Ring Road (8 page)

The only problem was: there were no books.

There were plenty of sandwiches: egg, cheese and ham, laid on by Margaret, who runs the bar at the Castle Arms. (Bob Savory, needless to say, was not impressed with the spread and since he has made it a rule never to eat the competition he was stuck on cocktail sausages and crisps all night, which is hardly enough to sustain a man through a heavy evening's drinking, and by eight o'clock he was drunk and bitter and complaining about the mere look of the sandwiches, about how presentation was everything in catering and how that was something that people round here had never really understood, how a chiffonade of parsley and a squeeze of lemon could make all the difference, and how we all got the food we deserved, which was certainly not Quality Food for the Discerning Palet, and if Billy had only asked, he said, he'd have done him a deal, and we could right now be eating chicken tikka with crisp lettuce and mayo on granary, or fresh buffalo mozzarella with roasted vegetables in a tortilla wrap, although to be honest most of us preferred plain ham and cheese with a pint, but we didn't like to say so.)

Billy had put £100 behind the bar for drinks and Margaret, who'd known Billy since he was born, and who had always bought her meat from Billy's dad, Hugh, twice a week all her adult life, had silently added another £50 of her own, to keep the evening flowing. She'd always had a special place in her
heart for Hugh, a strong man whose big forearms and black beard had reminded her of her husband, a merchant seaman who'd gone missing overboard in mountainous seas in the Atlantic, aged just twenty-seven. Margaret had never remarried, had never had children and she ran the best bar in town: there was hardly an adult male who hadn't enjoyed his first under-age drink under her watchful gaze, and who in later years hadn't felt the lash of her tongue and the threat to drink up and go home or have you no home to go to? Margaret was, everyone agreed, one of the old school. She'd had a cancer scare a couple of years ago, and regulars at the Castle Arms had raised over £1000 and sent her on a Christmas Caribbean cruise, which she had to pretend she'd enjoyed, but which she'd hated. The sea reminded her of her husband and she'd spent most days sitting in the boat's main bar – Bogart's – telling people all about her own little pub back home. The ship's bartenders, of course, grew to love her and showed her everything they knew about mixing cocktails, for which there had never been a big demand in the Castle Arms, but when she came back there was a brief fashion for Gimlets and Gibsons and Singapore Gin Slings, and for a time Margaret stocked almost as much angostura bitters as she did good Irish whiskey. Frank Gilbey liked to boast to his friends at the golf club that Margaret made a better dry martini than he had tasted anywhere in the world – and he had tasted a few.

Margaret belonged in our town. She belonged behind the bar.

Billy's was the first book written by someone any one of us actually knew, the first book written by someone, from our town, in fact, in living memory, although we do, of course, have the usual roster of nineteenth-century hymn writers and minor poets, whose work for the most part expresses repressed sexual longings and deep theological confusion, and quite often the two at the same time.

These were not words that any self-respecting teenage boy could sing in a school assembly without blushing or laughter. Nathan Hatchmore Perkins McAuley – a minister, apparently, who had lived in the old manse on Moira Avenue, which had gone with the ring road and which was now the site of eighteen starter homes – was inadvertently responsible for more detentions than any other single individual in the whole history of Central School.

One former pupil at Central, Tom Boal – stage name, Big Tom Tyrone, even though he wasn't actually from Tyrone – had obviously enjoyed and remembered the Reverend Mr McAuley's deep apprehendings and had somehow ended up on the folk circuit in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, singing about longings of his own. Turning to Country, he had recorded several albums in Nashville in the 1970s and he toured occasionally and had returned one year to town, for his mother's funeral, and had come in to school as a special favour to an old friend, our history teacher, the notorious motorbike-riding and leather-jacket-wearing Gerry Malone, a man who'd been known to do tapes of the Grateful Dead and
the Band for favoured boys in the sixth form. Mr Malone introduced Big Tom Tyrone as a contemporary of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, people we all thought were dead, or hippies, or myths, like the Greeks and the Romans, and certainly it was a surprise for us to meet someone so obviously old and yet so utterly unlike our parents: he might as well have been Odysseus, or Elvis Presley. None of us who were there will ever forget Big Tom Tyrone's long, thinning hair and his cowboy boots and his acoustic version of Nathan Hatchmore Perkins McAuley's ‘Fill thou our life, Lord', which he turned into a sleazy twelve-bar blues with a bottleneck middle section whose effect of longing and moaning came about the closest that most of us had ever heard to the sound of a woman in the act of lovemaking. The school's headmaster, a Brylcreemed man, a Mr Crawford, the predecessor of the current incumbent, Mr Swallow, was furious and ended assembly early. Girls hung around after the assembly for autographs – some of the better-looking girls too – and Big Tom Tyrone happily signed, in exchange for a kiss, and he must have been in his fifties at the time, I suppose, the age of our own fathers. We couldn't believe it. Billy and Bob and me had decided by that lunch break that we would form a band. We lasted about six months before we split, suffering from the usual musical differences and the lack of a drummer, and it was then that Billy turned seriously to poetry.

Billy's book was being published by a firm who had advertised in the
Impartial Recorder,
which Billy had foolishly taken to be a recommendation. The
Impartial Recorder
also carries advertisements for psychics, money trees, life coaches, ‘The Truth about Israel – the Key to World History' booklets, and ‘Hard-To-Believe-But-It's-True-We're-Giving-It-Away-Today-And-Today-Only-Its-An-Unbelievable-And-Unrepeatable-Bargain-But-All-Stock-Must-Go!!!' furniture stores, cut-price supermarkets and wood flooring specialists. Billy had submitted his work by post, enclosing a small fee, and he had
received a letter in reply just a week later, much different from the replies he usually received from publishers: it described his work as ‘original', ‘extraordinary' and it went on to use the kind of adjectives which Billy had secretly known for many years might properly be applied to his work, but at which he had blushed on reading and rereading. As well as its obvious literary merits the book, he was told, in the opinion of the publishers, could be a major commercial success. The publishers believed that they could guarantee reviews in national newspapers, magazines and literary journals, and prominent displays in all the major bookshops. Because of the extra distribution and publicity costs that this would involve, they wondered if they could possibly ask Billy to contribute about £1000? Out of this sum Billy would receive two free copies and he had an option to buy another 500 at a greatly reduced rate. The publishers said the initial print run was going to be about 1000: an enormous number for a first book by an unknown author.

Billy had inherited some money from the sale of the butcher's shop and its fittings after Hugh's death, so he gladly paid up, sat back and waited, and he believed for a long time that he was actually going to see the book.
*

But after the humiliation of the bookless book launch, days turned to weeks and then to months, and there were still no books received, and Billy's letters and telephone calls went unanswered, and in the end Billy decided he was going to have to go and see his publishers personally. He wore a suit and tie, as for a business meeting, asked for a day's leave from the dump and took the train.