Ring Road (33 page)

Everything had changed on the papers within Colin's lifetime. Colin was old enough to remember galleys, and men in pork-pie hats in pubs, and boys running around with corrected proofs, and cigarette ends piling up in clamshell ashtrays next to typewriters and waste-paper bins full to overflowing. It wasn't like that now. It was all done on screen now, and e-mail, and press releases, and he seemed to spend half his time in meetings with Justin, talking about advertising features and how much they could wring out of the DIY superstore or Bob Savory if they granted them a full-colour eight-page insert. All the fun had gone out of it. But a night like tonight made it all seem worthwhile.

Cigars for everyone!

Colin's success as an editor and his prodigious work rate he ascribed to his constitution, to alcohol, to Scarpetti's fried breakfasts with grated Parmesan cheese, to high-tar cigarettes and to prescription drugs. He'd been taking Prozac for about five years now, ever since his wife had left him. You weren't supposed to be on it for that long, but Doctor Armstrong at the Health Centre didn't seem too bothered about it, so neither was Colin. He simply kept on with the repeat prescription and there was never a problem. The great thing about the Prozac, Colin had found, was that it smoothed you out. It left you feeling a little less on edge, more satisfied, like you'd already had a couple of glasses of wine, and maybe a gin and tonic a half-hour or so before that, and a small ramekin of hand-cooked crisps, or some Bombay mix. With the Prozac Colin found it easier to take difficult decisions. For example, the decision he had just made: he knew that if he went to press with what he had on Frank Gilbey there'd be trouble. But the Prozac had helped him to understand that he really had no choice. The Prozac offered him the reassurance he needed.

Colin had said to himself, ‘I don't know about this. This story is going to be controversial.'

And the Prozac had said, ‘Whatever.'

This was going to be Colin Rimmer's ticket out of here. This was what was finally going to release him from his dependence, his addiction to this town. He had solved a bona fide mystery and now he could leave. He had earned his passage. He was away. Colin had always kept a cycling machine in his office, because he'd read that Harold Evans used to keep a machine in his office, and Harold Evans was another hero. Colin's cycling machine was planted right in front of the window, amidst the piles of papers, overlooking the car park and the Quality Hotel, and he liked to cycle for twenty miles every morning while watching the breakfast
news, and sometimes while he cycled and watched TV he imagined himself cycling up and out of the window and up and up and over the car park, over the top of the Quality Hotel, like the boys in
ET,
which was his all-time favourite film, and over the ocean to the offices of the
New Yorker,
where he would park his bicycle outside, and go upstairs and sit down at his manual typewriter and bang out a Talk of the Town.
*

Recently, while he'd been cycling, though, Colin had not been thinking about
ET
or the
New Yorker.
He had been thinking about Frank Gilbey. There had been plenty of times the
Impartial Recorder
could have gone for Frank, but they hadn't; Colin had held off, or his hand had been stayed. There was the mysterious slurry run-off, for example, a few years ago, on the fields around Bloom's, which had ruined many farmers' land, and which had allowed for the mall development not only to go ahead but to expand far beyond its original intended limits: Frank was behind it, Colin was sure, but he'd been unable to get enough proof. Then there was the problem with the supply of shoddy materials being used in the building of Bloom's: large parts of the roof had to be replaced within six months of the mall having opened, at huge expense; the main roofing contractor had subcontracted to a
subcontractor who had subcontracted to one of Frank's development companies, but the complicated paperchase had been too much for Colin to handle on his own. And then, of course, there was the general, unexceptional, unremarked awarding of council contracts to companies either owned by or connected to Frank: Colin knew what went on, everyone knew what went on, but that was just the way things were around here and if that's the way things were, that's the way they stayed. There was nothing you could do about it. Colin had other fish to fry. He couldn't get too excited about it. He remained, as it were, impassive. But in late November, Frank Gilbey had given Colin the excuse he needed and the determination to become implacable.

