Ring Road (29 page)

And then there were all these other people outside the pub, and someone had phoned for the police, and Bob and Billy and Davey were running away down streets they didn't know, until finally they found Billy's dad's van, the meat van, and they hid Davey in the back, amidst the stench of all the meat, and Billy drove so fast back to town in silence they might have been driving to catch a funeral: it felt like they were in the presence of death.

They might as well have been. When he got home Davey packed his grip and he went first thing in the morning, without even leaving a note or saying goodbye to anyone, and he was so terrified, and so relieved, and he felt so blank, that he never came back for twenty years. Billy and Bob kept an eye out for news in the
Impartial Recorder,
and Bob rang the hospital,
pretending he was a friend, and it turned out that the shaven-headed man was OK. Broken teeth. Broken nose. Stitches in his head. It was nothing serious. Nobody died.

Not that it would have made any difference to Davey Quinn. The outcome for Davey Quinn was assured: he knew he would have killed the man if he'd had the chance. He would have kept at him until there was nothing left. And that was the sad truth about Davey, which he'd discovered that night, aged seventeen. He had realised what he really was: a nasty, no-good shrivelled-up specimen of humanity. Just like everyone else, like he'd always known he was. Nothing special. He was the seventh son of a seventh son. And it meant nothing.

Once Davey had done the deed, once he'd let himself down, he found he could begin to face up to himself. He didn't have to impersonate himself any more, or pretend to be what he couldn't be and couldn't understand. As the seventh son of the seventh son he'd always struggled and tried not to stand out. If his brothers were behaving he behaved. If they misbehaved he misbehaved. He was, his teachers at school had said, easily led. He allowed other people to set the trend, to determine the tone, and he'd just copied, because he'd had no idea how to be himself. But now, defeated, and far away from our town, he was able to make himself up, however he wanted to be, to put himself together as a new person. He was doing his own thing. And he did – gloriously, for years, all over the globe, in all sorts of jobs and in all sorts of places – but in the end, of course, he knew he'd have to come back and try to be himself back home. Also, in the end it had meant coming back because he'd got a beating in a pub in London, when he'd started singing ‘Danny Boy' after a football match on the big screen, and some blökes in England tops had taken exception and had set upon him, and the next thing he knew he had a ruptured kidney and he was pissing blood, and he was in hospital, and it was time to come home. He'd served his time. He was free to start over.

But as soon as he came back he'd been caught. He'd been suckered back into the family business and had started to lose his way. After the disaster with the stripping he could feel his brothers start smirking at him again. And his grandfather, speaking to him through the writing on the wall. Everyone wanting to catch up on where he'd been and what he'd done, and what he was going to do next, and everyone with an opinion. Davey Quinn Senior only allowed him to work on new properties on the estates round the ring road and he wasn't allowed to strip – stripping was definitely off the menu. Painting and papering, and fresh walls only. Doing the stock-take he realised that this was his life, this was going to be his life: calculating paint amounts, applying coats. He was the seventh son again and he was a nobody.

So by the time he shut the lock-up on that wind dog of a morning he'd decided.

There was no place for him here. He wasn't going to be hanging around.

He had no real friends here any more. Billy Nibbs had his head so far into his books that he was unreachable. And as for Bob Savory … Bob had become a parody of a businessman, who thought he could blackmail Davey and get him to do whatever he wanted. Which, of course, he couldn't.

Although. He had given Davey a way out, if he wanted it. Davey really didn't care about the Quality Hotel, or why Bob and Frank Gilbey wanted it out of the way. It meant nothing to him.

So he'd decided to do the job for Bob. He'd decided he was going to take the money and run.

And this time he would not be coming back.

But first he had to go and price a job for his dad.

It was Lorraine. She'd decided to redecorate. She needed a change. She wanted carpets instead of the laminate floors. She wanted new curtains. It was time she treated herself to a new
duvet cover. It was time she washed away all memories of the Scotsman. She'd had a tartan biscuit tin, but that was away already.

