Ring Road (11 page)

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.

That was Exhibit A. Michael, Paul's uncle – or the criminal mastermind, as he was described in court – got six months' suspended for that. Paul was lucky: he only had to see a social worker.

Joanne's mum didn't know about the charity bag fiasco. Or about Paul's disorderly behaviour and obstructing police when he was seventeen (six months' suspended), his driving without due care and attention (£250), his driving without a licence, without insurance and without an MOT certificate (£275), or even his driving while disqualified (four months' detention and £150) and his unlawfully damaging a police car (£175). She only knew about his causing criminal damage to property (£200 for smashing a window at Paradise Lost,
plus £75 compensation), which had recently been prominently featured in the
Impartial Recorder.
Paul wasn't proud of it himself, but he couldn't see what she got so upset about. It was a minor offence and they had it coming to them, sacking him just because he was going on honeymoon, and anyway he was drunk, which is hardly a sin.

One day soon, though, Paul is going to prove them all wrong – he's going to be a big success – but in the meantime he drinks his cup of tea and goes through to the front room, or at least he gets down on his hands and knees and crawls into the front room. On the far side of the room is the window, and he crawls over and crouches below the sill and peeps out.

It is odd behaviour, but there's a reason for it: the woman living opposite is watching Paul, waiting to catch him out. She's spying on him. He's sure of it.

You see, Paul, like a lot of people in our town, is paranoid. It's not clear whether it's the drugs or being unemployed, or what it is that's done it to him. He has taken a lot of drugs in his time, but it could just be the effect of being married. Marriage affects a lot of us that way – it can make you want to duck for cover. Marriage can mess with your head in much the same way as a class A drug: it's a kind of neurotoxin, marriage. The first few weeks Paul had coped with it fine, but as time passed and he realised he was actually going to be living with Joanne every day, and in perpetuity, he started to feel a little jittery and restless. He began to get depressed. He became withdrawn and uncommunicative. He came to resemble the rest of us.

Paul missed the DJ-ing. He dreamed of another life. He used to tell himself that he was going to be massive: that was the word he used in his head, all the time, when he was practising his music.

‘Massive,' he would say to himself, ‘I am going to be massive.'

It had started out as a challenge, but had turned into a comfort and then a kind of mockery: he knew that he was
never going to be massive. He wasn't able to stick with it. He wasn't able to stick with anything. That's what his teachers and his social worker had said.

He didn't even know if he was going to be able to stick it with Joanne. It had seemed like a good idea at first, getting married, then coming to town, getting a little house, so they could be near Joanne's family. It seemed like the kind of life that Paul had always wanted. Joanne was all right, he loved Joanne, but he found it hard getting on with her family. He tried to get on with them, but he didn't share their interests and they didn't share his: they had never heard of drum‘n'bass, or ragga, or big beat, and jungle to them is a place with trees. Joanne's family's interests were restricted pretty much to Joanne's family, and Paul was never going to be a part of that. He hadn't realised that when you got married to someone you were marrying into their family: it had never occurred to him. He didn't know that was how families worked. No one had told him.
*

He tried working on his decks during the day, but he found himself quickly getting bored and then he realised he was frittering his time away, hanging around the job centre and the shops, always restless, and like a caged animal at home. Which is when the woman across the road started getting on his nerves. He became convinced that she was watching him. She watched him every day, nine to five, settling into her armchair first thing in the morning, her small table next to her with her tea things and a pile of magazines and library books. An hour for lunch and then back in the afternoon. Paul knew what she was doing: he'd seen her.

Paul did not want to give her the satisfaction of seeing him unemployed. It was none of her business. He'd bought some
net curtains and put them up in the front room and the bedroom. Joanne had complained that they made the rooms too dark. He said that they needed their privacy, that he didn't want the neighbours to see what they were up to. One Sunday he got Joanne to go outside and check if it was possible to see him behind the curtains.

‘Just a shadow,' said Joanne. He decided then he'd have to keep down during the day, so that nobody would be able to see him. They wouldn't even be able to see his shadow.

