Ring Road: There’s no place like home. Ian Sansom
did this with everyone, in fact, male and female, as many of us in town could testify – it was nothing to do with Francie McGinn. It was a piano stool, after all. Miss Buchanan had never married and was good friends with – was a companion to, indeed – Miss Carroll, the town’s midwife, who was Miss Buchanan’s senior by twenty years. As Miss Carroll’s retirement approached, however, Miss Buchanan decided to marry Thomas Odgers, the auctioneer, whose daughter by his first wife was one of her pupils. Odgers, an old-fashioned man with wild ginger hair and mutton-chop whiskers, was rumoured to be seeking a son and heir. As is well known, Miss Carroll committed suicide shortly after her retirement and Mrs Odgers (née Buchanan) bore no children. On her husband’s insistence she gave up teaching the piano.
† God had told Francie to choose a wife while Francie was at the bible college in Hampshire, by drawing Francie’s attention to a number of possible helpmeets among his fellow female bible students and tormenting him with 1 Corinthians 7 and constant thoughts of his filthy imaginings, and acts of self-arousal in his dormitory and the communal washrooms. Wisely, Francie had never allowed his own daughter, Bethany, to attend so much as a Youth Fellowship weekend away.
In which Paul McKee, a hindered character, works from home, eats biscuits and attempts to unleash his enormous talent
There’s been a lot more weather recently – masses of the stuff – but the rain held off for long enough last week for Irvine’s Footwear, ‘Always One Step Ahead’, to be able to put in their new shopfront. There was nothing wrong with the old shopfront, actually, but as Mr Irvine explained to Big Dessie Brown’s daughter Yvette, a cub reporter on the Impartial Recorder conducting her first big interview for the paper – which was a success, which was praised by everyone, even the editor, Colin Rimmer, and which Big Dessie now has proudly magneted to the fridge – ‘Bigger windows showing more shoes means more choice means more customers.’ Irvine’s old hand-painted fascia has gone, then, with the stained-glass fanlight and the cracked plastered niches: IRVINE’S is now spelt in red plastic on white, and there are the obligatory pull-down metal shutters. It took two men just two days to rip out the old and bring in the new, and Mr Irvine is delighted with the results. Mr Irvine is getting on a bit now but he still likes to think of himself as a go-ahead kind of guy: he had the town’s first electric cash register, years ago, and he accepts all the major credit cards today, still something of a rarity among our few remaining small businesses and sole traders.
Mr Irvine is a man who understands selling and who understands shoes: he has always had a feel for feet and Irvine’s has always been a popular shop, particularly among the wider-footed men and the narrower-footed women of our town. For a long time it was the best shoe shop around: now, of course, it’s the only one, if you don’t count the chain stores in Bloom’s, which we don’t. Irvine’s is the only shop between here and the great beyond where you can still buy all lengths of shoelaces and ladies’ brogues.
Next door to Irvine’s is the old Brown and Yellow Cake Shop, which has retained its original wide windows, its little recessed entrance and its barley-sugar columns, and where, as well as the old brown and yellow cakes, they do baguettes and ready-to-bake garlic bread to take away, and hot and cold snacks, including a very popular bacon and egg morning sandwich – ‘Start the Day,’ says the handwritten fluorescent orange star-burst sign pinned to the front of the microwave, ‘the Right Way’, the right way in the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop being to load up your system with sugar and saturated fats and carbohydrates, and maybe a polystyrene cup or two of tea or instant coffee. The Lennons, Sean and Mary, who own the shop, like to keep their staff costs to a minimum, so they employ only two shop girls, Deidre, who is seventy-three and deaf, and Siobhan, who is seventeen and pretty typical. This leads inevitably to long queues, but in our town a long queue is not necessarily a disincentive to shop: indeed, it may be a recommendation. There are a lot of people around here who are more than happy to join the back of a long queue, and who feel a genuine sadness when they arrive somewhere and there’s no queue to latch on to: queuing in our town is a vital sign. If you’re queuing you’re still alive: you have something to be thankful for, you’re looking forward to the future, even if it’s only a nice tray bake for elevenses or a fresh floury bap with some soup for lunch. The Brown and Yellow Cake Shop is busy, then, as always, full with people on their way to work starting the day in the right way and celebrating their existence. Mr Irvine is buying a celebratory cream horn for later: he does love a cream horn and that new shopfront is certainly something to celebrate.
Next along is Nelson’s Insurance, which always looks shut, and then Lorraine’s Bridal Salon and Tan Shop, which is shut and has been shut for some time because Lorraine has been in hospital again recovering from a mystery illness – they say it’s the slimmer’s disease and she certainly is thin, which should be an asset in her line of business, where every customer is watching weight and could do to lose some, but Lorraine is getting so thin now that people notice and comment, and not always favourably. It’s not good to be too fat or too thin in our town: about a maximum 38-inch waist and a 44-inch chest for a man and nothing below a size 10 for a lady. It’s not good to fall outside the average: it’s not good to stand out. We have noticeably few tall women in town, for example, and all our hairstyles lean towards the same, men and women. Even our ethnic minorities are not really large enough to be minorities: they are still individuals, which is just about OK. If you stray too far off the mean, or there’s too many of you, it’s best to move away: that’s what cities are for, after all. If you want to be different that’s fine, but we’d rather you did it somewhere we didn’t have to see you every day.
Lorraine’s problem is the opposite, in fact, of her noticeably roly-poly father, Frank Gilbey, a man who stands out, but who can carry his weight, due to his age and his charm and his general assumption of seniority. If anyone in our town had ever used the word chutzpah – and the Kahans and the Wisemans may have done, but in private, so as not to shock, behind closed doors, tucked up in their kosher kitchens, provided by McGinn’s, our kosher kitchen specialists – they’d have used it about Frank Gilbey.
Frank these days is a man under pressure – his appeal against the council’s refusal to allow him change of use for the Quality Hotel had become bogged down in the usual paperwork and bureaucracy, which Frank has no time for and which his solicitor, Martin Phillips, should have seen coming, and he’s facing a few cash flow problems as well, although nothing he can’t handle, he tells himself – but when he’s at his best, when he’s on form, you might say Frank is the kind of man who puts the ‘pah’ into chutzpah. Frank is a man whose influence and whose tentacles stretch far and wide in our town. In fact, there just aren’t enough local pies into which Frank can put his little fat fingers, so his grasp has reached as far as a share in a racehorse in Newmarket and a number of investment properties in southern Spain.*
Frank had set up Lorraine in the Bridal Salon and Tan Shop after her disastrous and painfully short marriage to the bad Scotsman, who said he was an actuary but who was also an alcoholic. It was a difficult time for Lorraine, who turned to sunbeds and to binge eating as a comfort, and for Frank, who was then still mayor, and for Frank’s wife, the town’s first lady, Irene. It was just lucky that Frank was such good friends with Sir George Sanderson, the proprietor of the Impartial Recorder, or the paper might have had a field day.
On the opposite side of Main Street, the dark side, the opposite to the bridal side – what we call the Post Office side – an unnamed shop owned by an out-of-towner who may or may not be foreign and who employs sixteen-year-olds to run the place and who doesn’t seem to have invested too much in his staff training, sells cheap toilet rolls, king-size cigarette papers, novelty items and out-of-date foodstuffs. Next to them is what used to be Swine’s, the newsagent and sweetshop, which after fifty years of selling sweets from jars by the quarter has recently thrown in the towel and caved in to the inevitable tide of videos and instant microwave burgers. It was always a mystery to us as children how a man as miserable