Her brief marriage to the Scotsman, whose name had not been mentioned since he'd gone, had been the embarrassment that Lorraine had been waiting for all her life. The Scotsman was an alcoholic when he met her, but he never drank in company, or in the house, so Lorraine had never really noticed: he ate a lot of mints and he wore an expensive aftershave, so he always smelt nice; in fact, it was one of the things she liked about him. She'd never much liked the smell of men she'd been with before – smoke and beer and urine. The Scotsman smelt fresh in comparison. Compared with most of the men in our town the Scotsman was ambrosial. Her dad, Frank, had liked him a lot.

When they married, the Scotsman had taken to drinking secretly in the car, or in the garden shed, where he would stare out at a patch of grassed-over builder's rubble that he knew he was never going to plant as a garden. He used a mouthwash, actually, as well as the mints and the cologne – Lorraine never knew. And when he gargled, he swallowed. He got a buzz off the alcohol.

The crunch had come one night in November. They'd been married for three months and Lorraine was determined they should plant a garden before Christmas. In her mind she needed something to show for the first few months of marriage. The Scotsman had made it clear that he wasn't ready for them to start a family.

Lorraine loved her gardening magazines and books, and watching the television make-over programmes. Theirs was a new house on the biggest, most prestigious estate built outside the ring road, Woodsides. The houses there are all pretty high spec, despite the usual cost cuttings and obligatory subcontracted shoddy workmanship – they're all maple kitchens with under-heated Italian tiled floors and hotel-style bathrooms
with slightly dribbly taps and wonky fittings.
*
Double garages come as standard. All the houses are sold now, but the main contractor's big blue van is rarely off site, replacing warped doors or cracked tiles, rewiring, reroofing and even, in some cases, reboring the drains. ‘If You Live in WOODSIDES,' according to the estate agents and developers' exclusive, full-colour, typographically insistent promotional information packs, ‘You Expect the Best' but to be honest, if you do Expect the Best, you'd do better not to Live There: most of our town's new-builds are a sure sign that Standards Are Slipping. A house built here in, say, 1995 has aged a whole lot quicker than a house built here in 1905, halogen spots or no halogen spots. Lorraine liked the house, though. She liked the double-length combined living and dining room, which was large enough to accommodate two white leather sofas and an eight-seater dining table which she'd covered with white damask. The sofas had been a gift from Frank and Irene to the young marrieds, and ever since the wedding Lorraine had been itching to get friends round to admire the sofas and the stainless steel and all their shared good taste, but somehow they hadn't got round to doing much entertaining. The Scotsman said he wanted them to get settled in a bit first, so Lorraine spent her evenings fussing over fabric books and catalogues. The four bedrooms would give them plenty of room for the children when they arrived, as they inevitably would, as surely as the fashion for curtain fabrics swung from swags to blinds and back again.

They'd bought the house off-plan, so they'd been able to
choose a lot of their own fittings and there was, to all intents and purposes, nothing to be done to the place when they moved in. It was an instant home. Thus, the garden had become Lorraine's obsession.

Frank had offered to pay for his own gardener – Little Mickey Matchett, who used to work for the council parks department, when there was a council parks department – to come and sort it out, but Lorraine wanted the garden to be the outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible grace of a married relationship, and she believed that her planting designs should be carried out by a dedicated husband, attending garden centres and nurseries with her on a Saturday, and happily planting and tending all day Sunday. In fact, the Scotsman spent Saturdays watching sport and Sundays recovering from a hangover and preparing for another week's drinking.

So Lorraine had gone to work on the garden herself. She'd had delivered enough bedding plants to maintain every roundabout on the ring road and beyond, and it was a Saturday when a trailer load of farmyard manure had been deposited on the front drive that finally did it for the Scotsman.

He'd arrived home from the golf club in his BMW saloon, about halfway through the day's drinking timetable, post gin and tonics and beer, and pre wine and spirits, and he saw the manure piled in the drive. He saw Lorraine inside the house, a pair of Marigolds on, gazing anxiously at the clock, and suddenly he saw his life flash before him: the mulch of years to come, the plants, the children, the pets, the elderly parents requiring care, and he suddenly turned the car round, and headed for the ring road and out on to the motorway. He retuned from Classic FM to Radio 1 and he never looked back.

