Ring Road (24 page)

But now these same useless individuals were giving him terrible trouble over the Quality Hotel, the thing he most wanted, the thing he most needed. Him, Frank Gilbey, who more than anyone had helped shape the town over the past couple of decades. Frank had been responsible for drawing up the town's first local plan, years ago, before anyone else had even thought of it – detailing policies, mapping out proposals, determining which sites should be developed.
That
was Frank, that was his doing. It was Frank who had helped draft the plan and who had made sure it was open to interpretation, so that it favoured his own interests, naturally. It was Frank who'd got people to start thinking of the town not as a corporation but as a business. It was Frank who'd got the council to start referring to citizens as ‘customers' buying the council's ‘products' and he had, of course, made sure that many of those products were his own, his own properties, and his own property management companies, and his own property maintenance companies. You can't possibly do that, people had said at the time. Yes you can, Frank had said. You can't delegate civic responsibility to private companies and individuals, they'd said. Yes we can, Frank had said. And they did. And it had worked. And Frank had become very rich.

And this was all the thanks he got.

Frank had not done anything wrong. He had bought a lot of land around town, years ago, but that was simply because he'd had the foresight to do so. And as for his relationships with the council's planning officers, well, they really were his friends. He wasn't pretending. And his own involvement as a councillor, well, if he didn't get involved, who would?
Shouldn't we be encouraging participation in local democracy? Of course we should.

And as for Bloom's, well, yes, he had known there were plans afoot. After the ring road, it was logical. But anyone could have worked it out. Anyone with their eyes open and looking to the future. Frank had been to America enough times to be able to see the future: malls, vast car parks. Convenience, that's what people wanted. And it rains here approximately 270 days a year, for God's sake, so you'd have had to have been stupid not to see that malls were the way to go. And Frank wasn't stupid, so he had gone about systematically buying up the land outlying the ring road, even before the plans were announced. Most of the deals had been straightforward, but there had been one or two problems. Miss McCormack's father, the Scotsman, Dougal, had some land, for example, where he kept his piebald. Frank needed the land, but the land had been in the family a long time and Dougal didn't want to move his horse. Frank knew everyone had a price, but the price wasn't always money. So Frank got to know Dougal. He found out what his weaknesses were. Dougal's only weakness was the horse. If there was no horse, there'd be no problem. So the piebald ate lavender one day and died. Simple. The horse's dying broke Dougal's heart and he sold the land within a month, he just wanted shot of it. And he moved further up-country, away from our town and from us, the townspeople, and our ambassador, Frank Gilbey. That's the way the world worked. That's the way Frank Gilbey did business.

Frank was lovely and cosy in the car, sucking his lolly, thinking his profound thoughts, and he didn't notice his wife getting in – she was not someone he had ever really needed to attend to. He had enough other things to worry about without worrying about her. She looked after herself pretty much, under his supervision. That was the great thing about Mrs Gilbey – she was easy. She was straightforward. They had never argued, the pair of them, not really. They never
had. He'd married her partly because he was aware there was no chance of her arguing with him. She wouldn't have said boo to a goose.

She coughed.

‘Right, ' he said, starting up the car and setting off for home. ‘Well?'

‘Well what?' she said.

She was not going to tell him. She never did. She was determined. She was not going to give him the satisfaction. He'd only laugh at it. She was not interested in his opinion anyway, or anyone else's. If you've never tried it, don't knock it. That was Mrs Gilbey's new mantra.
If you've never tried it, don't knock it.
That's what she said to herself these days when she saw the look on the faces of her friends and the wives of some of Frank's business colleagues when she told them about the line dancing. Like Frank, they all thought line dancing was common.

‘Oh, really, have you ever tried it?' she'd ask them, as they held their little retroussé noses up in the air. Plastic surgery was the big thing these days with a lot of them, and what was that if not common, thought Mrs Gilbey. Trimming your nose and your neck fat, like you were the Sunday roast going to waste? Having someone siphon fat from your belly, or pump it into your thin little lips? Going out to lunch with her friends was starting to get like going to Madame Tussaud's: they were all beginning to look like models of themselves, like they'd been freshly poured out of moulds and dressed up in lookalike clothing.

