Baby steps to bankruptcy
In and around recurring fantasies of a charred and gutted McCarthy Ellison: Leeds, our first fortnight in the new digs was a potent mix of underachieving and overspending. Hartley Castle House had four bedrooms and any number of sitting rooms, standing rooms and kneeling and praying for work rooms, all of which were empty. By the first Friday they were still empty, but a bewildering five hours at the Leeds IKEA spent largely lost, otherwise largely spending ensured a truckload of improvement by Tuesday. Curry’s had been and gone leaving a silver collection of fridge, freezer, dishwasher, washing machine and drier and assorted chips out of the paintwork. The oilman had been and gone leaving a full tank of oil for the radiators and truck tracks in our lawn. Sky had promised to send someone to install satellite TV within a week. British Telecom had promised to send someone to install Broadband within a year.
There was a car to buy. Or two cars when Gabriel’s elderly Skoda shat itself on a Durham County dual carriageway. I went a bit mad on the cars: a 2001 Volvo XC70 (poo brown) and a 2002 Audi A3 Quattro Sport (shot liver purple). A big practical and rather dapper four wheel drive station wagon (estate) for dogs and road trips and babies(?), and a wee turbocharged rocket so Gabriel could get to her next collision a little earlier. Together these vehicles cost me twenty five thousand pounds, which was about twenty thousand more than I could afford.
Another issue was the castle ruins, or, more specifically, what to do with the castle ruins. Being utterly, boringly, unromantically, stodgily hard nosed about it, the castle ruins were little more than a very old derelict building with no roof; a building with no practical use other than providing a private place for Kurt and Courtney to poo. But I’d paid for this great dilapidated pile of bricks and, while I loved to just sit and look at it and sit in it and look up at it, I was going to find an ongoing use for it if it killed me. In a stroke of Kiwi genius I found one:
The largest walled but roofless chamber of the castle (perhaps originally some sort of grand hall or pool room) was carpeted in a very flat bed of lush green grass peppered with deeply embedded stone slabs that had fallen from the walls eons ago. These walls, topped with reedy plants and moss, rose to a ragged thirty to forty feet on all sides. With just the odd pocket-sized window scattered about, they were near perfect wind breaks. At the northern end of this great roofless rectangle, a wide doorless arch big enough to wheel a cartload of plague victims through faced onto our expansive moors view. It was, in Australian parlance, an absolutely bonza spot for a barby!
I ran this stroke of genius past Gabriel.
‘I think it’s a lovely idea,' she said. 'For next summer.’
‘When’s summer again?’
‘June, Bailey.’
‘June when?’
‘June next year.’
It was the middle of September.
‘So,’ I said after deliberating this, ‘your recommendation would be…?’
‘Nice idea. But not for now. You should be more worried about finding a job.’
I gazed lovingly out the kitchen window at my great stone edifice. ‘I should be, shouldn’t I?’
Finding a six burner gas barbecue and outdoor table setting at the cusp of an English winter wasn’t going to be easy. But I had a car now. And a mobile phone. And a Yellow Pages. Just as critically, only a short, sharp drive away across the moors was a surprisingly impressive and functional town called Hustwickgate.
***
Hustwickgate was a thriving and decidedly affluent market town – an historical market town no less -near the border of County Durham thirteen miles from Hartley Castle House on the north-west edge of the moors. Hustwickgate was our nearest and dearest source of supplies and entertainment and on a good day (a good day being when you weren’t stuck behind a tractor for five miles) you could make the journey in forty minutes. There were cities – Newcastle, Durham, York and Leeds – all between one and two hours drive away, but from a daily needs perspective, Hustwickgate was our best and closest bet.
On the surface Hustwickgate was picturesque, even pretty in that spectacularly grey manner of English market towns. Roughly translated Hustwickgate was a bastardised version of Hurst (Anglo-Saxon for wooded hill) and wick (farm), the whole meaning the gate to the farm on the wooded hill; or, at least, the one that was there before they bulldozed the woods and farm and tore into the hill to build a castle. Hustwick Castle, a ruined 16th century fortress that made Hartley Castle look like a Gate House, was a vast structure once home to not just a family, but an entire community – a sort of medieval resort with high rise accommodation for squillions and its own town square. What was left of its eighty foot high walls wrapped themselves around two undulating acres of rubble and parklands and the High Street wrapped itself rather steeply around that.
Hustwickgate’s cobbled High Street was a perfect combination of Georgian charm and functionality for this pleasantly surprised Kiwi. Packed wall to wall along its sweeping curvature of a spine were elaborately ornamental one and two storey facias, some of which promised useless tourist memorabilia – Hustwickgate Heaven, Castle Collections, Gateside Antiques – but most of which promised big town practicality – M&S Food, WH Smiths, Ottakers, Body Shop, Boots, Woolworth’s, Curry’s, Toni & Guy, Saks, Monsoon, Lloyds TSB, Barclays, Barkers department store. There was any number of restaurants, assuming that number was eleven – Indian, Italian, Chinese, Thai and English, with word of a Japanese restaurant opening soon. There were three butchers, three bakers and, yes, there was a candlestick maker, although they also made chocolate. There were twenty three pubs.
