Page 30 of Her Fixer Upper

‘Oi, nosy parker, let go of my phone. If you imagine I’m telling you the passcode, think again, mister,’ I said, sending the clump of carpet spinning back towards him again.

He managed to catch it without even looking up, surprising himself.

‘Hey, did you see that? I bet if we tried fifty times over I’d never be able to manage that again. We should start a double act.’

‘Stop trying to distract me. Give me my phone back.’

‘Make me,’ he said, his grin growing wider than ever. ‘I reckon I could guess your passcode. Never mind texting Leila about using her bath, how about your lovely boss Mr Rhys? I bet he has bathrooms galore. I’m sure he’d be delighted to share his facilities with his best member of staff.’

Typical Charlie, always a compliment hidden amongst the teasing. But I wasn’t prepared to risk him actually following through on his threat, even though I was ninety-nine per cent sure that this was another one of his jokes. I hurried across the room and grabbed him round the waist while he held the phone up high.

‘At least put some effort in, Hutch,’ he said, holding it out of my reach with some considerable effort. ‘Do you think Mr Rhys will lend me a dressing gown? What style do you think he goes for? Maybe a Hugh Hefner silk look?’

I pretended to vomit, which of course made him laugh even more, loving getting a rise out of me. I decided I might as well play along seeing as he was determined that we were going to regress to primary school levels of behaviour.

‘You asked for it.’ I let go of his waist and then started tickling him beneath his right armpit, remembering how it used to send eleven-year-old Charlie into paroxysms. It turned out grown-up Charlie was equally vulnerable to attack there. He tried to squirm out of the way, but I was determined to be as relentless as he had been in teasing me. Eventually he managed to wriggle out of my grip, both of us crying with laughter. It felt good to be letting loose after days of hard labour and worry.

‘Okay, okay, I surrender,’ said Charlie eventually. ‘Have the phone back. Mr Rhys is a definite no-no, I accept that now. But how about you swallow your pride and message Leila? She wouldn’t have given an open invitation if she didn’t mean it.’

‘I still think it’s a bit unfair on her. She’ll probably have Nim over. The last thing she’ll want is us two getting in the way and tramping filthy footprints all over her immaculate flat.’

‘Stop making excuses. She’s your friend, and she’ll be delighted to help. Stop thinking you’re not worthy of being helped out by a mate. Grab some clean clothes. Like the ancient Romans, we’re going to the bathhouse, aka Leila’s flat.’

Charlie scrunched up the clump of carpet I’d used as my original weapon and shoved it in the bin pile, then beckoned me to follow him.

‘You’re not being serious?’ I asked, as he took his car keys off the plyboard worksurface.

‘I never joke about hot baths. You can text her on the way. Besides, I’m doing this for purely selfish reasons. I’m hoping once you’ve finished in the bath, she’ll let me jump in too. Once it’s full of fresh hot water, obviously. I dread to think how scuzzy the water will be once you’ve finished with it.’

‘Fine, I give up. If you absolutely insist. But I still think we’re being a bit unfair inviting ourselves around like this.’

‘Stop being a martyr to the renovation. We’re in this for the long haul. I don’t see why we can’t treat ourselves every now and then.’

I nodded, already imagining the wonderful sensation of sinking into hot, floral-scented bubbles. I sent Leila a brief begging message to which she thankfully replied with a yes in capital letters and lots of exclamation marks, then grabbed a clean set of underwear, some jeans and a top, none of which were the kind of thing I’d wear for house transformation, and joined Charlie on the driveway where he was coaxing the Land Rover to life.

Even sitting in the ancient vehicle with the noisy heater on seemed like the greatest luxury compared to how we’d been roughing it over the last few days. As we whizzed towards Leila’s I looked longingly at the other houses, houses that weren’t falling to pieces like ours. I realised that since we’d moved in I’d not set foot beyond the boundaries of the village, which perhaps was why I’d been starting to forget that a world existed beyond the tumbledown walls of Oak Tree Cottage.

‘We’ll get there eventually,’ said Charlie, somehow knowing exactly what was going through my mind. ‘We can’t expect to do a complete transformation in the two weeks of the Easter holidays.’

‘I know that. But I fear I may have underestimated the scale of the challenge, despite my colour-coded list of tasks. I’m already worrying about how I’m going to cope when I go back to school. It’s all well and good joking about managing with cold showers and cooking on a camping stove, but it’s going to be a lot harder when I’m trying to juggle all that with marking, lesson prep and the renovations, plus it’ll be exam term, and the pressure is always even bigger then.’

‘If it makes you feel any better, I’m worried about keeping my business going while we’re doing all this building work. And I won’t have a lovely warm school building to escape to.’

I glanced across at Charlie. ‘That doesn’t make me feel better. In fact, it makes me feel a whole lot worse. I’ve been too busy focusing on myself, without considering the impact on you. Sorry, I’m a rubbish house partner.’

‘No, you misunderstand me. I didn’t say it because I was looking for sympathy. And you’re anything but a rubbish house partner. You’re the perfect house partner because you have a friend who’s prepared to let us descend on her and use all her hot water.’ He glanced away from the road for the briefest of seconds to send another of his annoying grins in my direction. ‘But seriously, we’re in this together, and the only way we’re going to get through this is together. We’re both going to have wobbly moments. The important thing is that we keep on talking about them, that way we can get each other through them. And if that’s not in The Rules, then it should be added immediately.’

‘That and the need for a hot bath at least once a week.’

‘That sounds like a subsection I could definitely go along with. Right, you’ll have to direct me from here.’

I navigated Charlie through the final few streets and then we pulled up in front of Leila’s flat. She was waiting for us by the front door with a pair of very large bath towels.

‘Blimey, have you travelled straight from a war zone?’ she said. ‘There’s the artfully rumpled look, and then there’s looking in a proper state, and I’m afraid you two are most definitely the latter. If the neighbours see you, they’re going to think I’m taking in a pair of rough sleepers.’

‘Thanks, Leila, lovely to see you too. And rough sleepers is a pretty accurate description of us. Right, Charlie, are we going to Rock, Paper, Scissors for who gets first dibs on the bath?’

‘Ladies first,’ said Charlie.

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