Ring Road: There’s no place like home

It was not an obvious chat-up line, but Cherith liked the way he looked her straight in the eye when he spoke, and she liked his honest and open smile, and to be honest Francie rather liked her long blonde hair and her small firm breasts.

At the time he was twenty-two and Cherith was just sixteen. Two years passed in chaste and secret engagement, with Cherith attending Francie’s church, first in the Central School hall and then in the community centre on Windsor Road, and on the day of Cherith’s eighteenth birthday Francie presented himself at her parents’ in his best and only suit and tie, and asked for her hand in marriage. Cherith’s mother Barbara thought it was wonderfully romantic, while Cherith’s father Ron said – in private, to Barbara – that he’d rather his daughter married a drug dealer or a criminal than some weird religious cradle-snatching nut who was running a church which didn’t have its own premises. But when he discovered that Francie was an heir to the McGinn kosher kitchen empire he relented, welcomed Francie into the bosom of the family, and he and Barbara toasted their good fortune with a bottle of sparkling white wine.

Cherith and Francie were married in the People’s Fellowship, which had finally moved to its own premises in the old Johnson’s Hosiery Factory, where the paint was still wet and the plaster still drying, and where a new blue plastic banner hung across the main entrance over the words ‘STOCKINGS, NYLONS, TIGHTS AND FLESHINGS’ carved deep into the granite. The new banner read, in white on blue, with stylised orange flames licking around the edges of the words: ‘GEARED TO THE TIMES, ANCHORED TO THE ROCK’. At the wedding Francie preached a sermon which focused on some of the more lurid and explicit passages from the Song of Solomon, and the Worship Band played their sweet spiritual music. Bethany was born nine months later.

Bethany was their first and last child – Francie and Cherith both felt that there were so many needy people in the world and that the Lord had called them to minister to them, and so Francie had gone and had the op. Sometimes Cherith felt that they should have gone on and had a big family, but Francie had had enough of big families and he was not the best with children: he was a serious man, with weighty matters always on his mind, and his eyes fixed firmly on the glory of God. Cherith admired her husband and thought he was a good person, but she did sometimes wish that he would lighten up a bit.

As for Francie, he often wondered how he had ended up a minister, since he was clearly such a bad person. He frequently found himself tormented by his impure thoughts, but this was not something he felt he could discuss with Cherith, who was a good person and who always wore long skirts below the knee, who never lost her temper, and who was placid in all matters personal and physical. The closest they had ever come to a frank discussion of their sexual needs and preferences had been a couple of years before when Cherith had asked Francie what he would like for a birthday present and Francie had asked for a video of the singer Shania Twain. This seemed tantamount to requesting under-the-counter hard-core pornography to Cherith, who bought the video nonetheless and who had convinced herself that her husband obviously needed to keep up with popular culture and music in order to be able to communicate effectively to the church’s young people. Late at night, when he was supposed to be preparing a sermon, Francie would sometimes sit in the dark, with the curtains drawn, and watch the singer perform. And he would wish he were performing with her.

That night, the night of the Good Friday Carvery, Bobbie Dylan sang about Jesus coming into people’s hearts and filling them with joy, and about love overflowing, and as she stood there at the microphone, the lights shining upon her, her backing band chugging away in the background, the smell and the smoke of Tom Hines’s barbecued meats hanging in the air, it seemed to Francie that Bobbie was the incarnation of everything he had ever dreamed of: a sanctified version of a rock goddess.

Before his Preaching of the Word Francie went to the Disabled toilet – which was doubling as Bobbie’s changing room – to congratulate and thank Bobbie for her performance.

The two of them were deep in an embrace when Cherith walked in. There had been a long queue for the Ladies, as usual, and Cherith thought she could get away with using the Disabled.

The Carvery went ahead as planned. Francie preached the Word. And Cherith went home and packed.

