Bricking It (15 page)

Gerard chooses not to take the bait and addresses the audience again through Pete’s lens. ‘That’s about all we’ve got time for on the programme today, everybody. I do hope you’ve enjoyed our look around Daley Farmhouse, and are looking forward to seeing the finished article in a few months.’

Gerard then starts to talk about all the interesting features the audience can find on the BBC’s interactive services. What he doesn’t realise is that while he has been talking, Pat The Cow has wandered over from where she was happily chewing on a clump of old grass in the far corner of the front garden. As Gerard is telling his audience about what time the show will be on next week, the cow has come up behind him, looking for her customary pat. Gerard now sees the cow, but as he’s in full flow, he ignores her, which is a mistake of epic proportions. Danny’s cow doesn’t like to be ignored, so as Gerard is saying a final awkward goodbye to the public, Pat butts him heavily in the side, sending the poor bugger teetering off balance. The last thing the million or so viewers see of their favourite TV presenter is him stumbling out of shot with a squawk of surprise.

‘That’s it. My career is over,’ Gerard moans from where we sit watching the TV crew pack up the equipment.

I pat him on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. I bet it won’t be that bad.
’

He gives me a look. ‘Butt plugs? Cock taps? Cow assault? The F-word?’

‘Fair point, but it was a live show. Things always go wrong on live TV, don’t they?’

‘Yes, and people invariably lose their jobs because of it.’

I can’t help but feel at least partially responsible for Gerard’s glum mood. This is, after all, my house of horrors, and my team of renovators. ‘Sorry, Gerard.’

He smiles at me. ‘It’s not your fault. How were you to know?’

We both lapse into silence. There doesn’t seem to be much more I can say to console him at this stage.

‘Hayley?’

‘Yes?’

‘There might be something you can do that might make me feel a little better.’ Gerard’s tone has changed. The glumness is gone. Now he sounds nervous.

‘What’s that?’ I reply, suspicion dawning.

‘I . . . I’d like to take you out to dinner. Would you come with me?’

Okay, so that’s
not
the question I thought he was going to ask me. I was expecting him to want another live TV broadcast out of us to make up for this one, not a date. I’m struck dumb for a moment, unable to respond.

He sees this. ‘I’m sorry! It was a stupid suggestion.’

‘No! Actually, it’s a very nice thought.’

‘It is?’

‘Yes.’

It really is, as well. I’m very flattered that a celebrity would want to take me out to dinner. If life had dealt me a better hand recently, I might have accepted.

I take Gerard’s calloused hand. ‘It’s a very nice offer, but I don’t think I’m ready for anything like that. It hasn’t been that long since my divorce, and—’

‘Oh god, I’m sorry!’

‘No. No. It’s not you. It’s me.’ Captain Cliché, eh? ‘It’s just that Simon, my ex-husband, he was very bad to me . . .’

Gerard puts his other hand over mine. ‘Don’t worry, Hayley. I completely understand.’

‘We’re ready to go, Gerard,’ Monica the producer calls over from the BBC truck. She looks even more worried about her immediate future than he does.

The presenter stands up. ‘Well, that’s that then,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘I’m sure we’ll be back again soon. Take care of yourself, Hayley.’

‘And you, Gerard. And thank you again for the offer.’

‘My pleasure,’ he replies with an uncertain grin, and walks over to his waiting colleagues.

As the BBC van drives away I feel a sudden and very much unwanted anger rise from the depths of my body. It’s been nearly two years since I threw that bastard out of my life, but here he is again, ruining my life without even having to be in it. I’ve just turned down a date with a famous – and handsome – TV presenter because of the emotional baggage Simon Claremont has left me carrying around like a ton of bricks.

When the hell am I ever going to get over this? When the hell am I going to be able to trust a man again?

I stand up and walk back towards Daley Farmhouse, trying to put such black thoughts at the back of my mind.

To help me do this, I think again of the golden butt plug and rusty handcuffs.

Someone put those bloody things up in that chimney. But who? And
when
?

