I’ve always liked wetting things. But it has to be a secret, something performed high up at the top of the house, alone. Or perhaps there’s one other who can share, someone who perfectly accepts. That’s always the problem, to choose the right person. Someone you can trust to tell. This time I’ve chosen you. Can you keep it quiet?
When I was little I’d lie there in the mornings, too full of scared coldness to get out of bed and go all the way down through the house. The toilet was at the back, beyond the darkened kitchen. I had to hitch myself up onto the seat before I was old enough to stand. The draught from under the door tickled the soles of my feet, scratched at bare toes, then clasped my ankles and crawled up inside my pyjama legs. It was safer to stay in one place, be close to the sky, and let the warm fizzle start. In bed it could wiggle and spray over chapped
skin until the flow ceased. Then I would lie there, enjoying the sharp sting on the insides of my thighs, until the rest of the house began to stir.
My mother kept the secret. She didn’t tell my father or sister. She bundled the sheets downstairs and into the washing machine, bathed me and hid any hint of shame with towelling and talc. I never ever told anyone at school that I still did it. I knew what they called the sissies who wet themselves. Dirty cry-baby, and worse. While no one else knew, the knowledge wasn’t shameful to me, only wet and warm. Later I discovered that I could make fountains in other ways. I kept that a secret too.
Even now I’m not interested in doing it with girls who’re into safe-sex and don’t like getting wet and sticky. When I get a chance to stay the night, I gladly offer to sleep in the damp patch. There’s something so adult and yet childish about the raw rub of the sheet against my buttock, skin growing colder as I lie awake listening to the rhythm of someone else’s breathing. I still live with my parents though and until I’m out of college there’s no prospect of anything else. But occasionally I entertain impossible dreams. I look at houses the way some of my friends eye up cars. Perhaps that’s why I got the Saturday job at the estate agents, a way to be closer to the ideal of a place of my own.
That’s how I first noticed this one on our files. At the tail-end of last year, before it went on the market, someone from our office did a preliminary valuation. The house was on my walk home from college, on a slope overlooking the river. Its façade was grubby. Then the scaffolding went up and the stone-cleaners got to work. I took to peering in at windows, or sometimes the door was left propped wide while the men worked.
I imagined going inside and climbing to the top of the house. I guessed it would have amazing views into the hills. So I watched as a succession of lorries and vans parked outside; suspended ceiling installers, kitchen fitters, carpenters, plasterers, decorators and tilers. They were doing it up, from basement to attic. When I looked inside, there were contrasts of gleaming surfaces and sawdust everywhere. Stripped wood and spackled walls disappeared behind billowing sheets of white. Damp and rotten window frames were gouged and patched, filled and sealed, loose stonework healed over. After nearly five months, the workmen cleared out and the scaffolding came down. It was perfect, ready. The windows were cleaned and the pavement swept. The For Sale sign went up. The owner came in and instructed us to sell it. Well, not me personally. I was doing photocopying and stuffing envelopes. But I know where the keys are kept and how to check when the agents are booked to escort viewings. It only took me a quarter of an hour to get a backdoor key cut in my lunch hour.
When I finally got up the courage to use my new found treasure I chose a quiet afternoon and bunked off classes, something I’ve never done before. I went around the back, along an alleyway, counting the gardens until I arrived at a gate with a fresh coat of paint the same colour as the front door of the house. There was no one about, so I scrambled up the ivy and over the wall. The duplicate key worked a treat. There was a gentle click and the sweet well-oiled swing of the door to the kitchen. The house opened itself to me. I passed inside.
I explored slowly, beginning by going down to the basement. It was newly whitewashed with a vaulted ceiling and a second chamber that seemed to extend beneath the camber of the street. It hadn’t been mucked about, just the knobbly walls and old red tiles, clean, neat and unimproved. The kitchen took up the whole of the next floor, with a newly-installed Raeburn and hardwood work surfaces. At the front of the house the room was at street level but the rear half was open, a breakfast area awaiting a solid oak table, with french doors out onto a wisteria-clad balcony.
The whole house was empty, sparse, but an open invitation. In the largest reception room a wooden step ladder was still propped against the wall. The floor-to-ceiling window, with freshly-painted shutters, looked out onto a balcony with Trafalgar railings. The light from the window streaked across the floor to end at the foot of a white marble fireplace dominating the rest of the unoccupied room. I climbed the final flight of stairs to the very top of the house. The entire upper storey had been turned into a fantasy bathroom. It was enormous. A giant bathtub sat in the centre of the room. It was the real deal, not repro, from a reclamation yard. It had beaten copper flanks that gleamed, and an apparatus of sprouting taps bent over it. A copper shower head, maybe eighteen inches across, was suspended from the ceiling. The plunge pool, set into the floor, was so big that it looked as though it ought to have shipping lanes and tides. It was easily the craziest bathroom I’ve ever seen.
I wondered if they’d had to re-enforce the floors to withstand such a weight of ironmongery and water. Surely, I thought, the sway of the moon would make waves if that expanse of marble were filled. I walked to the arched window and took in the view towards Little Solsbury Hill, although you couldn’t actually see it from that angle. Then I turned on the shower and the taps of the bath and the hot pool. I admired the efficiency of the re-plumbing. There was no drop in water-pressure at all, each flow was unimpeded by the other. I played them on and off to test this and enjoyed the deep-throated resonance of the splash into the hollow of the tub.
