friend Pat, just like they had done when they were teenagers, growing up in town together, before the children had got in the way and they’d missed about twenty-five years of films between them. Fortunately it wasn’t too difficult to pick it up again.
In the old days, of course, they’d have gone to one of the three cinemas in the centre of town, the Salamanca, the Tontine, or the Troxy, and then they’d have visited a coffee bar afterwards, maybe the old ABC Espresso Bar on Bridge Street, which boasted the town’s first Gaggia espresso machine and offered not only coffee but also Ferrarelle mineral water and Hill’s Gingerette and West Indian Lime Juice. In the ABC they’d have then removed their coats to show off their tight-fitting pink cashmere jumpers to boys with quiffs wearing skinny ties, who would be listening to Frank Sinatra and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers on the jukebox. Now they wore mostly pastels and leisurewear, and went to the multiplex on the ring road – the Salamanca, the Tontine and the Troxy all having been demolished and replaced with a Supa Valu supermarket (the Salamanca), a car park which has recently, controversially, become Pay and Display (the Tontine), despite a campaign in the Impartial Recorder, and forty starter homes in a development called the Troxies (the Troxy).*
It was the destruction of the cinemas, those sacred places, that really made Mrs Donelly sit up and take notice, and begin to take an interest in local politics. She was too late to save the cinemas and too late, probably, to save the town. By the time she was elected, the ring road had already been built and Bloom’s was under construction. Too late, Mrs Donelly realised that the town she loved was being torn apart and destroyed, and that behind its destruction was the man she had once loved: Frank Gilbey.
Mrs Donelly and Frank Gilbey had been a courting couple, years ago. They were the couple that everyone talked about and everyone wanted to be. They used to go to the big dances at the Quality Hotel and Morelli’s, the dance hall at the top of High Street, which burnt down the year that man walked on the moon and which is now Roy’s Discount Designer Clothing Warehouse. Even in those days there was something special about Frank: he had a bigger quiff than the other boys and his drainpipe trousers were tighter.
From a distance – a short distance, naturally, in our town – Mrs Donelly had watched Frank Gilbey’s inexorable rise, with his lovely wife, her old friend Irene, alongside him, and there were times, of course, when she wished it could have been her: the foreign cruises, the trips to America, their famous weekend city breaks, the beautiful clothes. She’d been into the church, once, when Frank’s and Irene’s daughter Lorraine had married the bad Scotsman, and the flowers! The flowers alone must have cost nearly £1000. The town had never seen the like. Mrs Donelly sat at the back and imagined herself as the mother of the bride, dressed smartly, though not in the coral pink chosen by Irene, she thought. The two-inch heels were a mistake, also, for the larger lady.
It would never have worked, though, Mrs Donelly and Frank. They were incompatible, not least because she was a Catholic and back then it still mattered. Frank was a Protestant, which is probably what she liked about him: his was definitely a Protestant quiff and Protestant trousers.
Mrs Donelly saw a lot of him still, around town, although less so as the years went by and their paths diverged – hers into her little job at the Health Centre, and the children and holidays in a caravan by the sea, and his into property management and his homes in several counties and abroad.
She didn’t exactly become a councillor because Frank Gilbey was a councillor, but it did give her pleasure to feel herself his equal and adversary, and she enjoyed seeing him at meetings and in committees.
Frank Gilbey, of course, had other reasons for becoming involved in local politics: sentiment was not an issue for Big Frank Gilbey. Frank always described the town hall to Mrs Gilbey as ‘the best club in town’ and certainly it was more exclusive than the golf club, although it consisted largely of the same people. The difference was that in the golf club all you got to do was play golf: in the council you got to wield power. Sometimes Mrs Donelly and Frank got to sit on the same committees and wield power together, which was more fun than playing eighteen holes and a long way from necking in the back of the Troxy.
These days, at the multiplex Pat and Mrs Donelly would buy their tickets from a machine, Pat would buy a tub of salted popcorn and never eat it all, and they’d sit close to the screen and watch the film, and then they would drive home again to their husbands, who preferred TV, or the pub. Some of the actors had changed on the big screen since the old days, and there was a lot more of what Mrs Donelly called ‘sexy talk’, which covered talk about both sex and violence, but the stories were pretty much the same as they had been back 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
