Ring Road: There’s no place like home. Ian Sansom
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nothing except that he gets to hang out in the kitchens occasionally, and to meet the waitresses and drive them home – he drives a Porsche at weekends and a BMW during the week – and for the first few weeks everything goes fine, but after a while the young ladies always want to talk, and Bob never has much to say. Bob is a doer rather than a talker or a thinker and at the end of a day he just wants peace and quiet, and a little bit of rest and relaxation. He does not want to sit and talk about the state of the world or the state of play between man and woman. He is not a man who enjoys contemplating his own navel: he would rather be contemplating someone else’s. So pretty soon he finds himself driving someone else home from the restaurant and the waitresses find themselves waiting tables elsewhere. As a consequence, the Plough and the Stars enjoys a rather high staff turnover, and the loyal front-of-house manager, Alison, says one day they’re going to run out of young women in the town to employ and they’ll have to start importing them. Bob thinks that this would not be such a bad idea.
Now Bob is, of course, a rich man, a millionaire, although, as he points out, being a millionaire these days is nothing special. Virtually everyone is a millionaire these days, according to Bob, or they could be. Bob reckons he needs at least another £2 million to be really comfortable. He’s got it all worked out. With an extra £2 million, maybe a little more, he could afford to live the rest of his life on about £120,000 per annum. Which would be quite sufficient, as long as you’ve cleared all your major debts. And Bob has cleared nearly all his debts. Except for one.
His mother.
Bob is an only child and his dad, Sammy, Sam Savory, a wiry man with a thick head of hair and as thin as a whippet and as strong as an Irish wolfhound, died a few years ago. He was a sheet-metal worker. He worked hard all his life and then he got cancer and was dead within six months of retiring. Mesothelioma – a cancer caused only by exposure to asbestos. It was not a good death. It was an industrial death. Bob paid, of course, for private nursing, but it couldn’t save Sam, and Bob’s mum Maureen was ashamed: she felt her husband should somehow have known he was working with asbestos and should have been aware of the dangers, even before anyone knew there were dangers. She blamed him and so did Bob. They felt that it reflected badly on the family. It’s difficult sometimes to feel sympathy for the dead and the dying. Sometimes, when someone dies, even someone close to you – especially someone close to you – you just think, how dare you? And in Bob’s case, and for his mum, there was also the corollary: how dare you and how dare you die of such a stupid man-made disease, something which was so easily avoidable? If only you’d worn gloves and a mask and some protective clothing you would have been OK. None of this would have happened. None of us would have had to be so upset. It was your own fault. They didn’t even claim for compensation.*
And now Bob’s mother Maureen has Alzheimer’s. Bob can’t believe it. Sometimes he’ll shout and rage at her, when no one else is there: he can’t believe she’s really ill. A part of him thinks she’s putting it on. Silly woman, he calls her. Silly bitch. Stupid cow. Challenging her. Words he remembers saying to her only once before, when he was a child, after they’d had some argument or other and his mother had said to him, ‘You’re not too old for me to give you a good hiding, you know,’ and he smirked at her and so she did, she smacked him, right across the backside, and he felt the full force of her wedding ring and he never said the words again. Until now. When Maureen deteriorated one of the nurses recommended a book to Bob, to help him cope, but Bob doesn’t read books. He does not admire book learning: what Bob admires is expertise. So he buys in twenty-four-hour care. It’s the least he can do.
At night when he gets home from work, he lets the nurse take a few hours to herself, and he sits down with his mother in front of the wide-screen TV, in his TV room. He’s had the place fitted out with a DVD player and a complete home cinema system – which he’d had to order specially from America. He’d gone to considerable trouble, had got in Harry Lamb the Odd Job Man to help him fix the screen to the joists in the ceiling – but he didn’t enjoy watching the home cinema with his mother. It didn’t feel natural. He only watched it now with the waitresses. With his mum he preferred to watch TV, like they used to when Bob was a child. They watch anything, Bob and his mum. Films. Football. News. Documentaries. It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. It’s not the content. It’s the act of watching that counts. It is a huge comfort to them both.
Before they go to bed at night, during the adverts, Bob always makes them something to eat. He tends to get hungry around about ten, the same every night, before the news, but it always seems to surprise him, his own hunger. He never seems prepared for it. Sometimes he roams around the kitchen in the semi-darkness, opening cupboards, ransacking for food. Bob is a rich man, but he can find no food in his own house which he would want to eat. What he could really manage would be one of his mum’s roast dinners. He could eat a tray of those roast potatoes. A whole tray. They were always so good. The beef dripping – that was the secret. He knows how to do it, of course – you have to get the beef dripping nice and hot in â saucepan, and then you bash the parboiled potatoes around in there for a bit, and season them with salt and pepper, and then slide them on the tray into the oven, and one hour later, perfect roast potatoes. But he could never be bothered to do it himself. It just wouldn’t be the same.
The rare roast beef, though. He could definitely eat some of his mum’s rare roast beef. And maybe some carrots. And a nice gravy.*
He goes from cupboard to cupboard – chocolates, biscuits, crisps, nuts, crackers. None of it is any good. It’s all manufactured. It’s all rubbish. He knows it’s rubbish. Sometimes the rubbish in his cupboards makes him so angry that he throws it all away, just chucks it in the bin. And then he buys more. He buys more rubbish. This is what happens when you’re a rich man in our town. You don’t necessarily buy better. You just buy more. Because there isn’t anything else to buy. You want something more fancy, you have to leave: you have to go to London, or somewhere else where they do funny spaghetti and truffle oils, and novelty cheeses.
Bob’s mother used to make lasagne. And she used to make a salmon soufflé, on special occasions, using a whole tin of salmon – that was good too. And sausage rolls. Macaroni cheese. Pies and pastries. And cakes. The smell of baking. The smell of fresh bread. The food then seemed so different. It was all so good. Bob’s favourite meal, of all the meals his mother used to make … after all these years, he still has no doubt what was his favourite, and every night, between the adverts, he ends up trying to re-create it.
When he used to come home from school he would be just so tired sometimes, and he’d be so hungry, before his dad got home from the works, and so he and his mum would sit down together, his mum drinking her coffee with two sugars and smoking, and him eating the sandwich that she’d made him: white bread and margarine and Cheddar cheese, or sometimes a slice of ham, if they had it in the house, which was not often.
‘How was school?’ she’d ask.
‘Fine,’ he’d say. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘OK,’ she’d say and that would be fine. They didn’t have to talk: they were mother and son.
They would just sit there, the two of them, looking out of the window, eating cheese sandwiches and waiting for his dad to come home.
So when Frank Gilbey rolled up at Bob’s late one night, just before Christmas, Bob ushered him in, asked him to sit down in the big kitchen equipped with every piece of gadgetry imaginable, and about half a mile of granite work surface and a foundry’s worth of stainless steel, put the kettle on and put a simple cheese sandwich down in front of him.
‘So?’ said Bob.
‘There’s a problem,’ said Frank.
* He also has his own website now, and a cookbook, Speedy Bap!, which includes chapters on ‘Home-Made Burgers that Don’t Fall Apart’, ‘What Next with Tuna?’ and an appendix, ‘Mayo or Pickle?’, in which Bob comes down firmly on the side of chutney. The book