Ring Road (32 page)

The Band, then, was a challenge. They were rehearsing now three or four times a week in the hall at the People's Fellowship, for about two hours per session, and they always began with a time of prayer, and after their various intercessions and invocations they'd kick in with ‘Green Onions', just to get them loosened up and in the mood, with Bobbie herself subbing on keyboards if Samantha didn't show. They were working on the basis of an hour-long set for the Christmas Eve concert. They'd be performing a number of Bobbie's own songs – ‘Lord, Rein Me In', ‘I Am Yours', ‘It's Risin″, and ‘True Surrender' – but she knew that what was really going to draw in the kids was the covers with the alternative Christian lyrics. They were working hard on them. Their version of Katrina and the Waves' ‘Walkin' on Sunshine' – ‘Let the Son Shine' – was a show stopper, if only they could get the instrumental breaks right. Brian, the horn section, didn't like being told what to do: he had a problem with women in authority. He thought it was unscriptural. Bobbie would point him towards Lydia, and Sapphira, and Tabitha, in the Book of Acts, and Brian would bring up the stuff in Corinthians and 1 Timothy about silence and submissiveness, and then Bobbie would suggest they discuss it outside rehearsals, and would ask him to please concentrate on the music please, thank you, Brian.

But Bobbie had to admit it, her mind wasn't entirely on the music either. There were problems at home with Francie – problems of a personal nature.

Francie had never had any problems before in that department – quite the contrary. Francie's views about sex had largely been formed during his Catholic upbringing, when he was taught that man was diseased by lust, so as a teenager he had, of course, been consumed with feelings of guilt and self-loathing. But in becoming a charismatic evangelical Bible-believing Christian – what the sign at the front of the People's Fellowship called ‘Pentecostal, Evangelical, Trinitarian' – he believed he had escaped for ever such legalism and strictures, and had entered into a personal relationship with Christ, and had embraced a theology which emphasised the goodness of God's creation and the freedom of the human will. Unfortunately, Francie had exercised his human will to enter into a relationship with a woman who was not his wife, and pretty soon feelings he had last known in his teens were returning in droves to torment him, and these feelings wore Roman collars and held rosaries.
*
It was enough for him to wake up and see Roberta's leather trousers on the chair at the end of the bed for him to lose confidence in his heretical ministry and to crawl back under the sheets, and to the Holy Roman Church. Francie was not feeling good about himself.

He was getting these terrible stomach cramps and ceaseless rumblings, like someone was playing tom-toms in his belly, and he was on the toilet half the day, and his wee was bright yellow, and it was either because he was drinking too much black coffee or it was God's judgement, or maybe both, he couldn't decide. Francie had always believed that when a
man and woman were joined together in holy matrimony they became one flesh, and that this joining was indissoluble. But he had broken that bond. He had committed a sin. And 500 years of Reformation theology seemed to have gone straight out of his mind.

He couldn't deny that he'd had a good time with Bobbie – that it had been, in one of Bobbie's favourite phrases, ‘life-affirming'. She had helped turn the church around. There was no doubt about that. She'd been an inspiration, in many ways: they'd done a lot of good things together. They'd gone up to the city, once, and eaten sushi in a Japanese restaurant – that was something. He'd only ever had Chinese takeaways before, from Wong's. He liked the sushi so much Bobbie sometimes brought some home from a supermarket up in the city, an unbelievable extravagance for a minister of a church in our town: priests and pastors here are supposed to be able to subsist pretty much on an unvarying diet of tea and biscuits, plus an evening meal of lentil soup, maybe with a ham shank thrown in, if you're a Catholic. Francie had also enjoyed seeing the director's cut of
Blade Runner,
several times. It was Bobbie's favourite film. During the course of his ministry Francie had missed out on years of films: the last time he'd seen a film Tom Hanks wasn't even invented, and Leonardo DiCaprio was still in short trousers. He couldn't believe how old Robert De Niro was looking these days. Bobbie brought home videos for the weekends, and sometimes, on a Saturday night, when he should have been working on his sermon for the next day, she would drag him into the front room and they'd sit and watch a romantic comedy, and one thing would lead to another, and the next day he wouldn't perhaps go into Thessalonians quite as thoroughly as he had intended. They'd also been to a hotel together. Midweek, though: Francie had said no to a Saturday night. A Saturday night had seemed wrong, for a minister of the gospel. It was a hotel with a swimming pool. He would
never
have done that with Cherith.
With Cherith they only ever went on caravan holidays, once a year, with other members of the congregation. He had allowed Bobbie to become his chaperone into this whole other world and it had turned out that she had led him somewhere he should never have been: a dead-end street. He had even allowed her to persuade him to remove the sign from outside the church that said, ‘The People's Fellowship – Pentecostal, Evangelical, Trinitarian', and replace it with a sign that said, ‘The People's Fellowship – the Happy Church'. He couldn't believe he'd agreed to that.

