Three Dont Tango 17

Another day goes by. I clear the kitchen, and the living room. The bedroom is stacked with everything we have. In the corner of the old living room is a small winding stairway. The axe goes through it. The wood is taken out, and now I have plenty of firewood.
The floor is re-done. Now there is no way to the upper levels, so I have to bang a hole through the outside wall where the landing will come through. The electric cables are hanging off the wall in a hair-raising way. I pull the cables out and reconnect them, luckily without blowing the fuses and putting the lights out for miles around.
I must now get upstairs via the ladder. The bathroom will go where the landing used to be, so I must run in a four inch waste pipe all down the inside wall which will then sit in a trench under the new kitchen floor to join the drains in the garden, and thus to a septic tank.
I dig a two foot deep trench right across the room and under the wall, and out to the driveway. Our home is now untenable. I move in with mother.
There is a room above the old kitchen which has not been used for over forty years. This used to be an office when the factory was working, now it is a derelict mess. There was an entrance from the building next to the kiln, so the only entry, now bricked up, is ten feet from the ground, facing out to the wood.
Now my new landing area gives me a floor level with the bottom of the bricked up area. I bang out the bricks and at last I can enter the room, black with age, and full of dusty cobwebs. The floor is covered with three inches of black cobwebby dust, and the boards are rotten. I gradually move out the rest of the bricks to make a proper doorway.
I lug up a length of railway sleeper to use as a lintel. As I am working on my own I use rollers and pulleys, and play at being Assyrians shifting blocks of stone forty feet long weighing two hundred tons. I tie ropes round each end of the beam. I prop joists under it as well to use as levers. As the lintel gets higher I use further joists to tilt the existing joist-levers and the lintel goes gently into position. I prop it with a joist and release all the rest of the bits. The wall is very dangerous above the lintel. It is a dry stone wall which is two feet thick with nothing but the lintel to hold the four rows of stone, some of the pieces being over two feet cube.
I stand back to survey my work, well pleased, then decide to go down and have my evening meal. I move forward one step only and the board gives way. I take another step quickly before my foot goes through the ceiling, and trip against the joist holding up the lintel. The joist moves, crashing down past the ladder to the floor below. My foot comes down where there is no board and goes straight between the joists, through the plasterboard ceiling below. The lintel slowly slides off the ledge and disappears down the wall, following the joist, missing me by a hair's breadth. There is a sickening thud as it hits the ground. I slip in an undignified way to the floor, one knee is doubled up beneath me, but goes through the floorboards anyway, then through the ceiling, and I come to a halt wedged between joists with bits of wood and plaster sticking into my clothes, my legs dangling over the old kitchen sink. I am immediately below the two feet of unsupported stone, and I hang there completely resigned to the whole lot falling directly upon my head. I whisper a sad goodbye to Annabel, to Cephren, and Mini, say a quick "I love you, Annabel", and wait for the rumble and fall of stone that will crush my head to nothing.
Nothing moves. I daren't move myself. One small vibration will set everything tumbling down. I wait. I move a little. I heave myself back out slowly, then reverse back into the room and look up. Ten minutes later I am playing Assyrians again, and the blocks and levers are going, and the lintel goes back up, and I get the hell out of it, and go and ring Annabel to tell her I am still alive.
I cant eat. I go to bed. I am suffering from shock. I hug a hot water bottle. The next day I am back up there again, struggling with forces that are well beyond my capabilities.

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