‘Oh God,’ I heard my mother say, and she called me to the toilet to show me four green frogs the colour of limes clinging to the inside of the bowl.
‘Look,’ she said, trying to flush them away. We watched the frogs swilling about in the current, before they were sucked down the U-bend. The two of us kept guard to make sure they’d gone but it wasn’t long before they reappeared, crawling slowly back up from the bottom of the toilet.
Later that afternoon the toilet stopped flushing altogether and an hour later when Mum turned on the tap in the kitchen a load of brown gravelly muck poured out into the sink.
I’d noticed a snowballing of things falling apart about the house: loosening boards, leaking fixtures, errant latches. A build up of what I assumed were the jobs my father had done without us even being aware that he did them. They were just part of the constant stream of misdemeanours committed by a house against its occupants. Jamming drawers, cupboard doors falling from hinges. They all could be and had been ignored, firstly, because my mother had never dealt with them before, and, secondly, because they required a type of action she was incapable of – asking for help. Edward had done what he could, but planing down jamming doors and unblocking toilets were beyond him. It wasn’t until we’d used the toilet in the Kings’ shed for a week because ours was blocked that my mother finally decided she had to do something.
I watched her struggle with the yellow pages. It kept falling from her lap like an injured gull, flapping south towards the floor. When she finally located a plumber’s phone number and rang, he was on holiday. The message on his answer phone gave the number of an alternative plumber. She tried that, but no one was home.
‘It’s too difficult,’ she said, and Edward, who had been watching my mother perform for half an hour, prevaricating and mumbling into her mug of cold soup, was so frustrated he couldn’t watch and he stood to leave the room. Then something drew our attention through the slats of the front blinds. It was a pair of legs running up the path of the Johnsons’ house. The legs belonged to a plumber and he was about to jump into his van and drive off.
‘Quick. Stop him!’ my mother called.
Edward charged out of the house.
‘Stop!’ she called over Edward’s head to the plumber, but Edward had already done that.
‘Stop!’ she called again, though the man had stopped and was walking towards her.
I trotted up the front path, behind my mother, nervous for her that she would be incapable of wording her simple request.
She pushed me aside. ‘We’ve got frogs in our loo,’ she said.
‘And that’s no good.’ The plumber’s words joined on to the end of hers and seemed to make a perfect sentence.
He followed my mother down the side of the house to the septic tank. She pointed out the man-hole cover and we watched him lift it off.
‘Same trouble as next door,’ he said, flinging the heavy square of cement on to the grass beside him. He peered inside, then he was gone, striding up the side of the house towards his van, stopping for a moment to stare up at the tree on the way.
‘Great tree,’ he said. ‘No good for your drains though.’
A minute later he came back down the hill carrying some drain-clearing device. He fed the arm of it down into the dark pit of the septic tank, glancing once at my mother. In that instant he took in the mess of hair, the odd un-matching clothes, the bare feet and the uncertain eyes. He seemed to see it all and know it.
‘Stand back,’ he said, as a load of chopped roots and mashed cockroaches spewed across the grass in front of us.
They stood together for an hour hosing the chopped roots down the yard towards the back fence. The spray from the hose plumed above them as they continued to talk into the orange dusk.
Edward had got fed up waiting for her and was cooking burgers in the electric frying pan. He squeezed blobs of tomato sauce over each lump of meat, then flipped the round of meat on to another saucy bed he had spread on some stale bread. We sat around the kitchen table eating and trying not to feel like we were waiting for our mother. Only Gerard objected openly by kicking his legs hard against the wall behind him. Finally Edward pushed him to the back door. I watched him from the top step run down the yard to our mother. She picked him up and he stuck to her, his legs and arms clinging like the frogs hanging on the porcelain toilet bowl.
When she finally came inside, even under the flat fluorescence of the kitchen light, I could see that her face had gained an evenness. The corners of wildness that had moved in months earlier seemed to have leached away. She took Gerard to the bathroom, washed his face, cleaned his teeth and tucked him in his bed. Then she came into the kitchen to tidy up. The worktop was a row of bowls and plates covered in a film of flour from Edward’s cooking. She wiped away the powder then started scratching at the burnt meat on the frying pan. Then she found her washing-up gloves and began to clean.
The noises of the house were different that night. Scrubbing and scouring, mopping and brushing. Buckets were filled and tidal waves of grubby water were emptied. She dusted the top of the kitchen cupboards, she pounded rugs, poured disinfectant into her sponge and wiped everything, the doors, the handles, the windowsills – under the kitchen table. Then the clearing began. The acres of sympathy cards and letters from distant relatives focusing on a memory or a phrase about our father, they had been scattered across the dining room table, she piled them up and put them in a box.
I lay in bed and listened to the rubbing and scratching, then the purposeful steps of my mother transplanting her tidying frenzy into another part of the house – her room. Cupboard doors creaked open and I heard the flumph of clothes being tossed on to the floor. The sound became lighter as the pyramid of possessions was growing. Then a rattling in the very top cupboard; papers and boxes being lifted out. I stood by my door and listened, concern pressed into my brow. Did my dad know he was being evicted from his house?
The back door rattled and I jumped. My mother who was careering around her room with boxes and colliding with the cupboard doors, stopped. We waited. Me, my mother, my brothers, the tree, all waited for the second knock. It was the drain man, we all knew that, with his brazen smile and a bottle of beer.
I peeked around the edge of my curtain. I could see him on the top step. My mother had slunk to the back door; I saw her caught behind the fly-screened door. She hesitated, then I heard him say her name.
‘Dawn.’
My mother was twitching and jigging and side-stepping.
‘Come in. No,’ she said, staying safe behind the screen door. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Come in. No go.’
I wondered, as did the drain man, what she meant. I noticed her eyes darting in the direction of the tree.
‘I’m sorry. Tomorrow? I know I said tonight, but – ’
‘Dawn, I’ll leave this here.’ He raised the bottle of cold beer he had in his hand. ‘Tomorrow night, maybe,’ he said, and then the drain man left, his feet turned out in his workmen’s boots as he hopped down the back stairs, the cold bottle of beer left on the top step.
The door opened and my mother skimmed down the steps taking the bottle of beer on the way.
That night the tree shook with jollity. It was a forced laughter though; I assumed a result of my mother’s guilt.
While my mother was visiting my father, I crept into her room and found his possessions piled on the bed. Boxes of papers stacked by the door for disposal. The curtains were drawn so he couldn’t see in, as if she was trying to hide the fact that he was being moved on. When she returned later that night, barefoot and merry from the beer she had drunk in the tree, she replaced the pile of clothes. I heard her re-hang each shirt and re-fold each jumper and pair of pyjamas. The heat I had felt from the tree when the drain man was on the back steps abated and the animals went about their business, trawling the sky in search of food.