Ring Road (30 page)

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.