Ring Road: There’s no place like home. Ian Sansom
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straight at the camera and he says just one word: sandwiches.
Sandwiches, sandwiches. White or brown, hot or cold, rolls, baps, tortilla wraps, subs and bagels, croissants, pittas, panini, it really doesn’t matter what to Bob, as long as you can eat it with one hand and the filling doesn’t drip down on to your shirt. So no hot cheese or scrambled egg, and no loose meat, but just about everything else: Brie, bacon and avocado, turkey and ham, egg and onion, tuna and onion, tuna and anything, all-day breakfasts, double – and triple-deckers, roast beef and horseradish, roast vegetables and mozzarella, chicken and prawn and cold sausage, every imaginable combination of cheese and meat and bread, smothered in every kind of mayo and mustard and sauce known to man, and some unknown, some made to a secret recipe known, they say, only to Bob, and handed down from generation to generation. Bob knows everything there is to know about sandwiches. He is our sandwich king, the prince, the lord, our contemporary Earl of Sandwich. When it comes to sandwiches Bob just seems to know what people like. He has a sixth sense. He has an instinct.*
I can remember when Bob was just getting into the catering business, or at least had gone into a restaurant and got himself a job, which is perhaps not quite the same thing, but it was a pretty big deal around here and in retrospect it was clearly the beginning of great things for Bob Savory.
Most of us when we left school had ambitions only to get out of town and maybe go to London, to Soho, to get to see inside a sex shop, visit some record shops, and maybe get a place of our own with a few lifelong friends and be able to stay up all night, drinking and listening to loud music, and meeting girls we hadn’t been to school with, girls who maybe worked in the sex shops, or who, like us, were just in browsing and who weren’t going to be afraid to explore their sexuality. But when it came to it we were content to end up working at the local garage, or on the sites, or going on to the Tech if we had the grades, and living with our parents until they kicked us out, and marrying the sister of a friend, and losing touch with our ambitions and our record collections, but Bob always had a firm plan and a purpose, right from an early age, and he never changed his mind and he never got distracted.
I remember seeing him the day he’d just bought his first set of knives and the look on his face, when he unwrapped them in the pub, to let us all admire: it was the look of a man who knew where he was going in life. It was the look of a man with a sharp knife in his hand and the future before him like a lamb to the slaughter. Bob’s knives were not like the knives our mothers had at home. Bob’s were German knives, made from high-carbon steel, with three beautiful silver rivets in the handles, not like they were ordinary rivets just holding the thing together, but like they were meant to be there, like they had been ordained, three perfect eternal rings, and Bob sat with us in the Castle Arms on the red velour, with these six-and ten-inch blades, and he rolled up his sleeves and he raised his hands, like the priest with the host, and he balanced the knives on his middle finger, one by one, and they perched there, like beautiful shiny birds come down to rest. They’d cost him his first month’s wages and then some, but he was as proud as you would be if you’d just met the woman of your dreams, and he handled those blades with exactly the same kind of care and attention, gazing at them fondly, and perhaps a little shyly, imagining their future life together. Bob told us you could get all sorts of different knives, knives of every size and for every purpose. He said there was even a knife called a tomato knife, for cutting tomatoes, and of course none of us had ever even heard of such a thing as a tomato knife, and we laughed at him and joked about all the other knives he should get: how about an egg knife, we said, where’s your cucumber knife, Bob, and your lettuce knife, and your knife for the cutting of toasted ham and cheese sandwiches, huh, and he rolled up his knives, in this brand-new beautiful thick green roll of material, and tied them up with their new strings, and we never saw them again, and that night we went back to our parents’ houses with their plastic-handled cutlery and tried to balance bread knives on our fingers.
