The House-Sitting Hobos
Quest
Jack and Hannah Ormerod and Lucia, Delphine & Fin
Fri 1 Jul 2016 17:48
Hi everyone, For the last couple of Saturday nights, Jack and I have done the decent Welsh thing and had a row. I don’t say that lightly or blithely or in a sensationalist way but because it leads to Philippa. That woman is a bloodhound. She and Ben have recently been asked to house-sit for a lady living alone up in the mountains and have invited us round for Sunday lunch two weekends in a row. Both Sundays we've had to explain what happened the preceding night and on both occasions, Philippa has leaned in across the table and asked, ‘Who’s fault was it?’ ‘Mine,’ Jack says without hesitation. Well, not many people would be able to digest this without scratching their heads and perhaps other parts of their body. Except it seems, Philippa. ‘I like to get right to the crux of the matter,’ she said to us when we met her, ‘I just can’t help it.' This Sunday, she sits back, her huge blue eyes satisfied, considering the matter and turns to me. 'What do you bring to the table?' 'A whole set of childhood issues and an annoying need for fairness,' I reply. ‘Unfortunately it makes me open my big mouth.' She laughs. She has a laugh you could get used to. 'You guys are honest.’ She’s half-Irish and says that in her house you had rows and then moved on almost instantly. 'That was what was expected, otherwise you were seen as wasting time and to this day I can’t understand people who don’t do that.’ No wonder she likes Jack, I think. They'd picked us up before lunch. It's been such a long time we'd been in someone else's house! Usually when we’re invited anywhere nowadays it’s on to other peoples' boats. Not that we're not grateful but this time, a whole house to look through! Aside from the small garments drawer of course. Oops sorry, I was looking for the bathroom. This house is completely geared for outside living; a covered verandah runs along the whole property, bedrooms are incorporated into the verandah and mozzie nets are their only walls. We're so high up here too, we're literally sitting in a bank of cloud and it rains on and off all day. We don't get wet but watch the rain drip off the edges of the wooden verandah while the garden pretty much grows right into the house. Vines snake enthusiastically along the walls, passion flowers with actual passion fruits climb into the front porch, avocado, mango and orange trees dot themselves all over the garden like a clinic of overdue pregnant women. Inside the house, bats nest in the raised, living room ceiling and we watch them yawn and stretch their wings out in the mid-afternoon. After a couple of hours, Lulu decides it's a witch’s house and not just because of the bats. There's a dark and dusty sea turtle shell propped up in the kitchen, a huge, stuffed puffer fish standing on a coffee table like a side lamp in the living room and an old, mis formed tiger-skin rug hanging up in the hall. This woman keeps eight dogs too in pens under the house and the longer we're here, the more we realise the whole place smells like a massive dog. Every once in a while the dogs bark, sing or take out a piece of each other underneath our feet while Fin being Fin, hides under the table and eventually finds the comfiest-looking sofa and takes refuge on it, looking worried. We all go for a walk after lunch, though it works out more of a downhill scramble through the jungle. We pass a growing bunch of bananas and stop to munch at them. At the bottom of the red, muddy hill is a huge nutmeg tree full of yellow golf balls. Apparently you cannot pick nutmeg; they are only ready when the fruits fall and not a moment sooner so we carry on and make it to a river with a bamboo shack perched above it like a little hermitage. During our walk, some of the lady's eight dogs, including two huge red ones, have jumped the fence and are now following us while Fin keeps them in line, Caribbean auntie-style. They don't dare mess with her but soon all of the dogs are covered with green, sticky burrs and at one point, Fin can barely see so we have to stop and de-burr her. We go back up the cliff and carry a now embarrassed-looking Fin through the lady's donkey field since the donkeys had tried kick her the first time round. All the other dogs look up at her, tongues out, slightly confused. We pass an enormous and intelligent looking Priscilla the pig, go back to the witch’s house, leave the dogs in the garden except for Fin who has quickly regained her shaggy superiority, drink tea and eat my brownies which I'd made with Grenadian organic chocolate but don't truthfully taste any different to any other kind of chocolate. Meanwhile, our sneakers are so covered in mud and an overlying layer of leaves, we could be on our way to a tropical Donald Duck convention. At dusk, we watch the bats make a sharp exit from the living room. We take this as our cue to leave too so we can go back to our home in the jungle boatyard and greet the mozzies who've got our names on placards like they're waiting outside the airport gates but Ben and Philippa’s trusty jeep doesn't start. It looks like little Alfi's switched something on in the ride up here and the battery has drained. 'Don't worry,' Ben says undaunted, 'I'll drive the lady's car. She said I could borrow it.' We all stare gratefully at the bright pink jeep in the drive and climb in. Our smiles soon fade. Turns out that this jeep has over 500,000 miles on the clock. 'Are you sure this car is alright?' Lulu asks. 'No problem,' Ben says, 'if it were daylight, you'd be seeing the road under your feet. By the way, have you seen a car that can do this?' He jiggles the steering wheel and it shakes so violently, it looks like it could come off any second in his hands. We all gasp and giggle and Delphine gets him to do it at least another five times before we decide another go would be just tempting fate. Lulu in particular, is taken with this vehicle. She tries to square it with herself that surely this woman doesn't drive, in her words, 'this incredibly dangerous old wreck' very often. That's our tween. 'Actually,' Ben says, turning the wheel as far it it will go into a steep downhill mountain bend, 'she drives it all the time.' 'Ha!' Lu exclaims, 'I knew she was a witch! Where did she go on holiday?' Ben shrugs. 'Haiti, I think.' Lu nods, quite serious now. 'She must be brushing up on her voodoo. Why else would you go to Haiti?’ When we get back to Quest, we can’t believe we made it without a single injury, very unlike us. We wave good-bye to Ben in his bright pink jeep and climb the ladder up to Quest. ‘I never want to do that walk again,’ Delphine says. ‘Sounds good to me,’ Jack says, right behind her on the ladder. Lulu comes up behind the two of them, climbing the three metres up to the transom. ‘You guys are crazy. I loved it.’ Love from F/F Quest and her crew xx |