Lorraine couldn't understand what had happened. He'd written after a few months – no return address – to apologise and said it was the drink. ‘Don't blame yourself, ' he
wrote, but it was too late, Lorraine had already blamed herself. She'd tormented herself going over every little detail, looking for signs, and suddenly she saw the signs everywhere. Looking at the Scotsman now, in her mind's eye, all day and every day, more than she'd ever even noticed him when he was around, she saw what she'd never noticed before: behind the sweet accent, beneath the sweet breath and the smart-casual clothing, she saw a selfish, lying, lazy, pathetic, hypocritical brute. And looking at herself she recognised what she'd always known and what she'd now had confirmed: she was a naïve, gullible, weak, needy, timid, ugly, fat, desperate thirty-something who'd probably have fallen for the first serial killer to take an interest in her.

Everything they'd done together, she realised, was a sham. Every moment they'd shared was a waste. Their vows were meaningless. Each kiss was a mocking insult. He was laughing at her when they made love, sniggering at everything she said. She could still see him sometimes in the mirrors, mocking her: how could anyone love that?! Huh? How could anyone respect that? All those fabrics and soft furnishings. The sofas. She told herself she should have seen it coming, that anyone else would have guessed it, or would have done something to sort it out. Anyone else, even an idiot, the most stupid person in the world, could have worked out that the Scotsman would prove to be a bad bet. She saw it all now, in full focus.

A few weeks before he'd disappeared, for example, they'd attended his work's Hallowe'en party together, which had been arranged by his new PA, Angie, who was unmarried and who had arrived at the party dressed as a Renaissance sorceress, a costume which involved her having her blonde hair dyed black, and wearing a bustier, black leather boots and a free-flowing see-through chiffon skirt. The Scotsman had gone as Count Dracula, wearing a tuxedo, with a set of false teeth. Lorraine had gone as the Bride of Frankenstein. She'd worn her wedding dress – which she adored – and
attached a plastic novelty knife dripping plastic blood. She'd thought it was funny at the time – a kind of a joke, and a good way to get some further use out of the dress. Now she realised it was a premonition. The Scotsman had spent all evening by the cocktails, chatting to Angie. Lorraine had assumed it was about work, but then she lost sight of them both for about half an hour and when she saw them again she'd noticed that the Scotsman was without his false teeth and the Renaissance sorceress had let her hair down. At the time she thought nothing of it. But now … It was terrible, the thought of it, her sheer stupidity. It tormented her. Anyone else, anyone except her, would have noticed.

The manure stood out front of the house for months, in humiliation. In the end, Frank had insisted that Little Mickey Matchett go round to clear it away and start work on the garden, but Lorraine had lost interest. She had always had a difficult relationship with her own body, but she now abandoned herself fully to bulimia and the music of solo female artistes. She'd got sick. The garden remained unplanted.

And then Frank had set her up in the Bridal and Tan Shop.

It was the shop that had saved Lorraine. It was the shop that had brought her back from the brink: the thought of all those dresses, and the lovely accessories, and the tanning bed, the responsibility of making other people's dreams a reality. She'd had to suspend trading a few times, because she just couldn't cope, but the beauty of it all kept bringing her back. ‘A wide range of dresses to suit all tastes' read her advertisement in the
Impartial Recorder.
‘Whether you're looking for the cutting-edge modern styles or the traditional, we can provide you with everything for your perfect day.' As well as the clothes and the tanning she did a full bridal package: the wedding music, the wedding favours, musicians, the rings, the flowers, the hair and the make-up. If you wanted her to, Lorraine could arrange just about everything for you, and she'd be there on the day to see you through, from the moment
you woke up in the morning to the minute you slipped away to your secret honeymoon location, or at least the hotel room upstairs. She loved all that.