To all and sundry, all that summer, Penny would announce, ‘Rob’s really sweeping me off my feet.’
It was a whirlwind. Experience everything, she was instructed by her innermost drives. At the peak of summer she found herself sucking, sniffing, chewing, drinking, laughing, frotting, coaxing, snorting, smoking, bleeding, gorging, sighing, retching, fucking, and starting at last to sort the sheep from the boys. And tingling always, shift key firmly depressed; shift lock, in fact.
At the beginning of September, Penny kicked leaves down the road, all the way from the whirlwind, into autumn, and back to school.
It was two garages knocked into one. The walls inside were soft with artificial light and clouds of sprayed colour. Cushions and bits of dismembered settees were strewn about, with acrylics, fabrics, zippers wound in waiting piles. Everywhere there was foam rubber. Jaundiced squares of sponge, fleshy slabs rounded at the corners. The room was a soft, comforting room. Here sofas were put back together. It was a surgery for the badly upholstered.
Frank was slumped on a mass of Styrofoam, knocking the mouth of a can against his teeth. His cigarette smoke rose in a blue plume to the naked light bulb above him. He wasn’t meant to smoke in here. The materials were dodgy.
Gary was wrestling with unwieldy cushions through his dinner hour. He was in mourning for his dog. He hadn’t told Frank anything about it, about finding his dog dead and surrounded by policemen at the side of the road first thing this morning. He had no idea how the dog had got out overnight. He worked continuously, stretching covers over, peeling them back, zipping them carefully up with pursed lips. His hands moved absorbedly over cheap fabric.
They hadn’t spoken at all this morning. Frank had been lying around, stewed to the gills. Gary’s only comment had been to zip up zips with more than his usual vehemence.
They hadn’t spoken properly since Fran’s argument and the threat about the axe. Frank would instruct Gary in his work — he was, after all, supposed to be teaching him — in as few words as possible. Gary would reply, ‘Yurp’ or ‘Got it’, and take his duties over.
It was Frank who broke the fractious silence. ‘Does your wife go out a lot?’
The question startled Gary. He dropped his latest cushion on to the pile and wiped his mouth on the arm of his camouflaged jacket.
‘She never goes out. We’ve got the kid. I don’t go out.’ He spat on the concrete and rubbed it away with a corner of his next cushion cover. ‘I walk the dog… of a night and that’s about it.’ For a moment there Gary had forgotten, and mentioning his dog almost made him break down. He strangled a sob in his throat. There was no way he’d let Frank see him upset. Ammo to the enemy.
Frank remembered how difficult it was being newlyweds. He remembered spending a lot of time indoors, and then standing at the bottom of his garden, waiting for the taunting fly-overs Fran’s brothers made on horseback.
‘I think Fran’s going to start spending money. Going out more.’
‘Get her a new armchair.’
‘I did last time.’
‘Get her another one.’
‘There’s only me and her who sit on chairs.’
‘Get them recovered.’
‘Nah.’
‘I was just suggesting…’ Gary let it go. He remembered that they weren’t supposed to be speaking, having threatened to do each other in.
‘That bloody family of hers.’ Frank spat too, but it was thick with beer and clung to the can. ‘Them and their horses. Giving her ideas.’
‘You’ve given her all she needs.’
‘I thought so.’
‘Yurp,’ Gary asserted, consolingly. He bent to start work again. He held up some material. ‘This is a new print, this. She’d like her three-piece recovered in this. I won’t say owt if you whip some.’
‘I don’t pinch stuff.’
‘I just said —’
‘And you don’t either. You’re unemployed, remember?’ Frank swapped cans and glared at his apprentice.
‘Yurp.’
‘Bloody horses! Giving ideas. Bloody cushions!’ Frank slid sideways in the Styrofoam. ‘I’d take her out, for fuck’s sake!’
‘You’ve got everything you need?’
‘I think so.’
‘I’m looking forward to this now.’
‘It’ll be a laugh.’
‘You look lovely in that. We’ll get you cracked off with someone. No bother.’
Fran laughed. ‘Thanks anyway.’ She peered into a dark shop window. Kerry had been right. ‘I’m walking round in an anorak I’ve had ten years and my hair’s all —’
Liz was dashing off to the bus stop, swinging her carrier bags. ‘Get a wig then!’ she cried.
Fran ran after her. ‘Look! Look who’s driving the bus!’ The bus stopped and, pulling up for them outside the fish shop and the video shop round the back of the precinct, the bus driver grinned at them.
‘All aboard!’ he shouted.
SIX
Vince had a suit that his father had bought him when he was seventeen. They went shopping together in the Metro Centre in Gateshead when the sales were on. Thinking back, it was the last real thing they had done together. In the spring of that year his father realised that soon Vince would be leaving, that by the end of the year he would be gone. The father would be on his own in the little house by the playing fields. He held no illusions about Vince’s attachment to him. He knew that, given one sniff of freedom and the life beyond, Vince would be away like a shot. Father and son had only ever been held together by a kind of tacit, improvised trustfulness.
His father wanted to buy his son a suit for the interviews he would be having at universities. He couldn’t be there himself, he couldn’t drive his son to all the different towns, but he wanted to do something. He didn’t think a boy that age should want his father there with him, anyway. One breakfast-time he tried to bring this up: how
