Bricking It (2 page)

‘No murderous clowns then,’ Danny remarks.

‘Apparently not.’

‘Big room again, though. They seemed to like their space back then.’

‘Yeah. You could get two double beds in here easily.’

‘I wonder if the other two are the same?’

And, by and large, they are. Each bedroom is large and very similar in terms of décor and disgusting mess. Estate agents would no doubt call them ‘generous’, but I’m not going to, given that the chances of finding a random pile of cash hidden in any of them is extremely small. I see nothing immediately terrifying in any of the three, though the floorboards do creek ominously in the one that sits in the front right-hand corner of the building. I try to tread as carefully as I possibly can, but Danny does the usual thing all men do when faced with a potentially hazardous floor surface – he jumps up and down on it several times to see whether it’ll give way under his weight.

‘Idiot,’ I remark. ‘If you go through that I’m not tying off any of your arteries, you know.’

So then we come to the final room the first floor, and the one that a rather horrific smell is coming from – the bathroom.

‘You can open this door,’ I tell Danny. ‘I’ve done all the others.’

Danny sniffs. ‘That’s entirely unfair you know. I would have cheerfully swapped door-opening tasks had I known that was the deal.’

‘Three bedroom doors equals one bathroom door. It’s a fact.’

‘Is it really?’

‘Yes. And I should know, I’m a teacher.’

‘Yes, but you’re very bad at your job, sis. Your pupils have all told me so.’

‘I can well believe you’ve spoken to a bunch of eight-year-olds, given that you are on the same intellectual level. Open the chuffing door, you twat.’

This is a fine example of typical conversation between my brother and I, of a type that has been repeated ad nauseam over the years. These kinds of arguments are only possible between siblings. If you tried to speak to anyone else in the same way, you’d probably get a punch in the mouth.

Danny doesn’t continue the quarrel. He knows I’ve always been better at the clever put-downs than him. He pushes the bathroom door open and we both take in the sights beyond with more than a little revulsion. In fact, it’s a wonder I don’t upchuck all over the faded landing carpet.

‘Well, that’d be where the smell is coming from then,’ Danny says helpfully.

‘Which one? The dead crow in the bathtub? Or the three decaying rat corpses on the floor?’

‘Either/or. Take your pick.’

‘Why the hell are there so many dead animals in here? They’re not anywhere else in the house. Not that we’ve seen anyway.’

Danny pauses for a moment. ‘I’m going to suggest a scenario here. It might seem a little far-fetched, but stick with me.’

‘Go on,’ I reply carefully.

Danny presses the fingers of both hands together under his chin. ‘I believe a fight to the death has taken place here. Crow versus rat. From the looks of things, the crow has managed to vanquish his ratty opponents, but not without suffering terminal injuries himself. He has then tried to flap away, only to get as far as the bathtub before expiring. It truly was a hero’s death.’

‘Face down with your beak stuck in a plughole?’

‘Exactly.’

‘You’re an idiot.’

‘Very probably.’

I take a step back. ‘At some point, I may have to go into that bathroom, but it will not be today, Danny. I guarantee you that.’

My brother nods. ‘I agree. Let’s just shut the door and not go back in until we’re wearing breathing apparatus and plastic boiler suits.’ Danny closes the door to the avian/rodent horror show and turns around.

‘That’s about it for upstairs, then,’ I point out. ‘Other than the bathroom, it’s not too bad.’

Danny shakes his head. ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’

‘What do you mean?’

He slowly points upwards, a look of sheer terror crossing his face. I follow his finger up . . . and see the loft hatch above my head.

‘No! No fucking way. I’m not going up there,’ I state in a firm voice, folding my arms across my chest.

‘Chicken.’

I flap my arms up and down a couple of times and make
buck buck
noises.

Danny stares up at the loft hatch for a moment. ‘I’m going up there,’ he tells me.

‘Why?’

‘Because there might be treasure.’

‘Or a human corpse.’

Danny shrugs his shoulders. ‘Either is fine by me.’

Men.

‘How exactly do you plan on getting up there? I don’t see a ladder lying around anywhere.’

‘I can balance on the bannister and boost myself up.’

I give the wooden bannister a long, hard look. I can’t see any immediate signs of woodworm, but am not taking that as an indication of its safety level. ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ I say, underestimating things just a tad.

Danny waves a hand. ‘It’ll be fine. Give me a shoulder.’

And with that he places one hand on my shoulder blade, boosts himself quickly up onto the bannister and leans across the landing, bracing himself with one hand as he pushes the loft hatch up with the other.

Danny pops his head into the open hatch. ‘Dark up here,’ he says.

‘You don’t say.’

‘Hang on.’ He produces his Zippo lighter from his front jeans pocket and lights it. ‘Christ, it’s big up here, too.’

