Do You Want to Know a Secret? by Claudia Carroll Read Free Book Online Page B

phone down the loo, and her oldest brother didn’t realize and weed on it. Anyway, she asks if it’s OK if we convene at my place the following night, that her mum has agreed to babysit, and that she badly needs a night off or there’s a fair chance she’ll strangle someone, so I text back, saying grand, no worries, my house it is. Well, house slash building site would probably be more accurate.
    It WILL be lovely when it’s finished, is my permanent mantra as every morning I sit gulping down cups of coffee at my washing machine, which is doubling up as a kitchen table for me at the moment. I’m not kidding, the house and renovations are costing me so much that I can’t afford proper furniture.
    Well, at least, not yet.
    It’s a dotey, tiny little doll’s house Victorian railway cottage , which was waaaay over my budget when I bought it last year, in the face of a great deal of opposition from my nearest and dearest which I can neatly summarize thus:
    DAD: ‘It’s nothing but a money pit, there’s damp downstairs and I’d swear I see a bit of dry rot, and you know the maintenance on an old house is constant, a bit like the Golden Gate Bridge, you start work on one end and by the time you finish, it’s time to go back and start all over again blah, blah, blah etc., etc. . . .
    Dad, I should tell you, fancies himself as a great handyman, on account of a power drill we got him one Christmas, and even though he spent ages swaggering around the house with a very authoritative-looking tool belt strapped to his waist, all he really ended up doing was putting a load of Swiss cheese holes in my mother’s good IKEA occasional table. Poor Mum, every bank holiday weekend she has to put up with him strutting around, dismantling her hostess trolley and magazine stands to illustrate how badly they’re made. (‘Held together with glue, do you see? Total crap.’) Then abandoning everything and leaving a big mess all over the living-room floor the minute a Cup Final match comes on.
    I do not know how my parents haven’t divorced, I really don’t.
    MIDDLE BROTHER: ‘Should have gone for a cool penthouse somewhere in town instead, Vick, guys love that, plus you’ll never get the old-lady smell out of that house. And is that actual stippling on the ceilings?’
    MY INCREDIBLY CONDESCENDING SISTER-IN-LAW, A WOMAN WHO’D MAKE A S TEPFORD WIFE LOOK LIKE W AYNETTA S LOB: ‘It’s so . . . what’s the word? Oh I know, cosy.’
    Which, by the way, we all know right well is code for ‘small’. You know, just like when you say a guy is ‘distinguished’, it’s actually a euphemism for ‘really old and I wouldn’t go near him in a sugar rush’. Then to add insult to injury, when I did eventually move in she said, ‘I LOVE coming around to visit you, Vicky. It’s just like camping out. And I can totally sympathize. When we had the builders in a few years ago, my masseuse said she never saw me retain such tension in my shoulders. Never get a conservatory, sweetheart, it’s soooo not worth the hassle.’
    Even Barbara had a go. She came to a viewing with me and grudgingly said, ‘Buy it if you want, but you’ll never get a man to move in here with you. For God’s sake, the outside is painted pink. Pink, as a colour, is a very well-known man-repeller. That’s a fact. Bit like a single woman with a cat. Guys tend to think you’re a total weirdo.’
    See what I mean? I ignored the lot of them and bought it anyway, all swept up in the romance of owning a house with beautiful period features, bay windows, a cast-iron fireplace in the bedroom, and a lovely, bright downstairs kitchen with actual coving on the ceiling. ‘Listen to you, your trouble is you’ve seen too many Merchant Ivory movies and now you fancy yourself as Helena Bonham Carter in a tight corset, clutching your pearls, looking out the sash window,’ Laura quips at me every time I enthuse about how lovely it WILL be in about two hundred years’ time, when