"But I wanted to know when he was working this week anyway."
"So you should have asked him."
"He doesn’t like me, he probably wouldn’t have
answered."
"He would have answered. And he does like you. He just
thinks you don’t like him."
"I don’t."
"Gee, I would never have guessed."
CHAPTER 45
When I get home after work that
night, I briefly think that maybe I have entered a parallel universe, or gone
back in time to the nineteen seventies.
Then I realise that the curtains currently up at our windows
are the same floral monstrosities that my mum had in her arms when I left this
morning.
"Mum!" I yell. "Where are you?"
"Surprise!" She cries, jumping out from behind the
sofa—the sofa with a floral throw on it and two fluffy cushions.
"What is going on here?"
"I did a little redecorating. Do you like it?"
"No, I do not," I say instantly, then pause to
take a look around. I take in everything. The green and brown flowery curtains.
The throw on the sofa that
almost
matches. The fluffy, pink cushions
that clash like nothing else on earth. The pictures on the wall—two hand
painted countryside scenes and three photographs of cats with silly hats on. A
framed picture of Baby and Pussy wearing matching outfits is on top of the TV.
The glass doors of our DVD cabinet reveal that it is now a book cabinet. I walk
over to inspect the titles. They’re not even our books.
War and Peace
,
some John Grishams and Catherine Cooksons. I look around in horror.
"Do you like it?" Mum asks.
"I hate it!" I yell. "How could you do
this?"
"You two don’t read enough. You watch too many of those
silly DVDs, and you really should read more, so I thought I’d give you a kick
start."
"I don’t want a kick start," I say. "I want
my things back."
"Just give it a while, Mackenzie. I know it’s a shock but
it’ll grow on you."
"It won’t grow on me. How dare you wait until Dan and I
are out at work and then redecorate our house? You don’t live here!"
"But I thought I was doing you a favour…"
"How could you be doing us a favour? You watched Dan
and I decorate this place not six months ago. How could you possibly think that
we wanted it redone to your taste? You don’t live here, mother. You’re going
home tomorrow, just as soon as the building inspector has gone."
"Insurance surveyor."
"Whatever. You’re going home, and I’m going to fix this
place."
"But—"
"But nothing. Where are my things? Where are our DVDs
and our curtains and our Roy Lichtenstein painting? Because if you’ve thrown
them out, I’ll… Well, I don’t know what I’ll do. And you better not have knocked
nails into our walls, because we only had one picture up, not five."
"Yes, but it was so ugly."
"It was a Roy Lichtenstein," I say exasperatedly.
"How dare you just waltz in here and move everything you don’t like? This
is not your house!"
"I was just trying to help."
"Where are our things?"
"Don’t worry, they’re in the spare room. I didn’t throw
anything out."
I throw my hands up in the air and make an infuriated sigh.
I run upstairs to the spare room and nearly trip over two paint cans on my way.
"Why are there two cans of paint on my landing?" I
yell.
"I was going to paint when you were at work
tomorrow," Mum says, coming to the bottom of the stairs.
"But it’s hideous," I hold up a paint can and read
it. "It’s Apple White. It’s fucking off-white. It’s not even a proper
bloody colour and you were going to paint our living room with it?"
"Yes," she says. "Then it’ll look just like
mine."
Arrrrrrgh!
"I don’t want it to look just like yours. Yours is
horrible. It’s a nightmare of bland colours and clashing out-of-date
accessories. Why on earth would I want my place to look anything like
yours?"
"You don’t have to insult me, Mackenzie."
"And you don’t have to take it upon yourself to
redecorate my living room."
I feel a little better when I’ve been in the spare room and
seen all our things piled high on top of Dan’s junk. I don’t think she’s done
anything permanent. I just thank my lucky stars that she didn’t have time to
paint the walls today as well. I can’t believe that my mother would do this to
us. I can’t believe that she might actually be deluded enough to think that Dan
and I want our living room—our house—to look just like hers.
I change into some old clothes in our bedroom and go back
downstairs with my own curtains, lampshades and cushions in my arms.
