AS I HEARD IT

The message

Sally Vincent

Having grown contented with life in a raffia and sacking hut furnished with two hard cots and a piece of mirror with rag round the edge, whose refinements were limited to an antique fly-spray, two candles and a short stumble to the Aegean, it was perhaps a little capricious of me to come home to all these luscious water taps, dunlopillo mattresses and closing doors and describe the whole lot, in the manner of Bette Davis, as a Dumppnp. Perhaps the trauma of re-entry lowers one's tolerance threshold to a roof that has been leaking for five years, a sitting-room carpet with a six-foot desert down the centre like an old man's parting, a kitchen that has been rightly described as a sink of iniquity, a bathroom so unsightly I have developed the custom of directing guests to the spare lavatory through the broom cupboard with a careless cry of "don't impale yourself on the Hoover," assuming my jest and the Christopher Logue poem over the pan will distract them from the squalor and its reflection upon me long enough for them to return to more bohemian fancies around the mouldering Wilton, and lastly, the Child's room (which we have always blamed on the child, who bears with amazing fortitude the name Mr Dirty) which is, for all I know, condemnable.

From now on, I said to myself and anyone else who would listen, there are going to be some improvements around here, I'm going to get Men in to Do Things. Since money is an object, there were certain manifestations of neglect I could deal with myself, thus leaving heavy reforms to the experts. I could, for instance, buy a pair of those sponge covered scissors you clean venetian blinds with. Arid flush out the nest of black beetles under the cooker. And attend to the several paper lanterns so that they encompass their electric light bulbs instead of dangling six inches beneath them. And I could resolve to be more fastidious about the cats' litter tray. But there my talents desert me. I drew up a list of priorities. Get roof mended. Get bathroom decorated. Get kitchen refloored. Bung the child an endless supply of fifty pence pieces and let him do-his-himself.

There was never any question of entering into these projects thoughtlessly. Naturally I gave a great deal of consideration to my method of approaching the good people from the Yellow Pages Classified (South West). Should I describe Myself as a Mrs or a Miss? Miss would conjure a shrewd, bitchy spinster who would take no shoddy workmanship while M.rs would suggest a soft, feminine lady With all the time in the world. I decided to be a Miss.

After two days of concentrated ringing Up, ringing back and waiting to be rung up and rung back, I realized a sore dialling finger. Two more days and I realized some

thing else. All those reassuringly inartistic line drawings of roofs with " roof troubles ended" on them, and those smiling fellows attached to paint brushes pointing "the way to brighter homes" are mere snares to get you into conversation with innumerable lying zombies who say they'll send a man in the morning and don't.

On the fifth day a man came. He would do the bathroom, he said, in two days. He looked about thirteen years old and was naked under his dungarees, but I was grateful. At least he didn't whistle through his teeth and say " dicey, dicey" when I described what I wanted him to do. Besides, with nothing and no one to compare with his performance I was bound to assume his mode of operation was normal.

He came in at around eleven each morning, scampered up the stairs and spent ten minutes in the bathroom. Then he came down for coffee and money to buy the tools of his trade. The first day it was a couple of pounds for lining paper, the second a pound for a knife, the third a pound for stripper and the fourth a pound for sandpaper. On one occasion I had only a five pound note and that was the day of the little mound of change, and on each day the errand took four hours. This did not worry me unduly, since my bathroom is small enough for anyone to lie in, sit on and stand at the various bits of porcelain and still be able to reach anything else' in the room — and would therefore be an undemanding job for any decorator, however eccentric.

Each morning I furtively inspected progress while he was out, so as not to make him feel uneasy. And each morning the scene was the same. There in the bath would be two little strips of old paper, delicately peeled from the wall, and there in the lavatory bowl gigantic evidence of recent use. For four days, since I am afflicted with a somewhat anal sense of humour, I responded lightly to these unpromising beginnings. Such rancour as I felt I betrayed only to the numerous recalcitrants who had failed to put in any kind of appearance at all.

In the course of a week my tongue had lashed and relashed no less than fortyseven telephone voices. I berated them for their false advertising and their broken promises and was told that rudeness / facetiousness/temper would get me nowhere. I tried to engage them in conversation and they said they were busy. But what are you busy doing? I asked, with what I considered to be sweet reason, but nervous every time that I might possi bly be asking the butcher to sell me a pound of sugar. Oh great, you're busy mending roofs, you do mend roofs, that's specially exciting to know because what I was asking was that you should come and mend my roof. And lay my lino. And cut my carpet. And mend my window. Indeed, I was exceedingly sharp, even cutting, about the whole thing. But nobody actually turned up.

Meanwhile the bathroom queen had been reassuringly regular. He also broke the window, lost the fittings for the venetian blinds, snapped my palate knife in half, ate a box of chocolate biscuits and smattered odd pieces of lining paper across the ceiling. By his fifth day I began to imagine that he somehow, mysteriously, held the key to all the frustration and lunacy of the past fortnight. I felt that if I could persuade him to explain to me what he thought he was up to I would have the answer to everything.

He was, when I approached, stabbing at a piece of sticky paper with a razor blade. Not all that querulously I inquired his opinion of his progress. "Must get on, must get on," he replied and dithered his arms up and down his chest to enforce his intention.

" You said," I insisted, "that this was a two day job, and here we are after five with nothing much accomplished . . Aren't we?" I added.

"Must get on, must get on" he repeated, flapping away like the White Rabbit.

The moment I heard myself utter the words, "quite frankly," I knew we were in for a moment of truth. "Quite frankly," I said, "I think you're barmy." Rushing on, mindful of the razor blade and in case he really was, "I mean, I can't see how it profits you to spend all this time doing nothing."

With vast dignity he replied that he was not in in for profit. Well, what are you in it for, I returned, quick as a flash, to give me pleasure? And what do you mean, not in it for profit? You've got to live, haven't you, and you must consume as much as anyone else, I said, blushing faintly at the daily evidence of this fact. " What's your game?" I demanded, recovering my normal pallor.

"This," he said, waving the razor recklessly round the room to take in the whole pathetic mess, "this is the way the working class shows contempt for the middle class." He had to repeat it three times before I understood what he was saying. It's the revolution, he explained. Surely I'd got the message by now? What did I think all those phone calls were about?