Ring Road (12 page)

What Paul has in mind at the moment is some
thing
– he can't be more specific – some kind of thing, some kind of thing like the things he's read about in books. He's read about the rave scene in the 1980s and the 1990s, but he was hardly even born then, so it's all academic to him. He'd studied it at the Institute, where for two years he learnt the theory and practice of music technology, all about channels and monitors and gates and compressors, and attended seminars and lectures with titles like ‘Smashed Hits', in which tutors like Wally Lee – sad, unmarried, middle-aged men not originally from our town with creative facial hair and skaters' T-shirts – would examine issues of musical freedom of expression, beginning with Elvis Presley
and ending with Puff Daddy, and Paul would sit there transfixed, listening to people talk about Frankie Knuckles and Marshall Jefferson, men who took an art form, shook it up and made it into something new. That's what he wanted to do. He wanted to make something happen. He wrote a long essay once about acid house and another one about the invention of breakbeat. They were good essays. He got nearly 60 per cent for those – they were his highest marks.

He dozes off to this ambient mix of memories and ambitions in his head, and he doesn't wake up until four o'clock, the whole afternoon wasted and almost time to make the tea.

He checks to see if she's still there, the old woman opposite. She is. He feels exhausted after the sleep. Sometimes he's sure he can actually feel himself getting older, actually physically older by the day – his life draining away. He used to exercise, but he couldn't really be bothered with that either these days. (After Bucky, he'd started going to the gym, straight from school. He trained for a while at the All Saints boxing club, up there in the city. There were loads of big names who'd started out there: Micky McCann; the Monaghans, the boxing dynasty; Mickey Hillen; Tom McCorry. He told himself that he was going to be a great boxer. He was going to be like Barry McGuigan. He was going to be a Great White Hope. But he couldn't stick that either. He didn't like getting hit. Or having to get the buses. In the winter he'd rather go home and watch the telly.)

He goes downstairs and while he gets the tea ready he switches on the radio.

It's the local station, HitzîFM, a phone-in, and there's a woman on from town complaining about the high prices charged by vets. She's had to pay £150 for her dog to have a hysterectomy, she says. The DJ on the radio, he's called Julian Johns, he thinks he's hilarious. He thinks he's some kind of a shock-jock. He says that if the woman were to go into a private hospital to have a hysterectomy it would cost
her – what? – about £3500, what with the anaesthetist's fees and everything. So what on earth is she complaining about? She's getting a bargain. Paul laughs for the first time that day. It was ridiculous to compare a human with a dog.

The programme ended and Paul got some peas out of the freezer compartment, and another programme came on, a panel discussion about the protection of the county's historic architecture, and they had on a local councillor, a woman, Mrs Donelly, talking about the need to preserve our heritage, the usual stuff, and then suddenly she mentioned the derelict Quality Hotel, which was just round the corner from where Paul was standing peeling potatoes. Mrs Donelly says she can remember when they used to have big show bands at the hotel in the old days, and dances, and people came from miles around to enjoy themselves. ‘We had,' she says, ‘the time of our lives.'

This rings a bell with Paul. He has been looking for somewhere to have the time of his life all his life. He's been thinking about a venue for ages: whatever it is he's going to do he's going to need somewhere to do it, and he knows it needs to be somewhere big. Which rules out most places in our town, unless it's the People's Park, but he doubts the council will grant permission, since they even stopped the circus coming a few years ago, because of all the horse shit and the damage to the flower beds and the grass.

Potatoes peeled, he crawls into the lounge to watch TV and wait for Joanne to come home.

It's a lovely sunny evening.

He thinks, maybe when Joanne gets home they'll go for a walk, down to the Quality Hotel, just to have a look.

It's been raining, again, midsummer, and for a plumber rain is just another reminder that there will always be leaks and that we shall never be dry, that this life is a vale of tears, that we evolved from the slime, from the earth's boiling soup, the bouillon of all existence, and that we shall eventually return to the same.

A rainy day is not a good day for a plumber.

