Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [56]
‘We’ll see about that…’ Rose sat back in the banquette and folded her arms like Les Dawson across the washing-line.
I for IKEA
‘This is definitely Dante’s seventh circle of hell. No, it’s the eighth. I just cannot believe that people come here seriously – I mean other than for bets, punishment or alphabet games.’
‘Well, they do. In their thousands.’
‘I know. They’re all bloody here today.’
It had taken them fifty minutes to park on the top storey of the blue and yellow car park, and now they had joined a stream of lemmings on the escalator, all clutching stubby pencils, rulers and huge blue plastic loot bags.
‘Don’t crack on like it was my idea to come, Tom. I was your letter, if you remember…’
‘Yes, well, blame Serena. She’s the one who wants me and Rob to have this stuff.’
Serena had requested more chairs and a matching console for the meeting space. She had waited until she knew the letter I was coming up, then suggested that the yellow and blue jungle might be a good place for Tom to take Natalie. ‘I know. Genius.’ She and Rob had laughed.
‘Besides,’ Rob had gone on, ‘you’re the one into DIY and this is the kingdom of the flat-pack, so I’d have thought you’d be thrilled.’
Natalie had laughed. She’d asked for it, she supposed. ‘Touché! But what exactly is this supposed to be showing us about each other? At least with D there was a point. Can he, or can he not, put shelves up straight and strong?’
Between kitchens and sofa-beds, a red-headed toddler lay spreadeagled in their path, screaming angrily. His mother, heavily pregnant, was sprawled across a sofa-bed about twenty feet away and shouted, ‘Shut up, Callum,’ but Callum was beyond verbal reasoning, teetering very near the edge of a fit. Politely, Tom and Natalie steered their trolley off the walkway and round the little boy, as the twenty trolley-wielding shoppers before them had.
‘I know they were straight. How about strong?’
‘Haven’t put anything very heavy on them yet. But, believe me, you’ll hear about it if I put my collected works of Walt Whitman and Shakespeare up there and they can’t take the weight.’
‘Don’t see that as an imminent risk. The latest Penny Vincenzi, maybe.’
‘Oy! I read the classics.’
Tom raised an eyebrow.
‘Okay. I did read the classics. I own them, anyway, which is all anyone really does with those books. They’re in Mum and Dad’s loft, I think.’
‘Don’t judge everyone by your own shoddy standards of integrity and intellect.’
‘All right, smartass. What was the last classic you read, apart from Classic Car Monthly?’
He didn’t miss a beat. ‘It would have been the new Ian McEwan.’
‘That doesn’t count!’
‘Why not? A classic of the future.’
‘Tenuous. And maybe you did, but did you really, really enjoy it? I mean, if you went on Desert Island Discs, for example, right now…’
‘Love to. I’ve had a bit of a thing about Sue Lawley ever since Nationwide.’
‘Be serious. If you did, you’d say something pretentious and clever, wouldn’t you, for your book, but you wouldn’t mean it?’
‘I might.’
‘Come off it. Nick Hornby. At best.’
‘What would you say, then?’
In Bathrooms, a couple were arguing about towel colours. Apparently he was a stupid colour-blind git while his wife, allegedly, ‘wouldn’t know good taste if it smacked [her] in the arse’.
‘Well… you get the Bible and Shakespeare, don’t you? So I’d have to say… the fattest sex-and-shopping novel I could find in the bookshop. Lots of characters. Lots of filthy sex scenes.’
‘You so would not say that on Radio Four!’ Tom laughed at her. ‘What about music?’
‘That’s much tougher. It’s a different ten every time, isn’t it?’
‘Not for me. Rolling Stones, Cream, plus Clapton’s live “Layla”, bit of Queen…’
A small, balding man was fighting with two trolleys that were stuck firmly together. Despite the abundance of single trolleys available to him, he seemed determined to have one of the conjoined ones. He was swearing under his breath, and a thin sheen of sweat had appeared on his forehead. Tom manoeuvred their trolley around him, and they left the