Ring Road (16 page)

At the school closure Frank was not dressed, as he was usually, like a mafia don. He was dressed more like somebody out of an L.L. Bean catalogue – button-down shirt, a V-neck jumper, chinos and a braided leather belt. Frank recommends L.L. Bean to all his friends at the golf club and L.L. Bean is now quite big around here, among those who drive company cars and are in the know, making Frank responsible for what the town looks like in several senses. With his property companies and all his power, and his hairdressers, lingerie shops and his elegance, Frank has determined both our architecture, our women's hairstyles and underwear, and our gentlemen's attire. Frank also uses words like ‘movie' and ‘ass' and ‘gas' when the English equivalents would do, but this has not caught on. On the whole people here still prefer to use English.

Frank's casual clothes that night, though, were a disguise, because he was at the school strictly on business. Like most of the people who were there, Frank was looking for closure. He wanted to keep an eye on Bob Savory, who had kindly agreed to undertake some business on his behalf.

Bob was trying to strike a deal with Davey Quinn. Bob and Davey go way back – to football, mostly, but also to school, and before that, even, to BB. The aim and purpose of the BB, the Boys' Brigade, an aim and purpose which Bob and Davey had learnt and recited as children, was ‘The Advancement of Christ's Kingdom Among Boys and the Promotion of Habits of Obedience, Reverence, Discipline, Self-Respect and All that Tends Towards True Christian Manliness'. In practice, the promotion of the habits of True Christian Manliness involved playing Kim's Game, marching around a large hall in a blue uniform on a Tuesday night and learning how to cook pineapple upside-down cake. In our
town, this is what we mean when we talk about Advancing Christ's Kingdom.

Bob Savory did not himself believe in God, even at an early age. God did not figure large in the mind or the life of even the high-stepping, blue-shirted, five-year-old BB Bob Savory. Bob was an infant atheist: the world, as far as Bob could see, was a given and he saw no need to seek a cause. Bob himself was all the cause he needed: he was self-sufficient from an early age, going so far, as his mother had once liked to boast to her friends, as wiping his own bottom before the age of two, quite an achievement in our town, where until recently most of our mothers stayed at home tending to the personal needs of their infants, and where potty training was therefore quite often long postponed, especially for the boys, who never quite caught up with the girls in the long race to maturity. As he grew older, though, the precocious and bottom-wiping Bob became the determined, the driven and the self-starting Bob, the Bob of local sandwich legend, the Bob who did not suffer fools gladly, who always got what he wanted, and who saw the need to believe in God as a sign of weakness to which some of his more feeble-minded friends, colleagues and employees were ‘inevitably prone, just as some of them were prone to support Manchester United, or to commit acts of petty crime, stealing jars of mayonnaise, say, or remnants of ham-on-the-bone. Religion, Bob believed, was a kind of disease, a bug or a parasite that resided in the minds of the weak, the sad, the lonely, the merely salaried and the hopelessly unsuccessful. God was, to Bob, just a common nonsense, like the common cold and depression, and a strong will was enough to keep them all at bay. Even when his father was dying – indeed, particularly when his father was dying – Bob did not for a moment tolerate the idea of a God. He was appalled by his mother's incredulity, which had become worse with her Alzheimer's, a disease which Bob believed, like God, was a kind of weakness that people were either prone to or not.

Bob was not prone. Bob was mentally fit and healthy, and he intended to stay that way. He read the
Financial Times
from cover to cover every day, and inspirational business books, which he bought by the dozen, and he avoided all weakness in his life – he did not smoke and never had, and he hardly drank, except in occasional lonely bouts of self-punishment. No one had ever seen Bob drunk: then again, no one had ever seen Bob smile. Bob did not indulge and did not imbibe. He firmly believed – and he believed that he had been proved right, on the clear evidence of his success – that at a business lunch, say, the refusal of even a social glass of wine marked a man out as an individual of peculiar strength of character.

‘You set the trend, Bobbie,' his mother had told him when he was young, when boys at school had teased him because his blazer was of a cheap nylon and he received free school dinners. And Bob has set the trend. These days we're all of us eating out of the palm of Bob's hands. These days, at £2.99 for a triangle pack of deep-filled BLT, Bob is making us all pay. In the world of the sandwich Bob is like God Almighty, and in the world of the Irish-themed restaurant he is – as he had occasionally been heard to announce to the staff at the Plough and the Stars – Jesus H. Christ.

