In which Lorraine overcomes her difficulties and goes to the Garden Centre, and Davey Quinn goes with her
The wind was battling at the door, howling through the metal grilles over the windows like a little cold wet dog trying to get in and nip you around the ankles and leap up at you. It was annoying, like a little cold wet dog is annoying. Mr Donelly had a little cold wet dog once, a Jack Russell, which he had nicknamed Windy, as it happens, but that was for another reason. It was annoying, then, the wind, but it wasn’t terrible by any means. There were no trees down. No one was going to fall over in the street – and this had happened, on several occasions, on Main Street, in big winds. Flushed with excitement, coming from the market on their way to Tom Hines for a chop, or a floury bap at the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop, some of our old-age pensioners get up a little too much steam, lean a little too far into the headwind and before they know it they’re down, and they’re out, and they’re making the long journey round the ring road and up to the city to the hospital, with their sprained wrist and their blue plastic carrier bags full of cabbages and onions, and the chops and the baps have to wait until next week, if they can remember. That wasn’t going to happen today: you – might have ended up with a lot of crisp packets and paper litter in your backyard and your washing twisted round your line, but you weren’t going to lose any roof tiles or chip your teeth. It was just gusty and annoying and unsettled, and no warmth to be had anywhere. It was big boots weather, woolly hat and fingerless gloves weather, and Davey Quinn had his big boots on, and his woolly hat, and his fingerless gloves, and jeans, fresh socks, a T-shirt, a pullover, a pair of bib and braces, and one of his many quilted shirts. He could have done with a smoke and a sausage in a buttered roll with a strong cup of tea from Deidre and Siobhan in the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop, but he was in the lock-up doing a stock check. It sounded like the wind was checking up on him.
The shelves all around him were filled with industrial quantities of paint and he went along slowly with the stock check book, checking things off: standard primers, undercoats, eggshell, gloss, emulsion, metal finish, sundries, wood preservers, stains, varnishes, wallpaper paste. Tick, tick, tick. An Aladdin’s cave of every kind of covering and finish. There was probably enough here to redo the whole town – you couldn’t have painted it red, but you could definitely have done it magnolia.
His brothers were gone already. They were out in the van. They were working on a couple of the big contracts – the new Collegiate School up on the ring road and some new apartment complex on North Street, where the old telephone exchange used to be. They’re calling the new apartments the Tel-Ex – strictly speaking, of course, it should be the Ex-Tel-Ex, but that sounds more like a young person’s drug, or a laxative, and the Tel-Ex was a good month’s worth of work to Davey Quinn and Sons, so they weren’t complaining, even if it was a daft name for a building. This is not New York and sometimes people need reminding: it’s easy to get carried away here, like anywhere else. People watch a few too many episodes of Friends on the telly and suddenly they’re into Mr Hemon in Scarpetti’s, asking for flavoured decaff cappuccinos and blueberry muffins. But change here comes slowly and we’re not there yet, and progress means more than being able to get a feather-cut hairdo, or the occasional availability of exotic fruit and veg.*
They had divided up, over the years, the Quinn brothers who’d gone into the business, and each one had found his niche and his forte. Danny was the man for the paper hanging, and the cutting-in. He was the closest thing to Davey Senior, a perfectionist. Gerry was the best for the coverage – he was a demon with the roller. He was the workhorse. He shifted and moved stuff, and he was also the one who sorted out problems and negotiated. He was big. You didn’t argue with Gerry. He was also good outside and in tricky staircase areas. Craig was the creative one. He handled all the decorative finishes.
Davey didn’t have a niche, or a role, which suited him fine. It had never been his ambition to play a part within the family business and he had never tried to fit in. If Davey took after anyone in the family it was probably his mother, Mrs Quinn, who remained an outsider, the only woman among many men, and she was a distant, thin, dreamy kind of a person, with frazzled hair, good at playing games and smoking, and imagining. It was she, after all, who had agreed to marry Davey Senior, the seventh son, which must have taken quite a leap of faith, when you think about it, and a willingness to perform in the great Quinn family drama, taking on the responsibility for fulfilling the dream, for providing seven sons for a seventh son.
In those days, though, it didn’t seem like that big a challenge. Seven children was not uncommon for families in our town, whichever church they attended and even among those who did not. Even atheists used to have big families in those days. Mr Gait, for example, who was a teacher at Central and who was famous around town as a bearded, duffel-coat-wearing, bicycle-riding socialist who refused to sing hymns in the school assembly and who was a member of CND, had five children of his own with his wife, Mrs Gait, who was the town’s part-time registrar of births, deaths and marriages, and who therefore knew just about everyone, and they’d adopted two more children, a brother and a sister, two babies, Peter and Laura, whom Mr Gait always described as being ‘of mixed race parentage’ but whom older people in town always referred to as ‘the wee darkies’. Peter, wisely, has long gone and is a policeman, apparently, in London, which probably has his bearded father turning, duffel-coated, in his grave, but Laura has stayed put and is a veterinary nurse at Becky Badger’s Animal Centre and Pet Surgery on Windsor Avenue, and she looks after the woman she calls mother, Mrs Gait, who hasn’t got long left, probably, who’s in her eighties and who’s soon going to complete her own trio of town hall certificates. It’ll be down to someone else now, of course, to sign her off: Alex King, the son of Ernie King, who used to run the music shop on High Street, is the registrar these days, his impressive name and signature, a big florid A. King, which Alex has practised for years to the point of perfection, lending a certain glamour and dignity to what are otherwise always rather dull and disappointing proceedings. There’s really nothing worse than arriving for one of the most important days of your life only to be greeted with a damp handshake from a fat man with a goatee in a sagging polyester suit attempting to look pleased to see you. Alex is no Angel Gabriel: in our town, with our dentists, it’s hard to pull off a very convincing beatific smile and, frankly, if this was the kind of greeting you could expect in heaven a lot of people would have chosen right there and then to give the other place a try.
