The Bone Bodies

THE BONE BODIES

DAVID MARTIN

Copyright © 2012 by David Martin.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Moving House

Chapter 2 The Woods

Chapter 3 The Skeleton Under The House

Chapter 4 The Bone Bodies

Chapter 5 The Figure In The Dark

Chapter 6 The Bone Bodies Return

Chapter 7 The Voices

Chapter 8 O’Malley

Chapter 9 The Vicar’s Story

Chapter 10 Breaking Out

Chapter 11 Trapped

Chapter 12 No Escape

Chapter 13 Mr Friedman

Chapter 14 My Fault

Chapter 15 Repentance

Chapter 16 Of My Creation

Chapter 17 The Unmarked Grave

Chapter 18 Picking Up The Pieces

Chapter 19 The Rising

Chapter 20 My Nightmares

Chapter 21 The End Of It All

Aftermath

For Kieran, who gave me the inspiration for the Bone Bodies.

I t was all Mikey’s fault. He was the one who first used the words ‘Bone Bodies’. If only I had known before what they were and why they came, I would never have brought my family to live in this town with me. I didn’t know that the madness that had descended upon this land in the past would rear up again to claim a hold on me and those I loved. I don’t believe in fate or destiny, but it seems that something out there wanted us in that house and wanted me there most of all. I think the mysterious vicar from the next village may have something to do with it, and I’m pretty sure he knows more than he’s alluding to. I don’t know if I’ll be alive much longer, so I need to tell the story now, while I can still make some sense out of my own life. I must ensure that nobody else ever has to encounter the Bone Bodies.

CHAPTER 1

MOVING HOUSE

I t’s not easy moving house, especially when you’re an out-of-work actor with a wife and four kids on the go. It’s even worse when you’ve been forced to make the move because you can no longer afford your luxurious pad in the nation’s capital city. But that was what happened to me and my family in the winter of two years ago. They had always told me that my royalty cheque would run out someday, but I never believed them. I thought my one co-starring role in a moderate blockbuster would set us all up for life.

How wrong could I be? We had moved to a luxury apartment in Swiss Cottage, a huge five-bedroom pad in central London, with massive bedrooms, two ornate bathrooms, and two reception rooms. The kids, I, and my wife loved it. Things were just about perfect for us for a while. I was sure that the good reviews I had received for my last film role would be enough to guarantee me work for considerable time to come. And in the meantime, I had loads of partying and high-society living to do.

It just didn’t seem to pass the way I had planned, though. There just seemed to be no room in town for English actors who looked like Mr Bean but talked like big Arnie, had the brainpower of Stephen Hawking, and had the dancing ability of John Travolta. I had always thought it to be a great combination, but maybe that was the root of the problem. Having broken it with one film, I was typecast into a role that would never come up again.

Don’t get me wrong, I tried. I read scripts, I went to auditions, and I sucked up to as many film execs and critics as I could meet. But nothing seemed to work. A year and a half after our dream move, we had to concede that the dream was over, and we had to move away and start anew.

It took us a while to find a suitable new place, and during that time, we had to rent a three-bedroom cottage on the outskirts of London. It was cramped, noisy, and dirty, yet it was all we could afford at that time. Oh, how the mighty can fall! Central London houses seemed to be out of our price range now since the cost seemed to rise daily with the tide. I wanted to be near London, but equally, neither of us wanted to have to settle for second best. In the end, we found a decent-sized house up the road in Gales Rise—a small village on the perimeter of Luton, only about half an hour’s drive from where I needed to get to in the city and big enough for all of us to spread out a bit.

The thing that really got me about this house was how big it was for the money we paid. I suppose it was because it was a bit rundown in places and in need of a fair bit of work. It had been empty for a couple of years, by all accounts, and had fallen into disrepair—nothing too major, mostly cosmetic stuff, but still enough to plunge the value down. The seller had moved overseas and apparently didn’t have the time to worry about it; he just wanted a quick sell. Despite its size and ideal location, there had been an overwhelming lack of interest in the place. Maybe that should have rung the alarm bells early on, but it didn’t.

