Ring Road (21 page)

Once Jackie had shampooed and rinsed his hair, Francie said, through gathered phlegm, ‘The shampoo smells nice, like almonds.'

And Jackie said, ‘Well, what did you expect it to smell like? Cat's pee?'

And Francie said no, he didn't expect it to smell like cat's pee, actually. He wasn't sure what he'd expected it to smell like.

‘You know, ' said Jackie, ‘it's like when I cut some people's hair and they say to me, ‘Wow, that's really good″ and I think, like, well, yeah, what did they expect? I'm a hairdresser, not a butcher, d'you know what I mean? I'm not chopping up meat here, am I?'

And just as he said that he nicked Francie's ear with the razor. ‘Oops, sorry, ' he said and Francie felt a tiny trickle of blood on his neck. He closed his eyes again.

The cross had also been Bobbie's idea. She'd been trying to persuade Francie for a long time that it would be good to erect something on the roof of the church, to put the place on the map. The People's Fellowship is, of course, really just the old Johnson Hosiery Factory, done up a bit, and it still looks pretty much like a factory: there's not a lot you can do on a tithing budget to transform a nineteenth-century industrial space into a modern, twenty-first-century place of praise and worship. As things began to pick up, though, and the Spirit definitely began to move, Bobbie felt that the church needed to make a more dramatic statement, that it needed to announce itself more clearly to the town as a holy place, and a happening place. Francie had said they couldn't afford expensive signage or neon, so Bobbie had put on her thinking cap and had just gone ahead and asked Marion, one of the Fellowship's many spinsters, to ask her brother Harry, Harry Lamb the Odd Job Man, if he wouldn't mind knocking something up. Harry was more used to doing fiddly wee jobs around town – installing Slingsby loft ladders and clearing blocked guttering – and he hadn't done a cross before, but he said he'd give it a go.

A large cross is not, in fact, that difficult to make. If the Romans could do it, after all, with their primitive tools, it was hardly going to be much of a problem for Harry with his circular power saw, a rotary electric planer, some galvanised angle brackets and his tradesman's discount at the World of Wood. Harry liked to think, actually, that he could probably improve on the original design, and he put together a few drawings for Bobbie to have a look at, sketching out crosses in all sorts of different shapes and sizes, using different joints and finishes which he thought might look quite impressive. But Bobbie felt that the cross needed to be like a real
cross, a cross that a man might actually be crucified on, so in the end Harry had kept it simple and used some 4″ x 4″ tanalised timber, with a 6-foot crossbeam to accommodate a man's outstretched arms, and a 12-foot upright. Harry was not a believer himself, but he had to admit that putting the cross together had made quite an impact on him. It was a pretty gruesome bit of kit, when you looked at it up close, and hardly something to be scoffed at or mocked. He went for belt and braces to connect the two beams, using a half-lap joint with a metal plate and bolts to secure it, and then the Young People's Group – Can Teen – got to work on it, and had it primed, undercoated and finished with two coats of a pure white weatherproof gloss, guaranteed to last six years, sealing each coat under Francie's guidance with a prayer and a blessing. Harry set the whole thing into a concrete base up on the roof of the People's Fellowship and it looked pretty cool, the young people agreed.

The problem was, though, on a sunny day, the cross whited out against the sky, and in the rain and mist you could hardly see it.

So the Day-Glo paint had been Bobbie Dylan's next idea.

And then the floodlighting.

Jackie was showing Francie the back of his head in a mirror, the haircut complete.

With the Day-Glo paint and the floodlighting you could see the cross from about two miles away, even if you were wearing dark glasses, which of course no one in our town does, unless they're Wally Lee, or one of the mothers of the children at Barneville House, or unless they're actually blind or partially sighted, and even then they might have been able to make out a vague outline, or just felt it there, burning in the night. You could certainly see it, even on a grey day, from Bloom's and the ring road. Which is when the council had got on to it: they wanted the Fellowship to take it down, or to pay £250 for an application for planning permission. And
then the
Impartial Recorder
picked up on the story and started a campaign, prompted by Bobbie, ‘Save the Sign of Our Salvation', and it looked for a while as though the cross might get to stay, for free and gratis, until someone who was visiting his mother in town, and who hadn't been here for a long time, was momentarily distracted by the sight of what looked like the first sign of the Second Coming, and drove straight over a mini-roundabout on the ring road and into a municipal flower bed, taking out a lot of expensive bedding plants.