‘Any spiders?’ I say with a catch in my voice. ‘I can’t stand the little buggers.’

‘Loads. Webs everywhere – but there’s not a lot else to see. Just some old wooden boxes full of shredded paper, a few bits of old cloth, a—
What the hell is that?
’

‘What is it? What have you seen? Is it a
corpse
?’

‘No corpses, just what looks like . . . well, I don’t really know. It looks like some kind of harness from here.’ Danny cranes his head a bit further into the loft. ‘Yep. Must be for a horse or something. I think it’s called a
tackle
. . . though I could be completely wrong. It’s hanging up on one of the joists.’

I am incredulous. ‘A horse’s harness? You mean like the halter and reins? Why the hell would Grandma have that?’

‘No idea. We are in the country. Maybe she owned one . . . I’m going to have a closer look.’

With that Danny puts his arms up through the hatch, sets himself and pushes off from the bannister and up into the loft in one swift movement.

For a few moments all I can hear is him clumping around. ‘Can you see anything else?’ I ask.

‘Not much,’ Danny replies, and I hear the clinking of metal as he picks up the harness. ‘It’s really odd. I don’t see how a horse’s head would fit over it. The leather is rotten through, and the metalwork is rusty. Must’ve been up here for ages. I wonder if—
AAAARRRGGHH
!
’

There is a terrible cracking sound of rotten wood giving way, followed a loud, high shriek.

‘Danny!’ I shout in dismay, and watch in absolute horror as my brother appears from above in the bedroom opposite where I’m standing, surrounded by a cloud of dust, plaster and wood.

DANNY

April

£0.00 spent

I
t takes a couple of seconds for me to realise that I’m not dead.

I see Hayley come running into the bedroom, where I’m now laying spread-eagled on the dirty yellow carpet.

I replay the last few moments of my life – and none of them are good. One minute I’m looking at something you’d sling over the nearest mare, the next I’m heading south at a rapid pace thanks to some rotted loft boards, with a load of debris flying around me.

Luckily for my continued existence, I don’t fall through the ceiling instantly. The breaking ceiling plaster slows my progress. I just about have enough time to prepare myself for the shock of landing on the floor below, remembering to bend my legs on impact. This doesn’t stop jarring pain from shooting up both my legs as I hit the bedroom floor. I’m saved a broken back when the carpet and floorboards give under my weight slightly, before springing back again. Thank Christ the wood isn’t as rotten as in the loft I’ve just broken my way through.

I have never viewed myself as a lucky man in life, but after this I might have to re-evaluate.

‘Danny! Danny!’ Hayley screams at the top of her lungs. Always with the melodrama, my sister. ‘Are you alright?!’ She also has the knack of asking stupid questions during a crisis.

‘Oh yeah,’ I reply, coughing up plaster and dust. ‘I’m great. There’s nothing like falling through a loft to really help your cardio programme.’

Hayley bends down and takes one of my hands tightly in hers. ‘Is anything broken?’

‘My hand will be if you keep gripping it that hard.’

‘Danny!’

‘No! Nothing is broken. I didn’t fall too fast, so I had time to prepare myself for the shock. All those years of jumping off garage roofs as a kid have finally paid off.’ I roll over with a groan and slowly get to my feet. I keep expecting to feel sharp and hideous pain rocket through my body as I do so, but am amazed to bring myself upright with only the merest twinge. ‘Bloody hell. I think I’m okay.’

‘Really?’ my sister exclaims in a disbelieving voice.

‘Yep, everything seems to be where it should be,’ I tell her, brushing the dust off my jeans.

‘You lucky bastard,’ she mutters.

‘Oh no . . . wait. It looks like I have a splinter.’ I hold my left hand out to her, showing her the half-inch long splinter of wood buried in my thumb.

Hayley looks up at the large hole I’ve created in our new house, and then back down at me. ‘You mean to tell me the only injury you appear to have suffered after having fallen several feet through a ceiling is a small splinter?’

‘Oi! That’s not small,’ I argue, waggling the thumb in her general direction. ‘It’s quite big. And painful, as it happens.’

‘If that had been me, I’d have broken every bone in my body,’ Hayley tells me, shaking her head.

‘Oh, well, try not to sound so disappointed that I’m not crippled, sis. I can always jump back up there and have another go, if you like.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘It’s going to be bloody expensive to get that fixed,’ I point out.

Hayley gives me an exasperated look. ‘Danny, there are dead animals in the bath, somebody has attacked the kitchen with heavy artillery, the garden looks like a jungle and the staircase could give way at any moment. I’d say an extra hole in the ceiling isn’t much to worry about at this stage.’

I have to agree. So far this tour around Grandma’s past hasn’t exactly been a barrel of laughs – unless you call narrowly avoiding serious injury a fun pastime.

Hayley looks me up and down again. ‘Are you sure you don’t want some kind of medical attention?’

