Ring Road: There’s no place like home. Ian Sansom
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between an ‘a’ and an ‘o’. Oranges look like aronges and apples look like opples. Mind you, his is no better: he’d have made a good doctor, according to Mrs Donelly, who used to work as a receptionist at the Health Centre down by the People’s Park, so she should know. Mr Donelly was not a doctor, though: he’d been a warehouseman, up at Bloom’s, until he’d retired. He used to be a compositor, years ago, but the bottom fell out of the market.
It’ll be a quiet Christmas for them without the children, but they’re still planning to have a few people round on Boxing Day – the Quinns, with Davey, their celebrated returnee, Mrs Skingle and her son Steve, the scaffolder, who earns a packet, according to Mr Donelly, and Mrs Donelly’s cousin Barbara, who is all alone – so Mr Donelly has stocked up, as instructed, on twenty-four Cocktail Pizza Squares (‘A fun selection of eight tomato & cheese, eight ham & cheese, and eight mushroom & cheese’), twelve Vol-au-Vents (‘Four creamy chicken & mushroom, four ham & cheese, and four succulent prawn’), some mini quiche (Traditional, Mediterranean and Vegetarian), some ‘small succulent’ pork cocktail sausages, ‘fully cooked and ready to serve’, needless to say, twelve Chicken Tikka Bites (‘Lightly grilled pieces of chicken in a traditional Indian-style marinade of spices, coriander and garlic’), some hand-cooked crisps, and six Chocolate Tartlets (‘Chocolate pastry tarts filled with white or milk chocolate mousse, decorated with chocolate curls’). A veritable feast. Mrs Donelly used to do the Boxing Day buffet herself when the children were younger, but she doesn’t have the time these days and since it’s going to be just the two of them she’s even skimping on their usual Christmas dinner: instead of the big bird, the roast potatoes and the mound of sprouts, Mr Donelly has picked up a Small Turkey Breast Joint (‘For 2–3, Butter Roasted’), a pack of baby new potatoes (‘hand-picked’), some mangetout (from Kenya), and a miniature ‘Luxury’ Christmas pudding (‘packed with plump, sun-ripened vine fruits’). It’s the Christmas of the future: their first Christmas alone.
After the shopping Mr Donelly managed to squeeze in a quick pint at the Castle Arms, laden down with his shopping bags, much to the amusement of Little Mickey Matchett and Harry Lamb the Odd Job Man, and Big Dessie, who were all in gearing up for Christmas themselves, and who have never actually been into a supermarket unless accompanied by their wives, and only then to push the trolley.
‘All set, then?’ Mr Donelly asked Big Dessie, proud of his labours.
‘I don’t know,’ answered Dessie, mid-pint. ‘That’s all the wife’s department.’
Billy and Harry nodded in agreement with Dessie. It was hard to believe a big man like Joey Donelly doing the shopping for his wife on Christmas Eve. Times certainly were changing.
Mr Donelly spent the afternoon at home on a chair, putting up decorations: he wouldn’t have bothered if it was down to himself, but Mrs Donelly had insisted. He didn’t put up as many as usual, though: it hardly seemed worth it without the children there, and he’d never liked those paper lanterns Mrs Donelly’s mother had given them when they were first married and which had remained their central festive decorative feature, their theme, as it were, for over thirty years. They were pink, originally, the lanterns, but they’d browned slightly with age, like raw meat left too long out of the fridge. He put them back in the cardboard box in the loft. He was trying to keep everything a bit more low-key.
Christmas Day itself shouldn’t be too bad. It’d probably be pretty much the same as usual. Mrs Donelly would go to church and Mr Donelly would prefer to skip it. They’d have their lunch and maybe watch Morecambe and Wise on UK Gold. They used to play cards in the old days, and Monopoly, but they haven’t bothered with any of that for years, not since the children were little, although Mrs Donelly still liked to play a few hands of patience, for old times’ sake.