So Harry Lamb was instructed to take a chainsaw to the cross, and he carved it up, and that was a sad day for Francie, a day of humiliation, and Harry sold the wood on to a friend who runs a stick and log business out of the industrial estate, and it has been used to light fires throughout town ever since.

Francie was trying to smile at the face looking back at him in the mirror.

‘Well?' said Jackie.

‘It's nice, ' said Francie. His teeth were a bit yellowy.

‘You look like a new man, ' said Jackie.

‘Yes, ' agreed Francie.

‘You never know, you might get lucky tonight!' said Jackie, his tapering sideburns crinkling up into a smile.

Which was really the moment, if he had to identify a moment, at which Francie realised that he did not belong here and that he had made a terrible mistake.

Francie would not be getting lucky tonight. Just for the record, and for the sake of the congregation, Francie and Bobbie are in fact no longer sleeping in the same bed. They just weren't compatible. Bobbie is always cold at night and Francie too hot, and they'd tried one of those dual-tog partner duvets, thirteen tog on one side, ten tog on the other, which have been on sale up at N'Hance, the furniture and interiors place in Bloom's, but the duvet just didn't do it. Bobbie wanted still more warmth, and she was piling the bed high with jumpers and dressing gowns, and in the end Francie had given
up and gone to get some sleep downstairs, where he used to sit awake reading the Bible or watching late-night TV or Bobbie's exercise videos. She had a full range of pop and soap stars doing boxercise, yoga, aerobics and everything in between – they'd had to clear some shelf space to accommodate them all. Some of Francie's devotional works had had to be shifted to under the bed.

Also, at around the same time, Francie had been forced to move some of his clothes into a suitcase – Bobbie had so many clothes there wasn't enough room for them all in just her half of the wardrobe. She kept on buying new clothes all the time; Francie had had no idea this was what women did. As far as he could remember Cherith could get by for years on a couple of sweatshirts and some elasticated skirts, and they'd shared socks (which may have explained the persistent athlete's foot). But Bobbie just kept on buying and buying. She preferred cheap clothes, actually, for no moral or spiritual reason except that if she bought something cheap and only wore it a couple of times it didn't matter so much. She had maybe two dozen pairs of shoes in constant rotation. And the make-up. Cherith had never really bothered with make-up except for special occasions – Christmas, say, or Easter, which usually merited some lipstick and a bit of blusher. But Bobbie had this big box – a large metal box – and because she was used to performing, she would wear a kind of stage make-up all the time, which Francie had to admit he found impressive, except perhaps at breakfast, when he did find it a little grisly, particularly if they were having a fry.

The women in the congregation had all loved Cherith, who was like them, who was shy, who preferred slacks to skirts, and who wore the wrong bra size, just like they did. But now it was the men in the congregation who loved Bobbie. Francie couldn't help but notice that the members of the Band seemed to be swelling week by week, male
members of the congregation offering up their hitherto undisclosed talents as percussionists, backing singers, roadies, supporters and general encouragers. Bobbie's position within the People's Fellowship was becoming unassailable.

It was when she suggested that they spend Christmas in Tenerife, though, that Francie had to put his foot down. She'd tempted him with the idea of langoustine pool-side on Christmas Day.

‘Sure, ' she said, ‘isn't God there in Tenerife just the same as he's here?'

‘Yes, ' Francie had had to agree, but that was hardly the point. He was a minister and he had responsibilities.

Bobbie had granted him that, but she insisted that they needed something to look forward to at Christmas, which is how Francie had ended up agreeing to her idea for the big Christmas Eve concert. She was calling it on the posters ‘The People's Fellowship Annual Big Night Out, Featuring Bobbie Dylan and the Band' in big font, and noting, in smaller font, ‘Featuring Also the Wise Men, the Virgin and the Little Baby J'.