I hold my hands out, palms up. ‘Nope. I’m fine. Keen to get back down the stairs again though, before this floor gives way underneath me as well.’ I give the carpet a concerned look.

‘Alright,’ Hayley agrees. ‘Let’s get out of here. I want to go look out the back anyway to see how much land this thing comes with.’

And with that, the Daley siblings make their careful way back downstairs, one of them worrying at the splinter caught in his thumb, the other watching for spiders and dead human bodies.

Sadly, to get to the back garden, we have to go through the fly-infested kitchen. At least, I assume most of them are flies. If there are any mosquitoes in the cloud of small black bodies flying around the green fridge, we’ll both be scratching ourselves into insensibility for the next couple of days.

The back door is a lot harder to open than the front.

‘Are you going to kick this one too?’ Hayley asks, as I push against the solid door with my shoulder.

I peer through one of the opaque windows in the door, and spy a large heavy object against it on the outside. ‘I don’t think so, not this time. There’s something stopping the door from opening. Something heavy.’ I pause for a second. ‘. . . And no, Hayley, it isn’t a corpse.’

What it
is
, is a tyre. Not one from a small family hatchback, either. This thing came off a tractor. It takes a lot of pushing and shoving on my part – with a little help from my feeble, weak sister – before the tyre has shifted enough to allow us to get out of the door.

By the time we squeeze through the gap, I’ve got a real sweat on thanks to my efforts and the unseasonably mild spring weather.

‘Christ,’ I say, wiping my brow with one hand. ‘I hope that was worth it.’

‘Well, it was the only way to get out here,’ Hayley comments and looks off to one side, making a face. ‘Oh . . . apart from the fact we could have just come out of the front door and walked round.’

‘What? And get ripped to pieces by the brambles? No thanks. I’ve already nearly broken both my ankle and my back today. Adding severe lacerations to the litany of injuries this place has caused me in the last half an hour is something I’m happy to avoid.’

‘Fair enough. Let’s see how the garden looks.’

It’s not really a garden, though. What we’re talking about here is a bloody huge field covered in a thick, tall layer of plant life that will need way more than a strimmer from B&Q to get rid of.

‘Great. I wonder if there are any Triffids out here?’ I say, knowing full well the reference will probably be lost on my sister.

‘What’s a Triffid?’

See what I mean?

‘Never mind,’ I tell her. ‘Not something we have to worry about.’ I look out over the vast sea of green. ‘Probably.’

‘This hasn’t been cut in a while,’ Hayley remarks.

‘In a
while
? More like never.’ And that’s no exaggeration. The grass is easily a foot and a half high at its shortest length, even now in April. This grass obviously hasn’t been cut in years. The only places where it isn’t that long is where some kind of creature has forced its way through, trampling the grass flat. I’m resolutely not going to think about what that creature might be at the moment, in case it is just about to leap out of the grass and take my throat out.

There are more of the massive overgrown bramble bushes dotted around the large patch of land laid out in front of us. At least four gnarled apple trees are in evidence towards what I can only assume is the back of the land this house comes with, and I swear I can a Christmas tree growing way off in one corner, proving that Mother Nature doesn’t give a monkey’s about human customs.

‘Exactly how big is the land?’ I ask Hayley, as I peer down the left side of the field at the remains of a barbed-wire fence that marches its way for several hundred feet down towards a large wall of trees right at the end. Over the fence is pastureland.

Standing here in this quiet vegetative expanse, it’s hard to believe that we’re only a minute’s drive from the village centre down the rough, pot-holed road that runs right up to the broken garden gate.

Hayley pulls a piece of paper out of her pocket and reads. ‘Apparently it’s one point one acres.’

‘Wow. That sounds like . . . a lot?’

I’m hazarding a guess here. I actually have no idea how big an acre is. Nor does anyone who grew up within walking distance of a metropolitan town centre. I know it’s supposed to be quite a large unit of measurement, but quite how large, I have no clue.

What I do know is that the overgrown land in front of me is
bastard
big – and in dire need of someone with a bulldozer and some imagination.

‘Not really much of an improvement on the inside is it?’ Hayley says, a little deflated.

‘Oh, I don’t know. At least out here we can get a nice suntan.’

‘Where does it end?’ Hayley ponders.

I indicate the barbed-wire fence. ‘I think that’s where the left-hand side ends. I guess the back is where those trees are, but as for the right . . .’ I tail off. There appears to be no clear indication of where the land ends on that side. It slopes down into a shallow valley, and I can’t see any signs of a boundary marker. Where the land starts to rise again is a neat cornfield, so that’s obviously not ours.

‘Look! There’s a patio set.’

Hayley points over to where a wrought-iron set of chairs are stacked against the back wall of the house. The table that comes with them must be a relative of the one in the dining room, as it too only has three legs.

