It has been drummed into Carly for as long as she can remember that it is very important to get onto the property ladder. She supposes she could have saved more money by living at home with her parents whilst studying but she values her independence enormously. Anyway, this is another one of her parent’s mantras. Being independent. So, Carly sees this above saving every last penny. Anyway, she has a good job, and she marries someone who has a more lucrative one. Carly doesn’t really mind that he earns more as she wins over him on having many more letters after her name than he has after his. And the fact that she is a doctor who supposedly helps people whilst he is a lawyer who makes money out of other people’s misfortunes. She muses that she is being rather simplistic. But he does works in corporate recovery which is a euphemism for insolvency. So he does work with human misery but related to unsuccessful business ventures rather than failed health issues.
On entry to heaven, she is sure she will score higher on the social accountability agenda entry criteria. Carly is competitive by nature. What a shame she gets divorced. Now it is not so easy check on how he does at these heavenly gates where the cherubic angels float around with their clipboards and check lists. Carly doesn’t just have rows with her ex in her head. She often rows with lots of other people. Always in her head. Often complete strangers. They have no idea. Maybe it is better to call them discussions. It is all about how important she feels she is compared to them. This reached an all-time high when she did a paediatric oncology job. Children with cancer. Really you can’t get more brownie points that that, but it also doesn’t get much more emotionally draining either! More importantly the world cannot only be staffed by people doing these sorts of jobs. There is a need to eat and wear clothes, realises Carly. So, judging others isn’t particularly healthy, she realises. Who really knows what is on that heaven entry gate list? This train of thought really is a long way from property. Back to the title.
Carly likes to decorate her home using lots of colours. In one flat the palate was limited to only lime green and fuchsia pink. When she buys a bottle of navy-blue shampoo, she has to keep it in a cupboard for fear of colour offence. Next time find the right colour – never mind the brand. Or even the product. Oh dear, Carly must really try harder. Luckily most toilet paper is white, so this was less of an issue. Actually no. Wait a moment. Her sister has black toilet paper……but all this attention to toilet paper colour is, as her daughter Boo would say, is a first world problem.
Also, she has to have outside access as part of her property. Not that Carly smokes. She hates that. Rather she needs to feel the wind, look at nature and read novels outside. It could be a balcony, or a garden will do. Especially if you can have a trampoline. Large or small. Bouncing is always good. Especially now Carly cannot knock herself out post breast reduction surgery! When younger, Boo would often bounce in the sleeting rain with the dogs on the large trampoline. Those small exercise ones are fun but they aren’t really for sharing. The older Boo is now much too worried about her makeup to do this reckless exercise.
Carly likes to have some connection with water. Best to look out over the sea, a river or reservoir. However, once she had a hot tub. This worked well as she had three teenagers who would never desist from using their phones which really bothered Carly. They loved to take their friends into this gorgeous, calming water and even they didn’t want to risk drowning their beloved devices. So, Carly managed to get them off their screens for at least some of the time. The dogs loved the hot tub as much as anyone who went in it. They would always want to play “bring the ball and drop it into the hot tub” and when the ball was lost, they just barked at you until you flicked water at them which they drank mid-air. Snappy, snappy went their jaws. Really this was very tedious, especially for the teenagers who had come into relax and chat. Instead, it felt like active dog sitting or playing. A bit like babysitting when the children won’t go to bed, and you have to play with them and not get on with your own stuff. And worse still, no one paid you for these dog entertainment games. The hot tub was made of wood and had lights which cycled through the rainbow spectrum. A bit like Carly’s water feature in her current rental home which would otherwise have to connection to water. Carly wonders about this recent obsession of cycling lights through the rainbow spectrum. Her old car radio did the same. Bizarre she thought.
The only other connection to water in her current rental house is the automatic atomiser. This house was clearly built by very fire averse architects. The smoke alarms go off before you even put the bread in the toaster. Really far too sensitive and the scream it makes is something else. And in addition, there is this system in the kitchen set to drench everything. Carly knows that more damage is done by water to put out fires. Her son was home cooking roast potatoes but clearly things got too smoky. These atomisers behave a bit like daleks with flashing lights and spray vast amounts of water at head height all over the kitchen. Carly and her son had to fuse the whole house to turn this system off. Part of the problem was that Carly insisted she knew where the boiler was. But she confused it with the hot water tank. They do look similar, Carly muses and forgives herself this temporary aberration of knowledge! Carly is trying to be kinder to herself and only admonish herself for really serious misdemeanours. Luckily this atomiser system is now deactivated until the engineer comes round to reset it. But who is going to let the engineer know? Certainly not Carly. Nor her son. One internal tropical storm is quite enough.
Carly also has to sell her home too. She makes the house really attractive. Everything is put away. It looks homely but without clutter. Marie Kondo who wrote “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying” would be so proud of Carly. She takes photos of how she wants it to be kept looking so that everyone knows the baseline. Also, when an appointment is booked, there is coffee roasting and bread baking. She has a large stash in the freezer of those half-baked rolls. She even gets someone to take the dogs out when Nathan, the estate agent, brings round potential buyers. She didn’t want to put off people who are scared of dogs. They always say they are allergic. But when these people come round and are fine with her cats. Carly knows that they aren’t the allergic type as cats are much more allergenic than dogs. Just scaredy cats! Funny word for dog phobic people.
One afternoon Carly is having a bath. This is special and unusual. Carly makes the bathroom smell nice with candles and incense. She puts rejuvenating salts in the bath and eases herself into the hot and comforting water. She tries so hard to relax. She empties all thoughts out of her head like she has been taught in her mindfulness training. She breathes deeply and slowly. She really does try hard but after five minutes she is bored. So, she gets up, plays some music and does shaking in the bath. She has learnt to do this on a course. She shakes away in time to the music. She is in a trance jigging up and down in the bathtub. Thump thump thump. Yes, she can carry this on for much longer than lying in the bath trying to be mindful. It is good to be using up this energy in a productive way. She starts doing some shouting too. Ahhhhhhh. Oooooooooh. Grrrrrrrrrr. She did that on the same course. But she can’t be too loud as there are the neighbours to consider.
Being Carly, she can’t really keep this shaking up too long as she gets bored of that too. So, she gets out of the bath. During her jigging she thinks maybe she heard her daughter Boo return home. With her towel wrapped round her she dashes up to Boo’s bedroom. Carly knows Boo will be in bed. She has been a mother to teenagers for nearly a decade now. This is the place they go. Unless they are eating or showering or going to the toilet. Everything else is done in bed. Carly enters Boo’s bedroom, but she cannot see her. Boo is under the duvet cover. Carly thinks this is unusual even for a teenager as it is mid-afternoon. Boo is hiding. Then Boo talks from under the duvet. She admonishes Carly for having sex in the bathroom with the estate agent Nathan. “For real?” thinks Carly who cannot decide which is more ridiculous. Having sex in the bath or having sex with an estate agent. Boo then pulled her trump card and said that Nathan wasn’t actually bad looking.
Carly does eventually sell this house; Nathan is worth his weight in salt – she just cannot allow it in gold! She will always be contemptuous of estate agents. Even good-looking ones. Carly considers her next move. She buys a flat which overlooks a reservoir, has a veranda and is part of a large development so she can always meet new people which is very important for an extreme extrovert like Carly. It has a concierge to deal with her online shopping obsession. It also complies with the now very stringent cladding laws. But most importantly it only has one bedroom. Her children are now adults as they repeatedly remind her. They forever moan when they claim she is “helicoptering” them. So now with this new flat she is promoting their independence. They can of course choose to live with their father.
