Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  There was a lot of scurrying inside the Quality Hotel, the sound of rats on the remains of parquet, and there were these curious winds and draughts, and it was impossible to see much because of the dark. It looked a lot better from the outside, actually, than inside, the Quality Hotel, but that would be true in town generally.

  Scunty had managed to borrow a van, and they’d gone and picked up all the gear: some bass-bins, and a smoke machine, and some UV lights from a place up in the city, and the candyfloss machine and the hot-dog stall, and the Slush Puppie maker, and they’d got a hold of a few milk crates for people to sit on, and Paul had set up his turntables in what More O’Ferral had intended to be the chapel, but which had ended up as the library and then the dining room, and finally the place where you could get a Knickerbocker Glory on a Sunday.

  ‘It’s gonna be totally crazy, ’ Paul had kept saying to Scunty in encouragement and in the closest thing to a kind of black American patois that he could manage, as they lugged the gear into the deserted building and across the moonlit lobby into the chapel. ‘It’s gonna be wicked.’

  Paul had had to scale down his original and rather more wicked plans. He hadn’t had time to pull everything together. He’d had to take a job – he couldn’t turn it down, or he’d have lost all his benefits. He’d had an interview and before he knew it, there he was, working, actually working, for a firm who had a franchise to operate coin-operated children’s rides in shopping malls and in leisure centres and in hospitals and in indoor soft-play areas. He had to start out at Bloom’s early in the morning, at 6 a.m., before anyone else was there, cleaning the rides and collecting the money, and he was paid the minimum wage and he had to wear a black polo shirt with WILLOUGHBY RIDES embroidered in white over the breast, and he felt like a Roman slave, branded with his master’s name. By the afternoon the malls were all like cattle markets, but early in the morning he didn’t mind, early in the morning a place like Bloom’s felt more like an amphitheatre or a cathedral: the hush, the vast floor spaces. It felt like an arena, somewhere where something might happen, and where Paul was a part of it. He was supplied with rags, and Marigolds, and antiseptic surface cleaners, and baby wipes, and he’d added an old toothbrush of his own, to help him get into those difficult-to-reach corners: Hank’s Hot Dog Van was an absolute bugger.

  It wasn’t a bad job, really, and it was the rides that had given him the idea: some kind of Christmas Eve fairground or circus in the Quality Hotel. That was his big idea. An event. A space. Rides and entertainment. But once he’d made a few calls he realised that a fairground wasn’t practical: the rides were too expensive. Far too much. Even for a juggler you were looking at £100 cash in hand, money up front. He was amazed – he thought street performers were all hippies who’d have been glad of a swig from a bottle of cider and the chance to pass round the hat. But everyone these days, it seems, is a professional. He’d even rung a local children’s magician, ‘Laughing’ Norman Needy, and Norman had asked him about insurance, for goodness’ sake.* So Paul had to scale down. He did some basic cash projections and business plans on the back of the Willoughby Rides brochures. Tickets for the evening would cost, say, £10, and he reckoned he could attract up to 500 people, and once they were inside they were his. He’d get a Slush Puppie machine – that only cost £50 for the night’s hire, and then he could charge £2 per drink. Candyfloss as well, similar. If his calculations were correct, he reckoned he’d be able to take about £20,000 in one evening, what with all the other merchandising opportunities: helium balloons, sparkly wands. And the drugs, of course. Scunty knew a couple of people and Paul thought he could guarantee exclusive rights to them.

  He’d had it all worked out. This was going to be the start of something big. Tonight was just the beginning, the beginning of a new kind of scene in our town, something really intense, something with that kind of vibe and that kind of feeling you get off the music when it’s really working.

  But the only feeling he’d had so far tonight was of panic. He was down about £2000 so far – all the gear had taken a huge chunk of the budget, and on top of that there’d been all the money he’d had to agree to pay Scunty’s friend Ricky for taking care of the drugs. Any money he’d had to pay up front he’d taken out of Joanne’s building society account: it was the money they were saving up for a deposit on a house. He was planning to pay her back, of course, as soon as he had all the money in later. He hadn’t told her about it. He wanted to surprise her. She wouldn’t have understood.

