Ring Road (15 page)

You always sign the wall: that was another thing his father had taught him when he was young. That was what you did, if you were a good tradesman and proud of your profession. Paper or paint, it didn't matter, you always signed and dated the wall. So that others knew you'd been there; proof of a job well done.

The writing was a neat copperplate, in pencil, perfectly
straight, each letter the size of a finger or a thumb, and in three scrapes Davey had the whole thing clear:

David Quinn, 20 August 1929

His grandfather. Old Davey. The first Davey Quinn. He'd been here first. He'd done the room.

The hair stood up on the back of Davey's neck, a sensation he had experienced only once before, when Angela Brown had grabbed him, pulled him towards her and kissed him, unexpectedly, his first real kiss, by the monument in the People's Park.

His grandfather's hands – he couldn't get the thought out of his head – had covered these same walls, the same space, hanging the paper, pasting this paper, the paper that lay in shreds all around him.

And, just the same as Angela Brown's kiss, Davey had no idea what this meant, but he knew that it meant something and that it had consequences, and he found he had to steady himself; and as he looked outside he saw that it had grown misty, that a thick fog had come rolling in, and then he realised that he had not ventilated the room and that it was not fog rolling in at all, it was condensation, and that the room he was in was now a very wet room indeed. He bent down and touched the dust sheets on the floor and the sodden carpet beneath, and as he glanced at the soaking dust sheet on the bed, he felt dizzy and he felt droplets on his head, and he looked up and saw that the steam from the mighty Steam-Master® had softened the lath-and-plaster ceiling, which was now hanging down, just inches above his head, and as he reached up, instinctively, and touched it the whole thing came tumbling down upon him.

And when he came round what he saw was the pregnant Mrs Wilson standing over him and the writing on the wall.

Monday night there was a red sky at sunset, the glow spreading right across towards the east. It was unusual – people remarked upon it as they were going into the school, many of them for the last time. Even the weather, they said, looked valedictory. Actually, they didn't say it looked valedictory.

‘It looks bad,' they said, ‘a red sky.'

The school is closing. Central School. Our school. The place you went if you weren't smart or you weren't Catholic or your parents weren't rich. They've been talking about it for a long time now, ever since the opening of the new Collegiate School out on the ring road and the changes in the post-primary selection procedures, but now it's finally happening. The inspectors arrived at the end of last year. Their report – just two weeks in preparation and less than one hundred pages in length, a report like all reports, feeble and thin and white, and punching well above its weight and far below the belt – recommended immediate closure. There were, of course, the well-attended public meetings in response and a community delegation to the Secretary of State to put the case against closure. The High Court granted leave to move for judicial review. But still the school is closing. The falling attendance cannot be reversed and
the failing standards cannot easily be remedied, despite all the valiant efforts of Mr Swallow and his staff.

The rot set in with the stories being leaked to the
Impartial Recorder
about the building of a new school better to serve the community on the ring road: current provision, according to unnamed sources, was ‘inadequate', and ‘radical proposals' were being considered. From that moment Central was fighting a losing battle. No one wants to send their child to a school that's about to close, or that's rumoured to be about to close. No one wants to be associated with the inadequate, not even round here. We may
be
inadequate, but we don't care to know it, thank you. Mr Swallow had meetings at the time with the editor of the
Impartial Recorder,
Colin Rimmer, a former pupil himself at Central, a man who as a boy played rugby for the school, who was a tight-head prop, but who was otherwise undistinguished and who hated most of his classmates almost as much as they hated him, a man who suffers from our common small-town delusion of grandeur, who seems to think he's running a national paper and whose weekly column he calls ‘Rimmer's Around', in which he mocks and satirises all that most of us here hold dear, including truth and beauty and scouting and people who write letters of complaint about dog fouling. Colin Rimmer told Mr Swallow, in no uncertain terms, to let him get on with running his paper and he'd let him get on with running his school. When Mr Swallow appealed to his better nature as a former pupil, Colin just laughed and then he wrote about the meeting in his column, suggesting Mr Swallow had lived up to his name and done it with his pride. It was first blood in the school's long slow death from a thousand cuts.

Mr Swallow has already lost most of his teachers – a massive haemorrhage: all the younger ones and anyone with remaining ambitions – but he doesn't blame them, he has encouraged them to leave, in fact, and has offered them every assistance. They're not rats, he has had to explain to his
deputy, a bitter woman with a pudding-bowl haircut and lemon-sucking lips called Miss Raine, who is what people in our town would call a ‘career' teacher, which is a euphemism, which means a woman aged over thirty who has not found a man and who is never likely to, a woman who wore stout shoes and pink acrylic and elastic-waisted skirts, and who believed that every teacher should be proud to stand on the prow while the ship went down. These people are not rats, he'd had to explain to her, they're just human. We're all human, he had to remind Miss Raine, and there's nothing we can do about it.