* (#ulink_6a733e71-f353-5576-bbb3-8c82a50f3783) There are no sign-writing classes any more, of course – people like Wilkie the Gut, with his vinyls and self-adhesives, have put paid to them – and Colin himself has been reduced to mere painting and decorating in order to supplement his income. It’s been a comedown, for a craftsman. It took Colin about fifteen years to master the various skills of sign-writing, and these days he’s lucky if he gets to do the occasional bit of rag-rolling and marbling, or a Teletubby mural for a rich kid’s bedroom. He works out of a little shed in his back garden and over the door he’s painted the famous inscription from the entrance to hell in Dante’s Inferno, in a nice, simple, chiselled-edge Gothic: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter’.

* (#ulink_ae6fcbb2-7978-5b2f-bd48-f257c0b3ab79) Barry McClean, the United Reformed Church minister who teaches Philosophy for Beginners at the Institute and who does not actually believe in God as such, would have called Francie’s a ‘believer’s faith’. ‘‘Credo quia absurdum’, as he likes to tell the ever dwindling numbers in his classes, ‘To believe because it is absurd. The believer’s ultimate reassurance. The final abandonment of reason.’ Barry’s own studies in philosophy and religion have alas brought him no reassurance of any kind, and the exercise of his reason had led him only to several obvious and depressing conclusions: that two contradictory statements can be true; that there is no rational order of things; and that the mind is incapable of knowing truth. As a consequence, Barry’s sermons – or ‘talks’, as he likes to call them – are rather lacking in conviction. And his evening classes can be confusing.

* (#ulink_3fb66721-133f-573e-bbba-562488bd82dd) Miss Buchanan did this with everyone, in fact, male and female, as many of us in town could testify – it was nothing to do with Francie McGinn. It was a piano stool, after all. Miss Buchanan had never married and was good friends with – was a companion to, indeed – Miss Carroll, the town’s midwife, who was Miss Buchanan’s senior by twenty years. As Miss Carroll’s retirement approached, however, Miss Buchanan decided to marry Thomas Odgers, the auctioneer, whose daughter by his first wife was one of her pupils. Odgers, an old-fashioned man with wild ginger hair and mutton-chop whiskers, was rumoured to be seeking a son and heir. As is well known, Miss Carroll committed suicide shortly after her retirement and Mrs Odgers (née Buchanan) bore no children. On her husband’s insistence she gave up teaching the piano.

† (#ulink_3fb66721-133f-573e-bbba-562488bd82dd) God had told Francie to choose a wife while Francie was at the bible college in Hampshire, by drawing Francie’s attention to a number of possible helpmeets among his fellow female bible students and tormenting him with 1 Corinthians 7 and constant thoughts of his filthy imaginings, and acts of self-arousal in his dormitory and the communal washrooms. Wisely, Francie had never allowed his own daughter, Bethany, to attend so much as a Youth Fellowship weekend away.

6 Massive (#ulink_6fc33793-322a-559b-bc71-076c19330cec)

In which Paul McKee, a hindered character, works from home, eats biscuits and attempts to unleash his enormous talent

There’s been a lot more weather recently – masses of the stuff – but the rain held off for long enough last week for Irvine’s Footwear, ‘Always One Step Ahead’, to be able to put in their new shopfront. There was nothing wrong with the old shopfront, actually, but as Mr Irvine explained to Big Dessie Brown’s daughter Yvette, a cub reporter on the Impartial Recorder conducting her first big interview for the paper – which was a success, which was praised by everyone, even the editor, Colin Rimmer, and which Big Dessie now has proudly magneted to the fridge – ‘Bigger windows showing more shoes means more choice means more customers.’ Irvine’s old hand-painted fascia has gone, then, with the stained-glass fanlight and the cracked plastered niches: IRVINE’S is now spelt in red plastic on white, and there are the obligatory pull-down metal shutters. It took two men just two days to rip out the old and bring in the new, and Mr Irvine is delighted with the results. Mr Irvine is getting on a bit now but he still likes to think of himself as a go-ahead kind of guy: he had the town’s first electric cash register, years ago, and he accepts all the major credit cards today, still something of a rarity among our few remaining small businesses and sole traders.

