Ring Road (31 page)

But not Davey. With Davey she would happily sit and eat a cheese-and-pickle sandwich, and talk about his travels and the meaning of life. She did not mention the Scotsman, but she did speak of seeking out new horizons, and needing to get her head together, and getting out of town. All the years he'd spent away Davey had really only talked to people under the influence and at night, in foreign countries, so it was shocking to be talking to someone about the meaning of life over a cup of tea, in our
town, during the day. He liked it. As Davey got to know her, he became convinced that he had led a wonderful, colourful life, that he was not someone who had simply run away from his responsibilities as the seventh son of a seventh son. He was an adventurer. He was, to Lorraine, the person he had always known himself to be in his own head.

He worked hard on the job. He made sure he touched up any spots and drops and drips. He tidied up after himself every evening. He ventilated the rooms properly. He made no mistakes and he made the job last. And when at last he'd finished, Lorraine asked him if he knew anything about gardening. A bit, he said, not much.

Well, would he do her a favour, she asked. Would he like to join her in a trip to the garden centre, just to pick up some plants?

He would, he said.

The best and biggest garden centre around here is without doubt Gardenlands, out on the Old Green Road. Mr and Mrs Crolly, of course, run a little place they call the Shrubbery, at the back of their house, up on the edge of the industrial estate, but it's really only for aficionados and lovers of hedging. They don't sell Christmas decorations, for example, or whimsies, and they don't do tray bakes, or provide a soft-play area for children. Gardenlands, on the other hand, is out beyond the ring road, where there's enough room to begin to stretch out and provide not just plants and shrubs, but more of a garden centre experience.
*

It was a beautiful sunny day when Lorraine and Davey arrived and they spent a long time wandering around, bending over and sniffing at herbs together, and kneeling down to look at tiny little alpine plants, squeezing down aisles of pots and planters, and after they'd had a cup of coffee and a slice of apple Strudel in the garden centre café, Threshers, and Davey had got hold of a large trolley for Lorraine, and they were pushing it along together, he slipped his hand gently over hers – it was somewhere between the cotoneaster, Lorraine remembered, and the broad-leafed Indian bean trees.

And it was only three o'clock when they got back to the house and unloaded, but they agreed they could plant up tomorrow.

So it wasn't until the next day, when Lorraine went to write Davey a cheque for the job and he glanced over it, just to make sure everything was in order, that he noticed her signature.

Lorraine's marriage to the Scotsman had lasted so short a time that she had never even had the chance to change the chequebooks, so it still bore her maiden name: Lorraine Gilbey. Frank's daughter.

The man for whom Davey Quinn was about to burn down the Quality Hotel.

The rain was playing timpani on the roof of the People's Fellowship, and a snare, and high hats, and cymbals – it was kind of free-form, overspilling every bar and filling up all the spaces. There is no musical notation for rain, as far as I am aware, but if there is, we could do with someone explaining it to us here in town, if it wasn't too complicated, so we could begin to distinguish one day's rainfall from another, like Eskimos and their snow. The weather here is our only form of syncopation.

Bobbie Dylan was rehearsing the Worship Band up at the front of the church, before the altar. Actually, she wasn't rehearsing the Worship Band so much as begging them to play, bullying them into playing, chastising them, cheering them on, coaxing them, teasing them, willing them into some kind of shape, some semblance of musical sense. In Bobbie's mind what she had before her was a bunch of flabby new recruits, a bunch of teenagers who'd decided to join the army and were having trouble getting through the basic training. They lacked discipline, of course, that went without saying, but they also lacked the basic skills, or the muscles, so it was almost impossible to get them to do what she wanted. If it
had been up to this lot to blow their horns and bring down the walls of Jericho, the Canaanites would probably have still been living there today, getting up to all sorts of unnatural practices, and Joshua would be remembered as just another obscure servant of Moses, and the Promised Land would have remained just that.

