Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  Q: Say the sixth commandment.

  A: Thou shalt not commit adultery.

  Q: What is forbidden by the sixth commandment?

  A: All unchaste freedom with another’s wife or husband.

  Q: What else is forbidden by the sixth commandment?

  A: All immodest looks, words, or actions, and everything that is contrary to chastity.

  * It was certainly not the example he’d imagined. He was mindful of the Psalmist – ‘That our daughters may be as cornerstones, polished after the similitude of a palace’ (Psalms 144:12). He was never sure what that meant exactly, but he was conscious that Bethany was not shaping up as a cornerstone and he couldn’t help thinking that it was his fault.

  † Where this is small.

  20

  Cigars

  A celebration which proves that there is no goodness without malice

  It was below freezing, nothing like as bad as the winter of 1962, of course, which people still talk about here, a winter when they say you couldn’t have gone outside for fear of blinking and your eyeballs freezing over, a winter when the headlines from the Impartial Recorder told pretty much the whole story: ‘THE BIG CHILL’, announced the paper one week, and then ’THE BIG FREEZE’ the next and, finally, ’THE BIG THAW’. Back then, when the thaw eventually turned to flooding, the sewers collapsed at the top of Main Street and there was a tide of unspeakable waste – about fifty years’ worth of town centre dregs and spoilings – that swept down towards the Quality Hotel and took half the new tarmac road surface with it. The Impartial Recorder – whose own basement composing room and presses were under 3 feet of filth and water, and which only made it to the news-stands due to the valiant efforts of Ron English, who had served at Verdun in the First World War and who had sandbagged around his precious old Linotype machine – ran a one-word headline: ’DELUGE!’* The last time the paper had resorted to an exclamation mark was on VE Day, and since 1962 we’ve had only four more: President Kennedy, men on the moon, Princess Diana and the big winds in 1989.

  It’s nothing like as bad as that now, nothing like exclamation mark weather, but it’s certainly cold enough to make you catch your breath – it’s more like comma kind of weather, you might say, or maybe a semicolon. You could feel the cold from the top of your balding head right through to the bottom of your thin-soled shoes as soon as you stepped Outside the door, and you could tell that people all across town were making a mental note to ask for a hat-and-glove set this year from Santa, and to go up and see John ‘The Leatherman’ Brown, who has relocated from his old premises on the windy exposed corner of Commercial Street and Main Street, to the twenty-four-hour warmth of Bloom’s, but who has retained his same sense of humour, the same mechanical cobbling gnome and the same sign in his window: ‘Time Wounds All Heels’. And he still doesn’t accept cheques or credit cards.

  We like to drive everywhere here in town, obviously, if we can, from home to school to work, to Bloom’s and back again, to avoid walking, even in summer, but in this weather you tend to see even fewer people out on the streets than usual. Sales of de-icer and thermal socks and Bisto and Bird’s custard powder were brisk, and in Scarpetti’s, Mr Hemon was dismayed to see only his regulars. It was not weather for passing trade or for popping out for a cup of tea, chips, peas and Irish stew (£2) or a curry sauce baked potato with cheese. It was weather to stay at home, to put on your slippers and to eat cook-from-frozen supermarket pies, sweet or savoury, or preferably both.

  But Christmas was coming and at Christmas you can learn to love the cold a little, you can learn to reach out and linger with it for a moment, to appreciate that festive chill as you stride to the bus stop or to the car with your kettle, allowing your shiver merely to increase the anticipation of your first warming glass of wine at your office party, or your seasonal Advocaat with lemonade and a glacé cherry, or that extra £20 in the pay packet. Christmas was coming, thank goodness, and the sun had been shining all day, high in a cold blue sky, and there had been a slow and steady build-up of heat and excitement in the glass-fronted offices of the Impartial Recorder. Looking out from the freezing, broken windows of the Quality Hotel, if you were a pigeon, say, or a big fat chilly rat up from the sewers, looking out across the car park deserted by even the most hardy of skaters towards the red neon lights of the Impartial Recorder, you’d have been feeling pretty jealous of what we humans sometimes get to enjoy, even in the depths of winter. In the offices of the Impartial Recorder the egg-nog, the champagne and the cocktail sausages were flowing, and anyone or anything, a pigeon even, or a rat, from a distance, could have sensed that strange human glow, that exaggerated, cartoonish extra-physical presence of people with something to celebrate. It was difficult even for Colin Rimmer not to feel excited.