Then spreading forth from this spine in the softly rippled land around Hustwick Hill, the castle and the High Street lay the flesh and bone of Hustwickgate, a helter skelter noodle soup of streets, lanes and dead ends packed to the curb sides with terrace housing for twenty thousand and great posh mansions for a few hundred more, these dotted along the snaking River Farn. This lowland was also home to a mainline railway station, a small library, a medium-sized hospital, a small maximum security prison and an outlying industrial park with a B&Q, Tesco and a bunch of furniture and carpet discounters.
Market days were Wednesdays and Saturdays when the already hectic High Street became a gridlock of traffic, white vans, striped tarpaulins and discarded cardboard boxes. On these days, the town centre was best avoided unless you were in the market for fox skin slippers (or barbecue tongs). We didn’t know this, of course. We also didn’t know it was highly inadvisable to leave a car parked overnight in the High Street on a Friday if you planned to get tanked and sleep in until midday Saturday. Believe me; Hustwickgate was a much uglier place with a hangover, a missing Audi and an abusive stallholder telling you just how his white van came to be parked exactly where you left your car the night before.
***
I devoted an exhausting, obsessive, stubborn, pig headed day to my Great Hall creation, finding stuff in and around Hustwickgate, ferrying it back to Hartley Castle House, secreting it away in the ruins, then going out for more; a day that turned into night without (criminally) the dogs getting walked and (sneakily) Gabriel having any idea what I was doing.
Under torchlight that night, both of us rugged up like Eskimos (in autumn), I led Gabriel down to the ruins with Kurt and Courtney in tow to view my outdoor living creation. I shone the light on the barbecue (only a four burner and second-hand but in remarkably good nick) against the wall next to the great arch and commented grandly on the importance of an enticing focal point for conversation over the sizzling plate as we chefs didn’t like to cook alone. I shone the torch across the six seater table setting, an impressive wooden affair comprising a long slatted teak table stained dark brown (and cigarette burn-black in a few places) with a hole in the middle for an umbrella (not yet purchased) and six pine fold down chairs with green squabs and kind of matching dark stain (they were brand new).
Teeth chattering, Gabriel nodded about. ‘Very good,’ she said. ‘Pity we can’t use it for six months.’
‘Ah!’ I said. ‘That’s where you’re wrong.’
I shone the torch at the side wall and my master stroke: four ten foot tall gas heaters with butane bottles in their bulbous bellies, tubes in their long necks and heat for England under their stainless steel sombreros.
‘You’ve got to admit,’ I said.
‘I have got to admit, monkey,’ she said nodding about, teeth chattering.
‘Midwinter barbecues, Gabriel. At Hartley Castle House. In the castle ruins. I mean…Who’s going to say no?’
She grimaced and her little eyelashes were fluttering and her teeth were still chattering. ‘Only English people, monkey.’
Question marks over the ultimate local appeal of a winter barbecue aside, we’d achieved a lot in a very short space of time. We were largely set up and ready to crack on with our exciting new lives in the North Yorkshire countryside. It had taken some expansive driving, long, stressful, card brandishing days and some on the spot ‘Yeah, whatever,’ decision making, but Hartley Castle House was already feeling like home.
That said, keeping up appearances was proving to be a high main¬tenance exercise.
I now needed to rein in the expenditure. I was riding bareback and until I’d found a decent saddle, there was every chance of a life-threatening fall. For better or worse, I was the only one in the relationship who knew of this imminent crisis. I didn’t discuss money with Gabriel and she didn’t discuss it with me – she just spent it on the assumption it was never going to run out.
I didn’t think for a moment Gabriel was a gold digger. Yet no girl with self-respect wanted to be with a loser. I was not a loser; I just wasn’t quite the winner she thought I was. Whether wittingly or not, all this overt spending – the two thousand pound a month house in the country; the Audi, the Volvo; the new furniture and appliances; the inaugural three hundred pound trip to Tesco; the apparent Gung Ho attitude – it all manifested itself in the tacit illusion of wealth. I had done nothing to deny this. In fact I had wittingly and perhaps brazenly perpetuated the charade. For a year.
Gabriel knew I rented my house in Brisbane. But she had lived in the house. She’d swum in the pool and shopped in the exclusive neighbourhood. The one occasion she’d asked if I’d ever thought of buying I was able to easily sidestep this with: ‘I’ll buy when I know where I want to live,’ a similarly plausible excuse for not doing so here.
Cold hard fact: I arrived in England with seventy thousand hard-earned pounds. More than enough to satisfy Lloyds TSB of my worthiness as a new client, open Visa debit card accounts in my name and Gabriel’s and pay cash for all and sundry…
I now had eight thousand pounds. And no job.
Granted, I’d paid a year’s rent in advance. Granted, every bit of furniture, every appliance, every last object we’d stuck in a power point or light socket was paid for, done and dusted. That was fine. What wasn’t fine was this: three thousand of the eight thousand pounds to my name was in Gabriel’s account and she was the only one in the relationship who didn’t know that money was precious.
Admittedly she had a job and I didn’t. A commission job that was yet to bring home enough bacon to complement two eggs, let alone feed an entire manor-dwelling family of dogs and humans.
I hoped I wouldn’t have to come clean before Austin Hogg died. I hoped beyond hope someone or something would sort me out. Yet every day Gabriel churned up the North Yorkshire countryside in her Audi with its fifty pound tank of gas and returned that night having dented everything but her sales budget; and every time she sat on the phone to my sister in New Zealand scheming wedding venues for hours at peak hour rates; and every time she left the back door open for the dogs and turned the thermostat up to twenty five to compensate, that time inched ever closer, like a legless Beelzebub across sand.
