Summer seems to end earlier every year – the weather turns, the football starts, and you realise you’re going to spend the remainder of August trying to reconnect with your lost luggage. This year the traditional demarcation between the seasons – when we arrive home from holiday to find everything in our house in dire need of immediate repair – has come so early that we haven’t even been away yet. The light switch in the downstairs loo is stuck in the on position. The back door will not shut. The garden hose has exploded.
“Nothing in this house works,” my wife says, trying to flick the jammed light switch.
“Better always on than always off,” I say, trying to be positive. A stuck light switch is no reason to cancel your holiday, after all.
It has been a bright, warm summer morning, but now the sky suddenly darkens. A steady rain starts to fall. I begin the long process of trying to close the garden door: yanking it shut while lifting the handle – repeatedly – until it finally catches. After a few moments the rain turns heavy, battering the skylight above.
“I was gonna buy a new hose today,” I say. “I guess there’s no hurry.”
“We needed the rain, I suppose,” my wife says, staring out the window as the back garden blurs.
“That’s the spirit,” I say. The oldest one appears, down from the attic bedroom where he now lives and works.
“The roof is leaking,” he says. “I need something to catch the water.”
“Take a bowl,” my wife says.
“I put a bowl there already,” he says. “But the bowl is full. I need a bucket.”
We find a bucket and follow him upstairs. A crack has appeared in the bedroom ceiling – several cracks, in fact, forming a jagged asterisk with water pouring steadily from its centre.
“That’s new,” I say. In the distance I hear the ominous roll of thunder. I think: this actually is the kind of thing people cancel holidays for.
By the time the bucket is full the rain has stopped and the sun is out. Normally I would take this opportunity to put the problem out of my mind, but I was struck by the speed at which the water cascaded from the crack. It wasn’t like a leaking roof. It was like not having a roof at all.
Later, on my way to bed, I find a wet spot on the lower bannister, which I trace to a second leak – water raining down two floors from the very top of the staircase. I decide not to tell anyone about this.
“Did you call Mark?” I ask my wife the next day. I am referring to Mark the builder, who my wife sometimes calls “Mark No Problem” in order to contrast his approach to life and work with mine.
“Yes,” she says. “I told him it was fairly urgent.”
“Did he say ‘no problem’?”
“He didn’t, actually,” she says. “He said the roofer he usually recommends has just retired.”
“Oh,” I say.
“But he’s going to try to find someone else,” she says.
The next day my wife texts me a phone number to call. It’s from Mark, but it’s a recommendation once removed: he’s heard good things.
The man at the other end of the phone seems mildly suspicious of me, an unrecommended customer. But he says he will try to stop by and look at my leak before Thursday.
“I’m going on holiday on Thursday,” he says.
I text him my details.
The person who calls me on Tuesday is not the man I called originally. He’s the man’s nephew, he says, and also a roofer. He can come on Wednesday.
“Is there easy access to the roof?” he says.
“No,” I say.
The nephew arrives the next morning. I take him through the house to the garden, so I can point at the bit of roof in question.
“It’s the flat bit right at the top,” I say. “Above the window.”
“It’s just a question of how we get everything up there,” he says.
I take him up to see the star-shaped crack in the ceiling, with the bucket still underneath.
“That’s not good, is it?” he says.
“No,” I say.
“Let me get out there and have a look,” he says, climbing out the window. He stands on the apex of the rear extension, on his toes. I can only see his legs from where I’m standing, by the bucket.
“Oh that’s bad,” he says.
“What?” I say. He pulls his phone from his pocket and starts taking pictures.
“That’s really bad,” he says.
