by Alexis Hall
Now he had come to the actual Doing It Yourself bit of DIY, Alfie discovered he was at a bit of a loss. But it wasn’t enough to really dampen his enthusiasm for trying. Maybe in a bit he could take a break and have a cup of tea with Fen, just like at home. Alfie had usually been shooed off because he tended to knock things over and get in the way, but he had good memories of his dad fixing things for his mam. There was a bit in the middle when everything was slightly chaotic, so it was like the normal rules got suspended, and it felt almost like a holiday, and they’d eat cheese sandwiches sitting on the stairs, Alfie wedged in between his parents, his dad in his coveralls, smelling of paint and dust and chemicals. Afterwards, it would all get put to rights again, better than before. And now Alfie was doing that for someone else. Making things right.
Reassured, he took a closer look at the shower rail, and then at the hole in the wall. The edges were ragged, which he was sure was bad, and he poked at them a bit, trying to smooth them down. Which made quite a bit more of the wall fall off. So he stopped doing that. It probably wasn’t helping.
He closed the toilet lid, sat down, and read the instructions on the plaster mix very carefully. Water and plaster—hah, easy—in a bucket. Oh shit.
He went back into the shop to see if they had one.
Gothshelley gazed at him and then shook her head sadly. “Sorry, no.”
Alfie was just getting into his car in order to drive back to B&Q when Fen came running after him, pulled him back inside, and pointed wordlessly at the main display. Which was full of flowers. Standing in buckets.
Gothshelley snickered into Suffering.
Fen’s hand had somehow slid into Alfie’s as he led him into the back room and to an immense, wobbling stack of plastic buckets.
Alfie peered up Mount Bucket. “Oh.” And then slanted a sideways look at Fen. His lips were pressed so tightly together they were little more than a pale line. “Are you laughing at me?”
A little shake of the head. But then, as if he couldn’t stop himself, Fen smiled. Wide and slightly goofy, cutting two deep brackets into his cheeks and showing slightly pointy, slightly crooked teeth. Alfie grinned back and squeezed his hand. And to Alfie’s surprise, Fen squeezed back before letting him go. “If you need anything else,” he offered finally, “just ask me. I’m sorry I . . . um. What Shelley said.”
Alfie shrugged. “Mate, it’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. It’s like I’ve forgotten how to be grateful. And I should be. I mean I am. Because truthfully I probably couldn’t pay to have someone come in, and there’s no way I could do it myself. So . . .” Fen lifted his eyes to Alfie’s. “Thank you.”
Alfie was entranced, caught in a green and gold fairyland, and touched by the possibility of trust. Which made this a truly terrible time to admit he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. So he busied himself with the buckets, snagged one from the pile, and escaped to the bathroom. As he ran the tap, he couldn’t help daydreaming a little, imagining his life was something like this—DIY and a man to take care of—instead of the work-and-play treadmill of London.
When the bucket was about a quarter full, he tried to add approximately the same amount of plaster. This turned out to be a lot trickier than he had expected. First none of the stuff wanted to come out of the packet, then nearly all of it did, so he had to add more water to balance it out, but then it went too runny, so he added more plaster, and eventually he had an entire bucket of lumpy sludge. So he got another bucket, decanted off the worst of it and tried again. And then he had two buckets of the lumpy sludge. Which was probably a bit much for one smallish bit of wall. He prodded at the mess with the tip of his trowel. It looked kind of like the lightning sand in The Princess Bride.
Well, maybe it was supposed to be like that.
He hopefully battled some of the rapidly hardening goop onto the trowel and then tried to get it to stick to the wall. It sort of did. But when he tried to smooth it down, it just rolled over and over itself until it was covered in fluff and flaky bits of old plaster, and looked, frankly, terrible. Worse than before he had started fixing it.
Alfie’s dad’s favourite saying was, “When you’re in a hole, stop digging,” and it was a good one, but Alfie wasn’t sure that it applied to plastering. Because if he stopped now, all he had was a bigger mess than when he’d started. No, probably the thing to do was keep going. Add another layer. It would cover everything up, and there was no way it could be as bad as the first.
