Containing several shocks and surprises for the Quinns, both father and son
It’s been blue skies for nearly a week now, and temperatures hot enough for young men to strip down to T-shirts and tattoos, and women to lie out in the People’s Park in bikini tops, sipping Bacardi Breezers and listening to the radio. It’s positively Mediterranean, though with more techno, maybe, and not as much garlic. Davey Quinn Senior has been house painting and he’s as brown as a berry: Mrs Quinn says he looks like a black man. He’s so brown, in fact, that his tattoos have virtually disappeared: they look like shadows, or large areas of skin cancer possibly.
Despite being up the ladder and out in the sun ten hours a day, Davey Quinn Senior has not been applying sun cream, much to Mrs Quinn’s disapproval: his old bald head is peeling so badly it looks like a hot chestnut and he leaves flakes behind him in bed. Davey Senior does not really believe in sun cream, although unknown to Mrs Quinn he has been using a lot of Deep Heat recently: he’s been suffering pains in his hands and in his knees and in his hips again.
Davey Quinn Senior is sixty-three years old now and built like a boxer: hands like mangles, a chest like a barrel, arms like joints of meat and a back almost as broad as it is stiff. His knees are thick and swollen, and almost entirely without cartilage. When he bends down to pick up a paint pot these days there is a grinding of his joints, like a machine without oil. He drinks about triple the recommended units per week, takes three sugars in his tea and six in a flask, but he doesn’t eat like he used to. He sleeps for no more than five hours a night, often waking at 4 a.m. with back pain and a terrible need to piss. He had trouble with his prostate a few years ago – he pronounces it ‘prostrate’, deliberately, to annoy Mrs Quinn, successfully – and he has cut down on the beer and now drinks mostly wine and spirits. He’d never drunk wine until he was in his mid-fifties – most of the men he knew still didn’t, but Davey was not a stick-in-the-mud in his drinking habits and he liked to keep up to date. There was even a time, during the early 1970s, when he drank martinis, but that was just a phase, everyone was doing it – even in the Castle Arms and the Hercules Bar there were grown men drinking sweet drinks from small glasses, with olives and slices of lemon. Davey Senior fancied himself now as something of a connoisseur, if not a wine buff exactly. Mrs Quinn would occasionally take a glass of chardonnay, or a rosé, but Mr Quinn preferred the red wine – you couldn’t beat a nice New World Shiraz, in his opinion. He gave up smoking five years ago – having first down-shifted to low-tar – after his friend Jacky had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Davey Senior had found it hard giving up: it took him two years to stop completely, but he’d been determined. He didn’t want the same to happen to him as had happened to Jacky. Jacky had died and he was only fifty-six years old, and in Davey’s terms this meant Jacky was a young man, a baby almost: Davey, at the time, was fifty-seven. Jacky had been in the year below him at St Gall’s. It was a shock and a sadness to see him go – of course, you always wonder who’s going to be the first among you to go, and when they go you can’t help feeling that somehow it was the right thing, that it was never really meant to be you, that you were always the one destined to hang around for a little longer than the others, even if it was only to apply a few more coats of paint to your crumbling walls and to enjoy a little extra elbow room at the bar. It’s a terrible truth and one you can’t live with for ever, but when an old-friend dies, you draw a little strength from their passing.
Davey Senior had learnt his lesson from Jacky and had tried an acupuncturist for the smoking, a Chinese fella, Doctor Ye, recommended to him by Little Mickey Matchett, whom Davey used to play football with and who’s had terrible trouble with his cartilage – the old footballer’s disease – and who now swears by what he calls the ‘foreign medicine’.