Mrs Quinn herself was of course from a good Catholic family of eight, four sisters and four brothers, perfectly balanced. But seven boys – she had wondered how she’d cope with that, if she succeeded. She’d worried most about the Quinn succession with her second son, with Gerry – he’d set the trend, really, and had made all the rest possible, like the second line of a poem, or the difficult second album, which is supposed either to confirm your early promise and set the rhythm, or to prove the doubters correct and to begin the long decline. Gerry was a triumph, though, a boy, and Mrs Quinn hadn’t worried again about completing the set, getting all seven, staying in the groove, until it came to the last one, the seventh, to Davey himself, and then she had prayed and prayed, and tried to do everything exactly the same as she had for her previous pregnancies. She just couldn’t have coped with six sons and a daughter: that would have looked like carelessness. With Davey she could not afford to slip up, or to skip a beat: Davey had to be a boy.
Davey Senior had also looked forward to the birth of his seventh son all those years ago, but he hadn’t been that worried about it. He felt it was not his responsibility. All he’d had to do was what he always did, which wasn’t really that difficult. When Davey was actually born, though, when the little fella was actually there in the flesh, the all-important number seven, and all the newspapers and the TV cameras started arriving, that was special. That had confirmed it for Davey Senior, his sense of destiny. He felt he had fulfilled what his father and mother had wanted him to achieve and now he could relax a little, now it was up to his son. For the first few years Mr and Mrs Quinn had watched Davey closely for any signs of supernaturalness. They didn’t really know what to expect and Davey failed all their expectations. He walked late, he talked late and at school he was just OK. He seemed entirely without any of the powers one might have hoped for from the seventh son of a seventh son. He couldn’t even charm a wart.
And Davey knew it. He knew from an early age that he was special, marked out, and yet somehow not quite special enough. Old men in the street would press money into his hands and pat him on the head, and they would look deep into his eyes, as if there might be some wisdom contained within there that they might be able to fish out – like the salmon of knowledge, swimming around in there, in the pools of his eyes, in the depths of his very being, waiting to be seen and comprehended and grasped. And old women, old women would want to hold him and kiss him, as if some of his good luck might rub off on to them as easily as their lipstick rubbed off on to him. And with all the patting and holding, Davey had grown big and fat and shy, and failed to flourish, and he vowed at an early age that he was going to leave our town and he was not going to have any children of his own. The seventh son of the seventh son had had enough.
As a teenager he’d tried to joke about it and to laugh it off, but all the time he’d been angry, boiling up all bitter inside, cooking up dark thoughts and fantasies at every mention of this irrelevance, this annoyance that was his life, this life that had been imposed upon him. He was waiting for the moment to make someone suffer for it, make someone regret having made him what he was, to let fly and spit it all out, to get it off his chest. And finally, when he was seventeen, the opportunity had arisen.
They’d been to a boxing match, him, Bob Savory and Billy Nibbs. None of them had ever been to a boxing match before. Billy had got the tickets from his dad, Hugh, the butcher, who’d got them from his friend the greengrocer, Johnny ‘The Boxer’ Mathers, who owed Hugh a favour. Their shops, the butcher’s and the grocer’s, used to be opposite on the High Street, up the top, near Dot McLaughlin’s Happy Feet Dancing School, and Johnny had always supplied Hugh with parsley, and Hugh had kept Johnny in sausages, and on a warm day, if business was slow, they’d stand outside their shops and shout across the road and talk about football, and boxing, and Johnny would talk about the great featherweights he’d fought, and Hugh would compare the heavyweights. And this was in our lifetimes, remember, in our town: shopkeepers, with actual shops, in actual aprons, in the actual centre of town, talking to each other across a road which these days you’d be lucky to get across in the slack hours between 3 a.m. and 7 in the morning, some time after the final conclusive vomitings outside the club, Paradise Lost, and before the first of the council’s electric street sweepers arriving to scoop up the polystyrene burger boxes, the beer bottles and yesterday’s papers.
Davey and Bob and Billy had driven up to the city in Billy’s dad’s van, the meat van, with its cheery picture on the side of a bearded butcher, a plucked chicken in one hand and a cleaver about to enter into the head of a grinning pig in the other, and Davey had brought his cassette recorder and they were listening to loud music and they were singing along, in a way that teenage boys rarely do, because they’re usually too self-conscious, and they’d parked up, and got a feed of drink into them, and then they made it to the big hall where all the men and women were screaming, and there was this fantastic chaos of tiny figures far away, grappling with each other, and they felt an excitement they could barely understand or contain. These were boys, really, who had hardly known a woman in any intimate sense, who had never been to war, who were young and strong and who wanted to be big, but who knew no excitements other than drinking beer and hanging around in the car park opposite the Quality Hotel. And after the boxing they came out into the street throwing punches at each other, and then in the pub they couldn’t get served. There were too many people in, and Davey was signalling to the barman, his hand up, and he made eye contact, but the barman ignored him and he turned instead to serve someone to the left of Davey, a man with a shaven head, not much older than Davey himself, and about a foot shorter, and he’d turned, the shaven-headed one, as he put in his order, and he smirked.
