Confessions of a Plumber's Mate Page 7

  I take a butcher’s at the two rooms I have got to paper and find to my relief that they have been emulsioned. The paper can go straight on the walls. Into the kitchen and I pour the paste powder into a bucket of warm water. It doesn’t half pong nice. Almost like a bird’s perfume. The subtle niff wafts round my hooter and I turn to find – blimey! Mrs Richmond has shed her slacks and jersey and is wearing a play suit that looks as if it has been painted on her by a spray gun fitted with telescopic sights. The pong is definitely her own and her face has been brightened up by the addition of some craftily applied make-up. To a man not stretched on the rack of a shattered love affair she would look very fanciable.

  ‘Finding everything all right, are you?’ she says.

  ‘No problems so far,’ I say.

  She hovers before me for a moment and then picks up the Radio Times and willows out of the room. From behind, she looks like a couple of cats in a sack. Percy hoists one of my goolies a couple of millimetres and then goes back into mourning.

  I lay some sheets of newspaper along the wall of the lounge and give the paste a stir. It looks like frog’s spawn. I have never hung any wallpaper before but I am certain it is very easy. You just press it against the top of the wall and then smooth it out. There are always a few wrinkles but they disappear as the paper dries. I spread the roll out along the kitchen table and bend down to pick up the brush. When I straighten up, the paper has curled up again. I put the brush back, unroll the paper, stand the iron on the end of it and – the paper curls up from the other end.

  ‘All right? Still winning?’ By the cringe! Mrs Richmond is now wearing a long black see-through nightie with a big pink bow underneath the tits. What has got into the woman – no help from the audience, please.

  ‘Fine,’ I say, wrenching my eyes away from the festival of knocker. ‘It won’t be long now.’

  ‘You don’t find it too warm, in here?’

  ‘It’s all right for me,’ I say.

  ‘I find it very close.’ Mrs Richmond accompanies this remark by brushing against a sensitive part of my anatomy as she replaces her Radio Times. ‘Nothing on,’ she says.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Nothing on the telly,’ she says. ‘Sometimes they have a film in the afternoons.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘Anna Neagle. My Mum watches them.’

  ‘Oh.’ Once again she glides to the door. ‘See you later. If you want everything – I mean, anything, I’ll be in the bedroom.’

  ‘Roger,’ I say. For a moment, her eyes widen hopefully. ‘I mean, I understand,’ I say.

  What a funny woman. There is something about her manner that suggests I might be able to lob my ferret up her coney hatch without fear of reproach. Still, that is not the kind of thing I am interested in at the moment. Work is my life.

  I measure out a strip of wallpaper, cut it, and weight it down on the kitchen table. Now for the paste. I reach for the brush and find that it has slipped below the surface. Knickers! By the time I get it out, my hands are covered in paste. What a blooming nuisance! The paste has set much thicker than I thought it would and has got more lumps in it than Mum’s porridge. This I find when I slap some on the paper. There is clearly more to this wallpapering lark than I had thought. I pick off as many lumps as I can and smear them on the edge of the sink. Now for the big moment. I remove the weights and carefully lean forward and peel the paper off the table. Easy does it, that’s it. Fantastic! I was terrified that I might tear the paper and have to start all over again. I carry the paper into the lounge and choose a spot fairly near one of the corners so that I have a vertical line to work with when positioning the paper. I may not have done this before but I am no – oh, Fuxbridge! I am holding the paper with the sticky side towards me. What a twit!

  ‘Are you all right?’ Mrs Richmond is nuzzling my left arm. I must not let on that I am making a pig’s arse of everything.

  ‘Lovely, thanks.’ I turn my head to give her a confident smile and – eek! She is only wearing a pair of dark blue lace panties. I thought it felt funny when she nudged me.

  ‘How are you going to get it on to the wall?’

  Good question, Mrs Richmond. Go to the top of the form and piss off. I concentrate hard, take a deep breast – I mean, breath – you can see the effect the woman is having on me – and try and turn the paper round and pin it against the wall with my elbow. The paper folds like a book snapping shut and the two sticky surfaces are glued firmly together.

