Bricking It Read Free Page B

showing her the half-inch long splinter of wood buried in my thumb.
    Hayley looks up at the large hole I’ve created in our new house, and then back down at me. ‘You mean to tell me the only injury you appear to have suffered after having fallen several feet through a ceiling is a small splinter?’
    ‘Oi! That’s not small,’ I argue, waggling the thumb in her general direction. ‘It’s quite big. And painful, as it happens.’
    ‘If that had been me, I’d have broken every bone in my body,’ Hayley tells me, shaking her head.
    ‘Oh, well, try not to sound so disappointed that I’m not crippled, sis. I can always jump back up there and have another go, if you like.’
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
    ‘It’s going to be bloody expensive to get that fixed,’ I point out.
    Hayley gives me an exasperated look. ‘Danny, there are dead animals in the bath, somebody has attacked the kitchen with heavy artillery, the garden looks like a jungle and the staircase could give way at any moment. I’d say an extra hole in the ceiling isn’t much to worry about at this stage.’
    I have to agree. So far this tour around Grandma’s past hasn’t exactly been a barrel of laughs – unless you call narrowly avoiding serious injury a fun pastime.
    Hayley looks me up and down again. ‘Are you sure you don’t want some kind of medical attention?’
    I hold my hands out, palms up. ‘Nope. I’m fine. Keen to get back down the stairs again though, before this floor gives way underneath me as well.’ I give the carpet a concerned look.
    ‘Alright,’ Hayley agrees. ‘Let’s get out of here. I want to go look out the back anyway to see how much land this thing comes with.’
    And with that, the Daley siblings make their careful way back downstairs, one of them worrying at the splinter caught in his thumb, the other watching for spiders and dead human bodies.
    Sadly, to get to the back garden, we have to go through the fly-infested kitchen. At least, I assume most of them are flies. If there are any mosquitoes in the cloud of small black bodies flying around the green fridge, we’ll both be scratching ourselves into insensibility for the next couple of days.
    The back door is a lot harder to open than the front.
    ‘Are you going to kick this one too?’ Hayley asks, as I push against the solid door with my shoulder.
    I peer through one of the opaque windows in the door, and spy a large heavy object against it on the outside. ‘I don’t think so, not this time. There’s something stopping the door from opening. Something heavy.’ I pause for a second. ‘. . . And no, Hayley, it isn’t a corpse.’
    What it is , is a tyre. Not one from a small family hatchback, either. This thing came off a tractor. It takes a lot of pushing and shoving on my part – with a little help from my feeble, weak sister – before the tyre has shifted enough to allow us to get out of the door.
    By the time we squeeze through the gap, I’ve got a real sweat on thanks to my efforts and the unseasonably mild spring weather.
    ‘Christ,’ I say, wiping my brow with one hand. ‘I hope that was worth it.’
    ‘Well, it was the only way to get out here,’ Hayley comments and looks off to one side, making a face. ‘Oh . . . apart from the fact we could have just come out of the front door and walked round.’
    ‘What? And get ripped to pieces by the brambles? No thanks. I’ve already nearly broken both my ankle and my back today. Adding severe lacerations to the litany of injuries this place has caused me in the last half an hour is something I’m happy to avoid.’
    ‘Fair enough. Let’s see how the garden looks.’
    It’s not really a garden, though. What we’re talking about here is a bloody huge field covered in a thick, tall layer of plant life that will need way more than a strimmer from B&Q to get rid of.
    ‘Great. I wonder if there are any Triffids out here?’ I say, knowing full well the reference will probably be lost on