By Easter the school will be closed, the school that Mr Swallow has presided over for thirteen years: long enough to see the first of the sons and daughters of former pupils returning to years 1 and 2, pupils who, like all the others, must now be reschooled, who must make the trek out to the new school with its squeaky-clean anti-climb – and anti-graffiti-painted walls separated from the rest of the town by four lanes of traffic and a few quick-growing conifers. Miss Raine will be going into teacher training, where she belongs. But Mr Swallow is doing the honourable thing. He's going down with the school. He'll be taking early retirement, to lick his wounds and to mend his broken heart. A school can break your heart, if you let it. A school is capable of exciting every human emotion and fulfilling none. A school will take everything you've got and show you no mercy. It knows no sympathy, cares nothing for your cares and grants no favours. Central was Mr Swallow's first headship and it will be his last, and he knows that he has failed himself and the children, which is a terrible knowledge. He doesn't say anything about it, because he is not a man given to self-pity and he does not have the time, but his wife knows how he feels, he doesn't have to tell her, and once the school has closed she wants them to move away from town and make a new start. She has a sister in Australia whom she hasn't seen for twenty years and she's suggesting a three-month trip away,
with a stopover in Singapore going out and Los Angeles on the way back, and spend the money and worry about it later. She's had enough of responsibility. She's had enough of a grumpy husband with hair going greyer every day, made a scapegoat and a laughing stock by people who didn't know the meaning of hard work and dedication. The man she married, the man who was appointed head, was a young man with big ideas, and enough skills and enthusiasm to fire people up and make the place work, even a place like Central. But he had been betrayed by the times and it had aged them both, and she doesn't want to be around in the aftermath: there is already speculation in the
Impartial Recorder
that the site will be sold off for redevelopment as another multi-storey car park, in an attempt to regenerate the town centre, which is a bit like trying to revive a failing marriage by taking other lovers. What the town centre needs no one can give it back. What the town centre needs is its past. It needs its heart. What it needs is its school.

It was the big farewell concert last week. Former pupils were invited to return and the school band was re-formed specially for the occasion.
*
There were speeches and an auction, with proceeds going to the very education authority
which had forced the place to close, an auction at which Mr Swallow himself was expected to wield the gavel. It was the final humiliation and it stuck in the throat. A headmaster selling off his own school's tables and chairs: the
Impartial Recorder
published the picture on its front cover. Even Joe Finnegan, the lensman, felt uncomfortable with that one. Mr McGee's pickled snake fetched £50. Blackboards were going for £40. Music stands were £5 apiece, trophies and shields and school uniforms were sold in sets and boxes, and the piano went to Dot McLaughlin's Happy Feet dance studio for £150. A set of four Duralex glasses cost Billy Nibbs £1.

A lot of people managed to make it for the ceremony, and this in a town where it can sometimes be difficult to gather enough people together for a party, even if you're offering free drink and nibbles: it just depends what's on the telly. We are people who are averse to gatherings of any kind, suspicious of the motives of anyone who organises or enthuses outside the traditional 11-till-1 slot on a Sunday morning, and distrustful equally of politicians, amateur theatricals, joggers and people shaking tins for charity. Even the Freemasons have never really got a hold in our town – you could wait a long time here for a funny handshake. This is a town where people who play bowls are viewed as radicals. Young people are allowed out until they're twenty-one and then they're expected to knuckle down, draw the curtains by 6 p.m. and watch television until retirement, when some tea dancing or perhaps a long-awaited cruise will be permitted.

But last week there were cars parked the length and the breadth of High Street and some people, they say, came from as far afield as London, people who are known to have second homes and who are on to their second husbands or wives, and who'd heard the news on the grapevine, or on the telephone from their ageing parents, and had decided to make one last journey to lay memories to rest, and perhaps to marvel at the sight of older and fatter and less successful friends and
their clearly unsuitable spouses. Cards of commiseration and best wishes were read out from former pupils who couldn't make it, those who have escaped entirely – the lucky citizens of America and Australia, and some of the former Soviet republics. It seems people are prepared to go a long way to get away, and then they spend half their time wishing they were back.

There were couples there that night in the school who had come to visit the sites of earlier conquests and romances, and the changing rooms and the bike sheds, it is said, echoed to the sounds of passions past and present. There were also people who wished simply to walk down dark corridors, and to stand at the front of empty classrooms, and to remember how much they hated
The Canterbury Tales
and the periodic table. People were lining up in front of blackboards to do impressions of Miss McCormack and Gerry Malone, and there was much sitting on radiators and reckless smoking, and the staff room, of course, was packed all night, as was the headmaster's office. Many people lay down on the bed in the nurse's room, and there was the general unscrewing of room numbers and coat pegs – there was even an attempt to remove a water fountain from outside the science block.

Frank Gilbey cut through the crowds that night and of course everyone was pleased to see him, teachers and former pupils alike, although he had been an unremarkable student nearly half a century ago: he was in the ‘listeners' group in the choir, which meant he wasn't allowed to sing; he was never chosen for any teams; and he was in neither the top nor the bottom streams in any of his subjects. You would hardly have noticed Frank at school, in fact. Not like now.

