Ring Road (36 page)

Scraping the remains of sausagemeat stuffing and chestnuts from under her fingernails, Mrs Gilbey slipped upstairs and prepared herself. Tonight she had decided to wear her new chisel-toed lace-up white leather ankle boots with the tapestry side panels. They were a bit young-looking on her, but they really were quite something and it was Christmas, after all. She was also going with her imitation suede skirt, which she kept for special occasions, with the tasselled fringe and the diamante trim on the seams. And she was teaming that up with her sparkly red, white and blue round-neck sleeveless top: her arms weren't as bad as her neck. It was quite an outfit, if she said so herself. She'd had her hair done that morning, in Fry's, by Noreen Fry herself – who has lovely teeth, Mrs Gilbey noticed, for the first time. She'd had her
hair cut and blow-dried, just the usual, but with a touch more colour, for the festive season.

Tonight, on Christmas Eve, Frank would be going round town with the Rotary Club, dispensing his largesse, and he wouldn't be home till midnight at the earliest, so he wouldn't even notice that she hadn't been there.

After carefully laying out Delia on the granite work surface ready for the morning, she took a taxi to the Leisure Centre, where she saw her fellow dancers already on the coach and Big Donna standing up front, resplendent in sparkly red stetson and white leather chaps. She smiled a big smile when she saw Mrs Gilbey climbing on board. ‘Hello, pet, ' she said. ‘We'd almost given up on you. I'm so glad you could make it.'

And the whole coach clapped.

Mrs Gilbey blushed to the roots of her Christmasy hair and as the coach set off she found herself seated next to a man wearing a plaid shirt, blue jeans and a fringed suede jacket. He was a pleasant enough sort of a fellow. He said his name was Spencer Bradley. He used to write a column for the
Impartial Recorder,
he said. She might have heard of him?

‘No, ' said Mrs Gilbey, she didn't think so.

‘The bat watch column?' he said.

‘Oh, ' said Mrs Gilbey, ‘the bat watch column.'

He worked at the Spick and Span car wash up on the ring road these days, he said – did she know it? Yes, she knew it, although Frank refused to take any of their cars there. Spencer Bradley said that his real love was still for animals, even though he no longer wrote the bat watch column. He kept a smallholding just outside town, where he raised chickens and a few sheep. It wasn't a bad life, he said. ‘But enough about me. Tell me about yourself.'

‘Well, ' Mrs Gilbey began, as the coach made its way up Bridge Street, past Macey's the chemists, and Tommy Tucker's chipper, up towards the ring road, ‘I'm not a terribly interesting person actually.'

‘Come on, ' said Spencer. ‘You look like a pretty interesting person to me.'

That's actually what he said, word for word, and Mrs Gilbey simply could not believe it.
My God, my God, my God!
she thought, as Phoebe might say in
Friends.
Was this a compliment? Mrs Gilbey had almost forgotten what it was like, a man paying you a compliment. It was quite nice, actually, if rather shocking and a little OTT – a bit like a bird displaying its plumage in one of those nature programmes, or Delia's recipe for the Christmas goose stuffed with prunes.

‘No, really, ' she said, looking out at the big new purple call centre and Kwik-Fit, and becoming conscious of fingering her hair, ‘there's not much to tell.'

Oh. My.
God!

‘Come on, ' said Spencer, reaching into the bag beneath his feet, ‘I've told you all about myself. Maybe this'll help loosen your tongue a bit.' And he produced a miniature bottle of brandy and a couple of plastic cups. ‘Happy Christmas, ' he said, pouring large measures and handing a cup to Mrs Gilbey. ‘Cheers!'

‘Cheers!' she said, accepting. This could be fun.

‘Look, ' said Big Donna, pointing back towards town, as they pulled up on to the ring road, heading for the motorway.

Frank had seen it too.

He'd been feeling pretty uncomfortable all night in his Santa suit, what with one thing and another, and now he was flaming red with itches. He'd acquired the suit some years ago, when he was maybe a stone or two lighter, and Mrs Gilbey had patched it since, adding a large piece of what had once been the red velvet curtains from the dining room into the crotch and sewing a large ‘V into the waistband, but at the end of the day nylon is nylon, and it was stretched tight across his belly and up under his armpits, and it was giving him hell,
and his beard kept falling off, and he was freezing cold. Frank was not feeling very festive.

