by Ian Sansom
Marie has had the opportunity to practise this particular smile over a number of years now, and it hardly ever failed to work its magic, even on non-native speakers of English. It was a philosophical smile, a smile that suggested that although the loss of luggage obviously caused her pain, she understood from a wider and longer perspective that it was a small matter and that you, the unfortunate but undoubtedly reasonable passenger, should regard it as a small matter also, for thus and this way, the smile implied, lay the path to enlightenment. Davey interpreted this complex smile correctly and filled in a pink form without protest under Marie’s benign gaze. The luggage, said Marie, might be over on the next flight. Or it might not. And then she checked Davey’s name and signature on the form, which was when it happened. ‘I know you,’ she said.
‘You do?’
‘Of course. I know you.’
‘Right,’ said Davey.
‘David Quinn?’ She wagged a finger at him.
‘Yes,’ said Davey.
She’d caught him: she had him bang to rights. ‘The son of David Quinn?’
‘Yes,’ he agreed mournfully. He knew what was coming.
‘The seventh son of the seventh son?’
What could he say? They were words that he hadn’t heard for twenty years and he could live without hearing for another twenty more. But he couldn’t deny it, although he’d hoped that perhaps he could have got away with it. He’d thought that if he stayed away long enough he might have become unrecognisable to the past, but it was not to be so; the past has a very long memory.
For most of us, for those of us who return home out of necessity, or in mere shame or pity, rather than in triumph and trailing clouds of glory or with our reputations preceding us, the journey home is always a disappointment. For most of us there’s never going to be ticker tape and no free pint, no surprise pick-up at the station or the airport, and the best we can hope for is a mild handshake from our father and a teary hug from mum. Which is never enough.
But Davey had wanted nothing more. He’d have been happy to creep back unannounced and unnoticed – a quick pat on the back, then pick up the car from the Short Stay car park and home for a nice cup of tea. That would have been just fine.
They say that everybody wants secretly to be recognised, but Davey Quinn really had wanted to be left alone and it had suited him, the years of anonymity, it had given him space to breathe and to get to know himself. Living away, he thought he’d finally begun to grow into his face, the jut of his own chin, the set of his own nose, the furrows of his own brow: he felt pretty sure that they all reflected his new, different, more secure sense of himself. He thought that he’d found the perfect disguise.
‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ said Marie, hand on hip.
‘Really?’
‘You get back a lot?’
‘I haven’t been back in twenty years,’ he said.
‘Living in London?’
‘Yes,’ he agreed.
‘You’ll see a lot of changes.’
‘Uh-huh,’ he said. ‘Right.’
‘I’ll see what I can do about the luggage,’ said Marie, picking up her walkie-talkie.
‘Thanks,’ said Davey, turning to walk away.
‘Honest to God, you look just the same,’ repeated Marie.
‘Good,’ said Davey.
‘And that extra bit of weight suits you.’ And then she spoke into the walkie-talkie. ‘Maureen?’ she said. ‘You’ll never guess who I’ve got here.’
There was a crackle.
‘David Quinn.’
And then more crackle.
‘Yes. Him.’
And then crackle again.
‘Maureen says welcome home. And Happy Christmas.’
‘Thanks,’ said Davey. ‘The same to you.’
It was getting late and he caught a cab. The driver was humming along to a tune on the radio, a typical piece of bowel-softening Country and Western, sung in an accent yearning for America but tethered firmly here to home. Davey sat down heavily in the back, dazed, and stared out of the window.
So this was it.
Home.
Marie was totally wrong. There weren’t a lot of changes. In fact, everything looked exactly the same: the same rolling hills, the same patches of fields and houses, the same roundabouts, the motorway. It was all just as he remembered it. A landscape doesn’t change that much in twenty years.
Or the weather.
It had been fine when they left the airport, but now the rain was sheeting down and about twenty miles along the motorway one of the windscreen wipers popped off – the whole arm, like someone had just reached down and plucked it away, like God Himself was plucking at an eyebrow.
