Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  The sleigh he rode on every year was in fact two large pieces of sleigh-shaped plywood tied on to a trailer on loan from T. P. McArdle, and hitched to the back of Martin Phillips’s Range Rover, which had a large red nose tied to its bonnet, Rudolph-style, and strange to say people actually paid for the privilege of having Frank Gilbey trussed up as Santa sat on the back of the trailer to come and visit their home and wave to their children on Christmas Eve, but then all the proceeds do go to charity and we are generous givers to charity here, although we prefer charities we can relate to: the Cancer Research Campaign, for example, is very popular, and Help the Aged. Oxfam is slightly suspect – all those ethnic items in the shop.

  Frank was wondering if perhaps he wasn’t getting a little old for this game and whether it was time to hand on the reins, and the boots, and the beard to a younger, slimmer man. They were still only about halfway through their rounds this evening and Frank had had enough. He was at a low ebb, which was unlike him: Frank’s tides are nearly always high. The piece in the Impartial Recorder accusing him of having stolen council property – or ‘our national treasures’, as the article had put it – had undoubtedly damaged his reputation. All he could do was hope it’d all be forgotten by the New Year. He’d weather the storm. Publishing a story like that just before Christmas was a pretty foolish move – people’s stomachs are bigger than their memories – and he was currently taking legal advice from Martin Phillips on the best way to win redress from the paper. What Frank really wanted was the head of the editor, but tonight he just wanted to get to his glass of malt at the golf club and then home. Mrs Gilbey would have all the Christmas stuff prepared. She usually left him out a little something on Christmas Eve – a mince pie and a glass of milk, as if he really were Santa. He’d sleep in the spare room, so as not to wake her.

  And as they drove down the High Street he could see the Quality Hotel in the distance.

  Bobbie Dylan saw it too. She was just introducing the Band to the audience during ‘Green Onions’. It was difficult to sanctify a number like that, because it didn’t have any lyrics – and Bobbie didn’t believe that any melody in and of itself, any melody alone, could be either sacred or profane – but Brian had perfected this nice little thing on his trumpet where he kind of quoted ‘Amazing Grace’, which was enough to raise ‘Green Onions’ to something approaching sacred status, and it looked like ‘The People’s Fellowship Annual Big Night Out, Featuring Bobbie Dylan and the Band, the Wise Men, the Virgin and the Little Baby J’ was going to be a success.

  Bobbie had been up at the microphone all night, doing her intercostal diaphragmatic breathing and singing her heart out. They had a pretty good crowd in and this was what it was all about: praising the Lord in the only way she knew how Giving back a little of what she’d received: love, mostly, or something, she was never quite sure what.

  No sign of Francie, though, in the audience: he’d said he was going to have to do some pastoral visiting. He seemed tired and anxious at the moment, and Bobbie wondered sometimes if he was really up to it. She’d put together a few notes for sermons herself, actually, some ideas, and she was wondering if perhaps God was leading her to extend her ministry in that direction. Maybe Francie could keep the morning service and she could take care of the evenings: that was an idea. She was thinking something a bit more casual, maybe a cappuccino cart by the entrance, so the congregation could purchase refreshments on their way in, coffee and chocolate-chip cookies, and maybe a few sofas instead of stackable chairs. She’d have to pray it over with Francie.

  She’d nearly finished introducing the Band when she saw it out of the window.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, ’ she was saying, ‘I want you to put your hands together for probably the best bass player this side of Memphis, and certainly this side of the ring road: Mr Chick Stevens.’ Cue crowd. And then she went on, ‘And of course last but not least, behind him, and behind us all, keeping us all together, on drums … Jesus Christ!’

  At this the audience, as one, looked up at Gary behind his drum kit.

  Gary really is no one’s idea of the Second Coming, unless you happen to believe that Jesus has put on a little weight since the last time around and has taken to wearing Nirvana sweatshirts and sweatbands, and is balding; Phil probably comes closer to most people’s idea of the Messiah, minus the beard, but he was playing guitar rather than drums. So it was only when the audience looked to where Bobbie was pointing, behind them, out of the window, that everybody saw it.

