Ring Road (37 page)

Bob's mother was doing absolutely fine in the home, if a person who needed help to dress, eat and go to the toilet could ever be said to be doing fine, which in our town they could, actually, because if nothing else we are taught from a young age not to grumble and to be happy with what little we've got, so frankly if you're still breathing you're doing fine here, even if you're on a ventilator, and it looked as though Bob's mother might be fine in the home for some time to come. She wasn't going anywhere. She was not about to drop off her perch.

Bob, on the other hand, had started going to all sorts of places. He had flown the nest.

Now that he didn't have his mother at home to worry about, Bob sometimes found himself in the evenings with nothing to do and no one to do it with. He hated watching the TV alone. Even TV with his mum was to be preferred to watching TV alone. Having his mum there talking to it or at it or just staring mesmerised at the screen made you realise just how bad TV was, and what it was for, and who it was aimed at: TV is aimed at people with a serious brain dysfunction. If you realise that it's easier to understand it – you can appreciate it better. He was also beginning to tire of the waitresses at the restaurant – he just couldn't manage the necessary chat any more – and so he found he had a little spare time now, for the first time in years, and he had started visiting clubs, in search of companionship and something else which he couldn't quite put his finger on. He'd been to quite a few places up in the city, but tonight, because it was Christmas Eve and he didn't want to drive, and because this was going to be his first Christmas without his mother at home, and because he needed a drink, Bob decided he would stay in town and visit Paradise Lost.

He'd been in there for only half an hour or so, admiring the thirty-foot zinc bar and the mirrors, and the fake tropical vegetation and palm trees, and the snakes coiling around
columns everywhere, their fibreglass bodies cool to the touch and glistening under the lights.
*
He'd got talking to the barman, Peter, who was from Australia, a backpacker who'd made it all the way over from the other side of the world and had somehow ended up here. He'd wanted to experience real life, he told Bob – he was from Melbourne – and so he had avoided all the usual glamorous destinations and chosen here as a stopping-off point, a kind of archetypal nowhere, he said. It's hardly flattering to have your town described as a nowhere, but even a nowhere's a somewhere to nobodies like us and, anyway, most of us here are impervious or just plain dumb enough to take criticism as a compliment. He'd enjoyed real life here so much, in fact, Peter the Australian, that as soon as he'd earned enough money he was getting the hell out and moving on to New York. This was a lot more information
than you'd usually get out of a barman here in town – even if you've known him since childhood, which many of us do, but it made no difference, because barmen and women here are obliged to take a binding vow of silence and surliness at the age of eighteen – and Bob had to admire the young man's ease and confidence and eagerness, and his obvious bartending abilities. He had mixed an excellent rum and Coke, which had become Bob's drink of choice while out clubbing, a return to adolescent enthusiasms, before the beer and then wine and then the whiskey had got a hold of him.

The club was half empty. It was still early.

Bob had found in the music and in the crowds at the clubs exactly the distraction that he needed and desired; the perfect alternative and replacement, in fact, for a mother with Alzheimer's. When he wasn't working these days Bob was either thinking about work or visiting his mother in the home and that was it, that was his life: work, mother, work, mother. There was nothing else, except the gym and investing his money, which wasn't as easy as it looked, when you considered the recent worldwide downturn in stocks and shares. What with trying to get the franchise together on the sandwich place, Bob's plate was pretty full. But when he went to clubs and he was assaulted by the music and the people and the atmosphere, and the drugs, admittedly, he found that he forgot all about his everyday concerns and considerations, and became conscious of other ideas and desires forming within himself: ideas and desires he could not articulate; and did not want to; and which had nothing to do with his mother, or sandwiches, or money; ideas and desires which had never really occurred to him before.