And that was all it was, a smirk, nothing else. That was the thing that had finally driven Davey Quinn away from our town and which had taken him twenty years to get over. Smirks, sneers, mumbles, those little laughs behind the hand: these are things that can destroy a man.* Of course, this wasn’t just any smirk, this smirk, this was the smirk that Davey Quinn had been seeing all his life, it was Life’s Smirk, if you like, the very quintessence of smirk, the same smirk that he’d imagined seeing smeared on the faces of all those cameramen and photographers when he was born, taking pictures, as if he mattered, knowing that he was just a little kid, who knew nothing about myths and superstitions and who hadn’t asked to be born. It was the smirk of the old people on the streets, and his teachers, and his friends, and his family, who all knew that he was nothing special, that he was just a wee boy born into a big family with a lot to live up to, and no way of knowing how. It was a smirk that let Davey Quinn know who he was and what he was: a travesty of himself.
Davey had gone berserk. Once he’d got him outside he was punching the shaven-headed man hard in the face, fists clenched, with a left hook and a right hook, swinging just like a boxer, using his height to his advantage, except it hurt more than Davey had imagined from seeing it in the ring, but suddenly the man’s legs were going and then he was down, and then Bob Savory and Billy Nibbs were pulling him off, before he could do any more damage. Davey suddenly felt heavy and as light as a feather, and he could feel his heart beating, and he looked at his bleeding hands and he wished he’d been wearing boxing gloves. He had never been in a fight in his life. He’d only ever fought with his brothers and with his dad. He hadn’t meant to do any harm to the fella. He’d just lost his temper. That was all.
And then there were all these other people outside the pub, and someone had phoned for the police, and Bob and Billy and Davey were running away down streets they didn’t know, until finally they found Billy’s dad’s van, the meat van, and they hid Davey in the back, amidst the stench of all the meat, and Billy drove so fast back to town in silence they might have been driving to catch a funeral: it felt like they were in the presence of death.
They might as well have been. When he got home Davey packed his grip and he went first thing in the morning, without even leaving a note or saying goodbye to anyone, and he was so terrified, and so relieved, and he felt so blank, that he never came back for twenty years. Billy and Bob kept an eye out for news in the Impartial Recorder, and Bob rang the hospital, pretending he was a friend, and it turned out that the shaven-headed man was OK. Broken teeth. Broken nose. Stitches in his head. It was nothing serious. Nobody died.
Not that it would have made any difference to Davey Quinn. The outcome for Davey Quinn was assured: he knew he would have killed the man if he’d had the chance. He would have kept at him until there was nothing left. And that was the sad truth about Davey, which he’d discovered that night, aged seventeen. He had realised what he really was: a nasty, no-good shrivelled-up specimen of humanity. Just like everyone else, like he’d always known he was. Nothing special. He was the seventh son of a seventh son. And it meant nothing.
Once Davey had done the deed, once he’d let himself down, he found he could begin to face up to himself. He didn’t have to impersonate himself any more, or pretend to be what he couldn’t be and couldn’t understand. As the seventh son of the seventh son he’d always struggled and tried not to stand out. If his brothers were behaving he behaved. If they misbehaved he misbehaved. He was, his teachers at school had said, easily led. He allowed other people to set the trend, to determine the tone, and he’d just copied, because he’d had no idea how to be himself. But now, defeated, and far away from our town, he was able to make himself up, however he wanted to be, to put himself together as a new person. He was doing his own thing. And he did – gloriously, for years, all over the globe, in all sorts of jobs and in all sorts of places – but in the end, of course, he knew he’d have to come back and try to be himself back home. Also, in the end it had meant coming back because he’d got a beating in a pub in London, when he’d started singing ‘Danny Boy’ after a football match on the big screen, and some blökes in England tops had taken exception and had set upon him, and the next thing he knew he had a ruptured kidney and he was pissing blood, and he was in hospital, and it was time to come home. He’d served his time. He was free to start over.
But as soon as he came back he’d been caught. He’d been suckered back into the family business and had started to lose his way. After the disaster with the stripping he could feel his brothers start smirking at him again. And his grandfather, speaking to him through the writing on the wall. Everyone wanting to catch up on where he’d been and what he’d done, and what he was going to do next, and everyone with an opinion. Davey Quinn Senior only allowed him to work on new properties on the estates round the ring road and he wasn’t allowed to strip – stripping was definitely off the menu. Painting and papering, and fresh walls only. Doing the stock-take he realised that this was his life, this was going to be his life: calculating paint amounts, applying coats. He was the seventh son again and he was a nobody.
So by the time he shut the lock-up on that wind dog of a morning he’d decided.
There was no place for him here. He wasn’t going to be hanging around.
He had no real friends here any more. Billy Nibbs had his head so far into his books that he was unreachable. And as for Bob Savory … Bob had become a parody of a businessman, who thought he could blackmail Davey and get him to do whatever he wanted. Which, of course, he couldn’t.