Francie ran his fingers through his gelled hair and looked up at the sky. God forgive him.

The sky, Mrs Donelly herself might have said, was the colour of the back of a used teaspoon. It was a day already drunk to the dregs and all washed out. A typical day here: nothing much to report and nothing much on the horizon, only clouds, and biscuits.

Mrs Donelly had led a quiet life, a used-teaspoon kind of a life, even by her own estimation. Anything she'd achieved she'd always dismissed, from a good apple pie with custard to the birth of her children to the chairing of a difficult council committee, and she always treated praise with the same ironic raising of a thin, pencilled-in eyebrow, whether it was praise from her children, from her colleagues, her employers, her husband, or even, as she sometimes liked to think, from the good Lord Himself. ‘Well, ' she would say, ‘there you are now.'

She had only ever worked part-time, to fit in around the children. Hers was what she and Mr Donelly both referred to as the ‘little job', her job as a receptionist at the Health Centre, even though it was often her little job that had kept the wolf from the door and their heads above water. A few extra pounds a week can make a big difference in the raising of a family. It can mean the difference between, say, one fish finger or two in a sandwich, and the difference between patching a patch and
a new pair of trousers. Every penny she'd earned had gone on feeding and clothing and caring for the children, and even when the children had left home and things had taken off and she became a councillor and had to attend evening meetings, Mrs Donelly always tried to put others first. She always made sure that Mr Donelly had something ready for his tea, for example, even if it was only a slice or two of wafer-thin ham, some buttered bread and some shavings of iceberg lettuce: the important thing was that there was something on the plate. Mr Donelly, of course, appreciated her efforts, and felt it was only right and proper. He didn't want her to get too carried away with all the council business and get too big-headed.

Mr Donelly could not abide big-heads. In the Castle Arms, if they were discussing some young footballer, say, who was playing at the height of his powers and earning lots of money and going out on the town with beautiful young women, and Big Dessie and Little Mickey Matchett and Harry Lamb the Odd Job Man were saying fair play to him and how great it was, Mr Donelly would just give a slight tut and a shake of his head, and that was enough of a dampener, enough of a reminder, to him and to them, that there were no heroes any more, that the age of chivalry was over and that the rich or the powerful were no more deserving of respect than anyone else. Like a lot of people here in town, Mr Donelly wasn't exactly a socialist but sometimes he sounded a lot like one: here, where we are, socialism and pessimism are pretty much the same thing.
*
It doesn't matter how many goals you score,
or how much money you make, or whatever you've achieved, everyone is basically the same according to Mr Donelly and, frankly, if you're looking for a hero you're better off with a dog, because people are bad, but dogs can at least be relied upon, as long as they're properly trained. Here in town people tend to take a post-lapsarian, pre-millennial view on most things: these may not be the End Times exactly, but they're certainly closer to the End than when we were all young.

Mr and Mrs Donelly had met long ago, in a Golden Age, when Mr Donelly was an apprentice at the printworks up on Moira Avenue, when men still worked with hot metal, and Mrs Donelly was working in the Carlton Tea Rooms, where the waitresses still dressed as waitresses and the diners wore gloves, and there were pure white tablecloths and a three-tier cake stand on every table. They'd met at church; they used to see each other at Mass. Mrs Donelly had stopped going for a while in her teens, but then she'd been so shocked at what had happened between her and Frank Gilbey that she began attending again. She wanted a new start in life. She'd believed for a while that what she wanted was the fast life that Frank Gilbey had to offer, but then she had realised that the fast life involved all sorts of complications and difficulties for a young woman in our town in the 1950s, so she settled for Mr Donelly instead.

Mr Donelly was not just Frank Gilbey's replacement, but his opposite. Where Frank had been all hard edges and cheekbones and energy and a big quiff, Mr Donelly was soft and friendly, just like a big bear, really, with his hair all muzzed
up and wearing his dad's old cast-offs. He was shy, modest and apparently thoughtful. When they were courting he used to bring her presents of pats of butter wrapped in newspaper, and eggs, and the occasional chicken – his parents were from up-country and he had that country way of speaking, and that manner, that Mrs Donelly had liked so much and eventually had fallen in love with.

