Ring Road (13 page)

Billy rang the bell. There was no answer. There was another piece of paper stuck below the bell. It said, ‘Bell not working. Please knock. Loudly.'

Billy did as was suggested and eventually he heard movement from within the house.

An elderly man opened the door, dressed in green jumbo cords and a T-shirt featuring a cartoon drawing of a man with wild staring eyes and chattering teeth and the words ‘Caffeine High!'. The man wearing the T-shirt wore tartan carpet slippers and was completely bald, except for the hair
growing from his nose, and his ears, and up around his throat, and the back of his hands. A pair of glasses dangled from a rainbow-coloured cord hung round his neck. There was the unmistakable smell of gin and cigarettes.

‘You are?' asked the man.

‘Billy Nibbs.'

‘And this affects me how?'

‘You're publishing my book.'

‘Ah!' said the man.

‘And I haven't received any copies of the book yet, and I ...'

‘Goodbye!' said the man, slamming the door and bolting it behind him.

‘Hang on!' shouted Billy.

‘Go away!' said the man, retreating off into the hallway.

Billy shouted through the letter box, but his calls went unanswered. All the curtains in the house were drawn – there was no way in, or round.

Billy stood on the doorstep for a long time before he went away and started the long walk back to the station, past the skips and the houses, and he only realised gradually – could only allow himself to realise slowly, to save himself the pain – exactly what had happened to him.

He felt sick. He felt like an idiot. He felt like crying. He felt as though someone had cleaved away the innermost parts of himself and left him hanging like an empty carcass. There was no publisher. There was going to be no book.

The journey home was different from the journey down, although it was just the same train, going backwards, and the same scenery in reverse. The weather outside had taken a turn for the worse and Billy found himself staring out of the window, watching his too solid and semi-permeable flesh fast disappearing in the rain. He looked at his reflection and what he saw suddenly did not look like a writer. All the great writers look like writers. Evelyn Waugh in his tweeds. George
Orwell in all that prole gear. Beckett in his roll-neck. They're always done up – the men in particular – as if they know what they're about, like applicants keen to make a good impression. With his beard and his earring and his novelty tie Billy Nibbs did not look like a writer. He looked like an eccentric council employee, a man who tended to skips and bins and bottle banks, and who read books in his spare time, and who wrote bad long poems.

When he arrived back in town Billy headed straight for the Armada Bar. He recognised most of the people in there, but no one spoke to him, and he did not speak to them. The Armada was not a bar where conversation was expected, or encouraged, or condoned.

By the time he left the Armada he was feeling a lot worse. He had that feeling, that feeling like it's three or four in the morning and you've been drinking since about six and you've been at a party and you're walking home and it begins to rain and you've no coat and there are no buses and you can't afford a taxi and you think about the countless ways you've let yourself down at the party and the good time all the other people were having and you sit down at the side of the road and hold your head in your hands and there's a bunch of young blokes you hadn't noticed before in a bus shelter on the other side of the road, and they all have shaven heads and are wearing sports-casual clothing and baseball caps, and they are all staring at you. It was that kind of feeling.

That's what literary failure feels like. It feels like you're about to get a kicking.

When he finally made it in safely through his front door he made a cup of tea and sat down and stared at the reproduction of Van Gogh's
Sunflowers
which hangs heavily in a snap-frame above his flimsy blue Formica-topped fold-out kitchen table. The picture is one of Billy's favourites. He also has a reproduction Matisse in the hallway – one of those blue blobby women – a stained Escher in the bathroom and a
blurry Monet thing above his bed. In our town, this virtually constitutes a gallery. But the flat is not a gallery – it's a bedsit down on Kilmore Avenue, with its own separate kitchen and bathroom. ‘This is Luxury You Can Afford,' said the landlord when Billy came to view the property fifteen years ago.

