Ring Road (14 page)

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.