Since I had no job to go to, I figured that there would be no problem in finding the time to do a lot of the necessary work, and so we put the deposit down, and a few short weeks later, we moved in.

I guess I should let you know who ‘we’ consisted of. There was me, Michael Warner (sadly no relation to the Warner Bros., who make the films), and my wife of nine years, Rachel—at thirty-five years old, she was a year older than me, but most people thought she was younger, and she certainly looked it. The four kids were Davey, born nine months almost to the day after the wedding, Peter, now a lively seven-year-old, and Michael Jr., aka Mikey, who was now four, coming up five. The runt of the litter was little two-year-old Seth. Rachel was a big fan of Dusk till Dawn and had wanted to name the latest arrival after George Clooney’s character. All in all, we were a happy and contented family, although the happiest times seemed to be behind us for the moment, and I realise now that those times can never return.

We also had a cat. A slightly shabby looking moggie called Buzz Lightyear, so named after Davey’s favourite film character of the time. I had so hoped he would want to name it something sensible. I felt such a fool shouting out to Buzz Lightyear whenever the damn thing went missing. Still, I suppose it could have been far worse.

Did I ever mention I used to be an actor? Oh yes, well, I suppose you’ll want to know how I got into all that and where it took me. It all began when I was in school. I grew up in a little village near Barnet and attended the local primary school. There were less than a hundred of us there; it was a tiny place. Acting was the one thing I was really good at, and when the time came for me to go up into big school, that was the one area I looked forward to developing myself in.

I was never that much of an academic and never really settled into the boring routine of turning up to lessons and learning stuff. I and learning didn’t really go hand in hand. Drama was always the one area I could kind of do well in. I guess I had always had a natural flair for it. I got a starring role in the school production, playing Oliver Twist. I was only twelve at the time, so I beat a lot of older and more experienced kids to the role. The play was a storming success, and from there, I got the bug for being on the stage. The next year I was in a starring role again, this time as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet. Again the play received a rapturous reception from the four-hundred-strong audiences, and we sold a record number of tickets over the week of the play, even adding another night to the performance to cope with demand. It seemed like they had all come to see me, at least in my eyes they had. I was the star, a great stage actor. By the time I came to leave school, I had added Hamlet and Macbeth to my portfolio.

Everyone was talking about me. ‘He’s going to make the big time,’ some of them used to whisper. Despite this, I never went to stage school. I suppose my parent couldn’t afford it. I wasn’t worried though; I was confident enough that I would land my dreams by doing things my way, and who needed a stage school anyway. I knew how to act, and there was nobody out there who could teach me anything anyway. I was cocky and self-aware. I decided I was going to graduate from the stage and become a movie star instead. Since acting was the only thing I had ever really enjoyed, I decided to follow my dream.

The first couple of years were tough. I had no money and spent my time scratching a living on the streets, sometimes getting shitty jobs in seedy bars or washing dishes in crappy restaurants. Always hard work, always low paid, always cash in hand, and no questions asked. No job ever lasted more than a few weeks, and then I would hit the road again. I usually had just enough cash to afford basic lodgings. Nothing fancy, just a room in someone’s attic mostly, but at least it was a base and somewhere I could call home, if only for a short time. That would be where I would spend my evenings, practising for the auditions to parts I hoped I would get. Of course, I turned up to the auditions in quite a shabby state most of the time, often not having any money for decent clothes or even a proper haircut. I dread to think what most of those people thought of me. On more than one occasion, I was told to go away until I’d had a shave and a haircut. It was quite embarrassing, but there was nothing much I could do about it.

I auditioned for anything and everything. If you know what it’s like being an out-of-work actor, you’ll know that you’ll do anything to get a part, no matter how small. I auditioned for stage plays, TV commercials, and a couple of drama productions going out on the telly. I didn’t get a single thing out of them. I was about giving up hope and jack it all in for something more stable when I landed a part in a long-running TV series. Nothing fancy, but it would be enough to pay the bills for a while. Plus, it was a leg-up, a foot on the first rung of the ladder. I got myself a haircut and some new clothes and set off to start the grown-up phase of my life.

