“Right, Mrs. Hartley,” he said, rolling up his sleeves. “Time to give this drain a haircut.”
“It’s the downstairs loo,” she said, leading him through a cluttered living room. “Gurgles something awful. My Harold used to sort it, but… well. He’s two years gone now.”
He lifted the manhole cover in the back yard. The smell hit him first—that sour, primordial stench of stagnant water and decay. He shone his torch down. The channel was choked with a writhing mass of pale, fibrous roots, like the veins of some buried monster. They’d broken through a joint in the pipe and were now weaving a thick mat, trapping wet wipes, congealed fat, and the dark silt of years. drain root cutting wakefield
He thought about Wakefield while he worked. The old mining towns, the mills converted into flats, the bypass they’d built twenty years ago that had somehow made the traffic worse. Beneath it all, the same network of drains, most of them laid when Victoria was Queen. Every house, every street, was connected by these subterranean rivers of waste. And every spring, the roots came back.
Twenty minutes later, he heard it—the glorious, satisfying gloop of a blockage clearing. Water rushed through the pipe, carrying the last of the debris away. He ran the camera down to inspect. The cut was clean. A circular tunnel now ran through the heart of the root mass, wide enough for waste to pass. But the roots themselves were still there, alive, clinging to the outside of the pipe. They’d be back. They always came back. “Right, Mrs
“All done,” he said. “Flush the loo a couple times. Should be fine for another year, maybe two.”
The address was a small terraced house, the kind with a yard no bigger than a postage stamp. The woman who answered, Mrs. Hartley, was in her seventies, with worried eyes and a floral apron. “Gurgles something awful
He packed up his gear, washed his hands with industrial wipes that smelled of citrus and chemicals, and knocked on Mrs. Hartley’s door.