Although. He had given Davey a way out, if he wanted it. Davey really didn’t care about the Quality Hotel, or why Bob and Frank Gilbey wanted it out of the way. It meant nothing to him.
So he’d decided to do the job for Bob. He’d decided he was going to take the money and run.
And this time he would not be coming back.
But first he had to go and price a job for his dad.
It was Lorraine. She’d decided to redecorate. She needed a change. She wanted carpets instead of the laminate floors. She wanted new curtains. It was time she treated herself to a new duvet cover. It was time she washed away all memories of the Scotsman. She’d had a tartan biscuit tin, but that was away already.
Her brief marriage to the Scotsman, whose name had not been mentioned since he’d gone, had been the embarrassment that Lorraine had been waiting for all her life. The Scotsman was an alcoholic when he met her, but he never drank in company, or in the house, so Lorraine had never really noticed: he ate a lot of mints and he wore an expensive aftershave, so he always smelt nice; in fact, it was one of the things she liked about him. She’d never much liked the smell of men she’d been with before – smoke and beer and urine. The Scotsman smelt fresh in comparison. Compared with most of the men in our town the Scotsman was ambrosial. Her dad, Frank, had liked him a lot.
When they married, the Scotsman had taken to drinking secretly in the car, or in the garden shed, where he would stare out at a patch of grassed-over builder’s rubble that he knew he was never going to plant as a garden. He used a mouthwash, actually, as well as the mints and the cologne – Lorraine never knew. And when he gargled, he swallowed. He got a buzz off the alcohol.
The crunch had come one night in November. They’d been married for three months and Lorraine was determined they should plant a garden before Christmas. In her mind she needed something to show for the first few months of marriage. The Scotsman had made it clear that he wasn’t ready for them to start a family.
Lorraine loved her gardening magazines and books, and watching the television make-over programmes. Theirs was a new house on the biggest, most prestigious estate built outside the ring road, Woodsides. The houses there are all pretty high spec, despite the usual cost cuttings and obligatory subcontracted shoddy workmanship – they’re all maple kitchens with under-heated Italian tiled floors and hotel-style bathrooms with slightly dribbly taps and wonky fittings. * Double garages come as standard. All the houses are sold now, but the main contractor’s big blue van is rarely off site, replacing warped doors or cracked tiles, rewiring, reroofing and even, in some cases, reboring the drains. ‘If You Live in WOODSIDES,’ according to the estate agents and developers’ exclusive, full-colour, typographically insistent promotional information packs, ‘You Expect the Best’ but to be honest, if you do Expect the Best, you’d do better not to Live There: most of our town’s new-builds are a sure sign that Standards Are Slipping. A house built here in, say, 1995 has aged a whole lot quicker than a house built here in 1905, halogen spots or no halogen spots. Lorraine liked the house, though. She liked the double-length combined living and dining room, which was large enough to accommodate two white leather sofas and an eight-seater dining table which she’d covered with white damask. The sofas had been a gift from Frank and Irene to the young marrieds, and ever since the wedding Lorraine had been itching to get friends round to admire the sofas and the stainless steel and all their shared good taste, but somehow they hadn’t got round to doing much entertaining. The Scotsman said he wanted them to get settled in a bit first, so Lorraine spent her evenings fussing over fabric books and catalogues. The four bedrooms would give them plenty of room for the children when they arrived, as they inevitably would, as surely as the fashion for curtain fabrics swung from swags to blinds and back again.
They’d bought the house off-plan, so they’d been able to choose a lot of their own fittings and there was, to all intents and purposes, nothing to be done to the place when they moved in. It was an instant home. Thus, the garden had become Lorraine’s obsession.
Frank had offered to pay for his own gardener – Little Mickey Matchett, who used to work for the council parks department, when there was a council parks department – to come and sort it out, but Lorraine wanted the garden to be the outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible grace of a married relationship, and she believed that her planting designs should be carried out by a dedicated husband, attending garden centres and nurseries with her on a Saturday, and happily planting and tending all day Sunday. In fact, the Scotsman spent Saturdays watching sport and Sundays recovering from a hangover and preparing for another week’s drinking.
So Lorraine had gone to work on the garden herself. She’d had delivered enough bedding plants to maintain every roundabout on the ring road and beyond, and it was a Saturday when a trailer load of farmyard manure had been deposited on the front drive that finally did it for the Scotsman.
He’d arrived home from the golf club in his BMW saloon, about halfway through the day’s drinking timetable, post gin and tonics and beer, and pre wine and spirits, and he saw the manure piled in the drive. He saw Lorraine inside the house, a pair of Marigolds on, gazing anxiously at the clock, and suddenly he saw his life flash before him: the mulch of years to come, the plants, the children, the pets, the elderly parents requiring care, and he suddenly turned the car round, and headed for the ring road and out on to the motorway. He retuned from Classic FM to Radio 1 and he never looked back.
Lorraine couldn’t understand what had happened. He’d written after a few months – no return address – to apologise and said it was the drink. ‘Don’t blame yourself, ’ he wrote, but it was too late, Lorraine had already blamed herself. She’d tormented herself going over every little detail, looking for signs, and suddenly she saw the signs everywhere. Looking at the Scotsman now, in her mind’s eye, all day and every day, more than she’d ever even noticed him when he was around, she saw what she’d never noticed before: behind the sweet accent, beneath the sweet breath and the smart-casual clothing, she saw a selfish, lying, lazy, pathetic, hypocritical brute. And looking at herself she recognised what she’d always known and what she’d now had confirmed: she was a naïve, gullible, weak, needy, timid, ugly, fat, desperate thirty-something who’d probably have fallen for the first serial killer to take an interest in her.