Work came naturally to me, and I was surprised how disciplined I could be: getting up in the morning, often before the sun rose, doing a full day at the studio, and then coming home again. I even found the time to get myself a social life, and it was some time at this point that I met Rachel, and we started dating. It may sound strange, but I can’t remember our first meeting or our first date. I guess I was so wrapped up in what I was doing back then that I couldn’t see the rest of the world around me.

Then came the big break. I had been working on the TV show for almost five years, a cop show, where I was one of the cops, a regular around the station but never really a central character. Like I said, it was enough to pay the bills but not enough to make me a star. I got wind that there was a big-budget film coming to town, and they needed extras for a big scene; only they wanted a few experienced actors into the mix too as it was quite a complex scene, and they didn’t feel like having to train the bunch of drunk students who normally turned up. I and about thirty others from the set went down to this huge aircraft hanger in Hatfield, where the auditions were being held. One thing I didn’t know at the time was that one of the central characters in the film had not yet been cast. They were looking for an English gentleman type to play an army major during the First World War. What they wanted was someone of unassuming looks, but who could also command with authority. Most of the American guys were too rugged in their looks, and those who weren’t were a bit too comical or at least totally unable to play an English guy with enough conviction. So as it transpired, I was plucked out of the line and given my first role in a Hollywood movie.

I didn’t earn that much from it. I didn’t ask for much either; the thrill of being a movie star was enough allure on its own. I felt this could be a useful springboard to greater things, and as such, the money was of secondary concern. I can honestly say that the time spent in making the movie was the second best time of my life. The best time came later when I had to go to all the premieres with the rest of the starring cast.

The Battle of the World was a box office success, not on the grand scale of Star Wars or Indiana Jones but still pretty big in the grand scheme of things. I was famous for the first time ever; my face became recognised round and about, and I became convinced that offers for work would flood in for me. I had received generally very good reviews for my role in Battle and for my ability to command an army with such strong conviction, but few, if any offers of work came my way.

It left me feeling very sour towards the whole industry. I had worked my balls off to do well with my one great opportunity, and I had been led to believe that my performance had been a success. I was to learn then of the cruel fickleness of Hollywood. Nobody cared. In a world full of selfish people, all living off the rotting carcasses of each other, there was no room for sentiment. I was not a Hollywood star, and I never would be. Instead, I was just one of the thousands of British actors who made it there for a fleeting moment, caught a glimpse of the top, and then was plummeting back down to earth before the ice had melted in the champagne bucket.

I suppose some of it could have been my fault too. I guess I am far along in life now to accept that much at least. In truth, there were some offers of work, mostly from BBC sitcoms and the like. A year or two earlier I would have jumped at them but not now though. I was a big movie star with a glittering career spanning out in front of me. I wasn’t going to be bothered with trifling small matters like small-screen sitcoms. If I remember correctly, I don’t even think I returned their phone calls. Very amiss of me, even if I wasn’t interested, I should still have been British enough to thank them for their interest and decline politely. That at least would have kept the door open for me, if only ajar a little bit. But I was in Hollywood now, and Hollywood was rubbing off on me. The unreality of the whole place seemed to addle my brain a bit, or maybe a lot. Then, eventually, with no other offers coming from the States, it was time to swallow my pride and go back home.

Except, they didn’t want me there either any more. The papers had got a hold of the story and reported how I saw myself as too big for Britain after just one film and how I had become snooty, aloof, and ungentlemanly. I couldn’t really even deny it; it was pretty much an accurate account of my behaviour. Subsequent reports claimed that my film wasn’t all that good anyway, and certainly, it hadn’t been well received outside of America as it had inside.