Mr Irvine is a man who understands selling and who understands shoes: he has always had a feel for feet and Irvine’s has always been a popular shop, particularly among the wider-footed men and the narrower-footed women of our town. For a long time it was the best shoe shop around: now, of course, it’s the only one, if you don’t count the chain stores in Bloom’s, which we don’t. Irvine’s is the only shop between here and the great beyond where you can still buy all lengths of shoelaces and ladies’ brogues.

Next door to Irvine’s is the old Brown and Yellow Cake Shop, which has retained its original wide windows, its little recessed entrance and its barley-sugar columns, and where, as well as the old brown and yellow cakes, they do baguettes and ready-to-bake garlic bread to take away, and hot and cold snacks, including a very popular bacon and egg morning sandwich – ‘Start the Day,’ says the handwritten fluorescent orange star-burst sign pinned to the front of the microwave, ‘the Right Way’, the right way in the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop being to load up your system with sugar and saturated fats and carbohydrates, and maybe a polystyrene cup or two of tea or instant coffee. The Lennons, Sean and Mary, who own the shop, like to keep their staff costs to a minimum, so they employ only two shop girls, Deidre, who is seventy-three and deaf, and Siobhan, who is seventeen and pretty typical. This leads inevitably to long queues, but in our town a long queue is not necessarily a disincentive to shop: indeed, it may be a recommendation. There are a lot of people around here who are more than happy to join the back of a long queue, and who feel a genuine sadness when they arrive somewhere and there’s no queue to latch on to: queuing in our town is a vital sign. If you’re queuing you’re still alive: you have something to be thankful for, you’re looking forward to the future, even if it’s only a nice tray bake for elevenses or a fresh floury bap with some soup for lunch. The Brown and Yellow Cake Shop is busy, then, as always, full with people on their way to work starting the day in the right way and celebrating their existence. Mr Irvine is buying a celebratory cream horn for later: he does love a cream horn and that new shopfront is certainly something to celebrate.

Next along is Nelson’s Insurance, which always looks shut, and then Lorraine’s Bridal Salon and Tan Shop, which is shut and has been shut for some time because Lorraine has been in hospital again recovering from a mystery illness – they say it’s the slimmer’s disease and she certainly is thin, which should be an asset in her line of business, where every customer is watching weight and could do to lose some, but Lorraine is getting so thin now that people notice and comment, and not always favourably. It’s not good to be too fat or too thin in our town: about a maximum 38-inch waist and a 44-inch chest for a man and nothing below a size 10 for a lady. It’s not good to fall outside the average: it’s not good to stand out. We have noticeably few tall women in town, for example, and all our hairstyles lean towards the same, men and women. Even our ethnic minorities are not really large enough to be minorities: they are still individuals, which is just about OK. If you stray too far off the mean, or there’s too many of you, it’s best to move away: that’s what cities are for, after all. If you want to be different that’s fine, but we’d rather you did it somewhere we didn’t have to see you every day.

Lorraine’s problem is the opposite, in fact, of her noticeably roly-poly father, Frank Gilbey, a man who stands out, but who can carry his weight, due to his age and his charm and his general assumption of seniority. If anyone in our town had ever used the word chutzpah – and the Kahans and the Wisemans may have done, but in private, so as not to shock, behind closed doors, tucked up in their kosher kitchens, provided by McGinn’s, our kosher kitchen specialists – they’d have used it about Frank Gilbey.