Everything they’d done together, she realised, was a sham. Every moment they’d shared was a waste. Their vows were meaningless. Each kiss was a mocking insult. He was laughing at her when they made love, sniggering at everything she said. She could still see him sometimes in the mirrors, mocking her: how could anyone love that?! Huh? How could anyone respect that? All those fabrics and soft furnishings. The sofas. She told herself she should have seen it coming, that anyone else would have guessed it, or would have done something to sort it out. Anyone else, even an idiot, the most stupid person in the world, could have worked out that the Scotsman would prove to be a bad bet. She saw it all now, in full focus.
A few weeks before he’d disappeared, for example, they’d attended his work’s Hallowe’en party together, which had been arranged by his new PA, Angie, who was unmarried and who had arrived at the party dressed as a Renaissance sorceress, a costume which involved her having her blonde hair dyed black, and wearing a bustier, black leather boots and a free-flowing see-through chiffon skirt. The Scotsman had gone as Count Dracula, wearing a tuxedo, with a set of false teeth. Lorraine had gone as the Bride of Frankenstein. She’d worn her wedding dress – which she adored – and attached a plastic novelty knife dripping plastic blood. She’d thought it was funny at the time – a kind of a joke, and a good way to get some further use out of the dress. Now she realised it was a premonition. The Scotsman had spent all evening by the cocktails, chatting to Angie. Lorraine had assumed it was about work, but then she lost sight of them both for about half an hour and when she saw them again she’d noticed that the Scotsman was without his false teeth and the Renaissance sorceress had let her hair down. At the time she thought nothing of it. But now … It was terrible, the thought of it, her sheer stupidity. It tormented her. Anyone else, anyone except her, would have noticed.
The manure stood out front of the house for months, in humiliation. In the end, Frank had insisted that Little Mickey Matchett go round to clear it away and start work on the garden, but Lorraine had lost interest. She had always had a difficult relationship with her own body, but she now abandoned herself fully to bulimia and the music of solo female artistes. She’d got sick. The garden remained unplanted.
And then Frank had set her up in the Bridal and Tan Shop.
It was the shop that had saved Lorraine. It was the shop that had brought her back from the brink: the thought of all those dresses, and the lovely accessories, and the tanning bed, the responsibility of making other people’s dreams a reality. She’d had to suspend trading a few times, because she just couldn’t cope, but the beauty of it all kept bringing her back. ‘A wide range of dresses to suit all tastes’ read her advertisement in the Impartial Recorder. ‘Whether you’re looking for the cutting-edge modern styles or the traditional, we can provide you with everything for your perfect day.’ As well as the clothes and the tanning she did a full bridal package: the wedding music, the wedding favours, musicians, the rings, the flowers, the hair and the make-up. If you wanted her to, Lorraine could arrange just about everything for you, and she’d be there on the day to see you through, from the moment you woke up in the morning to the minute you slipped away to your secret honeymoon location, or at least the hotel room upstairs. She loved all that.
But it was the clothes that she really cared about. She loved the clothes more than anything. Just the smell of the clothes – when there was no one in the shop she’d sometimes take deep breaths, breathing it all in, burying her face in the ivory chiffon and the antique lace, and the tulle skirts. The shoes as well, of course, she loved the shoes. All the shoes she sold were special shoes. She’d never have wanted to work in a regular shoe shop, like Irvine’s, or Orr’s, having to sell trainers and other awful things. She only sold slingbacks, and kitten heels, and ivory silk satin stilettos with T-bars. Princess shoes.
The shop has done well, surprisingly. Over the past couple of years there’s hardly been a wedding in town that Lorraine hasn’t played some small part in. The blue garters she sells by the bucket-load. In our town, Lorraine Gilbey is weddings. She is the Bridal Salon and Tan Shop. It’s taken a while, but after the bad Scotsman she has managed to reinvent herself.
And now, finally, she’s ready to tackle the house and the garden.
When they’d first moved in they’d had the house decorated almost entirely white. That was the Scotsman’s idea. He’d wanted white walls and he didn’t want anything on the white walls. He wanted it blank: he even refused to let Lorraine put up her photos in her favourite silver frames. Which was another warning sign, really, when you thought about it. When he went, he left Lorraine with nothing but white walls and all her photos still packed in a box, and genital warts. That’d hurt.
She’d been through the books and chosen her colours. She loved going through fabric books and the paint brochures – she was very much a colour person, actually, despite all the time she spent in the shop amidst white. She has deep mahogany skin, Lorraine, and french-polished nails, which look like tiny ivory handles on a large dresser. Her teeth have been whitened, and her hair is expertly highlighted and straightened. But her clothes – her clothes really were radiant – they were what set it all off. She’d had her colours done years ago in a Colour Me Beautiful™ session with her old school friend Kim Collins, who is a colour analysis consultant up in the city and who’s doing very well with it, not just with individuals but with corporate accounts, and some men even, these days, and once Kim had done her colours Lorraine had never again strayed outside her colour palette. Lorraine is Light Spring, which means she looks best in pink, teal, salmon and periwinkle, and her best neutrals are gold and camel, and she knows a thing or two when it comes to matching separates and pulling together a co-ordinating outfit from a messy wardrobe. And now, she had decided, she was going to apply these principles to the house, and to her life.
