Open House

by Jane Christmas

  IT IS NOW SEVEN DAYS before we move in. I feel on the verge of a breakdown: my bones and organs are functioning, but my emotions are slopping like lava inside Vesuvius. If I can just keep breathing and adopt a Zen-like attitude, we can hold off calling the paramedics again.

  The detailed, orderly spreadsheet I created looks like it has been handled by a preschooler.

  Worse, the itemized costs and expenditures show we will be over budget. I cannot ignore it anymore. I do the sums and subtractions again and again. No change. It is not a massive amount, but still. How were my calculations so off? The windows. I had not factored in new windows; had only agreed to them when Francis suggested replacing all of them, rather than just the new ones we were installing.

  I look at my spreadsheet to see where there might be savings, but at this late stage there is nothing that can give. Trades have been scheduled; certain non-negotiables, such as moving the gas meter, boiler, and the electrical panel, were booked months in advance. I had so wanted to have at least a few thousand left over for some new furnishings. And bookshelves. I must have bookshelves. I go online to check out Ikea.

  The real worry is The Husband. How do I tell him that we will be over budget? All this was riding on my shoulders: I was the one with the grand vision; the one who said we could get it all done, loft extension and landscaping included, within our £70,000 budget. But now I must concede defeat. We cannot afford to do the loft or the landscaping. Failure weighs on me.

  Things have cost a lot more than I thought—or rather, more than what I remembered them costing from previous renovations. We have not made excessive purchases aside from the bathroom vanity and the Corian kitchen worktops. I can blame the new windows, though I am glad we had them done. But there, too, I acted rashly. I did not ask Francis what they would look like; did not bother getting a second quote. I was too proud, did not want to appear like a novice; was keen to show I was decisive and savvy so others would not take advantage of me. But they have anyway.

  And then there is Cyryl, the painter, to consider. When Francis gives me his quote, I almost have a seizure: £2,500 to paint three rooms and the upper and lower hallways.

  “How is that possible?”

  He shrugs, smiles sheepishly. He assures me that Cyryl’s work is excellent, and that he works fast.

  I say “Fine” only because I have run out of energy to say no, and we are desperate for things to get done. Who knows when the painting will start? The living room and hallways have yet to be plastered. How will they get plastered, and dried, and painted in the space of a week?

  THERE IS AN EDGE TO MY VOICE, as biting and tight as the scream of a circular saw. It rises only in conversation with The Husband. He goes off to run, or to find a quiet café where he can have a cappuccino or two and read the paper. I am at the house, on my knees, finessing paint strokes on the skirting boards and trying not to get oil-based paint on the newly sanded floors or the newly painted walls. I am trying desperately to make it look as if I do not mind my husband’s absences or his lack of interest in fashioning our home. But I do. A renovation demands its participants be present, enthusiastic, and willing to learn.

  I pretend that someone asks me, “Would you do this again—renovate another home?” And my answer is “I would love to, but not with this husband.” I could not do this to him or with him again. If there is anything I have learned, it is that he is truly uncomfortable with just about every aspect of it. If someone tells me, “Oh, I could never do that,” I think: Sure you can! Let me show you! Because I see renovating as a thrilling act of courage, not something to fear. Courage, they say, is fear that has said its prayers. Renovating is not skydiving. But who knows? Maybe the idea of jumping out of a plane at ten thousand feet is more preferable to some people than stick-handling a house renovation. What has become glaringly obvious is that this is more than a renovation: this is a marriage, and I suppose smarter people know enough when to step away from the challenge, even when that challenge beckons like a siren’s call, when you would just as soon jab a needle into your vein as say “Yes!” to that challenge.

  I was raised on renovation; The Husband was not. He has been generous enough to give me the space and opportunity to have my fun, but it was always going to be a one-off project, not a lifestyle. Unfortunately.

  WHEN THE UTILITY COMPANY ARRIVES to move the electrical panel, we are sitting outside. I say to The Husband, “I am going inside to see what I can learn.”