  They were expecting most people to turn up around midnight. By then it’d be packed. You wouldn’t be able to move. Ricky said he’d be coming in at about 10 with the drugs. Loads of people from the Institute were coming after pub chucking-out time. Wally Lee, even, who was playing a gig himself up at Maxine’s, some line-dancing thing, said he’d be in later.

  ‘It’s gonna be totally crazy, ’ Paul told Scunty again, as he lined up his records. ‘It’s gonna be massive.’

  A couple of people had turned up at 8, but they were local grungy teenagers just, and they handed over their money, wandered around the ground floor of the hotel, and then sat down on the milk crates in the old chapel, rolled something up and started smoking it. The teenagers were Bethany, in fact, Francie and Cherith’s daughter, and her boyfriend, Kirk, who is several years older and who owns a car.

  Bethany is not like Kirk’s other girlfriends – as a minister’s daughter she has all the appeal of forbidden fruit, the guileless, trusting nature of the truly meek and mild, and she is reckless enough to try anything. It’s a winning combination and Kirk is completely obsessed with her. Bethany, meanwhile, remains obsessed with CO2 emissions, the hole in the ozone layer, CFCs, acid rain and the prospect of nuclear war: she’s into what Kirk calls globiality. Kirk couldn’t get into it himself. What Kirk and Bethany have in common is the same musical taste, beginning with Nu-Metal and Marilyn Manson, and going right back to Nirvana and further back even to the Doors. Music is what had brought them together in the first place and why they were here – the promise of something so loud that it would take them out of themselves and out of our small town. They were discussing where to buy drugs and whether amyl nitrate was any good or not. Kirk claimed it was excellent, although he’d never had any and wasn’t quite sure what it was. He assumed it was something you got in a chemist’s.

  After smoking what they believed to be a joint of the highest quality THC dope and which was, in fact, tobacco sprinkled with Tesco’s Mixed Herbs, but which seemed to have had the required head-spinning effect, Bethany tossed the butt away and embraced Kirk in what she hoped was a passable imitation of a vampish manner and kissed him, using her tongue in the way her last boyfriend, Danny, had taught her. The technique certainly seemed to work with Kirk, although all the herbs made it taste a bit like kissing an omelette, and she had to take a break after a few minutes to catch her breath and to pick a few strands of rosemary from her teeth.

  Paul saw them kissing at the same moment he saw the flames, and right away he knew it was time to get out.

  It began along one of the chapel’s remaining panelled walls, a wall crusted thick with a century’s dirt and varnish but which still held an engraved metal tablet listing the names of all those from our town who had died in the Great War, names familiar to all of us still today, the Cuddys and the Cannings and the Grieves and the Hawkinses and the McCruddens: the great Unfallen. It was a slow starter, the fire, appropriately enough, but then it suddenly found its feet and leapt up into the hidden cavities and voids behind the panelling, and spread upwards and outwards, round the walls and up and out into the dining room and the arcade and the bedrooms upstairs, leaping, jumping and breaking through all the enclosures of the Quality Hotel, through every wall and vaulting every obstacle, the flames and hot gases catching on to the natural air currents and moving out and across the plastic fibre carpets, through the stud walls, along the suspended ceiling tiles and rushing through the ventilation and lift shafts. The twenti
eth century was destroyed within minutes. The rest of the building took longer.

  People die in a fire for one of two reasons: either they burn to death quickly or they’re slowly asphyxiated, and Paul did not intend to die either way. He had assembled all of this, all the gear, all the people soon to be arriving. He had made something happen. Or at least something which was about to happen. But now he was going to have to close down before he’d even properly begun. It was a disappointment, but he had no choice.

  He did two things.