The closest thing to a weakness – if you could call it a weakness – in Bob's life was sex. Bob enjoyed sex in much the same way that other people enjoyed smoking or drinking, which is to say often, carelessly and at some personal expense.
*

Things had begun to go wrong for Bob recently, though, regarding sex, and he could pinpoint exactly when it had happened, when the problems had started, during a moment of passion with one of his waitresses, a girl called Christine, who had large thighs and was only filling in during the summer holidays, before going back to university to study Accountancy. Bob liked Christine – he joked with her that maybe when she was qualified she would like to come back to work as his accountant, an idea that appealed to Bob, who was excited by the idea of being able to combine his two favourite pursuits – sex and money. His own accountant, Finlay Maguire, had a moustache and played rugby at weekends, and Bob was many things, but he was not – as was sometimes rumoured around town, because of his age, and because he's still unmarried, and because he wears clothes that fit – he was not a man who kicked with the proverbial other foot. Except that on that fateful night, during his close embrace with Christine, Bob had found himself thinking about Finlay Maguire, and it came as a moment of terrible shock to Bob and not something he could easily explain to himself. No one in town would have believed it, if they'd known, and certainly none of us would have suspected. Davey Quinn, for
example, had no idea, even though he and Bob went back a long way, which is why Bob was allowed to – but was dreading to – ask Davey what he was about to ask him.

‘Davey, listen,' he said.

Bob often told people to listen, even though such an instruction was not usually necessary in the context of a conversation, but Bob always felt the reminder was a help.

‘I've a wee favour I need you to do for me.'

‘Well, big fella,' said Davey, who had taken to addressing all his friends as big fellas, although strictly speaking, at six foot two, he was by far the biggest among most of us fellas. The phrase was a kind of verbal stoop. ‘It depends what it is. If it's money you're after' – and he patted his pockets –‘I'm afraid I'm a little short at the moment.'

Money was the big joke between Bob and Davey. Bob had so much of it and Davey none, the disparity was so large that the only way they could make sense of it was to laugh about it.

‘No, it's not about money,' said Bob. ‘But it is something I'd like to pay you for.'

Now, Davey did not much like the way this conversation was going. You don't pay a friend for a favour, even Bob Savory should have known that. But that was the whole trouble with Bob these days – he no longer seemed to be able to tell the difference between favours and business. In any small town there is a point at which favours and business inevitably begin to merge and this point is often on the golf course, or in the golf club bar, which is also the place where right and wrong frequently decide to give up their differences over a gin and tonic, and agree to find a more congenial and common way forward. Also – and you often notice this on the golf course as well – the rich have a kind of Tourette's syndrome when it comes to money. They can't help but talk about it. They no longer have control over it. The money begins to control them, like their spoilt and unruly children, invading every conversation.

‘I'll come to the point,' said Bob, while Davey finished the dregs of an instant coffee. ‘You know the Quality Hotel?'

Davey did indeed know the Quality Hotel. Like everyone else in town, the hotel held fond memories for him, in Davey's case memories of being sick in the toilets, from drinking too many Jack Daniel's and Coke, and of head-butting a reveller on the steps of the concrete basement disco. ‘Yeah.'

‘Well, we need to get rid of it.'

‘Right,' said Davey vaguely. ‘Do we?'

‘We do.'

‘We?'

‘You.'

‘Uh-huh. You're losing me here, Bob.'

‘Listen, Davey.' Davey was listening. ‘I've heard that there are small fires in there sometimes.'

‘Oh, really?'

‘Yeah. You know, you get dossers down there, sometimes, sleeping in some of the old rooms?'

‘Right.'

‘Well, I don't know how it happens exactly, but I suppose sometimes one of them might have been smoking and their cigarette end might not have been disposed of properly.'

‘Right.'

‘And whoosh!'

‘Whoosh.'

‘Yes. Might happen again. Any time. A big fire.'

‘Yeah, I suppose.'

‘Good. Well, let's shake on it.'

Davey was absent-mindedly extending his hand before he caught himself on.

He noticed Frank Gilbey loitering by the headmaster's office, listening in to their conversation.

