The next morning just after nine, Steve caught sight of us again outside the bar (we'd just dropped the children off at school) and he pulled over in his car and walked over.
'Christ,' I mumbled to Adrian under my breath. 'Why can't he just go straight to the house and get on with some work?'
'Hi there, you two. God, I'm knackered. Get me a café solo will you?' he said as he slumped into a chair and got out his tobacco tin. 'I've got to lay off the beer a bit, I think. I've got a splitting head-ache.'
I could hardly say, 'Uh, no. Can you just go straight to the house and get on with some work, actually, because we're paying you by the hour?'
Instead I gulped my coffee down as quickly as I could and pulled faces at Adrian to do the same. I then picked up my bag, went to the little serving hatch, called out, 'Me cobra!' and having settled the bill I proceeded to stand by the table until the two men got up. I had to get this guy working.
It was 9.45 by the time we got to the house this time but it didn't make any difference. Steve just got his tobacco tin out and wandered outside to the garden to try and make conversation with the Romanian labourers, in his non-existent Spanish.
'Que?' he asked, pointing at the steel wires they were putting in place. He was all sign language and smiles, smoking his rolly, while they worked, until they stopped for their break at 10. Then he sat down on a log with them, while they opened their tins of sardines and got their barras out.
'Adrian, can you come inside a minute?' I called out from the exposed opening into the old house.
'What are we going to do?' I said in a low voice. 'What's he playing at? Can't you drag him away from Petro and Aurelius and get him working? Helen's going to be billing us for 20 euros for the last two hours despite him having done bugger all. It's stressing me out.'
So Adrian called him in and once more went throught the list of things that needed doing to make a start on the old part of the house.
'The thing is,' Steve said in a case of déjà vu, 'it's tricky to know where to start at this stage.'
This was a bit different to the attitude he'd displayed a few months earlier when we'd sat around in his and Helen's lounge, chatting about how we would go about the project. Then, it was:
'Yeah, no sweat. I can sort it out for you. I can turn my hands to most things, don't you worry. We'll work out a plan of action and I'll get stuck right in. You'll have no worries with me.'
Instead, I was now inwardly cursing and not in the mood for another day of him wandering around like a wet weekend. Adrian and I had wasted the previous evening traipsing down to the coast, with the children in tow, to return the electrical box he'd erroneously got us to buy.
'He's an electrician for Christ's sake,' I said. 'If he can't even get that bit right, what hope is there for him handling the rest of the job?'
This second day he decided to start chipping away at the ceiling in the open doorway between the two downstairs rooms. The doorway had been designed for a very short person, so it was necessary to increase the height of it and we would then get a carpenter to produce a mould that we could use to turn it into an archway. We also had to build up a layer of two or three steps, as the one room was about a foot and a half higher than the other room and at the moment we had to clamber down from one to the other.
Adrian and I went to a nearby town for building supplies for Benjamin and when we got back Steve was still intermittently hacking away at the ceiling. When he saw us about to leave at 2pm to meet the children he said:
'Hey wait! I'll come with you. I could do with a break.'
The three of us headed up to the bar. We only went there as it was where we met the children each day, after they'd walked up the steep road from the school. We both had a caña and Steve ordered an imported bottled beer; he didn't like cheap Spanish beer.
We were in the habit of killing an hour at the bar, not wanting to rush back to the cortijo as frankly it was boring and it would be a long afternoon if we went there too soon. It also meant that we could pop back to the casa around 3pm and double-check if Benjamin would need anything for the next day, since we were in charge of ordering materials for the job. The problem was that it seemed that Steve was going to stay for however long we were there. The children had a drink and some huevos fritos con patatas and so it was 3 o' clock by the time we left.
When I'd got up to order a second drink for us all, Steve had called out:
'Hey! How much is a pack of Fortuna?'
'Two euros fifty,' I called back.
'Oh, get me a packet then,' he said.
When it was time to pay, he made no move to even pay for the cigarettes and I ended up footing the bill for them and for his beers, on top of the ten euros an hour.
(Yeah, some of you out there. Don't tell me it's all my own fault and I should have asked him, because I just CAN'T. If there's one thing I hate doing it's asking people for money they owe me. It's my worst thing)
'I don't really see the point in staying this afternoon,' he then said. 'It'll be better to make a fresh start tomorrow.' And he got into his car and turned to go back to Adreimal.
'Well it's no loss,' I said to Adrian.'At least the clock will stop ticking earlier today.'
By the time he got back to Adreimal it would be near enough 4 o' clock and Helen would be writing down his hours presumably as 8.30 till 4pm...
To see the end result of all the work on the casa, take a look at the house now:
http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p86636
And also another of our completed projects:
http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p475271