The landlord was Frank Gilbey. Frank liked to call personally to collect the rent once a month and Billy could understand that. There is no real satisfaction in a standing order. If you're a landlord you must want to see that look of fear and anger and frustration in the eyes of your tenants as they hand over their hard-earned cash to you to keep your children in private schools and your good self in fine clothes and cigars and vintage sports cars. In fifteen years, Frank Gilbey had never once asked Billy Nibbs how he was, or who, and he ignored every one of Billy's requests for maintenance or repairs or rent rebates. The place was gradually deteriorating, but it didn't matter to Frank Gilbey, because he was just sitting on the property, waiting to sell it on for redevelopment when the time was right. In the meantime he could afford to let the place just fall apart.

Which, arguably, Billy was too: he had no book, no woman, no prospects and nothing to show for it, his thirty-odd years on this earth. At this moment he felt something of an affinity for Van Gogh, the difference being, of course, that Van Gogh was a genius and Billy could still see the colours in his sunflowers, in a poor reproduction, over one hundred years after he'd painted them, even in the dark and under the influence, while Billy's cup of tea looked a pathetic grey already, like the walls in the flat and his own miserable insides.

Billy stared at his walls and finished his grey tea, thinking about Van Gogh.

(Van Gogh chopped off his own ear, didn't he? But it wasn't his whole ear. It was his lobe. The
lobule.
It couldn't have been the whole thing, because you lose your hearing: it sort of funnels the noise in, doesn't it, the fleshy bit? Billy couldn't
remember how. Sometimes he wishes he'd listened in science at school, then he might be able to remember useful stuff like that, like how birds sleep and why penguins' feet don't freeze, and how mirrors work, and why the moon is round. Or even basic stuff, like the names of clouds and birds and body parts.)

Billy rinsed his mug in the sink and made his way unsteadily to his bedroom-cum-sitting room, pausing only to kiss a lovely blobby blue Matisse breast along the way.

There were books and papers piled high on the floor, which in the dark looked a little like artful piles of bricks, or stacked tyres, and there were clothes spilling out imaginatively from the wardrobe, whose numerous constituent MDF body parts had long since parted company from each other, peeling apart as if possessed by demons or by the thing in
The Thing
or the alien in
Alien.
The duvet was very limp. On the desk there were bits and pieces of poems, and some congealed scrambled egg and bacon on a cracked plate.

Looking at the mess that was his life, Billy wondered for a moment if perhaps he could wrap the whole thing in cellophane, or set it in plaster and sell it wholesale to some collector in New York, or to Charles Saatchi – £10,000 would do him for a year. Or £5000. Or actually, Billy would probably settle for some free cinema tickets and some extra points on his Sainsbury's reward card, and a few celebrities at the gala exhibition opening. He'd take whatever second-rate champagne swillers were currently on offer. Oh yes. Bring ‘em all in. Kill the fatted calf. Come and feed your faces on canapés, ye Mighty. And as they all gathered to admire his handiwork, all the critics and the publishers and the editors, Billy would rise to address them and he would say … He would say … Do you know what he would say?

He opened his eyes. He was still there, lying in the spa pool. And looking out of the window, he saw the offices of the
Impartial Recorder,
its big red neon lettering staring at him, lighting up the night sky.

And suddenly he no longer felt self-pity or frustration. He no longer felt like a poet. The pool had entirely cleansed him of those feelings. It felt like a tide had gone out on his emotions, washing away all the murk. Now he only felt clear, pure white anger – anger towards his publisher and towards Frank Gilbey, and towards all the other people who had treated him wrong in his life. Suddenly he knew what he wanted to say. Suddenly the way seemed clear.

Sammy came in to find Billy getting dressed – he'd finished stocking the shelves downstairs with little books of calm. ‘Did you enjoy that?' he asked.

‘I did, actually,' said Billy. ‘I feel much better.'