He couldn't imagine, either, the example he was setting to his daughter Bethany.
*
Whenever he got to see her – and Cherith had granted him very generous visiting rights – she always just said she was fine, and she was really enjoying living with Cherith and Sammy, which made Francie feel about
this
big.
†
Francie always tried to quiz her – very, very gently and very carefully – to see how she was doing at school and he'd ask her about her friends, and she'd be cool about that too and say fine, everyone was fine, no problems, Dad, fine, fine, fine. But he
knew
she wasn't doing fine. He'd seen her around town hanging out with skaters and smoking. He had no idea what she was smoking and he didn't want to know. He saw her once giving a boy a kiss – in public, at the car park in front of the Quality Hotel. It was extraordinary. It was like Sodom and Gomorrah down there, with these young people skating along walls and jumping over little ramps, and trampling on the flower beds, and Francie had abandoned his daughter to this, but he was in no position to do anything about it: he was a man living in the proverbial glass house.
He was no better than them. He didn't have a leg to stand on. He might as well have been wearing hooded tops and flared trousers himself, and chains, and spray-painting his tag all over town. He might as well be performing flip tricks on a skateboard in the car park in front of the Quality Hotel.

Cherith he saw around town occasionally and he hardly recognised her. She looked slimmer, and fitter, and more confident than she ever had when she was married to him, and the Oasis was going from strength to strength. He'd even considered himself joining a class in Slim Yoga, but he was worried he might bump into Sammy – he had nothing against Sammy as such, but he couldn't get over the feeling that Sammy was married to his wife. In fact, Sammy
was
married to his wife. People never tell you this about divorce, but when you get divorced it feels like other people are living your life, like they have become you and you have become them: it's impossible to imagine other kinds of domestic arrangement. So, in his imagination, Francie had been replaced by Sammy. And Bobbie had replaced Cherith. It was as if they'd swapped. It was confusing.

He turned to Scripture as a comfort in his confusion. Never theologically sophisticated, he relied upon God's inspiration to lead him to the right passage, and thus he took the Bible in his hand, opened it up and stuck his finger in, and in his torment he found himself reading from the book of Isaiah: ‘But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.' Francie was not so deranged, though, that he couldn't figure out that this was probably a fluke, so he tried again, to see if God might like to rethink on the issue. And his finger found this: ‘Make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof (Romans 13:14). This was not what he wanted to hear either. He'd never felt that comfortable with St Paul, though, so he decided to give God the best of three and he flicked back through the
New Testament, thinking he might find something a bit more cheering in the gospels. And he got this: ‘And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.'

If that wasn't a sign he didn't know what was.