Colin could just about cope with running sycophantic interviews with councillors: that was part of the job. He could just about cope with the paper's ridiculous new red masthead, which made it look like an amateur tabloid, but which he agreed was a necessary updating, and he'd managed the big change from the old Linotype machines to computers and photocomposition, which, in his opinion, made the paper look like a cheap photocopied newsletter, and which took away all the romance involved in going to press. He could just about cope with Justin's continual demands for increases in advertising space, which paid for the paper, after all, and the occasional use of press releases as news, which Colin justified to himself as being due to a lack of staffing. He could even cope with the ghastly syndicated pictures of so-called celebrities, which had begun to creep into the pages, and the slow steady drip of disinformation from the council's press officer, who now handled all enquiries regarding local council business. The police were the same: you couldn't get to talk to anyone any more up at the station or in the pubs. It all went through the press office. That was understandable, that was OK. What Colin could not cope with, though, was the distortion of facts. Colin may not have been a Woodward or
a Bernstein, he may have failed in all his early ambitions, but he liked to think that his paper stuck to the facts. Facts, Colin believed, were the life and blood of a paper, the spirit and the soul, and they were sacred. Facts could not be bought and sold, and to suggest that they could was sacrilege. So as far as Colin was concerned, Frank Gilbey had committed the sin against the Holy Spirit.

In early November, Frank had asked Colin to run a story suggesting that Bloom's would be reporting a pre-Christmas surge in profits and that they were predicting their best Christmas yet.

But Colin knew
for a fact
that this was not the case.

Colin knew that consumer spending was down. He had enough contacts at Bloom's himself to do his own digging. John ‘The Leatherman' Brown had been a friend of Colin's parents – he was into light opera and listened all day to Classic FM – and he kept Colin informed of what was happening up there at the mall. There were rumours, according to John, that some of the bigger stores, which were owned by multinationals, were going to be issuing profits warnings.

Frank had suggested to Colin, over lunch in the Plough and the Stars, that the story had to be run ‘for the sake of the town', and that was it, that was too much for Colin.
For the sake of the town!
Frank Gilbey was not interested in our town. Frank Gilbey had destroyed the town. Frank was responsible for the three things that had ruined the way we were, the way Colin remembered things: the ring road, Bloom's and the luxury apartments. These three things had destroyed the little micro-communities that had made up the town, communities that you'd have hardly known existed, but which made the town what it was, the little communities where people had grown up, where Colin grew up, and Davey Quinn, and Francie McGinn, and Bob Savory, and Cherith, and Sammy, and Bobbie Dylan, all of us, places with no names but with their own little small row of shops, and a patch of
waste ground or a scrap of park where you could play football and smoke, and fight wars, places where twenty-four-hour garages had now replaced the shops, and where the waste ground now housed exciting developments of luxury loft-style apartments, with electric gates and high fencing all round. Colin knew that this was progress, but he wasn't so foolish as to think it was a good thing. The town had been destroyed and Frank Gilbey was largely responsible, so when Frank stuffed a big artery-clogging slice of Banoffee pie into his big fat greedy mouth and uttered that phrase, ‘for the sake of the town', Colin's heart was hardened against him.

Over coffee – which he took black, no sugar, with characteristic fortitude – Colin decided to return to the chase. He had a paper to run and his resources were limited, but he had someone now he could trust, who would do his bidding and do his digging for him, and that someone was Billy Nibbs.

Billy had loved being a part of the paper. He loved being among people who regarded writing as a natural, normal experience, and an activity for which it was possible to get paid. To get paid, for writing: that was just incredible for Billy. For Billy, writing had always been a troubled and troubling enterprise, something you did in private and in secrecy, and which offered no prospect of paying its own way. To Billy Nibbs working at the
Impartial Recorder
was therefore like attending a banquet at the court of an all-powerful king – it was both delicious and corrupting. In his first few weeks at the paper he'd been invited out a couple of times by the legendary Tudor Cassady, the Arts and Features editor, a man almost as wide as he is tall, who lives up to his name by resembling in all but crown and furs the late Henry VIII and who writes the ‘Forks and Corks' column, and who has done so for over thirty years, and whose little chin-bearded face peers out from a photograph at the top of the page, for all the world as if he were about to issue the command, ‘Off with Their Heads!'
Billy couldn't believe he was actually being paid to eat out. Tudor also gave him a few books from the stash on his desk. They were first novels, mostly, but still. They were free – free books! He was even sent to see a play for free. It felt like he'd died and gone to heaven. Billy had had no idea that this sort of thing went on, in our town.