Bobbie had most trouble with Gary, the drummer, inevitably. A Christian drummer is a contradiction in terms. Drummers are pagans, in their heart of hearts: there's something about beating skins with sticks that brings out the infidel in a man, or a woman. To be a good drummer you have to understand the downbeat as well as the upbeat; you've got to be able to see the other side; you've got to be able to think differently from other people; you have to be able to hold steady, but you also have to be able to
swing.
Gary had plenty of swing – or as he liked to put it, taunting the rest of the band, and quoting one of his favourite James Brown tunes, he had ‘More Bounce to the Ounce'. He also had a lot of issues that he needed to lay before the Lord: like, basically, he was an arrogant little shit. He was into Frank Zappa, and jazz, while the rest of the band were more into the Christian equivalent of 1970s Pacific coast rock.

Apart from Gary's kit, which was Yamaha, and green,″ the Band's gear wasn't much good. It was ancient amps and dodgy cables, and microphones as big as your head, and poor old Bobbie was used to working with professionals, or at least semi-professionals, certainly people who had to fill in a tax return and who knew how to fiddle their expenses and get a good, clean, dry sound when they needed to, so it really was a strain to her, having to cope with all this cheap, rattling second-hand gear, on top of everything else. The Worship Band were just a bunch of amateurs, when it came down to it, in every sense.

She kept thinking to herself, what am I doing this for? Why am I bothering? Don't I have better things to do with my time
than prepare a bunch of no-hopers for a Christmas Eve concert that is going to be a disaster, very probably? And when she thought those thoughts, which was often, Bobbie liked to put on some music – a little Mahalia Jackson, maybe, or some Ella Fitzgerald, or M People – and she would remind herself of why she was doing what she was doing. It was for the glory of the Lord, naturally. She did her best not to try to understand or analyse the other reasons why she chose to perform in case she didn't like what she saw. That's what she'd told the
Impartial Recorder
one time, when they'd interviewed her, and they'd published a photograph of her on stage at Maxine's, ‘The Pub with the Club', which is out in the country, between here and the city. Joe Finnegan had taken the photo, but he'd put in some time at the bar first, so it was not the best photograph of Bobbie that's ever been taken – he'd cut off the top of her head, and caught her leaning forward on the microphone stand, with her mouth wide open, like she was about to be sick, or spew out frogs or something. She was interviewed by Tudor Cassady, who was never really known for his sympathies, and in the interview he quoted her as saying, ‘I don't know why I sing. Sometimes I wonder myself. Sometimes I don't know if it's a gift from God, or from the Devil.'
*
She was joking, of course, and she was tired after performing a full set of country gospel classics to an unappreciative audience of non-Christians who were hoping for something more like the Blues Brothers, but local newspapers can't really tolerate late-night irony in interviewees, so the article was titled ‘Devil Woman?'. Bobbie had turned down requests for interviews with the
Impartial Recorder
ever since.

All Bobbie could say for sure was that she had wanted to perform for as long as she could remember. When she was nine years old, apparently, she had announced her intention
to become a singer/songwriter/actor/performer, a kind of entertainment all-rounder, like Olivia Newton-John. Bobbie's mother, Ivy, had always been happy to encourage her daughter in her ambitions, although it was difficult to know exactly how to encourage someone in the singer/songwriter/actor/performer/all-round entertainer direction, particularly in our town, where it's difficult to see how to make the leap between here and Olivia Newton-John. It certainly takes more than high heels and tight leather trousers. Everybody in town of course knows someone who's sung in a pub band at one time, or a show band, but Ivy wasn't that keen to get her little girl started on a circuit of singing songs about love and death in pubs and clubs in front of men in quilted shirts drinking beer, so she signed her up for elocution lessons instead.