The sleigh he rode on every year was in fact two large pieces of sleigh-shaped plywood tied on to a trailer on loan from T. P. McArdle, and hitched to the back of Martin Phillips's Range Rover, which had a large red nose tied to its bonnet, Rudolph-style, and strange to say people actually paid for the privilege of having Frank Gilbey trussed up as Santa sat on the back of the trailer to come and visit their home and wave to their children on Christmas Eve, but then all the proceeds do go to charity and we are generous givers to charity here, although we prefer charities we can relate to: the Cancer Research Campaign, for example, is very popular, and Help the Aged. Oxfam is slightly suspect – all those ethnic items in the shop.

Frank was wondering if perhaps he wasn't getting a little old for this game and whether it was time to hand on the reins, and the boots, and the beard to a younger, slimmer man. They were still only about halfway through their rounds this evening and Frank had had enough. He was at a low ebb, which was unlike him: Frank's tides are nearly always high. The piece in the
Impartial Recorder
accusing him of having stolen council property – or ‘our national treasures', as the article had put it – had undoubtedly damaged his reputation. All he could do was hope it'd all be forgotten by the New Year. He'd weather the storm. Publishing a story like that just before Christmas was a pretty foolish move – people's stomachs are bigger than their memories – and he was currently taking legal advice from Martin Phillips on the best way to win redress from the paper. What Frank really wanted was the head of the editor, but tonight he just wanted to get to his glass of malt at the golf club and then home. Mrs Gilbey would have all the Christmas stuff prepared. She usually left him out a little something on Christmas Eve – a mince pie and a glass of milk, as if he really were Santa. He'd sleep in the spare room, so as not to wake her.

And as they drove down the High Street he could see the Quality Hotel in the distance.

Bobbie Dylan saw it too. She was just introducing the Band to the audience during ‘Green Onions'. It was difficult to sanctify a number like that, because it didn't have any lyrics – and Bobbie didn't believe that any melody in and of itself, any melody alone, could be either sacred or profane – but Brian had perfected this nice little thing on his trumpet where he kind of quoted ‘Amazing Grace', which was enough to raise ‘Green Onions' to something approaching sacred status, and it looked like ‘The People's Fellowship Annual Big Night Out, Featuring Bobbie Dylan and the Band, the Wise Men, the Virgin and the Little Baby J' was going to be a success.

Bobbie had been up at the microphone all night, doing her intercostal diaphragmatic breathing and singing her heart out. They had a pretty good crowd in and this was what it was all about: praising the Lord in the only way she knew how Giving back a little of what she'd received: love, mostly, or something, she was never quite sure what.

No sign of Francie, though, in the audience: he'd said he was going to have to do some pastoral visiting. He seemed tired and anxious at the moment, and Bobbie wondered sometimes if he was really up to it. She'd put together a few notes for sermons herself, actually, some ideas, and she was wondering if perhaps God was leading her to extend her ministry in that direction. Maybe Francie could keep the morning service and she could take care of the evenings: that was an idea. She was thinking something a bit more casual, maybe a cappuccino cart by the entrance, so the congregation could purchase refreshments on their way in, coffee and chocolate-chip cookies, and maybe a few sofas instead of stackable chairs. She'd have to pray it over with Francie.

She'd nearly finished introducing the Band when she saw it out of the window.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, ' she was saying, ‘I want you to put your hands together for probably the best bass player this side of Memphis, and certainly this side of the ring road: Mr Chick Stevens.' Cue crowd. And then she went on, ‘And of course last but not least, behind him, and behind us all, keeping us all together, on drums … Jesus Christ!'

At this the audience, as one, looked up at Gary behind his drum kit.

Gary really is no one's idea of the Second Coming, unless you happen to believe that Jesus has put on a little weight since the last time around and has taken to wearing Nirvana sweatshirts and sweatbands, and is balding; Phil probably comes closer to most people's idea of the Messiah, minus the beard, but he was playing guitar rather than drums. So it was only when the audience looked to where Bobbie was pointing, behind them, out of the window, that everybody saw it.