We were silly to scoff. These days Bob has his own catering company, Old-Fashioned Foods (Cooked the Traditional Way), and a subsidiary called Sandwich Classics. He has a fleet of vans he runs out of the industrial estate, up by the new fire station, and the motto on the side of the sandwich vans says it all. The signs read ’SANDWICH CLASSICS AND SNACK FOODS FOR THE DISCERNING PALET’.* The sandwiches are Bob’s big earner. They go the whole of the length and breadth of the county. He’s talking about setting up a franchise.
Bob also has a stake, a small but significant financial interest, in the big new Irish-themed restaurant out on the ring road – the Plough and the Stars they call it – which offers delicacies such as Turkey O’Toole, and Flannigan’s Fish Sandwich, and Banbridge Cajun Chicken Tagliatelle, ‘chunks of tender local chicken dusted with cajun spices and served on a bed of tagliatelle, covered in a creamy white wine sauce (vegetarian option available)’. It’s good. Or at least it’s profitable. People flock to it in their cars, on their way to or from Bloom’s, the shopping mall, and the DIY superstores and the big new private gym, the Works, which is right next door. The central feature in the Plough and the Stars – which was advertised on opening in a full-colour two-page centre spread in the Impartial Recorder as, ’AN ARCHITECT-DESIGNED WAREHOUSE-STYLE EATING EXPERIENCE’ – is a fibreglass whitewashed cottage with three-foot-high animatronic leprechauns who enter and exit on the quarter-, the half-hour and the hour, singing ‘Danny Boy’, ‘Galway City’ and ‘The Bard of Armagh’. The words of the songs are on the back of the laminated menus and most customers are happy to join in, as long as their mouths aren’t full of ‘The Kerryman’s Garlic Bread (made with fresh Kerry butter)’, or ‘Belfast City Trifle’ and sometimes even when they are.
Bob lives outside town, far from the Plough and the Stars, beyond the ring road, in a house set in its own landscaped grounds, now minus two trees, with outbuildings, and its own jacuzzi, and a games room with a pool table, and table tennis, a minibar, genuine antique furniture and original art on the walls, and a hallway so vast that in the winter he lights a big fire and has carol singers, a twelve-foot Christmas tree, and he invites us all round with our children to play party games, and he sits on this antique chair he calls a gossip-seat – and who are we to argue? – dressed up like Santa, handing out presents, like the proverbial lord of the manor.
Bob has definitely made it.
But Bob is not a satisfied man. Of course, the secret of Bob, the glory of Bob, is that he’s not a satisfied man: if he were a satisfied man he’d be just like the rest of us, living in a semi off the ring road, treeless and jacuzziless, and those with a ‘discerning palet’ would be cheated of sandwich classics and old-fashioned foods (cooked the traditional way). Bob works seven days a week, fifteen, sixteen hours a day, talks endlessly on his mobile phone and he hasn’t taken a holiday in years, not since he paid for a group of us to go on holiday with him to a resort in Spain, which was not a success, which was a disaster, in fact – he paid our fares and our accommodation, but he made it clear that we would have to pay for our own food and drink and entertainment, and I think, to be honest, some of us felt cheated, as if Bob should have gone the whole hog and paid for everything, as if he owed us something, and those of us who didn’t feel that probably felt that we owed him something, so in the end everyone was dissatisfied. Generosity can be hard to bear and a generous friend can be a burden. Harry made a joke one night when we were in a club in Marbella that the whole thing was probably tax deductible anyway, so it didn’t really count, and Bob left the club, caught a cab straight to the airport and we didn’t see him for months afterwards.
Not that Bob is lonely, or that he needs our company. He’s had relationships with many women over the years – many many women – and he’d like a family of his own, he says. He’d like a big family – a dozen children he reckons he could cope with – but he’s not yet found the right woman. He’s getting older, of course, like the rest of us, but the women seem to have stayed around about the same age – early twenties, which is undoubtedly a good age, nothing wrong with it at all, and none of us would wish to deny Bob or his female friends their various pleasures, but you can’t help but think that even the young can get stuck in a rut. In fact, the young may even be a rut. At the moment Bob is kind of stuck on waitresses