The Water Room

9. RUNNING WATER

Nothing in London ever lies in the direction that you expect it to be. The Thames constantly appears to turn the wrong way. The London Eye seems to move around on its own accord. The tower at Canary Wharf wavers laterally like the point of a compass. Buildings north of the river suddenly appear to the south, and vice versa. Walking the streets, London shakes and rearranges itself like an amoeba. Kallie was thrilled at finally being able to get her bearings. She felt like placing a pin on a map. Balanced in the V of the roof, she studied the horizon. ‘The house faces east-west,’ she called down.

‘Is that good?’ Paul was framed in the window of the narrow attic, struggling into a sweater.

‘It means the front gets the morning sun, and the rear bedroom gets the sunset.’

‘How are the slates?’

She looked around her feet. ‘A few are broken. And there’s a busted gutter.’

‘It looks as though the rain comes in. She couldn’t have done anything to the place in thirty years. We could have had a survey done if you hadn’t been in such a rush.’

‘We’ll put it right bit by bit.’ She had a hard time explaining why the house meant so much to her. Paul had fantasized so often about being free to travel, it seemed odd that her instinct now was to put down roots. ‘We’re all packed in so closely together.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You can see rows and rows of Victorian terraces from up here. You’d think we would know more about each other. How do we all manage to live such separate lives?’

‘Come on down, the van’s here.’

Paul’s brother had brought over their clothes. Kallie had been shocked to see how easily her world could be packed into a few boxes. She suspected that Paul thought it was rather cool. He didn’t like the idea of becoming encumbered by belongings. She had agreed at the time, but being here changed everything. There was something about the house that made you want to draw the curtains and never go out.

She loved being up on the roof, feeling the first spackles of evening rain on her face, looking down at the ten gardens, five from the houses on her side of Balaklava Street, five more from the road beyond, grouped together like a densely cultivated park, divided by strips of fence and low brick walls. She counted rowans, wild cherry trees, a small-leafed lime, holly, crab apples, London plane trees, hornbeams, several ponds, sheds, clothes lines, a conspiracy of gnomes. The gardens harboured the interior life of the neighbourhood. Kids didn’t play on the streets any more, but the gardens were still safe, protected by terraced fortresses. She knew she would come up here often on summer nights, the way a cat climbs a tree to better survey its territory.

‘It smells damp,’ Neil sniffed. ‘Needs a lot of work.’ He picked at a corner of wallpaper in the hall and lifted it, running his finger across the powdery grey plaster. ‘All this will have to come off.’

‘It’s fine for now,’ Kallie told him, protectively smoothing the paper back in place. Neil worked for a mobile-phone company in the city, and wanted to be twenty-five for ever, even though he was in his early thirties. He treated his girlfriends like his cars, replacing them with more roadworthy models whenever they showed signs of mileage.

‘That’s the last box out,’ he told her. ‘There wasn’t much to unload. How are you going to fill the rooms?’

‘Self-assembly stuff, until we can afford something better.’

‘It’ll have to be flatpack to go down this hall.’ Neil had a warehouse apartment with porterage, but the open-plan design had made it virtually impossible for anyone to stay without being in the way.

Paul went off with his brother to buy him a thank-you beer, so Kallie spent her first evening in the house alone. The carpets were filthy. She vacuumed them as best as she could, then set about washing out the kitchen cupboards. Plastic buckets filled with hot soapy water and disinfectant began to make the place more inhabitable. The old lady hadn’t intentionally kept a dirty house, but she had clearly been unable to manage by herself. At least the electricity was back on, although it didn’t extend to all parts of the house; the ancient wiring needed replacing.

There were odd noises outside: a ceanothus rattling with fresh rain in the garden, dead laburnum leaves dropping on to the yellowed roof of the leaking lean-to conservatory. Inside, too, the pilot light of the central-heating system flared up with a pop that made her jump, pipes ticked as steadily as grandfather clocks, floorboards creaked like the decks of a galleon. The basement light switches didn’t work, and it wasn’t worth trying to clean by torchlight.

A dead woman’s house-worn cups and saucers, a drawer full of odd items of cutlery, another filled with string, bags, three-pin plugs and out-of-date discount vouchers, perished rubber teatowel holders from the seventies. Alien smells in the cupboards-packets of cardamom, juniper, custard powder, spills that were bitter and blackly sticky. Brown L-shaped marks on old linoleum where something heavy and ferrous had once stood and overflowed.

At ten-thirty she sat down in the ground-floor lounge to unpack linen and the handful of chipped china ornaments that had belonged to her grandmother. The street was preternaturally quiet, but now she could hear something. Setting down an armful of sheets, she rose and listened.

The sound of running water.

A steady susurration of rain, cataracts rushing through gutters, swirling into zinc funnels, precipitating through plastic pipes, racing across the bars of a drain. The crepitation was steadily rising to a crescendo.

She climbed the stairs to the floor above and walked into the second bedroom: no light bulb in here. The damp wood of the window frame had swollen so much that she couldn’t budge it. The sound was softer beneath the roof, so it couldn’t be loose guttering. Collecting her torch from the hall, she clicked it on and ventured into the basement. They would take out the non-supporting walls, she decided, repair the conservatory and bring more light in from the raised garden. The bathroom was absurdly large for the house. She supposed a parlour had been converted, yet it seemed odd to have had a parlour with only a single tiny window, high and crossed with bars, little more than a skylight looking out at street level.

Now she heard the sound quite clearly, running-no, rushing water. It seemed to be coming from the right-hand adjoining wall. She hadn’t met the people on that side. Heather had told her that their names were Omar and Fatima. What could they be doing that would make such a noise? It wasn’t a tap, more like a set of them, all turned on at once. The sound had volume and depth. Coupled with the noise of the heavily falling rain, the sense of precipitation seemed to enclose the house entirely.

She shone the torch around the bathroom, and wished she hadn’t. The fittings were cheap, a bilious shade of avocado that had been popular in the seventies. Only the bath was white enamel, and there was a good chance that it had feet, those French ball-and-claws that could look nice if they were cleaned up. Unfortunately, the whole thing had been boxed in with corrugated hardboard. She thought of her parents’ house and remembered the craze for boarding over bannisters, sinks, door panels, any decoration that smacked of Victoriana. The house had probably had a dozen makeovers, each according to the prevailing taste of the times, each leaving a residue of personality in a crust of paint.

The Swiss army knife she had used on the packing cases was still in her back pocket. Cross-legged on the cold parquet floor, she unscrewed the six chrome-topped pins holding the bath’s front hardboard panel, then dug the tip of the blade under its base. The board groaned as she flexed it, then split and came loose. She bent back the sheet until it lifted free, and was horrified to find that she had released hundreds of tiny brown spiders from their penumbral home. They scattered in every direction, over her legs, across the floor, up the walls, fleeing the torchlight. She leapt to her feet and shook out her hands in revulsion, dusting them from her clothes, feeling the tickle of legs everywhere, imagining more than she could see.

Jumping out of her jeans was the best idea, but scattering the spiders with bright light would have been better. She headed for the safety of the bare bulbs in the hall, leaving behind the churning noise of water. This, she thought, is what owning a house is all about. It’s going to take some getting used to.