I’m not a fan of mysteries, and I resolve quietly to myself that I will get to the bottom of this one before the renovation is complete.

DANNY

September

£112,291.45 spent

I
n
the end, our very special episode of
Great Locations
ended up being the third most downloaded programme on the BBC iPlayer for the month of August. Gerard O’Keefe was praised by his bosses for ‘handling a difficult situation’ – along with a metal butt plug – and the programme was once again renewed for another series. This all goes to show that if you surprise the audience with something they weren’t expecting, the chances are you’re onto a winner.

Not long after the broadcast I discover that I am resolutely
not
onto a winner when I get steamrollered into doing something concrete about the bloody garden.

I would like to just concrete the whole thing
over
, as I’m sick of looking at a vast combination of mud, badly cut grass and gnarled old trees, but this won’t do. If nothing else it’ll play havoc with Pat The Cow’s hooves. Therefore, I am tasked with finding an appropriate landscape gardener to have a proper go at it.

We’ve obviously picked the ideal time to find a gardener – the arse end of the summer. I’m sure most of them are planning to disappear down a burrow soon to hibernate until March. Still, somebody started Find a Trade for a reason, so I spend an hour or so browsing the selection of gardeners in the local area who might actually be agreeable to coming out and doing some work as autumn hits us square in the face.

I find a likely looking company called Willingham Landscape Creations, who certainly sound like they know what they’re doing, just from the name. I give them a call and have a brief chat with the head of the company, a middle-class-sounding but very friendly woman called Sally.

‘It sounds like an interesting project,’ she tells me, after I’ve filled her in on all the gory details. ‘It’d have to be a simple design to start off with, I think. Once winter has passed we could look to putting more in, as and when it is needed.’

I grimace. The idea of working on this house next year is not one that fills me with pleasure. There’s still so much to do, and everything will slow down once bad weather hits.

Sally (who I assume is the Willingham of the company’s name) agrees to come over later today to have a look at the place. This pleases Hayley no end. Whether that’s because she didn’t think I could find a gardener in the local area, or whether it’s because she didn’t think I could find a gardener because I am an
idiot
, I will never know. Still, the appointment is booked. I have done a good job, and probably deserve a nice pat on the head.

It occurs to me though, as I look out at the mess that is our garden, that when Sally turns up I am going to have some explaining to do. I confess that we have not treated this garden with anything like the kind of love and attention the house has been getting. It’s been a complete afterthought, and boy is that screamingly obvious when you look at it. I have never met Sally Willingham, but by the sounds of her on the phone I can imagine her as tall, robust and likely to look down on me with a mild loathing when she sees the mess we’ve made of such a potentially lovely stretch of greenery.

‘Well, there’s not much we can do about it now,’ Hayley says to me, when I voice this concern. ‘Go and have a poke about, and see if you can neaten it up a little. At least cut the hedges back a bit at the sides. That’ll improve things.’

I open my mouth to protest, but frankly, I have nothing else to do today. The electricians are in the house now, doing the rest of the wiring – a job that has to be left to the professionals, lest you want to die at the end of 40,000 volts and burn your house down at the same time. Even Fred’s crew have knocked off for the day, leaving their boss and my sister loafing about, keeping an eye on the electricians and advising them when necessary.

I could go into work and catch up on all the jobs I should have had done ages ago, but I can’t frankly be arsed. I have to admit that my eighteen hours a week at the Emberland House Museum have shrunk to more like fourteen, given the amount of time I’m bunking off to come here and work on the house. But what can I say? I am far more invested in making this place look good, than I am in trying to maintain a badly neglected city museum on the brink of closure. If we sell this house at a premium, I’ll earn about ten years’ wages in one fell swoop.

So, given my inability to run wiring through a loft space, and given my supreme indifference to my part-time day job, I really have nothing better to do than a spot of light gardening, in order to tidy the place up a bit before the landscape gardener comes over. This is rather like washing your dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, but I try very hard to ignore this fact as I pull out a few battered and rusty gardening tools from the back of Fred’s Transit van.

