Final Demand Read online

  David didn’t tell her he remembered this. They spent their lives together, working side by side, they were in each other’s company day and night. They had all the time in the world to speak of such things, yet somehow the moment never came up, did it? Not when you had been married for twenty-eight years.

  As he pulled Archie’s pint Sheila’s gaze met his, but without registering; she was talking to her mother. ‘Give it a good jiggle around in cold water,’ she said. Every day they talked on the phone; how could they find so much to say? Sometimes David was amused, sometimes awestruck. Today he was irritated. How female they sounded! Everyone they knew seemed to be suffering from some life-threatening ailment. Then there was the saga of her mother’s neighbours and the ongoing debate about the definitive fish pie – cheese on top or not? David knew that this was one of Sheila’s few pleasures. The pub was their workplace, their home, their tyrant. Unless they came in for a drink, phone conversations were the only way Sheila could stay in touch with her family. Still, it irritated him.

  ‘Crying shame, eh?’ said Archie.

  ‘What?’

  Archie pointed to the newspaper. A woman’s body had been found dumped in a wood next to the M6 motorway, near Congleton. She had been raped and strangled. Archie looked obscurely gratified. ‘Now who would do a thing like that, eh?’

  Sheila, who had finished her conversation, came over.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. She sat down next to Archie and looked at the paper. ‘The poor girl.’

  Sheila was good with the customers – friendly, confiding, always ready to commiserate. Whatever happened to them she could pluck, from her large family, something of a similar nature. I know just what you mean. My Uncle Patrick, he had it too and it moved to his kidneys . . . and they were off. There was an ease about her which David admired, for he was incapable of it himself. He was a good publican – honest, fair, firm with drunks – but he was not a chatty man and people gravitated naturally towards his wife. He had few intimate friends. In fact, none. All he had in this world was his small family – his wife and daughter.

  Chloe ambled in. David gazed at her. She was wearing a shapeless print dress. Her big, pallid arms were bare except for a wayward bra strap that had slipped down her shoulder. His daughter always wore slightly unsuitable clothes, never quite right for the occasion. Today, too flimsy and middle-aged. Frumpy.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be starting on the lunches?’ he demanded.

  Chloe looked like a startled rabbit; Sheila, too, jumped up. ‘Come on, pet,’ she said. ‘I’ve made a start on the veg.’

  ‘Seen the news?’ said Archie, with grim satisfaction.

  ‘Don’t show her,’ said Sheila, ‘it’s upsetting.’

  Chloe moved closer and picked up the paper. David was standing behind her. He gazed at her vast hips. Her upper arms, from the back, were ruddily mottled; her elbows dimpled, and sunk in flesh. A spasm of pain passed through him.

  Chloe let out her breath. ‘How awful . . .’

  ‘Listen, Chloe—’

  She swung round, jumping to attention. Why did he have that effect on her?

  ‘Wherever you are,’ he said, ‘whatever the time, it doesn’t matter how late . . .’ David wanted to put his arm around her but he hadn’t done that for years. ‘Day or night, if you need picking up, just phone. Understood? Just stay there and I’ll come and fetch you in the car. Is that a promise?’

  Surprised by the passion in his voice, she looked at him. ‘OK.’

  ‘Phone me. That’s what your mobile’s for,’ he said. ‘And make sure it’s charged. You know how forgetful you are.’

  Sheila gave him a sharp look. He shouldn’t have added that; it made the whole thing accusatory. His irritation rose.

  ‘And run across and get some tomatoes for your mother.’ He thrust a note into her hand. ‘They weren’t in the delivery.’

  Chloe made for the door.

  ‘Put on your coat!’ called Sheila.

  But their daughter had gone. Traffic rumbled, as the door opened. David felt a familiar sense of failure.

  ‘You’ll catch your death!’ Sheila called.