"Right," I say to her. "Now we’re going to
undo this mess."
"But it took me all afternoon."
"I don’t give a damn how long it took you. How could
you have the audacity to change our room—our room, mind you, not yours—around without
even asking me or Dan first? It’s ridiculous. So, no Mum, I don’t care if it
took you three years. It’s going back to how it was when I left this morning
right
now
."
"Fine," she huffs. "But I wasn’t aware that
I’d brought you up to be so ungrateful. You haven’t even thanked me for trying
to help. I thought you had better manners than that, young lady."
"Oh, I am ungrateful. I didn’t want my living room
altered. And you were going to paint? Paint? Something permanent and not
undoable? I obviously have better manners than you, because I would never go in
to someone else’s house and do permanent damage to their living room."
"But this colour is so awful."
"It’s dark purple. The dark purple that Dan and I
chose. It’s a solid, block colour, not some hideous shade of white."
"But it’s so dark."
"It’s not dark, it’s just not white with a hint of
something. It’s a real colour."
"Humpfh."
"Don’t humpfh at me. How would you feel if I bought a
can of black paint and came round to your house while you were teaching yoga
and repainted your entire living room, and took all your photos of Baby down
and replaced them with retro art prints?"
She shrugs, obviously unaware that there is something wrong
with redecorating your daughter’s living room to your own tastes.
"Don’t shrug at me," I say. "You’d hate it.
You’d be horrified to find your hint of lilac white living room suddenly
painted black. You’d be upset if I came round and took your flowery curtains
down and replaced them with luminous orange ones. You’d hate it if I took all
your Catherine Cookson books away and filled your cabinets with Star Wars DVD
sets. Wouldn’t you?"
She shrugs again. "I suppose I might."
"You’re damn right you might. And yet you think it’s
okay to come round here and do it to us. You’ve lost your mind."
"I thought I was doing you a favour."
"But you know Dan and I decorated this place. You know
how lucky we were to get a landlord who didn't mind us redecorating."
"I was trying to say thank you for letting me stay
here."
"For one thing you don’t have to thank us, and for
another, you could’ve just bought us a box of chocolates or something, like a
normal mother would do."
"Are you saying I’m not a normal mother?"
"Not exactly, no."
"You’re not exactly saying that or I’m not exactly
normal."
I shrug. "Either."
"I was only trying to help."
"You can help me take these horrible curtains down for
a start," I say. I clamber up on to the window ledge and make a start
pulling the gruesome things down. "Actually, on second thoughts, I can
manage this. You can take that dreadful
thing
off my sofa and put our
twenty quid cushions back on, please. And then you can take those horrible
pictures off the wall, and take your books back home."
"Um, the picture thing might be a little
difficult."
"A little difficult?" I stare at the things in
horror. "So, what did you do? Bang nails in to my wall and make a
mess?"
"Oh no, I never bang nails in. I’m always scared I
might hit a water pipe or an electricity wire."
Come to think of it, the pictures do look kind of flat against
the wall.
"Okay, so what did you use?"
"Some of that No More Nails stuff."
"We don’t have any of that stuff. We ran out last
week when Dan tried to fix the back door."
"Well, I may have improvised a bit."
"A bit?" I ask. "What the hell did you use?"
"Superglue."
"Superglue? To put pictures on the wall?"
"Yes," she nods. "Genius, huh? I bet Lawrence
Llewellyn Bowen never thought of that."
"No, because he’s not that bloody stupid."
"I thought it was quite clever. It stuck well."
"Yes, and how do you propose that we get it off?"
"I didn’t think you’d want to get it off right
away."
"Well, I do," I say, angrily. "I want it off
right now. Dan is going to be really mad if he comes in and sees this
shit."
"Dan should be able to control his temper."
"Dan can control his temper, but you’ve just ruined a
room that took us weeks to get the way we wanted it. And now we have five awful
pictures superglued to our walls."
"Four. One is on the nail that your horrible picture
came off."
"It’s a Roy Lichtenstein. And it’s not horrible. It
fits in perfectly with the room. Unlike those appalling cat things. How do you
propose we get them off?"