‘Hold on, mate. Do you mean &' He glanced at Frank Gilbey. ‘You mean you want me to …?'

Bob raised an eyebrow.

‘No,' said Davey. ‘No, no, no. Come on. I'm not getting involved in anything like that.'

‘OK,' said Bob in businesslike fashion, wrapping up the conversation. ‘That's fine. We need never speak of it again.'

‘Fine. Do you want another coffee?'

‘No thanks.'

‘OK.'

‘It'll be like that other thing we never need speak of.'

‘What?'

‘I think' – and Bob smiled at this point, relishing the sentence – ‘we both know what I'm talking about.'

What Bob was talking about was the reason for Davey's departure all those years ago, the reason he left town and never returned. The reason why Davey Quinn had left and which he'd thought he'd put behind him.

In summer, at night, it can sometimes be hard to get to sleep here. Not because of the sound of the cicadas, or the late-night café culture and the revelling and the parties, or the heat even, but because of the sheets. We still prefer man-made fibres, most of us, for most purposes, both in bed and out, even though they make you sweat like a pig and leave you all sticky. They don't take as much ironing, that's the thing, that's why we like them. And they do keep their colour.

When he can't sleep in the summer because of the sheets and because the window in his bedroom doesn't open – the frame's been painted over too many times – Billy Nibbs lies awake sweating the ham out of his system and thinking about his heroes. Billy's heroes have always been, in no particular rank or order, Che Guevara, James Stewart, Bono, Xena Warrior Princess, Nelson Mandela, George Orwell and the two journalists who broke the Watergate scandal whose names he'd long ago forgotten. Billy was a thoroughgoing cynic with a propensity to idolise the worthy dead; he was a typical pessimist, with the pessimist's secret bedtime hope that this is in fact a wonderful life and that ours is a wonderful world,
whose great wonder and whose secret have only been temporarily mislaid and are just waiting to be discovered, probably by Billy himself, when he's half awake and not really looking. Which is why he liked working at the dump and why now he was working for Colin Rimmer on the
Impartial Recorder.

The
Impartial Recorder
was a newspaper which insisted on the simple goodness and simple Tightness of life, insisting upon it in the face of all the local evidence of wrong, all the graffiti, dog dirt, car crime and head-on crashes to the contrary. In the
Impartial Recorder
there were no big ideas, there were no ideologies and no purely evil days. There were only personal triumphs and tragedies, inconveniences rather than scandals, with a nice cup of tea always on the horizon and a boiled sweet in your pocket to keep you going. In the pages of the
Impartial Recorder
there was never any profanity, nor any superfine English, and nothing was incomprehensible. Even amidst the darkness there was always a Soroptomist's meeting going on somewhere, an award being presented over a glass of sherry for sixty years of service to a voluntary organisation, an evening of old-time gospel music in a church hall, a charity trekker who'd lost twenty pounds and raised a thousand, or a civic delegation come to admire the way we do things here.
*
If a newspaper could be said to
have a theme tune, the theme tune of the
Impartial Recorder
was Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes singing ‘Up Where We Belong'.

But this was not necessarily what the paper's editor, Colin Rimmer, felt it should be. He felt the paper's theme tune should be something more like Bob Dylan singing ‘Blowin' in the Wind', or the Clash playing ‘Police and Thieves'. Colin was a man who'd become the editor of an MOR newspaper which he despised, but which he'd been determined to transform; he'd set out to shake things up, like a young Elvis, or like Dylan going electric.

‘Journalism,' he often told his staff, thinking this might impress them, ‘is the new rock‘n'roll.'

Many of Colin's staff have grown up with Eminem as a staple and it's their grandfathers who listened to rock‘n'roll, but Colin was doing his best. He was the kind of editor who made a point of not wearing a tie, who read
Private Eye
and style magazines as well as
The Economist,
and who sometimes wore jeans to important meetings. He wasn't exactly ripping up the rule book, but he was taking a stab at it. He was making an effort.

