Whatever It Takes by Adele Parks

Author:Adele Parks [Parks, Adele]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780755371365
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2012-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

25

‘How’s it going?’ Eloise placed a mug of sweet, strong tea on the only surface that she could find – the floor. Charlie was lying on his back fiddling with something under the whirlpool spa bath that was yet to be plumbed in. The room smelt of wood shavings and his aftershave, which was the same as Mark’s, and whilst this was pleasant Eloise wished the room smelt of sweat and toil. ‘How’s it going?’ was client code for ‘Will this be ready for Christmas?’ Eloise had been using the same code for a couple of weeks now; today the longing was tinged with something a little more abrupt and resentful. Glancing around the bathroom, she could answer her own question; you didn’t need to be a trained plumber to know that there wasn’t a hope in hell of this room being finished by Christmas. Least not this Christmas.

It had taken ten weeks to get this far. To date, Charlie had pulled out the ugly brown suite, pulled up the hideous, cheap lino and chiselled away at the wall tiles (which, when loosened, had brought down half of the partition wall, which then had to be fixed). He did these tasks well. He worked with care and precision, he didn’t mark Eloise’s hall walls as he carried debris out of the house, and none of the children had punctured their feet with discarded rusty nails. So far so good. Charlie had made the room square again. He’d re-plastered the wall so Eloise was now staring at what looked like the inside of a grocery box, beige and flat, but that wasn’t the look she’d been going for. Eloise really wanted the bathrooms finished. She knew they should be the least of her concerns but living with the chaos of unplumbed bathroom suites littering the house couldn’t be overestimated. Ray and the mums from school kept making jokes about some people favouring the industrial look as an interior design choice but Eloise was pretty sure that the industrial look wasn’t supposed to mean piles of tiles stacked precariously in towers in the bedrooms and bags of cement blocking the hall entrance.

She’d imagined the ultimate designer bathroom. Obscene luxury where she would literally feel her cares float away. A modern, white suite, with clean lines and no fuss. Eloise was adamant that a stylish home could be defined by the presence of white sheets and towels, white loo roll and white bathroom suites; anything else was tacky. Her mother had taught her that colours were for walls and children’s clothes. She’d chosen dark purple mosaic tiles for the surrounds and large, grey slate tiles for the floors. She had clusters of candles on stand-by and the brand-new fluffy towels, with as much bounce as a trampoline, were patiently hibernating in the airing cupboard, just waiting for their moment. When Eloise looked at the far-from-finished bathroom she tried not to despair and scream, ‘When oh when!’ Instead, she tried to see it as a blank canvas, a place where transformation was imminent.

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