Doctor Ye is known to most people in town as ‘the other Chinaman’ – Mr Wong and his family from the takeaway being the first, the most important and the most popular.* Doctor Ye’s parents arrived here from China in the 1950s. They were actually from the same town in China as the Wongs, and when they heard over there how well the Wongs were doing and how much they liked it here – something, one suspects, had been lost in the translation – they thought they’d give it a try, and they managed to steal a passage and get out, and for years they ran a little upholstery business from home, a house on the Brunswick Road, full of bare naked chairs and vast blankets of fabric, and they kept themselves to themselves, quietly assimilating and getting on with the endless task of mending and making good. They got to like milk in their tea, and toast, and they got into pub and club refurbishments, big business here in the 1980s. The children were privately educated, at Barneville House, the old boarding school beyond the ring road, and they all made it to university. The eldest son, Stevie, Doctor Ye, now operates out of his own house on Cromac Street, where he eats macrobiotic, as much as is possible here, and has a little pagoda built from breeze blocks and rendered and painted in Dulux Weathershield ‘Golden Sunrise’ in the front garden, and a nice water feature – installed at enormous expense, but which was tax deductible – and he spends his days in his converted front room burning herbs and sticking long thin needles into the fat white fish-bellied bodies of the people of our town.
Not a lot had changed, according to Stevie’s dad, Mr Ye. He did chairs: Stevie does people.
The acupuncture hadn’t actually worked on Davey Senior’s smoking – he’d managed it in the end with gum – but while he was seeing Doctor Ye, Davey had mentioned the trouble he was having with his shoulder and Stevie had popped in a couple of extras, for free, and – bam! – it was like electric currents racing through Davey’s body.
‘It felt like being rewired,’ he told everyone down at the Castle Arms, including Georgie Hannigan, who is an electrician and who rather doubted it – he’s been electrocuted a couple of times himself and he knows it’s not something to boast about. Davey Senior had briefly become an acupuncture bore: talking about yin and yang, and energy channels and meridians, but he found that people’s eyes soon glazed over when he started talking about it and, without either the interest or the ability to pursue the subject further, he soon got bored with it himself. The needles became just a pleasant memory.
He was thinking about acupuncture now, though, for the first time in a long while, and about private medical insurance, as he lay on the floor, the sharp point of a paintbrush, or something, possibly a body part, digging in his back. He had no idea what had happened to him.
There’d been a touch of drizzle first thing in the morning and he’d moved inside on a job, and one minute, just a moment ago, he’d been up the ladder, quite high, cutting in, using one of those so-called ‘heritage’ colours that everyone was so keen on these days – and which all looked like bird shit if you asked him – in one of the big old houses on Fitzroy Avenue, with the thirteen-foot ceilings and the ornate plaster covings, and the next thing he knew he was lying on the floor, looking up at a freshly painted ceiling.
Davey Senior did not panic. The worst thing you can do in a situation like that is to panic. For the self-employed, falling off ladders is something you come to expect now and again, like a letter from the taxman asking you to come in for an interview. As he lay there, Davey Senior remembered the many who had fallen before him, or at least the ones who’d admitted to it: Jacky, who’d lost two fingers when he was working in the steel plant and took a tumble from a gangway; Scotty, the big Scotsman, who was a glazier and who had the scars to show for it; and of course Davey’s old friend Dessie, Big Dessie Brown, a friend from way back. Dessie had had it the worst of all of them, of course, had suffered the biggest fall, but then look what had happened to him. Dessie was the living proof, in our town, that there were sometimes silver linings.
Dessie had been a roofer and had broken his back when he fell off one of the new builds doing the slates on one of the first estates built outside the ring road. The injury nearly finished him off – he walked bent double, like a cripple, with a stick – but he always referred to the fall as his ‘lucky break’. He said that when he was lying there looking up at the sky, unable to move or to speak, it was like a revelation, a visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that what She was saying to him was clear and unambiguous, and it had changed his life for ever and in an instant. It might be better, the BVM seemed to be suggesting to Big Dessie, to pay someone else to climb roofs for you. From that moment on Dessie had never looked back. He never climbed another roof, and now he lived in a six-bedroom house with a swimming pool, tennis courts and views across open fields. He ran a full team right across the county – sparks, joiners, plumbers, plasterers, painters and decorators, the full works – and he paid no heed to niceties like tax and National Insurance, which the Blessed Virgin didn’t seem to have been too bothered about Herself, and he drove a specially modified Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, with a disabled badge, and he’d always stand Davey Senior a pint if he saw him down the pub, and they would reminisce about old goals and fixtures. Those were the days. He used to pay for his drink from a big roll of cash he carried around done up with an elastic band.*
Davey Senior was thinking about that big wad of cash and he was looking for his own silver lining all the way to the hospital, where the doctors told him the worst: he’d cracked two ribs and three vertebrae. He was going to be off work for some time.
