IT’S TIME, WHILE I can still waddle around a maze of furniture without recourse to a portable resuscitation device, for the big trip to the giant blue and yellow place just outside Belfast. So we call to Portadown to collect Queenie, my boyfriend’s mother, at 10.45am as arranged. The tumble dryer in my own mother’s place (our temporary home) is broken, so my boyfriend has brought up bags of washing to hang on the line. He has just pegged the last item when Queenie surfaces from the hairdressers.
Expertly coiffed and wearing new black jeans that make her legs look as long as Naomi Campbell’s, she excuses her tardiness with the news that just when she was about to leave, her hair stylist produced a rake of holiday snaps of Egypt. It would have been rude not to make interested noises at the pictures of pyramids, she explains.
Then she asks (again) whether we are sure we don’t want to go to the small, family-run traditional furniture place she has suggested instead of the giant blue and yellow place where furniture is flat-packed and you can buy a sofa for half nothing. “You get what you pay for,” she warns.
Queenie is not a fan of the flatpack. She tells me a few times that she has a suite of furniture in the sitting room that is 30 years old and has been reupholstered more times than Joan Collins. She speaks of real leather and of chairs that last a lifetime and there is no doubt but that she is going to the blue and yellow place under duress. Still, she is going and this ability to humour what she views as the radical furniture fetishes of myself and her son is one of the many things I love about her.
Our first stop before the blue and yellow place looms into view is a sofa store in the centre of Belfast where I have my eye on a “Fancy Nancy”, a gorgeous contemporary sofa covered in pink fabric. Queenie says: “I just don’t know about fabric sofas, especially with babies boking all over the place . . .” Boking is Norn Irish for puking, but I prefer posseting, which I’ve recently learned is the genteel word for milk regurgitation.
“They won’t be in that room, it will be a boke-free zone,” I say, smiling through gritted teeth because it’s only 11.30am and I can already sense this is going to be a very long day.
The sofa store has just closed down, a victim of the times. We peer through the glass and I notice the “Told you so, these fly-by-night furniture places, we should have gone to my one,” look appear on Queenie’s face. We visit the next sofa place on our list, where the nice but unsuspecting salesman earns his money for the guts of an hour.
She questions everything. The prices. The guarantees. The quality. She even scoffs at the stuff they use to protect the furniture. The poor man is in bits by the time we leave for the curtain material shop, where we have a long conversation with a young salesman and what he doesn’t know about pelmets and valances, well, it isn’t worth knowing.
I tell him how I have an aversion to curtain poles and Queenie chimes in: “She doesn’t want to see the pole poking out,” and suddenly the conversation seems to be taking a funny turn, so we leave abruptly with some samples of a rich silk material which isn’t really my style, but Queenie’s presence is turning me into the type of person who likes a nice six-inch-deep pink silk valance.
“I didn’t think that kind of thing was really your style,” says detective Queenie before we all go to lunch and eat lamb shanks and have a good laugh about the pole incident again.
Then it’s time for the blue and yellow place. We have a list. We have a budget. We have a companion who, whenever she sits on a sofa or tries out a chair, has a face like she’s sucking lemons. But as we walk around, something happens. She starts to warm a bit to the blue and yellow place and to the blue and yellow staff who couldn’t be more charming and patient with these blue and yellow virgins who can’t work out the blue and yellow system and so need to be told about it three times.
It’s tiring, though. When we find the Dream Bed, we all lie down – Queenie on the chaise longue, us on the Dream Bed, which she says is too big. “You won’t fit anything else in the room,” she warns.
When we get to the cafe area we order two drinks each and are so nonplussed we forget to clear our own table. This is verboten in the blue and yellow place because making you clear your own table is how they are able to charge £69 for a sofa and £6.99 for shiny plastic yellow chairs. We bought six. God, they are really very shiny and very yellow and very, very plastic.
We don’t get out of the blue and yellow place
until 9pm. And even though she thinks the Dream Bed is too big for the room and she doesn’t believe we will ever use the sofa bed we bought – “Nobody ever uses sofa beds,” she pronounces – and even though she secretly thinks it’s all going to fall apart, on balance we are glad we initiated her in the mysteries of the blue and yellow place. She even bought some glass tumblers. She may yet come back for storage jars.
By the time we reach Portadown, it is raining. Folded in neat piles on the kitchen table are all our clothes. While we were gone, Queenie’s husband retrieved the washing from the line, then ironed and folded every item including my 10-year-old pyjama bottoms that have never met an iron before in their lives.
It’s not off the ground my domesticated boyfriend licked it, apparently. We thank his father but he looks at us with an expression that says he wasn’t expecting thanks, that it’s just what you do when there is washing on the line and it’s raining.
We are fed chicken and broccoli bake and given drinks and fruit for the journey home, where we will discover the Dream Bed is too big for the room. Of course.