That is always the big flaw with any American war movie. They always seem to portray themselves as the heroic men who rescued the Allies. I was playing the part of a British officer whose massively depleted squad of soldiers was on the brink of surrender. Along came the yanks and settled the score for us. I never stopped to think much about it until I returned to Blighty, but that wasn’t the real war at all. And for all the artistic licence we allow in our films, there has to be an element of realism, especially when the film is of a historic nature. This one didn’t have it, and while I had been wrapped up in my little Hollywood bubble, critics over the pond had been systematically ripping my movie to pieces. Not that I had spent the time looking up to even care, never mind defend myself. ‘Face it, Mike,’ I said to myself one day. You’ve fucked this one up big time.

So that’s how I came to be back here, just another out-of-work actor with a family to look after and no money to do it with. I was lucky in many ways that Rachel was herself no thicko and worked as a moderately successful accountant. She had been with a highly reputable firm in London called Houston Waterman Fredericks but had left when she became too heavy with Seth to carry on working. When we moved to Luton, one of the first things we did was to set up a study area so she could continue to work freelance. Fortunately, Houston Waterman Fredericks had a number of clients out this way, and they paid Rachel a retainer to look after these clients for them. She was thus able to work under their flag, so to speak, as well as building her own portfolio of independent clients on the side.

It was tough for her at first, but she loved her work. In many ways, I think it was tougher on me because I was the one left in the house all day to look after the kids and do the chores. That may sound selfish, but I truly felt that way. She would often go out to lunches or business meetings in various hotels, not coming back till late in the evening. I would manage the affairs around the house while trying desperately to get myself some work, on the stage, the TV, anywhere. My masculine values as the family breadwinner were seriously under threat here, and this served to darken my mood considerably. The continuing absence of offers of work was also a constant source of pain for me. It may have been easier if Rachel wasn’t going about her own life with such ease and success. I began to resent her, as well as becoming fearful of the future. I wondered if she might leave me if I didn’t pull my finger out soon.

I suppose you’ll want to know where the kids fit in to this story. I married Rachel at the age of twenty-five, two years into my stint on the TV cop show I used to do. Davey came along exactly nine months later, so accurate along the timeline that he was surely conceived on our wedding night. He was a bright kid (taking after his mum, of course); he was doing very well at school and seemed to fit our almost nomadic existence easily. He was at home wherever we went and blended in to any new school without any of the problems I would have had at his age. He loved sports and was rarely seen anywhere without a football stuck to his right foot. I had high hopes that one day he might play for Chelsea if he worked hard enough at it.

Next up was Peter, born a little under two years after his elder brother. The pair were like chalk and cheese. Peter was sulky and irritable most of the time, and I think all he ever wanted was a normal life, something that being the son of an out-of-work actor didn’t afford him. I think he would have been much happier if I had been an insurance salesman or a plumber. He managed to find fault with near enough everything, and he was as lazy as his brother was lively. He too had dreams of football stardom, but the closest he was ever likely to get would be running the hot dog stall inside the grounds, and even that might be beyond the scope of his talent. Peter lacked the drive of Davey and often simply couldn’t see the point in putting his back into something. It was a shame because he had equally as much ability as Davey; it was just his application that lacked. He was a bright lad, and I spent many unsuccessful hours trying to teach him the value of an honest days’ work and how he could achieve anything he wanted if he only worked at it.

I guess if you took a look at his role model, you might understand his attitude. I think Peter was ashamed of his father, an out-of-work actor who mooched around the house all day wearing scruffy clothes and not shaving while his mum went out and did all the real work. It was tough trying to pin down Peter for a conversation, and I reckon he would rather I just moved out and let them get on with their lives. He didn’t want to move to Luton, hadn’t even wanted to leave Swiss Cottage, and couldn’t be convinced that there was no choice. He thought it was all my fault for being too dumb to earn a living at the only thing I was any good at. If that was my best chance to make money, he must have thought of me, and then God help us all. While Davey tried to succeed in life in spite of the problems we faced, Peter seemed content to use those problems as something to blame for not succeeding in life.

