Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in Fenwick ·
The Flooded Kitchen at Fenwick
A council officer checking the damp in a terraced house finds the kitchen under ankle-deep water on a dry day, and a grey bird of tallow standing in it, patient as a heron on a river bank.
The report came in as a damp complaint, which is the kind of thing Dilys Forde had been sent out to look at for eleven years. Number nine, Coppice Row, Fenwick. Tenant says the kitchen floor is always wet. Tenant says the wall plaster is cold to the touch. Tenant says there is water in the sink that does not drain and a smell like cut hay. Dilys brought her damp meter, her torch, and the thick grey coat the council had issued her after the Ostmark survey, and she parked outside the terrace at ten past two on a bright afternoon with no rain on the roof.
The front door opened before she knocked. A thin man in a cardigan said that his wife was in the back, and that she had been standing in the kitchen for two days now, because she did not like to move if the water was still rising.
Dilys walked down the hall. The floorboards were dry. The kitchen door was open. She stepped through it into water that came up over her ankles, cold and clear, with a faint green shimmer on the surface where the window light fell. There was no leak. There were no pipes. The water had no source that she could find, and it was not moving, and it did not seem to belong to the room at all. It was simply there, standing, as if the kitchen had been built on a shallow pond that had decided to stay.
The bird was in the corner by the stove.
It stood with its legs in the water, up to the knees, very still. It was taller than a heron and its body was the colour of old candle grease, pale and faintly translucent, so that the light from the window shone through the feathers in soft yellow glows. Its eyes were closed. Dilys thought at first that it was asleep, and then saw that its beak was lightly resting against the wall above the stove, and that the plaster there was wet and darker than the rest, as though the bird had been drinking from it.
The woman was at the sink. She was perhaps seventy, in a flowered housecoat, and she was holding a dinner plate in both hands, looking into the water that filled the sink to the brim. She did not look round. She said, "It came in the night before last. I didn't hear it. I just woke up and the floor was wet, and then I saw it standing where the fridge used to be."
Dilys asked her if she had called anyone.
"I called the council," the woman said. "They said it was a damp complaint."
The bird opened one eye. It was the colour of tallow flame. It looked at Dilys with a calm, deep attention, the way a nurse looks at a patient she has been expecting for some time. Then it lifted one leg out of the water, very slowly, and placed it down again a yard farther along, and the water in the kitchen rose a fraction and settled.
Dilys backed out of the room. Her boots squelched on the dry hall boards. Behind her the man in the cardigan said, quite distinctly, "Is it going to stop?" and she realised she did not know.
She wrote her report at the kitchen table in the council van with the heater on high. She noted the moisture levels, which were off the scale. She noted the water, which had no measurable temperature or source. She noted the bird, in a single sentence, and then crossed it out, and wrote instead *domestic flood, cause not identified, recommend no entry pending further assessment.* She sent it to her supervisor, who wrote back within the hour to say that the Ostmark survey had recorded three similar cases in the last decade, and that all of them had resolved, and that the households had been unusually calm about it.
Dilys drove home past the terraces of Fenwick, and the streets were dry and bright in the afternoon sun, and every house seemed quiet. But when she stopped at the lights by the church she saw, through the open window of number nine's neighbour, a grey shape in the far corner of a kitchen, standing very still, knee-deep in water that was not there, watching the road.