Bricking It

by Nick Spalding

  Pat The Cow supplies me with a reproachful look. At least I think it’s reproachful. It could just as easily be wind.

  ‘Just give her a pat. I’m sure she’ll move away then,’ I suggest to my sister, who, with nose wrinkled and trowel still held up defensively in her other hand, reaches out and issues Pat The Cow with a timid couple of light taps to the forehead.

  This seems to be enough as far as Pat The Cow is concerned, as she backs away from Hayley, nearly knocking over the pasting table snack bar.

  ‘One question,’ Hayley says.

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘How the hell did it get in here?’

  Now this, in any other circumstances, would be a very sensible and unanswerable question. But we are dealing with a very special cow here. One able to vanish without a trace, like Batman.

  ‘I’ll just lead her back outside . . .’ I venture, not willing to answer Hayley’s question for fear of sounding like a lunatic.

  Luckily, Pat The Cow is not feeling in an intransigent mood today, so when I gently put my arm over her neck and start to pull her round to face the doorway, she doesn’t put up a struggle.

  ‘What the living fuck?’

  This comes from Fred Babidge, who has just appeared at the patio doors, no doubt wondering what all the fuss is about.

  ‘It’s alright, Fred,’ I assure him, ‘I’m getting her out.’

  ‘You’d better! That concrete’s only just set. Those hooves could do some real damage!’

  I think Fred’s being a bit melodramatic, but I figure it’s best not to argue with him. To that end, I start to pull Pat The Cow’s head towards the door. She moves, but when she reaches the threshold, she stops dead, giving Fred a look.

  ‘Er . . . I think you’d better pat her,’ I tell Fred.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have to pat her. It’s what she wants.’

  He looks at me aghast. ‘It’s what she wants? It’s a flamin’ cow, chief!’

  ‘Just do as he says,’ Hayley tells Fred. ‘Otherwise we might be here forever.’

  Fred huffs, and shakes his head in disgust – but also reaches out a hand and smacks Pat The Cow once on the top of the head. It’s not so much a pat, as it is a slap for being naughty, but Pat The Cow doesn’t mind. She’s made of strong stuff.

  Fred has to dodge out of the way as Pat The Cow makes her exit, easily avoiding doing any damage to the patio doors. Pat The Cow may not be svelte, but she’s not big enough to trouble such a wide exit either. The several hundred quid we spent on the big glass doors to provide great views of the garden and easy access to the patio are starting to pay for themselves already.

  Pat The Cow does not hesitate once she’s outside. She trots off back towards the jungle garden without a look back at any of us.

  ‘Maybe we should follow it,’ Hayley says. ‘Find out where it’s getting in.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ I reply, knowing full well the extent of Pat The Cow’s supernatural abilities.

  ‘In all my years of doing this job,’ Fred says, ‘I’ve never known anything like that.’

  ‘Pat The Cow is quite special,’ I reply, regretting it as soon as it’s out of my mouth.

  Fred looks in disbelief at Hayley. ‘He’s named it?’

  Hayley grimaces. ‘It appears so.’

  Fred Babidge has several laughs.

  There’s the ‘someone’s just told a dirty joke of which I wholeheartedly approve’ laugh. There’s the ‘don’t try and pull a fast one on me, son, I’ve heard it all before’ laugh. And everyone’s favourite, the ‘Danny Daley has just said or done something ridiculous, and boy do I find it hilarious’ laugh. I’d like to say the first two are far more common than the third, but I’d be lying through my teeth.

  Fred walks off back to where the rest of the crew are busily pointing the side of the house, leaving me to ponder where Pat The Cow might have gone . . . and my sister pondering where my sanity might have gone.

  Which brings us to our third and final meeting with Pat The Cow thus far, and blimey if it isn’t the weirdest one yet.

  Picture, if you will, a cold, windy, summer’s morning. A typical July day of 18 degrees and cloud.

  The weather, having recently been very mild, has changed for the worse, bringing in a gusty wind that tempts you to put the central heating on in the middle of what could be laughably termed the English summer.

  Given the fact that most of the doors and windows haven’t been fixed yet, Daley Farmhouse is falling prey to the wind, and is rather like a wind tunnel when we all arrive early that morning to start work again.