Mrs Gilbey was not into remodelling. It was not her style. With Mrs Gilbey you got what you saw. Which was a lot. Mrs Gilbey knew exactly who she was and how much of her there was, thank you very much, and she did not intend messing around with her essentials, or reducing the size of the portions. She was the same now as she'd ever been, although every Thursday night at seven she did go to the
‘Dance Ranch', which is actually the badminton courts at the Leisure Centre, which during the day and at night hosts the full range of what a good local council leisure services facility should be able to offer, including Step Aerobics, Boxercise, Pilâtes, Spinning, several martial arts, and Seventies Disco Turns and Bums. And badminton, of course. And every Thursday night the badminton court announced itself as ‘The Place for Foot Tappin', Heel Stompin', Clean Livin' Honky Tonk Fun', a claim that is entirely correct, as far as Mrs Gilbey is concerned, even though the place may still look like the badminton courts to you and me. In our town it helps if you can use a little imagination.

Frank had tried, of course, during his time as a councillor and his tenure as mayor, to get all the council's leisure services contracted out: he'd have happily seen the Leisure Centre taken over by a private company. He had tried, in fact, to get the council to make overtures to the Works, the private gym up on the ring road, to see if they might be interested in taking the place over, but he'd failed. People here in town seem to like fat, unattractive women behind the till, and graffiti on the walls, and wet floors in the changing rooms. Frank suspected that anyone who used the Leisure Centre was a socialist, and frankly they deserved verrucas and athlete's foot.

Mrs Gilbey was not a socialist, as far as she knew, but she had always liked country and western music, which was also suspect in Frank's opinion: it was but a short step from country-and-western to folk music, Frank believed, and folk music opened the floodgates to all sorts of silliness. You get one man strumming on a guitar, and before you know it you've got a whole load of people growing beards and burning their bras and going down to Yasgur's farm to demand equal pay for the disabled and single mothers. Mrs Gilbey was not keen on folk, but she had always liked Patsy Cline, ever since she was little, when her father had been a train driver, taking trains up to the city and back, and he used to do this country
and western yodelling thing when he was driving the trains, and Mrs Gilbey used to travel up and down with him sometimes, at weekends, and she would sit and listen to him, and to the sound of the trains, and they'd eat hot pies and apples. And that's about as close to a communist childhood as we come in this town. At home her father liked to listen to Hank Williams and he also played the ukulele, an instrument which seems to have fallen out of favour, here and elsewhere, but which at one time was the instrument of choice for the working man and woman in town.

A ukulele is cheap, it's portable and you can learn to pick out a tune in an afternoon. It's a bright, happy instrument, an instrument of innocent pleasures and of limited range. Bill Bell and his French wife Antonietta – whom he picked up and brought back after the Second World War, quite a souvenir, everyone agreed – used to duet on Sunday afternoons in the Palm Court at the Quality Hotel, Bill on tenor ukulele and Antonietta on soprano. They even made a record,
The Two Little Fleas,
and it was a pretty good record, one of the only records ever to have come out of our town.
*
Mrs Gilbey's father had learned a lot from that record. Mrs Gilbey's own
all-time favourite performers were probably Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson – they were classics, obviously, and they reminded her of her dad, but she also liked some of these younger women who'd come up over the past few years. Mary Chapin Carpenter she liked, and Shelby Lynne. Frank called them Chafin' Carper and Slippery Finn. Frank thought it was all very funny. Frank thought country music was a joke.

This was because Frank was not interested in emotions. And he did not like sentimentality. He did not agree with it. Emotions and sentimentality were pretty much one and the same thing to Frank; he could not distinguish between the two, like it's sometimes difficult to tell, just by looking at the light, whether it's dawn or it's dusk. Mrs Gilbey remembered once, a couple of years ago, she'd wanted to talk to him about Lorraine, when things were going wrong with the bad Scotsman – a necessary, difficult conversation – and he'd just said, ‘Let's try not to have an emotional talk about this, shall we?' And that had shut her up. She'd never spoken to him about it since.

It was difficult to explain what she liked about the line dancing exactly; it wasn't just the emotions. You could have emotions at home. What she liked was going out and getting dressed up for it. Sometimes it can be good to have emotions outside the home, although it's not a habit many of us here in town have acquired, street preachers, drunks and small children excepted. Mrs Gilbey liked the clothes, wearing her pre-faded jeans and her cherry-coloured waistcoat, and the stetson, and the lace-up boots. She liked tucking her thumbs into the top of her jeans. She liked doing the slides and the splits, the slappin' leather. There was a period, a couple of years back, when everyone was mad on Toby Keith's ‘A Little Less Talk and a Lot More Action' – she loved that song – and they'd do the ski bumpus and there was something about that leaning to the right, and leaning to the left. It was very ... freeing is what it was. When she tried to explain it to
Frank he just laughed. But – and she never said this to Frank, it was pointless talking to Frank about it – if you've never tried you'll never know.

Actually, what Mrs Gilbey really enjoyed about the line dancing was that you didn't need a partner. You weren't stuck with someone like Frank. When you were line dancing you could forget you wore a wedding ring.

When they were young and she and Frank were courting they used to go to the dances, to the Quality Hotel and Morelli's, and they used to dance rock‘n'roll, but Mrs Gilbey had never been keen on it. She couldn't have identified what she didn't like about it then, but now, now that she was older and wiser and she knew herself a bit better, she thought she knew what it was. It was partly that before she'd started stepping out with Frank he'd been courting this other woman – her old friend Mary, Mrs Donelly – and they were great dancers, Frank and Mary, the pair of them, and Mrs Gilbey just hadn't been able to compete. She'd always been a little bit large around the hips, truth be told, and a bit heavy up top, so she was a bit self-conscious when she was dancing, and particularly with that style of dancing, the rock‘n'roll-style dancing, where the man stood still, pretty much, and the woman was supposed to jiggle all around him. She didn't like that, the man giving the lead. Mrs Gilbey was not a feminist, but she always thought rock ‘n'roll dancing was just a formalised version of what went on in the home – the woman doing all the work, the man thinking he was in charge. Which was fine, but it wasn't that … freeing for the woman. It was boy's music, basically, rock‘n'roll. It certainly wasn't ukulele music.

But now with line dancing everybody was equal, and you didn't have to answer to your partner, or for your partner. It just made more sense to Mrs Gilbey: it was fun. Frank and Mrs Gilbey didn't dance together these days. The most they'd ever do together now would be a last waltz at a golf club dinner.

The line dancing was her lifeline, really; it was her breath
of fresh air; it revived her at the end of a week; when she was tired it gave her strength. It had even helped with her diverticulitis, although she couldn't say how. She was addicted now: she'd started to watch Country Music Television on satellite, and she would practise, in the bedroom, with the curtains drawn, doing the Electric Slide, or the Tush Push. She also watched
Friends
in the afternoons sometimes, on cable. That was the other thing she liked. Frank liked everything about America, but he couldn't stand
Friends:
he said it was unrealistic and unbelievable, and yet then he watched all these films with Sylvester Stallone or whoever it was in them, films with lots of explosions and shooting and fights. At least
Friends
was funny – shooting people isn't funny, Mrs Gilbey didn't think. And Mrs Gilbey believed it could be quite revealing,
Friends,
actually: you could tell something about people if they preferred, say, Rachel to Monica, or Chandler to Joey. She liked Phoebe the best. Phoebe was her favourite. Frank would probably have liked Joey. If only, she thought, there were somewhere like Central Perk here in town. There was Scarpetti's, of course, which hardly counted. So the next best thing was the Dance Ranch. You could get a cup of coffee from the machines after the session, and sit in the soft-seating area and talk to some of the others, if it wasn't too busy with the fellas from the ju-jitsu drinking Lucozade.