Ring Road (4 page)

His mother.

Bob is an only child and his dad, Sammy, Sam Savory, a wiry man with a thick head of hair and as thin as a whippet and as strong as an Irish wolfhound, died a few years ago. He was a sheet-metal worker. He worked hard all his life and then he got cancer and was dead within six months of retiring. Mesothelioma – a cancer caused only by exposure to asbestos. It was not a good death. It was an industrial death. Bob paid, of course, for private nursing, but it couldn't save Sam, and Bob's mum Maureen was ashamed: she felt her husband should somehow have known he was working with asbestos and should have been aware of the dangers, even before anyone knew there were dangers. She blamed him and so did Bob. They felt that it reflected badly on the family. It's difficult sometimes to feel sympathy for the dead and the dying. Sometimes, when someone dies, even someone close to you – especially someone close to you – you just think, how dare you? And in Bob's case, and for his mum, there was also the corollary: how dare you and how dare you die of such a stupid man-made disease, something which was so easily avoidable? If only you'd worn gloves and a mask and some protective clothing you would have been OK. None of this would have happened. None of us would have had to be so upset. It was your own fault. They didn't even claim for compensation.
*

And now Bob's mother Maureen has Alzheimer's. Bob can't believe it. Sometimes he'll shout and rage at her, when no one else is there: he can't believe she's really ill. A part of him thinks she's putting it on. Silly woman, he calls her. Silly bitch. Stupid cow. Challenging her. Words he remembers saying to her only once before, when he was a child, after they'd had some argument or other and his mother had said to him, ‘You're not too old for me to give you a good hiding, you know,' and he smirked at her and so she did, she smacked him, right across the backside, and he felt the full force of her wedding ring and he never said the words again. Until now. When Maureen deteriorated one of the nurses recommended a book to Bob, to help him cope, but Bob doesn't read books. He does not admire book learning: what Bob admires is expertise. So he buys in twenty-four-hour care. It's the least he can do.

At night when he gets home from work, he lets the nurse take a few hours to herself, and he sits down with his mother in front of the wide-screen TV, in his TV room. He's had the place fitted out with a DVD player and a complete home cinema system – which he'd had to order specially from America. He'd gone to considerable trouble, had got in Harry Lamb the Odd Job Man to help him fix the screen to the joists in the ceiling – but he didn't enjoy watching the home cinema with his mother. It didn't feel natural. He only watched it now with the waitresses. With his mum he preferred to watch TV, like they used to when Bob was a child. They watch anything, Bob and his mum. Films. Football. News. Documentaries. It doesn't matter. It's all the same. It's not the content. It's the act of watching that counts. It is a huge comfort to them both.

Before they go to bed at night, during the adverts, Bob always makes them something to eat. He tends to get hungry around about ten, the same every night, before the news, but it always seems to surprise him, his own hunger. He never seems prepared for it. Sometimes he roams around the kitchen
in the semi-darkness, opening cupboards, ransacking for food. Bob is a rich man, but he can find no food in his own house which he would want to eat. What he could really manage would be one of his mum's roast dinners. He could eat a tray of those roast potatoes. A whole tray. They were always so good. The beef dripping – that was the secret. He knows how to do it, of course – you have to get the beef dripping nice and hot in â saucepan, and then you bash the parboiled potatoes around in there for a bit, and season them with salt and pepper, and then slide them on the tray into the oven, and one hour later, perfect roast potatoes. But he could never be bothered to do it himself. It just wouldn't be the same.

The rare roast beef, though. He could definitely eat some of his mum's rare roast beef. And maybe some carrots. And a nice gravy.
*

He goes from cupboard to cupboard – chocolates, biscuits, crisps, nuts, crackers. None of it is any good. It's all manufactured. It's all rubbish. He knows it's rubbish. Sometimes the rubbish in his cupboards makes him so angry that he throws it all away, just chucks it in the bin. And then he buys more. He buys more rubbish. This is what happens when you're a rich man in our town. You don't necessarily buy better. You just buy more. Because there isn't anything else to buy. You want something more fancy, you have to leave: you have to go to London, or somewhere else where they do funny spaghetti and truffle oils, and novelty cheeses.

Bob's mother used to make lasagne. And she used to make a salmon soufflé, on special occasions, using a whole tin of salmon – that was good too. And sausage rolls. Macaroni
cheese. Pies and pastries. And cakes. The smell of baking. The smell of fresh bread. The food then seemed so different. It was all so good. Bob's favourite meal, of all the meals his mother used to make … after all these years, he still has no doubt what was his favourite, and every night, between the adverts, he ends up trying to re-create it.

