Unhappy New Year

Unhappy New Year

by James H Jones

Copyright © James H Jones 2015

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events are imaginary and any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

     It began as a slow, insidious drip, drip, drip from the kitchen ceiling.

     Every three or four seconds, a swelling teardrop of water would ease itself out of the plaster and would land with a splat in the puddle which was spreading across the tile floor.

     We couldn’t be sure when it had started. It was New Year’s Day, our very first new year in this lovely old house, and we had slept in. Hardly surprising, considering the previous evening’s revelries, which had gone on into the early hours.

     By the time we came downstairs, the puddle on the floor was about the size of a table-top, and the damp patch in the ceiling was creeping ominously close to the light fitting.

     While Debbie set about mopping up as best she could, I went to the shed and grabbed my car-wash bucket, which I placed squarely under the drip.

     I dashed upstairs to check the bathroom. There was nothing visibly wrong, to my untrained eyes, at least, but there was a tell-tale musty smell pervading the atmosphere. I had to assume that the leak must have been emanating from a pipe under the floorboards somewhere. Bloody marvellous!

     When I got back downstairs, Debbie was sitting at the dining table in the living room, our address book in hand and her phone at the ready.

     “Who are you calling?” I asked, as I went into the kitchen to make us both some coffee.

     “Steve, of course,” she replied, and I could hear the beeps as she entered his number into the phone.

     Oh, yes, Steve. I remembered that he had done some work for us when we first moved in, the previous May. He had fitted an en-suite shower cabinet for us, in the master bedroom, and did some tiling work, as well. An excellent worker but oh, boy, did he know how to charge. The estate agent had put us on to him, and, conveniently, he lived just around the corner. It turned out that he knew our house well, having done some work for the previous owners.

     Not that any of that would make him any less expensive. No doubt he would still hit us with a massive call-out charge. Ah, well.

     “What do you mean, ‘not again’?” Debbie was saying when I came in with the coffees. There was a quite lengthy pause while she listened to his reply, then, “Really? You have to be joking!” Another pause. “Well, thank you, Steve, that’s most appreciated, especially today, of all days. See you in a bit.”

     “What was all that about?” I asked, sliding her mug of coffee to her across the table.

     “Steve says that exactly the same thing has happened before,” she said, frowning. “On precisely the same day. New Year’s Day, last year. And the year before that.”

     “That’s crazy!” I exclaimed, and was about to say more but she held a hand up to stop me, just like a traffic cop. I had a fleeting idea of buying her some white gloves, but knew better than to say it out loud.

     “It gets crazier,” she said. “He says that each time, he was unable to find any sign of a leaky pipe, and, get this, the drip stopped of its own accord a few hours later, and everything dried out, good as new.”

     I laughed. How else was I supposed to react? Debbie joined in, thank goodness, otherwise I could have been in trouble for not taking the situation seriously.

     “You’d have thought the previous owners would have mentioned it, at least,” she said, after the laughter had died down.

     True to his word, Steve turned up an hour later. He lifted the vinyl in the bathroom, and the floor under and around the bath was wet. He checked the pipes feeding the bath taps, then prised up the floorboards and had a good look at the pipes running below. Just as he’d said, there was no sign of a leak. The musty smell, however, was noticeably stronger, and I was forced to open the window, letting in a blast of freezing cold air.

     It went exactly as he had predicted. The drip stopped that very same evening, and in a few days everything had dried out and was back to normal. Even the ceiling plaster recovered as good as new. The musty smell lingered a day or two longer, then that, too, faded to nothing.

     Needless to say, our Steve still managed to chalk up a sizeable bill.

     I would have been more than happy to leave it at that. All’s well that ends well, least said, soonest mended, and all that. Debbie, on the other hand, being a free-lance journalist and writer, is of a much more enquiring, inquisitive nature.

     I came home from work a few days later to be met with an unbearably self-satisfied Debbie, wearing a grin wide enough to turn a Cheshire cat green with envy.

     She had been a busy little bee, quizzing the estate agent and the previous owners of our house, as well as talking at length to our immediate neighbours. Armed with what she had learned from those sources, she next descended upon the offices of the local newspaper.

     Her enquiries unearthed some rather interesting facts.

     The previous owners of the house, it transpired, had bought it, roughly three years ago, from the executors of the estate of an old man.

     It turned out that this poor old fellow had been widowed the previous year. His beloved wife had died suddenly, just before Christmas. Heartbroken and devastated, he was completely unable to face the prospect of going on alone without the love of his life.

     So, he wrote a sad and somewhat apologetic farewell letter, which he left propped against the mantel clock.

     He went upstairs, put the plug in the bath and blocked off its overflow, then set the taps running, and lowered himself in.

     It was established that all this had taken place in the very early hours of New Year’s Day.

THE END