But then again there are really no good days in plumbing, which is something that people who are not themselves plumbers tend to forget. People tend to call plumbers when things have gone badly wrong and plumbers do not therefore tend to see human nature at its best, or the world through rose-tinted glasses. There are only so many toilets you can put your hands into before you begin to doubt the idea of human perfectibility, and there is no sunshine and no soap strong enough to cleanse a man of such doubts once he has begun to entertain them, so in middle age the wise plumber starts to specialise in kitchen and bathroom refits – work which pays better and which, if you do it right, is guaranteed to put a smile on people's faces. A new shower unit can do wonderful things for a person's self-esteem. However much
trouble you might have with your shower heater unit, or your wall brackets, or your curling sealant round the shower base, it is as nothing compared with the horror of a cracked cistern and the sight of a downstairs ceiling sagging like a huge pendulous breast, and a householder standing underneath it, like an idiot, with a bucket and a stick.

Sammy had never exactly been a happy plumber, but he had accepted misery as an occupational hazard. He was a silent man whose misery and whose silence we had always tolerated and even admired, but which had deepened into a terrible depression a few years ago when his four-year-old son Josh got sick on New Year's Eve. Sammy's wife, Sharon, who was a woman who did not share her husband's gloom, but who loved him nonetheless, had arranged to go out with a few friends for a girls' night out, to see out the old year and see in the new, and Sammy, who had never really enjoyed New Year's Eve and who always preferred to stay in and watch TV, had been more than happy to babysit.

Josh had complained before he went to bed of a slight headache, which Sammy had thought nothing of, and which he had put down to all the videos, but then the little fella had woken during the night with diarrhoea and vomiting, which Sammy put down to the fizzy drinks and sweets. Sammy was, of course, more equipped than most fathers to be able to deal with the mess, which he quickly cleared up, and afterwards he had treated himself to a couple of beers, to congratulate himself on his calm and his efficiency, and to welcome in the New Year. Over the next couple of hours, though, Josh's sickness had developed into a fever and then unconsciousness, and by the time Sammy had got the boy to the hospital early next morning, after he'd tried to wake him from his sleep and failed, he was in a coma. He never recovered.

Little Josh made the front page of the
Impartial Recorder
for three weeks running: first his coma, then his death and finally his funeral. There were full-colour photos – photographs
of the grieving parents, of Sammy and Sharon, and a photo of Josh the paper had got hold of from his playgroup, down there on Russell Street. Joe Finnegan, the ‘lensman', had refused an instruction from Colin Rimmer, the paper's editor, to use a telephoto and focus on the parents' tears, but the stuff Joe shot from a distance outside the hospital and of the funeral cortège was bad enough. It was not an auspicious moment in the newspaper's history and not a story that anyone in town could feel proud of: there were letters of complaint. Colin Rimmer replied, refusing the charge of prurience in his column, ‘Rimmer's Around', invoking the Watergate scandal, the death of Princess Diana and other examples of the freedom of the press, where the public had a right to know. Even Bob Savory, a long-standing friend and supporter of Colin's, felt that on this occasion he had gone too far. But the damage had been done.

After the funeral, Sammy did not leave the house for about a month: he was too ashamed and often at night, for a long time afterwards, Josh would come to Sammy in his dreams, and he'd be sick again, and Sammy would carefully clean him up and put him to bed, and Josh would say again to Sammy the last words that Sammy had heard him speak – ‘Poo and pee myself, Daddy' – and then Sammy would wipe the boy's fevered brow and he'd fall off to sleep, and everything would be OK.

But then Sammy would wake up from the dream and be sure there was a smell in the room, only to find that he had soiled the sheets himself. It was a terrible judgement that his body was wreaking upon him and he was completely unable to cope, was totally overwhelmed, in fact, and, naturally, he had started to drink.

