An Excess of Phlegm in the Pipes

It was the dripping tap that woke her up. She had slept through the dawn cacophony of seagulls, grinding traffic and the neighbour, hawking up whatever was left of last months plague into the cracked sink on the other side of the wall. It was the regularity of it, drip, drip drip.drip drip drip drip.drip. One off splash or gurgle breaking its beat, dust mites settling on the tabor of a disillusioned drummer. She had a good idea what was making it drip, of course, the thing beneath the bed had been threatening for days, conspiring with the plumbing drown her in several feet of water whilst she slept. She could be dead now, if the drip of it hadn’t woken her up. She had seen it gathering, globules of transparent liquid poised on the hollow end of the tap, not enough tension to plummet into the grimy depths of the plughole, not enough water to make her too concerned, to take the sink in her bare hands and tear it from the wall and smash it on the concrete outside, with the shards scattered on the pavement, crude mosaic, before it drowned her in her sleep. Her terminally malodious neighbour came round and demanded that could she please fix her plumbing because hair and stagnant water was crawling out of his sink like a thing from the depths, he had tried a plunger on it but that had a hole and really, the pipes were on her side of the wall and wasnt it in her contract to maintain them anyway, because it certainly wasnt in his, and quite frankly, it made him want to retch in the morning, the state of that sink. She told him to stick his damn sink up his arse, and who was he to complain to her about goings on on the otherside of the wall. She told him that she would be quite happy to swap with him and he could have her sink, because, quite frankly, she didnt want to live in the same room as a sink and a thing under the bed that were conspiring to drown her in her sleep, and if he wanted to risk having his limbs balloon in the early hours of the morning as they became impregnated with water, then that was up to him, because she certainly didnt, and she would have to take measures. He muttered something about that it wasnt his fault that he hadnt had a job in two years but did that really mean that they really had to put him in what was obviously a halfway house for loonies with an obscure form of hydrophobia and subsequently substandard washing facilities. He said he was quite frankly pissed off and he hadnt had enough sleep because she had woken him up at five in the morning hawking up into her sink just behind his head and thats probably what was causing all the problems in the first place, an excess of phlegm in the pipes.


Mado