Not What They Were Expecting

by Neal Doran

  It was the set-up of the shop as you went in, rather than the cut-price cuisine, that got to Rebecca. First thing through the door, there was the big yellow price tags boldly declaring a ridiculously cheap price for a quite nice coffee table that she’d be more than happy to have in her house. If they had room for a coffee table. But it didn’t matter, the signs just screamed of the potential for more great stuff that they could easily afford just at the top of the stairs. There were Nice Things everywhere, and she didn’t care at that particular moment that the nicest of them would probably also be owned by everyone they knew.

  But the main thing she loved, that meant she giggled and joined in rather than sighed when James did his impressions, was the little rooms laid out before her on the first floor. It was like a giant doll’s house and you got to play in it. Living rooms for lying around in, being angsty while watching Scandinavian detective shows. Home offices where she could be a highly regarded architect working at a desk with a top that tilted up and down, instead of a dull solicitor. The kitchens in which it would be morally wrong to use a stir-in sauce. When she’d been a little girl they hadn’t really had this stuff. IKEA opened nearby when she was in secondary school, but by then she didn’t want to hang out with her parents at the weekend, and the importance of lighting design somehow wasn’t making any impact on her teenage brain. That was almost entirely being used for hating French (the language, not the people) and thinking about *NSYNC. Besides, her parents had always been more John Lewis people.

  So now, in the mid-morning quiet of the store, with migrating shoppers still only arriving in ones and twos, she felt like a kid again. James, meanwhile, having exhausted the impressions he could do with his props, was now doing his version of the same play-acting, treating every display as a Hollywood sound stage.

  ‘Hi honey, I’m home!’ he cheesily beamed as he stepped into a living room delicately decorated with well-structured but still comfy-looking sofas and chairs.

  ‘Oh hi dear, good day at the office?

  ‘Up at the warehouse? Say it’s great! Only seven work-related injuries all day. And I still have all six toes!’

  ‘Well that’s lovely dear, let me get you a Marti—’

  Rebecca stopped as a middle-aged couple came murmuring into the room, smiling briefly at them as they took over the space, pointing at side tables and poring over a catalogue.

  As the older couple circulated, taking over the display, James gestured to the cocktail shaker on the side table and silently mouthed ‘offer them one?’ to Rebecca.

  ‘C’mon,’ she mouthed back with an amused reproachful smile, gesturing towards the next section.

  ‘Mi casa es tu casa’, James mumbled cheerily as he manoeuvred past the husband, who was squeezing a sofa cushion to test its firmness.

  ‘Would you like to come up to my room?’ James whispered seductively in Rebecca’s ear as they stood in the aisle.

  ‘Why, we’ve only just met.’

  ‘I’d like to show you my environmentally friendly cardboard laptop and television.’

  ‘It’s all so sudden…’

  ‘Perhaps…you could stay over.’

  ‘I shouldn’t… But I can’t resist… Yes. You’ve got me. But I’m getting top bunk.’

  They looked around the teenager’s bedroom, marvelling at the idea it could have a sleeping area, a homework area and a chillout zone in a tiny space.

  ‘Like any teenager would ever have a room as tidy and organised as this,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘We might get one,’ said James, ‘I always did.’

  ‘You always were a rebel.’

  ‘Admittedly it never smelled quite like this once I hit thirteen.’

  ‘Urgh, James!’ said Rebecca. ‘I’m starting to hope Bomp’s a girl now. Sweaty horrible teenage boys…’

  ‘Like teenage girls are all sugar and spice.’

  ‘I’m not even going to think about it. Bompalomp’ll be different. We’ll focus on the baby bit first. I guess that’s why no one’s ever said, “Great news! We’re going to be having an adolescent!”’

  The fantasising and role-playing had kept them both cheerful as they slowly made their way around the shop. The game was sprinkled, as the shop got busier, with observations of the other couples prowling the displays who might not be having as much fun.

  ‘You go through and talk to them,’ said James from a stainless steel kitchen, looking through at a grumpy husband and wife team glaring at each other over the table in an adjacent dining room.

  ‘No, you!’ said Rebecca. ‘They’re your guests.’

  ‘They’ve obviously had a row…’

  ‘She saw him testing the mattresses with another woman,’ speculated Rebecca. ‘He said she was staff and he only wanted to check for roll together.’

  ‘Like anyone who works here would be that helpful…’

  ‘Quick, they’re coming back in, look busy!’

  The rowing couple stomped through the kitchen, grimly moving against the flow of traffic. Rebecca watched them as they went past, while pretending to studiously examine the lines of a colander, and James tested the action of a shutting cutlery drawer.

  ‘Divorced by Christmas,’ Rebecca predicted.

  Then they turned a corner, and before they realised it they were in a nursery. For both of them the noise of the store faded into the background. The couples horse-trading over which sofa would fit with everything else in the living room, the mix-ups on prices with expensive stuff with headline prices that made it look like it was really cheap, no longer registered.

  They could see themselves there, the three of them, and it was beautiful.