It's been blue skies for nearly a week now, and temperatures hot enough for young men to strip down to T-shirts and tattoos, and women to lie out in the People's Park in bikini tops, sipping Bacardi Breezers and listening to the radio. It's positively Mediterranean, though with more techno, maybe, and not as much garlic. Davey Quinn Senior has been house painting and he's as brown as a berry: Mrs Quinn says he looks like a black man. He's so brown, in fact, that his tattoos have virtually disappeared: they look like shadows, or large areas of skin cancer possibly.

Despite being up the ladder and out in the sun ten hours a day, Davey Quinn Senior has not been applying sun cream, much to Mrs Quinn's disapproval: his old bald head is peeling so badly it looks like a hot chestnut and he leaves flakes behind him in bed. Davey Senior does not really believe in sun cream, although unknown to Mrs Quinn he has been using a lot of Deep Heat recently: he's been suffering pains in his hands and in his knees and in his hips again.

Davey Quinn Senior is sixty-three years old now and built like a boxer: hands like mangles, a chest like a barrel, arms like joints of meat and a back almost as broad as it is stiff.
His knees are thick and swollen, and almost entirely without cartilage. When he bends down to pick up a paint pot these days there is a grinding of his joints, like a machine without oil. He drinks about triple the recommended units per week, takes three sugars in his tea and six in a flask, but he doesn't eat like he used to. He sleeps for no more than five hours a night, often waking at 4 a.m. with back pain and a terrible need to piss. He had trouble with his prostate a few years ago – he pronounces it ‘prostrate', deliberately, to annoy Mrs Quinn, successfully – and he has cut down on the beer and now drinks mostly wine and spirits. He'd never drunk wine until he was in his mid-fifties – most of the men he knew still didn't, but Davey was not a stick-in-the-mud in his drinking habits and he liked to keep up to date. There was even a time, during the early 1970s, when he drank martinis, but that was just a phase, everyone was doing it – even in the Castle Arms and the Hercules Bar there were grown men drinking sweet drinks from small glasses, with olives and slices of lemon. Davey Senior fancied himself now as something of a connoisseur, if not a wine buff exactly. Mrs Quinn would occasionally take a glass of chardonnay, or a rosé, but Mr Quinn preferred the red wine – you couldn't beat a nice New World Shiraz, in his opinion. He gave up smoking five years ago – having first down-shifted to low-tar – after his friend Jacky had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Davey Senior had found it hard giving up: it took him two years to stop completely, but he'd been determined. He didn't want the same to happen to him as had happened to Jacky. Jacky had died and he was only fifty-six years old, and in Davey's terms this meant Jacky was a young man, a baby almost: Davey, at the time, was fifty-seven. Jacky had been in the year below him at St Gall's. It was a shock and a sadness to see him go – of course, you always wonder who's going to be the first among you to go, and when they go you can't help feeling that somehow it was the right thing, that it was never really meant to be you, that
you were always the one destined to hang around for a little longer than the others, even if it was only to apply a few more coats of paint to your crumbling walls and to enjoy a little extra elbow room at the bar. It's a terrible truth and one you can't live with for ever, but when an old-friend dies, you draw a little strength from their passing.

Davey Senior had learnt his lesson from Jacky and had tried an acupuncturist for the smoking, a Chinese fella, Doctor Ye, recommended to him by Little Mickey Matchett, whom Davey used to play football with and who's had terrible trouble with his cartilage – the old footballer's disease – and who now swears by what he calls the ‘foreign medicine'.