  The pub filled up, first with the regulars, then with the lunchtime crowds from the nearby offices – gaggles of girls (Chardonnay by the glass) and young blokes (Stella Artois, Czech imported Pilsner in the bottle) who shouted and blew smoke into David’s face as he served them behind the bar. They took the place over, pulling chairs away from the tables (You using this, mate?) and leaving the old boys marooned with their pints, looking like a nearly extinct species, which indeed they were. These kids spent money – where did it all come from? If the brewery had its way, which it was threatening to do, this last genuine local would be revamped into some themed Slug and Lettuce bollocks, transforming it from a pub that served food into an eatery that served drinks, because that was there the profits lay. And the few old lags who stuck it out would find themselves shunted into the corner, gazing glumly at a bottle of balsamic vinegar. Finally they would feel so out of place that they would just melt away. It was happening all over. Where did they go? Into some corner where they quietly died of natural causes?

  David felt equivocal about this. He couldn’t make a livelihood out of his pensioners, eking out their pints, but on the other hand he had run this pub for nine years; he knew their wives and their grandchildren, he had presided over their family celebrations in the function room upstairs. Besides, he too was feeling his age.

  Only fifty, he told himself, and then he would catch sight of his face in the mirror on the way to the gents’. A large expanse of his forehead was visible now; this left his eyebrows looking thicker and somehow comic. A person’s first reaction wouldn’t necessarily be: Look, a bald man. But he had to admit that a certain amount of his hair had disappeared, leaving alien, shiny skin that burnt in the sun. It seemed only yesterday that David had had a full head of it – thick brown stuff that just existed, taken for granted. He had even pulled it back in a rubber band when he went on stage. His moment of glory now seemed pitiful. What had he been? A Green Jacket at Warner’s Holiday Camp who had fancied himself as a singer. That young man had long since disappeared, to be replaced by this familiar stranger, his inappropriately clownish face lined with disappointment.

  Lennox, his barman, had arrived. Lennox was a virile young Australian who sported a full head of hair. He treated the customers with relaxed, almost insolent familiarity. ‘No worries,’ he said, with irritating regularity. He had no worries. Soon he would be off elsewhere – Montreal, Cape Town. The world was his for the asking; no doors had been closed to him, one by one. Lennox’s tanned arms flexed as he pulled the pumps; their blond hairs shone in the light.

  It was one thirty, and the decibel level was rising. David could set his watch by the volume of noise – it peaked at one thirty, and at ten thirty in the evening, just before closing time. Having consumed his usual pint and packet of pork scratchings, Archie rose to leave. The dot com whizzkids shouted over his head, moving aside to let him pass. David gazed at Archie’s dog. Its back legs were bowed, to accommodate its enormous balls. Their size was unseemly. Look at me and all I’m capable of. They rubbed against each other as it walked, stiffly, to the door. David lifted the mixers nozzle. Squirting some tonic into a glass he tried to remember the last time that he and Sheila had made love. Two weeks ago? Three?

  He gazed at his wife as she rubbed Lasagne off the blackboard. From the back she had spread, but in a shapely, feminine way. She was still an attractive woman. The knot of her apron had come undone; one tape hung down. This touched David. When had he last caught her in his arms and kissed her properly – a deep, passionate kiss, just like that – on the landing or in the bathroom?

  He was resolving to do it later when he heard a shout. ‘Chloe!’

  A girl was worming her way through the drinkers. She wore an air stewardess’s uniform and dragged a small black suitcase on wheels. Chloe was standing behind the cold food display, slowly a
ssembling a tuna baguette.

  The girl pirouetted round in front of the sliced meats. ‘Guess where I was this morning?’

  Chloe gaped at her old schoolfriend, Rowena. ‘Where?’

  ‘Lisbon,’ replied Rowena. ‘Lisbon, Portugal.’ She had just completed her training, she said. ‘The crew was divine! There’s this guy called Tim – last night, my dear, we were staying at the Marriott, and guess what—’

  ‘Pull a finger out with that sandwich, pet,’ said a customer.

  Rowena moved away to the bar. When the rush had eased, Chloe went over and sat down with her. Lennox had treated Rowena to a vodka and tonic and was chatting her up, a situation with which Chloe, who fruitlessly loved him, was only too familiar.

