Ring Road (20 page)

It was a good day to get your hair cut: wet and cold, but with a definite hint of sun high in the sky, an unmistakable gesture of hope in autumn, the kind of day when your body reminds you that despite what you think actually you're not dead yet, and that it might be possible to change your life and turn things around, shake things out and spice things up a bit, with the addition of just a few subtle tints and the trimming of a few split-ends, or maybe even a hair extension or a soft perm. A grey day, but just bright enough to suggest silver linings, a day to run a comb through your hair and to delouse your dog, to wriggle out of your foul-weather gear and slip into something more comfortable.

Francie was missing Cherith, and he was missing her in a way he hadn't expected. (Members of the congregation may wish to turn the page at this point.) He was missing her in bed. Before the split, Francie and Cherith had been married for long enough for there to be no sense of adventure or mystery when they slipped into bed together, synchronised, like two trained circus puppies, at the end of each day. When Francie and Cherith hopped into bed, Francie in blue flannelette to the right and Cherith in pink to the left of him,
they usually dropped straight off to sleep, give or take five or ten minutes of reading the Old Testament, which they both found more effective than either a hot milky drink or a modern novel. It may be, in fact, that God designed the names of the descendants of the tribes of Israel as a kind of resting place for a Christian's cares, a calming velvet hand, a charm and spell for tired and troubled souls. The Bible, one might even argue, is a kind of ark, somewhere to sleep while visiting this planet, an
accouchement,
a deathbed and an arbour all in one, the ultimate bed-and-breakfast.

But now with Bobbie Dylan, Francie remembered what it was like, being in a bed with a woman who was not a wife of long standing. Being in bed with Bobbie Dylan required much pillow talk and adjusting of the coverlets. It required a retraining. It was not an easy lay.

As a minister, Francie had to perform all day, every day. The performance was not his only, of course – he was sustained and supported in his work by the grace of God. When he visited people, when he spoke, he was often conscious of being used by the Holy Spirit. But when he was in bed at night with Bobbie, the Holy Spirit seemed to desert him and he was all alone, with a beautiful woman, and, he had to admit it, he was terrified.

This had, of course, led to all sorts of problems, problems which Bobbie had been more than prepared to help Francie overcome. Francie had had no idea that these sorts of things could be managed and handled; with Cherith, relations had always taken their own natural course, one way or another, and that had been enough for both of them. Now here he was, a full-grown man in his own bed, feeling like a little boy.

Bobbie was equally shocked and surprised: it felt to her like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. She'd never lived with another Christian before, and certainly not a Christian minister. So she was surprised to find that Francie was less than fastidious when it came to certain practical Christian
household chores and in matters of personal hygiene. In her book, and probably in the Good Book too, according to Bobbie, the use of products from the Body Shop was virtually a commandment. In this life, frankly, about the closest we're ever going to come to God is the sound of Enya and a running bath, the sight of a set of nice shining taps, and the smell of ylang-ylang and sandalwood aromatherapy oils.

Francie, it must be admitted, did not always pick up his own clothes at night and he had continued to resist Bobbie's attempts to smarten him up. She'd tried to get him out of his sta-prests and his lumberjack shirt, at least to get him into something from Marks, but – and Francie didn't tell Bobbie this – when he was slipping into and out of the clothes in the changing rooms, staring in the full-length mirror at his cheesy white buttocks and his flanks flecked with spots, his wasted upper arms and his protuberant belly, he was terrified at the prospect of further self-transformation. He didn't think he could take any more: on top of everything else, he didn't think he could cope with the sight of himself in chinos.

But he'd agreed to get his hair cut.

For as long as he could remember, probably his whole life since he was about five years old, Francie had gone to get his hair cut every two or three months by Tommy Morris up at the top of Kilmore Avenue. There was never really much of a queue: Tommy had you in and out before you could say straight or tapered, and anyway, whatever you said, it was all basically a variation on a Number 2 on the back and sides and a Number 3 on top. Tommy never spoke to you, he smoked the whole time he was cutting, and he'd lived happily with his companion, Andy, for twenty-five years without anyone seeing fit to question it, mention it, or even consider the possibility that Tommy was not as other men are. After work Tommy drank his Guinness in the Rose and Crown, bet on the horses, and he and Andy were never seen out in public after dark. They were regarded as upstanding citizens and
most men in our town wouldn't even consider going anywhere else for a haircut.

So Francie, of course, had never before been into Central Cutz. When he stepped inside it felt like treason. It was a humbling experience.

