The house has sprung a leak. After a third day of rain, water starts running down our bedroom window on the wrong side: the inside. It gathers in a pool on the sill and drips over the edge to the floor.
“We should prioritise this,” I say, the carpet squelching under my feet. What I mean is: we should move this up the list, ahead of mending the garden wall and installing the new towel rail. We will struggle to appreciate these small improvements, my reasoning goes, for as long as it continues to rain indoors.
“So get up there and fix it,” my wife says.
“Those days are behind me,” I say. What I mean is: I don’t go up on the roof any more. This is not because I am infirm, or lack balance. It’s because I’ve long since used up all my luck on that score.
As a child I feared everything, except heights. My brother and I once spent a whole summer jumping off the roof at the back of the house. We started every morning, as soon as my mother left, taking turns to leap on to a stack of cushions, then running back upstairs for another go. As the weeks wore on other kids would join in. I can’t say we were lucky no one got hurt, because we always kept going until someone got hurt. It was just never me.
I carried on taking these risks into adulthood. Even in my 40s I would regularly clamber up on to the roof to bat the television aerial back into position using a giant papier-mache pencil from an old book week costume. There was always a heartstopping moment on the way back in, when I had to dangle a little, but the only thing that eventually stopped me was the advent of cable TV.
“Now I’m done,” I say.
“I’ll get Mark,” my wife says.
Mark the builder is just putting a last coat of paint on the cupboard doors in our new bedroom, formerly the middle one’s bedroom. Unlike me, Mark’s immediate response to almost every issue is “No problem”, but this situation perplexes him.
The sudden nature of the cascading water, he says, is actually a good sign: it’s liable to be a blocked gutter, rather than some kind of serious structural compromise. There is no way to know, he says, until someone gets up there. This is the word we both keep using: someone.
“What if someone balanced a ladder down there,” I say, “on the peak of that roof?”
“Too risky,” he says.
“What if someone climbed through that skylight, and then over the top?” I say. Mark shakes his head, but I can feel myself wanting to press someone’s luck, by proxy.
“But you want to get it sorted,” Mark says. “Cos that is a lot of water coming in.”
The next day the sun comes out, and the issue gets deprioritised: the carpet has dried and anyway, we’re scheduled to swap bedrooms. The time has come to haul one mattress upstairs, and another downstairs. Clothes are moved from one cupboard to another.
“I need you to help me hang pictures,” my wife says, at teatime.
“Today?” I say. I regard this as low priority, but I’m overruled. I leave the middle one’s mattress leaning against the window in our old room, and go in search of some picture hooks. By 7pm, we are moved into the new room. At 11pm, I am lying in bed in it. Beside me, my wife is already asleep.
It’s amazing how unconcerning a leaky window becomes once you’re not sleeping next to it. In the new room I am completely preoccupied by how noisy everything is. I can hear the cat skipping through the cat flap six times an hour. I can hear the dog’s nails against the floor as it paces in the hall. Upstairs we were insulated from sound. Down here it’s like sleeping in a bus station.
I am distracted every few minutes by a new noise: the cat shredding a rug somewhere; a voice in the street; the rain beginning again in earnest. You are going to have to learn, I tell myself, to tune these things out.
At 4am, when I am woken by what sounds like a body falling from a roof, I convince myself I imagined it, and close my eyes. When I next open them, my wife’s silhouette is filling the doorway.
“What?” I say.
“You left the mattress leaning against the leaky window,” she says. “I couldn’t move it, so I just pushed it over.”
“Is that what that noise was?” I say.
“Yes,” she says.
“Did it get wet?” I say.
“Everything’s wet,” she says.
