“All done,” he said. “Flush the loo a couple times. Should be fine for another year, maybe two.”
He finished his coffee, grabbed his drain rods and the electric eel—a vicious-looking coiled spring with tungsten-carbide cutting blades—and headed out.
He thought about Wakefield while he worked. The old mining towns, the mills converted into flats, the bypass they’d built twenty years ago that had somehow made the traffic worse. Beneath it all, the same network of drains, most of them laid when Victoria was Queen. Every house, every street, was connected by these subterranean rivers of waste. And every spring, the roots came back. drain root cutting wakefield
Frank nodded. He’d heard that story a hundred times. The unsung heroes of Wakefield, the Harolds with their makeshift rods and their stubborn pride, keeping the roots at bay. Now it was his job.
Frank grunted. Roots. The word was a curse in Wakefield. The city’s old Victorian clay pipes were a labyrinth beneath the streets, and the sycamore and willow trees that lined the avenues had a malicious sense of direction. They could smell the warm, nutrient-rich water leaking through a hairline crack from fifty feet away. “All done,” he said
He fed the electric eel into the pipe. The machine hummed, then growled as the blades bit into the root mass. He felt the vibration through the rubber grips—a juddering, tearing sensation as the cutter spun at high speed. Grrrnd-chunk, grrrnd-chunk. It was an ugly sound, the noise of violent surgery. Shredded root fragments, looking like shredded coconut, began to flush back past the manhole. He worked methodically, pushing the cable further, clearing a path inch by inch. The pipe was old, fragile. If he pushed too hard, he could shatter the clay and create a bigger problem. Too gentle, and the roots would regrow in a month.
The call came in at 7:13 on a Tuesday morning, just as Frank was pouring his first coffee. The dispatcher’s voice crackled through the van’s two-way. He thought about Wakefield while he worked
The address was a small terraced house, the kind with a yard no bigger than a postage stamp. The woman who answered, Mrs. Hartley, was in her seventies, with worried eyes and a floral apron.