Never turn your back on builders. I only nipped out to walk the dog. I was barely gone half an hour. When I left I had one good room. The spare room. The only nice room in the house. I really love the only nice room in the house. I love the jasmine white walls, the beige carpet, the peaceful spotlighting, the satin curtains, the silk cushions, the newly fitted wardrobes. I keep it meticulously tidy because it is all I have got to show so far for my six-week-long renovations. The rest of the place looks like a bomb has hit it. The spaniel and I curl up on my overpriced Ikea day bed in the only nice room in the house and dare to dream.
‘One day, Cydney,’ I tell the spaniel as she snoozes, ‘it will all be like this. One day, everything will be jasmine white and beige, you wait and see.’
The spaniel opens one eye and looks ironically at me as if to say, ‘You’re deluded. I’ve seen the Albanians knocking ten bells out of the electric wiring. We’ll be lucky if we get out of this alive, never mind beige.’
Every time I leave the house, I shut the door of the only nice room in the house carefully and lay a sheet outside so that no brick dust can find its way in. I did this as usual as I left the house to walk the dog. But when we came back the spare room door was open. The nervous builder called Ben, who has very little English, had dismantled the day bed, hacked a metre-long channel in the bottom of the jasmine white wall and was, as Cydney and I stood there with our mouths wide open in horror, pulling a length of cabling out.
‘N-n-n-n-n-n-n…’ I said, as the power of speech deserted me.
‘I move socket. Stefano said we put socket here instead. Is better.’
‘N….n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n…’
‘Is better,’ he insisted, looking uncertain. ‘Is better?’
I stared at the ugly gash in the wall and the brick dust all over my beige carpet. ‘N-n-n-no dust sheet!’
‘Dus…shee…?’ asked Ben, nonchalantly.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, he grabbed his filler gun and started piping filler into the newly made cavity. But I wanted the socket put back where it had been. There was nothing wrong with it. There was nothing wrong with the only nice room in the house.
‘N…! N-n-n-n-n-n-n-no!’
Whereupon he dropped the gun, and spilled a huge dollop of filler all over the carpet.
‘Oops,’ he said, biting his bottom lip.
‘Howl!’ I cried. I didn’t know you could make a sound exactly like the word howl but you really can. ‘Howwwwwl!’
Being a conscientious cocker, Cydney got tremendously excited by this. Possibly thinking she was detecting her owner about to have an epileptic fit, she began running in circles, then leapt on top of the expensive memory foam mattress of the dismantled day bed coating it in mud. ‘Howl!’ I screamed, running for the kitchen, where I slumped to the floor and wept bitter tears.
Then I rang Stefano. It went straight to answerphone. No doubt he was in B&Q buying metres of the wrong cabling and filler guns full of gunk that didn’t match the jasmine white walls. ‘I can’t take any more. You’ve got to make it stop.’
When I came out of the kitchen, I found Ben cowering in the main bedroom digging a channel in the wall there, and looking like he wished he had stayed in a small Balkan village where the only thing he had to worry about were Mafia crime gangs.
‘I sorry,’ he said, looking pathetic.
‘No, I sorry,’ I said.
Stefano strode through the door. ‘What is matter? We move socket in spare room. You agree, remember?’
‘Oh, did I? Yes, maybe I did. Thing is, I don’t really know where I want this socket. One minute I think I want it behind the bed, then I think maybe you’re right, it should go next to the wardrobe. I want to do the right thing but I can’t decide what’s right. By the bed, or by the wardrobe? Every time I try to work it out I feel like my head is exploding…’
Stefano took me by the shoulders and whispered slowly, ‘Maybe you go away and leave everything to me and come back in the end and if you don’t like anything then we change.’
‘Yes, yes, you’re probably right,’ I said as he shoved my coat at me, then led me and Cydney to the car and put us inside.
‘You have somewhere to go?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about that.’ I hear the Albanian Riviera is very nice this time of year.
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