She fetched a plunger. Not a toilet plunger—a heavy-duty drain plunger with a rubber cone. She sealed it over the bottom outlet of the downpipe. "Now go upstairs," she said, "and pour a bucket of hot water down the top."
Defeated, Arthur went inside and called his neighbour, Gladys, a 78-year-old former plumber who used to fix boilers during the miners' strike. She arrived in slippers and a raincoat. how to clear blocked downpipes
Arthur remembered a YouTube video. "Use a garden hose," the man with too many teeth had said. "Ram it up there." Arthur rammed. He turned the tap to full. For ten glorious seconds, nothing happened. Then the pipe shuddered, made a noise like a bear giving birth, and a geyser of black, leaf-infused water shot out of the top of the pipe, directly into his face. She fetched a plunger
Arthur put on his ear muffs and tapped the downpipe. It sounded solid. Too solid. He removed the top strainer (a rusted metal flower that hadn’t stopped a leaf since 1987). He peered inside. It was not a pipe anymore. It was a time capsule of decay: a sludge-smoothie of moss, roof grit, and one extremely suicidal tennis ball. "Now go upstairs," she said, "and pour a
A sound like a champagne cork made of mud. The entire contents of the pipe—two years of roof debris, the tennis ball, and what looked like a fossilised squirrel—shot out of the bottom into Gladys’s waiting bucket.
The wall stopped weeping. The marrows were saved. And Arthur never looked at a coat hanger the same way again.
He straightened the coat hanger and shoved it up the pipe. Scrape. Thud. Something shifted. He pulled it out. On the end was a black, tar-like slug the size of a gerbil. He flicked it into the bucket. It landed with the sound of a wet sponge hitting concrete.
