With Steve gone, we had to find a replacement. We wracked our brains and asked around, but it wasn't until the end of November that Simon suggested a man called Denis who he said was a bricklayer. We went to see him at his cortijo in the campo. He and his wife, Norma, seemed delighted to see us (I'd previously been introduced to her by Pepe, who knew everyone and had sold a house to everyone and it was as much as she could do to look at me that time).
'I'll get the kettle on,' Norma said.
We knew a bit about them, from Patrick and his wife Yvonne. I'd instantly liked Patrick and Yvonne, partly because Patrick had said how he liked to help people and I'd never previously heard anyone say that. I could relate to it. It was nice to do favours for people with no expectation of payment. They'd given us the lowdown on Denis and Norma one day when Norma had passed by their garden as we were having a cuppa.
'She's a lot older than him, of course,' Yvonne informed me. 'He's her second husband. Apparently the first one broke his neck falling down the stairs.'
Judging by the sour look on her face I thought she might have pushed him. To my mind, she was the antithesis of stereotypical femininity; tall, thin, stern, with murderous eyes.
I was thinking of this while Adrian started questioning Denis; who now struck me as vaguely camp in his swaggering posture. (Indeed, it didn't take long for us to rename them Denise and Norman.)
'I heard you're a bricklayer?'
'Yeah, that's right,' Denise replied.
'Well, we've got a wall that needs knocking down for starters and rebuilding. Can you give us an idea of how long it would take you to put up a new wall? Like, looking at this wall here,' and Adrian pointed to their living room wall, which was about 8 metres by 2 and a half metres, 'how long did it take you to build that wall?'
'Oh, I knocked that up in under two days.'
Neither Adrian nor I had any idea how long it should take, but it seemed pretty fast. And he had done a lovely job, with the British-style bricks perfectly melded together in a way you never saw locally.
'You wouldn't have to be such a perfectionist with ours though,' I said, 'because we're going to have capa fina over all of it, so that will make the job a lot quicker.'
(It was only later that we found out he had not actually done his brickwork and was as much of a bricklayer as I was). We engaged his services that day and he agreed to start on the Wednesday. He had no work on at the time (a very bad sign).
We already had experience of employing British expats; the previous year when we'd used one to do the plumbing at the cortijo, as well as our brief experience with Steve, but we couldn't see any alternative. We had yet to find out that the British in Spain work like snails, do a crap job, moan like buggery and then want you to pay them a third over the local rate.
Denise, with Patrick as his labourer were to last 10 days. The first day they knocked down an upstairs exterior wall, cleared away the rubble and prepared it for the new wall to be built. When we popped by just after 4 o'clock on the first day I was impressed with the progress.
'That's more like it,' I said to Adrian and I made the mistake of also telling them that they seemed to be doing a speedy job. From that point on, the brakes went on.
Since the wall was ready now to be rebuilt, I rushed up to a town near Granada on the Thursday morning and bought 25 beautiful glass bricks – in the most luminous violets, purples and blues. Having learned from Steve's inability to think for himself, we were going to direct the work much more forcefully this time. I'd told Denise I'd be back by 1pm, by which time he would easily have laid a couple of feet of bricks on which the glass blocks would rest.
I raced back to the house and gave him a piece of graph paper clearly marking the pattern I wanted them to be installed in.
'I'd like you to put them straight in this afternoon,' I said. 'That's the absolute number one priority.'
He folded the piece of paper and put it in his pocket without looking at it. When we returned to the house just before 5 (the men had already left), the glass blocks hadn't been touched. Instead, it appeared the men had done some weird dotting and dabbing of the electric cables into the walls – a job the Spanish electrician was going to do as part of a priced job. We were paying Denise and Patrick 80 and 50 euros a day, respectively, for them to do someone else's job.
It soon became clear that Denise knew best and was not in a million years going to take instructions off a woman. And although we hadn't actually said we would employ him to do the whole project, but had seen the bricklaying as a test, there somehow now seemed to exist an understanding that he was a permanent employee. Indeed, Patrick told us a year after these events that, at the time, Denise had rubbed his hands together in glee, calculating that he would now have at least nine months work off us, whilst agreeing to our face that he would have the old part of the house habitable within three.
There then came the matter of payment. We usually paid Benjamin and the two Romanians on a Friday at 5pm, but this week we hadn't managed to get to the bank, but knew that wouldn't matter. They were always very laid-back about payment.
'We'll pay you Monday, if that's okay?' we said.
'Si, no hay problema,' they said in unison.
'What?' Denise said. 'But Norma is going shopping this evening. I need to give her the money. And she's leaving at 5.30.'
'Well, if it's that urgent, I can go to the bank now and get your bit out,' I replied.
'Yes, I need it,' he said, quite annoyed.
As Adrian walked down to the bank with me, he said:
'Well, considering a few days ago they had no idea that Denise would have this work, how come they're so desperate?'
'They must be living hand-to-mouth,' I surmised.
Yvonne told us that if they had a few spare euros they liked to go down the coast, have a curry, get completely smashed and spend the night in a hotel. Maybe that was the weekend plan.
To see the end result of all this work, 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