He found himself unable or unwilling to comfort or be comforted by Sharon, who said she didn't blame him, but she did, really, and he knew she did, but he couldn't talk to her about it and she couldn't talk to him about it, and he had
also spurned the comfort of his family and friends, preferring instead to spend time in the pub. He avoided the Castle Arms, though – anywhere he was likely to meet any of us, or any of his friends – and started drinking in the Armada Bar, which is a Spanish-styled place up by the station with flaking bullfight murals and a plastic imitation vine, a bar 30 feet long and only 5 feet wide, a bar shaped like a ship, with no tables, with stools only, where you can buy wine by the carafe and single cigarettes, and where there is only country on the jukebox, and which is the bar where people tend to go in our town when things have gone wrong in their lives, and which usually makes things about a thousand times worse.

Colin Rimmer, the editor of the
Impartial Recorder,
which had caused Sammy and Sharon so much grief after the death of Josh, made the mistake of calling in to the Armada one night for a drink and to catch up with local gossip, and when Sammy saw him he got up, dragged Colin from his stool and punched him hard in the face, just once, catching him off balance and knocking him down on to the floor and wiping the lopsided grin from his face.

Sammy was about to start in on Colin proper when Niall the barman got a hold of him. ‘You're barred,' he said.

‘Thanks,' said Colin, getting up painfully from the floor.

‘Not him,' said Niall. ‘You, you lowlife. Now get out.'

Sammy didn't pay for another drink all evening.

And so, within a year of Josh's death, Sammy had lost his wife, his house, his business, and he was busy drinking in the park from seven in the morning and in the Armada till late at night, seven days a week, returning to his bedsit down at the bottom of Kilmore Avenue only to sleep and to dream. He stank and, to be honest, he felt that it was all that he deserved.

It is as much a surprise to Sammy, then, as to anyone else, that within two years of the death of his son he has remarried and started up again in business, although this time not as a plumber.

Sammy and his new wife and business partner, Cherith, now run a small shop, a studio and offices opposite the car park, next to the Quality Hotel. And last week was the grand opening.

We were all there, a lot of us, to celebrate a new beginning for Sammy and for Cherith, and to wish them well.

Like Sammy, Cherith has been previously married also, of course – to Francie McGinn, the minister at the People's Fellowship. It remains a popular little church – and Francie remains a popular minister, still, despite everything. He decided right from the start to stay on and brazen it out, and God and his congregation seem to have forgiven him.

Cherith, though, had not. She had not given Francie a second chance: it can be much more difficult to forgive the pious than to forgive the average sinner, and actually Cherith was secretly delighted at not having to be a minister's wife any more. She went on another diet that actually worked, took some exercise, and took to wearing cropped tops and bumster trousers, and after the divorce came through she started going out more at night, to pubs and clubs, and she had started to drink and meet young men in Paradise Lost who wore aftershave and owned fuel-injected cars, but that was too depressing, and after a while she started to stay in more, but she kept on drinking, and she was getting through about a bottle of Chardonnay a night, plus a couple of lager chasers to clear her head, and two or three large glasses of Amaretto during
ER,
after a bath, and maybe a drop of Bailey's Irish Cream on the cereals in the morning – she was a sweet-toothed drinker – and in the end she kind of washed up at Alcoholics Anonymous, where she met Sammy, and the two of them clung to each other like two ships without a port.

The business was Cherith's idea, after she and Sammy had sobered up and had got themselves back on their feet, and they'd got married at sunrise on a beach in Thailand, and they had enjoyed aromatherapy and saunas and therapeutic massage in their luxurious honeymoon hotel. We've never had
anything quite like that in our town and Cherith was quick to see the gap in the market, and thus was born their business, the Oasis – not quite as luxurious, perhaps, as the place in Thailand, and lacking the same sunny aspect, but with good intentions nonetheless.

It's open now, just a week old – you can go in yourself and have a look. In Oasis, the Shop, Sammy and Cherith offer a range of books on subjects such as shamanism, life coaching and reiki healing, and a wide range of loofahs, seaweed scrubs and scented candles. From Oasis, the Office, they plan their dolphin retreat adventures, and classes in warrior yoga and belly-dancing, but it's the Oasis Aqua-Studio, which overlooks the car park in front of the Quality Hotel, that really is the centrepiece.