There had been a downside, of course, to Mr Donelly and his country ways: Frank Gilbey he most definitely was not, thank goodness, but Frank Gilbey he most definitely was not, alas. Mr Donelly was lacking in a certain keenness of spirit and he was not what you'd call adventurous. When it came to holidays, for example, Mr Donelly believed that abroad was probably overrated, and not that much different from here, except somewhere else. He liked plain food, plain speaking and he could sniff out the slightest sliver of garlic in one of Wong's Chinese takeaways or the faintest hint of cant in the
Impartial Recorder,
and he was not what you'd call a conversationalist, and he didn't eat fish, not even on Fridays; there was just something about it he didn't like, the smell of it, largely. But fresh fish doesn't smell, Mrs Donelly had always insisted. It only smells when it's going off. If it's fresh, she'd say, it doesn't smell at all. It does to me, Mr Donelly had always replied.

For their wedding anniversary one year Mrs Donelly had booked them into a little French place up in the city: one of the girls at the Health Centre had recommended it. It was a gourmet night, where you ate whatever the chef prepared, and it was quite expensive, but Mrs Donelly thought they might push the boat out just for once. It wasn't every day, as she'd had to explain to Mr Donelly, justifying the taxi fare and persuading him into his smart jacket, it wasn't every day that you've been married for thirty years. The chef did fish soup as a starter. Followed by salmon. And then wild boar. Wild boar, it turned out, was one of the other things Mr
Donelly did not much like. The evening was not a great success. After that, they stuck to Scarpetti's and the occasional Set Menu B from Wong's, without the garlic.

(Just for the record, though, so that he doesn't sound small-minded, which he is not – he's just sure of his opinions, which is a welcome privilege of middle and old age, after all the embarrassments and uncertainties of youth – Mr Donelly, it should be said, also dislikes politicians, cat lovers, litter louts, whom he calls ‘litter louts', men who wear earrings and children who are rude, precocious, or noisy.)

Mr and Mrs Donelly's own children had not been rude, precocious, or noisy. Well, rude, maybe, when they were younger, and noisy, but definitely not precocious. None of them had been a big-head, which was a major achievement, in Mr Donelly's book. Preventing big-headedness: this was an important aim and intention of parenting, according to Mr Donelly. None of Mr Donelly's children thought that they were better than they were. They knew their place. And as it turned out their place was far from here: one of them was in America, one of them was in London and one of them was travelling the world. Mickey lives in town, of course, but he is married to Brona, who clearly has her eyes set elsewhere: once she's done her training as a beautician and the children have to start school, she'd quite like them to move to Huddersfield, to be near her parents, or even to Manchester.

Mrs Donelly had been thinking a lot about her children recently, all of them. She was sorting out her will. She'd been very well organised. She had all the documentation carefully arranged in a manila folder. She'd started sorting things out as soon as she'd known. She was diagnosed in the November of last year and by March she had all her personal effects sorted. She'd started going through her wardrobe, throwing out anything she hadn't worn for a year or more: she certainly wasn't going to be needing it now. She cleared her drawers and began using up old tins in the cupboards – good-intentioned
foods, mostly, like kidney beans. They ate a lot of chilli con carne.

She'd started on the baking back in May, after they'd given up on the chemo. She didn't want to leave anything too late, to chance, or to Brona, who'd be happy with a shop-bought cake and a couple of quiches from Marks. She made tarts and pies and cakes and some sausage rolls. She filled her own freezer, and then she had to ask Pat to take one or two items. And Brenda. And Big Anne. She didn't tell any of them she was leaving food with any of the others and she didn't tell them what the food was for. She just said she was getting ready for Christmas early and she'd run out of room in her freezer. They all had grown-up children now, so they all had spare capacity, and they understood. None of them refused. None of them asked questions. In our town, even when the children have all grown up and gone away, the women still plan Christmas like it's a military campaign, so no one was surprised when Mrs Donelly said she was stocking up early, getting a few bits done in advance. Indeed, what happened was that they all started stocking up too, adding to the usual store of crackers and wrapping paper and Christmas napkins bought half-price in the January sales and tucked under the bed, so that by October there were enough trays of mince pies on ice around our town to feed Santa and all his elves for a month.

