THE BUILDER
Builders make a mess. I know that. We all know that. I don’t suppose there is anyone who doesn’t know that: that is unless they have never needed the services of one, and never known anyone else that has. It is a fact of life. One of those indisputable facts: the ones we moan about, as though if we needle about it long enough it will no longer be a true. But it is a fact, and there is just nothing you, or I, or anyone can do to change it.
She wasn’t a young woman. Not by any stroke of the imagination could she ever be thought of, and so described as a young woman. She was in fact a relatively old woman: relative, that is, to anyone who was older or younger than her. Her hair wasn’t long and blond, stretching it’s way all the way down to pert firm buttocks. It was brown, or at least it had been once, and now although it still held some of it’s colour it was mainly grey. A soft, silvery grey. It wasn’t thick either. It was thin, like fine strands of silver thread weaving it’s way all about her head. Her skin was stippled with age, and fine wrinkles ran out from the centre of her face into the shadows where the wispy hair overhung. She was small, and thin, and with all the bumps and protruding bits of flesh that appear on a woman when she passes middle age. She could, I suppose, be described as mousey. A little mouse of a woman squeaking her way through her middle fifties, in a house alone.
Her children had grown, and like proverbial birds had flown away to build their own nests. She had been divorced from her husband for almost a decade, but had never remarried: had never seriously thought about it, and had never taken herself out to find a new husband. She was alone, yes, but whether she was lonely or not, you could never tell. She may have been, but if she was she covered it up so well that the thought of it never entered your head. She had her house, she had her job, and she had her children: although they had gone, they hadn’t flown so far away and it was unusual if week went by without her seeing one of them, if not both. As far as anyone could ever tell, her children included, she was happy enough living quietly: as though she resided in one the little creases of her own face, just popping out now and then to say hello to the world outside her own, and then going back in to live the life she had moulded for herself out of the loose skin.
They were only supposed to be there for a few days, a week at the most. But, you know how they are: builders. Endless cups of tea, problems with the weather and all the other usual and well known procrastinations that tradesmen take great effort in coming up with had meant that they had already been there for over a week and a half. Well over in fact, probably nearer two weeks in all actuality.
There was dust and rubble everywhere. What a terrible mess. It was a small job. Should have been a small job. Started off as a small job. But it grew, as all monsters have a habit of doing, into a great hefty beast of a job.......