When Davey arrived to price up the job he managed to dissuade her from paint effects. No rag-rolling, scumbling, or stencilling: very outdated, he said. He was quite firm about that. He was scared she’d make him do it, so he insisted it was the wrong thing to do. She’d agreed with him on that, but she refused his suggestion of magnolia for the walls. The Quinns kept a lot of magnolia in the lock-up and they called it different things to different people – ‘Ivory White’ was always very popular, and ‘Lime White’, ‘Off-White’, ‘Old White’, ‘Pale White’, ‘Sand’, ‘Sugar Barley’, ‘Frosted Apricot’, ‘Almond Cream’. ‘Nomad Trail’, that was a good one. They just made them up. Davey was doing his bit to get it shifted. But it was pink and periwinkle for Lorraine, or nothing at all.
Davey got the job. Lorraine liked him, she liked the look of him, although he was not at all the kind of man she would normally go for. He was too tall, for starters, and he had large ears – but large ears, Lorraine believed, were a sign of intelligence. She’d read that in a magazine once. She wasn’t sure about the ponytail, but she liked the look of his bib and braces and his quilted shirt, and the fact that he smelt of damp tobacco. Also, he has that shy, lopsided grin that’s always been a big hit, right from when he was a child, the only winningly seventh-sonish thing about him. He reminded Lorraine of a big friendly dog.
Davey, on the other hand, had hardly noticed what Lorraine looked like, even though she’d made quite an effort to get her look exactly right for meeting and greeting the prospective painters and decorators. He had other things on his mind – getting out of town, mostly. It was nothing too much, actually, the look she’d gone for, she hadn’t gone too far – a little bit of lipstick, a slight teasing of the hair, the little bubblegum pink cardigan, an old pair of jeans and her old tan cowboy boots. And she didn’t bother to put in her contacts, she’d kept her little square black glasses on instead. It was a perfect Colour Me Beautiful™ look, a look that said, Yes, workman, I am a woman, but be warned, do not try to take advantage of me, for I am also pretty tough, as is reflected, subtly but clearly, in the power colours of my colour palette, so don’t think for a moment you can overcharge me and mess me about, because if you do I will quite happily throw you out on your ear. It was a look that a Hollywood producer would have called feisty.
Lorraine had spent years perfecting her looks – the Bridal Salon and Tan Studio was really just an extension of her own interests and obsessions, and this is true in our town generally. Tom Irvine, of Irvine’s Footwear, for example, he really is interested in shoes, he’s not pretending. He notices them on other people, still, after all these years, and he still can’t stand holes and scuffs and scratches – they make no sense to him. Tom himself would always have plumped for a nice pair of brogues, given the choice, and he had his doubts about slip-ons and suede. Similarly, at Priscilla’s Ladies Separates and Luxury Hairstyling it would have been impossible for Priscilla to conceive of a woman who wouldn’t have wanted her hair set nicely for the weekend and in just the way that Priscilla set it. At King’s Music, Ernie King’s and his son Charlie’s interest in music had always bordered on the obsessional: Ernie could have named you a Benny Goodman solo just from the sound of the maestro drawing breath, and his son could do the same for just about every guitar lick from the opening bars of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ to the closing notes of the legendary bootleg of Rainbow live at the Budokan. The butchers in our town all enjoyed their meat, from head to tail, and the grocers all loved vegetables, even turnips and the bitter little local apples. You had to. You had no choice. Your business was your life.
At Bloom’s, on the other hand, up at the shopping mall, business has been successfully divorced from life, from obsession and from passion. Desire has been set free from its object, and has become a goal in itself, a realm of fantasy and constant stimulation, a place of ever tinkling fountains and frothing cappuccino carts. You could spend your whole life working in a shop up at Bloom’s and never have any idea exactly what it was you were selling, or why. Indeed, that seemed to be pretty much the case with most people working in the shops at Bloom’s. Of course, this new free-floating world of goods and services has its advantages. It means you’re not tethered to your job. It means you can live a rich, fulfilling life, while ostensibly working eight long hours a day in ladies’ clothes, or giftware. Little Steffie Hutchinson, for example, works on the meat counter in the supermarket and she’s a vegetarian (although she does eat fish), and she works a split shift so that she’s always home to pick up her children from school. Johnny Portek, son of the town’s only Pole, is pigeon-chested and has a peanut allergy, but he’s still able to work in the in-store bakery and to travel the length and breadth of the county at weekends, playing with his mod tribute band, the Kasuals. He’s the rhythm guitarist. You don’t owe all your allegiance to your job any more. And it doesn’t owe it to you. Everybody’s satisfied all the time and nobody knows what they want.
Davey got stuck into the decorating job at Lorraine’s and had been at it about a week, with Lorraine shutting up the Bridal Salon and Tan Shop at lunchtimes and coming home to make him a sandwich and a cup of tea, and to talk to him about her day and ask him about his. When Davey told Lorraine his stories about all the different places he’d been to and everything he’d done, it seemed to her that he had lived the life she’d always dreamed of, a life of wandering and drifting, far away from responsibilities and away from this town. She imagined all the different colours in all the different stories and all the different scenes – the big red splash of tulips in Holland, the profound winters of Berlin and the soft summer tones of the south of France.
