Ring Road: There’s no place like home. Ian Sansom
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outside the Plough and the Stars, which is two roundabouts downwind, where all attempts at landscaping have failed to solve the problem. A few scented-leaf pelagoniums on the windowsills and some sweet william outside in huge terracotta-plastic planters are no match for the stench of the accumulated waste of our town. Goodness knows what people are putting in there: Billy spends half his time redirecting gardeners with grass cuttings to the GREEN WASTE ONLY bins, and the other half directing householders with stinking black plastic bags away from the NO FOOD WASTE bins. People do seem to be ashamed about their rubbish, or confused. There’s been talk of recycling – one of the town’s councillors, Mrs Donelly, no less, who has a cousin in Canada, is very keen; she says that’s what they do over there – but whether this will solve the problem of people’s shame or increase it, it’s difficult to say. No one wants to be reminded of their own waste: to have to separate it all out would simply be embarrassing. We’d rather future generations sort it all out for us – and Billy, of course.
It may just be the sweat and the bins, then, that make Billy smell so, but it may also be the ham. Billy Nibbs is addicted to ham. Absolutely addicted; there’s no other way to describe it. He lives by himself and has never been that interested in cooking, and after a few years he found he’d got into a routine. Every night on the way home from work he buys his bacon for his breakfast from Tom Hines, our one remaining butcher, and every morning he eats it straight from the frying pan, mopping up the juices with a slice of bread, dispensing neatly with the need for a knife, or a plate and, indeed, for any washing up whatsoever, since the frying pan will always do for the next day, and the next; and then for lunch he has a ham sandwich with mustard, and for dinner he usually eats at his mum’s, or at Scarpetti’s, the Italian late-night café in Market Street, which is no longer owned and run by Italians, Mr Scarpetti and his family having eventually returned to their native land like most incomers within a short time of having arrived here, once they realise that our town is, in fact, like every other small town on the face of the earth and no better than what they’ve left behind, unless, of course, it’s a civil war or state torture, and even then it can be a tough decision to decide to stay. We have no actual culture to speak of and no cuisine, unless you count the tray bakes and the microwave morning sandwiches from the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop. We can boast no local beer even, let alone a wine, and we have no town square, our festivals extend only to the traditional half-hearted summer parade and fireworks – Frank Gilbey’s attempts to organise a jazz festival a few years ago having ended in disaster – and we are not known for the warmest of welcomes.* But Mr Hemon, who now owns Scarpetti’s – and who is Bosnian – has stuck it out for eight years and it looks as though he’s going to stay, and he does a fair imitation of Billy’s mum’s sausage, chips and beans. In honour of his predecessors Mr Hemon offers espresso coffee – two heaps of instant instead of one – and keeps a bowl of Parmesan on each table, along with the usual condiments, and believe me, if you’ve never sprinkled grated hard Italian cheese on one of Scarpetti’s legendary big breakfasts with two fried slices, then you really haven’t lived, in our town.†
I think maybe it is all the pork that gives Billy that funny smell, because he smells the same all year round, so it can’t just be the heat. As you get older there’s no doubt food can play havoc with your system: Davey Quinn, I know, for example, hasn’t eaten a Chinese takeaway for years, after a night out in south London which started in a pub, went on to a club, and ended up with a couple of tin-foil tubs of hot and spicy Cantonese which wouldn’t usually have bothered him, certainly not while in his teens or twenties, but which left him in his early thirties unable to breathe and writhing around, choking up whole sweet-and-sour pork balls, and he ended up in casualty having his stomach pumped, and he can only remember that the stuff they pumped in looked black and the stuff they pumped out was yellow, and he stank for weeks afterwards. He has never again touched chicken in a black-bean sauce: the food of all our youths denied for ever to him. I myself – like most of us – have had to give up kebabs.
Davey waited a while after his return to town before calling in to see Billy Nibbs, and he hardly recognised him when he finally caught up with him – he had to do a double take. Billy these days looks exactly like his father, Hugh – right down to the thick black beard and the shiny steel-toe capped boots. Hugh ran one of the four butchers that used to exist on Main Street – not a single one remaining now, leaving only Tom Hines on High Street, who is not and never was the best, whose sausages are thin and greasy, whose chops and mince are too fatty, whose joints are overpriced and who has abandoned all pretence of providing dripping, black pudding, or the cheaper offal, the standard fare of the traditional family butcher, and who has opted instead to sell his butcher’s soul for the likes of hot and spicy Cantonese ribs, ready-stuffed chickens and pre-wrapped bacon from a wholesaler based in Swindon. Hugh was much the better butcher and famously bearded, a man who’d hung on to his facial hair right through the Seventies, when beards were still popular and even admired, when even Tom Hines had worn one, to hide his many opulent chins, and right on into the Eighties and through the Nineties, when beards became more scarce and rather frowned upon, certainly by people buying meat, perhaps because there was always the suspicion of some flecks, some tiny filaments stuck somewhere in there, although Hugh was scrupulous about washing the beard every night with Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo, to retain its softness and to try to be rid of that distinctive high, minty, slightly gamey smell of freshly butchered meat.
Hugh’s dying wish, that he’d had written into his Last Will and Testament, was a surprise for his wife, Jean, who’d begged him for years to update his image: ‘I INSTRUCT,’ ran the rubric, ‘on the event of my predeceasing my wife, that my beard be shaved.’ It was not the strangest request or instruction that the family solicitor, Martin Phillips, had had to incorporate into a will – you’d be surprised what secrets you can hide from your family and what you might want eventually to reveal. Even us little people can keep big secrets. In his cups and among friends, when he’d loosened up after a few holes and a few gin and tonics in the golf club, Martin Phillips would sometimes boast of being the keeper of the keys to the skeleton closets of the town, but he never revealed his secrets and he never told tales.* No one would have believed him anyway.
When Hugh died, Martin Phillips carried out his instructions to the letter – he brought in Tommy Morris, the barber on Kilmore Avenue, our last proper barber, who refuses not only women but who won’t cut children’s hair either, not until they’re sixteen and old enough to decide themselves exactly how short they want to have it, and who usually charges £2.50 for a wet shave with a cut-throat razor, although on this occasion he waived his fee – so when she visited her husband for the viewing, Jean was able to kiss Hugh’s smooth cheek for the first time in thirty years and her tears glistened upon his face. At the crematorium Billy had read a poem. There was not a dry eye in the house.
Billy had always been a keen reader, Marvel comics mostly when we were young, but in his teens he had moved up to literature and it wasn’t long before he started writing the stuff himself. I can still remember clearly the first poem he ever showed me. We must have been about fifteen. It began:
The sun doesn’t shine
way down in the blue. In the deep sea of liquid dark memories come on cue.
I’m no literary critic, but I didn’t think it was too bad and I told him, and he was encouraged, and so I feel now, on the publication of his first book, that I have in some small way been instrumental in the bringing to public attention of a new voice.
The launch party was just recently, in the Castle Arms.
Billy was there, of course. And his mum Jean was there. Davey Quinn was there. Bob Savory was there. Davey is effectively working for Bob now, in the kitchens at the Plough and the Stars, and it seems to be going OK. He’s only working as a kitchen porter, part-time, but it’s a start, it’s something to help him get back on his feet. Davey must have worked at two dozen different jobs during the twenty years he was away, and in a dozen different places, so he was used to starting over. He did a lot of bar work at first, way back when, and then he was in Berlin for a