Inside Happy Shop his usual tastes deserted him. The idea of sushi, or stir-fries, or anything with rice and coconut milk, or anything that had been messed about with, like the curries and chillies that he often ate, all running with sauce . . . turned his stomach. Revolted him, in fact. The store hoarded forgotten treasures from any 70s childhood and he’d spent his first week eating tinned pink salmon with a brand of white bread that he hadn’t known was still baked. There had been lots of tinned rice pudding in his new diet too, a Victoria sponge, ice-cream packaged in cardboard, and Mr Kipling French Fancies for pudding. He had rediscovered his enjoyment of condensed milk and individual frozen chicken pies. And he’d bought, for the first time in his life, a round English lettuce.
Up in Happy Shop, within minutes, a packet of Birds Eye fish fingers and a tiny bag of minted peas rustled in his basket. There were four baskets at the front of the shop that smelled of newspaper and tobacco. A tin of mandarin segments, strawberry-flavoured Angel Delight – they still sold it in sachets! – a box of PG Tips and a jar of Mellow Bird’s coffee went into the basket next. He avoided anything with onions as he’d recently gone off them.
To his growing haul, and because he missed its fragrance, he added some Pledge furniture polish that he remembered being stored under a sink in his family home; once he got busy with a duster and some Pledge, the veneered finish on the wardrobe would come up a treat, as would the rosewood sideboard and the teak dresser.
Frank had become fond of using the cupboard above the cooker as a space for treats, and had often found himself dipping into it before he watched telly in the afternoon. Inexplicably, the true purpose of the cupboard had suggested itself to him. So, in Happy Shop, he bought a bag of Murray Mints and a Fry’s Turkish Delight.
Almost done. What else did he need? Washing-up liquid. He seized one of the green and white plastic bottles of Fairy Liquid. He hadn’t seen that packaging in years. When he smelled the red nozzle, the fragrance of his childhood summers made him giddy. Overexposed images turned in his memory: running in swimming trunks, grass blades floating in a paddling pool, the plastic bottom blue, the water warm, suffocating with laughter as he was chased by his brother, who squirted him with water from a Fairy Liquid bottle, trying to swim in the paddling pool – though the water was never deep enough and his knees bumped the bottom – but then lying face-down in the warm water for five seconds before springing up to see if his mum was worried that he’d drowned. And he saw deckchairs in his mind too, with his mom and nan in them, watching him and smiling. He was rewound to such an extent that he even thought he’d detected a trace of creosote on a garden fence, that tang of burned oil and timber.
Frank walked back to the house, dreamy and taking short steps with his head down, as if wary of hazards underfoot, until he snapped out of the new habit and walked normally.
When Marcus knocked at ten on Saturday morning, Frank jumped up from the kitchen stool but couldn’t account for why he was so nervous. He was being silly, but opening the front door was suddenly a cause of great anxiety. So he hovered, scarcely breathing, inside the hall beside the thermostat that looked like something from an instrument panel at the dawn of space travel. When Marcus peered through the letter flap, Frank was forced to open up.
‘Fuck’s going on?’ Marcus said, when he saw the kitchen. ‘I brought the tiles and units with me. This shit should be long gone by now. Your stuff can’t stay in my garage for ever, mate.’
But, despite his friend’s disappointment, Frank craved a stay of execution for the kitchen, and hoped that he could somehow delay Marcus or persuade him not to engage in the splintering of wood and the crowbarring of those kitchen cabinets from the walls. They must have been up for decades and were still in good nick. Nothing wrong with them, in fact, so it seemed such a waste. And Frank also wanted them left alone for another reason and this motive had been nagging at him as Saturday had approached: gutting the kitchen just felt wrong. Bad, like violence. Like bullying.
Too embarrassed by his own sentimentality to defend them, and with a heavy heart, he helped Marcus break the cupboards away from the walls, and he’d felt like crying as they did their worst with the crowbars.
When they found the handwriting behind the first cabinet – Len and Florrie, 1964 – Frank went into the bathroom with moist eyes and smothered his face inside one of the big lemon-yellow towels that he’d found in the airing cupboard.
The three wall cabinets and the row of cupboards were soon piled like earthquake wreckage in the yard. The sight of the pale, unpainted wood that had been facing the kitchen wall since 1964 hit him as hard as the sight of a dead pet had once done: a rabbit rigid with the terrible permanence and unfairness of its final sleep, when it had still been loved.
Indifferent to the inscriptions left by Len and Florrie – they had found four – Marcus cracked open tins of white emulsion and began painting the bare walls. As Marcus worked, Frank recognised that he despised his best friend.
They didn’t have time to vandalise another room that weekend, and it was just as well, because Frank’s relationship with the house changed during the night after the desecration of the little kitchen.