‘Is there a secret passageway behind that door?’ said the weirdly difficult Kiwi as she eyed a door marked ‘private’ leading off the central staircase.
‘Yes, sort of,’ I said. Behind that door is the rear part of the house, unrenovated. So if you open it, the secret is you fall into a gap in one of the smashed floorboards, trip over a box of books or ten, fall against a stack of mattresses and tumble down a rickety staircase that lands you in the boiler and machinery room, where you will find the unfathomable clutter that is the builder boyfriend’s tool collection, the vast water tanks, groaningly driven by electric pumps, and my overflowing baskets of laundry.
I tried to explain that this was why it was off limits to our B&B guests, but the flame-haired New Zealander wasn’t having it. ‘I’d like to have a look in there.’
‘What is wrong with you?’ I thought. Kiwis are usually laid-back, humorous, easygoing. Not this one. The first weekend she was staying with us, she returned from a trip to a nearby stately home to complain they had not let her into their basement. She only got to poke around the entire ground floor and first floor, the gardens and tea rooms, where she met the owner serving the tea.
‘Not exictly ickcciss all areas,’ she harrumphed. ‘And I paid €15 for thit!’
This woman was unpleasable. From the moment she arrived she complained about everything, including the roads not having white lines down the middle and a local garage owner sending her the wrong way on purpose because, according to her, ‘he was a misogynistic pig’.
‘Dear God,’ the builder boyfriend said as we huddled in our bedroom the first night. Around midnight, the weirdly difficult Kiwi woke us by shouting outside our door that we were to come and remove our cat from outside her room as it was disturbing her by mewing. ‘I threw a gliss of water at it but it hisn’t worked,’ she said. Roux, the black and white, was sitting defiantly in the hallway – his hallway – looking daggers at her. I picked him up and took him into our bed.
A few days later, the Kiwi made me jump out of my skin as she came up behind me in the boiler room with her bed linen in her arms. I assured her I was intending to change her bed at the end of the week. No, she wanted it done now and would I hurry up so it would dry in time for tonight? I explained I have other sets, all matching. I’d put another one on. As I took the linens, I realised
that she hadn’t had an icksidint – perhaps a spillage of the endless cups of hot milk and saucy pasta meals she was squirrelling up to her room. The linens were as new. She had simply used them as an excuse to breach our rear defences.
Her next foray was to demand the padlock codes to the farmyard area. We said no, but that evening, we caught her climbing the gate. The evening after that, she returned from a walk to declare that she had photographed a cow she didn’t think was quite right. ‘They’re clearly over-milking it,’ she said, showing me a picture of a healthy young beef cow in a field. ‘That’s not a dairy cow,’ I said. ‘Yis it is,’ she said. ‘Listen to me,’ said the BB, becoming peevish. ‘That is our neighbour’s farm and it is not a dairy farm. That cow is one of his prize beef cattle.’
‘All right, all right!’ she said. ‘But anyway, look how thin it is. It’s got nothing to eat.’ I pointed to the bright green grass, informed her that was cow food, and she stormed out of the kitchen.
A few nights later she told me my neighbour’s dog was being mistreated because it was barking in the night. No amount of explaining that dogs bark in the night would appease her, so I had to lay it on the line. If she was going to distress herself misconstruing cows at pasture, barking dogs and elderly Irish garage owners, she would probably be better off somewhere else. I offered to refund her. But she said no, she was perfectly fine, thank you. And no, she wouldn’t put her dishes in the dishwasher, because ‘dishwashers cause neurological damage’. And she flounced once again from the kitchen.
Most infuriatingly, she attempted to misconstrue an iron. I told her I don’t provide an iron and she went looking for one. Went looking for one, found one, used it, then claimed it was dangerous. My brand-new iron, which she found by rummaging in my private linen room, was ‘sparking’ – ‘spaaaaarking!’ – and had ‘loose wires in it’.
She repeated this nonsense accusation, day after day, until eventually she put it in writing on the booking system.
‘Right, that’s it, she’s got to go,’ I told Airbnb, for she had booked through them, and they rang her. I don’t know what the ‘resolutions’ team said to her. But within an hour she left, then submitted her refund request. In it, she alleged that I had been going to the trouble of taking the linen off her bed and replacing it with a set taken from another bed, unwashed.
No amount of explaining that all the bed sets match was ever going anywhere with this woman. This was someone who could not understand that a cow eats grass, a dog barks in the night, and an Irish garage owner is going to send a weirdly difficult Kiwi the wrong way.
I wish he’d sent her a much wronger way, so she’d never managed to find my house.
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