  Like most of us, Colin preferred to hide his emotions, if at all possible. He was impassive – not a word we use often here, but if we did, we would use it as a term of praise. Impervious is good also, obviously, and imperturbable is a state to aspire to. Before Colin, the editor of the Impartial Recorder had been a man called Ivan, Ivan Nolan, who had a Russian name and a Mediterranean temperament, but who came from Magherafelt. Ivan was the classic hysterical style of editor, one of the rant-and-tirade brigade, who’d had a brief career on the night desk on a tabloid in London and who was someone as likely to embrace you when you’d found a good story as to shout at you when you hadn’t. Ivan was a man of the moment, and it showed, both in his life and in his death. Basically, Ivan lived the life of a feral animal – he had the intelligence of a fox and the instincts of a polecat, and all the appetites of a grizzly bear – and he died of a heart attack, while drinking champagne out on his yacht, a ridiculous luxury he could hardly afford and could barely sail, while married to his third wife, who was twenty-two years younger than him and a former model.

  ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ people asked at his funeral.

  Colin isn’t like that. Colin is going to die of cancer, probably, slowly, alone and with grim determination. Colin was not Ivan. Colin valued consistency and he’d always tried to be measured: tough but fair, that was his motto. To be honest, Colin believed that you couldn’t afford to have emotions in his line of work. He believed you had to choose very carefully what to get upset and excited about, even though we don’t actually have that much to get upset and excited about here in town and frankly the chance would be a fine thing. Nonetheless, as the editor of a journal of record, Colin felt that he could not allow himself to get carried away even with our little dramas, our little local triumphs and tragedies. He believed you had to keep things in perspective, even here, a place of infinite receding perspectives. There were only so many times, it seemed to Colin, that you could write the words ‘The driver of the vehicle, who has not been named, died when the car struck the tree’, or ‘The couple, who were engaged to be married, were both killed instantly when the car they were travelling in crossed the central reservation’, only so many times you could write those words before your emotions learnt to take the back seat and wear a seat belt. In twenty years of reporting for local newspapers Colin had had to cover every kind of fatal car crash, house fire and miserable scene of crime and suspected suicide, and you simply could not afford to get caught up in all that. ‘Local family struck by tragedy’, these were words that Colin had written many, many times, but you always had to handle them carefully: they had a way of creeping up your arm and into your mind, killing off a little part of you, a part which Colin tried to keep alive by listening to the music of U2, buying box-set videos of classic TV comedy series and working on his magnum opus. There were also sentences, of course, which began ‘He grew the 10-foot sunflower in a bag of tomato feed’, or ‘The congregation presented him with an inscribed crystal vase’, or ‘Five-times local pie-eating champion’, and these words and phrases killed off other parts of the self, parts which Colin did his best to keep alive by reading hard-boiled American crime fiction, watching thrillers and smoking cigars at every
opportunity. To be an editor, particularly the editor of the Impartial Recorder, is to learn to maintain oneself between contraries. To be fully human here, we believe, is to learn how to keep a straight face: smiles are frowned upon and frowns are for the short-sighted.

  Tonight, though, was a night to let it all hang out, a night for enthusiasm and emotions, and big grins. Tonight it was a cigar for yourself and for all your friends.

  Unfortunately, Colin does not believe in friends. In a small town like ours, where there is only so much love and hatred to go round, some of your friends will eventually inevitably become your ex-friends and some of them will become your enemies. Colin did not wish to run this risk. He was divorced already, after all, and so his ex-friends included his children, his erstwhile in-laws and everyone who had forked out for wedding presents. Friendship, in Colin’s opinion, like marriage, marble cheese domes and non-stick frying pans, was overrated. He didn’t really have time for friends, unless those friendships were carefully cultivated, in which case they became contacts rather than friends, part of the network, part of Colin’s local landscape of stories and sources. Colin felt happier dealing with employees, people whom he could rely upon, because they were being paid money to perform a task.

  It was cigars for your employees, then, tonight.