With his mum in the home Bob had begun to realise, had begun to work out what he really valued in life, what mattered to him, what he enjoyed, and these things were, in decreasing order of importance, Beauty, Luxury and Brilliance, none of them, obviously, readily available in our town, where stocks
are low, and he had started wondering if he might need to take a break from here and from work, and visit somewhere like San Francisco, or Melbourne even, to get a little top-up. Somewhere different, for a sabbatical. Somewhere where Beauty, Luxury and Brilliance grow on trees, and are waiting to be picked and plucked by passers-by. Maybe when his mother had died – there was no use denying it, he'd had the thought, ashamed though he was to admit it.

He loved dancing in the clubs – that was his holiday in the meantime – or even just watching people dance, people who were generally about twenty years younger than him, which did not perturb him. On the contrary, he enjoyed their youth on their behalf. He admired the fact that youth did not require discipline to acquire beauty – that it did not know even that it was in possession of beauty. To the young, beauty is simply a given, a gift, something they are born with which eventually is taken from them and which they are never able to get back. Bob had been working hard on his abs recently at the gym, and he'd started to see results, but it took so much work, just to burn off those few extra pounds, that sometimes he wondered if it was really worth it. For the young people in the clubs there was no such work involved: their abs just were; they existed, like them. The club was for Bob in some ways the fulfilment of the gym, but it was also its opposite: in the gym you were working and attending to yourself and your own business. But in the clubs you were there to be devoted to some other thing, some other feeling, or piece of music, and you became unconscious of your own existence and became part of a bigger, living, breathing organism. It was like when he was young, just him and his mum, eating sandwiches, staring out of the window, watching the world go by, that delicious feeling of things simply being right without your even having to try.

Yet he also found at the clubs that he was overcome sometimes with unaccountable feelings of pain and longing, feelings
which made him uncomfortable and angry with himself.

He was feeling angry tonight, actually, for some reason, drinking his rum and Coke, watching a young man dancing – there were only about half a dozen people on the dance floor and all the rest of them were women, so the man stood out. He stood out also because he was taller and he looked impudent. His head was held more erect, and he had close-cropped hair and wore an earring, and was dressed in a tracksuit top and stonewashed jeans, an utterly unremarkable-looking young man who danced in an ungainly, rollicking fashion, our own local variation on the style of the times, his knees slightly bent, throwing his arms and hands up into the air, his face entirely blank, and yet he seemed, in a way that Bob could not fully articulate, he seemed to be utterly complete, and in and of himself, to be perfectly self-contained and yet to have lost himself successfully in the music. He had something that Bob didn't have and which Bob wanted very badly. Bob thought, and he almost said out loud, ‘I want you.'

Bob found this thought unnerving, understandably for a man who as far as he was previously aware was around about 150 per cent heterosexual, yet it was a thought that merged quickly into a feeling and the feeling quickly overcame him, and he was seized suddenly with the need to get outside, to get a breath of fresh air and to regain his composure – if he could get outside he'd be fine and he'd forget all about this.

And it was when he stepped outside the club, into the dark and cold, that he too saw the Quality Hotel.

Paul, of course, had been the first person to see it. He was actually in the Quality Hotel. He was there.

He'd had everything ready and everything arranged. Scunty, his friend from the Institute, who was working in the Big Banana, the record shop up on High Street, had done him some great flyers, showing the hotel looking like a Gothic castle, with a huge, all-seeing, blood-red eye in the centre,
and he'd also got someone he knew on a pirate radio station up in the city to put out the word. They'd got into the hotel the night before, the two of them, their baseball caps pulled low, through the old entrance into the Italian garden on Tarry Lane, and they'd shifted a lot of debris. It was a creepy kind of a place at night, there was no denying it, although both Paul and Scunty did their best to pretend otherwise.

‘It's like Scooby-Doo,' said Scunty, who was the kind of man who collects old
Marvel
comics and who still lives with his parents. His bark was worse than his bite, Scunty. Even his tattoos were quite sweet, when you got up close – snakes, mostly, and flames, but he also had a little Scottie dog on his shoulder, in memory of his gran's dog Floofy, who'd wandered on to the ring road years ago, when it was first built, obviously thinking it was still fields. But no one need know about that tonight: Scunty was security for the evening.

