It was knackering. But we got rid of all the junk and the house looked ten times better already. We kept some of the chairs, the kitchen table and the ragged and stained three-piece suite. I thought there was no way Dad would want anyone to see that but when he saw me dragging the settee towards the back door he shouted at me to stop, pulled it back to the lounge and said, ‘Throws, Luke. Five quid each at the market. Cover a multitude of sins.’
I managed to bite my tongue and not ask why, if they were that cheap, and he saw them every other day, he hadn’t bought them six pissing months ago. Almost everything else went on the pile though. We were ruthless and it only seemed a shame that we had missed November the 5th. The bonfire was the fun bit. We stood and watched years of battered and tatty Thornber history go up in flames. We toasted the old couple with cups of tea and watched as the flames crackled and spat and then burnt into smoke and drifted across the fell.
Then the real work started. There had been a change of plan and I was to start painting by myself. Dad was going to make a start with the floor sander he’d hired. I thought that was unfair, that he’d got the fun job. But then I saw how hard and slow it was, and how much floor space he had to cover, and I was pleased I was on painting duty. I slunk away and left him sweating and swearing and covered in dust.
I started in what would be Jon’s bedroom and thought I was doing OK until Dad came into the room and laughed when he saw the progress I’d made. I thought I’d done a pretty good job but we needed to be quicker, he said, and we should only use the brushes on corners.He poured half a tin of paint into a tray, grabbed one of the big rollers and rolled it over a section of the wall. He covered as much in thirty seconds as I’d done in my half an hour. After I’d been shown the trick I cracked on and finished Jon’s room in a couple of hours. I finished upstairs at about nine that night.
We were too tired to play snakes and ladders; Dad just warmed up a pizza and we sat in the bare front room and ate off our laps. I said I was knackered. Dad said it was a break from dragging wood through a forest. I asked how the sculpture was going and when we could see it.
‘Shortly,’ he said. ‘Nearly there.’
With my dad, that could mean tomorrow or next Christmas. You never could tell. My heart spun when I saw him bring in a whisky bottle and pour himself a measure, but he told me it was just a small drink, just to relax, that we had another busy day tomorrow. And I checked the bottle before we went to bed and it looked like just one or two had been poured.
The next day followed a similar pattern but Dad finished sanding the floors and started helping me with the painting. We had a brief break for lunch, ate more pizza in the evening and then carried on working. Dad even managed to varnish some of the floors downstairs and got started with some of the smaller jobs. He replaced the missing wood in the banister and had a go at making the plugs safer. I didn’t know if they would pass any tests, but at least you didn’t worry about pulling the socket out from the wall when you unplugged the kettle any more.
Dad had bought throws and got more light bulbs and light shades and a couple of lamps and some picture frames. It was almost midnight when all the painting had been finished and when he started screwing in the light bulbs and fitting light shades. I was collapsed on the settee, my eyes flickering, my legs jerking out in sleep spasms. I stretched myself awake and said it was pity we didn’t have anything to go in the frames. Dad looked at me like I was simple and told me that paintings were one of the few things we had loads of. I managed to stay awake a few minutes longer but by the time he started to bang nails into walls I was gone and sleep was swallowing me. I dragged myself up to my brand new bedroom and climbed into bed without taking my paint-splattered clothes off. I fell asleep in a second, despite the banging, clattering and occasional swearing from downstairs.