‘Good luck using them, colonel,’ he tells me, as I walk past him down the left-hand side of the house. ‘The last time I did any proper outside work, Callaghan was prime minister.’

‘They’ll do. I only want to neaten up the hedges a bit.’

Actually, that’s about all I can do, anyway. The gnarled trees look like they could withstand a nuclear blast, and the expanse of grass is just too huge to have a serious go at without industrial lawnmowers. Besides, I wouldn’t want to deprive Pat The Cow of her favourite foodstuff, now would I?

Speaking of whom, I find my bovine pet standing at the rear of the garden, looking into the small patch of forest that stands at the garden’s edge. I haven’t investigated this area in the entire time we’ve been here, which is something of a surprise as when I was a boy I liked nothing more than having a good explore in a bit of woodland.

I pat Pat The Cow in customary fashion. She looks up at me with a content expression on her face, chewing the cud lazily, as she is wont to do. She then returns her gaze to the forest again.

‘What is it, girl? Have you spotted something?’

I sound like I’m talking to
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo
.

The image of Pat The Cow leading emergency services to the site of the abandoned well that little Timmy has fallen into suddenly springs into my head. I can picture the police and fire crew following her through the fields, mesmerised by her swinging udders.

This leads to a five-minute laughing fit that Pat The Cow wants no part of. She ambles away from me as I begin to get myself under control.

Pat The Cow may have lost interest in the patch of forest, but now my curiosity has been well and truly aroused. Figuring that I’m under no time limit, and whistling the
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo
theme tune, I wander over to the hedge that divides the forest from the garden and have a closer look.

There’s not a whole lot to it, to be honest. Bordered on three sides by our garden, and two fields belonging to Pat The Cow’s ex-owner, the woodland is a clump of beech and oak trees, interspersed with brambles, small bushes and leaf litter. Looking just over the hedge, I can see a large clump of some sort of tall plant, flourishing nicely in the late September sun. In fact, the closer I look the more of the broad, leafy plant I can see spread out in front of me. There’s something familiar about it, but I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. Some of the plant has invaded the boundary hedge of our garden and is growing through it, making the hedge even untidier than it needs to be.

Right then – there’s my first gardening job of the day. I’ll have to trim the hedge back to make it neater, and I suppose I’d better climb over into the woodland to yank a load of it out so it can’t grow back through the hedge again at a later date.

Feeling good that I have actually managed to identify a job to do, I get to work with the set of old garden shears I found underneath a bag of nails in Fred’s van.

The shears are blunter than an Australian sheep farmer. It takes three or four rapid chops to get through even a couple of hedgerow branches. The leafy green plant is easier to cut through, thankfully.

Two sweaty hours later, the whole back hedge is looking much, much neater. I check my watch and groan out loud. It’s lunchtime. At this rate, I’ll never get the other side of the garden cut before
Sally Willingham turns up to judge me. Still, I’ve pigging well started now, haven’t I? I can’t just do this one edge and not the others,
no matter how big and daunting the job appears. It would be rather like cutting the top of somebody’s hair and leaving the back and sides long.

I take a deep breath, an even bigger swig of water, and set to work on the rest of the job.

Luckily, the hedges on the left- and right-hand sides of the garden are easier to deal with. They’re less brambly for starters. It only takes me an hour on each side to wrestle them under some kind of control with the old shears. It helps when Fred provides me with a whetstone halfway through, and tightens the bolt in the centre of the shears for me. The two things help them cut a lot better, and by two o’clock the hedges have been trimmed all the way to the house.

I now have a slight problem, though. What the hell to do with all the greenery I’ve just chopped down. I can’t just leave it there. It looks awful. Pat The Cow may be a bovine masticating machine, but not even she can eat her way through that lot before Sally Willingham arrives.

‘Burn it,’ Fred suggests. ‘There’s a can of petrol in the van. Just make sure you do it well away from the house.’

‘But what will the landscape gardener say?’

Fred’s eyebrows knit with disdain. ‘What are you bellyaching about now?’

‘Well, she might not like it if I burn all that stuff.’

