraves, uPVC double glazing, quality facing brick and painted smooth render to exterior.) Prices start from £225,000.’

  * ‘From Perennials to Annuals, and Pots to Pot-Pourri, Let Your Imagination Run Away with You at Gardenlands, the One-Stop Gardening Shop. Be Inspired by Our Stunning Displays of Plants. Relax at Threshers, Our Award-Winning Café and Events and Banqueting Suite. Enjoy Our Amazing Range of Garden and Home Products, Including Chimeneas, Barbecues, Indonesian Teak Garden and Conservatory Furniture, Taylor’s Ston
e Statuettes™, Bandff Sheds and Quality Giftware. At Gardenlands, the One-Stop Gardening Shop, Something for All the Family.’

  19

  Country Gospel

  In which Bobbie Dylan practises intercostal diaphragmatic breathing and Francie McGinn loses his nerve

  The rain was playing timpani on the roof of the People’s Fellowship, and a snare, and high hats, and cymbals – it was kind of free-form, overspilling every bar and filling up all the spaces. There is no musical notation for rain, as far as I am aware, but if there is, we could do with someone explaining it to us here in town, if it wasn’t too complicated, so we could begin to distinguish one day’s rainfall from another, like Eskimos and their snow. The weather here is our only form of syncopation.

  Bobbie Dylan was rehearsing the Worship Band up at the front of the church, before the altar. Actually, she wasn’t rehearsing the Worship Band so much as begging them to play, bullying them into playing, chastising them, cheering them on, coaxing them, teasing them, willing them into some kind of shape, some semblance of musical sense. In Bobbie’s mind what she had before her was a bunch of flabby new recruits, a bunch of teenagers who’d decided to join the army and were having trouble getting through the basic training. They lacked discipline, of course, that went without saying, but they also lacked the basic skills, or the muscles, so it was almost impossible to get them to do what she wanted. If it had been up to this lot to blow their horns and bring down the walls of Jericho, the Canaanites would probably have still been living there today, getting up to all sorts of unnatural practices, and Joshua would be remembered as just another obscure servant of Moses, and the Promised Land would have remained just that.

  Bobbie had most trouble with Gary, the drummer, inevitably. A Christian drummer is a contradiction in terms. Drummers are pagans, in their heart of hearts: there’s something about beating skins with sticks that brings out the infidel in a man, or a woman. To be a good drummer you have to understand the downbeat as well as the upbeat; you’ve got to be able to see the other side; you’ve got to be able to think differently from other people; you have to be able to hold steady, but you also have to be able to swing. Gary had plenty of swing – or as he liked to put it, taunting the rest of the band, and quoting one of his favourite James Brown tunes, he had ‘More Bounce to the Ounce’. He also had a lot of issues that he needed to lay before the Lord: like, basically, he was an arrogant little shit. He was into Frank Zappa, and jazz, while the rest of the band were more into the Christian equivalent of 1970s Pacific coast rock.

  Apart from Gary’s kit, which was Yamaha, and green,″ the Band’s gear wasn’t much good. It was ancient amps and dodgy cables, and microphones as big as your head, and poor old Bobbie was used to working with professionals, or at least semi-professionals, certainly people who had to fill in a tax return and who knew how to fiddle their expenses and get a good, clean, dry sound when they needed to, so it really was a strain to her, having to cope with all this cheap, rattling second-hand gear, on top of everything else. The Worship Band were just a bunch of amateurs, when it came down to it, in every sense.

