Snowflakes at the Little Christmas Tree Farm. Jaimie Admans
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I go over to where he’s standing and try to take over without losing any of the air he’s already pumped in, but the process of me standing on one leg was never going to be a neat one – what I actually do is stamp on his foot and nearly overbalance. I flail around like a drunken great white shark trying to perform the Bolero routine and clutch the sleeve of his flannel shirt to stay upright. When did he take his coat off? I glance through the open kitchen door and see it hanging on the rack in the hallway, along with the hat he was wearing earlier. He’s wasted no time in making himself at home.
Once we’ve established that I’m not going to fall over and I’ve got a rhythm going with the foot pump, he goes back to the collection of things he dumped by the refrigerator and takes the heater outside to fill it. When he comes back in, he sets it on the floor, lights it and puts the safety guards in place, and sits back on his knees to show me the knobs to operate it. It makes the room smell like a Saturday morning at the garage. ‘This can burn quietly all night to give you a bit of light and warmth. The fumes will burn off in a minute, and you’ve got no roof or upstairs windows so there’s plenty of ventilation.’
I can feel the heat emanating from the little heater already, and it makes something that’s been tight in my chest since the moment I set foot in this house start to loosen.
He nods towards the pump. ‘Are you all right carrying on with that? Can I go and have a look around?’
‘Do you need a tour guide?’
‘This was my second home growing up, I know my way around.’ He takes a few steps across the kitchen but stops before he reaches the door. ‘Unless you want to give me the grand tour, that is? This is your house now, I have no right to walk around uninvited.’
I wave a hand dismissively and nearly overbalance again. ‘Be my guest.’
He adopts a French accent, which doesn’t work at all with his deep Scottish tone, and sings a few lines of ‘Be Our Guest’ from Beauty and the Beast. It makes me laugh so much that I nearly overbalance yet again. Disney songs and imitating singing candlesticks are the last things I expected from him, and his French accent gets progressively worse as he goes up the stairs and strains of the song filter down through the floorboards.
The mattress is starting to take shape, and I manage to switch legs without falling over when my thighs start to burn. I listen to the creaking floorboards as he crosses the landing and goes into the rooms above me. I like that he thought to ask if I wanted to show him around, even though he undoubtedly knows this house better than I do, and I’m strangely comforted by the sound of his footsteps upstairs.
‘So, what do you think?’ I ask when he comes back into the kitchen.
He cocks his head to the side. ‘It’s not that bad.’
‘Not that bad? There are more bits of the house missing than still in existence.’
‘Your main problems are the roof and the windows. Everything else is superficial. Things will look better once you have electricity, water, and some cleaning products, but the windows all need replacing.’
Considering there are no windows left to replace, even I could’ve guessed that. ‘How much is that likely to cost?’
‘I don’t know. A few thousand, at a guess. You haven’t got one whole bit of glass in the house.’
My eyes widen in shock. ‘I can’t afford that.’
‘You could afford this place,’ he says with a shrug.
‘Yeah, exactly. That was it. I put everything I had into buying it.’
‘And you didn’t think you might need to set aside some of your budget for essential repairs?’
‘Well, yeah, but I have a very limited amount left and it has to be prioritised.’
‘And there was me thinking you were just another rich city girl with more cash than sense and enough money to wake up one morning and say “I think I’ll be a Christmas tree farmer today” while dear old Daddy pours money into your trust fund.’ He must clock the look on my face because he looks suitably guilty. ‘Sorry. That wasn’t meant to be as offensive as it sounded. I’ve met people like you who come up here thinking it’ll be an easy get-rich-quick scheme in a film-worthy setting. They’ve seen the size of the land and dollar signs appear in their eyes. I assumed you were the same.’
‘The last thing I thought about was getting rich. I bought it because my parents would’ve loved it.’
‘Would have?’ he asks gently.
‘They died. Just over two years ago. I had the money from the sale of their house. I didn’t know what to do with it, only that I wanted to keep it for something important, and then I saw the auction and … I don’t know. It spoke to me. My dad always wanted to move back to Scotland. He loved Christmas trees and my mum loved Christmas, and I knew they’d love it. It seemed magical from the pictures.’
‘It was, once upon a time. A real winter wonderland.’ He looks around the dingy kitchen. ‘But that was a long time ago.’
There’s emotion in his words that makes me look at him, really look at him. I take in the slump of his wide shoulders and the sadness in his voice, and he realises it too because he shakes himself. ‘You could replace the windows one at a time to spread the cost. If you want me to, I can come over tomorrow and board up the remaining ones upstairs. And Evergreene had been intending to fix the roof for years, so there’s new roofing felt in the barn. I don’t mind nailing that over the hole as a temporary fix until you can afford to get it repaired properly. It’s a priority because the more water that gets into this place, the more damage is being done.’
My stomach drops like I’ve just got into a lift. How many Christmas trees will I have to sell to afford this sort of thing?
‘And I’ve got a builder who does all my building repairs. If you want his number, he’ll give you a decent price on the roof. Most of the materials are already here. The replacement tiles are stacked in the garden. You probably came across them when you were running from the monster squirrel earlier.’
‘It wasn’t the squirrel, it was the shock of the squirrel,’ I say, knowing that I’m never going to live it down, no matter what I say in my defence. ‘I’ve never been confronted face to face by an unexpected squirrel before, okay?’
He raises both eyebrows with a look of scepticism on his face. ‘From a spectator’s point of view, it was hilarious. I only wish I’d had my phone out to record it. Millions of views on YouTube beckoned. I’ve never heard such a bloodcurdling, ear-piercing scream over something so small and cute before. I thought you’d found Theresa May doing a dance or something equally horrifying.’
His ability to create the most random mental images is impossible not to laugh at.
‘Thank you,’ I say when the mattress starts letting out squeals of air because it’s full. I watch as he gathers up the pump and puts it back with the pile of other things, and sort of hovers next to it, paused halfway between helping with something else and picking up his stuff and leaving.
‘How