Boxing Day’ll be the big day – it used to be a really big deal, years ago. They used to have everyone round, the parents and the grandparents, when they were alive, and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins, dead now a lot of them, or just too old, and yet at one time all of them living and breathing and in the here and now, and all piling their plates up high, and roaring their way through the afternoon and long and late into the evening, everyone laughing at everything, slowly filling up, up and away on the bottled beer and Mrs Donelly’s hand-made party food. Eaten, drunken, but not forgotten, the ghosts of Christmas past.
In fact, in the old days the Donelly household was full not just at Christmas but all year round, with family and friends and family of friends popping in, drinking tea and talking, but now the children had grown up and moved out and moved on, and the party was over and the house was quiet, and Mr and Mrs Donelly had been busy these past few years trying to remake their lives. They had discovered to their surprise that remaking their lives was not something they could do very quickly or easily, and it was not something they could do within their own four walls, so the small home that had once housed at least six and was never empty was now too big and housed only two who were hardly ever there. When you want space, it seems, you can’t have it, and when you’ve got it you don’t need it.
This was an irony not lost on Mrs Donelly, who was a religious woman and who could therefore appreciate irony and paradox. It always helped, she had found, in church as in life, if you could take a joke: Jesus, for example, as far as Mrs Donelly could tell, had spent most of His time on earth telling people jokes and winding them up. There was nothing wrong, she’d decided, with the teachings of the Catholic Church – after a period of doubt in her late forties, which had coincided with her going on to HRT – just as long as you took them with a pinch of salt. And as the mother of four, having grown accustomed to constant demands and frustrations and irritations, Mrs Donelly’s pinch of salt was maybe a little larger than most – more like a palm of salt, in fact. She had found that if you ignored a problem for long enough it usually went away – usually, but not always.
Mrs Donelly did sometimes stay in just to enjoy the peace and quiet in the house: she’d been known to wash her hair and have a bath and draw the curtains and put on her towelling dressing gown at two o’clock on a midweek afternoon, and lie on the sofa in the front room watching television, eating Rich Tea biscuits like there was no tomorrow. But that was an exception: she usually preferred to keep active. There was all her council work, for starters, which took up most evenings and quite some time during the day.
Mrs Donelly was never going to be the best councillor the town had ever seen, but she cares about our town and she is honest, and these are rare qualities, particularly among our elected representatives. If she were really honest, Mrs Donelly would have to admit that she had become a councillor partly because of the prestige – in her own mind, if not others’. She sometimes found herself saying out loud, as she sat in her little old Austin Allegro outside the town hall, waiting to go in to chair a committee, ‘Well, who’d have thought it?’
And who would have thought it? Mrs Donelly had left Central at fifteen without even completing her leaving certificate. She didn’t have a certificate to her name, actually, apart from something awarded for attendance at the Happy Feet Tap and Ballet School, which she attended for a brief period when her family were flush and she was fourteen, and which is still going – under the guidance of the mighty Dot McLaughlin, sister of the famous tap-dancing McLaughlin twins, and ninety-five this year and still a size eight – up at the top of High Street, over what’s now the Poundstretcher and which was once Storey’s, ‘Gifts, Novelties, Travel Goods, Jewellery and Coal’, a shop which reverberated for years to the sound of Dot McLaughlin calling out ‘Heel, Toe, Heel, Toe’ and Miss Buchanan banging out a polonaise on the piano.
Mrs Donelly’s achievements may not have been certificated, but they were many: she had prepared three meals a day for a family of six for over twenty years, and continued to do the same for herself and Mr Donelly to the present and into the foreseeable future. She knew how to darn socks. She could sew, and had made curtains and bedspreads, and at one time had even made the clothes for the children. She paid the bills and balanced the budget. She had taken up and given up smoking, and she had seen every film made starring Paul Newman. When she was eight years old she’d read out a poem on the BBC, with Uncle Mac, on Children’s Hour. She was a good wife and mother – a good person and adventurous