On his appointment as editor, almost fifteen years ago, when he was still a young man, a young turk even, a tyro returned to town from stints with local papers outside the county and the occasional feature in a national, with a full head of hair and a set of Penguin Modern Classics to rival anyone's in town, his own laptop and a whole load of newfangled ideas about tele-working, QuarkXPress™ and Photo-Shop™,
Colin had set out his stall and made his changes. He'd managed to axe Spencer Bradley's bat-watch column, and he'd decimated Blair Saunders's weekly full-page bird-fanciers page and made it into a monthly. He'd also cut deep into the fat of the bowling and fishing pages, removing some of their vital organs, leaving them weak and incapacitated, but still just about functioning. He'd vetoed cricket and outlawed all mention of school football. He'd even managed to reduce the vast, swollen size of the weekly column written by Lesley Sanderson, the young wife of the newspaper's grand and elderly proprietor, Sir George Sanderson, from 2000 words to 1000. Less, he had managed to convince her, was more. The magic word with Lesley – what had done the trick – was ‘minimalist'.

‘Yes, of course,' she'd agreed, her discreet diamonds and blonde highlights flashing in the fluorescence of Colin's office, ‘like Philippe Starck?'

‘Exactly,' he'd said. ‘Brevity is the soul of wit.' And of lingerie, he'd thought to himself, but fortunately he'd had the self-discipline and foresight not to say so aloud. He might have had some absolutely bang-up-to-the-minute notions, but even he knew that it was not a good idea for a young editor to become involved with the proprietor's wife.

Apart from his initial changes, though, and despite all his big plans, the
Impartial Recorder
is substantially the same today as it was fifteen, or even fifty, years ago and for most of his readers that's just what was wanted. There was still the one-page ‘Udder Bits', the farming round-up page, and the stomach-churning, heavily sponsored ‘Forks and Corks' bar and restaurant reviews, the weekly ‘Good Book' bible study, and the interminable blurred photographs of weddings, anniversaries, eighteenth-birthday parties and charity events. Colin's controversial editorial page – in which he had lambasted and attacked local businessmen and bureaucrats, farmers, doctors, teachers, social workers, church leaders, the
police, celebrities, the nuclear family, gays, dog owners and the bearded – had proved a little too rock‘n'roll for our town and had lasted less than six months before the solicitors' letters and letters of complaint had led to Sir George leaning on Colin to give it up, and so his opinions were now restricted, carefully leashed and legally vetted in his short column, ‘Rimmer's Around', and his dreams remained unfulfilled. He had imagined the paper as like a just and mighty lion, bestriding truth, protecting the pride and devouring those who sought to challenge it: instead, it was more like an earthworm passing mud. Rock‘n'roll the
Impartial Recorder
most definitely was not: a little bit country, maybe, and ever so slightly operatic, but mostly it was like old-time dancing. The
Impartial Recorder
remains a slow-foxtrot kind of a paper.

But Colin did not blame himself for failing to live up to his own expectations. It was not in his nature to do so. He was a journalist, so he blamed other people, particularly the paper's proprietor, Sir George.

Sir George and his lovely wife Lesley live in a big house –
the
big house, really, the Manor – far out from our town, in the country. The town is basically where all the middle-income earners live, those of us who work in shops or offices, schools, factories, those of us who buy second-hand or flat-pack furniture and do DIY at weekends with the wrong tools, while outside town, in the country, is where the people live who work up in the city, or in the vast sugar-beet fields, people who have inherited furniture and tools, or their brothers' wives. They are, quite literally, a breed apart.

Sir George Sanderson is the complete and utter countryman, from the tippy-tip-top of his Burberry cap to the dirty scored soles of his six-hole brogues. He is a gentleman farmer who likes to hunt and ride, who uses Latin abbreviations in conversation and who'd been something in the City – even his wife isn't sure what – and who is now a non-executive board
member of several companies, which means many lunches in London, and so he is hardly ever seen around town, and if he is seen it's in his slightly mouldy heirloom three-piece tweeds and a four-wheel drive. The fragrant and ubiquitous Mrs Sanderson, on the other hand, wears chunky hand-knits made by people with learning difficulties, and knee-length wellies, and she rides a mountain bike into town twice a week, in fluorescent lycra, and she keeps dogs and horses, and smokes cheroots and writes a column extolling environmentally friendly farming methods, young artists and the work of Paulo Coelho. She believes in the Glastonbury Festival, and recycling, and in plastic surgery for those who can afford it. Between them, in fact, Sir George and his wife pretty much cover all the bases for Colin Rimmer. He despises everything they stand for.