Mikey, though, was different again. A very happy and lively little four-year-old, he seemed to revel in exploring and was always curious as to what was going on. He liked the idea of moving out of the stuffy and claustrophobic atmosphere of London and into somewhere less polluted and greener. Even at the age of two (as he was when we left central London), he had enough about him to recognise this as a good move. Unfortunately, as with so many kids, it would be his wandering and inquisitive nature that would ultimately land us all in trouble, although at the time I had no way of knowing this. Mikey looked just like me, apparent even at the time of his birth, and that was why he was named after me.

Seth came along when times were at their hardest. We had been living in the tiny cottage in Shenley for less than six weeks when Rachel announced she was pregnant again. I had been worried at first, but she was delighted, and that mood seemed to win me over eventually. We scrimped and saved, but fortunately, Rachel was doing well, building her practice up nicely, and the extra money from her old company was coming in very handy at that time. Being pregnant hardly even slowed her down, and she was able to press on, amassing a fantastic client base right up until her final weeks. I still couldn’t find any regular kind of work, though. I started moonlighting at a bar in town, just three nights a week but enough to keep the wolves from the door. It seemed to give me back a bit of self-respect too. Here at last was a reason to get up in the morning or evening, as it turned out!

Seth was the perfect baby, giggly and cute. He rarely gave any trouble and even slept through most nights. The others had all been difficult, but Seth was just perfect; there is no other way to describe him. I often wondered if he could be mine; he was so unlike the other three and so unlike how I myself had been as a baby. He was walking before we’d even got used to having him around, and rudimentary words started emerging from his mouth long before we expected it. I remember the first time he spoke. He sat on my lap, and I was jiggling him about. He always had hysterics when I did that, pretending to drop him and catching him at the last second. This time I did it, and afterwards, he put his chubby little arms around my neck and whispered, ‘Doggy’ in my ear. To the end of my days, I will swear he meant to say ‘Daddy’, but maybe that’s just me wanting to be romantic about it. Maybe he did really think his old man was a dog. I certainly looked quite like a wolf man at the time—scruffy clothes, unkempt hair, and unshaven face. I’m surprised that the poor kid didn’t have nightmares about me.

We finally found the house in Luton that we wanted. It was big enough for the family, big enough for Rachel to have some office space for her business, and big enough for me to have a bit of room to rehearse my scripts. Not that I had many scripts to rehearse. My agent in London kept sending me stuff, but little of it was of any value. Mostly I think it was a way to keep me doing something and make it look like they were doing something for me. I began to get increasingly despondent with the hopelessness of the situation.

Rachel was great. She kept my mood upbeat and stopped me from going insane during our first six months in the new house in Luton. The house was in need of some general repairs, and while I couldn’t quite get the motivation to do it from myself, she guided and directed me, making sure I had the right paints, the wood, the tools, and so on. Each day she gave me a target to achieve, and for the most part, I achieved it. The house was also set in its own grounds overlooking the local golf course, and so keeping that clear was another task I had to engage my day.

I think mostly Rachel wanted the house to look nice for the family but also for her clients. Perhaps if we had been living thirty years ago, it would have been an idyllic existence, with me painting and decorating and looking after the general welfare of things, but in the modern world, it wasn’t quite what I had in mind for my life.

Things carried on that way for a while. Rachel built up her business while I spent my days working on the house and its gardens, getting it into shape. There came a point where I almost forgot about my acting career. Every few days or so, I would call my agent, or he would call me. These calls gradually became fewer and fewer over the course of the first three months that we lived there. I think my agent began to feel that if I couldn’t be bothered with it then neither could he. I was a spent force anyway, not likely to make a mark on the glittering lights of Hollywood again. I, for my own part, had a new life now anyway, a life so far removed from the one I had left behind it was almost unreal, but like so many things in life, once you accept something and begin to act within its confines, it is amazing how quickly a comfort zone envelopes around it, and it becomes normal. It’s a dangerous place to be because when normal takes the place of desire, creative input is stunted. That was how it was for me soon after we moved. My creative juices stopped flowing, and I slowly became accustomed to my new role in life. Any thoughts of starring roles in major motion pictures were pushed right at the back of my mind. I almost forgot about my previous success. I certainly began to forget the lifestyle I had left behind. Maybe when push came to shove, deep down, I didn’t really want it anyway.