It was below freezing, nothing like as bad as the winter of 1962, of course, which people still talk about here, a winter when they say you couldn't have gone outside for fear of blinking and your eyeballs freezing over, a winter when the headlines from the
Impartial Recorder
told pretty much the whole story: ‘THE BIG CHILL', announced the paper one week, and then 'THE BIG FREEZE' the next and, finally, 'THE BIG THAW'. Back then, when the thaw eventually turned to flooding, the sewers collapsed at the top of Main Street and there was a tide of unspeakable waste – about fifty years' worth of town centre dregs and spoilings – that swept down towards the Quality Hotel and took half the new tarmac road surface with it. The
Impartial Recorder
– whose own basement composing room and presses were under 3 feet of filth and water, and which only made it to the news-stands due to the valiant efforts of Ron English, who had served at Verdun in the First World War and who had sandbagged around his precious old Linotype machine – ran a one-word headline: 'DELUGE!'
*
The last time
the paper had resorted to an exclamation mark was on VE Day, and since 1962 we've had only four more: President Kennedy, men on the moon, Princess Diana and the big winds in 1989.

It's nothing like as bad as that now, nothing like exclamation mark weather, but it's certainly cold enough to make you catch your breath – it's more like comma kind of weather, you might say, or maybe a semicolon. You could feel the cold from the top of your balding head right through to the bottom of your thin-soled shoes as soon as you stepped Outside the door, and you could tell that people all across town were making a mental note to ask for a hat-and-glove set this year from Santa, and to go up and see John ‘The Leatherman' Brown, who has relocated from his old premises on the windy exposed corner of Commercial Street and Main Street, to the twenty-four-hour warmth of Bloom's, but who has retained his same sense of humour, the same mechanical cobbling gnome and the same sign in his window: ‘Time Wounds All Heels'. And he still doesn't accept cheques or credit cards.

We like to drive everywhere here in town, obviously, if we can, from home to school to work, to Bloom's and back again, to avoid walking, even in summer, but in this weather you tend to see even fewer people out on the streets than usual. Sales of de-icer and thermal socks and Bisto and Bird's custard powder were brisk, and in Scarpetti's, Mr Hemon was dismayed to see only his regulars. It was not weather for passing trade or for popping out for a cup of tea, chips, peas
and Irish stew (£2) or a curry sauce baked potato with cheese. It was weather to stay at home, to put on your slippers and to eat cook-from-frozen supermarket pies, sweet or savoury, or preferably both.

But Christmas was coming and at Christmas you can learn to love the cold a little, you can learn to reach out and linger with it for a moment, to appreciate that festive chill as you stride to the bus stop or to the car with your kettle, allowing your shiver merely to increase the anticipation of your first warming glass of wine at your office party, or your seasonal Advocaat with lemonade and a glacé cherry, or that extra £20 in the pay packet. Christmas was coming, thank goodness, and the sun had been shining all day, high in a cold blue sky, and there had been a slow and steady build-up of heat and excitement in the glass-fronted offices of the
Impartial Recorder.
Looking out from the freezing, broken windows of the Quality Hotel, if you were a pigeon, say, or a big fat chilly rat up from the sewers, looking out across the car park deserted by even the most hardy of skaters towards the red neon lights of the
Impartial Recorder,
you'd have been feeling pretty jealous of what we humans sometimes get to enjoy, even in the depths of winter. In the offices of the
Impartial Recorder
the egg-nog, the champagne and the cocktail sausages were flowing, and anyone or anything, a pigeon even, or a rat, from a distance, could have sensed that strange human glow, that exaggerated, cartoonish extra-physical presence of people with something to celebrate. It was difficult even for Colin Rimmer not to feel excited.

Like most of us, Colin preferred to hide his emotions, if at all possible. He was impassive – not a word we use often here, but if we did, we would use it as a term of praise. Impervious is good also, obviously, and imperturbable is a state to aspire to. Before Colin, the editor of the
Impartial Recorder
had been a man called Ivan, Ivan Nolan, who had a Russian name and a Mediterranean temperament, but who
came from Magherafelt. Ivan was the classic hysterical style of editor, one of the rant-and-tirade brigade, who'd had a brief career on the night desk on a tabloid in London and who was someone as likely to embrace you when you'd found a good story as to shout at you when you hadn't. Ivan was a man of the moment, and it showed, both in his life and in his death. Basically, Ivan lived the life of a feral animal – he had the intelligence of a fox and the instincts of a polecat, and all the appetites of a grizzly bear – and he died of a heart attack, while drinking champagne out on his yacht, a ridiculous luxury he could hardly afford and could barely sail, while married to his third wife, who was twenty-two years younger than him and a former model.