Well, Davey Senior was a man who could not afford to be off work for some time. His three sons in the business, Daniel, Gerry and Craig, could keep things ticking over – they were good boys – but at the end of the day they were going to be a man down, and with all the contracts coming in they couldn’t afford to be. They had a school to do, the new Collegiate School up on the ring road; and houses; and shops; business premises. Davey was running a big small business and he was going to need someone he could trust to take care of some of the smaller jobs, a body, someone who knew the business, who could work unsupervised, and someone he could rely upon to uphold the standards of the Quinn name. Above all, he needed someone whom he didn’t need to pay.
Davey Senior had not been to church in thirty years, and he no more believed in the Blessed Virgin Mary than he did in the tooth fairy and Father Christmas, but as he lay in bed in the hospital, considering his dilemma, eating his hospital food, he had an idea.
On his first day back home, out of hospital, the first day of his convalescence, he asked Mrs Quinn to cook up a nice meal to celebrate his return: a good plain meat pie, maybe, with mashed potato and gravy, followed by a treacle pudding. If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, then Davey was determined to cut a swath, using all the complex carbohydrates at his disposal.
Since his own return home Davey’s son, young Davey, the seventh son of the seventh son, has tried to avoid eating with his parents. He just couldn’t face the same meals he remembered from his childhood: he was amazed, in fact, that they were still eating the identical stuff, twenty years on, with only the occasional added variation of a microwave lasagne and a token bottle of olive oil in the kitchen cupboard to register the fact that this was not still 1976, that this was post-Ready, Steady, Cook, this was a new millennium and not the culinary Stone Age. It was pies still, mostly, in the Quinn household, and puddings for pudding, and Mr and Mrs Quinn were even using the same plates that Davey remembered, and the same crackle-plastic-handled cutlery, and the English hunting-scene place mats. His parents’ house depressed him in general and unutterably, but the kitchen – the kitchen depressed him more than anything, and in every detail, from the fake marble finish on its lonely brown breakfast bar, to its varnished tongue-and-groove on the walls, and its faded Venetian blind perpetually at half-mast, even though no direct sunlight penetrated through the leylandii which now shaded and protected the bungalow on all sides.
No good things had ever happened in the Quinn family kitchen, as far as Davey could remember, it was just too small for anything except cooking and washing up, which of course is what a kitchen is for, except for the middle classes who, even in our town, tend to use their kitchens for the same varied purposes the Quinn family had always used the pub: in order to drink, and to argue, and to meet their friends. If the kitchen is the heart of the house, like people say, if that was really true, then the Quinn house had a serious coronary problem. The Quinn kitchen was not a place where family meals were shared, or problems discussed, where children did their homework while Mummy made muffins, or even where crockery was thrown, or cafetière coffee drunk late into the night while thrashing out personal or global political problems. It was simply a place, a narrow space, where for years the Quinns had eaten Findus Crispy Pancakes and Angel Delight, in rotation, all seven brothers taking turns on one of the two stools, only one of which – the TV stool – afforded a clear view of the television in the adjacent front room.
In fact, the only interesting thing that had ever happened to Davey in that kitchen was that when his father or mother spoke to him at mealtimes, now as then, Davey always seemed to know exactly what they were about to say. His parents had induced in him from a young age a permanent sense of déjà vu, but this was not, alas, Davey realised early on, because he was an alien abductee or because in another life he’d been a Cherokee Indian and was blessed with the gift of second sight or the Third Eye – it was simply because his family repeated themselves. Endlessly.*
Over the past few years Davey had grown accustomed to eating by himself, often in silence, or with his friends, when and where he wanted, usually in cheap curry houses or pizza places, and he only ate food he liked, with people he liked. In all his years away he had managed to develop for himself just one home-cooked speciality, chicken-celery soup, which when eaten with a slice, or preferably two, or even three, of wholemeal bread, Davey had found usefully combined both protein and roughage, and also those all-important vitamins and minerals that go to make up that all-important balanced diet that you always read so much about in the papers and on the side of cereal packets. There is a knack to soup-making – it’s all about balancing smoothness and acidity – and Davey Quinn believed that with his chicken and celery soup he had mastered the art. This is his secret recipe:
CHICKEN-CELERY SOUP
1 can chicken soup
1 can celery soup
Combine soups. Heat. Serves 4–6.