  The Husband stays planted in his chair with the newspaper. I can feel his eyes follow me, wondering why I bother “to learn” or thinking: What can she possibly learn?

  My attitude is to lean in; his is to stand back. Each can be seen as a strength and as a weakness. Plenty has been written about who we choose as partners, and how when differences rear up it should not be taken as a sign of failure or that we chose incorrectly; rather, it should be seen as a signal that this person, this creature who is so different from us, is teaching us to grow. The Husband and I are different. That is why we married.

  I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN ABOUT CHERYLL. In the evenings, once we are back in Little Britain, showered, fed, and exhausted, I spend a good hour online trying to find my childhood friend. The fact that she continues to bob into my head is, for me, a sign. I have long regarded my inner sense of urgency as a cosmic nudge that needs to be attended to tout de suite. It is time to find Cheryll. Besides, the stress of the house work is so all-consuming, so close to pushing me over the edge, that I need something to focus on other than hammers and nail guns.

  Finding Cheryll, however, is not as easy as I thought, despite my having applied journalistic skills to the task. I have tried various cities where she might live. I have tried the names of her parents and siblings. But the search leads nowhere. I have even scoured the obituaries, and so far it has proven a dead end, no pun intended. There is always Facebook, but social media and I are not acquainted. I often think that it is only me and Wilma Flintstone who have not signed up on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever.

  Weeks of fruitless online searching begins to add to my anxiety. Finding Cheryll clings to my brain like a wet shirt. Finally, I swallow my pride and surrender my virginity to Facebook. Within seconds, I find her. Hooray! She lives! There is a picture of her sitting with friends in a restaurant. She looks happy, carefree, like I suspect she has been all her life.

  I figure out how to post a message (yes, I am that ignorant of this kind of thing) and ask her to get in touch. It occurs to me that she could have got in touch with me, but all my moving and marriages would not have made that easy. After three marriages and four name changes, even I have forgotten who I am. Maybe my name means nothing to her now; I am just a blip in her past. Maybe she will think it creepy that I want to get in touch after such a long stretch. Maybe not. Who truly understands you but the friends you had as a child?

  Move, settle, make friends, lose friends, repeat. That pattern is the only continuity I have known.

  THREE DAYS BEFORE WE ARE to move in there is still no bathroom.

  22

  The Move

  “You need to roll with the punches.” My mother’s words roll back at me.

  It feels as if I have rolled enough, and gone extra rounds to boot, like some glutton for punishment who allows everyone to take a swipe at her.

  It is the day before our move, and work on the bathroom has picked up with the arrival of Paul, the plumber. The kitchen still is not done. In fact, when I walk in, I find Francis and Mick dismantling the kitchen and starting again.

  “What the hell?”

  “Now, don’t worry,” says Francis. He is clearly worried. “We want—I want—to get it perfect. Don’t worry. It will be done.”

  But Francis’s “It will be done” mantra has lost its calming power. It sounds more like a desperate prayer.

  I climb the stairs and retreat into the corner of the master bedroom, where I cry as quietly as I can without anyone hearing me. I am so fed up, I feel utte
rly pummelled and defeated. Nothing has turned out the way I had hoped. When I hear a sound at the foot of the stairs, I turn to the doorway of the bedroom to close the door, but this brings on another squirt of tears: the door still has not been put on. In fact, none of the doors, including those for the bathrooms, has been put on. How many times do I have to ask? I now hear someone coming up the stairs. Sounds like The Husband. I quickly daub my eyes on a corner of my dusty T-shirt and try to pull myself together. I cannot let him see me like this.

  They say communication is key in a renovation, especially between builder and homeowner. But everyone’s definition of communication is different. You, the homeowner, can be present and receptive and cheerful and helpful all you want, but if the builder is not explaining the detail stuff or not doing what he says he will do, if he is just forging ahead under his own steam, lost in his own world of worry, then communication is moot.

