"Changing Rooms"
“And lo, I saw the man that was not man. He who made things that were not. He who can destroy and build again in His likeness. And that man shall come from the sky, illuminate the world; and return all souls unto Him, for His is the grand design in the New Jerusalem. His sainted name was Andrew, and with his hands he did great works.” -- Second Letter of Saint Lawrence to the Thessalonians.
The end of the world will be televised. The viewing figures, however, will be shocking.
“And now on BBC1 a change of programming. Instead of the episode of EastEnders as advertised in most TV listing publications, we now be bring you live coverage from the front line at the Battle of Megiddo, where we join our chief news correspondant Kate Adie embedded with the forces of good in their battle against the armies of darkness. Then at nine-thirty, classic comedy with Only Fools and Horses.”
Lawrence turned his key in the lock and walked into the ornate front hall. Another exhausting day of book signings, tedious contract negotiations and insincere brown-nosing at corporate functions. It was late evening and he was thoroughly exhausted, his usual style and panache was no longer with him. The hair looked limp and bedraggled, the suit smelled of other people’s cigarette smoke and London exhaust fumes, and his head felt the same. Oh to be rich, oh to be famous. Didn’t people realise that fame was such hard work?
Lawrence changed rooms. He changed them from nothing into something more. From ordinary to extraordinary. From chintz and Laura Ashley into, well, Lawrence. He knew he was different, special, important even. It was his duty to take the dull, the boring, the tasteless, and shake it hard until things were beautiful again. That was the essential part of Lawrence, it was his mission in life.
His degree was from St Martin’s, but even they couldn’t teach him about style, wit, panache and the dangers of hessian wallpaper. That had to come from inside him, God-given talents. It had always been there, and his room changing talent let it all out. His was a touch of fop, a dandy and a bon viveur. A modern Wilde, even. And like Wilde, he’d leave his monuments behind when he was gone. Wilde’s were merely paper, brought to life only with the opening of a book, or a stage curtain. Lawrence left the real thing, always visible, always real. His work was something substantial, something you could touch. Wilde, on the other hand, was perfectly correct. With the book back on the shelf, the theatre gone dark, his art was quite useless.
Lawrence was more than an artist. Lawrtence was in television. Lawrence, as he never stopped telling himself, was an artiste.
He sighed, and slipped his frock coat over his shoulders. Underneath, he wore an embroidered waistcoat, paisley cravat, the kind of shirt with frilly cuffs and baggy sleeves that screamed “FOP!” at the top of its voice, hugely expensive none-more-black trousers from one of Saville Row’s more unusual bespoke tailors and boots that had only recently been part of something dangerous in a swamp.
Professionally, things weren’t getting any easier. He could change rooms until the cows came home, but at series nine, programme sixteen, another sitting room somewhere in the West Midlands, Daisy and friends were knocking at the front door. He’d done gothic. He’d done country house. He’d done art deco, minimalist, wattle and daub and bouncy castle chic. And when he thought nobody was looking, he’d done gothic a couple of times more. Six or seven times, just to make sure.
The trouble was, he reflected, after the two hundred and ninth living room, bedroom, outdoor privy; after the two hundred and ninth “Oh my God!” from the uncultured, under-educated punters who secretly hated his work and would rip the whole lot out within a week; after yet another middling-to-fat fee (not to mention a rather lucrative clause whenever the programme was repeated, which in these days of multi-channel digital entertainment packages, was often) landed in his bank account; after all this, the rooms all seemed to merge into one. The uber-room. The one, average rather-better-than-average Lawrence design. Gothic, with a twinge of fop. In short - dandy, rake, designer extraordinaire, genius that he was, Lawrence was all out of ideas.
The Great Blockage kept him awake at night. He marched up and down the stairs from Edwardian bedroom to post-modernist study and back again via fifties retro kitchen, looking at polaroids of that box of a living room he had been given. A box in a housing estate filled with identical boxes, the bastard progeny of some arse of an architect and his CAD package; finished off, despairingly by the unimaginative neanderthals who had bought the place because they had nothing better to waste their lives on.
It was pink. Pink carpets. Pink curtains. Pink walls. Pink suite. Lawrence, on a limb, had driven up from his office in London in his E-Type, just to check the place out, just to check there wasn’t something wrong with the production assistant’s camera. The whole house was a temple to pink, right down to the people who lived there. They didn’t need any rooms changed, he mused, just their heads. With a rusty spoon. Without anaesthetic. It was, he decided, the end.