  She kept thinking to herself, what am I doing this for? Why am I bothering? Don’t I have better things to do with my time than prepare a bunch of no-hopers for a Christmas Eve concert that is going to be a disaster, very probably? And when she thought those thoughts, which was often, Bobbie liked to put on some music – a little Mahalia Jackson, maybe, or some Ella Fitzgerald, or M People – and she would remind herself of why she was doing what she was doing. It was for the glory of the Lord, naturally. She did her best not to try to understand or analyse the other reasons why she chose to perform in case she didn’t like what she saw. That’s what she’d told the Impartial Recorder one time, when they’d interviewed her, and they’d published a photograph of her on stage at Maxine’s, ‘The Pub with the Club’, which is out in the country, between here and the city. Joe Finnegan had taken the photo, but he’d put in some time at the bar first, so it was not the best photograph of Bobbie that’s ever been taken – he’d cut off the top of her head, and caught her leaning forward on the microphone stand, with her mouth wide open, like she was about to be sick, or spew out frogs or something. She was interviewed by Tudor Cassady, who was never really known for his sympathies, and in the interview he quoted her as saying, ‘I don’t know why I sing. Sometimes I wonder myself. Sometimes I don’t know if it’s a gift from God, or from the Devil.’* She was joking, of course, and she was tired after performing a full set of country gospel classics to an unappreciative audience of non-Christians who were hoping for something more like the Blues Brothers, but local newspapers can’t really tolerate late-night irony in interviewees, so the article was titled ‘Devil Woman?’. Bobbie had turned down requests for interviews with the Impartial Recorder ever since.

  All Bobbie could say for sure was that she had wanted to perform for as long as she could remember. When she was nine years old, apparently, she had announced her intention to become a singer/songwriter/actor/performer, a kind of entertainment all-rounder, like Olivia Newton-John. Bobbie’s mother, Ivy, had always been happy to encourage her daughter in her ambitions, although it was difficult to know exactly how to encourage someone in the singer/songwriter/actor/performer/all-round entertainer direction, particularly in our town, where it’s difficult to see how to make the leap between here and Olivia Newton-John. It certainly takes more than high heels and tight leather trousers. Everybody in town of course knows someone who’s sung in a pub band at one time, or a show band, but Ivy wasn’t that keen to get her little girl started on a circuit of singing songs about love and death in pubs and clubs in front of men in quilted shirts drinking beer, so she signed her up for elocution lessons instead.

  She’d tried her at Dot McLaughlin’s Happy Feet dance school, which had seemed like the logical first step, but Bobbie didn’t like the ballet, she thought it was boring, and unfortunately we had nothing like a stage school in our town in those days, although we do now, of course, now that just about everyone’s ambition is to get on the telly, and now that Colette Bradley runs the Studio in the Good Templar Hall on Wednesdays after school (six- to eleven-year-olds), and Saturday afternoons (eleven- to sixteen-year-olds). Colette doesn’t so much teach a Method as encourage the children to express themselves and to use drama as a way of exploring new ideas and cultures, which is no bad thing in our town, where new ideas and cultures are pretty thin on the ground: her strictly goyische version of Fiddler on the Roof, for example, was something to behold. She’d had to call in Mr Wiseman, one of our town’s only proud possessors of a yarmulke and a set of McGinn speciality kosher sinks to help with details like prayer shawls and the pronunciation of the word shabbes, and he was thanked in the programme notes as the ‘Jewish consultant’, which pleased him and would have pleased his mother, because it made him sound like a doctor. He runs the industrial and contract cleaning firm, CleenEezy, actually, up on the industrial estate, which is a good business, but hardly what his mother would have wanted.

  This year Colette is tackling Othello.

  But back in the old days, before anyone had even heard of Bugsy Malone and Fame, or seen reality TV, it was elocution lessons only, and Eileen, Miss McCormack, was the elocution teacher in our town. Her sister, Elspeth, the other Miss McCormack, was of course the English teacher at Central, but Eileen was generally considered to be the artistic one, although the only way you could distinguish between the two from a distance was that Eileen always wore a brooch of a Celtic design, a silver brooch with enamel inlays and a thistle-like ornament at the end of the pin. She also sometimes wore a shawl and what looked like ballerina pumps, as though any moment she was about to throw off her shawl and break into a jig. Everyone loved Eileen. Her front room was equipped with a piano, the obligatory aspidistra and more books than is normal in our town. It was said that she knew the whole of Shakespeare by heart and could speak French like a French person. Bobbie used to have to stand by the piano
and recite poems and sing, unaccompanied, and she entered festivals, where she won prizes for recital, for creative storytelling, and for sight-reading, and she learnt how to breathe using the intercostal diaphragmatic method, not something that a lot of teenage girls here know how to do. Miss McCormack taught her other useful stuff too: how to shout without getting a sore throat, how to whisper ‘ah’, how to smile a real smile without feeling happy, and how to clear her mind while lying on her back with her knees pointing to the ceiling and her feet flat on the floor. All these things had come in handy later in life.