Ring Road (28 page)

Anyway, Mr Donelly was sitting up in bed, by himself, waiting for the post, waiting for further condolences, thinking about his children. Or, actually, he wasn't thinking about them, because he never really thought about them. He counted them, rather, and wondered at them and was grateful for them: much as a man might enjoy his own butterfly collection, or his stamps, or his pet Pomeranians. Mr Donelly could not easily describe thoughts and emotions to himself, and had never really attempted to do so: thoughts and emotions that you couldn't or chose not to describe to yourself you couldn't feel; that was his theory, and it worked. Sadness, loss, doubt, depression – these were things that had never much troubled Mr Donelly. His refusal to give in to himself, his self-discipline, had helped see him through four children, and the usual ups and downs of a lifetime.

But as he lay there, holding on for as long as he could before the urge to go to the toilet became overwhelming, he found himself full of feelings and he didn't know what to do with them. He didn't have anyone any more to tell him what to do with them, or to annoy and distract him, to help him chase them away.

He pulled back the blankets and the sheet a little and looked at the space where Mrs Donelly had once lain. It was Mrs Donelly who'd always taken care of things in the bedroom department: as far as he could remember he'd never turned the mattress, had hardly ever made the bed, and after the necessary excitements of their first few years together he had rarely initiated sexual relations. He thought probably that Mrs Donelly had gone off it. He looked now at the imprinted outline of his wife's body, her empty trough, and he thought: it might be useful for keeping the paper in at night and his glasses. The bedside table was too small – a glass of water and a lamp, that was all there was room for, and he hated putting things on the floor. He thought – and he was amazed at thinking it, but there you are – he thought, well, there's always a silver lining.

He needed a wee.

He went downstairs and made the tea. Within just a few days, he'd found, he was able to remember to put out only one cup. He'd given up on leaf tea too, had gone straight on to tea bags. Mrs Donelly had opinions about tea bags. But tea bags were more efficient according to Mr Donelly. You could get at least three cups out of one bag. He was going to be making quite a lot of savings on his living expenses, actually. A lightbulb had gone in the hall yesterday and he'd put in a 60 watt rather than a 100, something he had been wanting to do for almost forty years. About a watt a year. To be in charge of the household after all that time – it was a strange feeling, like a retired captain put back in charge of his ship. It was power and he didn't quite know what to do with it. He felt a little rusty.

He got dressed and went out back into the garden, into the cold and the dark, eating the other half of the Cornish pastie he hadn't finished for his lunch yesterday, and he had another wee by the single silver birch which was supposed to shield them from their neighbours and which didn't. It was only 6 a.m. and there was no one to tell him not to. Tim was
the only child left in the house now, the others had all gone back to their lives.

As he licked the Cornish pastie crumbs from his fingers Mr Donelly stared up at the back of the house, at the boarded-up window. He was going to have to try to get that fixed. He needed to get himself organised.

The funeral had taken it out of all of them. Mrs Donelly had stated in her will that she wanted open casket. Sid Rodgers had advised against it, but Mr Donelly wanted her wishes complied with and they'd had her laid out on the dining-room table, a fine, mahogany-effect table that Mrs Donelly had bought on credit from the big warehouse showroom, Jackson's Economic Furnishings, ‘Strong, Substantial and Elegant Furniture and Furnishing Requisites at Exceptionally Low Prices', which used to be up on Moira Avenue. It had nearly bankrupted them at the time, that table – if you added up all the monthly payments you could have bought an actual mahogany table, or even an antique. Mr Donelly had polished it once a week ever since – his only household tasks being polishing, winding the clock and setting the fire – so you could almost see your face in the shine. They'd had to have the extending leaves fully out to accommodate the casket, but they had nowhere to put all the chairs, so it looked as if they were about to sit down to Christmas dinner.

Mrs Donelly had a look on her face when she was in the casket – it was difficult to say what it was. Not bemusement, exactly, nor perplexity, not amusement – it was a face of curious repose, as though she had recently been to the toilet. There was a smell, actually. It was a smell that reminded Mr Donelly of his own mother.

