Ring Road (7 page)

You wouldn't have thought so, but the range of temperatures here in town can be pretty extreme. It can get all the way up to the seventies on occasion in July and even on a winter's afternoon, when the sun's out, you sometimes see young men sitting outside pubs in their shirtsleeves. In February, on a good day, on a bright day, outside the Castle Arms it's like a playground: little groups, little huddles, jackets off, joking and having fun. In our town such an opportunity is not to be missed: the sun here always tends to go to our heads.

But, alas, the unseasonably warm weather has not been good for my old friend Billy Nibbs: in the heat, the smell coming out of the skips and those big metal bins can be pretty stiff. In the summer you can actually smell the dump from the car park 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.
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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.
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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.
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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:

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 while, when there was a lot of work on the sites after the Wall came down, and then he was in Holland on the tulip farms, and then he had a go
on the campsites in France, and then it was back to England and the usual casual jobs, the temporary, the unsuitable and the strictly cash-in-hand: he was variously a care assistant, a windscreen fitter, a supermarket shelf stacker, a warehouseman and a bouncer. He drove a bus, he did security, he did landscaping and he did ventilation installation. He preferred jobs where he didn't have to think: he lasted only two weeks in tele-sales and he did his best to avoid computers. He worked for six months for Otis Elevators, which was a great job and was pretty much the summation of his career: full of ups and downs and going nowhere. It was a rootless existence and he wouldn't have had it any other way.

Things haven't been easy for Davey since he returned. He's been staying with his parents, and it's never good for a grown man to be thrown back upon the mercy of his parents. Mr and Mrs Quinn are good people but it's hard not to judge your children when they're under the same roof as you and you have to see them every day, and they're old enough to make their own mistakes but should know better, and Mr Quinn, Davey Senior, has had to bite his tongue on many occasions, from the breakfast table to lunchtime, dinner and beyond, and he is not a man used to having to withhold his opinions. He has been trying to persuade Davey to join him in the business, a painting and decorating business, a business started by Davey Senior's own father, Old Davey, way back in the 1920s, and a business which provides a good living for Davey Senior and no fewer than three of Davey's brothers, Daniel, Gerry and Craig. But Davey is holding out. One of the good things about leaving town all those years ago was that he didn't have to join the family business and now he's back he has no intention of doing so.

It's been a difficult couple of months, then, but Davey has picked up with a lot of old friends and a lot of them were at the book launch. Sammy the plumber was there. Francie McGinn was there. Francie's wife, Cherith, was hosting the
Ladies' Bible Night so she couldn't make it, but Bobbie Dylan was there, chatting to Francie, and it was nice to see them both looking so happy. Bob was between waitresses, so he was there too. All the old crowd. There was also a photographer from the
Impartial Recorder
– actually,
the
photographer, Joe Finnegan. Joe calls himself a ‘lensman' and he likes to say – to himself, if no one else – ‘I don't take sides: I take photos.' He'd turned to photography late in life, after the failure of his picture-framing business, a lovely quaint little place on Market Street, two doors down from Scarpetti's, where Joe never seemed to do much actual picture framing but instead spent most of his time chatting to old friends, and so, of course, he couldn't compete with the real professionals, with the much bigger and glitzier chain store, Picz ‘N' Framz, when it opened up at Bloom's, which has its own car park and a trained staff, and a wide range of ready-framed prints and posters, in many sizes, ready to hang. Also, to be honest, Joe liked a drink.

So Joe was snapping away, half cut, with his Leica, which is not a hobby camera, but with which he somehow still managed to produce the standard hazy amateur mugshots for the paper: a grinning Billy with his arm draped round Frank Gilbey, our ex-mayor; a grinning Billy with his arm draped round Frank's daughter Lorraine, shying away; Billy with his mum; and Billy with all of us. It made a full-page spread in the
Impartial Recorder.
My favourite photograph of the evening is one of Billy cheek to cheek with our old English teacher, Miss McCormack, who'd made it to the launch even though she's moved up-country now to live with her sister, Eileen, and to look after their elderly father, the big Scotsman Dougal, in his declining years, even though she is strictly teetotal and claims not to have visited a pub since her sister's engagement party over forty years ago, a party that famously ended with Dougal McCormack, a fervent Methodist, knocking out his prospective son-in-law when the young man had indulged in rough
talk and ribaldry. The young man seems consequently to have thought twice about marrying into the family, for the two sisters became spinsters and were frozen in time. Miss McCormack looks exactly the same now as she did twenty years ago when she was teaching us, which may be proof, as she had always insisted, that literature is one of the higher virtues and is good for you, like classical music, and art, and Guinness, of which there was, of course, plenty at the party – draught and bottled – as well as sparkling white wine. It was a good evening. Everyone who was anyone was there.