It was as bad as the first.
There were still random bits of crap stuck in the grain, along with the trowel marks even Alfie’s best efforts left over the surface. And the more he tried to make it better, the more weird and lumpy it got, like he’d murdered a mouse and attempted to hide the body in the bathroom wall. It briefly crossed his mind that he could replaster the entire room. Then the new bit wouldn’t be so obvious, because everything would look the same. By which he meant, uniformly shit.
Sweating and panicking, and swearing under his breath, but still refusing to give up, Alfie went in for a final attack. The trowel was in open rebellion now, just like everything else, and he somehow managed to get a long slug-spiral of plaster looped across the edge of the bath.
Never mind. One thing at a time. He could clean that up later.
All was not lost. He was starting to get the hang of things. Or, at least, he was getting a better handle on all the ways it was going wrong. Which meant, when he put the trowel back down, he was left with something that looked only quite bad. The whole experience had broken Alfie’s spirit sufficiently that he was prepared to accept this as a positive outcome. Still slightly high on the closest he had come to success, he stepped back to admire his handiwork. His foot banged against one of the buckets, and he leapt away just in time to avoid a concrete boot.
Of course, it also meant he knocked the bucket over.
There was this fairy tale Alfie remembered called “The Magic Porridge Pot.” It was kind of like that. Except plaster, not porridge. But, fuck, the stuff was everywhere. He actually had to climb into the bath to avoid the flood. When it seemed safe, he reached gingerly out to rescue the trowel, only to discover it was stuck to the floor. Really seriously stuck to the floor.
“Oh God. Oh fuck.”
So much for cups of tea and cheese sandwiches on the stairs.
But looking on the bright side . . . Okay, there was no bright side. He’d essentially just redone the bathroom floor. In cement.
Alfie sat, awkward and cross-legged, in the bottom of Fen’s scummy bathtub and took stock of the situation. In basic terms, it was pretty much the opposite of good. Not least because he still hadn’t finished the job he’d actually come here to do. How was he supposed to face Fen now? He’d been so sweet and grateful, and had trusted Alfie, when he had no reason to, and Alfie had made a pig’s ear of everything. Was ruining someone’s bathroom better or worse than bullying them for years? He honestly couldn’t tell. He just knew Fen was going to hate him again. And offering up his head for a bogging probably wasn’t going to cut it this time.
Basically he had two choices: give up and admit he’d made a big mess, or finish up what he could and then admit he’d made a big mess, but less of a big mess than it could have been. Both were awful, but there was no way he was leaving Fen to deal with it. His dad was very clear on that sort of stuff: men saw things through.
Alfie hauled himself up and prodded very gently at his plasterwork. Unlike the floor, it hadn’t turned into insta-concrete. It was, in fact, very slightly soggy. Typical. The packet said you should leave it to dry overnight, but since he wasn’t going to be working with that bit of wall, it was probably safe to fit a new bracket and hang the rail. Right? He reasoned that he’d already done the hard bit, that it would be plain sailing from here on out, but he must have buried his confidence with the trowel, because he wasn’t convincing himself. All he felt was stressed and inadequate. Disappointed that he wasn’t very good at this. When he shoul
d have been. He should have been.
He found a good spot, a little to the left of the original hole, took out his thankfully unplastered tape measure and marked everything up very precisely. It helped him feel a little better. At least he’d get something right. He readied the bracket, laid out his screws in a neat row on the edge of the bath, and set up the drill. He couldn’t actually remember the last time he’d used one, but the principle was pretty straightforward. Turn on, apply to wall, what could possibly go wrong? But then he’d thought the same thing about plastering. Unfortunately, he was sort of committed now. He was the Winnie-the-Pooh of DIY: couldn’t go backwards, couldn’t go forwards. Maybe Fen could use him as a towel rack.
Alfie lined everything up, braced himself for some unimagined disaster and . . .
It was fine. Perfect, even. There was the bracket, pinned to the wall by one skilfully drilled screw.
He held his breath as he did the second.
Still fine. Still easy.
So he did the third.