There was a lot of scurrying inside the Quality Hotel, the sound of rats on the remains of parquet, and there were these curious winds and draughts, and it was impossible to see much because of the dark. It looked a lot better from the outside, actually, than inside, the Quality Hotel, but that would be true in town generally.

Scunty had managed to borrow a van, and they'd gone and picked up all the gear: some bass-bins, and a smoke machine, and some UV lights from a place up in the city, and the candyfloss machine and the hot-dog stall, and the Slush Puppie maker, and they'd got a hold of a few milk crates for people to sit on, and Paul had set up his turntables in what More O'Ferral had intended to be the chapel, but which had ended up as the library and then the dining room, and finally the place where you could get a Knickerbocker Glory on a Sunday.

‘It's gonna be totally crazy, ' Paul had kept saying to Scunty in encouragement and in the closest thing to a kind of black American patois that he could manage, as they lugged the
gear into the deserted building and across the moonlit lobby into the chapel. ‘It's gonna be wicked.'

Paul had had to scale down his original and rather more wicked plans. He hadn't had time to pull everything together. He'd had to take a job – he couldn't turn it down, or he'd have lost all his benefits. He'd had an interview and before he knew it, there he was, working, actually working, for a firm who had a franchise to operate coin-operated children's rides in shopping malls and in leisure centres and in hospitals and in indoor soft-play areas. He had to start out at Bloom's early in the morning, at 6 a.m., before anyone else was there, cleaning the rides and collecting the money, and he was paid the minimum wage and he had to wear a black polo shirt with WILLOUGHBY RIDES embroidered in white over the breast, and he felt like a Roman slave, branded with his master's name. By the afternoon the malls were all like cattle markets, but early in the morning he didn't mind, early in the morning a place like Bloom's felt more like an amphitheatre or a cathedral: the hush, the vast floor spaces. It felt like an arena, somewhere where something might happen, and where Paul was a part of it. He was supplied with rags, and Marigolds, and antiseptic surface cleaners, and baby wipes, and he'd added an old toothbrush of his own, to help him get into those difficult-to-reach corners: Hank's Hot Dog Van was an absolute bugger.

It wasn't a bad job, really, and it was the rides that had given him the idea: some kind of Christmas Eve fairground or circus in the Quality Hotel. That was his big idea. An event. A space. Rides and entertainment. But once he'd made a few calls he realised that a fairground wasn't practical: the rides were too expensive. Far too much. Even for a juggler you were looking at £100 cash in hand, money up front. He was amazed – he thought street performers were all hippies who'd have been glad of a swig from a bottle of cider and the chance to pass round the hat. But everyone these days, it
seems, is a professional. He'd even rung a local children's magician, ‘Laughing' Norman Needy, and Norman had asked him about insurance, for goodness' sake.
*
So Paul had to scale down. He did some basic cash projections and business plans on the back of the Willoughby Rides brochures. Tickets for the evening would cost, say, £10, and he reckoned he could attract up to 500 people, and once they were inside they were his. He'd get a Slush Puppie machine – that only cost £50 for the night's hire, and then he could charge £2 per drink. Candyfloss as well, similar. If his calculations were correct, he reckoned he'd be able to take about £20,000 in one evening, what with all the other merchandising opportunities: helium balloons, sparkly wands. And the drugs, of course. Scunty knew a couple of people and Paul thought he could guarantee exclusive rights to them.

He'd had it all worked out. This was going to be the start of something big. Tonight was just the beginning, the beginning of a new kind of scene in our town, something really intense, something with that kind of vibe and that kind of feeling you get off the music when it's really working.

But the only feeling he'd had so far tonight was of panic. He was down about £2000 so far – all the gear had taken a
huge chunk of the budget, and on top of that there'd been all the money he'd had to agree to pay Scunty's friend Ricky for taking care of the drugs. Any money he'd had to pay up front he'd taken out of Joanne's building society account: it was the money they were saving up for a deposit on a house. He was planning to pay her back, of course, as soon as he had all the money in later. He hadn't told her about it. He wanted to surprise her. She wouldn't have understood.