The basic problem with our town, actually, is its colour. It’s grey. Grey is the dominant colour all year round and it’s not a palette of grey – it’s not a range of fancy greys that you might see in one of Lorraine’s paint brochures. It’s just pure grey-grey, plus a kind of wet-grey when it rains. So our town is really the wrong place for someone who likes colour and Lorraine did like colour. Lorraine even likes colourful drinks and colourful foods. She would always take a glass of rosé over a glass of Chardonnay, for example, because the colour seems to her much more expressive, of what she does not know, but of something, she is sure. Rosé is within her colour palette and she just enjoys bringing a little colour into her life whenever she can.
That’s why she loved working in the shop. The clothes were white, but it was all about colour, really. She loved advising women in the Bridal Salon, helping to put a little bit of colour and sparkle into their lives. She knew exactly what women wanted for their wedding day, or at least what they want in our town, which is usually something sexy, flouncy, something with a little bit of a heel, and something white. She did offer other colours apart from the white, but they were never popular. And the heels – well, she could always persuade people into heels, even women wearing Doc Martens.
‘I couldn’t possibly walk in those, ’ they’d say.
‘You’re not supposed to be able to walk in them, ’ Lorraine would say and, pausing for a moment, she’d add, ‘They’re not for walking in.’ Then she’d pause again, for a longer moment, and lower her voice, almost imperceptibly. ‘They’re for lying down in.’
And that’d be a sale.
Lorraine had always talked quietly, so you had to lean in a little to hear her, and she spoke a language of extreme diffidence, combined with an extreme, unexpected sauciness, which always worked with her customers, and it had worked also with the Scotsman, who had met her at a Rotary Club Christmas dinner at the Plough and the Stars and who had fallen for her when she was calling out the raffle, when she’d made a glazed ham, a box of Milk Tray and a bottle of supermarket champagne sound like telephone sex. Her voice worked with most people.
But it didn’t with Davey Quinn. Davey was used to working with women in all sorts of circumstances all over the world, women who had never had their colours done and who did not rely on sweet-talking in order to get their way. He’d worked with an Aussie spark in Berlin, for example, Margot she was called, and she was something: a tattoo on the inside of her upper lip, smoked roll-ups, and drank like a fish, worked harder than most of the men. There’d been androgynous fruit pickers from Uzbekistan, and Germans who used to finish a ten-hour day on the sites and go and lift weights for laughs. He’d worked for women bosses who pinched men’s arses and made sexist comments, women in hard hats and women who looked like they cut their own hair, women who were like fellas, most of them, and they did not behave in the way women here in town behaved, so Davey had grown accustomed over the years to treating women as equals, which is still something of a novelty here – it was only a few years ago, after all, that women started wearing slacks to church. Mrs Donelly had been a pioneer in this area: she gave up skirts on Sundays in 1977, the year of the Queen’s Jubilee and the Sex Pistols at number one in the charts, although it was not clear which of these two events, if either, had influenced her decision. But even though they now wore the trousers, women here on the whole still shopped, cleaned, and had the job that paid for the children’s clothes and the holidays, even if that job was as a head teacher or an independent financial adviser. That was the way it had always been and that was the way it would continue. A woman was expected to be either a daughter or a wife, without very much room for variation in between.
With Davey, though, Lorraine behaved more as though they were friends, which is uncommon for men and women in town over the age of thirty, and so she didn’t bother much with the voice, or with the exercising of her feminine charms. Lorraine had been an only child and Davey was the seventh son of a seventh son, but the effect was pretty much the same; neither of them had ever really had an intimate; they had been expected to rely upon themselves and to work things out for themselves. So they enjoyed being friends and pretty soon they had little jokes going together. Lorraine started leaving Davey funny notes if she wasn’t going to make it back for lunch. They cheered each other up. They made each other laugh.
Davey was certainly not like any man Lorraine had ever known before. She tended to measure men against her father, Frank, whom Davey was most unlike. He wasn’t nearly as competitive, or as aggressive. Frank would have wiped the floor with him. Lorraine’s first memory of her father was of him mowing the lawn and he even mowed the lawn as though he were in a race: he didn’t pause at either end, just swung it straight round and came haring back the same way. This was before he’d entered his vicuna overcoat phase, before they had a gardener. He was racing against himself, even then. He had been an absent but dominating presence in her childhood, a figure who had always embarrassed her and scared her, and she’d always thought that’s what men did. When he was angry he would shout so loud that it made her mother cry and when they went out to eat, as they increasingly did as he started making money on his property deals, he would always have to make a scene. One of his favourite phrases was ‘Let’s make an occasion of it’ and Lorraine hated him for always making an occasion of it. He was always wanting to make things happen, to let people know who he was. They used to go to the Quality Hotel, in the old days, to what was called the Grill Room and he would order a steak, but it had to be done right – always rare – and it was never quite rare enough and he’d send it back, and they’d have to cook him another. He would probably have preferred to eat the steak raw, actually, with his bare hands. Her mother, meanwhile, would always order a salad, and Lorraine could never understand that, as a child, but she felt she should order a salad also – to show solidarity. So she did. But it always left her hungry. So when she got home she’d raid the fridge, to fill herself up. And then she’d feel disgusted with herself, so she’d make herself sick. That was the effect men had on you, in Lorraine’s experience. They made you behave in ways that made you feel quite nauseous and unhappy.