I put the plug in the bath. Then I put the plug in the pool, and watched as both filled. The level of bathwater came up to the edge, surface tension broke, spilling down the sides of the tub onto deep, moss-like, carpet pile. I didn’t turn off the taps but observed, fascinated, as the level in the pool also rose. The water was loose at the top of the house. Liquid bounded, lively from the basin, and roamed across the floor. It dug in, eager to scramble and rummage beneath the underlay and claw out any crack or tunnel. Later, perhaps, the carpet would stink like an old dog. Water can rip the bark off trees with its bare teeth. Water can terrier down through hillsides. Water can take this house by the scruff and eat it all up.
I turned off the taps. I breathed slowly, deeply, looking around at what I’d already done to the room. Then I sat down. I placed my palm flat on the carpet, until it took on the dampness of the floor and held it to my cheek. Very still, cross-legged, I sat for a long time, looking out at the view of the rooftops. The water began to paw at my leg. I shifted to the plunge pool, took off my shoes and socks and dipped my feet in. I kicked the water away from me gently. It lapped back.
I stood up again, walked to the window to listen for any trace of noises in the street but there were none. I was alone at the top of the house. It was a long way down. Eventually I turned from the view and span each of the taps back full-on. I let the water relieve itself from the pipes, on and on, unstopped. After a while I went down a flight of stairs. I could still hear it running behind me. I listened carefully in case it halted when I abandoned it but the flow continued. I was on the landing below when the water sprang free from the grip of the ceiling. It puddled down onto the floor and in places the moulded cornices began to perspire, like big fat drops of honey-dew from a fruit. Sweaty marks spread along veins in the plaster. Then, the water scampered into a corner and I watched curiously as it trickled in beneath the skirting. It was away again.
I raced down again to find it. I searched two rooms before I discovered where it had broken free into the kitchen and was splashing off the stove. I thundered up and down the stairs, checking its progress in each room. Its descent was a form of miracle. It seemed so impelled. From fourth floor to third it was abandoning what were once servants’ quarters, down through the bedchambers, finding all the seams in the house. It dripped from the ceiling rose on the second floor and runnelled along the edges of the shutters in the bedrooms. Within the hour a thin trickle was already leaking out of the front door. It had come through the vaulted ceiling in the basement and was crawling, licking at the stone flags on the floor. Higher in the house I heard creaking. Chunks of plaster collapsed and were flung down to the floor. It spurted and flowed. Soon, very soon, there would be a deluge as something, somewhere gave way.
I tried to imagine the original Georgian sewers in the middle of the street, the diagrams from an old school project sprung to fresh life from the gigantic waterfall I was creating. The water must have been able to sniff out the Kennet and Avon, even from there, know where it was headed, on and on down the hill. This water was a stray runaway that’s scented the estuary, heard the squeal of the gulls. The water was homing. It didn’t falter or pause. It made for the sea. I knelt on the carpet of the first floor landing. The marshy squidge of underlay beneath was sponging water up through its pores. The knees of my jeans were immediately dank as my feet. I stayed there, feeling the cold water rise. At first I didn’t realise what the new sound was. I could hear it clearly over the gush of water, but it didn’t make any sense. There was a baby crying somewhere in the house.
I pushed a hand down into the water and levered myself upright. I followed the noise, beginning methodically downstairs although I was sure that it came from higher in the house. I went rapidly from room to room, my socks a swamp that squidged around in my shoes as I walked or ran. Sometimes the crying sounded louder, at other moments it let up entirely. I tried the next floor and the next. I thought for a moment that the sobbing was coming from inside the fireplace. I shivered, but didn’t want to look. There was already a torrent of water through the ceiling and the crack where it was coming through had bowed. Little slits were opening themselves up in the plaster. I left the room and pounded up the stairs to the top, to the bathroom, the highest point. Water flooded down past me on the stairs.
I looked about frantically. I’d not meant to hurt any living thing. Stupid dirty cry-baby. Wee-wee shit-bag. Nancy, pansy, little baby, peeing in its pants.
Where was it? How could you hide a baby in an empty house?
The sound of crying was so loud but the room was empty apart from the bath in full flood. The giant copper shower-head above was awesome. Where the light caught it from the arched window, rainbows were dancing over the tub. The sound of water pouring was a chorus throughout the house but the wail of the baby still clacked on and on and on. It just wouldn’t stop. There was another wail and then I realised. My hiccups of laughter began to cover the sobbing. A gull. A gull on the roof could make those sounds, echoing down the chimneys and into each floor, swirling down and spilling out into the empty open rooms.
I watched as water continued to tip out over the rug and down between the floorboards. Then I lay on my back. The water slipped beneath my legs and shoulder blades. My hair clung to the back of my neck. The elbows of my sweater sucked up more and more and more liquid. The cold encroached. Water pressed on, down through the house, utterly shameless. I lay very still in the wetness of my own making, right up at the top, while the water hunted for its own level. Soon I would get up, soaked, and wade down through the torrent on the staircase. I’d close the front door behind me with a soft click, shutting my secret inside, leaving it to find its own way out.
© Pauline Masurel 2008