something?’
‘Couldn’t face breakfast.’ Carol looks back at the house. ‘Did you hear me tell Tracy where to find the fish fingers?’
‘Look,’ says Jim, ‘she might not be the sharpest tool in the box but she can find a packet of fish fingers in a three-drawer freezer.’
‘What about the heating? Can she work our gas fire?’
‘She’ll be fine. Stop worrying.’
‘I’m not.’ Carol looks in her bag and finds her mobile phone. She’s not sure where the on switch is. She needs her reading glasses. ‘I’ll put this on, shall I?’
Jim unlocks and opens the passenger door for her. ‘You can, but she won’t ring you, because you never have it on.’
‘But nobody ever calls me on it.’ She gets into the car.
Jim is laughing. What’s he laughing at?
Fifty-Three
Richard
1993
Richard sits on a camping chair, sipping tea in front of the fire. There is white paint on his old cord trousers, on his hands, on his socks and, he suspects, in his hair. There’s white paint on the carpet too, where it escaped the ground sheet, but he doesn’t care. The carpet is destined for the tip anyway, and actually, thinking about it, he will have to pull it up tomorrow if he wants to freshen up the skirting boards. Why didn’t he think of that before? He’s done it in the wrong order. Ah well, it’s a learning curve.
The hot tea washes down his dry throat. It tastes absolutely delicious – almost shockingly so. Like nectar, as the saying goes, and he realises it’s because he’s been painting for over three hours without a break. He’s worked up a labourer’s thirst. He wonders if this is the first time he’s ever tasted tea as good as this, ever worked so hard for it. It seems worth it. And he’s enjoyed stretching his arms, clambering up and down the stepladder, the physical effort, the concentration that stills the mind, the earning of the break. He’s enjoying sitting here now, feeling the ache after the stretch, thrilled to bits with how transformed the room is and by the hot, sweet taste of this magnificent tea. But most of all he is enjoying the buzz of finally doing something, something that isn’t perhaps the most dramatic thing in the world but that to him feels seismic, life-changing. As if to reward him with its heartfelt agreement, the sun drifts out from behind a cloud, bathing the room in warm yellow light.
The house clearance people came yesterday. They took everything. Everything. Richard has only this camping chair and a blow-up camp bed upstairs. It is all he needs until he has finished painting the house, and, frankly, it is utterly liberating to be without any real material possessions. The once brown and beige floral living room, now so bright in the morning sun, adds to his feeling of lightness. He chose soft cream for the walls, white for the ceiling. He wasn’t up to stripping the wallpaper – he didn’t know where to begin – so he has contented himself with painting over it. It might not be what you’re meant to do, but it looks brilliant, just brilliant, and it’s his house now. Maybe he’ll lay a wooden floor, throw on a rug, like that picture he saw in the magazine Viv showed him. Viv will have some ideas. She said she’d come over at the weekend and help him decide. She has some catalogues, she said, one from the new Swedish place, which she says has the nicest, freshest-looking things she’s ever seen, and great prices. When the time comes, she said she might even come with him and help him choose. The idea warms him.
He drains his tea. One more coat on the back wall and he can move on to the kitchen. By next Thursday he hopes to have the whole of the downstairs gleaming like a grin.
‘Come on, Richy-Rich,’ he says to himself, standing and rolling out his shoulders. ‘Time to crack on, you lazy get.’
* * *
The following Thursday, on his way into the castle, Richard strokes his chin. It is still strange to feel bare skin where his beard used to be, where it was until yesterday afternoon, when Raymond, the same barber his father used to take him to as a kid, shaved the whole lot off with a cut-throat razor and clouds of white foam. After which, delighted with his new youthful appearance, Richard called in at the pub. He only meant to have one for the