He rolls his eyes. ‘Don’t be such a goon, chief. That’s the way they do things out here in the country. Look.’ Fred points at the horizon to a column of smoke in the distance. ‘You ain’t gonna be the only one having a bonfire today.’

Well, that settles it. If it’s good enough for the locals, it’s good enough for me.

It doesn’t take me long to gather all the mess up and collect it in a nice big pile in the right-hand corner of the garden. I make sure to site the bonfire away from any of the overhanging trees in the woodland. We don’t want this thing getting out of control, after all.

To that end, I’m quite sparing with the petrol. Too sparing to begin with, as the fire is hardly going before the combination of light wind and green branches put it out in a haze of smoke. The smoke makes me hack and cough a bit, so I have to take a step back to have a bit of a rethink, while the pile gently puffs white clouds into the air.

Second time around I pour more petrol on. Trying to be at least a little sensible about the whole thing, I light a piece of cardboard and throw it on the pile, rather than try to light the petrol up close. I enjoy having eyebrows, and don’t think the soot-blackened-face look would suit me.

This time the fire roars into life in a far more satisfactory manner. The amount of petrol I’ve poured on overcomes how green and fresh the branches are, and in no time the fire is a good three feet high and crackling away nicely.

I feel an immense feeling of manly pride.

This is par for the course any time a man lights a fire. Whether it is a bonfire, a barbecue or a campfire, we take great delight in the act of setting fire to stuff. It must be something written in our DNA from the time we were all cavemen.

I supress the urge to find a woman to hit over the head with a wooden club and step back a little from my fire, so I’m not breathing in quite so much smoke.

To tell the truth, I’m beginning to feel a bit giddy from smoke inhalation right now. My head is swimming, and my face feels a bit numb.

I step back even more from the blaze and the vast clouds of smoke emanating from it. Most of the smoke appears to be coming from that big leafy plant I extracted from the hedge.

As the fire burns I stand there and daydream a little. At first I think about how nice the house is going to look once we’ve finished the renovation. This leads me to picture the enormous £4,000 TV I’m going to buy with the money I make from the sale. Then, as is usual when I’m in a daydreaming mood these days, I think about Mischa in her underwear. Finally, I go back to thinking about Pat The Cow as a member of the emergency services. I can imagine her in her own TV series, saving small boys and elderly ladies from a variety of horrible dangers. A theme tune springs into my head and I start to make up some lyrics to go along with it.

‘It’s Pat The Cow, she’s Pat The Cow,’ I sing to myself. ‘If you’re in trouble, she’ll come right now. She’ll save your life, she’ll save your wife. She’ll be right there, if you’re in strife.’

An enormous bray of laughter erupts from my mouth. I can’t quite believe how
astronomically
funny my new tune is. And
how
creative am I being? To think of not only a theme tune, but the
lyrics
to the theme tune, all in the space of a few seconds? Amazing!

I continue to sing, marvelling at my inventiveness.

‘If you’re up a tree, or you’ve hurt your knee, Pat The Cow is a sight to see. Her udders are round, her eyes are brown, let’s make her the queen, let’s give her a crown.’

The image of Pat The Cow dressed in full ermine cloak and golden crown, sat on her throne in the House of Lords, instantly fills my imagination, and I start laughing again.

Twenty-five minutes later, I’m still laughing. There’s every chance that if I don’t get this giggling fit under control, I’m going to pass out from oxygen deprivation.

What the hell is wrong with me? Why is the image of my pet cow in a crown so bloody funny? I look over to where Pat The Cow is staring at me in bewilderment, and I mentally place a crown on her head. This sends me off into another fit of laughter that lasts a good quarter of an hour.

T
hrough tear-streaked eyes I look up to see Fred and Hayley walking down the garden towards me. With them is a tall blonde-haired woman of about forty-five, who must be the eponymous Sally Willingham. She’s wearing green wellington boots and a cable-knit sweater. Her hair is held back in an Alice band and she has the kind of suntan that only comes from extensive time spent outside.