later a scalpel dipped in a mix of TCP and varnish managed to cut and set it in the formation we wanted.
“Satisfied?” asked Kevin.
“Yes,” I answered. “But there’s still the blue and yellow patches to daub on.”
“Not my job,” Kevin said. “I’m out of here.”
We didn’t have much problem finding the right type of large taps for the bathtub—the problem was with making them look old. We had this problem often, as you might imagine: making things look old. The hallway had to be scuffed down with sandpaper and smeared with small amounts of grease-diluted tar. The banisters had to be blasted with vaporized ice to make them oxidize. And then the windows were too crisply transparent: the courtyard and the roofs didn’t look right through them. I couldn’t work out why at first, nor express what was wrong with them: I just kept telling my staff that the courtyard didn’t look right.
“So what’s not right about it?” asked the landscape gardener.
“Nothing’s not right about it: it’s the way it looks through these windows. Too crisp. That’s not how I remembered it.”
“Remembered it?” he asked.
“Whatever,” I said, waving him away. Annie came over and looked. She solved it instantly:
“It’s the type of glass,” she said. “Not old enough.”
Bingo. New glass is totally consistent, doesn’t gloop and run and crimp the things you see through it like old glass does. We had all the panes removed and older ones brought in.
My living room and kitchen came together nicely. We’d knocked interior walls down to get the right open-plan shape. Now we got cracking on the furnishings. I brought the right type of plants in—eventually. That Portuguese woman! Formidable: her voice, her stark physique. She stomped out of her van lugging these beautiful, lush, healthy ferns and spider plants that seemed to cascade out of white ceramic pots.
“These are no good,” I said to Annie. “They’re too lush, too green.”
“Waz wrong wiz zem?” the Portuguese plant woman thundered. “My planz healzy! My planz good!”
“I know they’re good,” I said. “That’s just the problem. I need old and shabby ones in tinny baskets.”
“Baskez no good for zem!” she said, slapping the back of her hand against my arm. “They needz zpaze, zupport. I know waz good for zem!”
Behind her, through the window and across the courtyard, men on the facing roofs were busily replacing the tiles we’d had laid down. They’d been too blood-red, not orangey enough. The Portuguese plant woman took a frond between her fingers, held it up to me and slapped my arm with the back of her free hand again.
“Look! Zmell! My planz iz very healzy!”
I escaped and went to Naz’s while Annie got rid of her. Later that day we picked up some half-dead plants in some old junk shop.
The fridge arrived the next day. We netted it not from the Sotheby’s Americana auction that I mentioned earlier but from an auction site Naz had found on the internet. It looked just right—but its door slightly caught each time you opened it, just like Greg had said all fridge doors do outside of films.
“That sucks!” I said. “That really fucking sucks! You’d have thought that with all of their alleged craftsmanship” (they’d played this aspect of the fridge up on the website) “they could have made one whose door didn’t catch like this. I mean, what’s the whole point of doing all this if it’s still going to catch?”
“What do you mean?” asked Annie.
“It…Just, well…” I said. “It bloody shouldn’t!”
I sat down. I was really upset.
“Don’t worry,” said Annie. “It just needs new rubber.”
Someone was dispatched to get new rubber. While we waited for that to arrive, we tested for the smell of liver frying. An extractor fan had been installed above the liver lady’s stove, its out-funnel on the building’s exterior turned towards the windows of my kitchen and my bathroom. Liver had been bought that day—pig’s liver; but we found that frying just one panful didn’t produce enough smell. Someone else was dispatched to buy more frying pans and a lot more liver. They cooked it in four frying pans at once. Annie and I waited in my flat.
“How’s that?” she asked.
“It’s great,” I told her. “The spit and sizzle is exactly the right volume. There’s just one thing not quite…”
“What?” she asked.
“The smell is kind of strange.”
“Strange?” she repeated—then, into her cackling radio: “Wait a minute. Strange?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sort of strange. A bit like cordite.”
“Cordite? I’ve never smelt cordite. You know what I think