There was a microwave in the kitchen of the shared house in west London where Davey had eventually ended up before returning home, and his cooking had increasingly come to rely upon and revolve around the microwave’s limited capacities: so Mondays, for example, was usually baked potatoes with cheese and baked beans; Tuesdays was baked potatoes with anchovies; Wednesdays, chicken-celery soup; Thursdays, baked potato with pesto. Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays varied according to whereabouts, although it was often a meal out with friends, or a meal in with his housemates. (He also used to patronise an excellent kebab shop, called The Sultan’s Delight, on the Uxbridge Road, more than once a week, where the proprietor, Dimitri, had lost his left-hand forefinger in an accident with hot oil and where privileged regulars, among whom Davey was proud to count himself, got to call him One-Finger and were given a few more slices of meat and some extra chilli sauce, if Dimitri was in the mood.)
The Tuesday-night baked potatoes with anchovies – Davey’s other claim to culinary innovation, apart from the chicken-celery soup – he liked to call his Mystery Potatoes. All you had to do was put the potato in the microwave for ten minutes, then scoop out the flesh from inside and mix it up with chopped anchovy fillets and then scoop it all back in and do the potato for about another five. And then … Surprise!
The first time one of his housemates, Jane, had tried a Mystery Potato, she had cut into it, releasing that lovely strong, slightly constipated anchovy smell, and revealing the lovely dark mush inside, and had refused to eat it, had hurried to the bathroom, in fact, and had not returned for some time. No one else apart from Davey seemed to like it.
The crust on Mrs Quinn’s meat pie, meanwhile, had been cooked to the point of explosion, the mincemeat inside dried stiff with Oxo, and the mashed potato was sober and cold. The carrots were chopped into chunks, the gravy was Bisto, and the New World Shiraz was fresh in from the shed and in contrast to the accompanying hot, strong cup of tea. Davey Senior kept on quietly refilling Davey’s wineglass and his mug with tea, and he waited until Davey had cleared his plate before he popped the question.
Would Davey, he wondered, consider taking on some jobs while he recovered from his fall – would Davey, in other words, reconsider his long-standing opposition to working in the family business, and come and work for Quinn and Sons?
Davey, of course, refused point-blank: it was a conversation they’d had enough times not to need a rehearsal, or even a pause for thought. Also, he had his work at the Plough and the Stars, as a kitchen porter, so it was out of the question.
‘But a kitchen porter,’ began Davey Senior.
‘What?’
‘Compared to the family business …’
Mrs Quinn saw how things were going. She felt her husband should have known better and she tried to move the conversation along, but Davey Senior persisted and positions became entrenched.
And then the treacle pudding arrived.
It was not the pudding itself that mattered. The pudding was much like any other: dry and suety, and too much of it, in a sticky pool of treacle. The point of a pudding is not to be unique and special: the point of a pudding is to be like other puddings.* Also, there is no such thing as the single-serve pudding: no one is going to bother to steam a pudding just for themselves. A single man does not make himself puddings: a pudding requires a family or at the very least some guests. Without others a pudding simply does not exist. A pudding is proof that there is such a thing as society. Davey, who was struggling back at home, who had spent so many years alone and away from his family and from this town, and not all of them happy, away from puddings and pies, and whose idea of a dessert was a bar of Dairy Milk from the twenty-four-hour garage, or something not quite defrosted in an Indian restaurant, now found himself completely defenceless in the face of his mother’s sugar and suet, this little mound of family values, and the sight of it and the taste of it, and another large helping, and a glass or two of the brandy his father had been given for Christmas last year by a satisfied customer, warmed and softened his cold, cold heart.