Central Cutz is named not for its close approximation to some Platonic ideal – a golden mean – of hair cutting, but rather for its convenient town centre location. It's on Central Avenue, of course, a few boarded-up shops down from Inspirationz, which offers quality cards and giftware from around the world, and opposite Sew-Biz, where Mrs Nelson, whose son has married a Romanian, does garment alterations and listens to Classic FM. Central Avenue also boasts a health food shop, Full of Beans, which is full of beans, although Mandy Gamble, the owner, is not: weighing in at around sixteen stone and with some serious personal hygiene problems and prone to depression, Mandy is not a great advert for vegetarianism or Culpeper herbalism. But Central Avenue remains probably the closest thing we have here to a Latin Quarter. On a Saturday night, midsummer, if you were very, very drunk, it might almost seem like the barrio.
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Central Cutz is not a barber's: this is an important distinction to make. Central Cutz is what is still called in our town a Unisex Hair Salon, although it's perhaps not immediately clear from the outside that they do, in fact, cater to men as well as women: only the presence of a pile of
GQ
magazines next to the
Cosmopolitans
and
People's Friends
on the little curly-wrought-iron coffee table by the window indicates that indeed they do. The walls inside Central Cutz are painted a rich terracotta and feature stencilled rustic motifs and découpage picked out by recessed spotlights, a quease-making effect that Francie himself had previously only seen demonstrated by tanned, skinny women on house make-over programmes on TV. It is not the interior of a barber's shop.

After settling into a chair and waiting for twenty minutes, reading a magazine featuring an interview with an actress and singer he'd never heard of called Jennifer Lopez, who rather reminded him of Bobbie Dylan – which unnerved him – Francie eventually plucked up the courage to speak to the receptionist and ask if he could go next, but apparently you're supposed to book an appointment for a consultation in Central Cutz, you don't just sit and queue, which he hadn't known, and no one had told him, but he was told there'd been a cancellation and he could have an appointment with a senior stylist, someone called Jackie, or Jacky, or possibly even Jacqui. Francie wasn't sure whether to expect a man or a woman.

Jackie turned out, in fact, to be a man, although a man sporting pencil-thin sideburns, like the go-faster stripes on an old Ford Capri, or the markings on a basketball, tapering to a point and a halt just short of his mouth, and with no hair whatsoever round the back and sides and a sort of short wet-look
bubble perm on top. Francie tried never to judge on first impressions, but he did not like the look of Jackie. Jackie did not look like a barber. He did not look like Tommy Morris.

Jackie guided Francie to a chair, which was the kind of fold-up director's chair you see in films about Hollywood and also in Habitat, and not a barber's chair at all of the kind that Francie was used to, and he asked Francie what he wanted done, and Francie said he wanted a haircut – he'd never really had to instruct Tommy – and Jackie said, in a voice crisp with sarcasm, ‘Right! Any preferences at all? You want to give me a clue?' and Francie said that he wasn't really sure, he hadn't thought about it, and Jackie said, in what was quite clearly a patronising tone, ‘OK, what I'll do is go round the back and sides, bring it in really nice and short, and then I'll wash your hair and cut on top by hand, does that sound all right?' Francie agreed that that would be OK.

Jackie picked up his scissors and Francie closed his eyes and started to regret having given in to Bobbie Dylan's entreaties. He tried not to think about it. He reflected instead on what had been a long and difficult year, full of ups and downs.

After the split with Cherith, Francie had experienced a long dark night of the soul, and he'd gone before his congregation to try to explain. God had spoken to him, he said, and He wished Francie to lay a fleece before Him, and so that was what Francie was going to do: if the majority of the congregation did not feel they could support him as minister, he would resign from the position.

In the end Francie lost about fifteen members of the congregation – young families, mostly, and he could understand that. A young family does not wish to see on a Sunday morning a reminder of everything they were missing out on as a young family on a Sunday morning – the sight of a man who had shrugged his shoulders and walked away from the difficulties and responsibilities of family life, and walked straight into something a lot more interesting. So the young families had
gone. The singles, the spinsters, the elderly couples, the young and the mad had mostly stayed on, and that was enough.

Jackie was pushing Francie forward: having never had his hair washed in a barber's before, Francie wasn't sure what was happening and resisted, and Jackie said, ‘Wash your hair, yes?' as he might to a child or a senile old man, and when he leant forward towards the basin Francie thought for a moment he was going to be sick. He let the water wash over him.