She'd tried her at Dot McLaughlin's Happy Feet dance school, which had seemed like the logical first step, but Bobbie didn't like the ballet, she thought it was boring, and unfortunately we had nothing like a stage school in our town in those days, although we do now, of course, now that just about everyone's ambition is to get on the telly, and now that Colette Bradley runs the Studio in the Good Templar Hall on Wednesdays after school (six- to eleven-year-olds), and Saturday afternoons (eleven- to sixteen-year-olds). Colette doesn't so much teach a Method as encourage the children to express themselves and to use drama as a way of exploring new ideas and cultures, which is no bad thing in our town, where new ideas and cultures are pretty thin on the ground: her strictly goyische version of
Fiddler on the Roof,
for example, was something to behold. She'd had to call in Mr Wiseman, one of our town's only proud possessors of a yarmulke and a set of McGinn speciality kosher sinks to help with details like prayer shawls and the pronunciation of the word
shabbes,
and he was thanked in the programme notes as the ‘Jewish consultant', which pleased him and would have pleased his mother, because it made him sound like a doctor.
He runs the industrial and contract cleaning firm, CleenEezy, actually, up on the industrial estate, which is a good business, but hardly what his mother would have wanted.

This year Colette is tackling
Othello.

But back in the old days, before anyone had even heard of
Bugsy Malone
and
Fame,
or seen reality TV, it was elocution lessons only, and Eileen, Miss McCormack, was
the
elocution teacher in our town. Her sister, Elspeth, the other Miss McCormack, was of course the English teacher at Central, but Eileen was generally considered to be the artistic one, although the only way you could distinguish between the two from a distance was that Eileen always wore a brooch of a Celtic design, a silver brooch with enamel inlays and a thistle-like ornament at the end of the pin. She also sometimes wore a shawl and what looked like ballerina pumps, as though any moment she was about to throw off her shawl and break into a jig. Everyone loved Eileen. Her front room was equipped with a piano, the obligatory aspidistra and more books than is normal in our town. It was said that she knew the whole of Shakespeare by heart and could speak French like a French person. Bobbie used to have to stand by the piano and recite poems and sing, unaccompanied, and she entered festivals, where she won prizes for recital, for creative storytelling, and for sight-reading, and she learnt how to breathe using the intercostal diaphragmatic method, not something that a lot of teenage girls here know how to do. Miss McCormack taught her other useful stuff too: how to shout without getting a sore throat, how to whisper ‘ah', how to smile a real smile without feeling happy, and how to clear her mind while lying on her back with her knees pointing to the ceiling and her feet flat on the floor. All these things had come in handy later in life.

If she ever did try to explain to herself why she enjoyed performing so much, Bobbie would describe it as a simple desire and an ability and a willingness to entertain others, to
bring pleasure to them and frankly, in our town, there are not that many people who are prepared to do that.
*
It's a risk, making people happy, and we are generally averse to risk taking here: fluctuations in the stock market, for example, have never worried us too much, because hardly anyone has stocks and shares; there's still quite a lot of money kept in tin boxes under beds, or in building society current accounts, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. Risk is not something we admire.

We have had, of course, our professional risk takers and entertainers over the years – Wee Willie Gibson, the ‘Laughing Dwarf, for example, was from here originally, and he really pushed the boat out and made it on to the bill of a Royal
Variety Performance back in the late 1950s, but Willie was really only funny because he was short. He didn't have much of a routine as such. He performed a double act with a woman called Millie Strecker, who was over six feet tall, and most of the act consisted of some clumsy physical theatre and double entendres. Wee Willie was four foot eleven tall, exactly one inch too big to count as a dwarf, medically, and he retired from the stage when he and Millie divorced: without Millie there really was no Willie. People in town said he never got over having failed in auditions for a role as a Munchkin in
The Wizard of Oz
back in the late Thirties: that extra inch had done for him and he'd walked with a stoop ever since.

