Month: Jan 2019

Back on the Drain Gang

shawshank 1

Like the bodies of its tenants, the homestead has had enough. This is especially true of the drains, which sometimes pack up altogether and flood back into the house through the toilet, the consequences of which are exactly as you would imagine. Despite being a fastidious neurotic in some regards, “recent events” mean that my prior reservations about dealing with sewage are vanished. You might even say I was into it. Not the thing itself, you understand. I just like that the fear has gone. We might stink but within it one can feel righteous, even redeemed.

The dilemma of what’s worth fixing when you’re hoping things can’t carry on goes from the small – one might, for instance, screw in a lightbulb and wonder whether it will die sooner than anyone it illuminates—to the large. Clearly an overflowing drain is a big-ticket item in the black Friday sale of everything must go (wrong), but do you really want to dig up the patio? Or call the man who can? No. Not today. So, piecemeal drain repairs are now my thing. If I don’t prise up the cover, drop down and get dirty with the garden hose every 12 weeks or so, the drain will buckle. I have a reminder on my phone about this. Even still, sometimes I miss my slot and then, it happens.

fatberg autopsy
Fatberg autopsy. Yes this is a thing.

When there is blockage I hold an enquiry into what/who the source is. I have access to hard evidence (the impacted knot of excrement, wipes and paper that one must chisel free blindly from the drain like some cursed sculptor). And yet, when I launch the inquisition as to whose reckless self-purification is behind all this, I am reminded of another shocking truth of our household—everyone lies. The three of us are over two hundred years old, and yet we fib about going to the toilet. And more besides.

The web of mostly benign deception was first clear to me when my parents elaborate counter-intelligence operation about which of them eats shortbread came crashing down in the supermarket last summer. Diabetes isn’t even in the Premiership of the Old Man’s ailments, but it’s there, and along with certain other comorbidities isn’t helped by the substitution of “proper” food for biscuits. Plus, if I clean up your sh*t, I should get a say in what you eat, perhaps.

The persistent presence of shortbread despite me never buying it meant of course that someone was. Each blamed the other for the purchase and accused the other of eating it. Then one day I was at the shop with mum and she stuck some in the trolley. I asked who it was for, pointed out that dad was in hospital and she just shrugged and tottered off towards the eggs. I knew then the calamitous truth. They were both eating it. And they were both lying. Chinatown.

chinatown
“Well, someone’s eating it…”

So it goes with the drains. “Not me.” “I would never” “The carers throw stuff down there.” The many mad battles that might make up the day are yours to pick, and sometimes my internal CPS lets us all off the hook by assessing that there is nothing to be gained from prosecution and we can let the whole thing drop.

But the drains are the drains. It’s £300 to get it done if I’m not there. And then there is the “shame” (Mother’s words, not mine) of the Dynorod van outside. As though the neighbours were scoffing and judging the inferred behaviour and implied moral dysfunction that might cause a family to, you know, block a drain. Instead of just being amazed that anyone here is still alive and eating solid food. Though I do not share her foibles I know they are felt deeply enough that she cannot be the problem. So, I know whose behind is behind it. But I am so relieved when the culprit makes it to the toilet, let alone on their own, that this is in fact a small price to pay.

Plus, I get to feel hands-on useful, I can picture myself as a blue-collar pragmatist as oppose to an intellectual narcissist. And when one does a thing entirely, one is just the doing of the thing. Freedom. The myth of Sisyphus*. The often-blocked drain.  Same deal.

Mum looks on as I hose off my boots. “You had a lot of badges in the scouts,” she muses. Two, actually. Reading and lighting fires. Both matters I still hold dear. “Is there a badge for this?” Aye, mother. I believe so.

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Crease up, get down.

I am upstairs on the phone to a solicitor, attempting to reckon and repair the wreckage of my former life. The billable minutes are clicking toward billable hours when the sounds of parental discord rise from below, like the house band striking up a familiar number in some place you can’t believe you still visit. A life you thought you’d left long ago. But no…

caretaker
“You’ve always been the caretaker”*

The telephones at my folks, like all else here, are far from modern. A botched network of cordless handsets that seldom make it back to the correct cradle, each with a background hiss that makes everything sound like AM radio. Improving this is somewhere on my list of things to do. The solicitor’s voice, which I (in some version of denial) struggle to make sense of on a good day, is relegated even further into my mind as I listen instead, just as I did as a child, to what my parents are squabbling about. In this case , trousers.

Mum’s relationship to ironing could be the subject of a separate essay, but the essence of today’s dispute concerns Dad (who I have never seen iron) asserting that some trousers she has ironed for him (in which he will go nowhere, see no one but her or me, and do nothing but sit down) should have a crease in them.  Mum says this cannot be, “you cannot have a crease in cotton trousers.” My father’s answer, which comes at a special volume, several notches higher than the one necessary to get my mum to hear you at all, peels through the house– “I CREATE ONE!”

600px-'adam's_creation_sistine_chapel_ceiling'_by_michelangelo_jbu33cut
and God sayeth unto Adam, “Why would you need a trouser press, is there something you’re not telling me?”

Given his size and wellness an utterance of this dimension is an achievement. The dying body is, one presumes, preserving these powers for some desperate and definitive address or plea. That it should arise instead from such apparent trivia is but the everyday pathos of domestic life. Something and nothing at the same time.

The creation of which he yells concerns his trouser press, an artefact (now inaccessible upstairs) which speaks to both its owner’s precision, care and vanity as much as to what I assume  (given his military experience) must be unwillingness rather than inability to wield an iron.

The more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that a further examination of the role of ironing in life here is necessary. Mum can barely lift the iron, the board is taller than she is now and yet, unless physically restrained she will haul these implements into position and iron something. Singing as she does so, sometimes. Whether you see this as a reflex of servitude or a state of studied and deserved grace will reflect perhaps some political position (I am of the latter party), but again, more on this to follow. I only hope that you can bear the tension.

As all this drifts through my mind, my solicitor takes pity and offers to end the call, I concur. I think on my father’s sartorial and presentational concerns, on quite how long it will take he and I sometimes to get him “ready” for not much at all. When we do go out, the stakes rise, the raiment laid out and double-checked the night before. A trip to the doctors, a funeral, a pub with good food, each rendered like a state occasion. I have come to find this a helpful way to think about it. I serve the last royals of a failing state. Ceremonies are all we have left before the people (in this case death, but also taxes) seize the palace. Here we go. Paris is burning.**

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We do not know what shade we throw.

In the morning rituals the angle of the sun reveals plumes of perished flesh erupting from his shins as I pull up his trousers. He is crumbling, monumental. We are told that dust is dead skin, but it’s not until I see this that the constant transaction between who we are, what we’re made of and where we are going becomes quite so clear. On one level there is revulsion, on another beauty. If the light is right you can see the particles falling and rising in the air and catch the sublime in it. All my life I have been told I think too much but at times like this it seems to save me. I wonder if he sometimes sees the same, I believe so. Occasionally I think the only difference between us is that I have found a way to get these things out, to express them, even if it is to strangers. I wish we talked more. Instead I pull the unsaid about me like a blanket. I have no idea how I would look without it now, or how to put it down.

*Not quite true. Once, you were the taken-care-of.

** I would commend anyone interested in dressing to the seminal documentary of the same name: