Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  Colin could just about cope with running sycophantic interviews with councillors: that was part of the job. He could just about cope with the paper’s ridiculous new red masthead, which made it look like an amateur tabloid, but which he agreed was a necessary updating, and he’d managed the big change from the old Linotype machines to computers and photocomposition, which, in his opinion, made the paper look like a cheap photocopied newsletter, and which took away all the romance involved in going to press. He could just about cope with Justin’s continual demands for increases in advertising space, which paid for the paper, after all, and the occasional use of press releases as news, which Colin justified to himself as being due to a lack of staffing. He could even cope with the ghastly syndicated pictures of so-called celebrities, which had begun to creep into the pages, and the slow steady drip of disinformation from the council’s press officer, who now handled all enquiries regarding local council business. The police were the same: you couldn’t get to talk to anyone any more up at the station or in the pubs. It all went through the press office. That was understandable, that was OK. What Colin could not cope with, though, was the distortion of facts. Colin may not have been a Woodward or a Bernstein, he may have failed in all his early ambitions, but he liked to think that his paper stuck to the facts. Facts, Colin believed, were the life and blood of a paper, the spirit and the soul, and they were sacred. Facts could not be bought and sold, and to suggest that they could was sacrilege. So as far as Colin was concerned, Frank Gilbey had committed the sin against the Holy Spirit.

  In early November, Frank had asked Colin to run a story suggesting that Bloom’s would be reporting a pre-Christmas surge in profits and that they were predicting their best Christmas yet.

  But Colin knew for a fact that this was not the case.

  Colin knew that consumer spending was down. He had enough contacts at Bloom’s himself to do his own digging. John ‘The Leatherman’ Brown had been a friend of Colin’s parents – he was into light opera and listened all day to Classic FM – and he kept Colin informed of what was happening up there at the mall. There were rumours, according to John, that some of the bigger stores, which were owned by multinationals, were going to be issuing profits warnings.

  Frank had suggested to Colin, over lunch in the Plough and the Stars, that the story had to be run ‘for the sake of the town’, and that was it, that was too much for Colin. For the sake of the town! Frank Gilbey was not interested in our town. Frank Gilbey had destroyed the town. Frank was responsible for the three things that had ruined the way we were, the way Colin remembered things: the ring road, Bloom’s and the luxury apartments. These three things had destroyed the little micro-communities that had made up the town, communities that you’d have hardly known existed, but which made the town what it was, the little communities where people had grown up, where Colin grew up, and Davey Quinn, and Francie McGinn, and Bob Savory, and Cherith, and Sammy, and Bobbie Dylan, all of us, places with no names but with their own little small row of shops, and a patch of waste ground or a scrap of park where you could play football and smoke, and fight wars, places where twenty-four-hour garages had now replaced the shops, and where the waste ground now housed exciting developments of luxury loft-style apartments, with electric gates and high fencing all round. Colin knew that this was progress, but he wasn’t so foolish as to think it was a good thing. The town had been destroyed and Frank Gilbey was largely responsible, so when Frank stuffed a big artery-clogging slice of Banoffee pie into his big fat greedy mouth and uttered that phrase, ‘for the sake of the town’, Colin’s heart was hardened against him.

  Over coffee – which he took black, no sugar, with characteristic fortitude – Colin decided to return to the chase. He had a paper to run and his resources were limited, but he had someone now he could trust, who would do his bidding and do his digging for him, and that someone was Billy Nibbs.

  Billy had loved being a part of the paper. He loved being among people who regarded writing as a natural, normal experience, and an activity for which it was possible to get paid. To get paid, for writing: that was just incredible for Billy. For Billy, writing had always been a troubled and troubling enterprise, something you did in private and in secrecy, and which offered no prospect of paying its own way. To Billy Nibbs working at the Impartial Recorder was therefore like attending a banquet at the court of an all-powerful king – it was both delicious and corrupting. In his first few weeks at the paper he’d been invited out a couple of times by the legendary Tudor Cassady, the Arts and Features editor, a man almost as wide as he is tall, who lives up to his name by resembling in all but crown and furs the late Henry VIII and who writes the ‘Forks and Corks’ column, and who has done so for over thirty years, and whose little chin-bearded face peers out from a photograph at the top of the page, for all the world as if he were about to issue the command, ‘Off with Their Heads!’ Billy couldn’t believe he was actually being paid to eat out. Tudor also gave him a few books from the stash on his desk. They were first novels, mostly, but still. They were free – free books! He was even sent to see a play for free. It felt like he’d died and gone to heaven. Billy had had no idea that this sort of thing went on, in our town.

  It was when he wrote his first review that Billy finally felt he had crossed over. He was no longer a creator but a destroyer and he realised that there was no going back. He was no longer a poet. He had become a journalist. The play he went to see was in the town’s playhouse – and yes, we do have one, although it remains a well-kept secret, Dreams, a tiny theatre on McAuley Street, which is in the premises of the old Home for the Industrious Blind, and which exists largely because of the fund-raising efforts of Colin Rimmer’s parents, Fee and Philip, who believed that what our town really needed back in the dark days of the 1970s was somewhere people could go to see Alan Ayckbourn plays and hear Gilbert and Sullivan. In fact, Dreams is used mostly for theatre in education projects, where children are taught about the evils of drugs and under-age sex by out-of-work actors from the city who stand outside after their performances, smoking, signing autographs and struggling with their sexuality.

  Billy knew people in the play he was sent to review, which was a modern dress version of The Duchess of Malfi – he’d actually been to school with the Duchess herself, who was played by Laura Buckle in a black wig and a 1920s cocktail dress. He sat up all night after the performance, eating biscuits and drinking cans of Red Bull, and writing what amounted to a complete demolition, a total destruction of what he’d just seen: if he could have pulled down the scenery and the proscenium arch as well he probably would have done. He spent a lot of his time trying to find synonyms for ‘pathetic’ and ‘risible’ in Roget’s Thesaurus, and consulting Colin Rimmer’s in-house style book, which now took pride of place on his desk at the end of his bed, replacing his once prized rhyming dictionary. When he handed in the piece the next day, Colin himself had seen to it, ripping through it with a red pen and interrogating Billy over every phrase and sentence – ‘What do we mean here?’ he would ask and Billy would try to explain, and Colin would say, ‘No, I think what we mean here is this’ and then he’d rewrite the passage, minus adjectives and clauses. When the piece was published later that week Billy bought two copies of the paper – one for everyday use and one to keep – and when he read the review he did feel a little guilty about what he’d written, particularly his criticism of the Duchess, whom he described as having a face like a mouldy potato and a voice like toasted ham and cheese, which was supposed to be a joke, but then he bumped into Laura Buckle when he was in Tom Hines’s one day buying his bacon, and he tried a sheepish smile, but she looked right through him and he realised that that was that. It was too late. There was no going back. The die was cast.

  Billy gave in, then, to the impulse to criticise everything and everybody. There was hardly a meal or a play or a book or a film that came his way that was not in some way deficient and which Billy did not take great pleasure in picking apart, for
his own education and amusement, and for the education and amusement of others. Unknown to him, he had passed the test: Colin had wanted to see if he had what it took. And he did. Billy had proved to have that rare combination of utter cynicism and unbounded enthusiasm which was required by the good jobbing journalist. Years of working at the dump had already confirmed Billy in his belief that people are basically dirty, smelly, waste-producing animals, whose remains and discards are good merely as food for vermin, wild dogs and seagulls, with the rest fit only to be burned or buried in a hole, and his reading of the work of the great modernist writers had convinced him of the same. He therefore had the makings of a truly great local journalist: he was a bitter man with huge dreams who was capable of infinite disappointment.

  So he was more than prepared when Colin had set him on to Frank Gilbey.

  ‘Imagine you’re writing a review, ’ Colin had said. ‘Except this time it’s a review of someone’s life.’

  Billy had no idea what he was looking for, but he knew where to start and he spent weeks in the Impartial Recorder’s old basement composing room, which had become the de facto library and archive, trawling through back issues of damp and crumbly bound volumes. He took notes and he set up interviews.

  But the breakthrough, when it came, like every lucky break, was not from some insight gained through research, but from a tip-off from a man in a pub. Billy had been in the Castle Arms, talking to his old friend Noel Savage, who is a landscape gardener. When he was still working up at the dump Billy used to allow Noel to offload straight from his trailer without using the weighbridge: tradesmen were supposed to pay a small fee for dumping, according to the size of the load, but Billy turned a blind eye for friends and people who were polite. Noel happened to mention to Billy that he was working on Frank Gilbey’s garden, thinning out some of the trees, sorting out a couple of the borders, and Billy had asked Noel, offhand and unthinkingly, if he’d seen the famous horse trough and the drinking fountain that had gone missing, all those years ago, and which people always claimed had ended up at Frank’s. Noel laughed and said he couldn’t remember seeing them, but he said that Billy could accompany him to the garden if he wanted to, to check for himself.

  Billy checked back first in the basement for old photos of the trough and the fountain, and he found some archive pictures from the 1950s, when the town still looked complete and still made sense, untouched by the spoiling hand of developers. It wasn’t until 1984, after the completion of the road-widening scheme at the junction of High Street and Main Street that anyone noticed that the trough and the water fountain had gone missing, and before anyone could protest they had been replaced with concrete bollards and a couple of trees in circular tree grates, and a bronze so-called piece of sculpture which looked like a man with half his head melted, all supplied by a firm owned by Frank Gilbey.