  They held hands and grinned, as they looked at the colourful rugs and colourfully painted wooden furniture. In less than four months now they’d be standing in a room like this again. But not pretending. James imagined himself, bleary-eyed but cheerful in his PJs, standing over the cot and checking the baby was snug and asleep. Then he’d stand up straight and clatter the mobile over the bed noisily with the back of his head, but the baby would just wake up for a second, give him a ‘good one, Dad’ look, and drift back off to sleep.

  ‘I think the red is the way to go,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘Hmm?’ said James, jarred out of his daydream.

  ‘The green, looking at it, could be a bit boysy and we’d have to have too many soft yellows to make it neutral. If we go with the red we can keep it more bright primary colours and it won’t matter what sex they are.’

  ‘Or we could always ask at the scan in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘We don’t need to know. And remember, they didn’t seem keen to provide that information in case we were being a bit too picky about gender.’

  ‘We could slip them a tenner with a nod and a wink?’

  Rebecca looked at him.

  ‘OK then, we could go for the private scan?’ he suggested.

  ‘You know we can’t justify the expense. You said…’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I know.’

  ‘And hey, weren’t you the one that said we shouldn’t be doing the whole gender colour stereotyping in the first place? I could hardly believe it when you started channelling your mother.’

  ‘I think you’d find Maggie would want to swap them around entirely to make a political point. Completely swamp young Master Bomp in pink fairies, or surround the Little Miss in construction vehicles and football as a kind of lifelong installation project. Personally, I just think all the pastels are tacky. With all due respect to whatever hideous tweeness your mother is expecting of us.’

  ‘That’s why we’re doing this a bit early,’ said Rebecca. ‘She nearly passed out when I said we were doing the baby shopping already. She didn’t say it directly, but she’d have no part in tempting fate with so long left to go, so we can do what we like with no interference.’

  ‘Red’s probably the way to go then.’

  ‘I’ve already got the aisle numbers written down.’

  After taking in
everything available for the wannabe Scandinavian baby about town, they decided to stop for a celebratory trip to the café. That, though, turned out to be a mistake.

  They were buzzing with excitement as they grabbed trays and constructed their lunches. Sitting at their table cheerfully close to the family seating section, James happily worked on lists of what they’d need to pick up from which aisle in the warehouse and Rebecca pinched his meatballs to accompany her salad. They ate and added up quietly for a while, until James stopped working and stared at his blunt wooden pencil for a while.

  ‘Do we need to get all this now?’ he asked.

  ‘You want to come back?’ said Rebecca. ‘You remember this is somewhere we can only manage once or twice a year?’

  ‘It’s just… There’s a lot of stuff. I’m not sure where we could keep it while we finish the decorating. And when you add it all up it’s not cheap.’

  ‘That cot bed’s a hundred quid! It’s convertible and’ll last them for years. We were looking at paying three times that for something not nearly as cute.’

  ‘I know that,’ James snapped. ‘That’s why I said, when you add it all up. Three hundred things that “are very good for the price, aren’t they?” adds up to a fuckload of money. We’ll be paying interest on a credit card so they can sit in our loft instead of here.’

  ‘But we said we’d get it done now to get it out of the way rather than leave it late and have to give birth in a display dining room because we got lost when I went into labour?’

  ‘You said to get it done now. But I didn’t disagree loudly enough at the time, so that’s my fault.’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s anyone’s fault. Just…surely the cost of any interest won’t be as much as the cost of that meatball mountain?’

  James paused and looked down at his plate and gave the meatballs a very dirty look, which wasn’t really aimed at them.

  ‘I have to get extra,’ he said looking up, ‘because you’re always going to take half of them.’

  ‘Yeah but still, who’s eating for two here?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I didn’t know men could have phantom pregnancies too.’

  That had been it. James had gone quiet again. It had not been the time for fat jokes, Rebecca knew. But she’d been worrying about his weight for a while, and hadn’t known how to mention it. She’d knew it’d be a sensitive topic, and hadn’t wanted to start a row. Maybe because they were already heading for one, some part of her brain had decided ‘hell, why not get it all out there while we’re here?’

  Since he’d lost his job, she’d noticed he had put on a few pounds, which was fair enough it was a stressful time, and he was big enough to be able to carry a bit of extra weight. But he didn’t seem to be showing any signs of slowing down. His face was starting to look a bit different, T-shirts weren’t sitting as flat on his belly as they once had. It wasn’t like him to act like that – that was the thing that was worrying her most. Still, there probably would have been better times to bring it up than over a big lunch on an increasingly stressful shopping trip, she conceded. And saying he looked like a woman due a baby any minute probably hadn’t helped.

  James stood up abruptly to get a coffee refill, and didn’t ask if she needed one. The trip was looking like it would deteriorate into bickering and the overwhelming urge was now to get it over. This, Rebecca now remembered, always happened. The wilful forgetting of the bad bits. The expectation that this time would be different. ‘I wonder what Freud would make of that if he got me lying on an IKEA Therapii chaise longue,’ she thought to herself.