  A cigar for Billy Nibbs, his top undercover reporter. And for good old Tudor Cassady, who handled Arts and Features. For Gilbert, on Sports. For the whole team, for the reporters, the subs, the production staff. For Mervyn, Minnie, Rosie, Terry, Elaine, Joan, Patricia, Archie and for Lena, Regina and Philomena, the weird sisters, as Colin called them, the three newsroom managers, who kept the whole place going and who got through a packet of biscuits each per day, bourbons for Lena, custard creams for Regina and Rich Tea for Philomena, who’s on a diet. Colin paid for the biscuits out of his own pocket; it was important to keep the ladies sweet. A cigar and a biscuit even for Justin Grieve, with his novelty cuff links and his £30 haircuts, who was the advertising manager and a thorn in Colin’s side. A cigar, certainly, for the office cleaner, Mrs Portek, who had given up smoking, with her husband, using the patches, two years ago, and who had a mouthful of gold teeth. She said she’d keep the cigar for her son, Johnny, who was back in Poland at the moment, looking for a wife. Local girls lacked a little something, according to Mrs Portek. Class, perhaps. Or warmth.

  Mrs Portek called Colin the King Pig, because his office was a mess. It was like a pigsty, according to Mrs Portek, although in fact it was more like a hamster cage or a cat litter tray. Colin lived among newspapers much as a pet hamster lives among them. They were everywhere, the papers, little scraps torn out and tucked into box files with no names or sorted into vast yellowing piles. Colin read all the dailies and the Sundays, and he also subscribed to Time magazine, Hello!, the New Yorker and The Economist, and he occasionally bought men’s magazines, purely for research. He had two computers, two TVs and two radios in the office, which were on all the time. At home he had broadband, satellite, and a TV and radio in every room, and he’d had to install an alarm – someone had tried to get in one night, whether to get hold of some of his many consumer durables or for some other purpose it wasn’t entirely clear. The police had suggested that Colin might like to review his personal security measures: he was the editor of a paper, after all, which meant some people were going to take exception to what he printed, even if it was only inaccurate cinema listings or grammatical errors, and Colin had indeed received calls in the night sometimes, telling him that they were coming to get him, but they never did.

  Colin knew that there were some strange people out there, people who were obsessed with split infinitives, for example, and who clearly had too much time on their hands, but he didn’t think they were mad enough or bored enough actually to come and kill him, so he wasn’t too concerned. Even the threatening letters he’d been receiving had turned out to be from Spencer Bradley, who was upset about losing his bat watch column. Colin had decided not to press charges. But there were a few others, more serious, who might have been keen to get at him: there was a garage owner, Roger Manon, for example, who’d been exposed by the Impartial Recorder and taken to court over his Health and Safety record. One night Roger had arrived down at Colin’s house with a big knife and a claw hammer, and had proceeded to ring on Colin’s front door and show him what he intended to do to Colin the next time he gave him any trouble, by slashing the tyres on his car, smashing the windscreen and breaking off the wing mirrors. Unfortunately for Roger, it wasn’t actually Colin’s car; it was his next door neighbour’s, Brendan’s, and you don’t mess with Brendan. Brendan drives a lorry for T. P. McArdle, and T. P. is one of Roger’s best clients at the garage, so mad Roger Manon had gladly agreed to pay for the damage and then some on top, and so his little plan of intimidation hadn’t worked, although for a while afterwards Colin did get dog shit through the letter box. Even Roger couldn’t miss with dog shit.

  Colin loved it, though. It was a sign he was doing something right. It made him feel like someone important. That’s what kept him going, to be honest.

  So, it was cigars tonight, for everyone, for Spencer Bradley and Roger Manon even, in their absence and their madness, for the whole bloody lot of them. A cigar for everyone who had ever read the Impartial Recorder, or appeared in its big beautiful pages. Which is pretty much all of us.*

  Colin had always loved the idea of working for a paper. Not necessarily the Impartial Recorder, of course – he thought maybe it would be something more like the Washington Post, or the Boston Globe, or the Sunday Times. He’d always loved everything about newspapers. When he was growing up, his parents, Fee and Philip, used to spend most of a Sunday reading the papers, drinking sherry, eating roast beef, taking walks and attending evening service at St Martin’s, the parish church, and so newspapers were for ever associated in Colin’s mind with all the forces of good in the world. His heroes when he was growing up were the Sunday Times Insight team, and Woodward and Bernstein, but of course no one on his staff had even heard of Woodward and Bernstein, and the Sunday Times is now merely an advertisement for expensive ladies’ underwear and London restaurants. Everyone on the staff these days just wanted to write hilarious columns about their boyfriends and their crazy lives, just like in the Sunday Times. No one these days seemed to remember what a paper was really for. A paper is supposed to ask the six essential questions: What? When? Who? Where? How? Why? In that order. Although, actually, to be honest, with the Impartial Recorder it was usually just the one essential question, plus a query and a satisfied sigh. Who? Really? Well, well, well.