Series nine would be his last. He had other Sea Bass to lightly sauté in exquisite sauces . The books sold well. A certain chain of Do-It-Yourself superstores was more than happy to pay him ridiculous amounts of money to put his beautiful, beautiful face on tins of paint; while broadcasters were falling over themselves to have his foppish charm and razor wit fronting any number of makeover and lifestyle programmes. They all pay the mortgage, or would do if the mortgage hadn’t already been paid off by the extraordinary advance he’d recently received for an as yet unwritten romantic mystery bodice-ripper set some time in his spiritual home of music hall London. And that’s before the consultations, the private commissions and the public appearances where his agent could pick and choose, naming the first-four figure sum that came into his head.
But series nine, series nine. Something had to be done. Go out with the proverbial bang. Go out with the masses saying, “Phew, what about that Lawrence, eh? Now there’s a dandy, there’s a guy who could made red wallpaper look good.” Give the proles something to remember him by. His days of changing rooms may be over, but it was hardly going to be the end of the world.
Lawrence sat up with a start. His wife dozed in the bed next to him. His Habitat alarm clock read 3:16am. The end of the world. He smiled inwardly. The voices had called, and he would answer. The end of the world, he’d give them Armageddon alright. Armageddon with drapes, cushions and Medium Density Fibreboard. Andy had better get ready with his nailgun - somebody was going to get crucified.
The two days’ filming was not without its problems. To start with, the hotel was simply not up to scratch for an artiste of Lawrence’s reputation. They had delivered The Telegraph to his room, when he had clearly requested The Times. Breakfast was the kind of deep-fried cardboard you only get in those roadside cafes that Lawrence made a point of never frequenting. And to cap it all, the talent had to share the place with the film crew; all jeans, work boots, lager and swearing. The producer told him it was something to do with the World Shower Fittings conference that had hit town the same day, and the bathroom salesmen had the foresight to book up the decent hotels before anyone else did. So they were left with this concrete hell-hole beside the M6 motorway, more motel than hotel, and therein lay the gulf between class and crass. Unpacking his Louis Vuitton luggage into a sub-MFI hardboard wardrobe with hideous faux-brass door handles, he puzzled over why, exactly, the Gideons had left an entire box of their bibles in every nook and cranny of his room. It was, he reflected, as if they knew something.
On the first day, the Pinks moved out of their Powder Pink Palace, and he was foisted with Mr and (presumably, it’s so hard to tell in these days of “partners”, “girlfriends” and “casual fucks”) Mrs Grey, an insufferably dull couple whose only contribution to the proceedings was to turn their ugly, suburban noses up at his plans, and prattle on endlessly about their idea of transforming the rooms into - his eyes rolled - an English seaside town, which Mr Grey had dreamed up during a two-week camping holiday in Cromer. They could, Lawrence subtly informed them between takes of the opening-the-paint-tins scene, fuck right off. You can’t describe the sights, the colours, the sounds of the end of the world, but they certainly didn’t include a helter skelter or a nice walk up the pier to play bingo. On second thoughts, however, he was finding it difficult to imagine the rapture without a Punch and Judy show. It just seemed so right somehow.
Then there was Carol’s little accident. He had asked her to run up some curtains and a couple of cushion covers from a length of cloth he’d acquired rather cheaply on a recent trip to Northern Italy. Her sewing machine, in a shower of sparks, ran out of control; and the next thing Lawrence knew the producer was driving her to casualty like a madman, while assistants were set the grim task of getting the stains out of the carpet. Like a trooper, she was straight back on the job, eyepatch and all, the nursing staff having done a wonderful job with the rest of her hand.
It seemed such a shame to dump her work in the skip, so he finished it off himself. It wasn’t as if it was the real thing either, the bishop had assured him the shroud had been proved a fake years ago, and if you can’t trust a bishop these days, who can you trust? In retrospect, he seemed in far too much of a hurry to get rid of it, throwing it into his arms even before he had started to negotiate a price. He had been right though, the curtains looked great. And the way they hung in the afternoon light. They glowed. Sort of.
At the end of day two, the flurry of activity at its end, the room smelling of fresh paint, all seams tucked out of sight, the staple gun hidden well out of view; the Greys, the production assistants and the warring angels and daemons ushered off camera, Lawrence stood back and admired his work. Without even closing his eyes, he could imagine the battle of good against evil over the fields of Megiddo. He could hear the cries of joy of the rapture and the blood-curdling screams of the faithless left behind. He could see the colours of blood merging with the colours of the Earth, the heavens, Hell, all points in between. It was, he contemplated, not unlike the first day of the Harrods sale.