‘Jesus!’ screamed the driver, having lost all vision through the windscreen in what seemed to be a massive and magic stream of liquid pouring down from the heavens, as if God, or Jesus, were now pissing directly on to the car, as if He were getting ready for an evening out, and they swerved across three lanes and pulled over on to the hard shoulder.
‘Did you see that?’
‘I did,’ said Davey.
‘Jesus Christ. Blinded me.’
‘You OK?’
‘Yeah, thanks. Yeah. I’m fine.’
The car was rocking now, as lorries passed by, and then there was a sudden clap of thunder in the distance.
‘You wouldn’t be any good at repairs, would you?’ asked the driver, turning round.
‘No, not really,’ said Davey.
‘Would you mind having a look, though? It’s just, I don’t know anything about cars. And this asthma.’ The man coughed, in evidence. ‘It gets bad in the rain.’ He reached for a cigarette, put it in his mouth ready to light it and waited, his hand shaking slightly.
‘Right,’ said Davey, who did look as though he knew about cars and who felt sorry for the man, who reminded him of his father: it was the shakes, and the cigarette, and the thickset back of the neck; the profile of most men here over forty, actually. ‘I’ll just go ahead then, shall I?’
‘I’d be grateful, if you would.’
Davey got out. The cars on the inside lane were inches from him, flank to flank, and the rain was busy pasting his clothes to him, and the wind was getting up, turning him instantly from safe passenger into a sailor rolling on the forecastle in the high seas.
He checked first round the front. The whole of the wiper’s arm had gone – just the metal stump remained – so he then made his way round to the rear and started pulling off the back windscreen wiper, in the hope he might be able to use it as a replacement. He managed to cut his hands on the fittings and the spray from the road was whipping up his back, but in the end, with a twist and a wrench, he managed to get the wiper off. And in so doing he dropped the little plastic lugs that had held it in place – they rolled on to the road – so there he was, big Davey Quinn, not an hour back home, down on his knees, soaked to the skin in the pouring rain, reaching out a bloodied hand into a sea of oncoming traffic.
It was no good. They were out too far and the traffic was too heavy. He gave up. He got back into the back seat, drenched, defeated, and dripping wet and blood.
The driver was smoking. ‘Good swim?’ he asked, chuckling at his own joke. ‘No luck?’
‘No.’ Davey reached forward and gave the driver the back wiper. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘You’re all right.’
The driver called into his office on the radio. They’d send someone along with a spare. It might take a while, maybe an hour or so.
An hour.
Davey thought about it.
Davey had been thinking about coming home for as long as he’d been away – there was not a day went past when he didn’t think about it – but it was a journey in which irresolution might still easily overtake him. He had enough money in his wallet and on his cards to be able to go back to the airport right now and get the next plane out, and maybe wait another twenty years before returning. He was, therefore, a man w
ho could not afford to hesitate.
The time was now or never.
He’d come this far: he was going to have to keep going. He was going to have to maintain his velocity.
He said he’d walk the rest of the way.
‘Walk?’ said the driver.
‘Yeah,’ said Davey.
‘As in, on your feet?’
‘Yeah,’ repeated Davey.
‘Walking? In this rain?’
‘Yes,’ said Davey one more time.
‘Are you joking?’
‘No. It’s not far from here, is it?’
‘Next exit. He won’t be long, though, with the spare.’
‘No, I’ll push on, I think.’
‘Well, it’s your decision, pal. What’s the hurry?’
‘I just …’ Davey couldn’t explain it. ‘I need to get back. What do I owe you?’
‘Well, I’ll have to charge you full fare and extra for the damage to the wiper.’
‘Right,’ said Davey. He believed him.
‘No, I’m having you on!’ said the driver. ‘Jesus! Where have you been?’
‘London,’ admitted Davey.
‘Well,’ said the driver philosophically. ‘I’ll tell you what. This isn’t London. We’ll call it quits. OK?’
‘OK,’ said Davey. ‘Cheers.’ People at home, he thought: they were the salt of the earth.
‘Happy Christmas,’ said the man as Davey slipped out. ‘And good luck.’
Davey had made it about half a mile and halfway down the slip road in the squall and rain before he realised that he’d left his little rucksack, his only hand luggage, in the car.