  ‘Oh dear,’ says Mrs Richmond. ‘It’s got stuck, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes!’ I shout. ‘It’s got stuck! Now do you mind very much leaving me alone!?’

  Mrs Richmond’s Manchesters begin to tremble in time with her lower lip and she turns on her heel and runs from the room. I start to follow her and realise that I have still got the wallpaper stuck to my hands. I try to straighten it out and then give up and crumple it into a sticky ball.

  When I get to the kitchen, Mrs Richmond is sitting hunched up at the kitchen table, sobbing her heart out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’

  ‘You were right, you were right!’ she wails. ‘I behaved like a tart. I asked for it. I don’t have any confidence in myself any more. I just wanted to prove that I could attract someone – that I’m not a reject!’

  Hot tears run down her cheeks and drop on to her knockers. It is very effective stuff and quick to warm Timmy’s heart – and regions southwards. Her situation is not so unlike mine – only much more serious, of course. I too have tasted rebuff. How selfish of me to be only thinking of myself when there was a fellow human being in need of sucker – I mean, succour. Suddenly, I forget about Mrs Fletcher and decide to concentrate on my client’s problems. Of course, it is not all pure goodness of heart. I have always found that the quickest way for a bird to get to my hampton is through her own tear ducts.

  ‘Careful,’ I say. ‘You’ve got paste on your – er, oh well, it doesn’t matter – look, you mustn’t blame yourself. I know how you feel.’ This is not one hundred per cent true but by the time I have slid my sympathetic arms around the lady’s trembling shoulders and dropped them down to the soft cave of her belly, then I do begin to get some idea of how she feels.

  ‘You don’t have to be sorry for me,’ she sniffs.

  ‘I know I don’t,’ I say.

  ‘You’d better let me go and put some clothes on.’

  ‘I don’t want you to go,’ I say. I am not lying, either.

  ‘I’ve made a complete fool of myself.’

  ‘No you haven’t.’ I kiss away one of her salty tears and remove a bit of paste from her nipple with the side of my little finger.

  ‘I’m not all that ugly, am I?’ she says.

  ‘No, I say. ‘Just sort of average.’

  ‘You’re making fun of me.’

  ‘That’s right.’ I bury my head in the angle of her neck and shoulder and gently tug at her flesh with my teeth.

  ‘Are you doing this because you’re sorry for me?’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  I move my mouth over hers and spread my fingers across the back of her head. Her hands slowly slide round me and squeeze me tight. As our lips stack, my right hand drops into her lap and starts to interfere with her underclothing. Nothing to get you pulled up in front of the beak for finger smuggling but a soft, rhythmic caress ruckling her panties and rippling over her short and curlies. She starts to say something else but I kiss her silent and quickly slip my hand inside the blue lace. Percy is quivering like a tuning fork activated by a steam hammer and as I send a couple of cuticled hombres riding into love gulch Mrs Richmond presses back against her chair and shoots out her parted legs. Too bad that one of them collides with my paste bucket and sends it spinning across the floor. A thick pool of lumpy gunge surrounds us. Fortunately, my client seems sufficiently preoccupied not to take any notice. Of course, I should clean up the mess right away but – ‘Go on! Go on! That’s hea
ven!’ Mrs Richmond bites her lip and grips my wrist in a ‘leave me if you dare’ gesture. Percy is now mounting a determined assault on the front of my trousers and it is clear that his thirst for action matches that of my abandoned client. ‘Take your clothes off!’ she grits.

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ I say. I stand up and start to take off my tank top. I have just got it off both shoulders when – whoops! I step in the spilt paste and slip backwards. My jacket hooks over one of the kitchen chairs and I am pinioned by my own weight, arms at side.

  Mrs Richmond looks alarmed for a moment and then smiles. ‘You’re at my mercy, aren’t you?’ she says.

  I struggle to find a foothold on the floor but the wallpaper paste has made it like ice. I do feel a berk. Mrs Richmond rises slowly to her feet and I can see a lop-sided triangle of minge fringe peeping over her half-lowered panties. She steps forward carefully and grabs hold of the tab of my zip. Percy strains forward like a golden retriever knowing that ‘walkies’ time has arrived. The tank top is stretched tight between my shoulders and I can’t move.