But not Davey. With Davey she would happily sit and eat a cheese-and-pickle sandwich, and talk about his travels and the meaning of life. She did not mention the Scotsman, but she did speak of seeking out new horizons, and needing to get her head together, and getting out of town. All the years he’d spent away Davey had really only talked to people under the influence and at night, in foreign countries, so it was shocking to be talking to someone about the meaning of life over a cup of tea, in our town, during the day. He liked it. As Davey got to know her, he became convinced that he had led a wonderful, colourful life, that he was not someone who had simply run away from his responsibilities as the seventh son of a seventh son. He was an adventurer. He was, to Lorraine, the person he had always known himself to be in his own head.
He worked hard on the job. He made sure he touched up any spots and drops and drips. He tidied up after himself every evening. He ventilated the rooms properly. He made no mistakes and he made the job last. And when at last he’d finished, Lorraine asked him if he knew anything about gardening. A bit, he said, not much.
Well, would he do her a favour, she asked. Would he like to join her in a trip to the garden centre, just to pick up some plants?
He would, he said.
The best and biggest garden centre around here is without doubt Gardenlands, out on the Old Green Road. Mr and Mrs Crolly, of course, run a little place they call the Shrubbery, at the back of their house, up on the edge of the industrial estate, but it’s really only for aficionados and lovers of hedging. They don’t sell Christmas decorations, for example, or whimsies, and they don’t do tray bakes, or provide a soft-play area for children. Gardenlands, on the other hand, is out beyond the ring road, where there’s enough room to begin to stretch out and provide not just plants and shrubs, but more of a garden centre experience.*
It was a beautiful sunny day when Lorraine and Davey arrived and they spent a long time wandering around, bending over and sniffing at herbs together, and kneeling down to look at tiny little alpine plants, squeezing down aisles of pots and planters, and after they’d had a cup of coffee and a slice of apple Strudel in the garden centre café, Threshers, and Davey had got hold of a large trolley for Lorraine, and they were pushing it along together, he slipped his hand gently over hers – it was somewhere between the cotoneaster, Lorraine remembered, and the broad-leafed Indian bean trees.
And it was only three o’clock when they got back to the house and unloaded, but they agreed they could plant up tomorrow.
So it wasn’t until the next day, when Lorraine went to write Davey a cheque for the job and he glanced over it, just to make sure everything was in order, that he noticed her signature.
Lorraine’s marriage to the Scotsman had lasted so short a time that she had never even had the chance to change the chequebooks, so it still bore her maiden name: Lorraine Gilbey. Frank’s daughter.
The man for whom Davey Quinn was about to burn down the Quality Hotel.
* There is still some debate here in town about the exact date of the appearance of our first avocado, an event which is generally considered to have marked the beginning of the end for our local turnip growers, a once prosperous group many of whom now run B&Bs or grow oilseed rape or live in Spain, or all three. No one in their right minds, not even here, is ever going to give up the sweet rich buttery flesh of a ripe Hass for the nostalgic pleasures of a plain boiled turnip. Some people date the beginning of our love affair with the avocado to the summer of 1974, when Johnny ‘The Boxer’ Mathers was forced to change his supplier to one of the big national companies, after his previous supplier, J. J. Farrelly, had been forced out of business by the first big supermarkets opening up in the city, who began importing fruit and vegetables from countries which remained a mere rumour to J. J., whose root vegetables simply could not compete with year-round sugarsnap peas and crispy iceberg lettuces. Certainly, prawn cocktails served on a bed of iceberg lettuce in the hollowed-out halves of avocado were a popular staple in the Quality Hotel Grill Room by the mid-1970s. The avocado and the Black Forest Gâteau, relative newcomers, have since become firmly rooted locally and have thrived and survived where garlic mushrooms with melted Brie, say, or warm Mediterranean goat’s cheese tartlets have withered on the vine. Aubergines also never caught on – just too weird – and fresh herbs apart from parsley remain a rumour.
* The phrase ‘What are you looking at?’ is one that is often uttered here in town, both inside and outside clubs and pubs on a Friday and Saturday and Sunday night, and it is a phrase which is usually caused and prompted merely by a glance, and one which often leads straight to hospital – proving a direct causal link between a look and loss of blood.
* Second phase, if you’re interested, soon on release. ‘Three Stunning New Designs of Detached Homes in this Prestigious Development: the Beech, the Hawthorn and the Oak. From Three to Five Bedrooms. All Designed to Suit Stylish Everyday Family Living! (Choice of kitchen doors and worktops as standard. Finishes to include moulded skirting and architraves, uPVC double glazing, quality facing brick and painted smooth render to exterior.) Prices start from £225,000.’
* ‘From Perennials to Annuals, and Pots to Pot-Pourri, Let Your Imagination Run Away with You at Gardenlands, the One-Stop Gardening Shop. Be Inspired by Our Stunning Displays of Plants. Relax at Threshers, Our Award-Winning Café and Events and Banqueting Suite. Enjoy Our Amazing Range of Garden and Home Products, Including Chimeneas, Barbecues, Indonesian Teak Garden and Conservatory Furniture, Taylor’s Stone Statuettes™, Bandff Sheds and Quality Giftware. At Gardenlands, the One-Stop Gardening Shop, Something for All the Family.’