Doctor Ye is known to most people in town as ‘the other Chinaman' – Mr Wong and his family from the takeaway being the first, the most important and the most popular.
*
Doctor Ye's parents arrived here from China in the 1950s. They were actually from the same town in China as the Wongs, and when they heard over there how well the Wongs were doing and how much they liked it here – something, one
suspects, had been lost in the translation – they thought they'd give it a try, and they managed to steal a passage and get out, and for years they ran a little upholstery business from home, a house on the Brunswick Road, full of bare naked chairs and vast blankets of fabric, and they kept themselves to themselves, quietly assimilating and getting on with the endless task of mending and making good. They got to like milk in their tea, and toast, and they got into pub and club refurbishments, big business here in the 1980s. The children were privately educated, at Barneville House, the old boarding school beyond the ring road, and they all made it to university. The eldest son, Stevie, Doctor Ye, now operates out of his own house on Cromac Street, where he eats macrobiotic, as much as is possible here, and has a little pagoda built from breeze blocks and rendered and painted in Dulux Weathershield ‘Golden Sunrise' in the front garden, and a nice water feature – installed at enormous expense, but which was tax deductible – and he spends his days in his converted front room burning herbs and sticking long thin needles into the fat white fish-bellied bodies of the people of our town.

Not a lot had changed, according to Stevie's dad, Mr Ye. He did chairs: Stevie does people.

The acupuncture hadn't actually worked on Davey Senior's smoking – he'd managed it in the end with gum – but while he was seeing Doctor Ye, Davey had mentioned the trouble he was having with his shoulder and Stevie had popped in a couple of extras, for free, and – bam! – it was like electric currents racing through Davey's body.

‘It felt like being rewired,' he told everyone down at the Castle Arms, including Georgie Hannigan, who is an electrician and who rather doubted it – he's been electrocuted a couple of times himself and he knows it's not something to boast about. Davey Senior had briefly become an acupuncture bore: talking about yin and yang, and energy channels and meridians, but he found that people's eyes soon glazed over
when he started talking about it and, without either the interest or the ability to pursue the subject further, he soon got bored with it himself. The needles became just a pleasant memory.

He was thinking about acupuncture now, though, for the first time in a long while, and about private medical insurance, as he lay on the floor, the sharp point of a paintbrush, or something, possibly a body part, digging in his back. He had no idea what had happened to him.

There'd been a touch of drizzle first thing in the morning and he'd moved inside on a job, and one minute, just a moment ago, he'd been up the ladder, quite high, cutting in, using one of those so-called ‘heritage' colours that everyone was so keen on these days – and which all looked like bird shit if you asked him – in one of the big old houses on Fitzroy Avenue, with the thirteen-foot ceilings and the ornate plaster covings, and the next thing he knew he was lying on the floor, looking up at a freshly painted ceiling.

Davey Senior did not panic. The worst thing you can do in a situation like that is to panic. For the self-employed, falling off ladders is something you come to expect now and again, like a letter from the taxman asking you to come in for an interview. As he lay there, Davey Senior remembered the many who had fallen before him, or at least the ones who'd admitted to it: Jacky, who'd lost two fingers when he was working in the steel plant and took a tumble from a gangway; Scotty, the big Scotsman, who was a glazier and who had the scars to show for it; and of course Davey's old friend Dessie, Big Dessie Brown, a friend from way back. Dessie had had it the worst of all of them, of course, had suffered the biggest fall, but then look what had happened to him. Dessie was the living proof, in our town, that there were sometimes silver linings.

Dessie had been a roofer and had broken his back when he fell off one of the new builds doing the slates on one of the first estates built outside the ring road. The injury nearly finished him off – he walked bent double, like a cripple, with a stick –
but he always referred to the fall as his ‘lucky break'. He said that when he was lying there looking up at the sky, unable to move or to speak, it was like a revelation, a visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that what She was saying to him was clear and unambiguous, and it had changed his life for ever and in an instant. It might be better, the BVM seemed to be suggesting to Big Dessie, to pay someone else to climb roofs for you. From that moment on Dessie had never looked back. He never climbed another roof, and now he lived in a six-bedroom house with a swimming pool, tennis courts and views across open fields. He ran a full team right across the county – sparks, joiners, plumbers, plasterers, painters and decorators, the full works – and he paid no heed to niceties like tax and National Insurance, which the Blessed Virgin didn't seem to have been too bothered about Herself, and he drove a specially modified Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, with a disabled badge, and he'd always stand Davey Senior a pint if he saw him down the pub, and they would reminisce about old goals and fixtures. Those were the days. He used to pay for his drink from a big roll of cash he carried around done up with an elastic band.
*

Davey Senior was thinking about that big wad of cash and he was looking for his own silver lining all the way to the hospital, where the doctors told him the worst: he'd cracked two ribs and three vertebrae. He was going to be off work for some time.