Frank these days is a man under pressure – his appeal against the council’s refusal to allow him change of use for the Quality Hotel had become bogged down in the usual paperwork and bureaucracy, which Frank has no time for and which his solicitor, Martin Phillips, should have seen coming, and he’s facing a few cash flow problems as well, although nothing he can’t handle, he tells himself – but when he’s at his best, when he’s on form, you might say Frank is the kind of man who puts the ‘pah’ into chutzpah. Frank is a man whose influence and whose tentacles stretch far and wide in our town. In fact, there just aren’t enough local pies into which Frank can put his little fat fingers, so his grasp has reached as far as a share in a racehorse in Newmarket and a number of investment properties in southern Spain.* (#litres_trial_promo)

Frank had set up Lorraine in the Bridal Salon and Tan Shop after her disastrous and painfully short marriage to the bad Scotsman, who said he was an actuary but who was also an alcoholic. It was a difficult time for Lorraine, who turned to sunbeds and to binge eating as a comfort, and for Frank, who was then still mayor, and for Frank’s wife, the town’s first lady, Irene. It was just lucky that Frank was such good friends with Sir George Sanderson, the proprietor of the Impartial Recorder, or the paper might have had a field day.

On the opposite side of Main Street, the dark side, the opposite to the bridal side – what we call the Post Office side – an unnamed shop owned by an out-of-towner who may or may not be foreign and who employs sixteen-year-olds to run the place and who doesn’t seem to have invested too much in his staff training, sells cheap toilet rolls, king-size cigarette papers, novelty items and out-of-date foodstuffs. Next to them is what used to be Swine’s, the newsagent and sweetshop, which after fifty years of selling sweets from jars by the quarter has recently thrown in the towel and caved in to the inevitable tide of videos and instant microwave burgers. It was always a mystery to us as children how a man as miserable and as thoroughly unpleasant as the late Mr Ron Swine could preside over a place so magical and so beautiful and so full of delights. All those jars of liquorice and lemon drops and cherry flakes and dinosaur jellies seemed like treasures to us, locked up and kept in a palace by an evil giant, who begrudged handing over even the slightest of penny chew or gobstopper.

The evil giant’s daughter, Eva, now runs the shop and she is a lovely sweet woman who waited until after her father’s death to change her name by deed poll, and she is patiently explaining to an old man who wants to buy a quarter of butterballs that Wine’s don’t do them any more. Eva had wanted to change her surname to something romantic and evocative, something like Monroe, or Hayworth, perhaps, but when it came to filling in the form she could hear the voice of her dead father nagging her about the cost of changing the shopfront, so she’d gone for the cheapest option and bought a pot of all-weather black gloss and gone out under cover of the night to erase the offensive initial. Of course, people from out of town sometimes get confused and locals have been known to set out to irritate and annoy Eva by going into the shop and asking for a bottle of Chardonnay or some cans of super-lager. Eva just shrugs it off: it’s a small price to pay for her freedom from the tyranny of some ancestor’s idea of a joke, or their job as a pig man. She suggests to the old man in search of butterballs that he try the Pick ‘N’ Mix up in Bleakley’s, the big department store in Bloom’s, the mall. The town’s only other old-fashioned sweetshop, and Wine’s only town centre competitor, Hi, Sweetie!, on Central Avenue, closed last year, on the site that is now Sensations.* (#litres_trial_promo)

Next to Wine’s, where Main Street is slowly collapsing into the Quality Hotel, is the Select Launderette – motto, ‘Dirty Collars Are Not Becoming to You, They Should Be Coming to Us’ – which is full, today being Wednesday, half-price-for-pensioners day. Betty and Martha, who run the shop and who would, in fact, qualify for Wednesday’s generous discount themselves, if they’d ever admitted to their ages, or looked them, are just about run off their feet. Betty is known to Martha and to the regulars as Iron Betty, and Martha as Martha the Wash. The pair of them talk all day and listen to local radio, they have eighteen grandchildren between them, have recently both given up smoking and they have no intention of retiring, although they have started to shut up shop for an hour at lunchtime, so they can sit and nap in the room out back. They have worked together for thirty years, eight hours a day, and have never spoken a cross word.

Just off Main Street, in South Street, builders are busy repointing brickwork, a postman delivers parcels, a dog squats at the side of the road and then trots on, and the man on the corner with a garden prunes his roses.

Paul McKee watches them all from his bedroom window: Paul is unemployed.