CHAPTER 2

THE WOODS

T he house we moved into was set away from the rest of the estate in quite a pleasant area away from the main road, nestled right between an eighteen-hole golf course and a small woodland area. I was never much into golf, so I never bothered to go out that way, but Davey quickly began to develop an interest in the sport and would often sit by the fence at the bottom of our estate watching the funny men in the silly trousers marching around the course. He seemed to find some kind of peace in what they were doing, and I could see him becoming a pro-golfer one day. That was until I saw the fees they wanted and reckoned that I’d need a few more acting jobs before we were ready to afford that. Davey didn’t seem to mind. I doubt that he would have wanted to play the game anyway. He seemed content just to watch, whiling away hour after hour watching, and almost hypnotised as the tiny white balls flew through the air and on to the fairways and the greens. Rachel’s job was coming along nicely by now, but most of her money was spent on the mortgage and on feeding the family. There was still precious little leftover for self-indulgent luxuries. By this time, I had almost no income whatsoever. I couldn’t get any dole money because I had stopped actively searching for jobs other than those involving acting, instead concentrating on the house renovations. I, therefore, didn’t qualify for state benefits.

The woodland area was a place we didn’t really venture into. When we had bought the house, it had been made quite clear to us where our boundaries lay. We were not to encroach on the golf course; they were quite strict on that as it was private property, and we were not to attempt to usurp land in the wooded area for our own. Why anyone would want to do such a thing, I can’t imagine. We had more than enough land as it was without wanting to poach any more of it, and the wooded area was hardly an ideal place to start building a garden. For a start, it was overgrown with trees which would all need felling before we could do anything, like I was going to do that by myself. The estate agent had also told us that there were a few nasty animals lurking in the woods. We didn’t tell the kids this as we thought it might scare them. By and large, they weren’t too bad with boogie men and monsters, but they didn’t need to be told that there were some hideous creatures right down at the bottom of the garden. So we kept that one quiet.

The previous owners had thoughtfully installed solar-powered lanterns all around the edge of the property, from the long driveway at the front, all around the perimeter as far as the golf course around the sides, and the start of the woodland space out the back. I was told this was to ensure that no golfers encroached on our territory, the meagre but pretty fence not being enough to hold them back if they really wanted to get in. It was also a deterrent to the creatures in the woods, who would hopefully be scared by the light and back away.

‘Creatures in the woods?’ God, I’m beginning to sound like a scared little kid myself.

The lanterns were linked to an alarm system which ran around the entire perimeter of the property. This would inform us if anyone tried to gain access to our land other than from the front driveway. By the look of the panel, it hadn’t been in use for some time, and we saw no need to reactivate it now. As the estate agent had said, all someone needs to do to get on to our property is walk up the front driveway; why then would they need to start sneaking around from the back area? As for the beasts in the woods, the dark can have a great effect on the imagination, but even then, a rational man should be able to discern the difference between reality and fantasy. There were no creatures I was aware of that were indigenous to England and that lived in urban woodland areas were likely to cause us any harm. Had this been the Nevada Desert, I might have been more cautious, but it was the outskirts of Luton, a popular, thriving town just off the M1 motorway. I doubted there was anything much to fear from the animal kingdom.

For a while, the decorating and renovating went fairly well. I was beginning to get a taste for this kind of work, and also, I had discovered a hidden talent within myself that I hadn’t previously been aware of. The house had been lived in by some old eccentric before we got to it according to the estate agent. Old and infirm, he wasn’t able to keep up with the maintenance of the house, and for almost ten out of the twenty years, he lived there; the place had been falling steadily into a worse state of disrepair. Added to that, the house had been empty for at least three years since the old soak passed on, and with no surviving relatives, the house had been swallowed up in the system, only recently emerging out the other side and on to the housing market.