We have the usual amateur magicians as well, of course, in town, some of them even members of the Magic Circle, and children's entertainers, karaoke enthusiasts, folk singers, Big Tom Tyrone – who if not a country music legend is certainly a persistent rumour – and Barry McSweeney, who's a twenty-stone window cleaner but who also does a nice Meatloaf tribute, ‘A Slice of the Loaf, and who has featured on national TV a couple of times, wearing his wig and sitting on a motorbike, holding his ladder.
*
But it's Suzie Ferguson who's probably our all-time most famous showbiz export, the
lady who got out and took the most risks. Suzie was born plain Susan on the Georgetown Road here, but she had elocution lessons with Miss McCormack and got out of town and into drama college, and ended up touring in rep and doing some stand-up, and then moving to California and landing herself with a big cocaine habit and a small part in
Joanie Loves Chachi,
a spin-off series from the TV programme
Happy Days,
which was pretty popular back in the 1970s. Suzie lives alone now, with her dogs, in Borehamwood, and is not generally considered to have been a good example to the young aspiring actors and actresses of our town. Only Miss McCormack – who is retired and who has abandoned herself to the pleasures of daytime television – still remembers Suzie fondly. She still keeps a signed photo on top of the piano which says, ‘To Eileen, Who taught me everything I know, With Love, Suzie'. If a family here gets stuck with a show-off or a joker then the name of Suzie Ferguson is often spoken in warning and alternative career plans are made. Bobbie is, in fact, one of the few locals who has weathered the warnings and comparisons and stayed put, ignoring the knockers and singing her little heart out for us, although, frankly, when she's rehearsing the Worship Band she really does wonder why she ever bothered.

She didn't just do it for other people's amusement, that was for sure, or she'd have given up long ago. It was God who remained Bobbie's prime target audience – and He was a permanent audience, obviously, a bit like having broadband, or your radio tuned permanently to the BBC World Service. The good thing about God as an audience, Bobbie found, apart from the fact that He was always attentive, was that He was also open-minded, pleasant and prepared to accept whatever she brought before Him. God, in fact, in her mind, was not unlike Eileen McCormack, right down to the brooch and the ballerina pumps: she imagined God as having excellent three-tone resonance and no glottal stopping. Bobbie was
a Bible-believing Christian but she'd never really had any use for Jesus in her work as a singer/songwriter/actor/performer, because she suspected he might be a critical and fidgety audience, who'd attempt to upstage her and who probably spoke with a whiney voice.

There were eight of them in the Worship Band, including Bobbie – two guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, a horn section comprising a single trumpet and a percussionist/tambourine player who doubled up as a backing singer. Their ages ranged from fifteen to seventy and the best musician, apart from Gary on drums, was probably the youngest, the guitarist, Phil, who was still at school and who played lead. The other guitarist is Nick, who is somewhere in his thirties and stuck on rhythm. Chick, in his fifties, plays bass without distinction but with his eyes closed and Brian is the eldest band member, aged seventy, the trumpeter and a trad jazz fan. Johnny, a recovering addict – though from what no one is sure, although he looks like he's tried most things – shakes with the tambourine and sings with gusto. And finally keyboards was Samantha, a witchy-looking woman in her early twenties who is a legal secretary and who needed a make-over, and Bobbie would have been happy to oblige, but she sensed some hostility there – Bobbie had come in and taken over as queen bee, after all, and Samantha didn't seem to like it. Samantha was used to being the special lady among all the drones, and once Bobbie had muscled in, Samantha had started to skip rehearsals. Bobbie would gladly have sacked her, but Francie wouldn't allow it. Bobbie had her eye on a fella in the congregation called Adam as Samantha's replacement – he was a primary schoolteacher with long fingers – and she figured it probably wouldn't be long before she got her way. Which would mean that it would be Bobbie plus an all-male backing band, which is what she was used to and what she was most comfortable with. Bobbie had always preferred the company of men to the company of
women – that's just the way she was and she made no apologies for it. She had lived with her mother, Ivy, for years after her parents had divorced, until finally she'd managed to save up and buy her own little flat on Kilmore Avenue, with its velux windows which gave a view of the People's Park, if you stood on a stool, and she felt she knew enough about women. Women did not greatly interest her. Men interested her more.