Three Dont Tango 16

You put a brick upon another brick which brings a certain sense of satisfaction that a job is being done, and a visible improvement in the world is taking place before your very eyes.
Take Two: You put a brick upon another brick and you look down at your hands and wonder why on earth you are doing this to yourself.
You put a brick upon another brick and your mind is concentrating hard on the business of keeping the line straight. The line is twisted around the end brick and is supposed to be taut. It was taut when you first twisted the slack and tested it and balanced a spirit level under it. No doubt the line was taut before you turned and tripped over the dammed thing, grazing your shin on the edge of a concrete block, and putting your hand into a sludge of wet cement, and banging your hip against another pile of blocks. Unfortunately the line is now a tangle of twine in the dirt.
You put a brick upon another brick, and every so often you have to check if the wall is vertical. It seems vertical until you put the spirit level up against it. So you straighten the blocks by leaning against them, and banging here and there, and of course, doing a whole lot more squinting. You then move along to the next few blocks only to find that when you've straightened them the first section is all cockeyed again. What's going on here? This wall has a life of its own.
You put a brick upon another brick and wonder why you are doing this. The weather is fine. You could be sitting in a deck-chair reading a novel. You could be upstairs watching Annabel doing some painting, and idly running your hand up her legs. There are loads of people who can lay bricks, you reason, but you are not one of them. Not for the first time in your life you stand gazing at nothing in particular in the realisation that things are not going as they perhaps should.
Why are you doing this? What possesses someone to take on these mammoth tasks they aren't fitted for, and to carry on doing them in the face of all the odds? Am I totally bats, and probably need my head examining, or should I be carted off to the nut-house? Actually the problem is much simpler. I can't afford to pay someone else to do the job.
I am halfway up the wall, and you can take that anyway you like. The handbook calls this position first lift. Stacked along the walls are piles of concrete blocks placed strategically so I can put planks from one pile to the next, and stand on them to cary on with the block laying. But now I am at first lift everything has to change.
I look in the paper for the names of local second hand timber merchants. There don't seem to be many about. "You want to get your timber straight off demolition sites," says my friend Edwin. "That should be easy, they are knocking down half of Bath."
I look in the paper under the heaading Demolition. The first big name in the book was someone called Bayliss, so I ring him up.
Once upon a time there was this brewery. Next door was a glove factory. Now there is no brewery, and the building next door is no longer a glove factory. They are both demolition sites. I go and take a look.
"How about these beams then? "Twenty feet long. Plenty long enough for you. Lovely timber. Nine by three. Not twisted. Do you a treat."
"How much?"
"A quid a piece."
How am I going to get them home?"
"I'll bring them out in the wagon for an extra fiver. What about these floorboards. Look at them," and he rubbed them with his big heavy boot. "Look at that. There used to be a lovely shine on these boards. You could have had one of them balls here. Like a dance floor it was. They'll polish up a treat. How much do you want?"
I did a quick bit of addition, then a spot of multiplication, and came up with a dubious figure.
"You might as well have the whole floor then. or what we can get up without splitting. I'll chuck them on the lorry as well."
And so he did. A couple of days later the driveway became totally blocked with masses of timber. My joists were there, and my floorboards. The garage space was filled so there was no room for the minibus.
I had to dig holes in the existing end wall of the house big enough to take the joists, but not too big to destabilise the wall. Then I got one end of each of the joists up on my new block wall, then moved the ladder to the old house wall, and gradually climbed up the ladder holding the joist, then slotted it into the hole I'd made. There were twenty-one joists. I then had to pack them out till they were level, and level with each other.
Sometimes you lose control of the joist, or it slides out of its hole again, and in the process knocks over the ladder you are standing on. Suddenly there is a concatenation of pains all screaming at you, and you scream, not knowing which to scream at first. You cannot hop up and down because your leg hurts so much, and you cannot clap your hand to the hurt hip because the elbow hurts so much when you bend your arm, and so you sit down, and find the hip cant take the bend, so another week's worth of swearwords come shooting out of the box, and Annabel comes out to see what all the fuss is about, and you shout at her, and she is upset because she only came out to help and sympathise.
I stand, staring out across the valley through the window frame. I stare at the grey-blue wall of ash-breeze blocks with white lines of cement, but instead I see a picture of myself sitting by the side of some warm road, eating an orange, and lethargically hitching for a lift into the next piece of somewhere, and once again I am aware of a reality gap. What am I doing? Why am I doing this? I have somehow landed myself in the wrong movie, and I don't like this movie at all.


