Ring Road: There’s no place like home. Ian Sansom
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so full of delights. All those jars of liquorice and lemon drops and cherry flakes and dinosaur jellies seemed like treasures to us, locked up and kept in a palace by an evil giant, who begrudged handing over even the slightest of penny chew or gobstopper.
The evil giant’s daughter, Eva, now runs the shop and she is a lovely sweet woman who waited until after her father’s death to change her name by deed poll, and she is patiently explaining to an old man who wants to buy a quarter of butterballs that Wine’s don’t do them any more. Eva had wanted to change her surname to something romantic and evocative, something like Monroe, or Hayworth, perhaps, but when it came to filling in the form she could hear the voice of her dead father nagging her about the cost of changing the shopfront, so she’d gone for the cheapest option and bought a pot of all-weather black gloss and gone out under cover of the night to erase the offensive initial. Of course, people from out of town sometimes get confused and locals have been known to set out to irritate and annoy Eva by going into the shop and asking for a bottle of Chardonnay or some cans of super-lager. Eva just shrugs it off: it’s a small price to pay for her freedom from the tyranny of some ancestor’s idea of a joke, or their job as a pig man. She suggests to the old man in search of butterballs that he try the Pick ‘N’ Mix up in Bleakley’s, the big department store in Bloom’s, the mall. The town’s only other old-fashioned sweetshop, and Wine’s only town centre competitor, Hi, Sweetie!, on Central Avenue, closed last year, on the site that is now Sensations.*
Next to Wine’s, where Main Street is slowly collapsing into the Quality Hotel, is the Select Launderette – motto, ‘Dirty Collars Are Not Becoming to You, They Should Be Coming to Us’ – which is full, today being Wednesday, half-price-for-pensioners day. Betty and Martha, who run the shop and who would, in fact, qualify for Wednesday’s generous discount themselves, if they’d ever admitted to their ages, or looked them, are just about run off their feet. Betty is known to Martha and to the regulars as Iron Betty, and Martha as Martha the Wash. The pair of them talk all day and listen to local radio, they have eighteen grandchildren between them, have recently both given up smoking and they have no intention of retiring, although they have started to shut up shop for an hour at lunchtime, so they can sit and nap in the room out back. They have worked together for thirty years, eight hours a day, and have never spoken a cross word.
Just off Main Street, in South Street, builders are busy repointing brickwork, a postman delivers parcels, a dog squats at the side of the road and then trots on, and the man on the corner with a garden prunes his roses.
Paul McKee watches them all from his bedroom window: Paul is unemployed.
Paul is not from around here. He married Little Mickey Matchett’s daughter Joanne just over six months ago. It was a registry office job – presided over by Ernie King’s son Alex, who took over from Mrs Gait as registrar a few years ago now, and who has finally got the hang of it, the right kind of smile and the right signature* – and it was close family only, and Paul had to hire a suit and he’s so skinny he couldn’t get one to fit. He looked pathetic, like a matchstick man, said Joanne’s mum, and not a groom. Joanne wore blue and did without a bridesmaid, but she had her little nephew Liam as a ring bearer. The reception was in the upstairs room at the Castle Arms, a venue which was not without its charms, as long as you overlooked the York Multigym and the punchbags, and the other boxing paraphernalia, including a three-quarter-size ring, which were used by the Castle Ward Amateur Boxing Club on Tuesdays and Thursdays. As long as you kept all the windows open the smell of the sweat wasn’t too bad.