It was when he wrote his first review that Billy finally felt he had crossed over. He was no longer a creator but a destroyer and he realised that there was no going back. He was no longer a poet. He had become a journalist. The play he went to see was in the town's playhouse – and yes, we do have one, although it remains a well-kept secret, Dreams, a tiny theatre on McAuley Street, which is in the premises of the old Home for the Industrious Blind, and which exists largely because of the fund-raising efforts of Colin Rimmer's parents, Fee and Philip, who believed that what our town really needed back in the dark days of the 1970s was somewhere people could go to see Alan Ayckbourn plays and hear Gilbert and Sullivan. In fact, Dreams is used mostly for theatre in education projects, where children are taught about the evils of drugs and under-age sex by out-of-work actors from the city who stand outside after their performances, smoking, signing autographs and struggling with their sexuality.

Billy knew people in the play he was sent to review, which was a modern dress version of
The Duchess of Malfi
– he'd actually been to school with the Duchess herself, who was played by Laura Buckle in a black wig and a 1920s cocktail dress. He sat up all night after the performance, eating biscuits and drinking cans of Red Bull, and writing what amounted to a complete demolition, a total destruction of what he'd just seen: if he could have pulled down the scenery and the proscenium arch as well he probably would have done. He spent a lot of his time trying to find synonyms for ‘pathetic' and ‘risible' in
Roget's Thesaurus,
and consulting Colin Rimmer's in-house style book, which now took pride of place
on his desk at the end of his bed, replacing his once prized rhyming dictionary. When he handed in the piece the next day, Colin himself had seen to it, ripping through it with a red pen and interrogating Billy over every phrase and sentence – ‘What do we mean here?' he would ask and Billy would try to explain, and Colin would say, ‘No, I think what we mean here is this' and then he'd rewrite the passage, minus adjectives and clauses. When the piece was published later that week Billy bought two copies of the paper – one for everyday use and one to keep – and when he read the review he did feel a little guilty about what he'd written, particularly his criticism of the Duchess, whom he described as having a face like a mouldy potato and a voice like toasted ham and cheese, which was supposed to be a joke, but then he bumped into Laura Buckle when he was in Tom Hines's one day buying his bacon, and he tried a sheepish smile, but she looked right through him and he realised that that was that. It was too late. There was no going back. The die was cast.

Billy gave in, then, to the impulse to criticise everything and everybody. There was hardly a meal or a play or a book or a film that came his way that was not in some way deficient and which Billy did not take great pleasure in picking apart, for his own education and amusement, and for the education and amusement of others. Unknown to him, he had passed the test: Colin had wanted to see if he had what it took. And he did. Billy had proved to have that rare combination of utter cynicism and unbounded enthusiasm which was required by the good jobbing journalist. Years of working at the dump had already confirmed Billy in his belief that people are basically dirty, smelly, waste-producing animals, whose remains and discards are good merely as food for vermin, wild dogs and seagulls, with the rest fit only to be burned or buried in a hole, and his reading of the work of the great modernist writers had convinced him of the same. He therefore had the makings of a truly great local journalist:
he was a bitter man with huge dreams who was capable of infinite disappointment.

So he was more than prepared when Colin had set him on to Frank Gilbey.

‘Imagine you're writing a review, ' Colin had said. ‘Except this time it's a review of someone's life.'

Billy had no idea what he was looking for, but he knew where to start and he spent weeks in the
Impartial Recorder's
old basement composing room, which had become the de facto library and archive, trawling through back issues of damp and crumbly bound volumes. He took notes and he set up interviews.