Cherith and Sammy have invested in a spa pool from America, called the ‘Oasis', which is top-of-the-range, and in which and through which they now offer aqua-massage, water dancing and Dynamic Movement Therapies. Sammy plumbed the whole thing in himself – it was a big job, the pool is a monster – and they had to have the floors reinforced and fulfil all kinds of safety regulations, and it took about a month to get it up and running properly. But finally it was done and the room fixed up with dimmer lights, and decorated in tasteful soothing aqua colours, and it sits there, the spa pool, in the middle of the room, with a view to the car park out front and to the People's Fellowship out back, like a beached vessel stuck in the middle of town, or a tiny liquid sea, and when you switch it on and you turn down the lights, it has the pleasant sound of a bubbling brook, the sound of water running away from you in the dark.

Billy Nibbs got to try it the night before the big opening last week – he was the first customer. Sammy and Cherith had invited him specially – Billy is Sammy's oldest friend and he is certainly someone who looks like he needs some time in a brand-new top-of-the-range relaxing spa pool.

Like most of us here in town Billy is in the habit of looking gift horses in the mouth and he'd taken some persuading, but in the end he had agreed to come and give it a go, and he slipped off his clothes and slipped into the warm water, and as he lay there looking up at the ceiling, bubbles all around him, he thought about the recent past; and Sammy, who had been stocking the shelves downstairs with books about Emotional Intelligence and Wisdom Traditions, appeared at the door and gave him an embarrassed little wave.

‘How is it?' asked Sammy.

‘It's good,' said Billy, getting up to get out.

‘You're supposed to stay in and relax,' said Sammy.

‘Right.' Billy had never been in a spa pool before. In fact, lately he'd hardly ever been in the bath.

‘It'll do you good.'

‘OK.'

Billy closed his eyes and tried to relax. He was at a pretty low ebb.

After the bookless book launch he'd gone to meet his publisher, and the train was two hours delayed, and there was no buffet car, and the windows did not open, and the trolley service was suspended, all of which had made Billy feel very Philip Larkiny, and he had consoled himself by stroking his thick black beard and trying to imagine his book, the book he was about to see and claim for his own.

He imagined it produced in beautiful dark-blue thick board covers, the embossed imprint of his publisher running along the spine. He also imagined a cheap paperback edition, distributed worldwide, with a beautiful cover designed by a famous artist, an artist who probably also happened to be a personal friend. He felt sure he'd have got on with Damien Hirst. He imagined launch parties in several European cities and big limos at airports, a ticker-tape parade in New York, the Nobel Prize even – well, he was maybe getting ahead of himself there.

He found that thinking about all this cheered him and
aroused him – made him forget about the lack of ventilation on the train and the shortage of hot and cold snacks and beverages – and he snuggled deeper into his seat, his eyes closed, tucking his hands between his legs, and he could almost feel himself fingering his book, he could feel its coolness, the weight of its white wove pages between his fingers, the fulfilment of so many years' ambition and desire.

Thinking about it left him feeling deeply satisfied and exhausted, and he fell into a deep sleep, and when the train arrived at its final destination he awoke refreshed, bought himself a street map and hurried off to his publisher's offices, his anticipation turning finally to excitement.

He'd had to walk for what seemed like a very long time down residential streets, past blocks of flats and houses being refurbished at ridiculous expense, having all their original features painstakingly replaced, and all the fine modern fittings removed and thrown into skips – in which he had, of course, a professional interest, and over which and into which he cast a professional eye – and in the end there was nothing to indicate that number 47 on the Dublin Road, a large three-storey terrace which remained unrenovated, was a business premises at all, except that taped under the doorbell, on a scrap of stained white paper, was the name, written in biro, the name that he had imagined a thousand times running down his spine, and on his title page: Byrne & Co.