  ‘Going down.’ Mrs Richmond pulls down my zipper and percy lunges forward like a grandfather clock under a dust sheet. Mrs Richmond unhooks my pants and my equipment bounces into the vertical. ‘You’re not going to run away from me, are you?’

  I nod my head as my client’s fingers lightly scamper the length of my love wand. ‘Hickory, dickory, dock, the mice run up the cock,’ she coos, gracefully hooking her thumbs into the waistband of her panties and steering them floorwards with an educated wriggle of her hips.

  I make another vain attempt to find a foothold. ‘Can’t you help me up?’ I say.

  Mrs Richmond straddles my hips and closes a hand around my hampton. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘That’s exactly what I’m going to do.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘Two weeks!’ says Sid. ‘Two weeks to do a little wallpapering job? You’ll have to do better than that.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ I say. ‘It took two weeks because you kept taking me away to do other jobs. Taking the roof off that place in Enfield, for instance. I’ll never know why we had to do that. We were supposed to be building a surround to cover in the bathroom basin, weren’t we?’

  ‘You do it because it puts the customer in your power,’ says Sid. ‘Whip off the roof and they won’t start complaining for fear you’ll abandon them. There’s a lot of little wrinkles in this building lark. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed them.’

  ‘You mean, like the way we never finish one job before we move on to another one?’

  ‘Exactly,’ says Sid. ‘You always take on more work than you can do so you can make more money. The art is to flit about a bit so you can have a little nibble here and a little nibble there and not let the punters get too dissatisfied. As long as they see you for about an hour a week they’re usually quite happy. You can always say that you’ve got a bloke off sick or there’s a shortage of materials – there usually is a shortage of materials anyway. Spinning the job out is good from the costing point of view, as well. By the time it’s finished and way over estimate you can say that all the prices of the raw materials have gone up or you had to use more expensive stuff because they’d run out of the items you’d specified.’

  ‘You seem to have got the hang of it very quickly, Sid,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t want to boast,’ says Sid. ‘But I reckon that’s my Charlie Forte. Crispin is a very good bloke when it comes to the chat-up but he’s a bit naive on business principles.’

  ‘Or the lack of them,’ I say.

  ‘Precisely,’ says Sid. ‘Still, now he’s come up with a little goldmine I can’t be too hard on him.’

  ‘What is it, Sid?’ I say.

  ‘The Slobovian Embassy. I reckon it could be keeping us in custard powder and knickers for the rest of our naturals.’

  ‘Big place, is it?’

  Sid leans forward confidentially. ‘Revolutions.’

  ‘Is it on wheels?’ I say. ‘Blimey! I knew the world was going through a tough time but I never thought they’d start moving embassies into caravans.’

  ‘You daft twit!’ says Sid. ‘I’m talking about punch-up-type revolutions, aren’t I? Slobovia is in South America and they have a new government every few months. No sooner will one lot have decided on a decor than they’ll be out on their ear and a new lot will move in. It will be like painting the Forth Bridge.’

  ‘Have we got a chance of doing that?’ I ask. ‘Why don’t we give them a special price and get the other three as well?’

  ‘Try and concentrate on one thing at a time,’ says Sid. ‘I’ll provide the mental dynamism. And tart yourself up a bit. We’ve got to see General Garstlia. You’ve finished that Richmond job, haven’t you?’

  Bearing in mind Sid’s instructions about not getting to grips with the lady customers I have deemed it inadvisable to tell him the real reason for the job taking two weeks. It is not just lousy workmanship, oh dear me no. That unfortunate lady needed an enormous amount of reassurance that she was still a fanciable property. I was getting about two strips of wallpaper up for every one of the other thing. Another couple of days and the bags under my eyes would have sunk so low that I would have been able to carry my balls in them. Fortunately, her old man put me out of my misery. I went round there one day and found that he had come back – good job he didn’t do it twenty minutes later. I could not help smiling to myself because he was practically on his hands and knees to her. He obviously reckoned that he had been a very naughty boy. Little did he know the chopper-chafing that wifey had been dishing out. The morning he returned was the one I finished one and a quarter rooms in two and a half hours.