The rucksack contained a bottle of whiskey for his parents, a bottle for himself and his wallet, stuffed with cash and cards.
He turned and walked back towards the car, in the face of the traffic spitting up fountains in his face.
The car had gone – there was just a wiper on the hard shoulder to mark where once it had been.
So this was how it was going to have to be. He was going to have to return, as he had left, with nothing and in ruin.
He put one foot in front of the other and set off in the wake of the cars’ slipstream.
It’s a long walk from the motorway to the outskirts of our town – an hour, maybe two, I’m not sure, it’s not a walk I’d care to take myself – but eventually in the distance, on that profound horizon, Davey saw the golf club, the outskirts, with its big stone sleeping lions and its 20-foot forbidding hedges, and there was probably a good half-inch of water in his shoes by this time, and his clothes were like wet canvas as he stood and rested his hand on the head of one of the lions and gazed at the entire grey town down below him.
A lot can change in a small town in twenty years. In twenty years men and women can do a lot of damage. There is no mildness in the hearts of small-town councillors and planners, and you should never underestimate what small-town people are capable of. You can double it and double it again, and keep on going with your calculations until you think you’ve achieved the unimaginable, and still you’d never come close. Any estimate will never match up to the extraordinary outstretched reality.
The people of my home town have outdone themselves. We have exceeded all expectations. We have gone further than was absolutely necessary. We have confounded probability and ignored all the maths. We have been reckless and we have been greedy, we have eaten ourselves alive, sucked the very marrow from our bones, and spat out the remaining pieces.
Davey was amazed. He was heading straight for the centre of town, past all the old landmarks – Treavy’s second-hand cars, Pickering’s the monumental masons, McKenzie’s broom factory and the old planing mill, where they used to stack the sashes and doors outside under a huge tarpaulin canopy, and J. W. John’s, the big coal depot, where the coal would sometimes fall over the wall, and we’d go to collect it and bring it home, or dig pits in the woods and gather kindling and try to make fires.
They’re all gone, of course – Treavy’s, Pickering’s, McKenzie’s, John’s. There is nothing of them remaining at all. It’s been quite a clearance. Even the long steep road Davey was coming in on, shin-deep in mud and puddles, what used to be Moira Avenue, a mazy S-shaped road flanked with trees and the cast-iron railings protecting the town’s little light industry, is now a straight flat dual carriageway with housing developments tucked up tight behind vast sheets of panel fencing on either side, a good quarter of a mile of soft verges and For Sale signs.
At the very end of the road, a road Davey no longer recognised but which he now alas knew, every foot-aching inch of it, at a big new junction with four sets of lights where the water had formed in deeper puddles, was the Kincaid furniture factory. Or rather, was the Kincaid furniture factory. There’s nothing there at all now. Just mud, and sprouting weeds, and a sign, ‘COMING SOON: EXCITING NEW DEVELOPMENT OF TWO AND THREE BED HIGH-SPEC TURNKEY FINISH TOWN HOUSES’, with a high-spec view, it should be noted, of the health centre car park, Macey’s the chemists, and Tommy Tucker’s chipper, which have all survived the clearances.
Molested by the remorseless rain, Davey Quinn waited for the little green man to tip him the wink, then he crossed over into the centre proper.
The old fire station is still there, but it has been converted into apartments – ‘LUXURY, FULLY FITTED APARTMENTS’, apparently, and two of them still for sale. The big tower where you used to see the long red hose hanging down to dry – what we called God’s Condom – is long gone.
Some things, though, remain. Down Bridge Street, past the bus station and the train station and the Chinese takeaways, the old Quality Hotel, our landmark, our claim to fame, still sits on the corner of Main Street and High Street, in all its glorious six storeys, with its balustraded parapet, its castellations and gables, its mullioned windows and square corner turrets, and its flat-roofed concrete back-bar extension and basement disco, the site of so many breathless adolescent fumbles and embraces, a place where so many relationships in this town were formed and celebrated, and where so many of them faltered.
