We set off, me chirping, ‘Isn’t this FUN, darlings! A splendid new adventure! We’re going to be SO HAPPY in the new house, I just KNOW it!’ while the children slumped in the back seat and complained it was SO UNFAIR that I hadn’t let one of them sit in the front because Judgy had already called shotgun (it’s his favourite seat – he likes to look out of the window for cats), and I pointed out that I might have let one of them sit there if World War Fucking Three didn’t break out over whose turn it is to sit there every single bastarding time we get in the car, and would they please just CHEER UP ALREADY, because this was a LOVELY FRESH START and we were going to be VERY FUCKING HAPPY.
As we turned out of the street for the last time ever (well, in reality it probably wasn’t the last time ever, because my friend Katie still lives across the road, and so I’ll probably be back to visit her, but it was still a Symbolic Last Time Ever), the new people who had bought the house turned into it. I accelerated slightly, lest they spotted me in the distance and tried to come after me to enquire about the Smell in Peter’s room. I’d cleaned the house, I really had, and in truth it was probably the cleanest it had ever been since we’d moved in, but nothing I did, not shampooing the carpets, not liberal quantities of Febreeze, not all the TKMaxx scented candles in the world could entirely shift that musty, fusty, Teenage Boy Pong from Peter’s room.
When people were viewing the house I had to open his windows as wide as they would go, empty half a can of air freshener into the room and hope the stench would be masked for long enough to dupe any potential buyers, but within half an hour the smell would start seeping back – an unpleasant combination of sweaty socks, BO, a hint of stale jizz and something undefinable that can only be described as Boy, all pulled together with a generous helping of Lynx. It just seems to be something teenage boys emit, however clean they are, however often you boil-wash their towels and bedding, however many hours they spend in the shower, however many cans of deodorant they empty under each pit (‘Darling, seriously, you just need a quick squirt under each arm, you don’t need to spray clouds and clouds of the damn stuff till we’re all choking on a chemical cloud that whiffs of broken teenage dreams and sexual frustration’) and however often you surreptitiously check under the bed to see if the source of the stench is a crusty wank sock stashed under there. So far I’ve been spared this horror, I presume because I discreetly provide a never-ending supply of Mansize tissues – I was so shocked when I finally realised what Mansize tissues were for (I’d thought it was just because Kleenex assumed men were snottier than ladies).
I remember (many, MANY years ago) when I was in halls of residence at university, and you could immediately tell when you’d turned the corner from the (pleasantly scented with hints of Impulse and Ex’clamation and Wella Mousse) girls’ corridor and had entered the boys’ corridor, due to the Smell. After we left halls, the university renovated the building (it was planned, we hadn’t trashed the place. Much), and I mean they gutted the whole thing and stripped it down to the bare bones. I went in to drop something off to someone after the renovation, when the whole building was spanking fresh and full of new paint and plaster, and the entire concept of boys’ and girls’ corridors had been done away with and it was all mixed sex, but you could STILL smell the Smell on what had once been the old boys’ corridors. So I think the new owners might be stuck with it. Hopefully they’ll also have a teenage boy who can just slot into the stinky room and they’ll assume it’s only his own Smell, and not a lingering whiff of the previous occupant …
Anyway, new owners successfully avoided, off we trundled to our New Start, ‘I Will Survive’ (OBVS, what else? Though Jane has repeatedly asked me NOT to say ‘obvs’, or ‘totes amazeballs’, or ‘down with the kids’, even in an ironic way) blasting out of the car stereo. The sun was shining, the birds were singing – it was all Most Auspicious.
Unfortunately, about a mile down the road, the sun stopped shining, the birds stopped singing, the sky suddenly turned black and it began to piss down royally. This, needless to say, was Less Auspicious.
The removal men were distinctly unjovial at having to unload in the tipping rain, as if it was somehow my fault and I was some kind of misguided witch who had conjured up the storm on my way here, because mysteriously I actually wanted every single thing I owned in the world to get soaking wet, and they muttered darkly as they lugged everything in. Worse, in all my excitement about my quaint and adorable cottage, I’d neglected to actually measure or work out if any of my furniture would fit in, and there were some ugly scenes manoeuvring my super-king-size bed up the most un-super-king-size cottage stairs, and trying to get my sofa through the door into the sitting room. At one point the Chief Removal Man announced, ‘You’ll have to saw it in half, love!’ and I frostily reminded him how only that very morning he’d informed me that he was a removal EXPERT, and thus I had faith in his expertise and would not be sawing my sofa in half, because he could jolly well work out how to get it in, thank you very much (after all, he’s a man, he should have had YEARS of practice at trying to get it in). The sofa was eventually manhandled in, although the dark muttering had turned into open and loud swearing by that point.
Unfortunately, now that the previous owners’ artfully placed furniture had been removed and the sun was no longer streaming merrily through the windows like it had been when I’d viewed the property, it began to dawn on me that all the ‘quirks’ of the house I’d convinced myself were ‘rustic’ might possibly also be construed as being a ‘bit shit’, even ‘problematic’. The house was also a lot darker and somewhat damper than I remembered, and there were some suspicious marks on the ceiling I hadn’t noticed before, which suggested the roof wasn’t in perhaps as quite as good order as I’d blithely assumed when I’d dismissed the survey report’s queries about it as mere naysaying.
Simon had offered to come with me to view houses, which I’d tartly informed him was quite unnecessary as I was perfectly capable of finding a house without him – after all, there was a reason he was now my ex-husband. He’d mildly replied that he was only trying to help, and had thought that in his professional capacity he might have been able to offer some useful advice, nothing more. I, meanwhile, declined his offer once again on the basis that I wasn’t going to all the trouble, effort and expense of divorcing him only to have him continue to piss on my chips when it came to finding my Dream House. Or even my Vaguely Dreamish House. Looking around the Not Quite Even Vaguely Dreamish House now, I reflected that I’d possibly been a little hasty in rejecting his offer of help.
But never mind, I thought. It’ll be FINE! We just have to be positive, as I pointed out to Jane as she wailed in horror at the realisation that she no longer had fitted wardrobes to not put her New Look hauls in, but instead had an alcove with a rail across it in front of which I was planning on hanging an adorable floral curtain.
‘HOW am I supposed to cope with that to keep my clothes in?’ she shrieked. ‘It’s fucking Soviet, Mother. It’s probably one of the things that define you as living in poverty. This is inhumane. I could report you!’
‘To who?’ I said. ‘I don’t think fitted wardrobes and constant access to Snapchat are actually included the UN’s Rights of a Child. I think it’s more things like clean water and not being sent down the mines. And anyway, you’ve never in your entire life put anything away in your wardrobe. You just chuck it all on the floor, so I fail to see how this will actually make any difference to you whatsoever.’
‘Do we even have clean water?’ moaned Jane. ‘Are you going to announce next that we have to fetch it from a well? Maybe a river? Or are we lucky enough to have some sort of pump in the yard that we can fill buckets from so we can crouch in a tin bath once a week in front of the fire and try and scrub the rural dirt from our calloused palms? By the light of an oil lamp?’ she added dolefully.