This time, there was a horrible grinding noise and half the wall just crumbled away, dragging with it Alfie’s fresh plasterwork.
“What the fu—”
And then a jet of cold water hit him right in the face.
To his credit, he didn’t freak out immediately. He put the drill down slowly and carefully, making sure he wasn’t drenching any electrics. Then he stepped away from the water. Then he freaked out.
He’d hit a pipe. Well, obviously.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Water was starting to form little pools, and the little pools were starting to join up and spread. Making big pools. He leaned out of the bath, grabbed Fen’s towel from the rack, did not notice how soft it felt or how nicely it smelled like him, and knotted it tightly round the exposed and grimy pipe. For a moment, it looked like it wouldn’t hold . . . but then it did. And Alfie let out a sigh of relief, before remembering exactly why he was relieved. Being relieved now was kind of like being pleased at the deck chair arrangement on the Titanic after it had hit the iceberg.
There was now absolutely no way he could make this right. It was completely fucked. And he had to face up to it. He found Fen in the back room, surrounded by freshly made up bouquets and the scent of flowers, and sheepishly asked him to come upstairs for a moment. When Fen saw the carnage, his mouth actually fell open in cartoon shock. “What . . . what have you done?”
“Um, yeah. It didn’t quite go to plan.”
“Was this revenge? Because I briefly contemplated putting your head in the toilet?”
“What? No! It was an accident.”
“You did this by accident? How bad at DIY are you?”
Alfie cleared his throat. “Pretty bad, apparently.”
“No fucking shit.” Fen pressed his knuckles over his lips and made a slightly hysterical, hiccoughing noise. “Oh my God, what am I going to do?”
This was worse than he’d imagined. And he felt terrible. “Look, it’s fine, I mean it’s not fine, but it’ll be okay. I’m going to fix this. I’ll get an emergency plumber out, and then I’ll get someone in to, y’know, deal with the rest of it.”
“This is South Shields, not London. Everyone will be booked up months ahead.”
He slithered his iPhone out of his pocket and tried to get a signal. “I’ll figure something out. Worst-case scenario, it’ll be a couple of days.”
“A couple of days?” Fen’s voice cracked. “You’re standing on top of a flower shop.”
“Yeah?”
Fen threw his hands into the air. Alfie didn’t think people really did that. But, apparently, they did when you pushed them to a certain point. “A flower shop, Alfie Bell. You know what flower shops sell? Flowers. You know what flowers need? Water.”
“What, there isn’t a separate—” Alfie flapped “—thing?”
“No, Alfie Bell, there isn’t a separate thing. When my mother’s mother set this place up, she didn’t think to herself, ‘You know what, I’d better use a different water supply for the shop on the off chance my grandson ends up entangled with a complete gibbering moron who will flood his fucking house.’”
That was kind of harsh. Except Fen didn’t sound angry—he sounded like someone trying really hard to be angry. When actually all Alfie heard in his voice was despair. “It’s only a little bit flooded,” he protested.
Fen was blinking rapidly, and Alfie was horrified to catch the shimmer of tears under his lashes. “Oh God, my stock. My orders. I . . . I’ll have to close. I can’t afford—”
“Fen, I’m sorry.” Unthinking, Alfie grabbed his hands, Fen’s rough, restless fingers lying chill and quiescent against his. “And I’m going to sort this out. Just trust me. Please.”
“But I did.”
Alfie cringed. “Trust me a bit more.”
“Fuck me, Alfie, if this is how you help people, I hate to think what happens when you set out to harm them. But—” Fen’s mouth twisted wryly “—if you think there’s anything you can do, be my guest. At this point, I don’t see how much worse it could get.”
“I could bust the electrics?” That earned him the faintest of smiles. Gave him courage. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.”
Fen gazed up at him so intently, it was all Alfie could do not to squirm. He didn’t feel judged, exactly. It was more just the sense of being looked at. Really looked at. “You know,” said Fen softly, “you really are just the same.”
“Uh, last time you said something like that, you meant it in a really bad way.”
“It was a really bad moment.” Fen wriggled a hand free, lifted it to Alfie’s face, tracing the line of his jaw. “But I meant the good things, this time.”