When he used to come home from school he would be just so tired sometimes, and he'd be so hungry, before his dad got home from the works, and so he and his mum would sit down together, his mum drinking her coffee with two sugars and smoking, and him eating the sandwich that she'd made him: white bread and margarine and Cheddar cheese, or sometimes a slice of ham, if they had it in the house, which was not often.

‘How was school?' she'd ask.

‘Fine,' he'd say. ‘I don't want to talk about it.'

‘OK,' she'd say and that would be fine. They didn't have to talk: they were mother and son.

They would just sit there, the two of them, looking out of the window, eating cheese sandwiches and waiting for his dad to come home.

So when Frank Gilbey rolled up at Bob's late one night, just before Christmas, Bob ushered him in, asked him to sit down in the big kitchen equipped with every piece of gadgetry imaginable, and about half a mile of granite work surface and a foundry's worth of stainless steel, put the kettle on and put a simple cheese sandwich down in front of him.

‘So?' said Bob.

‘There's a problem,' said Frank.

There hasn't been snow here for Christmas since 1975, which seems like yesterday to some of us, but which is already ancient history to others – around about the time of the Punic Wars, in fact, to many of the children at Central School, for whom modern history begins at the end of the twentieth century and the advent of wide-screen TV and mobile phone text messaging. Gerry Malone, who teaches history at Central – who taught most of us in town our history, in fact – has to be careful not to assume that the students know too much. He cannot assume, for example, that they know anything about the Punic Wars, or that Hitler was a Nazi even, or that mobile phone text messaging was not a means of communication available to Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. Gerry likes to quote Santayana to his students – ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' – but he knows that actually it's the opposite that's true. Those who
can
remember the past are condemned to repeat it – again and again and again. It is the history teacher's burden.

People have been feverishly praying for snow at Christmas in our town for nearly thirty years, but God seems to have
better things to do with His time than to attend to our prayers, although exactly what it is He's been getting up to recently it's difficult to see: since writing the Bible, He seems to have been on some kind of extended sabbatical. World peace, for example, does not seem to be too high on His list of priorities and, unless you count the weekly healing services at the People's Fellowship, His work, at least around our town, seems to have come to an abrupt end.

Gerry also likes to quote Nietzsche to his students and .he always writes up the name on the whiteboard first – the middle ‘z' always tends to throw them. ‘Nietzsche,' he explains, ‘rhymes with teacher.' And then, ‘God,' he tells his class, to audible gasps, ‘God, according to Nietzsche' – and here he always pauses, with an omniscient smile – ‘Is Dead.'

Well. I don't know. Maybe Gerry's being too harsh. Maybe someone just needs to text Him, to remind Him that we're all still here. W T F R U?
*

The sleet and the cold have certainly not slowed up the Donellys, who are old friends and neighbours of the Quinns, and who live up by the ring road and who, like the rest of the town, have been busy making their Christmas preparations.

It's going to be a very special Christmas for the Donellys this year, snow or no snow – their first Christmas without any of the children, a kind of rite of passage and a relief in
many ways, a return to a prelapsarian state, a time long before Mr Donelly's pot belly and his cardies, and the advent of Mrs Donelly's flat-soled shoes. This Christmas, if they wanted, Mr and Mrs Donelly could walk around all day naked, barefoot and freed from toil, the pain of childbirth but a distant memory, and freed also from the prying eyes of their offspring, so they could eat turkey sandwiches from morning till night,
au naturel,
on sliced white bread, with lots of salt and with butter, as God intended them to be.
*

The Donellys' youngest son, Mark, their baby, lives in America now, where he works for a firm of hypodermic needle incinerator manufacturers. He is married to Molly, has two lovely children, Nathan (five) and Ruth (three), and can't afford the fare home. Jackie, meanwhile, the Donellys' daughter, is in north London, a nurse, no boyfriend at the moment and knocking on a bit, but not without her suitors, so Mr and Mrs Donelly aren't too worried. She is working shifts this Christmas and can't get back either. Michael – Mickey – still lives in town, obviously, but this year he and Brona are going to her parents' for Christmas: her parents live in Huddersfield. When Mickey told his parents that he and Brona and the children wouldn't be around for Christmas Mr and Mrs Donelly both said fine, that's great, although they didn't really mean it. Mr and Mrs Donelly get to see their grandchildren all year round, so it's really only fair to let the other lot have a go, but Christmas is Christmas.

‘It's supposed to be a family time,' said Mrs Donelly to Mr Donelly. Mr Donelly pointed out that Brona's family in Huddersfield were family: they were Brona's family.

‘But they're in Huddersfield,' insisted Mrs Donelly. ‘It's not the same.'

