The floor of the morning room, when washed, turned out to be a beautiful, multi-grained parquet. They had scrubbed it down with a mixture of bleach and cleaning solution, before dragging a large tin of wax up out of the cellar. With nothing better to do with their time, the three of them tackled the job with abandon.
The furniture had mostly been moved upstairs or into a corner of the kitchen, and Rust, at last, seemed enthused to help, now she'd finally come to terms with what they were doing.
"I haven't been able to move like this in donkey's years," she smiled, sitting on the floor with her legs crossed, rubbing wax into the wood with a cloth. "I never thought I'd be able to do this again."
"You were older, right?" Quilt asked, and Rust nodded in acknowledgement.
Quilt nodded back, "I used to do uh," she paused, "community nursing. Visiting the elderly, makin' sure they weren't lying on the floor, that they hadn't run outta sausages, that kinda junk."
She took a scoop of wax, shuffling backwards a little as she did.
"Poor old birds the lotta them, and it was mostly birds mind, don't see many blokes at that age out living out on their own." She sighed, "Those that did make it to that age never outlived their old women."
Rust didn't say anything in response to that, taking another dollop of wax for herself, and they worked in companionable silence for a while.
"My ma used to work in a hospital," Shim finally said. "She did reception in A and E four days a week."
He stopped to look over his section of the floor, before shuffling sideways. They were working the wax in first, and they would buff it properly later, at least that was the theory. Rust was the only one who'd done it before, and that had been decades ago.
"Never paid well, and wasn' what she wanted, but she never had the time for nothin' else. She wanted to get a nursing degree, but..." He gestured to himself with the rag and then with a shrug continued working.
Rust took a touch more wax and moved a little. She was doing each piece of wood one at a time, making sure it was all worked in, and it was satisfying to see the colours change.
She knew all her children had jobs, that was why they'd moved away, but what they were eluded her, and she had never worked herself. If you didn't count raising a gaggle of children, running several clubs, and helping out with all the little things a village needed to function as 'working', anyway.
What they did may have even eluded her in life, there were a lot of them, and once you added on the grandchildren... She frowned to herself, there might even have been a couple of great-grandchildren, by this point?
The days went by so fast. How was she meant to keep up?
She stared around the half-empty parlour, curtains gone and windows bare to the thrashing rain outside. They'd had some great parties in here, over the years. D… Da… One of her sons, he always helped her choose a tree each winter, together they had made a tradition of it, and the whole family would pile in. It was also him that delivered the firewood once a month and made sure she was well stocked up on flour and sundries.
She wondered if the others had designated him with those jobs, or if he'd chosen to do it himself, and if it was him who'd inherit the house when she was gone. Or would it stand empty, or would her daughter and her… Her…
Rust blinked as a strawberry candy ricocheted off her arm, skidding across the floor and finding a new home underneath the piano.
"What was that for?"
"We lost you again." From Quilt, who had been readying another sweet, and was now instead unwrapping it for consumption. "What's on your mind?"
Rust shrugged. "I was thinking about my son. I think about them- my children- a lot."
She rubbed harder at the floor, putting her all into it.
"If we aren't outside of heaven. If this is the real world somehow..."
She paused for almost a minute, buffing the floor and thinking about how she wanted to word it, before giving up.
"No, nevermind. I'm younger now absolutely, and the more I remember, the older I think I was. If there is a real world out there, and this is some, some fuckery, then I'm dead now and I should stop worrying about it."
She hummed under her breath, a long, monotone sound, trying to work out what she had been going with this.
"I was never at the point the nurses were coming out." She nodded towards Quilt, "But my kids were always about, nagging me to move closer or in with one of them. They didn't like me being out here in this draughty old cottage on my own."
She huffed, "But I had my chickens, I had my garden, the windows were new, and I was happy."
She sighed, still feeling the pang of loss in her heart.
"My family will either find me or they won't. They had me for a long time, and nothing lasts forever. I was prepared to go."
She moved to a new patch of floor. They were almost done with this half of the room and would have to work out how to do the other, soon. As she shuffled over, she gently nudged Shim, "Plus, I have you two, for as long as you both want to stay. Even if you are turning my house upsidown!"
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She stretched up onto her knees, one hand on her back, and looked around again.
"What do we keep? The armchairs were never so bad, the chintz one was always the best, but we may as well put the sofa in the kitchen. I don't know what sort of duck they stuffed it with, but it's still trying to get out, I reckon. I never did manage to find a comfortable spot on that thing."
"And you want it in the kitchen?" Shim laughed, "where we'll end up sitting on it even more often?"
He smiled, eyeing up the floor as if considering how far he could slide across it on his knees. "But sure, we can clear out the all those boxes in the dust-corner, it might fit there."
-
Two days later and the room was ready for habitation. They had decided, by committee, to refer to it as 'The Living Room'.
They had polished the floor to a sheen and rearranged the most comfortable of the chairs around the stove. The smell of dust and disuse had been replaced by the warm smell of wax, woodstove, and a faint hint of cooking from the adjoining kitchen.
They had even pulled a couple of rugs out of one of the spare bedrooms, and the resulting room was warm and cosy.
They hadn't managed to fit the sofa into the kitchen, so it had instead been layered with blankets and cushions, until it was, if not comfortable, then at least semi-functional.
Most of the chairs had been covered with blankets, actually. It was almost reminiscent of the sheets, but the light colours brightened the room. They'd dragged in the big oil lamp from Quilt's apartment and made it at home in one corner, and the fancy dining chairs and other miscellany had found new haunts throughout the house.