But Colin had had to learn to rub along with them. They paid the occasional surprise visit to the offices of the
Impartial Recorder,
where they insisted – ‘No! Absolutely!' – on drinking the instant coffee along with everyone else and Sir George cracked jokes with the secretaries, and Colin was expected to visit them out in the country every couple of months, to drink Fair-Trade tea with Mrs Sanderson and to empathise with the plight of indigenous peoples, and to take a drop of whiskey with Sir George, and to reassure him that sales were good, that they weren't spending too much on luxuries like tea and coffee, and that advertising revenue was on the increase.

In his long career as a journalist Colin had found that he could rub along with just about anyone if he wanted to – it was whether or not he wanted to that was the question. Colin was a divorcee, a man possessed of few friends, many enemies and a wide circle of acquaintances. He had always believed in cultivating contacts and his contacts now outweighed anything that might properly be said to be a relationship by about a hundred to one.

Billy Nibbs, for example, was a contact.

As a good newspaperman, Colin had taken the precaution of getting to know Billy, in case anything ever turned up at the dump that might be of interest. Colin had no idea what this anything might be, but it might be something: weapons-grade plutonium had turned up before now on municipal dumping grounds, and bodies, and stolen works of art by Old Masters. Not in our town, of course, where it's mostly old fridges, and damp hardboard – and hedging, but there was always a first time, and when the first time happened, Colin wanted to be there. Colin popped in to see Billy every few weeks – he worked through his contacts using his Rolodex on a monthly schedule – and Billy would make Colin a cup of tea over the gas stove in his hut and they'd talk.

It had turned out that the two had much in common. They were both great readers and they were both writers, in a way. They certainly both wanted to be writers, and they both harboured huge and entirely unrealistic literary ambitions, which is often the next best thing to being a writer, certainly in our town, where every middle-class housewife would be the next J. K. Rowling, if only she had the time and someone to do the cleaning. Baseless hopes and fantasies of any kind can quickly cement a relationship, particularly between bitter, middle-aged men, as in the mutual admiring of powerboats or younger women – you can usually spot the desperate shared enthusiasm in the glinting hollows of another man's eyes, in the soft sag of the belly against the shirt and in the emerging capillaries around the nose; and of course what usually happens in our town is that you learn to recognise and overcome these desires by taking up golf and gin and tonic, or rediscovering football, and laughing too loudly at other men's jokes. But Billy and Colin were not natural joiners, or golfers, or laughers. They had taken instead the long alternative route to friendship – via books.

Billy himself had abandoned poetry for the moment, had
kissed goodbye to the Muse, crushed by his experience with his publisher, but Colin was still working on his magnum opus, late into the night and early in the mornings, before work. Billy is one of the few people in town who knows about it, but it's not a secret: one day it'll all be out in the open, so I don't think I'm breaking a confidence to reveal that Colin has been writing, has been for a long time, a novel about a character called Derek, a novel which is provisionally titled
Derek
and which is modelled loosely on Kingsley Amis's
Lucky Jim,
a book which came as a revelation to Colin when he first read it in his teens and which has remained for him the absolute, undisputed example of what a good book should be: funny, satirical and the work of an absolute misery.

In Colin's
Derek,
Derek is a brilliant, shabby, but immensely lovable and wise-cracking journalist who runs a local newspaper, and who is spectacularly and hilariously unsuccessful with women.

Colin had come up with the idea for his book and had found the time to write it when his wife, Lisa, had left him, with their children, the twins, shortly after he'd been appointed editor of the
Impartial Recorder,
when he was working eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. Lisa had left Colin for an architect called Stephen, a man who paid her some attention and who liked to climb mountains at weekends, and who'd designed and built his own house, and Lisa had moved up to the city to be with him and to pursue her own career as a teacher of the deaf.

‘I can get through to them better than I can get through to you,' was Lisa's parting shot to Colin, after a crockery-cracking row.

In Colin's novel
Derek,
Derek is married to a woman called Louise, who is a teacher of the blind, and they have triplets. In the novel Louise falls in love with a structural engineer called Martin. Martin is killed while paragliding. He turns
out to have been a bigamist and a credit card fraudster, and he is not good in bed.
*