The Punishment Of Water

This is a piece I wrote in late August, 2020, which the majority of you won’t have seen. It popped into my mind because, after the huge amount of rainfall here in Devon over the last few days, I was thinking about the astonishing weight of water and how often we underestimate it. Directly after the events described in the essay below, I became extremely poorly with shingles, followed by a blood clot in my lower intestine, and - amidst all of it - had to hurriedly find a new place to live (you’ll soon see why). All of this was hugely unpleasant, not least the shingles, which I discovered is the name for the process when a stoat somehow burrows clandestinely inside your stomach then begins to eat your nerve endings from within then turns back in the direction it came from and burrows back closer to your skin then somehow finds a tiny biochemicals factory inside your abdomen and sets it alight with the help of a can of old engine oil it found in a shed. Some of this experience inevitably ended up being transmuted into the narrative of the very watery novel I was writing, Villager. It added some colour - and pain - to the book which, with hindsight, I wouldn’t have wanted to be without. But I probably would not have seen it that way when I had a live angry pyromaniac stoat in rooting around close to my digestive organs…

My house flooded this month. Twice. First, water seeped through the back wall of the living room, turning the floorboards black. Next, it poured through the kitchen ceiling from the bathroom. It was hard to tell at first if the two floods were related, and, though now it seems more likely they were, it has not been confirmed. It might not ever be confirmed, because some of what goes on deep in the bowels of an old house will always be a mystery. To an extent, the house has been damp from my first day in it. Before I moved in, I pointed out a patch of damp on the bedroom wall to the lettings agent, who reassured me that it had built up because the place had been empty all winter and the builder who’d worked on the house was sure it would go away once the central heating had been on for a while. It didn’t. The damp has got worse since then, and has appeared in other places: the living room walls are wet to the touch, especially after heavy rain, and paint is peeling in several rooms. My clothes give off a mildewy odour if I dry them indoors. The salt, pepper, chilli flakes and flour in the cupboard against the back wall of the kitchen have all gone sticky, as if in the gradual process of liquifying. I was in denial about all of this for a while, partly because I don’t want to be a fussy tenant, and partly because I like this house, have worked hard on it, put extra money into making it pleasant to live in and rejuvenating its garden, and had intended to stay here a long time. But then I began to smell a strong drain smell: not sewagey, but earthy, stagnant. A smell that seemed to belch and growl from an era long since put to bed. I noticed that the downstairs toilet began to bubble any time water went down a plughole. Then there were the floods: the sly one that made its way into the living room while I slept, and the dramatic one that happened when the shower was put into use on Thursday last week.