Paul is not from around here. He married Little Mickey Matchett’s daughter Joanne just over six months ago. It was a registry office job – presided over by Ernie King’s son Alex, who took over from Mrs Gait as registrar a few years ago now, and who has finally got the hang of it, the right kind of smile and the right signature* (#litres_trial_promo) – and it was close family only, and Paul had to hire a suit and he’s so skinny he couldn’t get one to fit. He looked pathetic, like a matchstick man, said Joanne’s mum, and not a groom. Joanne wore blue and did without a bridesmaid, but she had her little nephew Liam as a ring bearer. The reception was in the upstairs room at the Castle Arms, a venue which was not without its charms, as long as you overlooked the York Multigym and the punchbags, and the other boxing paraphernalia, including a three-quarter-size ring, which were used by the Castle Ward Amateur Boxing Club on Tuesdays and Thursdays. As long as you kept all the windows open the smell of the sweat wasn’t too bad.

Paul and Joanne had met in Paradise Lost, where Paul was DJ-ing on Friday and Saturday nights: it was a handbag kind of a crowd, but Paul enjoyed doing it. The money was good and sometimes you do have to prostitute your art: his set list included the Jackson Five and James Brown for emergencies. Neither Paul nor Joanne believed in love at first sight, but it seemed to have happened to them, without the assistance even of mind-altering substances – which Joanne does not agree with – and they counted themselves lucky. Unfortunately, Paul lost the gig at Paradise Lost when he and Joanne went to Ibiza for their one-week honeymoon and he’s had trouble picking up anything since. He has big plans, though – he’s just in a period of transition at the moment. Joanne jokes at work that he’s a kept man, while Paul tells people that he is working from home, which he is, and he does, as much as anybody can: to be honest, he finds that there are too many distractions and too many biscuits for working at home to be a great success. Still, he’s working on a few things. He’s been trying to get a job in the music business, as a sound engineer or something, through a few contacts at the Institute. His tutor there was Wally Lee, a man with the occasional goatee and thinning hair swept back into a ponytail, a man in his fifties who wears stone-washed denim jeans and retro Adidas trainers, who sports a dangly earring, who wears sunglasses all year round and who has been known to wear leather trousers – in our town! – and who has no idea how he ended up here, who puts it down to amphetamines, who plays jazz at the Castle Arms on a Sunday lunchtime while people huddle over tiny wobbly tables and eat roast pork with boiled vegetables and mashed potatoes, and suffer Death by Chocolate, a man who has come a long way, who worked at one time as a keyboard technician on tours by Jean Michel Jarre and Chick Corea. Wally is an alcoholic, a dope fiend, and an incoherent and incompetent teacher, but he had inspired Paul, which can be a dangerous thing to do to young people in our town and which can lead to all sorts of trouble. Under Wally’s influence, Paul became determined that he was going to do something, that he was going to make something of his life.

But first this morning he has to get up and make Joanne a cup of tea. It feels like a punishment, this, for Paul, a man who like many unemployed young men in our town only really comes alive around about midday, and who only begins to feel good when he has a beer in his hand after about six o’clock in the evening. He had a job as a fork-lift driver for about six months, but the hours were killing him – 7 till 6, five – days a week, for a measly £200, through the books, which was the equivalent of just one night on the decks, cash in hand. Still, he put himself through it and he puts himself through this, the morning tea-making routine. Joanne has always said that she can get up and make her own tea – she’s only twenty-two years old, after all, and a feminist – but the one good thing Paul’s mum ever said about his dad was that he always used to make the tea in the mornings and so it seemed to Paul like the right and proper thing to do, a man’s job, an adult responsibility and no excuses. He listened to a lot of gangsta rap at home and tea making is not a big part of the whole gangsta rap worldview, but sometimes in life you have to make compromises. After tea in bed Paul actually gets up again, to set out the breakfast things: cereals, milk, toast, marg and jam, which is a one-up on his own absent father and more like the behaviour of a saint, frankly, than a DJ, let alone an Eminem in the making. While he’s sorting out the Shreddies, Joanne has a shower and gets dressed, and gets herself ready for work. Joanne has a job as a trainee catering supervisor at the hospital up in the city, which is long hours and shift work, but pretty good pay. When she’s on days she departs from the house at 7.30, leaving Paul ten hours before her return.