  Everything had changed on the papers within Colin’s lifetime. Colin was old enough to remember galleys, and men in pork-pie hats in pubs, and boys running around with corrected proofs, and cigarette ends piling up in clamshell ashtrays next to typewriters and waste-paper bins full to overflowing. It wasn’t like that now. It was all done on screen now, and e-mail, and press releases, and he seemed to spend half his time in meetings with Justin, talking about advertising features and how much they could wring out of the DIY superstore or Bob Savory if they granted them a full-colour eight-page insert. All the fun had gone out of it. But a night like tonight made it all seem worthwhile.

  Cigars for everyone!

  Colin’s success as an editor and his prodigious work rate he ascribed to his constitution, to alcohol, to Scarpetti’s fried breakfasts with grated Parmesan cheese, to high-tar cigarettes and to prescription drugs. He’d been taking Prozac for about five years now, ever since his wife had left him. You weren’t supposed to be on it for that long, but Doctor Armstrong at the Health Centre didn’t seem too bothered about it, so neither was Colin. He simply kept on with the repeat prescription and there was never a problem. The great thing about the Prozac, Colin had found, was that it smoothed you out. It left you feeling a little less on edge, more satisfied, like you’d already had a couple of glasses of wine, and maybe a gin and tonic a half-hour or so before that, and a s
mall ramekin of hand-cooked crisps, or some Bombay mix. With the Prozac Colin found it easier to take difficult decisions. For example, the decision he had just made: he knew that if he went to press with what he had on Frank Gilbey there’d be trouble. But the Prozac had helped him to understand that he really had no choice. The Prozac offered him the reassurance he needed.

  Colin had said to himself, ‘I don’t know about this. This story is going to be controversial.’

  And the Prozac had said, ‘Whatever.’

  This was going to be Colin Rimmer’s ticket out of here. This was what was finally going to release him from his dependence, his addiction to this town. He had solved a bona fide mystery and now he could leave. He had earned his passage. He was away. Colin had always kept a cycling machine in his office, because he’d read that Harold Evans used to keep a machine in his office, and Harold Evans was another hero. Colin’s cycling machine was planted right in front of the window, amidst the piles of papers, overlooking the car park and the Quality Hotel, and he liked to cycle for twenty miles every morning while watching the breakfast news, and sometimes while he cycled and watched TV he imagined himself cycling up and out of the window and up and up and over the car park, over the top of the Quality Hotel, like the boys in ET, which was his all-time favourite film, and over the ocean to the offices of the New Yorker, where he would park his bicycle outside, and go upstairs and sit down at his manual typewriter and bang out a Talk of the Town. *

  Recently, while he’d been cycling, though, Colin had not been thinking about ET or the New Yorker. He had been thinking about Frank Gilbey. There had been plenty of times the Impartial Recorder could have gone for Frank, but they hadn’t; Colin had held off, or his hand had been stayed. There was the mysterious slurry run-off, for example, a few years ago, on the fields around Bloom’s, which had ruined many farmers’ land, and which had allowed for the mall development not only to go ahead but to expand far beyond its original intended limits: Frank was behind it, Colin was sure, but he’d been unable to get enough proof. Then there was the problem with the supply of shoddy materials being used in the building of Bloom’s: large parts of the roof had to be replaced within six months of the mall having opened, at huge expense; the main roofing contractor had subcontracted to a subcontractor who had subcontracted to one of Frank’s development companies, but the complicated paperchase had been too much for Colin to handle on his own. And then, of course, there was the general, unexceptional, unremarked awarding of council contracts to companies either owned by or connected to Frank: Colin knew what went on, everyone knew what went on, but that was just the way things were around here and if that’s the way things were, that’s the way they stayed. There was nothing you could do about it. Colin had other fish to fry. He couldn’t get too excited about it. He remained, as it were, impassive. But in late November, Frank Gilbey had given Colin the excuse he needed and the determination to become implacable.