Billy Nibbs was pointing also. He'd been putting the finishing touches to a review – a devastating critique, if he said so himself – of the town's pantomime,
Open, Sesame!,
which had just premiered at Dreams, with an all-ages cast, and which was a combination of Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Sinbad the Sailor and
Sesame Street.
In his review Billy laid the blame for the worldwide decline in pantomime standards fairly and squarely at the door of the writers and producer and director and cast of the show, although he did admit that there was a problem with the form generally, which he blamed upon the rise of the novel, and he also took the opportunity to discuss at some length the question of predestination and free will, and whether Scheherazade was the first postmodern narrator, and the debt of the West to Arabic modes of storytelling, and he quoted Aristotle, F. R. Leavis and Jacques Derrida, not names that appeared often in the pages of the
Impartial Recorder
and which Colin Rimmer would soon be pulling out.

Colin could have done with a holiday. He would be driving up to the city tomorrow, Christmas Day, to drop off his presents to his daughters, who would be staying with his ex-wife and her omni-competent new husband, Stephen, who would only offer him the coolest of welcomes and a glass of chilled festive orange juice, because Colin was driving, and who preferred it if the children made all their presents, and then it'd be back to the house for a bottle of brandy by himself and a Christmas Dinner ready-meal from Marks. He might try to put in some work on the magnum opus, which he'd neglected recently. Lisa would be laughing on the other side of her face when he had the novel published and was working as a columnist on a London paper.

In the meantime he was stuck at the
Impartial Recorder
and he'd had quite a struggle with the lawyers, clearing the Frank Gilbey story, but he'd managed to push it through in the end, the week before Christmas, where they'd usually have had something soft as a lead, and Colin had splashed the headline 'FOUND: HIDDEN TREASURES'. It was not quite as hard-hitting a headline as he would have liked, but the lawyers had insisted. He'd been intending something more along the lines of 'THIEF!'  or 'SHAME!' or 'LIAR!' or even the headline he had always wanted to run but had never quite found the opportunity to use, the headline that every editor dreams of and believes in his heart of hearts his every word approximates: 'THE TRUTH'. In order to illustrate the story Colin had sent Joe Finnegan to get a photograph of Frank looking shifty, which shouldn't have been too difficult, since Frank is pretty much the personification of shifty, but Joe knew Frank from way back, when Joe was still in the picture-framing business and Frank had put quite a bit of business his way, providing frames and prints for various show homes and apartment developments around town, so Frank had actually looked quite poised and confident in Joe's photograph – benevolent almost, and ever so slightly contrite, with his head a bit bowed and wearing a
nice dark suit. In comparison, Billy's photograph of the trough and the fountain, which Colin ran alongside Joe's flattering portrait, perhaps lacked a little definition, but you could certainly tell that the objects photographed were the trough and the fountain that used to be down at the bottom of Main Street and which had disappeared, but it wasn't entirely clear from the blur exactly where they were, or why, so the overall effect was less immediately impressive than it could have been.

The story had certainly put on sales, though – a lot of newsagents were reporting no returns, which was something that hadn't happened for a long time, not since one of the teachers at Barneville House was sent to prison recently for doing things he said he didn't do at the school back in the 1970s.
*

For all the initial impact, it looked like Frank was going to try to brazen it out. A man like Frank didn't go down without a fight, but he would go down, Colin was sure of that: this might not have been the end, or the beginning of the end, but it was certainly the end of the beginning. Or the beginning of the beginning of the end. Or something like that. He really did need a holiday.

Once he'd brought Frank down, Colin was going to move on. Next year was going to be his year, he was sure of it. He was going to finish his book and put his life in order. Sort himself out a bit. He was even thinking of going in search of his birth parents.

It was Billy who called Colin over. Colin thought it would be just another plea for a semicolon. It was not.

As Colin stared out of the window, he was already composing the headline in his mind.

Bob Savory saw it at the same time and was making his own swift mental calculations.