  ‘I’m fast-track, they say,’ breathed Rowena, shooting a glance at Lennox. ‘Next year I’ll be on long-hauls – just think, Chloe Miami! LA! Four-star hotels, you can work on your tan. Go on, I’ll give you the number, you’d be great at it – like, knowing about serving and everything.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ replied Chloe. ‘I’m scared of flying.’

  Rowena caught Lennox’s eye. ‘Don’t be a wuss.’

  Chloe shook her head. ‘Anyway, I get airsick.’

  Behind the bar, David gazed at his daughter.

  That night, when he had closed up, David paused outside the bathroom door. Chloe was in there, singing. She sang when she thought nobody was around.

  ‘Once I had a sweetheart and now I have none . . .’

  When she was fourteen he had bought her a guitar, and for a few months she had learnt folk songs.

  ‘Last night in sweet slumber I dreamed I did see, my own precious true love sat smiling by me . . .’

  She had a beautiful voice, pure and true.

  ‘But when I awakened I found it not so . . . my eyes like some fountains with tears overflowed . . .’

  The lavatory flushed and Chloe came out.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, her face reddening.

  ‘You should take it up professionally,’ he said. ‘Why did you stop the guitar?’

  ‘Were you outside all the time?’ Her blush deepened. He had been listening to her on the toilet!

  ‘No – I just heard . . .’

  But she hurried away into her bedroom and closed the door.

  David tapped and let himself in. Chloe was sitting on her bed.

  ‘I was only trying to say—’

  ‘Please, Dad—’

  ‘I was only trying to say you should do something with yourself.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Her hands flew to her face.

  ‘You’ve got a nice voice. You’ve got – well, a lot of things going for you . . .’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Chloe! Stop being so bloody negative. You’ll never get anywhere that way.’

  ‘I want to go to sleep.’

  ‘Isn’t it time you got off your behind and did something with your life?’

  Sheila appeared in her dressing gown.

  ‘Mum, tell him to stop!’

  ‘David—’

  His voice rose. ‘Look at Rowena – don’t you want to see the world, go places?’ A terrible pity seized him; the way her thighs rubbed together now when she walked. When she waddled. ‘You can’t just sit here, rotting away—’

  ‘David!’ said his wife.

  ‘Do you really want to end up like me and your mother—’

  ‘What do you mean?’ demanded Sheila.

  ‘Stuck in a pub seven days a week? You really want that?’

  ‘Dad, stop it!’

  His wife put her hand on his arm. ‘That’s enough,’ she said.

  Later, Sheila came into their bedroom.

  ‘You shouldn’t have talked to her like that,’ she whispered.

  ‘I was only trying to help. She takes everything the wrong way.’

  ‘It’s how you put it.’

  David lit a cigarette. He knew that Sheila disliked him smoking, up here in the bedroom, but he just did. He was standing at the window, gazing down into the back yard.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ whispered Sheila. ‘She’s happy, in her own way. You just upset her, talking like that.’

  ‘It’s for her own good.’ Down in the yard, the barrels glinted in the lights from the office block. The windows were lit all night; it was a crying waste of electricity.

  ‘She’s not ambitious, not in the way you want her to be. You can’t mould her into the sort of person she’s not.’ Sheila sat on the bed. ‘You’re such a tyrant, Dave. Don’t you see you’re taking away her confidence, what little she has of it? Maybe she feels she’s too overweight to be an air hostess.’

  ‘Why doesn’t she go on a diet then?’

  ‘Ssh!’ Sheila lowered her voice.

  ‘Make herself a bit more attractive. She might even get a boyfriend—’

  ‘She’s perfectly pretty – just a bit plump—’

  ‘Plump? If she got on a plane it wouldn’t be able to take off.’

  ‘David!’ She stared at him. ‘That’s a horrible thing to say.’

  David turned and looked at his wife. He thought: If you hadn’t got pregnant I could have been a professional, I could have gone on that tour.

  ‘She’ll do what she wants,’ said Sheila ‘in her own good time.’

  ‘You want to keep her here.’ He thought: You want to stop her growing up, you want to tie her to your apron strings. ‘You want to keep her here just so you’ve got some company.’

  Sheila glared at him. ‘Well, can you blame me?’

  David thought: And this was the night I was going to kiss her.

  In her bedroom, Chloe pulled the duvet over her head and slid under it like a tortoise into its shell.

  Chapter Two

  ‘I’LL DO IT my . . . way!’

  Natalie belted it out at the top of her lungs. She had a terrible voice but she didn’t care. She adored karaoke. They had to practically drag her off the stage.

  Some of her friends from work were there. She went to the bar, waved a twenty-pound note, and ordered drinks. Sioban and Farida gazed at her as she handed out the glasses. There was something about Natalie nowadays; she gave off such heat, such exhilaration that she almost throbbed. She swore she wasn’t expecting a baby. It must be marriage – it was two months now – but who would have thought it? They gazed at Colin with new respect as he sat at the nearby table, guarding their seats. Maybe he was, in fact, a terrific fuck. He looked more confident these days, more mature. He wore a new sweater in a bold zigzag pattern; Natalie had smartened him up. There was a sharper definition to his face; men looked like that at work, when they had just been promoted. Ah, and the way he gazed at Natalie as she brought over his lemonade! It was a look of such naked adoration, such rapture, that they felt intruders, even to be in the same room.

  A big bloke was singing ‘Love Me Tender’ way off-key. Natalie sat down next to Colin and ruffled his hair. He took her hand.

  ‘You’ve got a lovely voice,’ he said.

  ‘It’s crap,’ she said, ‘but you’re sweet.’ She laid her head on his shoulder and hummed, ‘I did it my way . . .’

  Farida, also recently married, sat down next to her.

  ‘How are you two getting on?’ Natalie asked.

  The recent months had also changed Farida. Her girlishness had disappeared; she had become dignified and distant. She answered politely that she and Bashir were getting on very well.

  ‘Remember us talking about it?’ asked Natalie. ‘How it’s all a lottery?’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘How love comes later, you’ve got to work at it?’

  Farida looked blank. Wincing at Natalie’s cigarette smoke – she had given that up now – Farida sat there, composed, her hands in her lap.

  These sort of conversations embarrassed Colin. He turned to Natalie and said: ‘When you’re ready, love, we better make a move. Big day tomorrow.’

  Driving home, Colin ventured to mention something that h
ad been on his mind. ‘We got to pull in our belts, Nat,’ he said. ‘What with all the expense coming up. It’s different in a house, see, there’s the bills and putting down a deposit on the settee.’ He added, with pride: ‘There’s a lot of hidden expenditure when you own your own home.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that.’ Natalie sat beside him, her hands clasped around her knees.

  ‘But we’ve been spending money like nobody’s business. Drinks all round, the stuff you’ve been buying me . . . it’s ever so generous of you but I don’t reckon we should—’

  ‘We’ll be fine.’

  He indicated the seat belt. ‘Buckle up, love.’ He drove out of the city centre, across the river and down the Dewsbury Road. ‘I mean to say, where does it all come from?’

  ‘I told you, they paid me another bonus.’

  ‘But they paid you one already, last month.’

  ‘NT’s doing really well. Retail outlets and shit, it’s expanding all over the place. They’re really aggressive with marketing.’ She spoke with breezy authority. ‘We’re seeing off the competition, Stumps, we’re even putting the wind up BT, and know why?’ She polished an imaginary lapel. ‘Because of us, me and my mates. We’re the ones that keep it going, not that they’d notice, the bastards. You should see their profit margins.’

  Colin was impressed. He had no head for business, it was all beyond him.

  She ruffled his hair. ‘We’re happy, aren’t we? Isn’t that all that matters?’

  Colin’s heart was full. He nodded.

  The next day they moved into their new home. Colin stood in the back bedroom. It was a small white room; it smelt of fresh paint. It smelt of the future, of infinite possibilities. Outside, the sun blazed; it was only March but it felt like the first day of spring. Beyond his back garden lay the small muddy squares of other gardens. Some had been turfed and planted; some of the houses backing on to theirs were already occupied, while others had SOLD signs stuck to their windows. The houses, though detached, were packed close together; you could barely slip a knife between them. Colin liked this. He felt companioned in his happiness.