Al thought you couldn’t bargain with a house builder, but Colette showed her that you can. Even when they had agreed on a basic price, three thousand below Suzi’s target, she kept on pushing, pushing, pushing, until Suzi felt sick and hot and she began to capitulate to Colette’s demands; for Colette made it clear that until she was dealt with, and dealt with in a way satisfactory to herself, she would keep away any other potential customers—which she did, by darting her head at them as they climbed the steps and fixing them with her pale glare; by snapping, “Do you mind, Suzi is busy with me?” When Suzi’s phone rang, Colette picked it up and said, “Yes? No she can’t. Call back.” When Suzi yearned after lost prospects as they stumbled down the steps, following them with her eyes, Colette zipped her bag, stood up and said, “I could come back when you’re more fully staffed—say, next Saturday afternoon?”
Suzi grew frantic then, as she saw her commission seeping away. She became accommodating and flexible. When Suzi agreed to upgrade to a power shower en-suite to Bed Two, Colette signed up for fitted wardrobes. When Colette hesitated over a double oven, Suzi offered to make it a multifunction model including microwave. When Colette—after prolonged deliberation—gave the nod to brass switchplates throughout, Suzi was so relieved she threw in a carriage lamp free. And when Colette—after stabbing at her calculator buttons and gnawing her lip— opted for wood-style flooring to kitchen and utility, Suzi, sweating inside her orange skin, agreed to turf the back garden at Galleon’s expense.
Meanwhile, Alison had plummeted down on the click ’n’ fix korner group seating. I can afford it, she thought, I can probably afford it. Business was booming, thanks in part to Colette’s efficiency and bright ideas. There was no shortage of clients; and it was just as Colette said, one must invest, one must invest against leaner times. Morris sat in the corner, picking at the carpet tiles, trying to lift one. He looked like a toddler, absorbed, his short legs and potbelly thrust out, his tongue between his teeth.
She watched Colette negotiating, small rigid hand chopping the air. At last she got the nod and limped out to the car after her. Colette jumped into the driving seat, whipped out her calculator again, and held it up so that Al could see the display.
Al turned away. “Tell me in words,” she said. Morris leaned forward and poked her in the shoulder. Here’s the lads coming, he shouted. Here’s the cheeky chappies. Knew you’d find me, knew you would, that’s the spirit.
“You could take more of an interest,” Colette snapped. “I’ve probably saved us ten K.”
“I know. I just can’t read the panel. The light’s in my eyes.”
“Plain ceilings or Artex?” Colette said. Her voice rose to a squeak, imitating Suzi. “They think you’ll give them money to stop them making plaster swirls.”
“I expect it’s harder to make plaster smooth.”
“That’s what
Aitkenside said, we can’t live here. There’s no bleeding accommodation.
Dean said, Morris, are we going camping? I went camping once.
Morris said, how was it, mate?
Dean said, it were crap.
Aitkenside said, call it a porthole and it don’t bleeding open? Won’t do for Keef, you know, it won’t do for Keef.
“Brilliant,” Al said. “Couldn’t be better. What won’t do for Keith will do just fine for me.” She put out her hand and squeezed Colette’s cold bony fingers.
That summer, the birch trees were cut down and the last birds flew away. Their song was replaced by the roaring of road drills, the beeping of the earth movers backing up, the cursing of hod carriers and the cries of the wounded, and scrubland gave way to a gashed landscape of trenches and moats, of mud chutes and standing pools of yellow water; which within a year, in its turn, gave way to the violent emerald of new turf, the Sunday morning roar of mowers and strimmers, the tinkling of the ice-cream vans, the trundling of gas barbecues over paving and the stench of searing meat.
The flat in Wexham had sold to the first people who saw it. Alison wondered, will they sense something: Morris glugging inside the hot-water tank, or murmuring in the drains? But they seemed delighted, and offered the full asking price.
“It seems so unfair,” Colette said, “when our flat in Whitton wouldn’t sell. Not even when we dropped the price.”
She and Gavin had sacked Sidgewicks, tried another agent; still no takers. Eventually, they had agreed Gavin should stay there, and buy her out by installments. “We have hopes the arrangement will be persuasive to Mrs. Waynflete,” his solicitor had written, “as we understand she is now living with a partner.” Colette had scrawled over the letter,
On the day they moved from Wexham, Morris was fuming and snarling in a corner. “How can I move,” he said, “when I have given out this as my address? How will Nick find me, how will my old mates know where to come?” When the men came to take the pine dresser away, he lay on top of it to make it heavy. He infiltrated Al’s mattress and infused his spirit sulks among the fibres, so that it bucked and rippled in the men’s hands, and they almost dropped it in alarm. When the men slammed the tailgate and vaulted into the driver’s cab, they found their whole windscreen had been spattered with something green, viscid, and dripping. “What kind of pigeons do you have around here?” they said. “Vultures?”
As the Collingwood was Galleon’s top-of-the-range model, it had more gob-ons than any other house type in the development, more twiddles and teases, more gables and spindles; but most of them, Colette predicted, would fall off within the first six months. Down the hill they were still building, and yellow machines picked and pecked at the soil, their stiff bending necks strangely articulated, like the necks of prototype dinosaurs. Trucks jolted up with glue-on timbers of plastic oak, bound together in bundles like kindling. Swearing men in woolly hats unloaded paper-thin panels of false brickwork, which they pinned to the raw building blocks; they disembarked stick-on anchor motifs, and panels of faux pargetting with dolphin and mermaid designs. The beeping, roaring, and drilling began promptly at seven, each morning. Inside the house there were a few mistakes, like a couple of the internal doors being hung the wrong way around, and the Adam-style fireplace being off-centre. Nothing, Al said, that really affected your quality of life. Colette wanted to keep arguing with the builders till she got compensation, but Al said, let it go, what does it matter, just close the door on it. Colette said, I would but the frame’s warped.
The day their kitchen ceiling fell in, she strode off to the sales caravan, where Suzi was still selling off the last remaining units. She made a scene; punters fled back to their cars, thinking they’d had a lucky escape. But when she left Suzi and began splashing uphill, picking her way between stacked paving slabs and lengths of piping, she