When Joanne goes, Paul’s day can really begin: he goes back to bed for an hour, exhausted already from all the effort of tea making and breakfast. Then, around 9, he gets dressed and goes out to buy a newspaper.

Eva’s rush hours are 7 to 9.30 in the mornings and 4 to 6 in the evenings, weekdays, and 9 till 12 on Saturdays. She shuts on Sundays, despite demand, because she is a committed Christian and has recently started to attend the People’s Fellowship, down round the back of the Quality Hotel. She likes the music and, like a lot of the older women in the congregation, she finds that she feels a motherly instinct towards Francie McGinn, particularly since his problems with his wife. She’s less keen on the speaking in tongues and the hand waving, but before taking up with the People’s Fellowship she’d been going to the Methodist for almost thirty-five years, during which time no one had said a kind word to her, she knew all the hymns back to front and upside-down, and she had grown tired of wearing long skirts and a hat – a knitted cloche that had belonged to her mother – so she was glad of the opportunity to wear jeans and a sweatshirt to services, and she figured that no church was going to be perfect.

Eva doesn’t know Paul, but she doesn’t like the look of him – he seems to have this effect on many people. His eyes are close together, and his hair is shaved short, and he does wear gold chains and a sovereign ring, and sportswear, and a baseball cap pulled low, and she knows that this doesn’t necessarily make him a bad person, because she is a Christian and she tries to think the best of people, whatever they look like, but still she likes to keep an eye on him every morning when he comes in to choose which paper to buy – most people already know before they enter the shop, but Paul enjoys the privilege of being both unemployed and having had the benefits of a liberal education, having done the two-year course at the Institute in Music Technology with supplementary modules in Media Studies, so he likes to think he’s pretty media savvy. He takes a while choosing – suspiciously, in Eva’s eyes, who is unaware of his sophistication. Paul always considers, at least for a moment, the Financial Times, but he knows that that’s to come, a treat for later in life, when he’s big, somehow, and eventually he picks the Daily Mail. That’s enough of a stretch.

He goes home the back way with his paper, along the lane between the houses, picking his way between the dog turds and the empty plastic cider bottles, and through the yard and in the back door, and goes into the kitchen. He spends a lot of time in the kitchen these days, smoking, making his plans, sitting at the breakfast bar staring out of the window, making cups of tea. One of the reasons why Joanne wants them to own their own place is so that they can have a nice big kitchen with fitted units and enough room for a table. Paul doesn’t mind the kitchen, actually – although there is a smell. Frank Gilbey, the landlord, claims he’s getting on to it. Joanne’s mother thinks it’s a disgrace: she thinks they should get on to the council. She does not agree with the standard of kitchens in private rented accommodation. She does not much agree with Joanne and Paul these days, in fact, and their life choices: she had hoped that her daughter might have had more sense than to marry an out-of-work DJ. Paul is not exactly the son-in-law she had imagined for Joanne, a bubbly, hard-working girl, with lots going for her and a good social life. Paul is pigeon-chested, a loner, has multiple body piercings and has been in trouble with the police several times, although fortunately Joanne’s mother does not know exactly how many times, or for how long.

Paul was first in trouble when he was fourteen, when he was part of a scam involving bogus charity bags organised by his Uncle Michael. His Uncle Michael had seen the scam featured on an American daytime television talk show and he was so impressed that he decided to import it – Michael liked to think of himself as an entrepreneur. He bought a thousand heavy-duty black bin bags, got a mate to print up a few leaflets on his computer, dropped off the bags with the leaflets at homes all around the city, then just went back a few days later to collect the goodies, which he resold at markets and car boot sales throughout the county. It was like taking the proverbial candy from a baby.