Black Power

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Black Power

“Phew, what a day. I never, never ever want to go through that again.” The diminutive Tina fell exhausted onto the bed, her body aching from the longest day of her life. “I can’t believe we decided to move ourselves…what were we thinking of?”
“I think you said that saving a bit of money was one thing but that the sense of accomplishment would be far greater if we did it ourselves,” replied Andrew who was similarly shattered but had realised quite early on that the two of them had bitten off more than they could chew; moving the contents of a two bedroom flat with a hired transit van in a single day – a Friday - was hard.
“I lied!”

The two of them lay for a moment staring up at the faded yellow ceiling of the master bedroom of the Victorian semi they’d just bought. The one which, although it had been empty for nearly a year, still reeked of the cause of the previous owners’ death – cigarettes.
“Do you think that smell will ever go?” Tina had asked Byron, the estate agent when they’d viewed the property for the second time.
“Oh yes,” replied Byron, the twenty-three year old negotiator, “in my experience, it only takes a few days with the windows open for it to go.” Andrew had smirked at the response. Andrew knew the smell would take years to fade unless he completely re-decorated the place; something which Tina had been planning from the start anyway. Because of this there was no need to contradict the apparently ‘experienced’ sales negotiator.

Whilst the smell was in some ways repugnant to Andrew, it did offer a small, but welcoming reminder of the days when as a student he used to work in night-clubs in his hometown Portsmouth which – prior to any notion of a smoking ban – and in the times before and after the punters filled the places, always stunk of nicotine; the accumulation of the brown slime on the black ceilings even dripping back onto the clubbers below like rusty water in the stifling heat of the summer nights. Summer loving? It was more like summer staining. But it wasn’t just the nicotine smell which he’d noticed when they first visited and which he was still aware of. There was another oily, petrol-like smell which seemed to pervade the very fabric of the house. It was every where – in the cupboards, in the loft, in the darkened space under the stairs; euphemistically called the cloakroom by Byron. Tina didn’t possess Andrew’s sense of smell and so as she hadn’t mentioned it, then neither had he.

“I’m going to love living here – I think this is a really cool place,” said Tina dreamily. The two of them turned to each other, kissed each other and fell asleep – they hadn’t even unpacked the duvet.

The subsequent three months consisted of wave after wave of extra-curricular DIY activity for Andrew and Tina at no.4 Railway Cottages, Railwayside, Barnes, South West London. Whilst the property had been a snip compared to the price that the others in the street had gone for, this was because it had not been modernised in any way since the early 1940’s when the previous occupant, Valerie Joyce had moved there as a young girl with her family. Unfortunately, she’d died with no family and intestate so the property had taken a long time to come to market – long enough for the spiders to take over large parts of the house. Andrew and Tina were happy though; deliriously happy. They owned their own house.

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