  I am, unusually, the first to arrive. The reason for this is simple. My next-door neighbour is an arsehole. While most people are sleeping soundly at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning, she is just getting in from a night out. And boy does she like to let everybody know about it. There’s nothing like hearing Taylor Swift at high volume seeping hideously through your adjoining wall to really ruin the (very premature) start to your day. Having laid there trying to get back to sleep while Taylor tells us about how all of her ex-boyfriends are pricks, I eventually give up, when Taylor is replaced by Beyoncé, who, if anything, sounds even more grating than the elfin-faced pipsqueak at that time in the morning.

  Therefore, Fred and the boys are all amazed to see me standing next to my bike and munching on a stale cereal bar when they drive up at the crack of dawn.

  ‘You’re keen today, captain,’ Fred observes.

  I smile. ‘What can I say? I just can’t wait to get started on that plaster in the master bedroom.’ There’s no need to tell Fred the truth at this point. It would only disappoint him. Besides, I very much doubt he has any idea who Taylor Swift is, and it’s too early in the morning to try and explain.

  I swap a little morning banter with the crew as we make our way towards the house. As he opens the brand-new oak front door, Baz asks me for the hundredth time whether I’d like him to bring me in a big wooden box for later, when I need a mid-morning crap. I decline his kind offer and recommend that he stick his head up his arse.

  Each of the six-man crew heads off to whatever job he’s currently working on.

  ‘Take these upstairs,’ Baz says to me, handing over a couple of chisels and hammers from a large pile in the lounge. ‘You get started and I’ll be up once I check the wind’s done no damage out back.’

  ‘Okay,’ I agree and take the tools from him, making my way up the stairs and along the landing with a large and expansive yawn. I start to sing Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Space’ under my breath. The bloody tune has earwormed its way into my brain thanks to the early morning wake-up call. ‘Nice to meet you, where you been,’ I sing badly under my breath, ‘I can show you incredible things . . .’

  I walk into the master bedroom, and boy do I get to see an incredible thing, alright.

  The tools fall out of my hands in amazement.

  My gob is well and truly smacked.

  For a second I stand stock-still, simply unable to believe what my eyes are quite clearly telling me. Then my brain starts to function again and I stir back into life.

  ‘Er.’

  This is quite ridiculous.

  ‘Um . . . Morning, Pat The Cow?’ I say, uncertainly.

  ‘Moo.’

  Yes, that’s right. A half-ton cow is standing in the upstairs master bedroom of a Victorian farmhouse.

  Let’s think about the logistics of that for a moment, shall we?

  No, then again, let’s not. We could be here all day.

  It’s a testament to how involved I am in this house renovation that my next thought is how impressed I am that the new floorboards are quite easily taking Pat The Cow’s weight. Fred will be pleased.

  Alternatively . . . No, he bloody well won’t, because there is a cow in the upstairs master bedroom.

  ‘I don’t think you should be up here, Pat The Cow,’ I tell her, voicing what must be the most obvious statement ever uttered by a human being.

  ‘
Moo,’ Pat The Cow retorts, defending her position magnificently. She then wanders forward, and sticks her head through the tarpaulin covering the large glassless sash window for a look outside.

  Well, I suppose that’s a start. Her head has left the bedroom now. We just have to get the rest of her out.

  ‘Was that Taylor Swift you was singing then, Dan?’ I hear Baz say as he reaches the landing. ‘Only I downloaded the album the other day and it ain’t actually that ba—Fuck a donkey!’

  ‘Pat The Cow, be polite and say good morning to Baz,’ I say to my bovine friend. Pat The Cow chooses to ignore me. There must be something very interesting going on outside.

  ‘Why is there a fucking cow’s head poking out of that window?’ I hear Fred exclaim loudly from the front garden. Ah, it appears the interesting thing is our master builder falling into apoplexy at the vision of Pat The Cow’s head appearing majestically through a blue tarpaulin, several metres above where it can be found in more customary circumstances.

  ‘This ain’t good,’ Baz says.

  ‘This ain’t possible,’ I tell him in the same bemused voice.

  Baz blinks hard a couple of times, as if willing the sight of the upstairs Friesian away. He looks vaguely disappointed when Pat The Cow does not disappear in a cloud of brown smoke.

  I hear Fred stamping up the stairs, followed by some of the others. He comes in to the room, and does something we rarely see on site, he takes his flat cap off. Fred Babidge normally only ever takes his hat off when something very serious is going down. Whenever it is removed, Hayley and I start to panic, because it invariably means something very expensive.