The state of our new abode at least gave me something to fill my days with, and to begin with, at least I enjoyed myself. Rachel and I had sat down and devised a plan of action and a massive list of all the things that needed doing. We had walked through each room in turn and agreed on structural repairs, decorating, and furniture. For sure, it would look great when finished, if it was ever finished!

The first area to work on was outside. Structurally, there wasn’t much wrong with the place, just a few interior walls we wanted moving eventually, but we could do that later on. The outside, though, was a real mess. The driveway was overgrown and needed weeding, the gravel needed bleaching, and the garden, all overgrown with weeds, needed cutting back to size. On top of that, the exterior walls of the house needed repainting, and there were a few areas of the guttering which needed replacing. I figured it would take me at least a week or two to do the garden and driveway and probably another two or three weeks to do the house.

And so it turned out. I began on a bright and sunny Monday morning in June, starting with bleaching the gravel on the driveway. I found this to be surprisingly easy, apart from having to use a ton of bleach. I let it all soak in, and then I washed away the bleach with water. It didn’t exactly come up sparkling, but it was certainly better than I had expected and a dramatic improvement on its previous state. Next, I mowed the lawns. This was a hard one, and it took almost two entire days to complete. At the front side, the two lawns running alongside the driveway weren’t too bad—a bit overgrown but otherwise all right. I just had to chop through the worst of it before I could bring the mower out, but once I did so, it was easy. It was the rear garden that caused the problems. It was thickly overgrown in many places, and my mower wasn’t really up to the job. I persevered though, and eventually, after losing about a gallon of sweat in the hot sunshine, I came out on top. On Thursday, I planted some flowering plants, having first made a couple of rock gardens and landscaped the garden a little. On Friday, I bought some gravel and dug a pathway from the back door of the house to the rear of the garden and also two more which branched away to the flower beds.

I was happy with my work, and Rachel, too, seemed quite pleased. It certainly exceeded both our expectations of how the place would turn out. On Saturday, we took a trip into town and bought a climbing frame for the kids and a garden table and chairs for the rest of us. We spent Saturday afternoon putting these up and then spent a few precious hours of sunlight watching the kids play on their new toy whilst Rachel and I sat sipping wine at our new table on the terrace on the back patio. On Sunday, I bleached the terrace, just to finish it off, and added two planters to the sides of the terrace, just to give it the right feel. Overall, I was pretty satisfied with my week.

Sunday was a day of rest, and apart from bleaching the patio, which only took a few minutes, Rachel and I spent most of the day in bed. We didn’t get a lot of rest!

The second week I spent painting the house. I swear that if I ever have to do such a job again, I will pay someone else to do it. What a nightmare! The first day I got almost nothing done at all because no sooner had I got the ladder out, it started to rain. Watching the water piss out of the sky made me realise that the house wasn’t just in need of painting, but it was actually filthy. This meant that I spent most of Tuesday hosing the walls down to try and remove some of the excess surface dirt. I also had to spend time cutting down the ivy and other plants that had started to creep their way uninvited up the walls. This too was a tough job, which took me pretty much all day to accomplish. I finally wound up at about eight o’clock that night, totally knackered. It was now Wednesday, and I hadn’t actually started the job yet.

On Wednesday and Thursday, it rained solidly, but on Friday, the sun came out. I awoke early and got on with things pretty much straightaway. I managed to get one side of the house done by the evening when the light began to fade, but I still had the other three to do. I resolved to take the weekend off and start again with a vengeance on Monday.

Saturday was really the first chance I got to step back and take a look at my handiwork. It was also the first real opportunity Rachel had taken to come and have a proper look at what I’d been doing, and the first chance for us to spend a bit of time as a family. Rachel had also been working flat out all week. Her old bosses had been kind enough to send a couple of clients her way, and she had spent most of the week with them