It was a feeling and a warmth which had more or less worn off by nine o’clock the next morning, however, when arriving at a house in his dad’s van, with ‘Davey Quinn and Sons’ painted on the sides, to announce himself to the owners.
It was a couple, the job – a Mr and Mrs Wilson, and just one room. The Wilsons are new to town and their house is one of the old houses, up near the golf course, one of the few remaining houses we have with the original sash windows, which Mr and Mrs Wilson are determined to retain and maintain, and which afford pleasant views of the all-new, strictly-uPVC development, Woodsides, whose name is something of a misnomer, since they had to cut down the wood to build the houses.
Mr Wilson enjoys his elevated aspect and mature landscaped gardens to front and rear, and is a senior manager with Solly Wiseman’s industrial and contract cleaning firm, CleenEezy, which has its offices on the industrial estate, up there off the ring road, near to Bloom’s. The couple have a baby on the way – just weeks away, in fact – so they don’t have the time to do the decorating themselves, as Mr Wilson is at pains to explain to Davey, implying that he would have been more than capable of doing it himself, actually, and probably better, under normal circumstances. In our town, even if your wife is about to have a child and you work in middle management and you can afford to have people in to do work for you, you still have to pretend that you would and could do it yourself, if it weren’t for mitigating circumstances. You have to do a lot of face-saving in our town: as a people, we are not natural employers. All our middle classes here clean for their cleaners and we have turned the necessity of DIY into a virtue.
Mr Wilson was busy and on his way to work, wearing one of those shirts with the cutaway collar and the bone inserts – shirts which he loves and he has one for every day of the week, plus some in reserve – and a big fat tie in blue and yellow chevrons. He probably has some of the best ties in town: he orders them from London, from the pages of the Sunday Times magazine. Mrs Wilson is wearing black, has not a dyed-blonde hair out of place and is on maternity leave.
The Wilsons are undoubtedly the future of our town and not its past: they are proud of their leather sofa and their wide-screen TV, and quite right, since there is really nothing like relaxing on your own leather sofa at the end of a hard day, a glass of Czech-style beer in hand and satellite sport on the telly. Mr Wilson was thinking about it already, in fact, as he made his excuses and left for work.
They’d done most of the major work now, Mrs Wilson was explaining to Davey, touching her bump. Now they just wanted to get started on the decorating: her mother was going to be staying for a few weeks after the baby was born and so they wanted to begin with the spare room. Quinn and Sons had been recommended to them, ‘by word of mouth,’ she said, with a barely suppressed smile of satisfaction and knowing, ‘word of mouth’ appearing to her to be almost as good as a lifetime guarantee, a shibboleth, or access to the secrets of some cabalistic organisation or cult. Which is pretty much what it’s like, actually, which is the reality of living in a small town. You need the inside information in order to survive: you have to have the knowledge. Cities are full of amateurs – you can get by on a lot of bluffing in a city – but a small town is full of adepts.
Davey hauled his stuff in from the van and was shown upstairs to a large room whose walls were covered with a thick embossed paper and a built-in wardrobe. Mrs Wilson didn’t think the room had been touched since the house was built – Edwardian, she said. 1928, reckoned Davey – you get an eye for these things. Davey Senior could date decorative effects to within a year – flocks, swags, Anaglypta, floral wallpapers, dados, rag-rolling – and it was an eye for detail, and for other people’s mistakes, that Davey had inherited. This particular room, he guessed, had been gussied up in some haste, in about 1989 by the look of it, with a voile at the window and curtains with tie-backs on a long pine pole, but the wallpaper was old, and original, and painted thick: it was probably the wallpaper that had gone up when the house was built, said Davey, unable to hide what he was surprised to hear sounded like regret in his voice.
‘But that’s not a problem?’ asked Mrs Wilson hopefully, hesitating by the door.
‘No,’ said Davey, ‘it’s not a problem’, and did his best to radiate confidence, which seemed to work: Mrs Wilson could, of course, have no idea that Davey had spent no more time painting and decorating in the past twenty years than he had flossing his teeth. But he looked the part. He had borrowed his dad’s old bib and braces.