"White Spirit?"
"I’m not pouring White Spirit down my walls, it’ll take
the paint off."
"You’d be better with wallpaper."
"I prefer paint. It comes in nicer colours."
"This purple is dreadful."
"But
we
like it. Which is exactly the point,
seeing as
we
live here. You don’t."
"Humpfh."
"You’ll have your own kitchen to decorate soon, isn’t
that enough?"
"But the builders will be doing that."
"Yeah, but you’ll get to choose the colour scheme and
the materials and everything. It’ll be fun to do that. And you can leave our
place alone."
"I can’t believe you don’t like my curtains," she
mutters, turning her attention to taking the throw off the sofa."
"I’m just glad you left our bathroom alone."
"I was going to do that on Wednesday."
"No! Don’t you dare touch it. Don’t do anything to any
room in this house. Ever."
"Relax, I was only joking. I like your bathroom. It’s a
nice shade of pink."
"It had better stay that way."
CHAPTER 46
"Explain something to me,
baby," Dan says when he comes in from work that night. "Why are there
four big craters in our living room wall?"
"My mum tried to redecorate. Don’t be mad at her, she
thought she was helping."
"What did she do to the wall?"
"She superglued some horrible pictures to it."
"It looks like she used our living room as a bomb
testing site."
"Just superglue. And the holes in the wall are kind of
my fault. I couldn’t get the pictures off so I tried to split the superglue
bond with a knife and pull them off at the same time, and… Well, as you can
see, some of the plaster came out too."
Dan sighs.
"Don’t worry, I’ll buy some Pollyfilla tomorrow and
fill them in."
"Why on god’s green and verdant earth did she use
superglue?"
"Because she doesn’t like to bang in nails and we were
out of No More Nails."
"So, what else did she do?"
"Oh, nothing permanent. At least, not now I’ve
persuaded her to take the paint back to B&Q."
"You’re kidding me."
"I wish."
"I told you it was a bad idea to have her stay
here."
"What do you suggest I do, Dan? I can’t just throw her
out on the street. And she’d be here twenty times a day to use our kitchen
anyway."
"Yeah, but she wouldn’t repaint the living room.
Probably."
"Don’t stress about it. She’s going home tomorrow
anyway."
"Yeah, and I’ll believe that when I see it."
"You see," I say as we lug her three suitcases
back down the road towards her house. Actually, I should rephrase that—as
I
lug her three suitcases back towards her house while she walks Baby on a lead
and carries Pussy in her cat carrier. "I told you the insurance guy would
be fine. The builders are coming next week, and now you can move back in to the
comfort of your own home."
"Your sofa is very comfortable."
"I’m sure your bed is even comfier."
"But I don’t have a kitchen."
"You can use ours any time you need it. You even have a
key. Which I want back straight away when your kitchen is done," I add.
"I’m not having you bursting in to our house unannounced all the time, not
after yesterday's debacle with the living room."
"How was I supposed to know that superglue bonded with
plaster so well?"
"Yeah, so well that the plaster comes off instead of
the superglue. And I’m fairly sure that it says ‘
do not use on plaster
’
on the tube."
She shrugs.
When we get through the door, I lug the suitcases upstairs.
"I don’t like Pussy and Baby being here with all this
muck," Mum says when I come back downstairs. "What if they go into
the kitchen?"
"They’re not stupid," I say. "I’m sure they
won’t."
"What if they do? I can’t even shut the kitchen door
because it’s half burnt away."
"Animals can sense things like that," I tell her.
"They’re not going to want to go walking around in that mess any more than
you or I do."
"Pussy likes to explore."
"It’s just your normal kitchen, she won’t need to
explore it."
Mum doesn’t reply, but I can tell that she knows I’m
bullshitting her. It’s not that I want to make her move back in to her own
place when she obviously doesn’t want to be here with the kitchen in the state
it’s in, but her living with us is really putting a strain on my relationship
with Dan. And she’s only been there four days. There’s no getting around the
fact that she has to go back home, and fast.