First lift: I put planks down on the joists. Two joists are put sloping up to the upstairs floor, and used as tramlines. Cephren's pushchair is removed from storage. The concrete blocks are placed aboard. A rope is attached. Annabel steadies them at the bottom. Johnsie pulls from above and up they go. Cephren leans on the top row of blocks and watches them come up. I stack blocks all across the bedroom floor.
Now I can stand on the floor upstairs and look out across the valley. Now I can look down on the milkman, on Annabel, or grandma mowing the lawn. I can see into the wood at the back of the house because I am on the same level. My home is growing. I will soon finish, and be able to lay down my burden and be a normal person again. I will recover. I pull on the rope. A block falls off and hits Annabel on her toes.
I can feel the scream inside me. Poor Annabel. I love you Annabel. I didn't mean to pull too hard. I didn't mean to make a building that hurt you. I didn't want to destroy your feet Annabel. I wish I could take the pain for you. Annabel. Annabel. I hug her. We take off her shoe. The stocking is smashed into a bloody mess that was once a big toe. I daren't pull it out. We cut round the stocking and get the district nurse to come and sort out the damage, and Annabel limps with a great bandage round her foot.
There is dirt and dust everywhere. I am filthy every day. I have my breakfast, and then within five minutes I am covered in dust. The preservative comes off the timber onto my hands and onto my shirt. I lift something heavy and a great stain of dried concrete is upon my shirt, and concrete dust in my hair, and on my trousers. I cough. My nose is bunged up and when I blow into my handkerchief it comes out like ravels of black wool. I spit black phlegm onto the driveway, and I itch all over.
"Look Johnny, we cant go on like this. I can't keep the food clean, and Mini has to have all her stuff sterilised, and there isn't really enough room for us all here with you taking up so much space with materials you're trying to keep dry, and knocking holes through the walls. I think we should go and stay with your aunt Sally until you've got a bit further on."
And so Annabel phones aunty, and she and the children go to Coleby. Cephren goes to the local school, and Mini gets carried around with aunty on her trips to expectant mothers, and post expectant mothers; and she gets petted and told she's beautiful, and peers at other babies, and generally has a good time. And Annabel sits in the front room and reads, and takes Cephren round the corner to the village school, and he comes home for lunch, and everything is clean: no dust, no holes in the walls, no bags of cement to climb round, no piles of drying timber in the front room. And from the back bedroom window Annabel can see over Cephren's bed the small white moon high above the great Leicestershire plain.
At the bottom of the Lincoln Edge lies a medieval dark you think you can spy into, and the lights twinkle briefly, while the small white moon penetrates scarcely at all into the ancient gloom. It is a cold, brittle, glittering moon that sparkles with a frosty silence. The land is a large bed with a dark coverlet, and beneath there are secrets flickering about.
Annabel is in a high turret watching the moon go down.
Annabel is in a high turret, while Cephren is rocking his hard thick head against the wall and gurgling with strange songs. He lifts his head, blinks and goes back to rocking, and gargling. He is probably telling himself a story.
Annabel is in a high turret telling herself a story. The story fills the dark plain. She can see pictures of dark trees bulging upwards with a fierce time-lapse photography. There are smouldering lamps inside the dark cottages where people toss and turn.
Annabel is in a high turret painting. She is painting her thoughts. She is painting onto a think folding line of paper that slides imperceptibly into her subconscious, and if you listen hard you can hear her purring.
Annabel is in a high turret and the moon is sliding down her hair; a silver finger here, touching the strands till an icicle of light sparkles, then a palm, till her tresses are a still pond reflecting the pale gibbous. And neither moves. There is a long, long silence. The moon and the girl are held together by a long slender hand of silver.
As I am getting into bed thinking of Annabel she is in a high turret watching the moon go down.

---