So the food was prepared and frozen, and Mrs Donelly was ready, pretty much. She knew she was going to be in hospital by about September, so in August she went to see Martin Phillips to deal with a few last things.

Martin Phillips keeps his offices in one of the less salubrious areas of town, down the end of the optimistically named Sunnyside Terrace, which is tucked just within the ring road and which backs on to scrubland, and which is a street where the pubs have no windows and where a lot of the windows have no glass and where the floodlit petrol station
on the other side of the ring road serves as the only local amenity and corner shop. Martin Phillips keeps offices there because it's cheaper and it's good for business, because he's closer to his clients.

He lives on the other side of town himself, naturally, and he likes to begin every day with a run round the golf course, and then back for a shower and a bowl of muesli. He's a small, slim man of fifty-five with the body of a twenty-five-year-old – not bad for here, where the reverse is usually the case – and he still has a full head of hair which was last styled in the 1970s. He always wears smart-casual clothes, the same at home as at work: he's aiming for, and achieving, the look of an off-duty pilot, with the assistance of his wife Lynn, who buys most of his clothes, except his novelty socks and boxer shorts, which he likes to choose himself. Lynn takes care of the children, children Martin had never really understood or particularly liked, and who felt exactly the same about him. Two daughters. He'd really have liked a son, and it'd been a great relief to him when the girls reached their teens and had started bringing boyfriends home, and he could talk to them about cars and motorbikes and football, and make manly jokes, often at the expense of his wife and daughters. His daughters' boyfriends always got on well with Martin Phillips. His daughters and his wife, on the other hand, thought he was a creep.

Martin was always in the office first. He made a point of that. It was a responsibility. Also, it meant that he could avoid the school run. Being stuck in the car with the children with nothing to say and having to listen to their music depressed him: it was a bad start to the day. Being in first to the office gave him the psychological advantage. He imagined that his receptionist and his secretary envied him. His business partner, ‘Big' Jim McCartney, didn't usually arrive until 10, having dropped off his own children at school. Unlike Martin's children, who attended Barneville House, Jim's attended Central,
which suited Martin. He and Jim were equals in the partnership. But he felt – and he felt it was pretty obvious, actually, to anyone who cared to examine the evidence – that he was the de facto senior partner.

Every morning, after opening up and putting on the coffee, Martin switched on his computer, flicked through the post and he was ready for the day. ‘Bring it on, ' he would say to his secretary, Laura, when she arrived with the first set of briefs and documents. He said this to her every day. And then he always cracked his knuckles. It was driving her crazy.
*

On the morning of her trip to see Martin Phillips, Mrs Donelly had taken a long walk into town. The Buzy Bus was far too busy in the mornings for anyone except lazy schoolchildren to tolerate it and, anyway, Mrs Donelly had always resented the spelling. She strode in – and she could still stride, she was happy to report – past landmarks long gone. Past Carpenter's the tobacconist's, where her father used to buy his pipe tobacco for himself and the Gallaghers for her mother, both of them, alas, dead of cancer by the time they were sixty; and past Priscilla's Ladies Separates and Luxury Hair Styling, where Priscilla herself had done her hair for twenty years; past Gemini the Jewellers, where Mr Donelly, after some prompting, had bought her an eternity ring for their thirtieth wedding anniversary; and Carlton's Bakery and Tea Rooms, where she'd had her first proper job; and past good old Hugh Nibbs the butcher; and Noreen Orr's dad's shop, the shoe shop, Orr's, where she'd bought the shoes for her wedding and Mr Orr had given her a discount, which is the kind of thing you never forgot; and then the Quality Hotel, still the town's focal point, tethering High Street to Main Street, its domineering presence still helping to make sense of the mess the town had become.