‘Where did it all go wrong?' people asked at his funeral.

Colin isn't like that. Colin is going to die of cancer, probably, slowly, alone and with grim determination. Colin was not Ivan. Colin valued consistency and he'd always tried to be measured: tough but fair, that was his motto. To be honest, Colin believed that you couldn't afford to have emotions in his line of work. He believed you had to choose very carefully what to get upset and excited about, even though we don't actually have that much to get upset and excited about here in town and frankly the chance would be a fine thing. Nonetheless, as the editor of a journal of record, Colin felt that he could not allow himself to get carried away even with our little dramas, our little local triumphs and tragedies. He believed you had to keep things in perspective, even here, a place of infinite receding perspectives. There were only so many times, it seemed to Colin, that you could write the words ‘The driver of the vehicle, who has not been named, died when the car struck the tree', or ‘The couple, who were engaged to be married, were both killed instantly when the car they were travelling in crossed the central reservation', only so many times you could write those words before your emotions learnt to take the back seat and wear a seat belt.
In twenty years of reporting for local newspapers Colin had had to cover every kind of fatal car crash, house fire and miserable scene of crime and suspected suicide, and you simply could not afford to get caught up in all that. ‘Local family struck by tragedy', these were words that Colin had written many, many times, but you always had to handle them carefully: they had a way of creeping up your arm and into your mind, killing off a little part of you, a part which Colin tried to keep alive by listening to the music of U2, buying box-set videos of classic TV comedy series and working on his magnum opus. There were also sentences, of course, which began ‘He grew the 10-foot sunflower in a bag of tomato feed', or ‘The congregation presented him with an inscribed crystal vase', or ‘Five-times local pie-eating champion', and these words and phrases killed off other parts of the self, parts which Colin did his best to keep alive by reading hard-boiled American crime fiction, watching thrillers and smoking cigars at every opportunity. To be an editor, particularly the editor of the
Impartial Recorder,
is to learn to maintain oneself between contraries. To be fully human here, we believe, is to learn how to keep a straight face: smiles are frowned upon and frowns are for the short-sighted.

Tonight, though, was a night to let it all hang out, a night for enthusiasm and emotions, and big grins. Tonight it was a cigar for yourself and for all your friends.

Unfortunately, Colin does not believe in friends. In a small town like ours, where there is only so much love and hatred to go round, some of your friends will eventually inevitably become your ex-friends and some of them will become your enemies. Colin did not wish to run this risk. He was divorced already, after all, and so his ex-friends included his children, his erstwhile in-laws and everyone who had forked out for wedding presents. Friendship, in Colin's opinion, like marriage, marble cheese domes and non-stick frying pans, was overrated. He didn't really have time for friends, unless those
friendships were carefully cultivated, in which case they became contacts rather than friends, part of the network, part of Colin's local landscape of stories and sources. Colin felt happier dealing with employees, people whom he could rely upon, because they were being paid money to perform a task.

It was cigars for your employees, then, tonight.

A cigar for Billy Nibbs, his top undercover reporter. And for good old Tudor Cassady, who handled Arts and Features. For Gilbert, on Sports. For the whole team, for the reporters, the subs, the production staff. For Mervyn, Minnie, Rosie, Terry, Elaine, Joan, Patricia, Archie and for Lena, Regina and Philomena, the weird sisters, as Colin called them, the three newsroom managers, who kept the whole place going and who got through a packet of biscuits each per day, bourbons for Lena, custard creams for Regina and Rich Tea for Philomena, who's on a diet. Colin paid for the biscuits out of his own pocket; it was important to keep the ladies sweet. A cigar and a biscuit even for Justin Grieve, with his novelty cuff links and his £30 haircuts, who was the advertising manager and a thorn in Colin's side. A cigar, certainly, for the office cleaner, Mrs Portek, who had given up smoking, with her husband, using the patches, two years ago, and who had a mouthful of gold teeth. She said she'd keep the cigar for her son, Johnny, who was back in Poland at the moment, looking for a wife. Local girls lacked a little something, according to Mrs Portek. Class, perhaps. Or warmth.