  Billy Nibbs was pointing also. He’d been putting the finishing touches to a review – a devastating critique, if he said so himself – of the town’s pantomime, Open, Sesame!, which had just premiered at Dreams, with an all-ages cast, and which was a combination of Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Sinbad the Sailor and Sesame Street. In his review Billy laid the blame for the worldwide decline in pantomime standards fairly and squarely at the door of the writers and producer and director and cast of the show, although he did admit that there was a problem with the form generally, which he blamed upon the rise of the novel, and he also took the opportunity to discuss at some length the question of predestination and free will, and whether Scheherazade was the first postmodern narrator, and the debt of the West to Arabic modes of storytelling, and he quoted Aristotle, F. R. Leavis and Jacques Derrida, not names that appeared often in the pages of the Impartial Recorder and which Colin Rimmer would soon be pulling out.

  Colin could have done with a holiday. He would be driving up to the city tomorrow, Christmas Day, to drop off his presents to his daughters, who would be staying with his ex-wife and her omni-competent new husband, Stephen, who would only offer him the coolest of welcomes and a glass of chilled festive orange juice, because Colin was driving, and who preferred it if the children made all their presents, and then it’d be back to the house for a bottle of brandy by himself and a Christmas Dinner ready-meal from Marks. He might try to put in some work on the magnum opus, which he’d neglected recently. Lisa would be laughing on the other side of her face when he had the novel published and was working as a columnist on a London paper.

  In the meantime he was stuck at the Impartial Recorder and he’d had quite a struggle with the lawyers, clearing the Frank Gilbey story, but he’d managed to push it through in the end, the week before Christmas, where they’d usually have had something soft as a lead, and Colin had splashed the headline ’FOUND: HIDDEN TREASURES’. It was not quite as hard-hitting a headline as he would have liked, but the lawyers had insisted. He’d been intending something more along the lines of ’THIEF!’ or ’SHAME!’ or ’LIAR!’ or even the headline he had always wanted to run but had never quite found the opportunity to use, the headline that every editor dreams of and believes in his heart of hearts his every word approximates: ’THE TRUTH’. In order to illustrate the story Colin had sent Joe Finnegan to get a photograph of Frank looking shifty, which shouldn’t have been too difficult, since Frank is pretty much the personification of shifty, but Joe knew Frank from way back, when Joe was still in the picture-framing business and Frank had put quite a bit of business his way, providing frames and prints for various show homes and apartment developments around town, so Frank had actually looked quite poised and confident in Joe’s photograph – benevolent almost, and ever so slightly contrite, with his head a bit bowed and wearing a nice dark suit. In comparison, Billy’s photograph of the trough and the fountain, which Colin ran alongside Joe’s flattering portrait, perhaps lacked a little definition, but you could certainly tell that the objects photographed were the trough and the fountain that used to be down at the bottom of Main Street and which had disappeared, but it wasn’t entirely clear from the blur exactly where they were, or why, so the overall effect was less immediately impressive than it could have been.

  The story had certainly put on sales, though – a lot of newsagents were reporting no returns, which was something that hadn’t happened for a long time, not since one of the teachers at Barneville House
was sent to prison recently for doing things he said he didn’t do at the school back in the 1970s.*

  For all the initial impact, it looked like Frank was going to try to brazen it out. A man like Frank didn’t go down without a fight, but he would go down, Colin was sure of that: this might not have been the end, or the beginning of the end, but it was certainly the end of the beginning. Or the beginning of the beginning of the end. Or something like that. He really did need a holiday.

  Once he’d brought Frank down, Colin was going to move on. Next year was going to be his year, he was sure of it. He was going to finish his book and put his life in order. Sort himself out a bit. He was even thinking of going in search of his birth parents.

  It was Billy who called Colin over. Colin thought it would be just another plea for a semicolon. It was not.

  As Colin stared out of the window, he was already composing the headline in his mind.