I sigh. ‘Well, let’s see if they’ll take our weight. I need a sit down. All this exploring and near-death calamity has knackered me out.’

I tramp over to the chairs and yank a couple of them from their long-term resting place. I plonk one down for me, and gratefully sit down on it. Hayley is less keen on planting her backside on the chair I’ve moved out for her.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘My jeans will get ruined,’ she complains.

I shrug my shoulders. ‘Well, you always were one for dressing inappropriately, sis. Remember Clacton?’

Hayley shudders. When we were kids, Mum and Dad took us on holiday to Clacton-on-Sea at the height of what you could laughably refer to as summer. Seventeen-year-old Hayley obviously thought we were going somewhere where the temperature would be up in the twenties, and only packed light summer dresses and bikini tops. Eleven-year-old Danny knew full well what the weather would actually be like, and packed a duffle coat.

The doctor was very gentle when he broke the news that she had come down with a mild case of hypothermia. Dad was not happy about having his holiday cut short by four days.

As Hayley doesn’t want the chair, I prop my legs up on it and heave a grateful sigh. I then link my hands behind my head and yawn.

‘So then, what the hell are we going to do with this place now we’ve got it?’ I ask, tipping the chair onto its back legs.

Hayley’s brow wrinkles. ‘We’ve only got two choices, according to the research I’ve done.’

‘And they are?’

‘We can sell the place as it is.’

I groan. This doesn’t sound like much of a choice. The house is an absolute state, and the huge garden is no better. Who the hell would want to buy it?

‘It’s not going to be worth all that much then?’ I say to Hayley despondently.

‘No. Only about one hundred and sixty thousand, I’d say.’

‘What?!’ I exclaim, nearly tumbling backwards out of the garden chair as the shock hits me.

‘One hundred and sixty grand,’ she repeats. ‘The house would probably have to be knocked down, and there could be planning issues with a new build, so it keeps the price down a bit.’

I am speechless. No, more than that – I am virtually incapable of movement. For a moment, all I can do is stare, dumbfounded, at Hayley.

‘Are you alright?’ she asks. ‘Is it the fall? Are you having a delayed reaction?’

‘Did you . . . did you just say
one hundred and sixty thousand pounds
?’

‘Yep. That’s how much Grant at the estate agents said he could probably get for it, if we sold it as is.’

I leap out of the chair. ‘Then what the fuck are we still doing here?’ I cry in excitement. ‘Let’s get down there and get your mate Grant to put it on the market today!’ Another thought occurs. ‘In fact, why did you insist I come up here with you to see the place at all? You should have just told me how much it was worth, and I would have agreed to sell it without all the bother!’

Hayley scowls. ‘Hold your bloody horses. There’s a very good reason why I brought us both up here to see the place. I wanted to get a good look at how much work is needed.’

‘To do what? Bulldoze the place?’

‘No. Renovate it.’

‘Renovate it? Are you
menta
l
?
You did see me fall through the ceiling, didn’t you?’

‘I did. But Grant didn’t just quote me on how much the place would sell for as it is. He also gave me a figure for how much we could get for the house if it was completely renovated.’

Now I’m curious again. ‘How much?’

‘Here.’ She hands me the piece of paper she’s been clutching.

I give it a read, and have to sit back down again very quickly.

‘Six hundred thousand?’ I say in a faraway voice.

‘Yep.’

‘Six hundred thousand quid,’ I repeat.

‘That’s right.’

‘
Six hundred thousand
.’

Hayley sighs. ‘Yes, Danny. That’s how much this place would be worth.’

‘Why?’

She throws a hand out. ‘Are you kidding? You can see how glorious the view is, can’t you? And the place is a massive, three-bedroom, detached Victorian farmhouse. Properties like this go for a premium, especially out here in the country.’

‘But we’d have to fix it up, though, yeah?’

‘Yes. That’s the problem. It’s not a small job.’

Understatement of the century there, I think. ‘How much would that cost?’

‘I don’t know. Not until we’ve had people in to look at it. But it’s going to be expensive. Probably as much as again as what it’s worth now. At least a hundred and sixty grand.’

My shoulders slump. ‘Well, that’s us fucked then. You’re a teacher, I’m a caretaker, we’re both single, and we both rent the places we live in. Neither of us can stump up anything like that kind of cash.’

‘We can if we re-mortgage the house.’

It sounds like Hayley has put a lot more research into this than I thought. ‘But would a bank give us a mortgage? I mean, neither of us are the best of bets, are we? I live in what could charitably be called a shoebox on the worst council estate in the area, thanks to the fact I earn such a shitty wage, and after what happened with you and Simon . . .’ I trail off as I see the look of hurt in Hayley’s eyes. That bastard really screwed her over in the divorce. It’s a miracle she can even afford somewhere to rent on her teacher’s salary.