Mrs Portek called Colin the King Pig, because his office was a mess. It was like a pigsty, according to Mrs Portek, although in fact it was more like a hamster cage or a cat litter tray. Colin lived among newspapers much as a pet hamster lives among them. They were everywhere, the papers, little scraps torn out and tucked into box files with no names or sorted into vast yellowing piles. Colin read all the dailies and the Sundays, and he also subscribed to
Time
magazine,
Hello!,
the
New Yorker
and
The Economist,
and he occasionally
bought men's magazines, purely for research. He had two computers, two TVs and two radios in the office, which were on all the time. At home he had broadband, satellite, and a TV and radio in every room, and he'd had to install an alarm – someone had tried to get in one night, whether to get hold of some of his many consumer durables or for some other purpose it wasn't entirely clear. The police had suggested that Colin might like to review his personal security measures: he was the editor of a paper, after all, which meant some people were going to take exception to what he printed, even if it was only inaccurate cinema listings or grammatical errors, and Colin had indeed received calls in the night sometimes, telling him that they were coming to get him, but they never did.

Colin knew that there were some strange people out there, people who were obsessed with split infinitives, for example, and who clearly had too much time on their hands, but he didn't think they were mad enough or bored enough actually to come and kill him, so he wasn't too concerned. Even the threatening letters he'd been receiving had turned out to be from Spencer Bradley, who was upset about losing his bat watch column. Colin had decided not to press charges. But there were a few others, more serious, who might have been keen to get at him: there was a garage owner, Roger Manon, for example, who'd been exposed by the
Impartial Recorder
and taken to court over his Health and Safety record. One night Roger had arrived down at Colin's house with a big knife and a claw hammer, and had proceeded to ring on Colin's front door and show him what he intended to do to Colin the next time he gave him any trouble, by slashing the tyres on his car, smashing the windscreen and breaking off the wing mirrors. Unfortunately for Roger, it wasn't actually Colin's car; it was his next door neighbour's, Brendan's, and you don't mess with Brendan. Brendan drives a lorry for T. P. McArdle, and T. P. is one of Roger's best clients at the garage, so mad
Roger Manon had gladly agreed to pay for the damage and then some on top, and so his little plan of intimidation hadn't worked, although for a while afterwards Colin did get dog shit through the letter box. Even Roger couldn't miss with dog shit.

Colin loved it, though. It was a sign he was doing something right. It made him feel like someone important. That's what kept him going, to be honest.

So, it was cigars tonight, for everyone, for Spencer Bradley and Roger Manon even, in their absence and their madness, for the whole bloody lot of them. A cigar for everyone who had ever read the
Impartial Recorder,
or appeared in its big beautiful pages. Which is pretty much all of us.
*

Colin had always loved the idea of working for a paper. Not necessarily the
Impartial Recorder,
of course – he thought maybe it would be something more like the
Washington Post,
or the
Boston Globe,
or the
Sunday Times.
He'd always loved everything about newspapers. When he was growing up, his parents, Fee and Philip, used to spend most of a Sunday reading the papers, drinking sherry, eating roast beef, taking walks and attending evening service at St Martin's, the parish church, and so newspapers were for ever associated in Colin's mind with all the forces of good in the world. His heroes when he was growing up were the
Sunday Times 
Insight team, and Woodward and Bernstein, but of course no one on his staff had even heard of Woodward and Bernstein, and the
Sunday Times
is now merely an advertisement for expensive ladies' underwear and London restaurants. Everyone on the staff these days just wanted to write hilarious columns about their boyfriends and their crazy lives, just like in the
Sunday Times.
No one these days seemed to remember what a paper was really for. A paper is supposed to ask the six essential questions: What? When? Who? Where? How? Why? In that order. Although, actually, to be honest, with the
Impartial Recorder
it was usually just the one essential question, plus a query and a satisfied sigh. Who? Really? Well, well, well.