He peeps out of the window and sees her there, reading, sipping tea. An inquisitive old lady with nothing better to do than to look out of her window all day. Paul felt bad enough without people checking up on him all the time. He knew by the way people looked at him. He knew Joanne's family thought he was a shirker. He thought Joanne probably thought he was a shirker too.

‘But I didn't marry you for your money,' she says sometimes, joking. It didn't exactly make him feel any better. She never really said what she'd married him for, actually, and he had no real idea either.

Paul lies down on his stomach in the front room and turns on the telly. He does his best to be quiet during the daytime. If he listens to the radio or watches television he turns the volume right down, and he uses headphones on his decks, so no one can hear him. Not that there's anyone else around to hear him. The fella next door is at work, of course, and the people on the other side. He watches TV and smokes a cigarette. He's given up smoking dope: it's too expensive and Joanne didn't like the smell, and it made him tired.

It was difficult to say what had given Paul the most pleasure in his life, what had made him happy. He thought about this a lot at the moment, believing it might unlock the secret of what he should do next. They were mostly little things that had made him happy. Silly things. There was the time he'd won at the county Rabbit and Cavy Club event, for example – a
silly wee things looking back on it, but it had meant a lot to him then. He'd won it with his black-and-tan buck, Bucky. They'd won the Junior Any Colour Tan class and Paul had imagined himself as a respected professional breeder, sweeping the board at rabbit shows worldwide. London: ‘And the Winner of the All-English Fancy Challenge is … Paul McKee!' Paris: ‘And the winner of thé European Fancy Grand Challenge is … Paul McKee!' Singapore: ‘And the winner of the Asian and Pan-Pacific Best in Show Award is … Paul McKee!' He'd have liked to have moved on to French lops: he liked their big long ears that dropped down the sides of their faces.

But it had all gone wrong: Bucky had come to a bad end. Paul used to keep Bucky on the landing of the flat, and there were some older boys on the same floor who'd got into drugs and Paul's mum had had to speak to them a few times, and then one night, when he was eating his tea in the kitchen by himself – sausage and chips that his mum had left in the oven for him when he got home from school, while she went out to work – he looked outside and he saw two of the boys, smiling and laughing, they were totally off their heads, and they took Bucky from his hutch and threw him over the balcony. They were on the fifth floor. Paul was about eleven, and he ran outside and the boys just laughed at him. That seemed inexplicable at the time. Paul had cried for hours and when his mum came back from work, exhausted, she just said to him, ‘Well, life's hard,' which was irrefutable.

At lunchtime he eats two packets of crisps, an apple and some crackers, and at 12.30 he goes upstairs. He peeps out of the window. There's nothing happening. The postman has done his rounds, the builders have knocked off, the man on the corner with the garden has gone in. Even the old woman is probably on her lunch break.

He decides to lie down on the bed and have a think. He thinks maybe he'll have a nap.

Paul doesn't sleep well at night, now that he's started
sleeping during the day. He doesn't like sleeping during the day, but it has become a habit. He always dribbles and wakes up with a headache.

So he lay there, dozing, and trying to keep himself awake, trying not to think of all the things he could have done that day, like working and having weekends off, like normal people. He tried again to think about what he was going to do with his life. What he really wants to do is something spectacular – but who doesn't? He wants to create his own thing, be his own person. When he was at the Institute he cut some dub plates of his own and they played it, only in the studio there, but still, to have your music played, to be somebody. That was a buzz. Being married, on the other hand, is not a buzz, on the whole, he has found. Or being in our town. These things are ruts and a rut is pretty much the opposite of a buzz.

The only person Paul has talked to about his plans is his best friend from the Institute, Scunty, who is pretty much as his name suggests, and who has a mohawk haircut and a pierced lip, and who is into computers and who works in the Big Banana, the independent record shop up at the top of High Street, and who has promised that he will design some flyers for Paul – all Paul has to do is decide what he needs the flyers for.