Ring Road: There’s no place like home. Ian Sansom

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СКАЧАТЬ Day’ll be the big day – it used to be a really big deal, years ago. They used to have everyone round, the parents and the grandparents, when they were alive, and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins, dead now a lot of them, or just too old, and yet at one time all of them living and breathing and in the here and now, and all piling their plates up high, and roaring their way through the afternoon and long and late into the evening, everyone laughing at everything, slowly filling up, up and away on the bottled beer and Mrs Donelly’s hand-made party food. Eaten, drunken, but not forgotten, the ghosts of Christmas past.

      In fact, in the old days the Donelly household was full not just at Christmas but all year round, with family and friends and family of friends popping in, drinking tea and talking, but now the children had grown up and moved out and moved on, and the party was over and the house was quiet, and Mr and Mrs Donelly had been busy these past few years trying to remake their lives. They had discovered to their surprise that remaking their lives was not something they could do very quickly or easily, and it was not something they could do within their own four walls, so the small home that had once housed at least six and was never empty was now too big and housed only two who were hardly ever there. When you want space, it seems, you can’t have it, and when you’ve got it you don’t need it.

      This was an irony not lost on Mrs Donelly, who was a religious woman and who could therefore appreciate irony and paradox. It always helped, she had found, in church as in life, if you could take a joke: Jesus, for example, as far as Mrs Donelly could tell, had spent most of His time on earth telling people jokes and winding them up. There was nothing wrong, she’d decided, with the teachings of the Catholic Church – after a period of doubt in her late forties, which had coincided with her going on to HRT – just as long as you took them with a pinch of salt. And as the mother of four, having grown accustomed to constant demands and frustrations and irritations, Mrs Donelly’s pinch of salt was maybe a little larger than most – more like a palm of salt, in fact. She had found that if you ignored a problem for long enough it usually went away – usually, but not always.

      Mrs Donelly did sometimes stay in just to enjoy the peace and quiet in the house: she’d been known to wash her hair and have a bath and draw the curtains and put on her towelling dressing gown at two o’clock on a midweek afternoon, and lie on the sofa in the front room watching television, eating Rich Tea biscuits like there was no tomorrow. But that was an exception: she usually preferred to keep active. There was all her council work, for starters, which took up most evenings and quite some time during the day.

      Mrs Donelly was never going to be the best councillor the town had ever seen, but she cares about our town and she is honest, and these are rare qualities, particularly among our elected representatives. If she were really honest, Mrs Donelly would have to admit that she had become a councillor partly because of the prestige – in her own mind, if not others’. She sometimes found herself saying out loud, as she sat in her little old Austin Allegro outside the town hall, waiting to go in to chair a committee, ‘Well, who’d have thought it?’

      And who would have thought it? Mrs Donelly had left Central at fifteen without even completing her leaving certificate. She didn’t have a certificate to her name, actually, apart from something awarded for attendance at the Happy Feet Tap and Ballet School, which she attended for a brief period when her family were flush and she was fourteen, and which is still going – under the guidance of the mighty Dot McLaughlin, sister of the famous tap-dancing McLaughlin twins, and ninety-five this year and still a size eight – up at the top of High Street, over what’s now the Poundstretcher and which was once Storey’s, ‘Gifts, Novelties, Travel Goods, Jewellery and Coal’, a shop which reverberated for years to the sound of Dot McLaughlin calling out ‘Heel, Toe, Heel, Toe’ and Miss Buchanan banging out a polonaise on the piano.

      Mrs Donelly’s achievements may not have been certificated, but they were many: she had prepared three meals a day for a family of six for over twenty years, and continued to do the same for herself and Mr Donelly to the present and into the foreseeable future. She knew how to darn socks. She could sew, and had made curtains and bedspreads, and at one time had even made the clothes for the children. She paid the bills and balanced the budget. She had taken up and given up smoking, and she had seen every film made starring Paul Newman. When she was eight years old she’d read out a poem on the BBC, with Uncle Mac, on Children’s Hour. She was a good wife and mother – a good person and adventurous in her way. (A few years ago she had even bought, but never worn, some revealing underwear from a catalogue from one of Frank Gilbey’s lingerie shops, a catalogue which some of the younger girls had been passing around at the Health Centre. The garments remained in her bedside drawer, however. She was worried Mr Donelly might take a heart attack.) Above all, to her greatest satisfaction, she had become a councillor, elected in 1999, standing as an Independent, with a large – 1026 – majority, so even now, in her retirement, she was busy.

      On Mondays there were council meetings, and she liked to get her shopping done and clean the house, and then things really picked up on a Tuesday with more meetings and Aqua-Aerobics and a visit to her mother – Veronica, ninety and double incontinent, but her mind still as sharp as a razor – in the sheltered accommodation off Gilbey’s roundabout on the ring road. Wednesdays there weren’t usually any meetings so she might change her books at the library and meet her friend Greta for coffee in Scarpetti’s. Thursdays she had her Italian conversation class with Francesca Scarpetti at the Institute, a class Mrs Donelly had been attending now on and off for about five years, with no discernible improvement in her accent or any increase in vocabulary, and despite the fact that, like most of the class, she had never been and had no intention of ever going to Italy. People attended the class mostly to meet old friends and to listen to Francesca speaking Italian: it sounded so romantic, even when she was only asking the price of a pizza. When she opened her mouth and those sweet words came out, for a moment time seemed to stop, and you’d forget about your troubles and about our small town, and you could imagine you were somewhere else, somewhere bigger and better, with someone else, and possibly not even yourself. At the end of each course the class would all drive up to the city and go to an Italian restaurant, where Francesca insisted they order in Italian, and they would sit around drinking red wine and laughing, and they might as well have been in some piazza in Rome, or in a villa overlooking fields of sunflowers. The course was well worth the money, just for that one night. It was worth it just to be able to speak Italian to the waiters, unembarrassed, with no husbands around, to have the waiters lean forward, smiling at your accent, and have them nod and say si, si, signorina, and va bene, and desidera?

      On Fridays she had to miss council meetings because she took Emma and Amber for the day, her son Mickey’s two girls, aged just three and eighteen months, while his wife Brona went to the Institute, where she is training to be a beautician. Brona was always very well turned-out, and the children were too, and Mrs Donelly was proud to push the little ones round town, although she did not really approve of Brona’s spending so much on the children’s clothes – hers had always made do with second-hand and hand-me-downs – and she also wished that Brona would lay off a little on the tanning. Brona visited Lorraine’s Bridal Salon and Tan Shop once every six weeks for what Lorraine called the ‘St. Tropez’, the kind of tan usually only available on the Riviera in high season, but available in our town all year round. The St. Tropez is a full body treatment that involves exfoliation, body moisturisation, application of the cream and body buffing. It costs £45 for a half-body and £80 for the whole, and Mickey had been so appalled after the first time, when Brona had returned looking like someone had picked her up by the legs and dipped her in chocolate that he’d agreed to pay the extra for the full monty. The colour can be customised and Lorraine had got it about right after the first few treatments. Brona has explained to Mrs Donelly several times that the effect of the St. Tropez was more realistic – and thus more expensive – because it contained a special green pigment, which avoided the orange tinge of some cheaper, inferior tanning applications, and Mrs Donelly did not have the heart to disagree, or to tell Brona otherwise.

      On Saturdays Mrs Donelly always made it to the club with Mr Donelly for СКАЧАТЬ