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It never rains but it pours

No good can come from a phone call at 4.30 in the morning. There is very little that can ever be good at 4.30 in the morning. For the simple fact alone that it's in the morning the concept of 4.30 is, of itself, not a good thing and that is why when the strident ringing of the telephone interrupted our sleep we knew that it had to be bad.

Not adverse to self-delusion I counted the rings waiting for the answerphone to kick in. Maybe it was a wrong number, or a drunk friend calling to tell us that they really did love me (I have a fair few of those).

But then the mobile phone rang. With two sets of elderly parents, a call in the middle of night could only mean one thing. I jumped out of bed and raced down the stairs to see if a message had been left whilst The Boyfriend stood at the top of the stairs scratching himself. 

 

The call was from one of the tenants at the flats. Apparently water was pouring from the middle floor flat (Adam's) down into the alleyway below. Adam was gone, new tenants had been lined up, the world was back on it's normal axis and yet the downstairs tenant really wanted to risk my wrath by calling in the middle of the night about water? Not blood or anything like that just water.

 

Actually though, now that I was actually awake water really shouldn't be pouring from the flats. This wasn't Niagara. We had to go and investigate even if we were still half asleep. We reluctantly pulled on clothes appropriate for wandering about wet alleyways in the middle of the night - i.e. any that we could find on the floor - and headed out into the night.   

 

At the flats it appeared that Atlantis had appeared. Water was flowing from every conceivable nook and cranny from the middle floor flat onto the street outside.

 

In the flat itself the kitchen was ankle deep in water. My ill thought out jeans soaked up the water like an advert for Bounty kitchen towel as I struggled to get buckets, bowls and bins under the various drips that were streaming through the ceiling above. Clearly something was wrong in the upstairs flat.

 

We made our way up to the upstairs flat. But the heavy weight of anticipation was on our shoulders.

 

If the downstairs tenant, who wasn't even affected by the flooding was awake and aware, why wasn't the upstairs tenant, who by now should be thinking he'd got a new swimming pool installed?

 

But the thing is our tenants aren't just tenants. Remember Hackey on Sea?

 

Dave wasn't just The Upstairs Tenant. He was: The Upstairs Tenant Who Lived Alone And Had A History Of Alcohol Dependency, Whose Girlfriend Had Left Him And Had Denied Him All Rights Of Access To Their Son.

 

Hammering on his door the only thing going through my head was that something bad had happened. Or more to the point he'd done something bad to himself. I used to know a group of "friends" who would spend long hours at the pub discussing favoured ways to kill yourself if you absolutely had to, and invariably the bath featured highly in nearly all of these. Dave was a good bloke. He always had a smile for me and always paid his rent on time. I was not going to let him die.

 

We'd been yelling through the door, and ringing his phone non stop and there was no response. His ring tone was the Sex Pistol's Anarchy in the UK in excessively loud quadraphonic sound and we could hear its strident tones through the door as if Sid Vicious was in the other room.

 

I tried my keys in the lock but as Dave had always kept his door open I'd never needed to use them in the past and with the fear, adrenalin and lack of sleep coursing through me I couldn't get them to work. I tried all the other keys on the bunch as well. A stupidly large bunch that I'd never really thought about before. But none of them worked. The door was still locked with Dave possibly unconscious, possibly dying - I wouldn't let him be dead - on the other side.

 

The Boyfriend was still trying Dave's phone and if I never hear that song again it will be too soon. Downstairs we kept a few emergency tools just for odd jobs around the flats. I raced down the four flights of stairs and picked up the hammer and screwdriver set.

 

By combining both mine and The Boyfriend's full weight against the door I was able to wedge the claw part of the hammer between the door and the jam and tried to prise the door away from the lock. All the time I was shouting through the door in my most reassuring voice telling Dave that it would all be alright and we were nearly there.

 

I'm not a small person, I carry far too much weight to ever be a realistic challenge to the Cheryl Coles and Pussy Cat Dolls of this world but that night I was thankful for every ounce. Again and again I crashed my shoulder into the door. I could feel the wood vibrate but the damn thing just wouldn't move. I tried again and this time a slight gap opened I yelled at The Boyfriend to wedge the long handled screw driver into the gap and used it as a lever to maximize the gap.

 

With The Boyfriend pulling on the screwdriver and hammer and me smashing into the door the gap started to widen. By now we had been at it for nearly half an hour. Brain Death can happen in 4 minutes.

 

By now my shoulder was on fire. But as we persevered between the levering and the smashing the door started to move, but the structure of the locking mechanism meant that instead of the door coming away from the frame the whole frame was came away - taking part of the plaster wall with it.

 

Eventually enough of the wall broke that we were able to get through the broken door frame. I stepped over the pile of plaster rubble and made my way into the flat. The Boyfriend loitered in the doorway less confident than I was that everything really would be alright.

 

I headed straight for the bathroom still calling out for Dave in my calm reassuring voice and stood dumbfounded at the empty, dry room. He wasn't lying dead on the floor or in the bath tub (especially considering there is no bath in that flat), so I headed into the bedroom. At the sight of his great hulk my heart stopped hammering and as the sound of my panic stopped rushing though my ears the sound of snoring became all too obvious.

 

Dave was fast asleep.

 

Screaming at him simultaneously with frustration and relief to wake up, the undead Dave finally moved - I could have killed him.

 

His flat was dry and we were able to locate and turn off the stop cock. The deafening roar of water from the middle flat abated leaving behind stunned silence, two barely awake men, a woman with an exceedingly sore arm and a completely destroyed flat.

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