It is completely derelict, of course, the hotel, just a shell these days, a red, rain-soaked crust held up by rusty scaffolding poles and a big 10-foot sign on one of the crumbling turrets announcing that it has been ‘ACQUIRED FOR MAJOR REDEVELOPMENT’, no one knows exactly what. The peeling red stucco is stained with pigeon shit. It’s a wreck, but at least it’s still there. Like a lot of us, in fact.
Sitting, as if in commentary and judgement upon it and upon us, directly opposite the hotel and facing our only remaining free car park, are the new offices of the Impartial Recorder, our local paper, a journal of record, housed in a three-storey concrete building in the popular brutalist manner, with its red neon sign announcing both its name and the additional words, ’COMMERCIAL PRINTERS’.
Shaking now, with the cold and the shock, Davey set his face against the prevailing winds and the haze of rain, and prepared for the final drag before home, up Main Street. Past Duncan McGregor’s, the tailor and staunch Methodist and gentleman’s outfitter. Past the five bakeries, each offering its own speciality: the lovely treacle soda bread in the art deco Adele’s; the Wheaten’s miniature barnbracks; the ginger scones in Carlton’s Bakery and Tea Rooms; the big cheese-and-onion pasties in McCann’s; the town’s best fruit cake in Spencer’s. Past the four butchers, including Billy Nibbs’s dad, Hugh, ‘H.NIBBS, BUTCHER AND POULTERER’, with its large stained-glass frontage and its mechanical butcher forever cleaving a calf’s head in two, and McCullough’s, ’ALSO LICENSED TO SELL GAME’, with its hand-painted legend, ‘Pleased to Meet You, Meat to Please You’. Past the nameless paint shop that everyone called the Paint Shop; and Orr’s the shoe shop, and McMartens’, their competitors; past the small bookshop, known as the Red Front because of its pillar box flaky frontage; and Peter Harris Stationery; and Noah’s Ark the toy shop; Maxwell’s photographers; the entrance to the old Sunrise Dairy; King’s Music, run by Ernie King and his son Charlie; Priscil
la’s Ladies Separates and Luxury Hair Styling; Gemini the Jewellers; Finlay’s Auto-Supplies; Carpenter’s tobacconists; the Frosty Queen, the ice cream parlour, which featured an all-year-round window display of a plastic snow-woman; and the Bide-A-While tea shop, famous for its cinnamon scones and its sign promising ‘Customers Attended in the Latest Rapid Service Manner’.
All of them absent without leave. Gone. Disappeared. Destroyed.
And in their place? Charity shops for old people, and blind people, and poor children, and other poor children, and people with bad hearts, and cancer, and dogs; amusement arcades; chip shops; kebab shops; minicab offices; and a new club called Paradise Lost whose entrance features fibreglass Grecian columns and a crude naked eighteen-foot Adam and Eve, hands joined above the doorway and Eve mid-bite of an apple the size of a watermelon; and deep, deep piles of rubbish in the doorways of shuttered shops. Just what you’d expect. A street of bright plastic and neon shop fascia, holes, gaps, clearances and metal-fenced absences. Main Street had once been called what it was. But now, what could you call it? It hardly deserved a name. The old cast-iron street sign has long since vanished.
Virtually drowning now, breathing water and no part of him left dry, Davey managed to accelerate his march and reached the brow of the hill.
The Quinn family bungalow used to be on the edge of town, an outpost, past the People’s Park and the old council offices, part of a small estate looking proudly over its own patch of green with swings and a slide and a see-saw, and a small football pitch with its own goalposts, which was marked out twice a year by the council, and looking out back over trees and fields.
It’s still there. The family home remains. It hasn’t gone anywhere.
But it no longer sits as a promontory and is no longer proud. It has been humbled and made small, bleached and filthied not only by the passing of time and the fading of memory, but by the ring road, which has stretched and uncoiled itself around our town, its street lights like tail fins or trunks uplifted over and above in a triumphal arch, leading to mile upon mile of pavementless houses – good houses, with their own internal garages – and to our shopping mall, Bloom’s, the diamond in the ring, our new town centre, the place to be, forever open and forever welcoming, the twenty-four-hour lights from its twenty-four-hour car park effacing the night sky, ‘Every Day a Good Day Regardless of the Weather’.