  I start to wonder how expensive it will be to have Pat The Vertical Cow removed from the first floor of this house, but am interrupted by Fred the Incredulous Builder. ‘Did you do this, captain?’ he asks me. ‘Some sort of prank, is it?’

  ‘Are you mental? What do you think I did? Got myself a nice bale of hay and came down here in the depths of night?’

  ‘You was here before the rest of us this morning, Dan,’ Trey the Barbadian Sweatbeast points out, rather unhelpfully.

  ‘I had nothing to do with this!’ I snap at all of them. ‘Do you think I want any damage done to those bloody floorboards when I’m the one who paid for them?’

  ‘S’a good point boss,’ Baz remarks.

  Fred squints at me disapprovingly for a moment, before his face relaxes. ‘Alright, fair enough. But it doesn’t really matter how it got up here, how the hell are we going to get it out?’

  I have to disagree with Fred somewhat. How Pat The Cow got up here is a very important question, as far as I’m concerned. One for the ages, in fact.

  ‘Will it go through the window?’ Baz enquires. ‘Some of us can stand underneath it and catch it in a blanket. We had to do that with my mum’s dog once when it got stuck up a tree.’

  Fred puts his head in his hands. ‘Baz, that cow weighs half a ton. It’d kill all of us.’

  Baz looks crestfallen. I feel a bit sorry for him.

  ‘We’ll have to kill it,’ Trey intones ominously. ‘Chop the damn thing up and carry it down in bits.’

  Pat The Cow has heard this threat to her life and responds by removing her head from under the tarpaulin and giving Trey a look that suggests any attempt to chop her into little bits will be met with many hooves and head butts.

  ‘It’ll cause a right bloody mess,’ Spider argues. ‘Blood’s hell to shift, and the place will stink. I like Baz’s idea better.’

  ‘Moo,’ Pat The Cow agrees, still not taking her eyes off Trey.

  ‘We’re not chopping it up or pushing it out of the window,’ Fred says. ‘If it got up here, we must be able to get it out the same way.’ This sounds like the most sensible suggestion yet.

  He walks over to Pat The Cow and grabs it by the ear. ‘Come on you, let’s get you out of this room,’ he tells the bovine interloper, and attempts to pull her in the direction of the door. Pat The Cow is having none of it.

  ‘Move, you big bitch!’ Fred barks, and slaps Pat The Cow on the head.

  Pat The Cow gives Fred the same look she just gave Trey, looks away from him in disdain, lifts her tail and deposits an enormous pile of dung behind her, in what I can only assume is a dirty protest at her treatment.

  ‘Oh shit!’ Baz cries, extremely accurately.

  The stench of rich cow dung instantly fills the bedroom, forcing us all out onto the landing.

  ‘What the ’ell do we do now?’ Weeble asks in a high-pitched voice. Thus far he has remained silent, but it appears the pressure is getting too much for him.

  Fred rolls his tongue around his teeth thoughtfully for a few moments before speaking. ‘Baz, go get the nail gun. Trey, go get some saws.’

  ‘No!’ I shout. ‘You can’t kill Pat The Cow!’

  ‘Have you got any better ideas?’ Fred snaps.

  ‘Just . . . Just give me a minute,’ I tell him, re-entering the room and trying not to breathe too deeply as I do.

  ‘He gave it a fucking name?’ Trey whispers under his breath to Weeble, who shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head in disbelief.

  Yes, I did give ‘it’ a name, thank you so very much, Trey. Pat The Cow is a special cow, and deserves better treatment than to be sawn up by a bunch of brickies.

  ‘Think of something quick, Dan,’ Fred tells me, ‘or we’re having hamburgers for lunch.’

  I swallow hard and make my way back to where Pat The Cow is still standing defiantly in the centre of the room.

  ‘Um . . . Now look here, Pat The Cow. You need to leave, otherwise my friends here are going to do something very nasty to you, do you understand me?’

  ‘Moo.’

  ‘We need to get you back downstairs.’

  ‘Moo.’

  ‘Um . . . Please?’

  ‘Moo, moo.’

  Pat The Cow starts to walk towards the door. Once again I have successfully appealed to her better nature – and to her sense of self-preservation.

  ‘Blimey,’ Baz says, ‘he’s got her moving.’

  ‘He’s a bloody cow whisperer,’ Spider adds.