After he had rededicated himself to the Lord's work before his diminished congregation, Bobbie had begun to encourage Francie to introduce all sorts of innovations, and within a few months numbers had picked up again to what they were before his split with Cherith. Bobbie herself had settled into a regular slot during the Sunday morning services, and under her guidance and encouragement the People's Fellowship Worship Band – or just the Band, as Bobbie called them – had begun to play a little more up-tempo, a little tighter and a little louder. She felt that the music had been stuck in a 1970s M OR praise and worship mode – too many ballads – and it needed updating. It was her idea to start using pop songs and replacing the words with Christian lyrics. This was a massive success: the Band's sanctified version of Eminem's ‘The Real Slim Shady' (chorus: ‘Will the real Saviour please stand up?/I repeat, will the real Saviour please stand up?') bringing them to the attention of the
Impartial Recorder,
and then the local commercial radio station, Hitz!FM, where Bobbie was interviewed at length about her vision for the church.
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Bobbie did have her misses, though, as well as her hits.
She didn't always get it right. She had rechristened the Young People's Group, calling it Can Teen, and that seemed to work, but her Drive-In Services were not a success. The Drive-Ins were something she'd seen when she'd been to Nashville for a Christian country music convention a few years ago, and she thought it would be worth a try here. She had persuaded Francie to hire the main car park in front of the Quality Hotel from the council for a month of Sunday nights, and the council were more than happy, since it prevented boy-racers gathering there, burning rubber, and throwing beer bottles at the police and passers-by. Francie had then managed to borrow a cab and a trailer from T. P. McArdle, a big name in trucking locally, whose wife is a member of the congregation, and they brought down the church's PA, and the electric piano, set it up on the back of one of T. P.'s lorries and held their services. You had to wind down your window to hear and there was an order of service for every car, and it was quite a novelty. The first week they attracted about sixty vehicles in all, ranging from an old Datsun Sunny to a couple of BMWs. The Hegartys, Jerome and his wife, who have five children all under ten, and who are the closest thing we have here in town to actual hippies, came in their VW combi-van and blocked the view. They cooked sausages and beans during the hymn singing and ate them during the sermon, and Francie did find the smell of frying a little off-putting – but then, that's open-air preaching for you. Jesus probably had the same problem with the fish and loaves. By the second week the numbers had dropped right down, and by the third week the boy-racers had started to appear back again at the car park, turning up the volume on their stereos, pumping their horns, and drinking Smirnoff Ice and tequila slammers while Francie was trying to preach the gospel. It would have tried the patience of a saint. The fourth week, fortunately, it rained, the PA shorted and Francie insisted that they call the whole thing off.

But by now Bobbie had the bit between her teeth, and she suggested that Francie needed to update and improve and generally overhaul his entire preaching style. Francie wasn't used to anyone, apart from God, offering him advice on his sermons, but he was more than happy to listen to what Bobbie was saying: he'd never really felt comfortable in the deeper waters of interpretation and explication and exegesis, and now here was Bobbie offering him a lifeline and a way back to the comforts and shallows of a simple faith, which is where he'd begun, after all, and where he felt more comfortable. She suggested he might like to lighten up a bit and try telling a few jokes, and that he maybe take a theme sometimes rather than just a text, and instead of only announcing the times of services in the
Impartial Recorder
along with all the other churches, she encouraged him to advertise. The first of his new-style sermons – ‘God, Is that You Talking, Or Was It Just the Cheese?' – was advertised prominently in the
Impartial Recorder,
next to an ad for the Woodflooring Warehouse Super Sale (BUY! BUY! BUY!) and a Happy Hour at the Armada Bar (DOUBLE SPIRITS £1'), and was backed up by a feature, with a photo, based on a press release that Bobbie had put together on the Fellowship computer. It made quite an impact. Francie's next sermon, ‘Jesus: Bling Bling, or BaDaBaDaBooom?', brought in a few more of the curious and the under-thirties, as did ‘Does God Ever Say ‘Oops″?', on the problem of evil, and ‘Cheer Up! Some Day You'll Be Dead', on the Second Coming and the Book of Revelation. But by far the biggest crowds had been for a gospel meeting that Bobbie had persuaded Francie not to announce, as usual, as simply ‘A Gospel Meeting', but to advertise instead with posters and flyers asking, ‘Is This Really My Life, or Has There Been Some Kind of Mistake?' Six people gave their lives to Christ that night, a record for the People's Fellowship and possibly for the town. There were murmurs within other churches about a revival at the People's Fellowship, something
we haven't seen here since 1959, the year of the Great Revival, when the Spirit descended upon the Baptists during a week of meetings held by a travelling evangelist from Stockton-on-Tees called Maynard Rogers, whose name lives on in our town in legend and in the name of the Baptists' coffee bar and meeting rooms on Mountjoy Street, the Maynard Rogers Rooms (which are currently in the process of being converted into a Christian Internet café). Baptists, of course, are known to be both prone and partial to revival, and some of them had started sneaking down to the evening services at the People's Fellowship in search of the Spirit, who seems increasingly fickle these days and who no longer seems to favour the mainline denominations.
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