Stefano the Albanian was delighted to hear from me. He was really cross when I got myself a builder boyfriend, which he regarded as a terrible sort of betrayal. He knew something was up when I rang to cancel the spare room renovations. The builder boyfriend had promised to do it for free. On no account was I to commission my beloved Stefano to do the job. The boyfriend insisted that he would take charge of all my interior design and DIY needs from the moment we started dating last November.
And to prove he was serious, he set about ripping out my kitchen units in his spare time and installing new doors and drawers, including several that didn’t open or shut properly and one that was totally wonky because he did it at ten o’clock at night after a hard day on a roof. He was like a man possessed. It was hard to argue with him.
But I felt like a traitor. Shortly after cancelling the spare room, I ran into Stefano in the street. He was putting the finishing touches to a brick wall. I was walking the spaniel with the boyfriend, who was wearing his builder’s boots so there was no hiding what was going on in my life and why I had abandoned my commitment to eastern European migrant labour.
Stefano looked at me with visceral hurt in his black, deep-set eyes. We nodded to each other awkwardly. I smiled. Stefano smiled. We had a moment. The boyfriend sensed it.
‘Awight?’ said the boyfriend in his best chippy south London patois. The two squared up to each other. For a split second it looked as though there was going to be a confrontation leading to a full-blown diplomatic crisis and possibly the need for armed intervention by British troops backed by Nato in Tirana. Thankfully, both pulled back from the brink.
‘Who was that?’ asked the boyfriend as we walked away.
‘Stefano, the guy who does everything for me.’
‘Not any more,’ said the boyfriend. ‘I’ll fix that spare room for you now.’
But he never did have the time. And now, a year on, we have broken up and I am on my own with my DIY nightmares again. Naturally, I phoned Stefano to tell him about the break-up even before I rang my mother with the news. It was emotional. He was so pleased to hear from me he could barely speak. His voice cracked with joy, or possibly he was up a ladder. ‘You want spare room done now?’
Within days we were back to our old selves. It was as if the weird, year-long hiatus when I was in a proper grown-up relationship with a man who could just about look after me had never existed.
Stefano was in the spare room with two of his men within hours, whistling along to wacky sounding music on Islamic radio and gnawing at boxes of southern fried chicken as he ripped up laminate and stripped paint. He helped me take the furniture to the storage place in his van and within seconds he was arguing with Big Yellow company policy: ‘No lock. I don’t buy lock.’
I tried to rein him in. ‘We have to buy a padlock. Or produce one of our own. You have one in the van?’
‘No.’
‘Then we have to buy lock. I mean, a lock.’
‘Sign here,’ said the girl behind the desk. ‘You need to give us a week’s notice when you want to leave.’
‘No week’s notice,’ said Stefano, with considerable menace. ‘We tell you day before. Yes? Day before? Is good?’
‘No,’ said the girl, chewing gum and staring into space.
‘Please! Stefano! Leave it to me!’ My hair was standing on end, but in truth I had missed this. It was just like the good old days. Stefano trying to do business Albanian style and me getting mildly hysterical.
Next we went to B&Q to buy the knobs and handles for the wardrobe doors. ‘Knobs? Knobs?’ he mused, as we wandered up and down the aisles. ‘Is funny word this knobs. What mean?’ Then he argued with the trade counter over returns policy. It was glorious, like we had never been apart.
Back home, I made tea and Stefano sat on my kitchen sofa drawing fitted wardrobes. Not just any old wardrobes. These were reunion wardrobes and as such they would be the best wardrobes a girl could hope for. After a while he stopped sketching and looked up. ‘What happened to the man?’ he said, but he didn’t wait for me to try to explain. He got up and made a motion with his foot as if to boot a football. ‘You kick…’ he said, smiling grimly.
He knows me too well.
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