  The crew make way for me as I lead Pat The Cow out onto the landing. We all wince slightly as the floorboards take her weight. These ones haven’t been re-laid yet and there’s every chance we’re all going to get relocated to the ground floor in a few split seconds unless we can get the animal off them quickly.

  Now just comes the problem of the stairs.

  Quite how the cow made her way up to the first floor in the first place is a mystery, but how we eventually manage to get her down to the ground floor again is most certainly not.

  It involves a lot of pushing, pulling, swearing and loud exclamations of pain every time one of us gets squashed up against the wall. It also requires no less than four separate lengths of sturdy rope . . .

  . . . And four hours.

  Four sweaty, noisy, distressing hours of my life that I never want to repeat again as long as I live. I will happily shit repeatedly into a wooden box every day for the rest of my life, if it means I never have to coax a full-grown cow down a flight of broad Victorian stairs again.

  ‘Will she go through the front door?’ Fred gasps. He is red-faced, and covered in a film of perspiration. The flat cap was discarded hours ago, along with his jacket. I’ve never seen him work so hard.

  ‘Let’s bloody ’ope so!’ Spider says. ‘Getting Pat The Cow through the kitchen without breaking any of the new cabinets will be a nightmare.’

  This is a good point. The kitchen has finally started to go in, and the last thing we need is Pat The Cow destroying any of the new units.

  Fred reaches out a hand and attempts to open the front door. The handle doesn’t budge. ‘Who locked the bloody door?’ he cries in exasperation.

  ‘I did. It’s good security, innit!’ Baz replies defensively.

  ‘Well, have you got the key then?’

  Baz pats his pockets. ‘Er . . . must have put it dow
n somewhere. Anyone else seen it?’ he asks the rest of us.

  We all shake our heads. ‘I thought you had it, Baz,’ Spider says.

  ‘Not any more. Danny?’

  ‘I haven’t got it,’ I say wearily.

  Great. We’ve got Pat The Cow downstairs, but now we can’t get her back outside.

  Salvation comes when we all hear a key turn in the lock from the other side. The front door swings open to reveal Hayley and a man who must be a local farmer, judging from his dungarees, gingham shirt and muddy welly boots.

  ‘I’m sure your cow isn’t here, Mr Blenkins,’ Hayley is saying to him, looking at his angry face and not at us, ‘but I’ll ask my building team. Maybe they might have seen it—’

  Hayley turns her head and takes in the grand tableau in front of her. A group of full-grown and exhausted men, standing red-faced around a cow who looks exactly how you’d imagine a cow to look after being manhandled for the past four hours.

  ‘Oh good fucking grief,’ Hayley moans.

  ‘Thas moi bluddy cow!’ Mr Blenkins exclaims, in the most clichéd accent I’ve ever heard in my life. ‘What ’ave you perverts been doin’ to her?’

  Perverts? What’s he mean, perverts?

  Oh, yeah. I see.

  I wave my hands. ‘No no! It’s nothing like that!’ I cry. ‘We just had Pat The Cow up in the bedroom, and we’re were trying to get her out before any more damage was done—’

  ‘What?!’ Blenkins shouts in disgust. He then gives me the farmer’s stink eye. ‘Why’re you callin’ ’er Pat The Cow? Her name’s Angelina!’

  ‘Danny! What the hell is going on? What have you done?’ Hayley yells at me, as if this entire thing is my doing.

  I point at Angelina The Cow. ‘Don’t blame me. This is all her fault!’

  Angelina – no, fuck it, I still prefer my name – Pat The Cow looks up at me with an expression that seems to suggest that at some point I’ll be hearing from her lawyer.

  ‘Moo,’ she says, in a tone that brooks no argument. Pat The Cow then barges past all of us, including her irate owner, and squeezes out of the front doorway, trotting rapidly off up the garden path in Friesian disgust, no doubt.

  ‘She’s a roight one, that one,’ Blenkins tells me as he closes the gate on his own pasture land, some five hundred yards down the road from the entrance to Daley Farmhouse. I’ve spent the last ten minutes explaining what exactly was going on, and he seems to have accepted my account with only a raised eyebrow here and there. Convinced that I’m not the head of a sex ring of cow perverts, he’s allowed me to help him walk Pat The Cow back to where her rightful place in the world is. ‘Always buggerin’ off somewhere, she is.’