He could give me, he said, a ballpark figure, but a job like this always incurred extra costs. He’d do his best to make sure they weren’t high: he just wanted to be sure I knew what I was letting myself in for, that was all. While he spoke he had started walking around the kitchen, tapping walls, examining window frames, squatting down to wrench a small section of skirting board away with a screwdriver in order to look behind it, which elicited another volley of thumps.
‘Believe me, I’ve seen some neighbours in my time,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘With people living on top of each other the way they do here, it comes with the territory.’
He’d had people walk into properties where his men were working and try to wrest the tools from their hands; he’d had countless threats, legal and otherwise; he’d had people blaming him for their misfortunes, their illnesses and breakdowns, sometimes for their whole lot in life, because some people – he pointed down at the floor beneath our feet – will never take responsibility and are always on the lookout for someone else to blame. And no matter how obvious it might seem that he himself was not deserving of that blame, that he was merely the representative of someone else’s aims and desires and was only doing his job, he was nonetheless in the firing line.
‘Do you mind if I take a look out back?’ he said.
We went out to my half of the garden so that he could examine the rear of the house. When we opened the door a flailing cloud of startled pigeons rose flapping and whooping into the air around us. The builder put his hand to his chest.
‘Frightened the living daylights out of me,’ he said, with a wheezing, apologetic laugh.
The commotion of dirty-coloured birds settled heavily back on the window ledges and the drainpipes that criss-crossed the brickwork.
‘Christ alive,’ the builder said, screwing up his eyes. ‘There’s hundreds of them. I don’t like pigeons,’ he said, shuddering. ‘Horrible things.’
It was true that there was something malevolent about the way the birds crowded themselves, waiting, along their perches. Often they would skirmish, pecking and shoving one another flapping out into the air and then frantically scrabbling to regain a foothold. The houses to either side stood as though in feigned ignorance of the squalor in their midst: from here their tranquil, well-painted rear facades could be seen, looking out over tidy gardens with barbecues and patio furniture and scented flower beds. Often, over the summer, I had sat in the dark kitchen late in the evening watching the people next door, whose garden was just visible from the window: they were a family, and on warm nights would frequently eat outside, the children running and laughing until late on the lawn, the adults sitting at the table drinking wine. Sometimes they spoke in English but more usually they spoke in French or German: they entertained many friends and often, sitting in the dark in the unfamiliar room listening to the foreign hubbub of their conversation, I would become confused, forgetting where I was and what phase of life I was in. The light from the basement window would fall on the sordid garden so that it had the ghostly look of a ruin or a graveyard, with the spectral black angel rising at its centre. It seemed so strange that these two extremes – the repellent and the idyllic, death and life – could stand only a few feet apart and remain mutually untransformed.
To the right of mine was the professors’ garden, whose geometric design of gravelled paths and abstract statuary and fronded, esoteric plants suggested thought and contemplation. Sometimes I would see one or the other of them, sitting on a bench in the shade, reading. They had spoken to me once, over the fence, to ask whether I would mind giving them some of my apples, as my predecessor, they said, had been wont to do. The desolate apple tree in my garden was a Bramley, apparently. It yielded surprisingly good fruit: she had always given them a generous amount, which kept them in apple pies for the whole winter.
‘You haven’t made life easy for yourself, I’ll say that much,’ the builder said when we got back inside. ‘Like I say, it’s a can of worms.’ He looked at me quizzically. ‘It seems a shame,’ he said, ‘to put yourself through all this. You could always stick it back on the market, let some other idiot take it on. Buy yourself something in a nice new development – you’d have a lot of change left over, believe me, by the time you’re done here.’
I asked him where he lived and he said it was in Harringey, with his mother. It wasn’t ideal, but to be honest, if you spent all day working on other people’s houses, you didn’t have much energy left for being interested in your own. He and his mother got along all right; she was happy to cook an evening meal for him, and his diet was bad enough, let alone his lack of exercise. You’d think building was a physical trade, he said, but I spend all my time in my van. As a younger man he’d been in the army – he had that to thank for any physique that remained to him. Now that his heart was on the blink he’d had to start thinking about his health.
‘If you can call it thinking,’ he said, ‘lying in bed at night panicking for the thirty seconds it takes you to fall unconscious after a day at work.’
The faltering sounds of a trombone were coming through the kitchen wall, as they always did at this time of day: it was the daughter of the international family next door, who did her practice with such monotony and regularity that I had even come to learn her mistakes by heart.
‘It’s these single-skin buildings,’ the builder said, shaking his head. ‘Every sound goes right through them.’
I asked him when he had left the army, and he said it was more or less fifteen years ago. He’d seen some things in service, as you could imagine, but no matter how twisted up those situations became – even in his periods abroad – their component elements were basically familiar to him. What he’d seen in his years as a builder, on the other hand, was pretty much a foreign country.
‘Without wishing to imply anything,’ he said, turning and looking out of the window with his arms folded, ‘you get to learn a lot about people’s lives when you’re in their houses every day. And the funny thing is,’ he said, ‘that no matter how self-conscious people are at the start, no matter how much they begin by keeping up appearances, after a week or two they forget you’re there, not in the sense that you become invisible – it’s hard to be invisible,’ he said with a smile, ‘when you’re knocking out partitions with a claw hammer – but that they forget you can see and hear them.’
I said it must be interesting to be able to see people without them seeing you. It seemed to me that children were often treated in the same way, as witnesses whose presence was somehow not taken into account.
The builder gave a melancholic laugh.