Well, Davey Senior was a man who could not afford to be off work for some time. His three sons in the business, Daniel,
Gerry and Craig, could keep things ticking over – they were good boys – but at the end of the day they were going to be a man down, and with all the contracts coming in they couldn't afford to be. They had a school to do, the new Collegiate School up on the ring road; and houses; and shops; business premises. Davey was running a big small business and he was going to need someone he could trust to take care of some of the smaller jobs, a body, someone who knew the business, who could work unsupervised, and someone he could rely upon to uphold the standards of the Quinn name. Above all, he needed someone whom he didn't need to pay.

Davey Senior had not been to church in thirty years, and he no more believed in the Blessed Virgin Mary than he did in the tooth fairy and Father Christmas, but as he lay in bed in the hospital, considering his dilemma, eating his hospital food, he had an idea.

On his first day back home, out of hospital, the first day of his convalescence, he asked Mrs Quinn to cook up a nice meal to celebrate his return: a good plain meat pie, maybe, with mashed potato and gravy, followed by a treacle pudding. If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, then Davey was determined to cut a swath, using all the complex carbohydrates at his disposal.

Since his own return home Davey's son, young Davey, the seventh son of the seventh son, has tried to avoid eating with his parents. He just couldn't face the same meals he remembered from his childhood: he was amazed, in fact, that they were still eating the identical stuff, twenty years on, with only the occasional added variation of a microwave lasagne and a token bottle of olive oil in the kitchen cupboard to register the fact that this was not still 1976, that this was
post-Ready, Steady, Cook,
this was a new millennium and not the culinary Stone Age. It was pies still, mostly, in the Quinn household, and puddings for pudding, and Mr and Mrs Quinn were even using the same plates that Davey remembered, and the same
crackle-plastic-handled cutlery, and the English hunting-scene place mats. His parents' house depressed him in general and unutterably, but the kitchen – the kitchen depressed him more than anything, and in every detail, from the fake marble finish on its lonely brown breakfast bar, to its varnished tongue-and-groove on the walls, and its faded Venetian blind perpetually at half-mast, even though no direct sunlight penetrated through the leylandii which now shaded and protected the bungalow on all sides.

No good things had ever happened in the Quinn family kitchen, as far as Davey could remember, it was just too small for anything except cooking and washing up, which of course is what a kitchen is for, except for the middle classes who, even in our town, tend to use their kitchens for the same varied purposes the Quinn family had always used the pub: in order to drink, and to argue, and to meet their friends. If the kitchen is the heart of the house, like people say, if that was really true, then the Quinn house had a serious coronary problem. The Quinn kitchen was not a place where family meals were shared, or problems discussed, where children did their homework while Mummy made muffins, or even where crockery was thrown, or cafetière coffee drunk late into the night while thrashing out personal or global political problems. It was simply a place, a narrow space, where for years the Quinns had eaten Findus Crispy Pancakes and Angel Delight, in rotation, all seven brothers taking turns on one of the two stools, only one of which – the TV stool – afforded a clear view of the television in the adjacent front room.

In fact, the only interesting thing that had ever happened to Davey in that kitchen was that when his father or mother spoke to him at mealtimes, now as then, Davey always seemed to know exactly what they were about to say. His parents had induced in him from a young age a permanent sense of déjà vu, but this was not, alas, Davey realised early on, because he was an alien abductee or because in another life he'd been
a Cherokee Indian and was blessed with the gift of second sight or the Third Eye – it was simply because his family repeated themselves. Endlessly.
*