  Billy dressed in his old boots and boiler suit to accompany Noel to the garden. It was a nice garden. Gardens in our town tend not to contain many mature trees, or flowers – they’re more trouble than they’re worth. We’re more of an evergreen shrubby kind of a town, with the average plot not in excess of about 12 foot by 8. Frank’s garden, in comparison, was something more like the forest of Arden, or the grounds at the palace at Versailles. Frank lives in a big bluff red-brick mansion, the biggest and the bluffest in town, right up at the far end of Fitzroy Avenue, where the town used to become country, and where it now becomes the ring road. Noel pointed out to Billy some of the plants trained up against the house: a wisteria, and a magnolia lennei, he said, and a palm, a trachycarpus fortunei. Billy wrote these words down in his notebook and asked Noel to spell them for him, in case they came in useful, ‘for colour’, Billy had said and Noel had nodded, impressed. Noel had only known Billy as the man at the dump, and Billy only knew Noel as a gardener; he had no idea that a gardener might know some Latin, and Noel had no idea that Billy might want to write. It is customary here in town to underestimate other people – this is how small towns work. If you want a slap on the back for just being who you are, well, you’re welcome to live in the city, where there are plenty of people who’ll tell you how great you are. In a city, people talk each other up, that’s the deal: everybody’s great and everything is wonderful. In a town, we prefer to talk things down. If you think you’re special, or you want people to think you’re a genius, don’t get to know your neighbours.

  Spreading out in front of the flagged terrace at the back of the house there was a huge lawn, surrounded by mixed borders, and again Noel pointed out various shrubs and herbaceous plants. ‘Nicely done, ’ he said, indicating to Billy how the shrubs broke up the line of vision, and created the impression of depth and space.

  Billy agreed and he was pleased for Noel, that he was obviously an artist too, but he still couldn’t see what he was looking for. Then, at the end of the lawn they passed through into a rose garden, with some old-fashioned shrub roses on trellis-work, and they came upon some pathways leading to different areas – an enormous old greenhouse at the end of one path, a small pool surrounded by hostas and shaded by tall trees down another. Variegated poplars, Billy wrote in his notebook, prompted by Noel. Mature oak. Eucalyptus.

  ‘What about down here?’ Billy asked eventually, pointing down another gravel pathway. Noel had never been down there, and so they crunched their way past a long winding hedge and there, in the very farthest corner of the garden, hidden from the view of the house and from the Old Green Road running along outside, was a patio area, set with tables, and a large stone horse trough and a marble drinking fountain.

  Billy had his scoop. He’d brought a camera with him. He took the photos.

  Cigars all round.

  As soon as he got the photos, Colin had made an appointment to go and see Sir George Sanderson, the proprietor.

  Colin did not like Sir George, but he had to admire him, because Sanderson was old enough and rich enough not to care what people thought about him or his opinions, and actually his opinions happened to be pretty much Colin’s own: like Colin, Sir George was counter-intuitive, except he was counter-intuitive by breeding rather than by choice. He simply knew that what most people thought was right was often wrong, that hunting was a good, for example, and that nuclear power was absolutely fine and not something to get all fussed-up about. He didn’t need to work out his opinions, like his wife had to. He had inherited them, along with the estate.

  When Colin arrived he found Sir George and Lesley Sanderson in the library, hoovering. They no longer kept a staff and they did pretty much everything themselves. Colin knew they’d lost a lot of money a few years back, when the dotcom bubble burst, having invested heavily in their gay son’s on-line dating business, but this was something that was not talked about.*

  ‘Rimmer!’ said Sir George. ‘Good of you to come. Well?’ Sir George did not waste his words. You didn’t get to where Sir George is on pleasantries and chat.

  ‘I have a story that I want to run, but it might be a bit controversial, ’ said Colin, who wasn’t a great one for the small talk himself.

  ‘Controversial! Good! That’s what the place needs. A good shaking up. Nothing to do with me I trust?’

  ‘No. But it does concern Frank Gilbey.’

  Sir George had known Frank Gilbey for many years and he’d done a lot of business with him – who hadn’t? – so there was a bond of loyalty there. Then again, Frank was a horrid little man, who’d ogled Lesley at one of those dreadful Rotary Club dinners a few years ago, and he dressed like an American gangster. Sir George glanced at Lesley, who raised her eyebrows non-committally – she’d never liked Frank, for obvious reasons. He was common.

  ‘Is it business?’ asked Sir George.

  ‘No, ’ said Colin. ‘It’s personal.’

  ‘Well, I can’t see any problem then.’

  Colin started to open his mouth to tell Sir George the details.

  ‘No!’ said Sir George. ‘No need to know.’ If he didn’t know he could always deny it.
‘Run it past the lawyers, though, won’t you?’

  End of conversation.

  End of Frank Gilbey.

  The story was going in tomorrow.

  And there was still champagne to be drunk tonight.

  * Ron died in 1990, one of our last veterans of the Great War. He was from London originally, a proper cockney, but he married a local girl, and he was typical of his generation, a modest, practical, gentle man who in old age – from fifty – sported a thick white moustache, who wore a waistcoat with a fob watch and suits on Sunday, who kept an allotment and rode a bicycle with no gears in all weathers to the market on Wednesdays and who called black people ‘darkies’, who despised ‘homosexualists’ and who, having had the privilege of travelling abroad to fight for king and country, knew for a fact that this is the best of all possible worlds and ours the best of all possible towns: we won’t, as they say, see his like again.