Water

            Last Sunday evening, after we’d been out for the day visiting, we came back home and, in the hallway, my wife noticed that her slippers were damp. They were directly underneath my winter coat, the hood of which was sodden. I struggled to remember: had it been raining yesterday? Had I hung that coat up there without letting it dry? And then I looked up at the ceiling, in time to see a water drop fall through.

            I struggled to take it in. Was that anything to do with our plumbing? But no, it could only come from the flat above us. A leak. And then I started panicking.

            I shot out, went around to the central door. That flat didn’t have a doorbell. The flat opposite theirs did, and I rang that- perhaps the occupant their could walk across the joint hallway and knock? But nobody answered. I hammered at the letterbox, and called out. No answer.

            There were lights on in both flats, but supposing nobody answered them? I had visions of being flooded out, of electricity fusing- perhaps even the ceiling collapsing under gallons.

            Finally, someone opened the window above us and leaned out. My wife, in stark contrast to me, had stayed level headed. She calmly asked him to came down, which he did, accompanied by his girlfriend. They were a friendly young couple, and when we showed them they leak, they were horrified. They’d recently installed a new washing machine, and the boyfriend went back to his flat to check it.

            So that is how we met our neighbours. That’s how you do it in London, anyway. We knew that new people were upstairs, but neither set of occupants introduced itself to the other until now, when there was an emergency. Up until then, we’d been hoping that they would be alright- sane, honest, friendly, reasonably intelligent- but we’d dreading the possibility that they wouldn’t be any of those things. I’d heard from a man whose upstairs neighbour liked turning all the taps on because of the colour the water made. And we’d already had to deal with a drug dealer, a criminal, and a man who liked throwing pizzas out of the window.

I keep telling myself, as Susan Jeffers suggests in Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway, that, whatever happens, I’ll handle it. And I will; because you do, one way or the other. But here, I thought I might have to handle an underwater home, with chunks of floorboard floating about in it. This didn’t happen, though; and, as my wife pointed out to me that night, we were luckier than those poor people up in Yorkshire and Scotland lately.

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For this week, I’ve gone back to an old idea I’ve had for a contemporary novel. That’s every work day, Monday to Friday. I feel ridiculously proud of myself for doing it, and ridiculously optimistic. And, alright, some days it might have been writing one or two sentences, but the crucial thing is, I kept going back to it, each new day. I didn’t give in.

I might easily roll it all up into a ball and toss it into the wastepaper basket, of course. I don’t want to jinx it. What I’m trying to do is write the synopsis, only the synopsis of the novel, to read out to my writing group when it’s my evening (about a month away). Fingers crossed…