"Third callout in a fortnight, same house, same complaint. He says there's a knock in the pipes."
That's my brother-in-law Terry, halfway through his second can, telling this at my sister's kitchen table like he's talking about a blocked drain. Terry's been a gas engineer eleven years, maybe twelve now, I always get it wrong. He doesn't tell stories as a rule. That's what made me put my fork down.
The house was on Ashgrove Terrace, a two-up two-down with an extension out the back that never got signed off properly. Owner was a bloke called Meacham, sixty-odd, living alone since his dad died the year before. First time Terry went out, Meacham said there was a knocking under the kitchen floor. Regular. Two beats close together, then a gap, like someone tapping a spoon on a radiator. Terry checked the boiler, the pressure, the pipework under the units. Nothing. Told him it was probably air in the system, bleed the radiators, see how it goes.
Second callout, same complaint, worse. Meacham hadn't slept. Grey round the eyes, hands not quite steady when he put the kettle on. Terry ran the water, listened at the skirting, put his ear right down on the lino. Silence. He told Meacham straight: there's nothing there, mate. Sometimes pipes do this and it stops on its own.
Third time, Meacham rang at eleven at night. Terry nearly didn't go. Said afterwards he wished he hadn't.
He found Meacham sat on the kitchen floor with a claw hammer, three of the tiles already up, the underlay peeled back in strips. Meacham said the knock had started following him room to room, and worse, it had started keeping time with him. He'd stop still in the hallway and it would stop. He'd hold his breath and it would wait for him to let it out. His dad used to do that, he said. Rap twice on the bathroom door when Meacham took too long, always the same rhythm, and if you didn't answer straight off he'd do it again, harder, closer together, until you opened up.
His dad had died in that kitchen. Heart, on the floor, forty minutes waiting for an ambulance because the lane was blocked with a delivery lorry — Terry thought it was a furniture van, but he wasn't sure that detail mattered. Meacham had knelt next to him the whole time. Hadn't called anyone in for twenty minutes after. Said he'd just knelt there listening to him not breathe, because some part of him was still waiting to hear it. The two knocks. Telling him to get up and answer the door.
Terry said he didn't know what to do with that, standing in a stranger's kitchen at midnight with a man on the floor and a hammer resting in his lap. So he did what he does. He got down and checked the pipe run under the boards, torch in his teeth, methodical about it because methodical was the only thing he had. Fifteen-mil copper, boxed in, dry as a bone. No clips loose. Nothing touching anything it shouldn't.
He told me Meacham didn't even look at the pipe when he pointed it out. Just sat there with the hammer flat across both palms, weighing it, not moving. Behind him, through the hole in the floor, the exposed copper ran on into the dark under the units. Clean. Silent. Completely still.
"Snowshill Manor (NT) 10-08-2013" by Karen Roe is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.