  The Husband tiptoes in. “You okay?”

  My chin quivers; tears tumble in fat drops down my cheeks. “I am so sorry this has not worked out the way I had hoped and you had hoped. This is not how I envisioned it.”

  He puts his arms around me and draws me to his chest.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll get through it. The bathroom looks nice.”

  “Yes,” I say, blinking away tears. “But there is no door.”

  I draw the sleeve of my shirt under my nose. The Husband winces and hands me his handkerchief. I daub my eyes with it; hand it back to him.

  When he goes downstairs, I pick up the broom and dustpan. And then I pause in the room, and in a ragged whisper I plead with the house, “Please accept us as your new owners. Shelter us, keep us warm, and we will look after you so that you can live another 125 years.”

  I have to make friends with this place, whether I love it or not. I have never moved into a home about which I was so ambivalent.

  THE HUSBAND AND I WORK ALL DAY and long into the night, sweeping and washing down surfaces, only for them to accumulate another layer of dust. The house seems resistant to cleanliness. So much of its life has been spent in a state of despair that it needs to be coaxed out of it.

  Meanwhile, the feverish work of Francis and Mick does not let up. The sun sets, night draws in, and still the persistent sound of nail guns and power drills come across like a frantic attempt to save a life.

  Midnight rolls around and it still is not done. None of us are on speaking terms. Francis and Mick plead exhaustion and leave. The Husband and I, covered in dust and grime from head to toe, stand in a house that looks as if sacks of flour have been detonated.

  Tears and anger are out of the question at this stage. It will only open the floodgates to recrimination. I pluck a tired mantra from the ether and repeat it: “It will get done.” What saves me from totally imploding is a sight we came across the previous day.

  We had taken a walk around the leafy streets of our neighbourhood, to get away from the dust and noise. As we crested a rise near Greenbank Cemetery, we saw the perimeter road lined with horse boxes and vans. At first, we thought it might be an event of some sort, but the closer we got the more apparent the situation. This collection of panelled trucks, caravans, campers, and horse boxes were in fact people’s homes; a veritable colony of them, at least forty vehicles.

  These are the van dwellers, the people priced not only out of the housing market but out of the rental market, too. One of the vehicles labelled Horses has had the r crossed out and replaced with a u: it is that easy—a simple transposition of a letter—to slip from one social reality to another; it is that easy go from Horse to House. Outside one of the caravans, a dreadlocked mother in orange-striped harem pants and a stained T-shirt bearing the words “The Good Life” held her infant in one arm and checked her cell phone with the other. I cannot imagine raising a child in such conditions: no running water, no bathing or toileting facilities. It is August, but would they still be here in December? Yes, they would. What would they do for heat?

  It was awful for them, and awful for the neighbourhood. Easton is liberal territory, but even liberals have limits. I am not complaining in a NIMBY way, but homelessness is something that cities are not dealing with quickly enough, not just politically but civically and corporately. Why the lack of action? Why is there no office to take control of the situation and to look at ways of handling this and ferreting out options for accommodation? A city is a money-making engine, but it also has a duty of care and hospitality to its residents. Of all the empty houses, warehouses, and office buildings that exist in this city, why is it so difficult for someone to figure out an inexpensive remedy to house people and get them off the streets? Previous eras had no difficulty in forcibly requisitioning buildings and supplies for wartime and emergencies. What does it take to declare this an emergency? People will complain that they do not want empty office blocks being turned into favelas, but what is the alternative? Is it not better to adapt empty office space for housing?

  We had walked back home, to our dusty, partially finished two-storey home. In the scheme of things, in the current climate, our situation is more a brag than a complaint.

  PREDICTABLY, THE HOUSE MOVE of my dreams, of having the work finished two weeks before the movers arrive and of gradually and leisurely moving our stuff in, does not happen. What we get, instead, has all the calmness of a riot.