Mark had handled the oration very well. He was good at that sort of thing, what with living in America. He spoke a kind of middle management, which made it sound as though he were recommending some line of stock that was being discontinued. It was a nice talk, though.

And the burial itself was as burials are: so strange, so dramatic, that it managed your emotions for you. You hardly had to think about it.

Afterwards, Mickey had driven Mr Donelly back to the house for the wake and when he went to open the door Mr Donelly realised that he had no key.

Mrs Donelly had always looked after the keys – she looked after keys and cash and the bills. It was the way they worked things: he did the garden, the DIY, brought home the money. She did pretty much everything else. It was a workable arrangement: they had good clean gutters and the woodwork round the windows was freshly painted, and he didn't have to check the compound interest on their savings account at the building society, but now the system had broken down.

Mr Donelly checked all around to see if he'd left any windows open. He had not. He looked in the front room, where until that morning Mrs Donelly had been, but now she was gone, with the house keys, probably, and he suddenly realised that's what she was smiling about.

There was only one thing for it: he'd have to smash a window to get in.

Mr Donelly didn't want the embarrassment of all the mourners seeing the smashed window, so it would have to be a back bedroom window, where no one would see it unless they were out in the garden for a smoke.

Mickey had gone off to start ferrying everyone back, so Mr Donelly didn't have long. He was going to have to climb up himself. He didn't want to trouble anyone else with it.

Mr Donelly hadn't climbed up a building in a long time: fifty years probably, since he'd climbed on the roof of the Assumption with his friend Big Dessie, and they were beaten for it by a priest who came in specially once a day to beat bad children – strange job, when you thought about it, the priesthood.

Using a combination of windowsill, coal bunker, fence and
the next door neighbour's flat-roof extension, he managed to reach the first-floor windowsill, but he'd forgotten that he'd need to smash the window so he had to climb down again, take off his shoe and then climb back up. It took just a couple of knocks. He was glad they'd only double-glazed the front. This was easy and it was quite good fun – it wasn't something Mr Donelly would have wanted to take up professionally, but he could see how someone might begin to enjoy it. He reached in for the latch, opened up the window and climbed in.

The house looked different somehow. Coming in at a window changed everything: it was a bit like those aerial photos you sometimes see of people's houses. There was a company that did them. They took the photos and then came round selling them door-to-door. Dessie had bought one of his house: it didn't look like Dessie's house at all. It looked like an open prison.

Mr Donelly went downstairs into the kitchen to find the front-door key, but it wasn't hanging with the others. Then he checked the jar in the front room, where the many sausage rolls and quiches and tarts that Mrs Donelly had pre-prepared and frozen were now sitting ready, gathered in and fully defrosted from the many freezers of friends, on the mahogany-effect table, in place of the coffin.
*
But no keys there either.

She did sometimes have the keys in her purse, though, which she kept in the bedside drawer, so Mr Donelly went back upstairs to try.

Mrs Donelly's bedside drawer had remained a mystery to Mr Donelly for years. Privacy had been very important to
them, largely because they did not have that much to be private about, or much space to be private in. His shed, for example, was sacrosanct and Mrs Donelly was in charge of all the cupboards. So he was a bit nervous about going into the bedside drawer. He was worried what he might find in there.

He was certainly surprised to find a boxed set of black silk underwear.
*

But he was even more surprised to find a birth certificate for Mrs Donelly's eldest son.

The boy's name was Colin.