  Bob Savory saw it at the same time and was making his own swift mental calculations.

  Bob’s mother was doing absolutely fine in the home, if a person who needed help to dress, eat and go to the toilet could ever be said to be doing fine, which in our town they could, actually, because if nothing else we are taught from a young age not to grumble and to be happy with what little we’ve got, so frankly if you’re still breathing you’re doing fine here, even if you’re on a ventilator, and it looked as though Bob’s mother might be fine in the home for some time to come. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was not about to drop off her perch.

  Bob, on the other hand, had started going to all sorts of places. He had flown the nest.

  Now that he didn’t have his mother at home to worry about, Bob sometimes found himself in the evenings with nothing to do and no one to do it with. He hated watching the TV alone. Even TV with his mum was to be preferred to watching TV alone. Having his mum there talking to it or at it or just staring mesmerised at the screen made you realise just how bad TV was, and what it was for, and who it was aimed at: TV is aimed at people with a serious brain dysfunction. If you realise that it’s easier to understand it – you can appreciate it better. He was also beginning to tire of the waitresses at the restaurant – he just couldn’t manage the necessary chat any more – and so he found he had a little spare time now, for the first time in years, and he had started visiting clubs, in search of companionship and something else which he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He’d been to quite a few places up in the city, but tonight, because it was Christmas Eve and he didn’t want to drive, and because this was going to be his first Christmas without his mother at home, and because he needed a drink, Bob decided he would stay in town and visit Paradise Lost.

  He’d been in there for only half an hour or so, admiring the thirty-foot zinc bar and the mirrors, and the fake tropical vegetation and palm trees, and the snakes coiling around columns everywhere, their fibreglass bodies cool to the touch and glistening under the lights.* He’d got talking to the barman, Peter, who was from Australia, a backpacker who’d made it all the way over from the other side of the world and had somehow ended up here. He’d wanted to experience real life, he told Bob – he was from Melbourne – and so he had avoided all the usual glamorous destinations and chosen here as a stopping-off point, a kind of archetypal nowhere, he said. It’s hardly flattering to have your town described as a nowhere, but even a nowhere’s a somewhere to nobodies like us and, anyway, most of us here are impervious or just plain dumb enough to take criticism as a compliment. He’d enjoyed real life here so much, in fact, Peter the Australian, that as soon as he’d earned enough money he was getting the hell out and moving on to New York. This was a lot more information than you’d usually get out of a barman here in town – even if you’ve known him since childhood, which many of us do, but it made no difference, because barmen and women here are obliged to take a binding vow of silence and surliness at the age of eighteen – and Bob had to admire the young man’s ease and confidence and eagerness, and his obvious bartending abilities. He had mixed an excellent rum and Coke, which had become Bob’s drink of choice while out clubbing, a return to adolescent enthusiasms, before the beer and then wine and then the whiskey had got a hold of him.

  The club was half empty. It was still early.

  Bob had found in the music and in the crowds at the clubs exactly the distraction that he needed and desired; the perfect alternative and replacement, in fact, for a mother with Alzheimer’s. When he wasn’t working these days Bob was either thinking about work or visiting his mother in the home and that was it, that was his life: work, mother, work, mother. There was nothing else, except the gym and investing his money, which wasn’t as easy as it looked, when you considered the recent worldwide downturn in stocks and shares. What with trying to get the franchise together on the sandwich place, Bob’s plate was pretty full. But when he went to clubs and he was assaulted by the music and the people and the atmosphere, and the drugs, admittedly, he found that he forgot all about his everyday concerns and considerations, and became conscious of other ideas and desires forming within himself: ideas and desires he could not articulate; and did not want to; and which had nothing to do with his mother, or sandwiches, or money; ideas and desires which had never really occurred to him before.