  He shouted ‘Fire!’ and then he ran. Scunty and Bethany and Kirk followed him out into the Italian garden, where, like the rest of the town, they stood and watched.

  The last person to see it was Sammy.

  It was just a small flame, which had danced along the top of the roof of the Quality Hotel, until it reached the adjoining building, the building which housed the Oasis, where Sammy was inside.

  He was in the spa pool, as usual – the Oasis was shut down for Christmas, but he was there, in the pool just the same, and in his mind he was with little Josh. In his mind Josh was about fourteen tonight, which was a good age, because it meant he still enjoyed Christmas but he was also good to talk to, and so the two of them talked about how the past year had gone, and Josh was delighted with the presents Sammy had bought him.

  At first Sammy thought he was smelling in his imagination, which he’d done before – he’d smelt Josh many, many times, reminders of the evening when his little boy had died, when he’d let him down – but then the smoke began to fill his lungs, and it felt like acid, and the more he tried to breathe, the more he found himself choking, and he’d try to take a breath and then another breath, but it felt like someone pouring burning liquid into the back of his throat. He retched and tried to take a deeper breath, which was worse, and finally to escape the fire he went down under the water.

  Davey Quinn missed it all. He didn’t see a thing. He didn’t look back. He never took his eyes off the road.

  Davey wasn’t going to lose the momentum of this journey. It had taken a long time to build up to it. There was no way he was stopping now. This could be the start of bigger and better things. As he passed the golf club, the outskirts, with their stone sleeping lions, he gave a sigh of relief.

  He was leaving town, with Lorraine.

  He threw the bus up on to the motorway. He’d earned his PCV licence years ago when he was living in London, and now a job had come up, driving a tour bus round Europe – he’d found it on the Internet – and he’d jumped at it.

  They were getting away. First stop London, then Paris, Rome, down to Spain and back again. They’d be gone for eight months of the year, staying in a different hotel every night. It sounded absolutely perfect. He’d heard of people who’d gone as far away as Turkey.

  It was funny, leaving. Everything looked exactly the same: the same rolling hills, the same patches of fields and houses, the same roundabouts, the motorway. It was all just as he remembered it. Nothing had changed. Only the weather.

  ‘Wow,’ said Lorraine, pointing, excited. ‘Snow!’

  ‘Huh,’ said Davey.

  * Biscuits, also, were a godsend. Eaten with cheese, Mr Donelly found that three digestives provided him with a perfectly satisfactory lunch, with perhaps a custard cream or a bourbon to follow. He’d never been keen on pasta, and he now also avoided potatoes and rice – the only complex carbohydrate he could still be bothered with was bread. He bought a small white lodger twice a week from the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop. He found he could no longer stomach heavy bread.

  * See Delia Smith’s Christmas, pp. 20–1.

  * See the Impartial Recorder, 22 October 2001.

  *Paradise Lost is the creation, or the miscreation, or the brainchild, shall we say, of a forty-two-year-old blonde interior design consultant who calls herself Kitty these days, but whom we all know as plain brunette Katherine Crone, who is originally from here, but who now lives far away, and who works for the big pub-and-club-and-restaurant conglomerate Donovan’s, who own, lease, or otherwise control and manage most of what used to be our town’s little privately owned and personally run pubs and bars. Kitty travels hither and thither, sprinkling her fantastical designs like fairy dust over dry and dusty drinking holes and crippled old discos, transforming them into absurd, hyper-real palaces of delight. She specialises, according to her pale-pink business card, in ‘Creating and Sourcing Innovative Themes’, and Paradise Lost is certainly a theme, if not entirely innovative. It is more lush, more exotic, more simply picturesque than anywhere else in town, perhaps with the exception of Bloom’s, and possibly the Leisure Centre when the line dancing is on, and it boasts more nature, frankly, and has more healthy-looking fronds per square inch than even the People’s Park, which looks brown and dirty and broken in comparison, naked and denuded, particularly in winter, which lasts here from around about 1 September until Easter. Paradise Lost looks like a Polynesian jungle all year round: a Polynesian jungle, that is, with the added benefit of tequila slammers, a chill-out room, and a state-of-the-art PA and sound system. Bob had considered getting Kitty in to design the first of his franchise Speedy Bap!, but he was really looking for something a little simpler, a little less like Babylon and a little bit more Seattle. He was thinking Frasier.