The old dining chairs, on the other hand, had found a home in the stove, may they rest in pieces.
Rust sat perched on the edge of the sofa staring around with wide eyes and watching Shim mess around with the sewing table. He was trying to work out the mechanism for flipping the machine out, something she had never done. The chicken, Gertrude, was snuggled on her lap, but the others were confined to the cleared corner of the kitchen, having finally remembered the first tenet of chickendom, Poop on Everything.
Under normal circumstances she would have left them outside, a little rain or snow wouldn't hurt them, but this was too much, she had been afraid they might drown or get blown away, and it had been hard to even get to the coop to feed them.
Beside Shim, Quilt was polishing the top of the piano with what remained of the wax, and outside the wind howled and rain lashed. They had left the curtains soaking in the bath, trying to do something about the sixty years of ingrained dust, and she wasn't sure she wanted to put them back up.
Luckily the place was well insulated and the windows double glazed, so the storm was providing atmosphere more than anything else. Her kids had insisted on getting the windows put in only a few years previous, probably because they didn't want to find, come spring, that poor old grandma had frozen to death.
Plus, she suspected that when she did finally go, there would be schedules and timeshares written up about who got to holiday in the house and when. It made her smile to think about what might have been.
The parlour would have been the first thing to go, though, if she was being honest with herself, which she was forcing herself to be now. It had been old-fashioned and uncomfortable. Now it was still old-fashioned, but Quilt and Shim were rapidly sanding off the hard edges.
She ran a hand over Gertrude again, the feathers soft and clean against her skin.
The walls were painted a light, salmon pink, and she made a note to repaint them in white once the weather finally cleared. The store should have paint, and they'd have to go out soon either way, they were running out of food and one can only survive on eggs and sweets for so long.
"We ought to repaint the walls." She stated, and Shim looked up from the machine, glanced around, nodded and went back to his fiddling.
"The pink ain't too bad, it makes the room a little warmer." He said, " I think I've almost got it. it's not a mechanism at all, but it is held in by…"
A moment later the sewing machine was sitting on the floor, and the table was being examined again. "Oh, there is a belt in here!"
He pulled a rawhide leather belt out of the space where the machine had been, and after that a small needle box, which Rust recognised as having belonged to her grandmother. She'd always wondered where it had gone, but not enough to ever look for it.
He inspected the belt for a moment, and then with a shrug handed it over to Quilt. "We should oil it or something before we use it, probably?" He sounded unsure, and Rust reached out for the belt. A moment later it was in her hands.
"I've cleaned enough tack in my life," she said, running her fingers over it, "to know how to deal with leather. We had a stable out the back, at one point..."
She frowned a little, feeling her brow scrunch up. "Fish oil, beeswax and a little lard, generally, if my memory isn't failing me."
She bent it a little, feeling the roughness of it with the pads of her fingers. "It doesn't look like it's ever been used, there's no wear on it, It's just dry. I guess maybe my mother wanted to get the thing working again at some point?"
She gave a small shrug and handed the belt back, stroking the dozing chicken. "A little of the floor wax might do it, and we have some vegetable oil left in the kitchen. We can probably skip the lard."
"That sounds like a plan," Shim grimaced, taking a small glob of wax on his fingers and heading towards the kitchen, "let's skip the fish oil too, thanks."
Quilt laughed, "it's good for you, lad, plenty of vitamin… Uh, sun vitamins, to keep you nice and healthy."
He turned and made a face at her and she swiped at him with her cloth.
The piano gleamed under her ministrations, but the rest of it wasn't in such good condition. There was a hole in the stool, which she was blaming on mice, and Shim on somebody with a very pointy bum, and that was to say nothing about the actual sound of the thing.
Wincing, Quilt opened up the keys and ran her eyes over them, but not her hands. "Looks clean enough in here, but god, the sound of it."
"Don't do it!" Shim shouted from the kitchen, although he was hard to hear over the howl of the wind.
Quilt hesitated, one hand over the keys, and then with a vicious grin ran her hand across the whole thing.
Clink clonk clink bong clink! Rust put her hands over her ears and there was laughter as Shim returned, a cup of warmed wax and oil in his hands.
"Do you think we can tune it somehow?" he shouted over the racket, and Quilt shrugged, grinning and ceasing her banging of the keys. "Maybe we can find a book in our fantasy library, if this bleedin' rain ever stops."
"At least it's not actual 'bleedin'' rain," Rust said with a sigh, standing up and moving to return the chicken to the kitchen. "Let's hope it stops soon. I'll go put some beans in the oven, they should be ready by dinner."
Quilt nodded, cracking open the upper lid of the piano and peering inside. "Oh hey, BRICKS," she exclaimed, and a moment later she pulled out three more bars. "Oh, and a BLOCK, score one for dinner!"
She hopped down off the stool and took off after Rust, bars in hand, leaving Shim alone in the drawing room, gently rubbing wax into the belt.
He could hear the two of them in the kitchen together, Rust grumbling good-naturedly over the stove and Quilt showing off the BLOCK, insisting they make a stew. The fire next to him crackled quietly, and as he looked out the window, he realised the wind had stopped.
A moment later there was a quiet knock at the back door, and he placed the belt and wax down, meandering over to have a look.
A few violent tugs later and it swung open, he should oil the hinges, the rest of the wax would work for that.
He looked down at the girl on the step. Half his height and soaked to the skin, her hair was soaked flat to her head and she was shivering violently. She wasn't even looking at him, staring at his feet with vacant eyes.
He stepped back from the door and gestured for her to come inside.
"Ah," he said, "you must be here about the piano."