“So,” said Carol, “here we are again for the last time. How did you think you did?”
“Carol!” said Lawrence, feigning surprise, “I’ve surpassed myself. Can’t you see?”
“Well, it certainly is ... unusual.”
Carol focussed her one good eye on the far wall. The paint seemed to move, to shimmer, to come to life. She tried to count the ornaments on the shelf above the fireplace. Something in her mind told her there were three. Three angels. But there were more. Hundreds. Thousands. A whole host. Waiting. Swords shining in the light. The light coming from... where?
“One tries one’s hardest, as you well know. I looked at traditional and pre-conceived ideas of design, and threw them all onto the dump like the old-fashioned rubbish that they are. I’ve gone for something fresh, new, exciting. Something alive. Something that we can all relate to. Good versus evil. Faith against faithlessness. Life versus death. This is back-to-basics. The creation took six days. I did this in two.”
Carol blinked. The man was clearly bonkers. Linda over the road had done a very nice pink bedroom with the help of the charming Pink family. At least she was normal.
“Lawrence, we love you dearly, but your attention to detail this time has been exquisite. Do you want me to tell you how much money you spent?”
“If you must.”
“As you know, the budget each week is five hundred pounds. You spent..... four hundred and ninety-five pounds and seventy-six pee!”
“Oh! That’s good!” he replied, trying his damnedest to sound interested. In the New Jerusalem, after all, money means nothing.
“I’m impressed, some of this stuff looks very expensive indeed.”
“Expensive only in terms of meaning, my dear.”
Carol wasn’t certain, but there was something different about Lawrence now. He glowed, and there was nothing the make-up girl could do about it. The light that illuminated the angels was now shining on him. From him. It came from within the room, but from no discernable source. It even dimmed the camera crew’s lighting rig, and the director and the sound man were clearly edging towards the door.
“So....” she said, snapping back into a reality where her co-presenter didn’t have horns, “what was your best bargain?”
“Well,” Lawrence started rather too camply for his liking, ”I’m going to have to say the curtains. Didn’t cost me a bean. Sorry about the sewing machine.”
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
“That’s what you get when you mess with religious artifacts. Who’d have guessed the Turin Shroud was the real thing after all these years, eh? Live and learn.”
“Live and learn,” she echoed, her inner voice screaming at her to get the hell away from this nutcase, run for her life, and don’t stop until you reach the Channel Tunnel. “And your greatest extravagance?”
Lawrence lit up. Literally.
“Oh! It’ll have to be this.”
He pointed with a flicker to a large, ornate golden box, which Carol assumed Andy had knocked up out of a few scraps of MDF and a tin of gold spray paint. It had grown since she had last seen it too, taking up the entire corner of the room where the television had once stood.
“Och, that’s a nice TV cabinet,” she said.
“That is not a TV cabinet, my dear. That, Carol, is my piece de resistance.”
“Oh aye? So what...”
“It is, in fact, the Ark of the Holy Covenant.”
That got a result. There were one or two sniggers from the film crew, and Carol could barely suppress a smirk as the cameraman launched into a solo version of the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” theme.
“Like out of the film?” she asked, pronouncing it “fellum.”
“That’s the chap, only this isn’t some movie prop. This is the real McCoy, my dear.”
“Oh come on now, Lawrence, you’re having me on. Dr McCoy’s the chappie out of Star Trek...”
But she could tell he was deadly honest about it. He filled the room in front of her, his hair seemed to be buffetted by an unfelt wind, his black coat shimmered with the same gold as the Ark, which sat in the corner, brooding, humming gently.
A pause. The silence filled the room. Deafening, ear-splitting silence. Nervous hands gripped the faux-leather of the sofa, waiting for Lawrence to compose himself. And when he spoke, it was like a gunshot, an explosion of sound forcing them to jump back from reality for a moment.
“You know Carol, some would say that the Ark - the very chest containing the Ten Commandments handed down by God to Moses - was lost in the midst of time. Buried in the sands of the Holy Land. Hidden for mankind’s own safety in some catacomb by those fearful of its awesome powers. Or locked up in some warehouse in the good old U S of A, if you believe everything you see in the movies.”
“So where’d you get it then?” she asked, tremors hanging on her voice.