  The casualty of the day was our gorgeous grey, curved-backed sofa, bought when we lived in Walthamstow. It would not fit through our Bristol door. Every possible angle was tried, but in the end, it was reloaded onto the van and taken into storage, where it will await flogging on eBay.

  Our two-hundred-year-old pine dining table, salvaged by my parents from the basement of the Henry Farm house, fared better, but only just. The movers squeezed it through the doorway with no more than a quarter of an inch of allowance.

  “I can live with the sofa not fitting through,” The Husband says later, “but if your pine table hadn’t made it . . .”

  We shudder and shake our heads. Of all the furniture I own this is the one piece I want to pass on to one of my children. That table is more than a place where we eat our meals. So many of my childhood memories of home, good and bad, are etched into it. Literally, in one respect: One night during supper—this was around 1965—I was deep in discussion with my parents when our eyes pivoted toward my brother (a year younger than me), for no apparent reason except that he was unusually silent. There he was, idly carving his initials into the table with his dinner knife. It was a brazen act of vandalism that ended in a heap of punishment. The initials remained.

  Memories are shoved into the far corner of my brain for now. It is the present that commands my complete attention; more precisely, how to sort through all our chattels. When I was packing up my Canadian home to move to England, a friend asked why I was not selling everything and buying new stuff in England. I thought the idea was outrageous; how could I part with things that have travelled with me for so many years? In hindsight, it was a more sensible suggestion than I gave it credit. I was certain I could fit my old life into my new life, but that rarely works well.

  Our furniture is roughly sorted according to room. Towers of boxes are everywhere: I know exactly what I will be doing for the next month. In the room earmarked as my office there is a flash-mob of boxes broken only by a narrow path leading to the French doors opening into the side return leading to the backyard.

  A single memory, like a stray thread, inches forward as if apologizing for the intrusion in my thoughts but certain that it might be helpful to me right about now: It is the memory of me standing in my parents’ home the day after their own house move—when I offered to sort out their things while they went off to look at bathroom fittings, and in which I managed to pull off a little miracle of organization in just two hours. Could I achieve the same miracle here? Not likely. For one thing, there is simply no room—not an empty space to decant things to or rearrange. It is like a Rubik’s cube: to shift one box or one chair you have to mov
e six other pieces. We still have too much stuff, and this after I had done a major cull at our previous home . . . and the home prior to that. How much stuff have I accumulated in a lifetime? So no, that memory is not helpful. I banish it to the back of my brain.

  Despite the state of things, it does not break me. What grounds me is the image of the caravans arranged like covered wagons around Greenbank Cemetery. And always, in my peripheral vision, is the blackened shell of Grenfell Tower.

  The Husband and I are still struggling with the reality that neither of us loves our home; we lack the necessary sense of pride about it. I wonder whether we will ever get over that hurdle. Still, the fact remains: whatever the state of our minds or the chaos before us, we are still far, far better off. We have a home.

  THE DAY AFTER THE MOVE, Francis shows up. I fling open the door and glower.

  “Look, I can come back tomorrow, or another day to finish up,” he says, wisely interpreting my expression.

  “Not today, not tomorrow. We will call you next week.” I try not to snarl before closing the door. I do not want to see that man again. But I have to.

  The following week he returns.

  We have no water in the kitchen; no shelves in the pantry—food lies in boxes on the floor. No gas for the hob, so everything is cooked in the electric oven. We cannot figure out the microwave.

  “The interior doors? Can you please put them on? Not even the bathrooms have doors.” How many times do I have to ask him?

  “Sure, I can do that.”

  He hooks up the water in the kitchen, and then goes outside to start repairing the pebble dash around the windows. It is as if his avoidance in putting up the doors is meant to make a point. I resort to following him around like a terrier, barking, “Could you please do the doors?”

  Finally, he spends an afternoon putting up the doors. He says he will be back in two days.