  ‘Oh yes, Sid,’ I say. ‘I used my loaf and spun it out a bit like you said. Of course, there are those other little bits of unfinished business we were talking about earlier …’

  ‘Don’t worry about them,’ says Sid. ‘They can hang on a bit longer. I want to put everything we’ve got into this one because it’s going to be Rosie’s first job.’

  ‘Rosie’s first job?’ I say.

  ‘Yeah.’ Sid looks slightly uncomfortable. ‘She’s always had a leaning towards interior decoration.’

  A thought both coarse and objectionable springs to my mind but I reject it as being unworthy of me. ‘I know,’ I say.

  ‘She’s done a few things with Crispin but this is going to be her first solo effort. It’s a bent she’s always wanted to give vent to.’

  ‘You’ve got to give vent to a bent,’ I say. ‘It’s becoming quite a little family venture, isn’t it? Do you think you’ll be able to find an opening for Dad?’

  ‘I’ve had one in mind for some years,’ says Sid grimly. ‘Down at Wandsworth Cemetry. Dead handy for the nick, so I’ll be able to pop in and see you after I’ve dropped off the flowers. No, but seriously. I’m right behind this idea of working together as a family unit. I think that a return to the ideal of family togetherness is the only hope for the world. I mean, if you can’t trust your own kith and kin, who can you trust?’

  ‘What a bleeding depressing thought,’ I say, after a moment’s consideration. ‘Can’t you come up with something better than that?’

  ‘Family togetherness is not depressing, you stupid moon-faced git!’ snarls Sid. ‘If you really think it is I’ll punch your teeth down your throat!’ Sid has his own quaint way of putting his principles into practice and I decide that a change of subject would be a good idea. ‘This General bloke. Who’s he when he’s at home?’ I ask.

  ‘General Garstlia is the Slobovian Ambassador to the UK.’ says Sid. ‘He’s a very important geezer.’

  ‘I should think so,’ I say. ‘I mean, a general. That’s really something, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not in Slobovia it isn’t,’ says Sid. ‘They don’t have a rank in the army lower than colonel. I believe it’s the copper mines that helped his career along.’

  Whatever it is, I am quite excited when we roll up outside the S
lobovian Embassy in London’s fashionable Belgravia. One of the perks of this kind of job is that you get the chance to take a shufti at how the other half live and I have never been exposed to one of the South American variety before. I believe that they are very hot-blooded and passionate – at least that is what I was told by the copy on the back of the last Chili Con Carne packet I looked at.

  ‘All right,’ says Sid, his finger poised before the bell push. ‘Let’s have no cock-ups.’

  Rosie sighs and pats her hair. ‘Really, Sidney! Must you be so coarse? You’re not cleaning windows now, you know.’

  Rosie is wearing a pair of flair bottom slacks and a fun fur that is more of a laugh riot. It niffs so much that I reckon the goat must have been glad to get rid of it. On her bonce she is wearing a turban. Sid does not reckon this at all but I think she is trying to look like Carmen Miranda. Knowing Rosie as I do, he should be grateful that she is not balancing a bunch of grapes and a couple of bananas on top of her nut.

  ‘Hadn’t we better wait for Crispin?’ I say.

  Sid looks at his watch. ‘Nope. If he’s late, it’s too bad. We want to show these geezers we’re on the spot on the dot. That’s a good slogan that, isn’t it? “On the spot on the dot.”’

  ‘Yeah. It would be great if we were running a mini cab business,’ I say.

  Sid pauses with his hand wavering in front of the bell-push. ‘That’s not a bad idea –’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ says Rosie, shoving Sid aside and pressing the bell firmly. ‘Just concentrate on this, will you? If you latch on to my business colleagues you’re going to have to see things through.’

  Sid is swift to take umbrage at this remark and unpleasantness is only averted by the door being opened. ‘Yes please?’ The bird has just given the perfect answer to my unspoken question. She is petite, with full, sensuous lips; dark, flashing eyes, swept-back hair and big knockers that really fill out the distance between her shoulders. Down in the hammock of my Y-fronts, percy whispers ‘Olé!’. If this is a typical example of Slobovian womanhood then I will book my passage tomorrow – come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind booking her passage either.