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

in the 1950s and 1960s.*

      Mrs Donelly wondered sometimes if being in the cinema was a bit like what it was going to be like being dead – watching other people’s lives unfold and everything always working out for the best. She hoped so.

      It was in the cinema that she’d first discovered the lump, a few months ago. She knew what it was straightaway. She was reaching across to get a handful of Pat’s popcorn and it was the angle of the reach that did it – her right arm stretching across to the left, hand outstretched. She wished she hadn’t now. She’d rather not have known. She wished she’d never reached for the popcorn. She’d never really approved of Pat’s popcorn anyway: she thought cinema popcorn was a waste of money. For years she’d been trying to persuade Pat to make her own at home and take it to the pictures in some Tupperware hidden in her handbag. But Pat said the popcorn was all part of the fun: Pat did not believe in stinting, even though she was a Protestant. Unlike Mrs Donelly, Pat was not the kind of person who set out on an adventure with a wrap of sandwiches. Pat was the kind of person who believed that on life’s journey you could always find a little place that would happily do some sandwiches for you. Mrs Donelly, having been on holiday several times to the Isle of Man with four children, knew this not to be the case, but she didn’t say anything.

      Mrs Donelly had not told Pat about the lump. She was starting the chemo the week after Christmas. They’d decided not to tell anyone. They weren’t going to tell the children for a bit. They didn’t want to spoil Christmas.

While Mrs Donelly was at her emergency council committee meeting, Mr Donelly was out in the Christmas Eve sleet, walking the dog. He walks with her for about two hours every day, come rain or shine. After raising four children, Mr Donelly does not view a dog as a burden: on the contrary, he says, a dog, after children, is a pleasure. It’s a breeze. The worst a dog can do is bite and shit, and not usually at the same time, and a dog never asks you for money, and also you don’t have to wipe a dog’s arse, although the council would’ve liked you to: any attempt to get dog owners to poop-scoop in the People’s Park or to keep a dog on a leash was viewed with scorn by Mr Donelly. He regarded councillors as meddlers, on the whole, apart from his wife, of course, who was simply well-meaning. The whole point of having a dog, according to Mr Donelly, was that you could let it run around and shit anywhere: in a town where even the slightest misdemeanour could find you on the inside pages of the Impartial Recorder, dogs represented the wild side, the acceptable face of the animal in man, the beast inside, your only opportunity to act like a lord of misrule and to demonstrate to the rest of the world exactly what you thought of it: rubbish. Allowing your dog to cock its leg on a few council flowers was a means of self-expression for Mr Donelly, and clearly better than running amok around town mooning at police officers, breaking windows, fighting, scratching cars, stealing lawnmowers and bicycles, and weeing in shop doorways, which is what most of the town seemed to prefer to do these days to let off steam. Why the council couldn’t have focused more of their attention on that, rather than persecuting innocent dog owners, he did not know.*

Mr Donelly had several times explained to his friend Davey Quinn – Davey Senior – his theory of the therapeutic effects of dog owning and he had even gone so far as to suggest giving pets to hardened criminals in prisons, in order to assist them in their rehabilitation. Davey Senior hadn’t owned a pet since he was a child growing up on the Georgetown Road, when he’d won a goldfish at the town fair, and on his return from the fair his brother Dennis – son number six to Davey’s number seven – had promptly flushed the fish down the outside toilet. When Davey Senior had protested, Dennis had fought with him and forced his head into the toilet bowl, to allow little Davey to try to save the poor fish, a fish which Davey had decided to call Lucky. Even now, fifty years later, when he drove past the sewage plant up past the ring road Davey found himself wondering about the fate of that fish: he wondered if maybe it had made it out into open seas.* Davey’s brother Dennis had eventually ended up in prison and he remained altogether a bad lot, and Davey had therefore a rather pessimistic view about the relationship between man and beasts: he believed that Mr Donelly’s rehabilitation scheme was probably unworkable. But a pet was still an unequivocal good, according to Mr Donelly, and a doddle.

      ‘She’s easier to keep than your mother,’ he liked to joke, sometimes, to his children.

      She’s called Rusty, the dog – Mrs Donelly is Mary – and she’s sixteen and her eyesight’s gone, more or less, so Mr Donelly lets her watch TV with him in the evenings, with the Ceefax subtitles on, and he gives her a hot-water bottle in winter. She’s part of the family, part Airedale and part Irish Terrier, which is a cute combination, and a few years ago she won a rosette in our town dog show, in the category The Dog With The Kindliest Expression, and rightly so. Her expression is, in fact, much kinder than a lot of the people in our town, so she may not just be The Dog With The Kindliest Expression, she may, in fact, be in possession of our town’s Kindliest Expression, full stop – quite an achievement for a mongrel. Mrs Donelly wonders sometimes if Mr Donelly loves that dog more than he loves his own children. It’s possible.

      When he arrived back home from their customary walk – down to Bridge Street and Main Street, past the Quality Hotel, then up High Street and into the People’s Park – Mr Donelly settled the dog into its basket in the corner of the garage, a basket tucked in underneath all the jars and the tins and the tools and the wood offcuts of a lifetime, which might come in handy one day, squeezed in tight between a workbench that used to be the Donelly kitchen table, and Mr Donelly’s little Honda 50 with its grey and white trim and its seat bound with masking tape. Mr Donelly hasn’t been out on the Honda for nearly two years, since he’d taken a tumble on Gilbey’s roundabout. ‘The Nicest Things,’ they used to say, ‘Happen on a Honda,’ which may have been true thirty or forty years ago, but now there was so much traffic, even on the ring road, you were lucky if you made it unscathed up to the DIY stores or the Plough and the Stars, and then made it back home again safely.

      ‘I’m not identifying your body when you fall off that thing again and end up dead in hospital, all squashed,’ said Mrs Donelly. ‘It’s time to hang up your helmet, mister.’ You didn’t argue with Mrs Donelly.

      The helmet hung on a nail over the dog basket.

      Saying goodnight to the dog and locking up the garage, Mr Donelly made his way towards the house, his childless, empty house. He squeezed past the wheelie bin with its stick-on number – another ridiculous council regulation, as if anyone would want to steal it – and past the pile of flagstones that he’d borrowed, or requisitioned, in an act of defiance, from the council when they’d been doing the road-widening scheme at the bottom of Main Street, and he peered in at his kitchen window. The kitchen was spotless, as always, the way Mrs Donelly liked to leave it, almost as if no one lived there. The blue washing-up bowl was upended on the drainer, next to the sink, a residue of water and suds on the stainless steel the only sign of recent human activity.

      He then went round to the front of the house, to put the car up on the drive. The headlights lit up the windows – new windows, bay windows, which were uPVC and which he’d put in himself when they bought the place from the council. He hasn’t yet made good around the brickwork, but the windows look OK: they fit the hole. There’s a carriage lamp, and a few shrubs in pots but apart from that the place looks pretty much the same as when they’d moved in as a young family thirty years ago. He can still remember the day as if it were yesterday: their first house after all the flats. He remembered Mrs Donelly marching up and down the stairs with Tim and Jackie – they were babies then – laughing and singing. Their own staircase: that was something.

      He locked up the car and went to look through the front window, at his own front room, where hardly anything had changed in all that time: there were the same old ornaments on the windowsill and on the mantelpiece over the gas fire: a small mahogany elephant; a crystal vase; a miniature teapot; a Smurf; the ‘May Our Lady Watch Over Your Marriage’ imitation-mahogany-veneer plaque with a very attractive-looking BVM in gilt relief on the wall; the same three-piece