The Donellys' eldest boy, Tim, is travelling the world. He's thirty-one and should know better but he's working in a bar
in Sydney at the moment, apparently, Sydney, Australia, if you can imagine that, and the Donellys are expecting a call on Christmas Day. Tim's said he's planning a barbie on the beach and a game of mixed volleyball with some workmates for Christmas Day, and Mr Donelly really cannot imagine what that might be like, although Mrs Donelly watches a number of Australian soaps on TV and he's sat through them with her a couple of times, and he certainly likes the look of the lifestyle over there. It looks a bit more free and easy. More to do outside. No sleet. If he were forty years younger he might even have considered emigrating. But it's too late for that now.

Mr Donelly had offered to help his wife with the Christmas shopping this year – the first time ever – and she took him at his word and she gave him a list, and so he was down to Johnny ‘The Boxer' Mathers, our last greengrocer, the only one remaining, by ten o'clock on Christmas Eve morning, looking for cheap nuts and tangerines, and then he was on to M & S up in Bloom's after that, cursing Mrs Donelly's handwriting all the way. After forty years of marriage she still can't seem to shape her vowels properly – they're too rounded, like the handwriting of a little girl, and you can't tell the difference between an ‘a' and an ‘o'. Oranges look like
aronges
and apples look like
opples.
Mind you, his is no better: he'd have made a good doctor, according to Mrs Donelly, who used to work as a receptionist at the Health Centre down by the People's Park, so she should know. Mr Donelly was not a doctor, though: he'd been a warehouseman, up at Bloom's, until he'd retired. He used to be a compositor, years ago, but the bottom fell out of the market.

It'll be a quiet Christmas for them without the children, but they're still planning to have a few people round on Boxing Day – the Quinns, with Davey, their celebrated returnee, Mrs Skingle and her son Steve, the scaffolder, who earns a packet, according to Mr Donelly, and Mrs Donelly's cousin Barbara,
who is all alone – so Mr Donelly has stocked up, as instructed, on twenty-four Cocktail Pizza Squares (‘A fun selection of eight tomato & cheese, eight ham & cheese, and eight mushroom & cheese'), twelve Vol-au-Vents (‘Four creamy chicken & mushroom, four ham & cheese, and four succulent prawn'), some mini quiche (Traditional, Mediterranean and Vegetarian), some ‘small succulent' pork cocktail sausages, ‘fully cooked and ready to serve', needless to say, twelve Chicken Tikka Bites (‘Lightly grilled pieces of chicken in a traditional Indian-style marinade of spices, coriander and garlic'), some hand-cooked crisps, and six Chocolate Tartlets (‘Chocolate pastry tarts filled with white or milk chocolate mousse, decorated with chocolate curls'). A veritable feast. Mrs Donelly used to do the Boxing Day buffet herself when the children were younger, but she doesn't have the time these days and since it's going to be just the two of them she's even skimping on their usual Christmas dinner: instead of the big bird, the roast potatoes and the mound of sprouts, Mr Donelly has picked up a Small Turkey Breast Joint (‘For 2–3, Butter Roasted'), a pack of baby new potatoes (‘hand-picked'), some mangetout (from Kenya), and a miniature ‘Luxury' Christmas pudding (‘packed with plump, sun-ripened vine fruits'). It's the Christmas of the future: their first Christmas alone.

After the shopping Mr Donelly managed to squeeze in a quick pint at the Castle Arms, laden down with his shopping bags, much to the amusement of Little Mickey Matchett and Harry Lamb the Odd Job Man, and Big Dessie, who were all in gearing up for Christmas themselves, and who have never actually been into a supermarket unless accompanied by their wives, and only then to push the trolley.

‘All set, then?' Mr Donelly asked Big Dessie, proud of his labours.

‘I don't know,' answered Dessie, mid-pint. ‘That's all the wife's department.'

Billy and Harry nodded in agreement with Dessie. It was hard
to believe a big man like Joey Donelly doing the shopping for his wife on Christmas Eve. Times certainly were changing.

Mr Donelly spent the afternoon at home on a chair, putting up decorations: he wouldn't have bothered if it was down to himself, but Mrs Donelly had insisted. He didn't put up as many as usual, though: it hardly seemed worth it without the children there, and he'd never liked those paper lanterns Mrs Donelly's mother had given them when they were first married and which had remained their central festive decorative feature, their theme, as it were, for over thirty years. They were pink, originally, the lanterns, but they'd browned slightly with age, like raw meat left too long out of the fridge. He put them back in the cardboard box in the loft. He was trying to keep everything a bit more low-key.

