‘How’s it going?’ I asked.
‘Good.’
‘Can I see it?’
‘No! I haven’t finished yet.’
‘You might want to shout a bit louder,’ Hope said, cupping her hands behind her ears. ‘There’s a few folk on Holy Island who might not have heard you.’
‘I wasn’t shouting,’ Maddie said, her voice only slightly lower.
‘Yes, you were and you still are.’ Hope did a great job of matching Maddie’s volume and it clearly worked.
Maddie lowered her voice to a reasonable volume. ‘Sorry, but I don’t want anyone to see it until it’s done.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you’re still okay doing it on your own because we can all muck in if you need us?’
‘I’m fine.’
I didn’t miss the glare Hope gave her, triggering a delayed, ‘Thank you.’
As we ate, I marvelled at the way Hope continually engaged Maddie in conversation and showed no hesitation in picking her up on the unhelpfulness of short answers. Her zero-tolerance approach towards attitude was a valuable reminder in where to draw the line between playful banter and downright disrespect. I used to know where that was but I’d definitely lost my way. Maddie had pushed and pushed at an open door and I’d let her in the hope of a quieter life – especially after Laurie walked out – but that approach hadn’t worked. It had made her push harderand had severely damaged our relationship in the process. Things definitely needed to change.
22
Hope, Mam and I had a really constructive afternoon, applying a second coat of paint in the counter space and finishing first coats everywhere else. We’d had a lovely time together, having a good old catch-up on family and friends news, and my heart felt so lifted that we’d be able to do that regularly over a cuppa. FaceTime was great but nothing beat in-person contact.
Mam and I waved Hope off and returned to the farmhouse. I wanted to take the dogs out for a decent walk but decided to check on Maddie’s progress first.
Upstairs, I knocked on her bedroom door.
‘Don’t come in!’ she called.
‘Are you behind the door?’
‘No, but you can’t come in.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s not finished.’
‘Then let me help you before I take the dogs out.’
Taking a leaf out of my sister’s book, I pushed open the door and my stomach lurched. The walls looked terrible. There were roller streaks going in all directions, some completed with too little paint to cover the previous colour and others with far toomuch, resulting in blobs and trickles. The edges between the feature colour wall and the adjoining walls were a hideous blend of the two paints. I’d expected some imperfect cutting in but this was worse than I could ever have imagined. There were no dust sheets down and I could see speckles of paint on all her furniture and bedding, a large dollop of paint on the edge of her duvet where my guess was she’d dropped a paint-laden brush, and a smeared mass of paint on her floorboards. Couldn’t she have followed even the most basic of instructions to cover everything?
‘You hate it,’ Maddie declared.
‘It’s, erm…’ I didn’t want to criticise her work and searched for a positive but I couldn’t find one. I didn’t even like her choice of colours. I’d suggested at the time that they didn’t go well together but she’d been adamant they were what she wanted and that my opinion wasn’t welcome.
Maddie was standing on a stepladder painting over a splodge on the ceiling but she wasn’t using a paintbrush.
‘Is that…’ I stepped closer. ‘Is that Tipp-Ex?’
‘You said we didn’t have any white paint so I was improvising.’
Her thinking she’d be able to cover up the mess with Tipp-Ex was so ludicrous that I nearly laughed hysterically. She’d made such a mess that even twenty bottles of Tipp-Ex had no chance of covering the blobs on the ceiling, not that they’d be the same colour as the paint already there even if they did.
‘I wouldn’t bother with the Tipp-Ex,’ I said. ‘I think you should come down.’