  * Norman had learnt the hard way. He’d been booked a few years ago to do a children’s party up in the city – the parents were lawyers, which should have been a warning. Norman had double booked by accident and had to cancel the engagement at the last minute, and the parents had sued him for breach of contract. It had ruined him. He’d had a nice little semi outside the ring road, and had been working for years in show business, and working on his garden: he had his own koi pond, and grew lovely geraniums and strawberries in the summer, lovely happy fruits and flowers. He was living in a caravan now, out on Womack’s caravan park on the Old Green Road, with just a couple of plastic planters for a garden, and he’d thought about giving it all up, especially after he’d had the heart attack, but then he thought, well, if he was going to be dead soon, which he was, he might as well keep going. Norman believed in magic. But he wasn’t daft. These days he also believed in insurance.

  Index of Key Words, Phrases and Concepts

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

  The index is intended for the curious, the wary and the professionally lazy. It is perhaps less interesting than the Preface and probably less informative than the Acknowledgements. Its one great advantage is that it may be used as a substitute for reading the book itself – no bad thing. Skimming and skipping are two of the great pleasures of reading, although the fastidious may, of course, disagree; they may also take courtesy for a gimmick.

  The entries are by no means exhaustive. Some words – T, for example – have been deemed too insignificant for inclusion, while some concepts – let us say ‘love’ – have been regarded as too large. As a guide the index will therefore prove insufficient. But as an evocation it is my hope that it proves adequate.

  abandonment,

  – of all reason, Francie McGinn’s 82–83

  – of her first-born son, Mrs Donelly’s 206

  – of His Only Begotten Son, God’s 52–53

  abasement,

  – various forms of 12, 14–18, 28–29, 62, 71, 72, 95, 102, 105, 106, 128, 131, 135–136, 237, 255, 285

  ability,

  – unrelated to performance, 32, 71, 95–96, 251

  abominations,

  – various 15–18, 88, 186–188, 257–258

  abroad, ix, 43, 56, 73, 137, 134–135, 137, 172, 330n., 366

  – Mr Donelly doesn’t hold with 198

  – see also entries under America, Australia, and travelling,

  absence,

  – defend yourself by 5, 9–10, 12–13, 105, 137, 216–217, 254–255, 366

  – makes the hear
t grow fonder, xi, 32, 137

  – of a pie, 268n.

  abstinence,

  – engenders maladies, 82

  abstract,

  – ideas, ix., 3

  – ideas, dislike of, 4, 149

  abundance, xi, 29, 235–236

  academics,

  – mocked, 3

  accidents, 11, 270

  – solemn, 27, 166, 314–315

  – the self-employed and 119–120

  accomplices, 141

  aches,

  – and pains, 27, 115, 164

  – heart, 104–106, 214–216, 255

  achievements,

  – not certificated 38

  acquaintances,

  – and friends 153, 315–316

  acquisition, 24, 87, 117, 136, 236

  actions,

  – speak louder than words, 72, 200, 284–285

  actors, 38, 43, 302–303, 325

  acupuncture, 117–119

  – and upholstery, 118

  – see also entries under electrocution

  adages,

  – assorted, 244–245, 238–239

  Adam,

  – and Eve, 17

  addiction, 25, 56, 105, 106, 209, 217–218, 221, 234, 304, 320

  adepts,

  – compared to amateurs, 127

  adoption, 158–161, 170, 273

  adultery,

  – brazened out, 106, 185–186

  – regretted bitterly, 306–307

  adversity, 5, 13, 57n. 104

  – and wisdom, 119–120

  – sour, 171, 253