Christmas Day itself shouldn't be too bad. It'd probably be pretty much the same as usual. Mrs Donelly would go to church and Mr Donelly would prefer to skip it. They'd have their lunch and maybe watch Morecambe and Wise on UK Gold. They used to play cards in the old days, and Monopoly, but they haven't bothered with any of that for years, not since the children were little, although Mrs Donelly still liked to play a few hands of patience, for old times' sake.

Boxing Day'll be the big day – it used to be a really big deal, years ago. They used to have everyone round, the parents and the grandparents, when they were alive, and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins, dead now a lot of them, or just too old, and yet at one time all of them living and breathing and in the here and now, and all piling their plates up high, and roaring their way through the afternoon and long and late into the evening, everyone laughing at everything, slowly filling up, up and away on the bottled beer and Mrs Donelly's hand-made party food. Eaten, drunken, but not forgotten, the ghosts of Christmas past.

In fact, in the old days the Donelly household was full not
just at Christmas but all year round, with family and friends and family of friends popping in, drinking tea and talking, but now the children had grown up and moved out and moved on, and the party was over and the house was quiet, and Mr and Mrs Donelly had been busy these past few years trying to remake their lives. They had discovered to their surprise that remaking their lives was not something they could do very quickly or easily, and it was not something they could do within their own four walls, so the small home that had once housed at least six and was never empty was now too big and housed only two who were hardly ever there. When you want space, it seems, you can't have it, and when you've got it you don't need it.

This was an irony not lost on Mrs Donelly, who was a religious woman and who could therefore appreciate irony and paradox. It always helped, she had found, in church as in life, if you could take a joke: Jesus, for example, as far as Mrs Donelly could tell, had spent most of His time on earth telling people jokes and winding them up. There was nothing wrong, she'd decided, with the teachings of the Catholic Church – after a period of doubt in her late forties, which had coincided with her going on to HRT – just as long as you took them with a pinch of salt. And as the mother of four, having grown accustomed to constant demands and frustrations and irritations, Mrs Donelly's pinch of salt was maybe a little larger than most – more like a palm of salt, in fact. She had found that if you ignored a problem for long enough it usually went away – usually, but not always.

Mrs Donelly did sometimes stay in just to enjoy the peace and quiet in the house: she'd been known to wash her hair and have a bath and draw the curtains and put on her towelling dressing gown at two o'clock on a midweek afternoon, and lie on the sofa in the front room watching television, eating Rich Tea biscuits like there was no tomorrow. But that was an exception: she usually preferred to keep active.
There was all her council work, for starters, which took up most evenings and quite some time during the day.

Mrs Donelly was never going to be the best councillor the town had ever seen, but she cares about our town and she is honest, and these are rare qualities, particularly among our elected representatives. If she were really honest, Mrs Donelly would have to admit that she had become a councillor partly because of the prestige – in her own mind, if not others'. She sometimes found herself saying out loud, as she sat in her little old Austin Allegro outside the town hall, waiting to go in to chair a committee, ‘Well, who'd have thought it?'

And who would have thought it? Mrs Donelly had left Central at fifteen without even completing her leaving certificate. She didn't have a certificate to her name, actually, apart from something awarded for attendance at the Happy Feet Tap and Ballet School, which she attended for a brief period when her family were flush and she was fourteen, and which is still going – under the guidance of the mighty Dot McLaughlin, sister of the famous tap-dancing McLaughlin twins, and ninety-five this year and still a size eight – up at the top of High Street, over what's now the Poundstretcher and which was once Storey's, ‘Gifts, Novelties, Travel Goods, Jewellery and Coal', a shop which reverberated for years to the sound of Dot McLaughlin calling out ‘Heel, Toe, Heel, Toe' and Miss Buchanan banging out a polonaise on the piano.

Mrs Donelly's achievements may not have been certificated, but they were many: she had prepared three meals a day for a family of six for over twenty years, and continued to do the same for herself and Mr Donelly to the present and into the foreseeable future. She knew how to darn socks. She could sew, and had made curtains and bedspreads, and at one time had even made the clothes for the children. She paid the bills and balanced the budget. She had taken up and given up smoking, and she had seen every film made starring Paul Newman. When she was eight years old she'd read out a poem
on the BBC, with Uncle Mac, on
Children's Hour.
She was a good wife and mother – a good person and adventurous in her way. (A few years ago she had even bought, but never worn, some revealing underwear from a catalogue from one of Frank Gilbey's lingerie shops, a catalogue which some of the younger girls had been passing around at the Health Centre. The garments remained in her bedside drawer, however. She was worried Mr Donelly might take a heart attack.) Above all, to her greatest satisfaction, she had become a councillor, elected in 1999, standing as an Independent, with a large – 1026 – majority, so even now, in her retirement, she was busy.