Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [27]
One of my friends, Barnaby, accidentally punched the wrong builder in the stomach – ‘Oi! Fuck off, you little shit.’ Barnaby burst into tears and didn’t come round again.
The house itself soon started to take shape and began to be decorated. Because it was the mid-eighties, my mother settled upon a theme for her lovely new home. Hideous. An expression I heard a lot when growing up and, thankfully never again, was ‘rag-rolling’. ‘Rag-rolling’ is when you take a painted wall and ruin it. I can only imagine it was invented by mistake. Someone in the eighties must have leant on a wall without realizing it was newly painted and in the process not only invented ‘rag-rolling’, but also the equally tasteless paint splattered shirt which was all the rage at the time. What was wrong with people in the 1980s? I think the singer Sade was the only person who looked good.
My mother was looking less like Bananarama and more like Krystle Carrington every day. Her shoulder pads were so large she was once late picking me up from school because one of them wedged in the door of her new BMW 3-Series. The builders had to widen the doorways so she could get around her own home. She used every fad going to create what in the eighties was a dream home, but in hindsight was the stuff of nightmares. Looking back, I’d rather have lived in my father’s fictional ‘House of Death’. Loud bright colours were the order of the day. The out-of-bounds dark living room now had sky-blue rag-rolled walls and custard yellow carpets. Even though I was now allowed in, I banned myself from entering. The kitchen walls were Barbara Cartland pink with white stripes. Upstairs was worse. My mum employed more painting techniques of the era. There was a lot of ‘stencilling’ in the bedrooms and ‘marbling’ in the bathrooms. Marbling was painting made to look like marble. The results were criminal. A couple of the bedrooms were stencilled with swirls that were so disorientating it was difficult to keep your balance.
The fittings and fixtures were even more offensive. We had white cowboy doors between the pink kitchen and peach dining room. It was like a scene from the alternative ending of Brokeback Mountain, the version where they live happily ever after. The pièce de résistance of our new Hampstead house of horrors was undoubtedly the master bathroom. The bath had golden taps beside a spout in the shape of a swan’s neck and head. The water would shoot out of the swan’s mouth, like it was vomiting. The black loo was so over-stylized that it was actually unusable. The loo seat was angled in such a way that it pushed one’s bottom cheeks together, thus blocking nature’s course. It was difficult enough to poo with a vomiting gold swan staring at you, but the design fault made it physically impossible. It became a ‘show loo’, just for decoration. The whole house was a bit like that.
I don’t remember my father being around while the work was being done. He must have been making or editing his film. I know that he was also travelling to America a lot as he was putting together the sketch show Assaulted Nuts, which was co-produced by the US cable network HBO.
What I do remember is sitting in our newly converted loft playing with excess rolls of carpet and coming across my mother’s Filofax (an eighties must-have) and seeing a note to her from Steve, the builder with an iron chest. ‘I love you,’ it read. Why would Steve the builder love my mum? I was shocked. At this moment, my mother walked in. ‘Have you seen my Filofax, darling?’ She saw me sitting on the fluffy new carpet, the blood drained from my young face. ‘Are you all right, Michael?’
‘No,’ I said, barely audible. ‘The room is spinning.’
‘I know, Michael, that’s the stencilling. That’s the effect I’m going for. You’ll get used to it, it’s very trendy.’
I showed her the Filofax. ‘What’s that mean?’ I asked fearfully. Unfortunately, it had flicked to another