Paul and Joanne had met in Paradise Lost, where Paul was DJ-ing on Friday and Saturday nights: it was a handbag kind of a crowd, but Paul enjoyed doing it. The money was good and sometimes you do have to prostitute your art: his set list included the Jackson Five and James Brown for emergencies. Neither Paul nor Joanne believed in love at first sight, but it seemed to have happened to them, without the assistance even of mind-altering substances – which Joanne does not agree with – and they counted themselves lucky. Unfortunately, Paul lost the gig at Paradise Lost when he and Joanne went to Ibiza for their one-week honeymoon and he’s had trouble picking up anything since. He has big plans, though – he’s just in a period of transition at the moment. Joanne jokes at work that he’s a kept man, while Paul tells people that he is working from home, which he is, and he does, as much as anybody can: to be honest, he finds that there are too many distractions and too many biscuits for working at home to be a great success. Still, he’s working on a few things. He’s been trying to get a job in the music business, as a sound engineer or something, through a few contacts at the Institute. His tutor there was Wally Lee, a man with the occasional goatee and thinning hair swept back into a ponytail, a man in his fifties who wears stone-washed denim jeans and retro Adidas trainers, who sports a dangly earring, who wears sunglasses all year round and who has been known to wear leather trousers – in our town! – and who has no idea how he ended up here, who puts it down to amphetamines, who plays jazz at the Castle Arms on a Sunday lunchtime while people huddle over tiny wobbly tables and eat roast pork with boiled vegetables and mashed potatoes, and suffer Death by Chocolate, a man who has come a long way, who worked at one time as a keyboard technician on tours by Jean Michel Jarre and Chick Corea. Wally is an alcoholic, a dope fiend, and an incoherent and incompetent teacher, but he had inspired Paul, which can be a dangerous thing to do to young people in our town and which can lead to all sorts of trouble. Under Wally’s influence, Paul became determined that he was going to do something, that he was going to make something of his life.
But first this morning he has to get up and make Joanne a cup of tea. It feels like a punishment, this, for Paul, a man who like many unemployed young men in our town only really comes alive around about midday, and who only begins to feel good when he has a beer in his hand after about six o’clock in the evening. He had a job as a fork-lift driver for about six months, but the hours were killing him – 7 till 6, five – days a week, for a measly £200, through the books, which was the equivalent of just one night on the decks, cash in hand. Still, he put himself through it and he puts himself through this, the morning tea-making routine. Joanne has always said that she can get up and make her own tea – she’s only twenty-two years old, after all, and a feminist – but the one good thing Paul’s mum ever said about his dad was that he always used to make the tea in the mornings and so it seemed to Paul like the right and proper thing to do, a man’s job, an adult responsibility and no excuses. He listened to a lot of gangsta rap at home and tea making is not a big part of the whole gangsta rap worldview, but sometimes in life you have to make compromises. After tea in bed Paul actually gets up again, to set out the breakfast things: cereals, milk, toast, marg and jam, which is a one-up on his own absent father and more like the behaviour of a saint, frankly, than a DJ, let alone an Eminem in the making. While he’s sorting out the Shreddies, Joanne has a shower and gets dressed, and gets herself ready for work. Joanne has a job as a trainee catering supervisor at the hospital up in the city, which is long hours and shift work, but pretty good pay. When she’s on days she departs from the house at 7.30, leaving Paul ten hours before her return.
When Joanne goes, Paul’s day can really begin: he goes back to bed for an hour, exhausted already from all the effort of tea making and breakfast. Then, around 9, he gets dressed and goes out to buy a newspaper.
Eva’s rush hours are 7 to 9.30 in the mornings and 4 to 6 in the evenings, weekdays, and 9 till 12 on Saturdays. She shuts on Sundays, despite demand, because she is a committed Christian and has recently started to attend the People’s Fellowship, down round the back of the Quality Hotel. She likes the music and, like a lot of the older women in the congregation, she finds that she feels a motherly instinct towards Francie McGinn, particularly since his problems with his wife. She’s less keen on the speaking in tongues and the hand waving, but before taking up with the People’s Fellowship she’d been going to the Methodist for almost thirty-five years, during which time no one had said a kind word to her, she knew all the hymns back to front and upside-down, and she had grown tired of wearing long skirts and a hat – a knitted cloche that had belonged to her mother – so she was glad of the opportunity to wear jeans and a sweatshirt to services, and she figured that no church was going to be perfect.
Eva doesn’t know Paul, but