‘I’ll just have to …’ he began, by which time Mrs Wilson was away downstairs. Despite his height, at six foot two, Davey had become instantly reduced, like his father and his grandfather before him, to being just another little man in a big house. Nothing changes.
He manhandled all the furniture into the centre of the room – a large antique chest of drawers, inherited, Davey guessed, two large lamps, a couple of bedside tables, the double bed – and he covered them all with a dust sheet. Or almost with a dust sheet. The dust sheet he’d brought in from the van wasn’t quite big enough.
First he dismantled the built-in wardrobe – a pathetic effort, made of plywood nailed to some 2″ x 2″, with badly fitting louver doors.
‘What are the only essential tools for painting and decorating?’ his father had asked him when he was young. Paintbrushes, Davey had guessed, wrongly. A scraper and scoring knife? No. A papering table? Nope.
‘The only essential tools for painting and decorating – like all jobs – don’t forget this – are a large screwdriver and an even larger hammer.’
The wardrobe had been fitted straight on top of the paper, so Davey just hammered away to his heart’s content, and once he had a nice square room he could begin.
Undoubtedly Davey Senior’s favourite bit of kit, when it came to stripping, his best investment, was an industrial wallpaper steamer, the Earlex SteamMaster®, a beautiful machine, imported from America, of course, a work of art almost, like a big fat metal toaster, enclosed in a metal cage so strong you could stand on it, with a two-gallon water tank, lightweight steam pan, and over two hours of stripping time. Davey Senior loved that machine and now his son was growing to love it too. For the professional painter and decorator, the SteamMaster® was just about the best thing to have happened since lead-free paint. When Davey used to help his dad, of course, when he was young, it was still just the three Ss – Score and Soak and Strip – and the only gear you needed to prep a room was a bucket of water, some Fairy Liquid and a stripping knife, or if it was really tough a bottle of vinegar. Those days were long gone.
The water in the SteamMaster® took thirty-five minutes to heat and when the light went out the machine was ready and Davey held the steam plate up against the wall, held it with his left hand up in the far right-hand corner, just like his father had taught him as a child, and started stripping with his right. You had to keep the plate moving, otherwise it blew the top layer of plaster. As Davey held the steam plate to the paper, the adhesive dissolved beneath.
Davey worked for two hours without stopping, steaming and scraping, the paper coming away all gluey in his hands. As he peeled back paper and scraped down to the plaster, it felt like stripping the skin from a fish, like taking a clean edge to life and scraping it back to its beginnings, to guts and bones. He’d forgotten how much he enjoyed it. The wallpaper stuck to his skin in tiny wet scraps and patches, so that eventually his hands and face were covered. He’d gone all crinkly. He felt like an old man.
Davey’s grandfather, Old Davey, had established the business in 1924. Davey never knew him, and knew of him only through photos and old family stories – a bull-necked man with eyes brown like mahogany, a man who liked his pints, apparently, but who worked hard, and not a bad man – self-taught, a good singer, second tenor in the town’s male-voice choir, the son of a farmer from up-country, a man who had fought in two world wars and made his own way in life.
His grandfather represented to Davey his whole idea of history – there was no history further back, nothing before him, the man whose wife had borne the seven sons. It was his grandfather who had determined Davey’s name, and his life, and when Davey left town twenty years ago it wasn’t really his father he was escaping, or himself, it was this man he’d never met and his influence, reaching out to him across the years.
Just to the right of the window, as he was tugging at the paper, thinking about his grandfather, Davey saw what looked at first like some cracks in the plaster.
But it wasn’t cracks. It was writing on the wall.
You always sign the wall: that was another thing his father had taught him when he was young. That was what you did, if you were a good tradesman and proud of your profession. Paper or paint, it didn’t matter, you always signed and dated the wall. So that others knew you’d been there; proof of a job well done.
The writing was a neat copperplate, in pencil, perfectly straight, each letter the size of a finger or a thumb, and in three scrapes Davey had the whole thing clear:
David Quinn, 20 August 1929
His grandfather. Old Davey. The first Davey Quinn. He’d been here first. He’d done the room.