The wind was battling at the door, howling through the metal grilles over the windows like a little cold wet dog trying to get in and nip you around the ankles and leap up at you. It was annoying, like a little cold wet dog is annoying. Mr Donelly had a little cold wet dog once, a Jack Russell, which he had nicknamed Windy, as it happens, but that was for another reason. It was annoying, then, the wind, but it wasn't terrible by any means. There were no trees down. No one was going to fall over in the street – and this had happened, on several occasions, on Main Street, in big winds. Flushed with excitement, coming from the market on their way to Tom Hines for a chop, or a floury bap at the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop, some of our old-age pensioners get up a little too much steam, lean a little too far into the headwind and before they know it they're down, and they're out, and they're making the long journey round the ring road and up to the city to the hospital, with their sprained wrist and their blue plastic carrier bags full of cabbages and onions, and the chops and the baps have to wait until next week, if they can remember. That wasn't going to happen today: you – might have ended up with a lot of crisp packets and paper litter in
your backyard and your washing twisted round your line, but you weren't going to lose any roof tiles or chip your teeth. It was just gusty and annoying and unsettled, and no warmth to be had anywhere. It was big boots weather, woolly hat and fingerless gloves weather, and Davey Quinn had his big boots on, and his woolly hat, and his fingerless gloves, and jeans, fresh socks, a T-shirt, a pullover, a pair of bib and braces, and one of his many quilted shirts. He could have done with a smoke and a sausage in a buttered roll with a strong cup of tea from Deidre and Siobhan in the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop, but he was in the lock-up doing a stock check. It sounded like the wind was checking up on him.

The shelves all around him were filled with industrial quantities of paint and he went along slowly with the stock check book, checking things off: standard primers, undercoats, eggshell, gloss, emulsion, metal finish, sundries, wood preservers, stains, varnishes, wallpaper paste. Tick, tick, tick. An Aladdin's cave of every kind of covering and finish. There was probably enough here to redo the whole town – you couldn't have painted it red, but you could definitely have done it magnolia.

His brothers were gone already. They were out in the van. They were working on a couple of the big contracts – the new Collegiate School up on the ring road and some new apartment complex on North Street, where the old telephone exchange used to be. They're calling the new apartments the Tel-Ex – strictly speaking, of course, it should be the Ex-Tel-Ex, but that sounds more like a young person's drug, or a laxative, and the Tel-Ex was a good month's worth of work to Davey Quinn and Sons, so they weren't complaining, even if it was a daft name for a building. This is not New York and sometimes people need reminding: it's easy to get carried away here, like anywhere else. People watch a few too many episodes of
Friends
on the telly and suddenly they're into Mr Hemon in Scarpetti's, asking for flavoured decaff cappuccinos
and blueberry muffins. But change here comes slowly and we're not there yet, and progress means more than being able to get a feather-cut hairdo, or the occasional availability of exotic fruit and veg.
*

They had divided up, over the years, the Quinn brothers who'd gone into the business, and each one had found his niche and his forte. Danny was the man for the paper hanging, and the cutting-in. He was the closest thing to Davey Senior, a perfectionist. Gerry was the best for the coverage – he was a demon with the roller. He was the workhorse. He shifted and moved stuff, and he was also the one who sorted out problems and negotiated. He was big. You didn't argue with Gerry. He was also good outside and in tricky staircase areas. Craig was the creative one. He handled all the decorative finishes.

Davey didn't have a niche, or a role, which suited him fine. It had never been his ambition to play a part within the family
business and he had never tried to fit in. If Davey took after anyone in the family it was probably his mother, Mrs Quinn, who remained an outsider, the only woman among many men, and she was a distant, thin, dreamy kind of a person, with frazzled hair, good at playing games and smoking, and imagining. It was she, after all, who had agreed to marry Davey Senior, the seventh son, which must have taken quite a leap of faith, when you think about it, and a willingness to perform in the great Quinn family drama, taking on the responsibility for fulfilling the dream, for providing seven sons for a seventh son.

In those days, though, it didn't seem like that big a challenge. Seven children was not uncommon for families in our town, whichever church they attended and even among those who did not. Even atheists used to have big families in those days. Mr Gait, for example, who was a teacher at Central and who was famous around town as a bearded, duffel-coat-wearing, bicycle-riding socialist who refused to sing hymns in the school assembly and who was a member of CND, had five children of his own with his wife, Mrs Gait, who was the town's part-time registrar of births, deaths and marriages, and who therefore knew just about everyone, and they'd adopted two more children, a brother and a sister, two babies, Peter and Laura, whom Mr Gait always described as being ‘of mixed race parentage' but whom older people in town always referred to as ‘the wee darkies'. Peter, wisely, has long gone and is a policeman, apparently, in London, which probably has his bearded father turning, duffel-coated, in his grave, but Laura has stayed put and is a veterinary nurse at Becky Badger's Animal Centre and Pet Surgery on Windsor Avenue, and she looks after the woman she calls mother, Mrs Gait, who hasn't got long left, probably, who's in her eighties and who's soon going to complete her own trio of town hall certificates. It'll be down to someone else now, of course, to sign her off: Alex King, the son of Ernie King, who used to run
the music shop on High Street, is the registrar these days, his impressive name and signature, a big florid A. King, which Alex has practised for years to the point of perfection, lending a certain glamour and dignity to what are otherwise always rather dull and disappointing proceedings. There's really nothing worse than arriving for one of the most important days of your life only to be greeted with a damp handshake from a fat man with a goatee in a sagging polyester suit attempting to look pleased to see you. Alex is no Angel Gabriel: in our town, with our dentists, it's hard to pull off a very convincing beatific smile and, frankly, if this was the kind of greeting you could expect in heaven a lot of people would have chosen right there and then to give the other place a try.

Mrs Quinn herself was of course from a good Catholic family of eight, four sisters and four brothers, perfectly balanced. But seven boys – she had wondered how she'd cope with that, if she succeeded. She'd worried most about the Quinn succession with her second son, with Gerry – he'd set the trend, really, and had made all the rest possible, like the second line of a poem, or the difficult second album, which is supposed either to confirm your early promise and set the rhythm, or to prove the doubters correct and to begin the long decline. Gerry was a triumph, though, a boy, and Mrs Quinn hadn't worried again about completing the set, getting all seven, staying in the groove, until it came to the last one, the seventh, to Davey himself, and then she had prayed and prayed, and tried to do everything exactly the same as she had for her previous pregnancies. She just couldn't have coped with six sons and a daughter: that would have looked like carelessness. With Davey she could not afford to slip up, or to skip a beat: Davey had to be a boy.

Davey Senior had also looked forward to the birth of his seventh son all those years ago, but he hadn't been that worried about it. He felt it was not his responsibility. All he'd
had to do was what he always did, which wasn't really that difficult. When Davey was actually born, though, when the little fella was actually there in the flesh, the all-important number seven, and all the newspapers and the TV cameras started arriving, that was special. That had confirmed it for Davey Senior, his sense of destiny. He felt he had fulfilled what his father and mother had wanted him to achieve and now he could relax a little, now it was up to his son. For the first few years Mr and Mrs Quinn had watched Davey closely for any signs of supernaturalness. They didn't really know what to expect and Davey failed all their expectations. He walked late, he talked late and at school he was just OK. He seemed entirely without any of the powers one might have hoped for from the seventh son of a seventh son. He couldn't even charm a wart.

And Davey knew it. He knew from an early age that he was special, marked out, and yet somehow not quite special enough. Old men in the street would press money into his hands and pat him on the head, and they would look deep into his eyes, as if there might be some wisdom contained within there that they might be able to fish out – like the salmon of knowledge, swimming around in there, in the pools of his eyes, in the depths of his very being, waiting to be seen and comprehended and grasped. And old women, old women would want to hold him and kiss him, as if some of his good luck might rub off on to them as easily as their lipstick rubbed off on to him. And with all the patting and holding, Davey had grown big and fat and shy, and failed to flourish, and he vowed at an early age that he was going to leave our town and he was not going to have any children of his own. The seventh son of the seventh son had had enough.

As a teenager he'd tried to joke about it and to laugh it off, but all the time he'd been angry, boiling up all bitter inside, cooking up dark thoughts and fantasies at every mention of this irrelevance, this annoyance that was his life,
this life that had been imposed upon him. He was waiting for the moment to make someone suffer for it, make someone regret having made him what he was, to let fly and spit it all out, to get it off his chest. And finally, when he was seventeen, the opportunity had arisen.

They'd been to a boxing match, him, Bob Savory and Billy Nibbs. None of them had ever been to a boxing match before. Billy had got the tickets from his dad, Hugh, the butcher, who'd got them from his friend the greengrocer, Johnny ‘The Boxer' Mathers, who owed Hugh a favour. Their shops, the butcher's and the grocer's, used to be opposite on the High Street, up the top, near Dot McLaughlin's Happy Feet Dancing School, and Johnny had always supplied Hugh with parsley, and Hugh had kept Johnny in sausages, and on a warm day, if business was slow, they'd stand outside their shops and shout across the road and talk about football, and boxing, and Johnny would talk about the great featherweights he'd fought, and Hugh would compare the heavyweights. And this was in our lifetimes, remember, in our town: shopkeepers, with actual shops, in actual aprons, in the actual centre of town, talking to each other across a road which these days you'd be lucky to get across in the slack hours between 3 a.m. and 7 in the morning, some time after the final conclusive vomitings outside the club, Paradise Lost, and before the first of the council's electric street sweepers arriving to scoop up the polystyrene burger boxes, the beer bottles and yesterday's papers.

Davey and Bob and Billy had driven up to the city in Billy's dad's van, the meat van, with its cheery picture on the side of a bearded butcher, a plucked chicken in one hand and a cleaver about to enter into the head of a grinning pig in the other, and Davey had brought his cassette recorder and they were listening to loud music and they were singing along, in a way that teenage boys rarely do, because they're usually too self-conscious, and they'd parked up, and got a feed of
drink into them, and then they made it to the big hall where all the men and women were screaming, and there was this fantastic chaos of tiny figures far away, grappling with each other, and they felt an excitement they could barely understand or contain. These were boys, really, who had hardly known a woman in any intimate sense, who had never been to war, who were young and strong and who wanted to be big, but who knew no excitements other than drinking beer and hanging around in the car park opposite the Quality Hotel. And after the boxing they came out into the street throwing punches at each other, and then in the pub they couldn't get served. There were too many people in, and Davey was signalling to the barman, his hand up, and he made eye contact, but the barman ignored him and he turned instead to serve someone to the left of Davey, a man with a shaven head, not much older than Davey himself, and about a foot shorter, and he'd turned, the shaven-headed one, as he put in his order, and he smirked.

And that was all it was, a smirk, nothing else. That was the thing that had finally driven Davey Quinn away from our town and which had taken him twenty years to get over. Smirks, sneers, mumbles, those little laughs behind the hand: these are things that can destroy a man.
*
Of course, this wasn't just any smirk, this smirk, this was the smirk that Davey Quinn had been seeing all his life, it was Life's Smirk, if you like, the very quintessence of smirk, the same smirk that he'd imagined seeing smeared on the faces of all those cameramen and photographers when he was born, taking pictures, as if he mattered, knowing that he was just a little kid, who knew nothing about myths and superstitions and
who hadn't asked to be born. It was the smirk of the old people on the streets, and his teachers, and his friends, and his family, who all knew that he was nothing special, that he was just a wee boy born into a big family with a lot to live up to, and no way of knowing how. It was a smirk that let Davey Quinn know who he was and what he was: a travesty of himself.

Davey had gone berserk. Once he'd got him outside he was punching the shaven-headed man hard in the face, fists clenched, with a left hook and a right hook, swinging just like a boxer, using his height to his advantage, except it hurt more than Davey had imagined from seeing it in the ring, but suddenly the man's legs were going and then he was down, and then Bob Savory and Billy Nibbs were pulling him off, before he could do any more damage. Davey suddenly felt heavy and as light as a feather, and he could feel his heart beating, and he looked at his bleeding hands and he wished he'd been wearing boxing gloves. He had never been in a fight in his life. He'd only ever fought with his brothers and with his dad. He hadn't meant to do any harm to the fella. He'd just lost his temper. That was all.