Alfie’s mouth opened, but words entirely failed to happen. How could Fen possibly have seen any good in him back then? When, right now, he was having trouble seeing it in himself. If you’d asked a month ago what Alfie thought about his teenage self, he’d probably have said he was a bit of an idiot but a good mate and a decent bloke. And maybe it was still true, but it was hard to reconcile with what he’d done to Fen.
“There’s this confidence you have,” Fen was saying. And it sounded like he meant it—like he really believed in an Alfie who was strong and capable and who would fix things and sort things and make them right. And that was amazing, but also scary, because he didn’t feel very much like that Alfie anymore. Hadn’t for years. At least not since the gay thing happened. But then Fen’s eyebrows got all ironic, and he added, “You know, that entitled golden-boy magic.”
For some reason, that made Alfie laugh. There was something kind of . . . focusing about Fen’s sharpness, when he could be so disarming in other ways. The bite of lemon after a tequila shot. “Leave it to me.”
“All right.” Fen stepped into the hall. Hesitated. Spun back and struck an absurdly imploring, lash-fluttering pose in the doorway. “Help me, Alfie Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”
“Oh my God, you proper nerd.”
A rare smile from Fen, not hesitant, or bitter, or mocking. “Yes. I . . . I haven’t changed all that much either.”
And, with that, he was gone, leaving Alfie alone with his promises in the war zone he had made of the bathroom. He gazed round, horror dawning afresh as he took in the scope of the mess. How had it got so bad? Why hadn’t he stopped? Instead of charging forward, hoping it would miraculously get better, the harder he tried? Shit. He had to fix this. Come hell or high—higher—water. He plonked himself down on the toilet lid and rang every plumber in South Shields. Unfortunately, Fen had been right. The earliest someone could get out to them was next Friday, and that was only because Alfie had begged so pathetically. Except it might as well have been next month, or next year, for all the good it would do.
Alfie’s stomach had curled up like it wanted to eat itself. Because the truth was, when he’d fucked up this completely, there was really only one thing he could do.
He rang his dad. Who actually answered the house phone,
which meant Alfie’s mother was dead or shopping.
“Aye?” was Alfred Senior’s wary greeting.
“Hi.” Alfie’s throat had closed. “Erm, it’s Alfie. Alfie Bell.”
“Your mam’s not in.” Though with his dad’s rough lilt—so familiar, even after two years of silence—it sounded more like norrin.
“Actually I wanted to ask you something.”
“Oh aye?”
“Yeah, I’m in town at the moment. I’m at—” shit “—a friend’s. I’ve kind of . . . There’s been an accident with a wall.”
And so, half an hour later, Alfie’s dad; his brother, Billy; Billy’s mate Joe, who was a plumber; and Joe’s apprentice, Harry, were somehow crammed into Fen’s tiny bathroom like that joke about how many elephants you could get in the fridge. They were assessing the extent of the damage and talking about what to do, which seemed to involve either compression or soldering, and every now and then Alfie’s dad would draw air slowly through his teeth as if what had happened to Fen’s bathroom was too awful for actual human speech. Alfie had asked if there was anything he could do. And his dad had said, “I think you’ve done enough, lad” and exiled him to the hallway. As if he was still a kid.
Billy stuck his head out from behind the door, his cheeky grin very much an echo of Alfie’s, except way more annoying. “I could murder a cuppa, Alf.”
Yeah, I’m gay, not a woman, was what Alfie could have said, but didn’t quite dare. It would have involved saying the Word to his little brother, and anyway, he could hear Kitty in his head, calling him sexist for the assumption that making tea was a gendered activity. So he just shrugged. “Not my house, mate.”
Billy retreated with a forlorn sigh, and the conversation in the bathroom resumed. Alfie really didn’t want to hang around in the hall listening to a bunch of people, including his own family, discuss how shit at DIY he was, but he would only have been in the way in the shop. Of course, he probably shouldn’t have been snooping around up here either, but surely Fen wouldn’t object to him sitting in the kitchen. Though by sitting, he meant sulking.