Over the next week, Adrian and Sheila continued to clean up after Nigel. Sheila tackled the kitchen and Adrian sorted out the foul bathroom and toilet, as he couldn’t ask a lady to venture in there. Then they both blitzed the living room. Towards the end of the week, Adrian and I continued the work, blasting Nigel’s old room free of the grime. We had to re-paint the walls, ceiling and skirtings, because everything was heavily nicotine-stained, and the curtains had to be thrown out. He also left rubbish including a large old TV that Adrian lugged off to the dump.
Whilst Adrian was there, Simon questioned him about dumping the curtains from Nigel’s room in the bin; surely Adrian could clean them?
‘Yeah Simon. Have you seen the state of them? Look at the nicotine on them. It’s so deep they’ve gone stiff as a board.’
Simon then did his usual annoying thing of hanging around and moaning.
Adrian interrupted.
‘Hey, instead of moaning, why don’t you pull your finger out and do some cleaning yourself from time to time?’
‘I don’t see why I should,’ Simon replied. ‘I never go downstairs.’
Bearing in mind that the kitchen and bathroom were there.
Adrian replied, ‘Well, you use the loo and you must have a shower, now and then’.
Gerald was also moaning.
‘Simon’s got the two frying pans full of fat permanently in his cupboard now.’
Gerald couldn’t take the initiative and either clean one of the pans or get a new one himself (probably a pound or two in a charity shop). I decided to take one there just to shut him up, although we didn’t provide these things for tenants in other houses. At least Gerald texted Adrian on the Tuesday night after we’d been there, thanking him for making the place once more ‘habitable.’ This was possibly the first thank you to come from any of them.
Then, toward the end of the year in which we’d evicted Nigel, it was Gerald’s turn to start to seriously misbehave.