  Back on the shop floor, which seemed to have got much busier since they took a break, the passive-aggressive arrows that control how move you around the store quickly got more bothersome. And there was no relief when they did finally escape into the bazaar, where finding what you wanted got no easier. But in there, the cute little rooms were gone, and the likelihood of people inconsiderately ramming your ankles with their trolleys increased exponentially. There always seemed to be more kids too, thought Rebecca, running dangerously around the glassware. When Bomp got to an age, they wouldn’t be allowed to go feral in a place like that, she was sure.

  That they weren’t really talking to each other any more, and neither was sure just how much stuff they would end up getting on the trip, made it difficult.

  Then it got worse.

  It was a fluke. One of those coincidences that statistically are bound to happen. Harrow was just down the road from where they were, so the prospect of people here having seen the display at the station was pretty high. And they were in another public place where you could unexpectedly come across items more usually found in private bathroom spaces, which could trigger a link in someone’s mind. But it still floored Rebecca when it happened.

  It was another couple, probably about their age, maybe a little younger, and probably just moving in together for the first time. That was the only explanation as to why they were still happy and joking with each other by the time they’d worked their way around to the basement on a busy Sunday.

  ‘’Mand, ’Mand, look. I’m a copper!’

  The guy wearing a heavily branded T-shirt had whipped one of the toilet brushes from the display, and was holding it like a riot police truncheon. He then grabbed a bath mat that he faffed around with, trying to get it to look like a riot shield, but it was too floppy so he threw it down (in the wrong place) and said in a deep gruff voice, ‘Wanna taste of my truncheon?’ The toilet brush then drooped as he let his wrist go limp and he began trotting in small circles saying in an effeminate voice, ‘Ooh officer if you want to take down my particulars you’ll have to chase me!’

  They both stopped in their tracks, watching him. James quietly removed the tape measure he was still wearing around his neck and rolled it up in his pocket.

  Rebecca wanted to say something. To bawl him out for his awful homophobic stereotyping. That nonsense with a limp wrist and lascivious grinning while wiggling his bottom at an imaginary cop. He had no idea what she was going through. He was stupid. Just stupid. And her dad wasn’t one of them, anyway.

  To give the guy’s girlfriend some credit, she didn’t look too impressed with his performance. She gestured for him to quit messing about while nervously looking around to see if anyone was watching. He shrugged, put the toilet brush down (again, in the wrong place) and they strolled off to look at the crockery.

  Rebecca could sense James was watching her to see if she’d noticed the reference and, if she had (it would’ve been hard not to), how she was coping with it. But he didn’t ask her if she was all right. Not willing to come out of his sulk unless it was a genuine emergency, she figured. Well that was fine, she’d thought. She could deal with it on her own, she wasn’t going to be knocked off course on what was important about today, the reason they were in this dump, by some idiot in sportswear.

  By the time they left, she told herself determinedly, they would have a cot, and a nursing chair, and cute little-one-sized furniture. And colourful storage, a rug and wall decorations, and wooden toys. And she would buy herself some tealights.

  They moved back and forth between the aisles, not speaking except to say where they had to go to next, always on the verge of a row when the next location was a long way back the way they’d just been. They were getting everything on the list. A couple of times, Rebecca said, ‘We could leave this one for now’ as they searched for a kid-size wardrobe or play table, but James just grimly said, ‘No, let’s get it done,’ and strode off to find the right cardboard boxes.

  Relations actually began to thaw as they worked on their task and got into the rhythm of tracking down their items. While they weren’t talking yet, it was less obvious that they pointedly weren’t talking. They both heard the beeping at the same time, and realised what it was – a forklift, just like they’d been joking about since James decided he was going to do the temp job. Eyebrows lifted in recognition. Rebecca wondered if a well-timed jo
ke about being able to get a job here one day might be enough to dissipate all the tension between them. James looked like he might be thinking the same thing.

  Then the reversing forklift came into view, slowly turned and headed past them, yellow hazard lights gently flashing. The driver was a big man, one they’d obviously struggled to find an appropriately fitting bright blue T-shirt for. There was a band of glistening, slightly spotty-looking skin between where the top ended and his trousers started. He looked a little closer to middle age than they were, although the deadened look on his face could have been ageing him. Sweat was dripping down from the side of his askew glasses, and the hard hat perched high on his head looked ridiculous on him, mocking the idea that he was in shape to be doing anything remotely physical.

  The wisecrack died on Rebecca’s lips. She watched James studying him as he went by, and he kept staring long after the driver had gone. He blinked a bit and looked like he was having some difficulty swallowing. ‘You OK?’ Rebecca ventured.

  ‘Fine!’ he said, in a cheerful voice that sounded all the more forced because of how little they’d been talking just a minute earlier. There was an aggressive edge to it too, like the effort to be upbeat was in danger of bringing his anger with it.

  ‘Think we’re finally nearly there aren’t we?’ he added.

  James retreated back into himself as they picked up the last of their shopping. They stood silently in the queue, noticing, but not mentioning, the tantrumming kids, and the full-blown domestics over a pot plant. There was a guy struggling to carry a long and apparently slightly-too-heavy flat-packed wardrobe. He was nearly taking out everyone around him as he weaved about trying to find his family and their trolley. But neither of them nudged the other to watch.