Frank, these days, is unmissable. He is quite a character. That's how Frank describes himself to himself when he looks in the mirror – ‘quite a character'. He has the maturity now, the strength to carry it off, his character, to shoulder the weight of his own personality. Frank's character these days
weighs about eighteen stone, give or take a few pounds, is balding and sixty, and it wears a vicuna overcoat, a tailored shirt and jacket, smart slacks and the proverbial tasselled loafers. Frank's character has grown in direct proportion to his wealth, which is now substantial and which in a town like ours goes a long, long way.

Frank actually refers to himself, disarmingly and in company, as ‘Big' Frank Gilbey, for obvious reasons. He looks a bit like the Incredible Hulk grown old – although he isn't green, obviously, he's more a grey-brown-salmon sort of colour, a colour somewhere between pink pebbles and concrete. He was a handsome youth, Big Frank Gilbey, pretty, almost, pale and fine-featured, features which have, of course, coarsened and grown thick with time, and which these days look like they have been painted on with wide, heavy brush strokes. He has the look of a self-portrait in oils, a look that can only be achieved through years of heavy smoking, fried food and wilful self-neglect. He has what one might almost call an upholstered face, a face, in fact, like the sourdough bread in the
River Café Cook Book (One),
a book which Frank bought Mrs Gilbey after one of their weekend city breaks to London, after they had enjoyed a classic meal of
zuppa di cannellini con pasta, risotto al tartufo bianco,
and
torta di polenta con pere e miele
(Mrs Gilbey had kept the menu), overlooking the River Thames, and ‘Well,' Frank had said, as he often did when he was enjoying himself, so as not to forget, ‘this is the life' and Mrs Gilbey had agreed, although she couldn't really see the point of London, to be honest.

Frank likes London, but he
loves
New York. New York is Frank's kind of city. He was telling people, at the school closure, who were asking him how he was and what he was up to, about his recent trip to New York with Mrs Gilbey, for one of their city breaks, for which they are renowned, and which are considered the height of sophistication in our town. A city break, for us, is the equivalent of a Grand Tour,
available only to couples on double incomes, the rich retired, or the independently wealthy, of whom we have few.

‘New York,' Frank was telling anyone who asked, after he'd told them all about his theories about 9/11, ‘is my kind of city' and everybody knew what that meant.

Frank loves everything about New York, but then he loves America in general – the attitude, the clothes, the rock‘n'roll music, the large portions. He had a plate of nachos once – this is funny – just as a starter, on holiday in Florida, and the plate was so big, and it was piled so high, he got Mrs Gilbey to take a photo of him trying to eat it, and it's there, in another book of the photos that they never look at, but which Mrs Gilbey continues to buy and to fill and to label, year on year, cheap photograph albums documenting the life and the good times of Mr Frank and Mrs Irene Gilbey (née Nicholson), and their lovely daughter, Lorraine. Frank's little pink head is peeking over a small mountain of tortilla chips topped with bright yellow melted cheese, his little red eyes sparkling in the flash.

Frank has been to America many times – New York, and LA, and Toronto, which doesn't really count, but Mrs Gilbey had insisted, because she thought she might prefer it, because it was supposed to be cleaner and more like Europe, but it wasn't and she didn't. It's Florida they've been to mostly, doing fly-drive holidays with Lorraine. Sometimes Frank wishes he had been born American, but he's done his best to make himself over. As a young man he loved Elvis, and he'd stuck with him right through the Las Vegas years, sporting a quiff and sideburns until about 1987, when Elvis was decent in his grave and Frank's property business had started to grow, and he'd moved on to the town council and he needed a new image, and he started to model himself more on Marlon Brando in
The Godfather.
Mrs Gilbey told him once, on one of their city breaks, to Edinburgh, where they stayed in a nice four-star hotel with a pool, that as he grew older he reminded
her a little bit of Gene Hackman – she didn't say in which film, but Gene Hackman was pretty close to Marlon Brando, and about as close as Frank was ever going to get, and he really thought that was one of the nicest things his wife had ever said to him. Frank drinks vodkatinis in the golf club, and at home at the weekends he eats pastrami sandwiches, ‘on rye', as he likes to say to Mrs Gilbey, although you can't actually get rye bread in our town, but the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop does a nice wheaten, which is a close approximation, at least in terms of density, and Mrs Gilbey always tries to have one for him in the house, in case he takes the fancy. Pastrami you can get, of course, fresh off the shelves at the supermarket up in Bloom's, but Mrs Gilbey is not a fan. She says pastrami is just Spam with a fancy name.
*
Frank and Mrs Gilbey maintain separate space in the fridge: she has her low-fat ready-meals and her cottage cheese and her Philadelphia Light, and the medicine she has to take for her diverticulitis, and Frank has his pastrami and his salami and his stinky cheeses. They share a taste only for gassy lager and Australian chardonnay, which they keep next to the milk and help themselves to. And as in the fridge, so in bed: Mr and Mrs Gilbey have slept singly for about twenty years, coming together only occasionally when they have shared enough of the lager and the chardonnay for them to forget and for it not to matter. Mrs Gilbey tells Frank it's because of his snoring, but actually, right from when Lorraine was little, she'd wanted her privacy at night – she couldn't
stand him going on about all his deals and his plans and the intrigues – and she really can't stand to see him naked any more. She'd never truly enjoyed that side of the marriage.