“A car boot sale in Tottenham. They thought it was a TV cabinet.”
Big laughs off camera. Lawrence’s eyes glowed red, then a bright white. The laughs stopped.
He looked straight into the camera lens. “Want to see inside? Come on, you all want to see inside.”
“Err...” said Carol, desperately trying to get back to the script, “I think it’s time the Pinks saw their new room.”
The director opened the door, and ushered the family into the boundless room, hands over their eyes.
“Don’t look now,” Carol warned.
“Don’t look now,” echoed Lawrence, lifting the lid of the Ark.
“Don’t look... don’t look... don’t look... don’t look....”
“Look.”
“Oh. My. God!”
It was Mrs Pink.
“What’s happened to the pink?”
Under normal circumstances, Lawrence would probably have told the batty old dear to shut her stupid, ugly mouth, but at this present moment in time and space, he was heaving a large, solid gold lid onto the floor with a solid gold “whump.”
There were no angels. There was no swirling storm of death. There were no cleansing flames flinging faithful and sinners alike to all corners of heaven and hell. There was just a chest containing two broken slabs, lying there just as they had been placed millennia before by men of God, in His name, to carry and honour His word. The word of God, a code to live by, and a reason to live.
Mr Pink gestured towards the Ark. “That’s a lovely TV cab...”
Now the light.
One flash. Brighter than a thousand paparazzi flashguns. Brighter than the biggest nuclear weapon. Brighter than the sun. Brighter than all creation. Just a flash, leaving a black-white afterglow on the retina. You are blind, yet can still see. No heat. No cold. Just a quiet, deafening flash.
And the room was empty.
No Carol. No crew. No Pink family. Just white walls, white floor, Lawrence and the Ark. A smile fluttered over his lips. His best design ever.
The silence was broken by “The Yellow Rose of Texas” playing on the doorbell. With no one else in the vicinity, Lawrence walked down the hall and opened the front door where a figure in a long, hooded robe filled the frame.
“Excuse me - is this the right place for the end of the world?”
Over the figure’s shoulder, Lawrence could see a large white horse munching away at the grass verge at the end of the drive.
“Armageddon? The end of all creation? The battle against good and evil that will deliver the faithful to the New Jerusalem, God’s promised land of milk and honey?”
“Yeah, that’s the fella,” replied the figure in a rather over-familiar manner. He sounded, thought Lawrence, rather like a delivery driver asking for directions.
“Pshaw! You’ll be wanting Ground Force,” he lied, “I believe they’re filming in Dudley this week.”
“Dudley?”
“Dudley. It’s not far from here, just scoot up the motorway and you’ll be there in no time.”
“Dudley? The end of the world’s in Dudley? Revelations was right about something then.”
“Dudley. Mind how you go.”
“Dudley? I’d better be off then.” The figure turned on his heels, revealing skeletal features under the hood. It walked down the drive muttering to itself, while at the end of the road, three other horsemen waited on their steeds, one of them making a big show of pointing to an imaginary wristwatch with an exasperated look on his face.
“Excuse me!” Lawrence called after the departing figure.
“What is it now?” it replied, “We’re late enough as it is. Famine made us all stop for a sandwich, and you know what those Little Chef places are like...”
Lawrence didn’t know. The day he’d eat in a Little Chef would be the day hell froze over. Some time in the very near future then. He pointed to a dangerous looking object propped against the porch.
“You forgot your scythe.”
“Oh. Right. Ta,” said Death, “You’re a saint, squire. I’d forget to go to my own funeral if I wasn’t already dead.”
Lawrence shut the door on the four horseman and smiled. The day had been a triumph, and it would be a day where the sun never, ever set. Soon the whole world would embrace Armageddon chic. Bright light, big spaces, and best of all no people to clutter the place.
He removed his frock coat and let it slip to the floor, his great wings unfurling from his back, white light coming from everywhere and nowhere. Where Lawrence led, the world would follow.
To a far, far better place. One of his own design.
Note: "Changing Rooms" is a co-production of Endemol UK Productions and BBC Television featuring the talents of (amongst others) Laurence Llewllyn-Bowen, Carol Smillie, Linda Barker and "Handy" Andy Kane. This short story, however, is a work of fiction and the characters (be they alive or represented by anthropomorphic personification) and situations herein do not represent the personalities of those aforementioned, nor does it attempt to infringe the copyright of said television programme. Besides, my Lawrence spells his name properly.
Copyright Alistair Coleman, 2003
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