  With his mum in the home Bob had begun to realise, had begun to work out what he really valued in life, what mattered to him, what he enjoyed, and these things were, in decreasing order of importance, Beauty, Luxury and Brilliance, none of them, obviously, readily available in our town, where stocks are low, and he had started wondering if he might need to take a break from here and from work, and visit somewhere like San Francisco, or Melbourne even, to get a little top-up. Somewhere different, for a sabbatical. Somewhere where Beauty, Luxury and Brilliance grow on trees, and are waiting to be picked and plucked by passers-by. Maybe when his mother had died – there was no use denying it, he’d had the thought, ashamed though he was to admit it.

  He loved dancing in the clubs – that was his holiday in the meantime – or even just watching people dance, people who were generally about twenty years younger than him, which did not perturb him. On the contrary, he enjoyed their youth on their behalf. He admired the fact that youth did not require discipline to acquire beauty – that it did not know even that it was in possession of beauty. To the young, beauty is simply a given, a gift, something they are born with which eventually is taken from them and which they are never able to get back. Bob had been working hard on his abs recently at the gym, and he’d started to see results, but it took so much work, just to burn off those few extra pounds, that sometimes he wondered if it was really worth it. For the young people in the clubs there was no such work involved: their abs just were; they existed, like them. The club was for Bob in some ways the fulfilment of the gym, but it was also its opposite: in the gym you were working and attending to yourself and your own business. But in the clubs you were there to be devoted to some other thing, some other feeling, or piece of music, and you became unconscious of your own existence and became part of a bigger, living, breathing organism. It was like when he was young, just him and his mum, eating sandwiches, staring out of the window, watching the world go by, that delicious feeling of things simply being right without your even having to try.

  Yet he also found at the clubs that he was overcome sometimes with unaccountable feelings of pain and longing, feelings which made him uncomfortable and angry with himself.

  He was feeling angry tonight, actually, for some reason, drinking his rum and Coke, watching a young man dancing – there were only about half a dozen people on the dance floor and all the rest of them were women, so the man stood out. He stood out also because he was taller and he looked impudent. His head was held more erect, and he had close-cropped hair and wore an earring, and was dressed in a tracksuit top and stonewashed jeans, an utterly unremarkable-looking young man who danced in an ungainly, rollicking fashion, our own local variation on the style of the times, his knees slightly b
ent, throwing his arms and hands up into the air, his face entirely blank, and yet he seemed, in a way that Bob could not fully articulate, he seemed to be utterly complete, and in and of himself, to be perfectly self-contained and yet to have lost himself successfully in the music. He had something that Bob didn’t have and which Bob wanted very badly. Bob thought, and he almost said out loud, ‘I want you.’

  Bob found this thought unnerving, understandably for a man who as far as he was previously aware was around about 150 per cent heterosexual, yet it was a thought that merged quickly into a feeling and the feeling quickly overcame him, and he was seized suddenly with the need to get outside, to get a breath of fresh air and to regain his composure – if he could get outside he’d be fine and he’d forget all about this.

  And it was when he stepped outside the club, into the dark and cold, that he too saw the Quality Hotel.

  Paul, of course, had been the first person to see it. He was actually in the Quality Hotel. He was there.

  He’d had everything ready and everything arranged. Scunty, his friend from the Institute, who was working in the Big Banana, the record shop up on High Street, had done him some great flyers, showing the hotel looking like a Gothic castle, with a huge, all-seeing, blood-red eye in the centre, and he’d also got someone he knew on a pirate radio station up in the city to put out the word. They’d got into the hotel the night before, the two of them, their baseball caps pulled low, through the old entrance into the Italian garden on Tarry Lane, and they’d shifted a lot of debris. It was a creepy kind of a place at night, there was no denying it, although both Paul and Scunty did their best to pretend otherwise.

  ‘It’s like Scooby-Doo,’ said Scunty, who was the kind of man who collects old Marvel comics and who still lives with his parents. His bark was worse than his bite, Scunty. Even his tattoos were quite sweet, when you got up close – snakes, mostly, and flames, but he also had a little Scottie dog on his shoulder, in memory of his gran’s dog Floofy, who’d wandered on to the ring road years ago, when it was first built, obviously thinking it was still fields. But no one need know about that tonight: Scunty was security for the evening.