Page 18 of Snowflakes at the Little Christmas Tree Farm
‘So’s yours.’ He sounds nonchalant. ‘Bigger than mine, even. You’ve got about six thousand Christmas trees.’
‘Sixthousand?’ My voice has risen to a pitch only audible to whales. He’s got to be joking. ‘And they’re not all dead?’
‘Of course they’re not. But don’t go getting too excited, they’re not in sellable condition either.’
‘What am I supposed to do with six thousand Christmas trees?’
‘Origami?’
It makes me laugh again. I can hear him doing something behind me, so I turn around and watch as he goes to a cupboard under the stairs and comes back with a mop. He takes the keys the estate agent gave me off the unit and lets himself out the back door. Outside there’s a bucket of steaming soapy water waiting, which he must’ve left there on his way over. He plunges the mop in, squeezes it out, and comes back inside to start swiping over the floor.
‘Are you seriously mopping my kitchen floor for me?’
‘There’s no point in putting clean things down in this mess. It won’t take a second.’ His eyes are twinkling in the low light and there’s something in his smile that makes me smile. ‘Have a cup of tea, you look like you need one.’
I can’t argue with him there. I gratefully guzzle tea from one of the plastic flask cups. Within minutes, the kitchen floor is a totally different colour than it was before, and Noel’s unfolding the air mattress and spreading it out. He inserts the nozzle of the foot pump into the hole and starts pressing his foot up and down on it.
‘I can do that,’ I say, thinking I should probably start doing something to prove I’m notcompletelyuseless at fending for myself. I’ve pumped up a few paddling pools and inflatable flamingos over the years, when the summer’s hot and Chelsea decides to put a kid’s pool in her miniscule back garden and sit in it drinking wine.
I go over to where he’s standing and try to take over without losing any of the air he’s already pumped in, but the process of me standing on one leg was never going to be a neat one – what I actually do is stamp on his foot and nearly overbalance. I flail around like a drunken great white shark trying to perform the Bolero routine and clutch the sleeve of his flannel shirt to stay upright. When did he take his coat off? I glance through the open kitchen door and see it hanging on the rack in the hallway, along with the hat he was wearing earlier. He’s wasted no time in making himself at home.
Once we’ve established that I’m not going to fall over and I’ve got a rhythm going with the foot pump, he goes back to the collection of things he dumped by the refrigerator and takes the heater outside to fill it. When he comes back in, he sets it on the floor, lights it and puts the safety guards in place, and sits back on his knees to show me the knobs to operate it. It makes the room smell like a Saturday morning at the garage. ‘This can burn quietly all night to give you a bit of light and warmth. The fumes will burn off in a minute, and you’ve got no roof or upstairs windows so there’s plenty of ventilation.’
I can feel the heat emanating from the little heater already, and it makes something that’s been tight in my chest since the moment I set foot in this house start to loosen.
He nods towards the pump. ‘Are you all right carrying on with that? Can I go and have a look around?’
‘Do you need a tour guide?’
‘This was my second home growing up, I know my way around.’ He takes a few steps across the kitchen but stops before he reaches the door. ‘Unless you want to give me the grand tour, that is? This is your house now, I have no right to walk around uninvited.’
I wave a hand dismissively and nearly overbalance again. ‘Be my guest.’
He adopts a French accent, which doesn’t work at all with his deep Scottish tone, and sings a few lines of ‘Be Our Guest’ fromBeauty and the Beast. It makes me laugh so much that I nearly overbalance yet again. Disney songs and imitating singing candlesticks are the last things I expected from him, and his French accent gets progressively worse as he goes up the stairs and strains of the song filter down through the floorboards.
The mattress is starting to take shape, and I manage to switch legs without falling over when my thighs start to burn. I listen to the creaking floorboards as he crosses the landing and goes into the rooms above me. I like that he thought to ask if I wanted to show him around, even though he undoubtedly knows this house better than I do, and I’m strangely comforted by the sound of his footsteps upstairs.
‘So, what do you think?’ I ask when he comes back into the kitchen.
He cocks his head to the side. ‘It’s not that bad.’
‘Not that bad? There are more bits of the house missing than still in existence.’
‘Your main problems are the roof and the windows. Everything else is superficial. Things will look better once you have electricity, water, and some cleaning products, but the windows all need replacing.’
Considering there are no windows lefttoreplace, even I could’ve guessed that. ‘How much is that likely to cost?’
‘I don’t know. A few thousand, at a guess. You haven’t got one whole bit of glass in the house.’
My eyes widen in shock. ‘I can’t afford that.’
‘You could afford this place,’ he says with a shrug.
‘Yeah, exactly. That was it. I put everything I had into buying it.’
‘And you didn’t think you might need to set aside some of your budget for essential repairs?’
‘Well, yeah, but I have a very limited amount left and it has to be prioritised.’
