They're All Plumbers Working in Mosman?
They're All Plumbers Working in Mosman?
The tea had gone cold an hour ago, but nobody at the table seemed to notice. Gerald was mid-sentence, his hands sketching invisible pipework in the air above the scones.
"—so the pressure differential was never the problem. Everyone kept pointing at the pressure
differential. I said, no, you've got a root system infiltrating the joint, and roots don't care about your differentials. Roots care about water and darkness and time."
"And time," repeated Marcus, nodding gravely, as though this were a line of scripture.
The conversation had begun, as these Thursday afternoons always did, with birds. Specifically, with the pair of tawny frogmouths that had taken up residence in the jacaranda behind the Mosman Bowling Club. Zelda had brought photographs. She always brought photographs, printed at the chemist on Military Road, because she didn't trust phones to do justice to a bird. The frogmouths sat like broken branches, grey and improbable, their eyes reduced to slits of ancient contempt.
"Masterful camouflage," said Marcus. "You'd walk right past them."
"I did walk right past them," said Zelda quietly. "Three times. That's the point."
Everyone laughed. Zelda rarely spoke, but when she did, it landed.
Then the frogmouths had led, by the meandering logic of Thursday afternoons, to the question of nesting hollows, which had led to the question of old-growth trees, which had led to Gerald's story about the job on Raglan Street, where the excavation had exposed a root system so vast and so ancient that he'd stood in the trench and felt genuinely sorry. The fig had been there longer than the terrace, longer than the fence, longer than any of them. It had simply been minding its own business when a stormwater line was routed straight through its business.
"Forty years of pipework undone by something that was here before the first terrace house," he said. "You've got to respect it."
"You've got to cut it," said Marcus.
"You've got to respect it while you cut it," said Gerald.
A good licensed Mosman plumbing expert
This was the way of things. The bird talk always folded, eventually, into the talk of pipes and joints and blockages and the peculiar diplomacy of the drain. Because the truth — the truth that none of them had ever quite said aloud, though all of them knew it — was that every person at that table who could hold forth for twenty minutes on the migratory patterns of the white-bellied sea eagle could also, and with equal fluency, explain the correct angle for a P-trap.
Mosman was full of them. Plumbers who read field guides. Plumbers who kept binoculars in the glovebox next to the pipe cutter. Plumbers who could identify a crimson rosella by its call from three streets away and a failing seal by the sound it made under a sink. The suburb was quietly, unglamorously stuffed with them. They met on Thursdays. They drank tea. They talked about birds until the talk turned, as it always did, to work.
Marcus had wanted to be an ornithologist. He'd done the degree, even. But ornithology, it turned out, paid in conference sandwiches and the occasional grant, and Marcus had a mortgage and three children and a mooring at the Mosman Bay Marina that ate money like a gull eats chips. Plumbing paid. Plumbing always paid. There was no shortage of water in Mosman, and no shortage of old houses with old pipes and old trees with old roots, and no shortage of people willing to pay handsomely to have their problems made invisible.
So Marcus became a plumber who loved birds. And then, somehow, everyone he met was the same.
"It's the suburb," said Priya, who had joined the group two years ago and still occasionally seemed astonished by it. "It selects for it."
"It doesn't select," said Gerald. "It accumulates. Like sediment."
"Like scale in a hot water system," said Marcus.
"Exactly like scale in a hot water system."
Priya laughed. She was the youngest, and the only one who still occasionally talked about going back to finish her honours. Nobody discouraged her. Nobody encouraged her either. They all knew how it went.
Zelda, who had been silent for some time, set down her cup.
"I did a job this morning," she said.
Everyone turned.
"Balmoral, near the beach. Old terrace, original pipework, the whole thing. The woman said the kitchen sink had been draining slow for months. She'd tried everything. The boiling water, the bicarb, the vinegar. The little plastic snake from the hardware shop."
"And?"
"And nothing. It wasn't a blockage you could reach. It was further down. Under the slab, probably. You could feel it in the pipe — that dullness. Like a pulse that's gone wrong."
She paused.
"So I went in with the wrench. Not to force it. Just to persuade it. You have to be diplomatic with a blockage. You can't bully it. You have to let it know you understand it, and then, very gently, you have to bash the stuffing out of it."
Marcus nodded slowly. "That's the whole art."
"It is," said Zelda. "And it worked. It always works."
There was a long, comfortable silence. Outside, a pair of rainbow lorikeets tore past the window, shrieking like tiny drunken gods, heading for the flowering gums along The Esplanade.
Then Priya, who was young, and who had not yet learned not to ask the obvious question, looked around the table and said:
"What's the lifespan of a plumber?"
Nobody answered immediately. Gerald picked up his cold tea and put it down again. Marcus studied the grain of the table. Across the road, past the window, the spire of Sacred Heart Church caught the last of the afternoon light and let it go again, indifferent. Somewhere beyond the rooftops, on the path up to Bradleys Head, a kookaburra started laughing at something none of them would ever understand.
Zelda looked out the window, where the lorikeets had already gone.
"A plumber," she said at last, "lives about as long as a good copper pipe. Eighty years if the water's kind. Fewer if the roots get in."
"And the birds?" said Priya.
Zelda smiled, just slightly.
"The birds," she said, "were here before us. They'll be here after. We're just the ones who know how to listen for them in between the drains."
It was, all of them understood, an answer about birds dressed up as an answer about work. And for once — just this once — none of them needed to ask anything else.
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