The hair stood up on the back of Davey’s neck, a sensation he had experienced only once before, when Angela Brown had grabbed him, pulled him towards her and kissed him, unexpectedly, his first real kiss, by the monument in the People’s Park.
His grandfather’s hands – he couldn’t get the thought out of his head – had covered these same walls, the same space, hanging the paper, pasting this paper, the paper that lay in shreds all around him.
And, just the same as Angela Brown’s kiss, Davey had no idea what this meant, but he knew that it meant something and that it had consequences, and he found he had to steady himself; and as he looked outside he saw that it had grown misty, that a thick fog had come rolling in, and then he realised that he had not ventilated the room and that it was not fog rolling in at all, it was condensation, and that the room he was in was now a very wet room indeed. He bent down and touched the dust sheets on the floor and the sodden carpet beneath, and as he glanced at the soaking dust sheet on the bed, he felt dizzy and he felt droplets on his head, and he looked up and saw that the steam from the mighty Steam-Master® had softened the lath-and-plaster ceiling, which was now hanging down, just inches above his head, and as he reached up, instinctively, and touched it the whole thing came tumbling down upon him.
And when he came round what he saw was the pregnant Mrs Wilson standing over him and the writing on the wall.
* The Wongs have been here for over fifty years now and they have made their contribution to society – the original Mr Wong, Huaning, or Hugh, as we called him, became chairman of the Old Green Road Allotment Holders’ Association, where he grew prize-winning chard and begonias, and his daughter Zhu, or Sue, is now headmistress at the Assumption primary school, where she insists on phonics and observing saint’s days. Through providing generations of us here with spring rolls and egg-fried rice the Wongs helped provide their family back in China with enough money for Flying Pigeon bicycles and Snowflake refrigerators, and more recently, enough for a car, a DVD player and Manchester United replica kits. Mr Wong got to visit his sister in Beijing before he died a few years ago, the first time he’d ever been back, and he was glad he made the trip although ‘it looks like Birmingham,’ he told the Impartial Recorder. There was standing room only for his funeral at the Church of the Cross and the Passion, and Hugh’s son Rao, or Ray, now runs the takeaway but it looks as though he’ll be the last in the line. Ray’s own children, Jonathan and Sally, are keen to break with tradition: Jonathan is still at school but he works weekends and evenings at Becky Badger’s Animal Surgery and Pet Centre, and would like to become a vet; Sally is studying for a degree in Art History up in the city and would like to be a TV presenter or, failing that, a lecturer.
* Wallets, in our town, are still considered effeminate, a foreign practice, something you see people using on holiday in the Canary Islands, or the Balearics, or in America. Most men still prefer the jingle of loose coins in their pockets and the risk of losing the odd fiver in the wash – just to remind themselves of what it was like to be young and single. In our town it’s the ladies who tend to carry the cards in their purses – most men here cannot handle plastic. An elastic band or a metal money clip is about as far as most of us will go in the direction of organising our personal finances.
* In summary, Quinn family conversation consists of little more than a dozen repeated phrases, like the language of a primitive tribespeople, the No-Hopi, perhaps, of the Back of Beyond. These phrases are: ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to’, ‘No’, ‘I said no’, ‘Oh, dear’, ‘Well’, ‘Sorry, what did you say?’, ‘Fine’, ‘What time will you be back?’, ‘What do you want it for?’, ‘What do you want to do that for?’, ‘Because it’s too expensive’, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’, ‘Would you like another cup of tea?’ and ‘I don’t know what that’s all about at all’. There are some variations according to time, place and the person speaking, but not many. Non-verbal communication between family members lacks the same subtlety and tends towards a single expressive raising of the eyebrow, although Mr Quinn does make occasional use of tutting and Mrs Quinn of desultory head-shaking.
* Those who have attended Barry McClean’s ‘Philosophy for Beginners’ will perhaps recognise in Mrs Quinn’s pudding a reflection or shadow of the problem of Plato’s theory of forms and of various theories of identity through time, including Quine’s ‘no entity without identity’ and Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic.