2001 - Father Frank (12 page)

Anyway, the girly lunches with Helen hadn’t been as much fun since Helen had met Graham. Now that Helen was one seemingly happy half of ‘an item’ and Sarah was steadfastly single, the former now considered herself qualified to dispense unwanted advice on how to ‘get a man’. Sarah was more than capable of getting a man, she just had no desire to get one like Graham. Oh, he was all right—just a bit dull—but as Helen approached her thirtieth birthday, Sarah couldn’t help feeling that her best friend was making a big mistake: choosing contentment over happiness.

Graham was an accountant but, as Helen always insisted, ‘he’s not like an accountant’. Oh, yes, he fucking is. When he left college he thought, I know what I’ll do—accountancy. I’ll train for years and spend all my working life wearing a suit and…er…accounting. And the self-consciously wacky behaviour—the oh-so-humorous signs on the desk, “You don’t have to be mad to work here—but it helps’ and ‘The impossible we do at once, miracles take a little longer’, the consumption, with tie undone, of gallons of lager in the Pizza Hut on a Friday night, the hilarious paintballing weekends in Kent—would never alter this.

Graham and his safe, dependable ilk hover for years like birds of prey. They wait for women like Helen to become frustrated with attractive, interesting but unreliable men. After a while, the Helens of this world start to worry: they’re acutely aware of the ticking of their biological clocks, they don’t want to be left on the shelf, and they set their sights a little lower. That’s when the accountants get lucky. At any other time in their lives, the women who become their wives wouldn’t have even looked at them. Helen had become a little sachet of dehydrated matrimony and there was Graham, more than willing to ‘just add water’.

Tragic, really, and Sarah wasn’t about to follow her into soporific suburban stability. Not yet. She still refused to believe that it was a straight choice between a cat and an accountant. There had to be another option. Over a bottle of Chablis, however, Helen decided to go through all the options that Sarah had already forgone.

“James,” she began. “What was wrong with him?”

“Too posh.”

“Too posh?”

“Fundamentally cold.”

“Peter?”

“Too ambitious.”

“Well, that’s not a bad thing. Graham’s ambitious.”

“Not like Peter. I hope not, anyway. He always put himself first. On a plane he’d immediately recline his seat right back, no matter how cramped that made the poor person behind. At the gym, he’d stand at the water fountain filling this great big two-litre bottle while a queue of people were waiting behind him gasping for a drink. Hard to feel much affection for someone like that.”

“Ian?”

“Not ambitious enough.”

Helen gave an almost cruel chuckle. “You can’t have it both ways.”

“Oh, he was lovely. Really sweet, really good person, but what’s that old saying? “When poverty knocks on the door, love flies out of the window.” And after a while a man of thirty-four living in a squat in Deptford waiting for his Giro becomes a bit of a turn-off.”

“How about Michael?” said Helen dreamily. “He was gorgeous.”

Sarah laughed. “Well, he certainly thought so. I had to queue for twenty minutes to use my own hairdryer. And all his lotions and potions! He couldn’t pass a mirror without gazing into it. No one could love him as much as he loved himself.” She took a gulp of wine. “And, by the way, his mother was not Italian. He just spent a fortune on sunbeds.”

Helen recalled another of Sarah’s exes. “Andy?”

“Mean.”

“As in tight?”

“As a gnat’s arse. He was the sort of bloke who’d switch the gas off when he turned the bacon over. Wouldn’t have expected it, would you? For some reason you think good-looking people are going to be generous, but not him. Never went overdrawn, all his money sensibly invested,” explained Sarah, suddenly realising that Graham was probably another one knee-deep in PEPs and TESSAs. “And with mean people, money’s just the tip of the iceberg. They’re mean with their time, their love, they’re the sort of people who ‘don’t see why they should’. When I moved out, his main concern was getting a flatmate to help pay the mortgage.”

“Ah,” said Helen, placing her hand on Sarah’s with sympathy and affection but a hint of condescension. “You’ve been unlucky, haven’t you?”

Not as unlucky as you, thought Sarah, hitched up to a twat like Graham. “Well, not really,” she said. “I’ve only mentioned the bad times with those blokes, the reasons why things didn’t work out in the end. There were plenty of good times too.”

“Oh, I’m sure there were,” said Helen, “but there’s this guy that Graham and I really want you to meet.”

Graham and I? Graham and I?? Oh, no. Sarah’s heart filled with dread. She knew her friend was trying to be kind but alarm bells were ringing and she thought about making a dash for the fire exit.

“He works at Graham’s office. Real character.”

“Works at Graham’s office?” asked Sarah slowly. “So he’s…er…he’s an accountant?”

“Yeah, but he’s not like an accountant.”

At that moment, Sarah just wanted to bury her head in her wild mushroom risotto and scream and scream and scream.

B
uilders, generally, have a dreadful reputation and, in most cases, it’s richly deserved. Whole ITV programmes with imaginative titles like
Builders From Hell
have been dedicated to their laziness, incompetence and dishonesty. Britain lives in dread of cowboy builders, and the reason why the whole nation seems obsessed with DIY is that people truly believe they couldn’t make a worse bodge of it than the builders they employed last time.

To redress the balance, ITV should have sent a film crew down to Wealdstone to cover the renovation of St Thomas’s church hall. They could have called it
Builders From Heaven
or, more accurately,
Builders Terrified of Not Getting Into Heaven
, because Father Frank Dempsey had shrewdly put the fear of God into them. He’d cleverly implied that by carrying out this work quickly and honestly, they were working their passage to the kingdom of Heaven, the inference being that if they didn’t, eternal damnation would await them and they really would end up as Builders From Hell.

The place was in a far worse state than had been apparent to Frank’s untrained eye: rising damp, dry rot, wet rot, leaking roof, timbers crawling with woodworm, you name it. Ginger Tom, the electrician, could scarcely believe what he saw. “This wiring, I mean, it’s got to be pre-war. Any minute, any bloody minute, this place could have gone up like a tinder box.”

His brother, Ginger Ken, the plumber, was similarly appalled. “The pipes under here, they’ve nearly all rotted. I’ve never seen anything like it. Any minute, any bloody minute, this place could have been flooded.”

Frank couldn’t help thinking that if that had happened everything would have been all right. The ancient wiring would have caused a big fire and the flood from the dodgy plumbing would have put it out.

Danny Power marshalled his troops like a sergeant major, his huge voice soaring above the cacophony of hammers, drills and Capital Gold to make its orders heard. In his hands were the architect’s plans from John Toomey & Partners. John was known to everyone as ‘Socket’—Socket Toomey—and had no ambitions to be Norman Foster or Richard Rogers. He was far happier helping ordinary people achieve their dreams: loft conversions, kitchen extensions, new conservatories. He was only too pleased to help Frank achieve his. Naturally, he wasn’t being paid a penny.

The whole place was rewired, replumbed; it received new central heating, new joists and floorboards, a whole new roof. Danny ensured that Socket’s plans were followed to the letter. Footings were dug, an extension at the back was built; stud partitions, RSJs and catnick lintels were all heaved into place; parquet was laid for the dance-floor.

The scene was set, the canvas blank for the maestro. Satisfied with the standard of all the work that had been carried out, Danny Power waddled in with his plaster and trowel, and set about his task like a whirling dervish. A big, fat, sweaty one. He had toyed with the idea of letting someone else do the plastering but had opted to do it himself. He would do it more quickly, more skilfully, and it was a lovely big area to plaster. He could really go to town. And, most importantly, the back of his mind had not been immune to what Frank had implied: if he did the whole job himself, wouldn’t that put a few bonus points on his celestial loyalty card? Wouldn’t it make him less likely to finish up as one of Satan’s Subterranean Slaves?

At the end of his mammoth task, Danny had pains across his chest and arms. Not surprising, really, but he had done a magnificent job. Everyone had. The centre was sectioned off into two areas. The ‘Big Bar’ was enormous. Socket had modelled it on one he’d seen as a child at Butlin’s holiday camp in Filey, said to be the ‘the longest bar in Britain’. This one ran the whole length of the dance-floor and comprised a long line of draught taps backed up by serried ranks of optics. Then there was the ‘Small Bar’, which was in fact huge, square and accessible from all sides. Around it were chairs, sofas and four giant TV screens.

Frank had assiduously taken the names and addresses of everyone who had helped renovate the parish centre so that he could throw a big opening night party just for them, with a lavish buffet and free drinks all night. For all the work that these people had done, it would be a small price to pay.

A
nne Walsh (Mrs). Strange way to sign a letter but that was how she’d always done it—Anne Walsh (Mrs). As opposed to what? Anne Walsh (Mr)? Anne Walsh (Miss)? Was that it? Did Mrs Walsh want the world to know that she had received the sacrament of matrimony? That she was a good woman, a holy person, a proper, practising Catholic?

Anne Walsh was prim, proper, po-faced, pious. Anything beginning with P, really. Private, pragmatic, purse-lipped, prosaic, persistent, petty. All of these things. How about pretty? Well, she certainly had been, but since at least half of her fifty-two years had been spent frowning, her features had set that way and it was now her natural expression. She frowned even if she liked you; she frowned if she was pleased to meet you. Her smile could be an impressive and rather beautiful sight, rather like Halley’s comet. And witnessed about as often.

Her wealth and status, which existed largely within her own head, had brought with it a reproving respectability, a cheap snobbery. She wasn’t particularly wealthy but if you had been one of nine children brought up in a crumbling tenement on the north side of Dublin, everything is relative. She was Annie O’Malley then and, at nineteen, had moved to London to improve her circumstances. If damp digs in Kilburn were an improvement, you can imagine what those circumstances must have been. She’d worked behind the bar at the Crown, a huge Irish pub in Cricklewood, and it was on the number 16 bus to work that she’d met Pat Walsh.

Pat was the conductor, a chirpy little man from Limerick, usually teamed with a big, meaty-chopped driver called Len. Together they piloted the number 16 out of Cricklewood Garage and along the Edgware Road through Kilburn and Maida Vale, round Marble Arch, down Park Lane, round Hyde Park Corner, all the way to Victoria. It was a lively, interesting route that cut its own busy swathe right through the centre of town. Pat Walsh, standing on the running-board, helping people on and off, greeting regulars and calling, “Hold tight,” and “Fares, please,” was a happy man. He was brilliant with figures and, on more than one occasion, Annie O’Malley had marvelled at his arithmetical wizardry, his enviable ability to add up complex combinations of fares in an instant, never making a mistake, never giving the wrong change.

One night, she found herself the sole passenger on the last bus home. It was freezing, and as the rain lashed down spitefully on Cricklewood, she got chatting to Pat. Not difficult, he’d chat to anyone, and he was concerned for the well-being of a girl on her own late at night in one of London’s less salubrious areas. “Where do you live?” he enquired.

“Kilburn.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Victoria Road.”

At the next stop Pat ran out into the rain for a quick word with Len, and returned seconds later drenched but smiling. A little later, to Annie’s astonishment, Len took a detour: the bus left its scheduled route along Kilburn High Road and turned right, up Victoria Road, squeezing carefully between the twin lines of parked cars.

“Now, what number?” said Pat, with a smile.

“Er, a hundred and twenty-four, right up the other end.”

“Okay, the driver’s going nice and slow now. Just ring the bell when we’re there.”

Annie rang the bell, thanked Pat, and married him six months later.

However, she hadn’t left Dublin, worked hard at the Crown and endured the miserable squalor of Victoria Road only to spend the rest of her life married to a bus conductor. She was convinced that Pat could do better than that. Within a matter of weeks, she got behind her new husband and began to push. He seemed immovable at first but gradually Pat Walsh and his head for figures rolled slowly towards a more lucrative career. During the day, he conducted the number 16, but on three evenings a week he was at night school studying to be an accountant. After a few years he was able to say goodbye voluntarily to the number 16 bus, which was just as well, because the introduction of one-man buses a few months later would have made his valediction compulsory.

They moved to a little terraced house in Wealdstone, and shortly afterwards P.J. Walsh Associates opened in a tiny office in Harrow. Pat’s clients were almost all from the building trade. They valued Pat, needed his help with their VAT returns and to guide them through various tax loopholes, but he was never really accepted. His little soft hands had never done a day’s hard, manual graft. He was prudent, he was sensible, and wherever he went, his wife’s huge thumbprint was clearly visible on the top of his head.

Still, when it came to money, he was the man. Practising Catholic, straight as a die, and Father Frank Dempsey knew that, pretty soon, he’d have more money than he’d know what to do with.