sound

Darius may have packed up his stuff, tucked his English cultural treasures – Mockney CD and FIFA2012 XBox game – into his case and gone back to Germany but, in the interests of inter-country exchange, he left his dust allergy. With Lolly.
She has not stopped sneezing since - she only does it to annoy - and, when not sneezing, she is otherwise attention-seeking in a deeply unpleasing way: shaking her collar dramatically, squeaking, running like a loon on acid round the house (without, I may point out, going back shame-facedly later and straightening all the rugs). Standing oppressively close with a resentful cast to her eye. Breathing. Christ it’s annoying. Perhaps she needs Ritalin?
“Makes you wish for the good old days when she was just ... there,” I said.
“Makes you wish for the good old days when she … wasn’t there,” said E, “When she was just a twinkle in your eye.”
“My eye!! A twinkle in your eye!” I said, squeaking as if I were about to shake my collar.
The next ten minutes can be glossed over, covering as they do the tedious and familiar ground of blame: who actually wanted the dog in the first place.

On the plus side, I finally have a valid reason to look pissed off, and am in a position to trade “tiresome noises I endure” stories with E. For, at work, E sits near a man who sniffs every 3 seconds, which E has worked out to be 9,000 times a day …. 45,000 times a week. They’ve worked in the same office 15 years. And when this man is not sniffing, he’s sneezing, like Lolly, over-dramatically, snerffff! Snerfff! SNERRFFF!!!
“Does anyone say Bless You?” I asked. E’s glance told me all I needed to know about bloody stupid comments.

“We should have got a kitten,” said F12, tutting over Lolly’s shenanigans, "Back then, not ..." He can't quite finish but relentlessly makes good on the feline-shaped hole in his childhood by being ever ready to channel “kitten,” while plugging away on the PR for a real one most hours of the day.
We did have a cat once, but Lolly’s inappropriate enthusiasm rather did for her and the kitchen fitter sped her away for his mum, on a cushion in his van. News is that she got the expensive end of cat ownership: the dwindling teeth, the cancer, the headstone. Animals. They break your little heart. And the vet drives around in a Beamer.

And now poor Lolly, rapidly losing her last vestiges of friends.
“Even if we had, that would be some geriatric kitten by now,” I said. “On the way out.”
“No," he mewed.
“Yup, or doing time, I’d heard. In prison, on the chain gangs.” The mythical kitten breaks rocks in my mind.
“How could you,” he whimpered, “Be so mean! To a kitten. Stew and wallow in your shame.”

E and I are rather fed up with stewing and wallowing in our shame. The imprecation is wheeled out frequently, by one currently in disturbing garb. F12’s favoured home clothes were a Poirot-dapper suit, with an Indiana Jones hat and a broken bamboo, for wielding purposes.
Then the hat was switched for a peaked Inspector’s cap (the child, irritatingly, having put in no interim service as a mere constable, drudge beneath a domed, unfetching hat, although one thinks he’d have warmed to the parking ticket issuing).
Tall wellies were dredged from somewhere. This is a resourceful child, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. Put it down and it will rapidly be considered unconsidered. I picture some random old man in the village, stuck in his slippers, still turning in vague circles, muttering, “Am sure Oi left they somewhere round ‘ere;” his gate banging in the wind, a newly-booted child hot-footing it to the shadows.
The suit jacket was bossily buttoned and a swagger stick appeared. Culled no doubt from someone’s prized tripod or music stand.

So now, a door will slam, doors always slam if a child is one or other side of them, there is no gentle touch, and seconds will pass so you will forget and next thing your heart’s in freefall catching sight, out of the window, of a small determined Nazi Country Gent inventorying the garden in a worrying manner, swagger stick bouncing on a Chino’d thigh.

Later I spoke to him, having been troubled by that dullard: the self-esteem thing, having bumped into Mrs Caring, and being reminded, by unflattering comparison, how very dreadful I am.

