The machine Alfie the plumber has hired looks like a Zimmer frame with a big pump bolted to it – a pump designed to blast water through our heating system at many times the pressure of the one in the boiler.
This is the latest intervention in our ongoing heating crisis, which has been going on since early January. The pump has already been replaced. The pipes have been injected with two different scouring chemicals. The whole system has been drained and refilled several times.
It would be easy to say that none of this has worked, but in truth it’s worse than that: each intervention has left us slightly worse off. While Alfie kept coming back every few days to try something else, we had brief windows of warmth, and hope. But now the high-pressure pump machine has failed to fix the problem, we have neither.
“I’m out of ideas, to be honest,” Alfie says.
“We’ll just have to wait for spring,” I say. But spring is beginning to seem a long way off.
Over the next few days the situation deteriorates further. Random rooms used to heat up and cool down in an unpredictable pattern, but now they all stay cold, all day long, even as the boiler throbs away. When the outside temperature drops over the weekend, the mood in the house begins to darken. On Monday afternoon I find my wife in her office, in her coat, typing in fingerless gloves.
“If you’ve come to feel that radiator, I’m going to kill you,” she says.
“I just want to check if it’s …”
“Don’t touch it!” she shouts. “It’s off! They’re all off!” During the silence that follows, I slowly withdraw my extended hand.
“The towel rail in the bathroom is sort of tepid,” I say.
“If you haven’t got a solution, I’m not interested in updates,” she says. Another silence follows.
“Maybe we should call Alfie again,” I say.
“You mean I should call Alfie again.”
“Yes,” I say.
“And say what?” my wife says.
“That we’re cold!” I shout.
At sunset I carry the portable electric heater from my office shed into the living room and plug it in. It’s not big enough to heat the whole room, but it’s marginally preferable to going to bed at 6.30pm.
“Alfie’s coming again tomorrow between two and three,” my wife says.
“Does this mean you’re speaking to me?” I say.
“No,” she says.
Alfie arrives the next day, looking haunted. He’s probably wishing we would just die of exposure. He turns off the boiler to check the return pipe; nothing seems amiss. When he turns the boiler back on, the circuit board blows. Alfie shakes his head.
Years go we had an existentialist plumber called Patrice. At least I thought of him as an existentialist: he was French, had a downcast air and pronounced the word “system” in a manner that invited multiple interpretations. He made me feel as if my plumbing problems were consistent with a godless universe. It would be good to have Patrice here now, I think, if only for Alfie’s sake.
Alfie, having installed a new £200 circuit board that only takes us back to square one –square zero really – leaves defeated and bereft.
“He said we should think about getting a second opinion,” I tell my wife once he’s gone.
“He said that to me too,” she says.
“So who do we call?” I say. “A priest?”
Later, as we sit in the chill evening of the living room, the electric heater ticking gently, I put up my feet and lay my arm across the back of the sofa, then extend my fingers, one at a time.
“What are you doing?” my wife says.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Are you trying to touch that radiator?” she says.
“No,” I say.
“Leave it alone,” she says.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “There has to be a reason.”
“Please stop trying to talk to me about it,” my wife says. “I can’t bear it.”
“Is it a punishment?” I say. “For wanting a heated towel rail in the first place?”
“I don’t understand why you keep going on about it when there’s nothing we can do,” she says.
I’m just trying to extract meaning from futility. I think: Patrice would understand.