We had been at Mrs Lovely’s and I was being disloyal about my darling boy, regaling the dog gang with some witty tale.
“F12 doesn’t really speak like that, does he?” said Mrs Lovely.
“No, not really,” I admitted, do details of realism matter? “But when he goes off on one, we do all rather purse up our lips like this.”
Mrs Lovely and I chortled our horrid little heads off.
“Oh Good!” she said, “When Lulu’s being awful, Mr Lovely and I prance around the kitchen being the Munchkins in Wizard of Oz – like this – you know that face they make when they sing. Their hands! It’s the only thing you can do.”
We laughed the laugh of cruel parents snatching small treats from the wreckage.
“It’ll all come out in therapy,” she said happily.
“It will actually,” said Mrs Caring, not smiling as much as us. Certainly not smiling the smile of the imminently damned.
It sort of put a dampener on things.

“You don’t mind, do you, the teasing about the kittens stuff?” I was tidying his gun, smoothing his cap and propping up the swagger stick – she who would otherwise end up standing on it in bare feet in the dark was me. He sat on his bed and watched the staff at work.
“No,” he said, patting me tenderly as I sank beside him.
“I know you do it for my own good. To brush off my rough edges.”
“They’re quite furry edges, really,” I said kindly.
“Yes,” he said. Then he said, word for word, “Teasing gives life colour, it would be a shell without it, all beige. Shall I tell you about Lenin?” Somewhere in the bowels of the house came a canine sneeze. There was a sound such as of a collar being shook.
“Miaow?” F12 said, hopefully.

dust

F12 threw himself on the bed, emitting a funny little sound, such as a hamster in crisis might make, “No, no!” he squealed, “This cannot be! This is the deepest darkest day of the Mummy Occupation. Courage! She will not overcome!”
I squirted my delicious Method spray a little more vigorously and busied with my duster. Love product, loathe cleaning. Mmm, almond smell.
“She may take our stuff,” the One Boy Resistance Movement squeaked on, face down into the duvet, doing bugger all to help, “but our dignity and honour remain intact.”
I lifted his legs and poked the Hoover under them sending an expensive clatter of Lego flying up the tube.
"I'll do it!" Too late; the same watery promise has been made for weeks, months. His credibility is shot. "Later! I'll do it later!"

A grim business, entering his room, but needs must when a German Exchange boy is coming to stay. On Ritalin, and with a dust allergy. The heart soared.
I was anxious and collared the teacher.
The Ritalin concern was brushed aside with a brusque, “Lots of children are on it, you wouldn’t know,” so I moved onto the dust allergy, shadow boxing with the brutal truth of describing our house; jabbing hints instead, fearful of closing on the deal and saying out loud that it was a slut fest. “It’s not really … it’s not exactly …. Well it’s not very show-house,” I plumped for. The German teacher inclined her head and indicated that I should flounder further, she all but handed me a spade and pointed where to dig. “It’s more sort of, well, arty,” I cringed and rattled on, “lots of books and pictures and rugs and, and stuff. There’s quite a lot of stuff. And we’ve got a dog and back onto a field, so the chances of him sneezing at something here are quite high. So perhaps he’d be safer in another house?” I ended in a rush.
She gave me a look and said that this kind of allergy meant no building work. It would mean industrial levels of dust. That’s what a dust allergy meant. A vision of our house popped into my mind to fit the bill while I mused, too, on clever old German teachers, the things they know, their skill in reading between the lines, leaving you back where you started only with your card marked and your laziness on parade.

At the time of fessing up, the house was as nothing to what came next and, in retrospect, my protestations were rather fey: the house wasn’t that bad at all, but that was before we had to forfeit several thousand pounds in getting the roof tied together internally, which revealed that a vital steel was missing rendering T14’s room liable to imminent collapse. Back to the breeze blocks we went. Arguments with the builder and dwindling cash mean that T14’s room still has 2 big holes in it, ceiling and wall. No amount of dusting can deal with that one. It’s the sort of hole big enough for this season’s mutant spiders to squeeze through, if they hold their tummies in. That big. About 4’ square each.

So I’ve been attacking the house, on a mission to kill dust and destroy spiders, the beasts that nightly taunt me. Eight we had one night, eight.
One Ran Over My Arm.
Another, the size of Mordor, with legs to match, put approaching the larder out of the question for an evening.
Lolly fleetingly comes into her own as chief spider eater, by which, horrors, I mean only spider eater. But it’s not reliable and it’s not going to save her from the glue factory come the day.

I’ve hoovered under things, not merely round or near them; not merely thinking about doing it and then doing something else instead. I’ve stripped each room back, one by dusty one, in pursuit of hotel status. I’ve polished glass, the while lamenting our endless shelves boasting an array of the coloured beauties, all dunked now in lemony hot hot water and buffed to a sheen.
Towels are lined up, chrome gleams, tiles zing, floors glow. Like when you’re trying to sell the thing. If I’m not hands and kneesing with a dustpan, I’m fiddling with a fluffy thing on a stick rounding up the cobwebs. Really, it will be a housecoat and a scowl next, a broom and an organised shed.

I twitch when the family return to Hotel Lite, drifting into reception (I mean, the porch), before trudging across the foyer (rather, hall), to dump all their gubbins willy nilly in the kitchen. A backpack here, a blazer there, a tie sprawled half on half off a sofa. Sofas where I’ve even hoovered under the cushions.
Oh, pointless life.

In F12’s room, sub sofa cushions yielded a perhaps unsurprising haul: the predictable sock, foreign coins, a locked padlock (no key), a worrying quantity of curry powder, a teaspoon, a selection of bird badges, a short sharp stick and an electric toothbrush.

His room was the final frontier, the bête noir, Room 101. Dreaded and feared and overdue tackling. I girlfully girded my loins and took the brute on. The division of labour shifted: its best, 70:30 (me:him) swiftly became 90:10, became 105:-5 as he realised how much more pleasant it is to sit feet up, reading a book, so sauntered off to do just that in a room I’d prepared earlier (immaculate), leaving me the legacy of his own half-started attempts at tidying, all of which boiled down to fiddling with Lego and wailing and making things worse.

I summonsed him and held up something approximating trousers, “Do these still fit?”
He glanced across and nodded, “Yes.”
“Are you sure? Did you look? These, these trousers?”
“Yes,” (irritably) “hence the Yes.”
“It’s just that they’re age 7-8 and you’re nearly 13. Hence the Are you sure?”

At the end, I stepped back pleased, my face a boil in the bag red, back stiff, hands raw. Under the bed were storage boxes bursting with collated Lego; several bags of crap (broken this, grimy that, illicit wrappers, unidentifiable other) lolled in the boot of the car headed for the tip, “My childhood!” he keened, “How could you.”
Easily.
The room is now a room and not a squalid holding cell for ancient life forms. Moreover, the door can be left casually open for visiting Germans of a delicate persuasion to glance inside without risking death. One can inhale in there, and walking on the floor in bare feet is back on the cards. Really rather pleasant.

E returned from running round a county somewhere (recreational weekend fare).
“F12’s room looks good,” T15 said in the tones of one delivering unfeasible news.
“Good,” said E, “Good boy, F12!”
This was too much to bear, like having to sit by and just take that red-coated fattypuff Father Christmas getting all the praise.
I wheezed in desperation.
“Mummy helped,” F12 said airily. “It’s not as good as it was though. I liked it better before. It was more me.”
“What’s that you’re doing now?” E asked.
“This? Oh it’s a list. For my birthday. I need some more Lego. Quite a lot really.” He made that funny little sound he makes a lot to signify agreeing with himself – someone’s got to – “hmmmn mmm. Yes, more Lego.” He beamed. “There’s room now.”