The Legend of Kevin the Plumber

by Scot Gardner

  Inside the house, Mrs Wilde cheered. ‘Yay! You’ve done it. The toilet just emptied.’ Then she burst through the back door and picked across the lawn in her bare feet.

  ‘I heard it gurgling from the lounge room. I came in and . . . ’ She stopped, staring at the tangle at Kevin’s feet. ‘My god. Is that what I think it is?’

  Kevin nodded.

  ‘Well, I guess we won’t be flushing them anymore,’ she said, looking at me. She smiled. ‘That’s what you get from a house full of girls.’

  I made something in the paddock catch my eye. I stared at it and felt my face glowing.

  Mrs Wilde went on to explain that she had to go to work and that she’d leave the house open if we needed to go in and clean up. Lock it behind us when we leave. Kevin thanked her and I stood there staring at the nothing in the paddock and reeling from too much information.

  Mrs Wilde left.

  ‘Better get a plastic bag from the van,’ Kevin said.

  I grabbed the bag and Kevin insisted we do rock scissors paper to decide who was going to put the mess into the bag. I agreed. I’d worked out his technique; he almost always chose rock. One two three.

  I did paper. Kevin did scissors.

  I held my breath. The blowflies had started swarming around us in the hot, still air. I used the shovel and the spike. Kevin backfilled over the lid, scraping the last of it in with the side of his boot. I dumped the bag in the Wilde’s wheelie bin and slammed the lid.

  ‘Bloody women,’ I said.

  Kevin chuckled. ‘Better watch out . . . God is a woman. Got to rejoice in that.’

  I washed my hands at the tap near the back door. Somewhere, around the side of the house, a pressure pump started and I thought about all the shit I’d learned in the almost-two-weeks I’d been working. All the stuff about people and water and plumbing and life. I knew that the pump was pushing water from the tank. Pushing it along pipes and onto my hands. My grubby working hands. The stuff I was learning on the job was so different from the useless shit they were trying to stuff down my neck at school. The stuff I was learning from Kevin made sense. It was useful. Except maybe using welding rods to find water. That was freaky.

  Kevin washed himself at the tap then went into the laundry through the back door and scrubbed again with soap, a nailbrush and hot water. I packed the tools into the van.

  On our way down the mountain, back towards Christmas Bay, we could see the ocean and storm clouds casting heavy shadows on the water, but the sun still hounded the van and made the skin on my arms prickle.

  ‘Thought I could smell rain,’ Kevin said.

  I had to play monkey at the next job. Hanging off the ladder and holding the tape measure while Kevin climbed another ladder and decided on the lengths for the second-storey guttering. It was an unfinished and massive seaside mansion in a row of finished and massive seaside mansions with curved roofs and cream-coloured shade sails in the back yards.

  From the top of my rickety aluminium ladder, I could see a woman sunbaking in the neighbour’s yard. The top half of her body was under an umbrella so she couldn’t see me. I thought that her bikini bottoms must have shrunk in the wash. Her body was a bit on the pumped-up athletic side but I suffered my way through staring at her.

  Kevin told me to wait on the ladder while he cut the length of spouting.

  ‘Yep. Fine. No worries. I’ll just wait here then.’

  And try not to dribble.

  The woman sat up and scratched her ankle. Her beautiful tanned titties were free-range. Kevin was right. God is a woman, I thought. She lay down and they disappeared from view.

  I leaned out. Casually. I could almost see those golden globes when the ladder slipped and the ground came hurtling towards me.

  I hung on to the rung. I couldn’t think of anything better to do. Well, I couldn’t think.

  The ladder snagged on a galvanised spouting bracket, tore it from the wall of the house and dropped me two metres onto my feet.

  I was still holding the rung. I looked around the yard, panting. Nobody had seen my spectacular fall-dive-jump-stack landing. I whistled, put the ladder into a better position and climbed to the top again.

  The woman had gone. I’d hurried back up for nothing. The sky rumbled as if it was disappointed, too.

  Out on the bay, the seriously dark clouds were closing in. Bogan clouds in black beanies, flashing with lightning and carrying on. A full-on moshpit of storm.

  Kevin returned with the piece of spouting.

  ‘I think we’re about to get wet arses,’ I said.

  ‘You may well be right, Gary. Looks serious.’

  He poked one end of the gutter up to me and clambered up his own ladder with the other end. It fitted beautifully and I felt useful for once. Felt like the whole guttering thing would have been bloody hard for Kevin alone.

  The sun disappeared like someone had closed the curtains. Kevin and I looked at each other then a sound like distant jet engines caught our ears at the same time.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  Kevin pointed over my shoulder. ‘I think we might retreat to the van for a while.’

  The jet engine sound was rain. Rain on the tin roofs of beach houses. It hung in the air like a grey sheet so thick that we could no longer see the bay two hundred metres away. Kevin left the piece of cut spouting sitting in the brackets that would eventually hold it to the house and rattle-stepped down the ladder. I discovered that it’s possible to run down a ladder and that it’s a lot less stressful than riding a falling one to the ground.

  The rain hit as we made it to the van. Kevin slammed the back door and dived into the driver’s seat, the shoulders of his shirt darkened with droplets. He shook like Trixie after a bath and smiled.

  ‘Nice drop,’ he said.

  At first, the rain was a noisy drum solo on the roof of the van but within seconds it had turned to a wash of sound that made me think we were under water. It cascaded off the windscreen in rippling sheets.

  ‘It’ll be all over in five minutes,’ Kevin suggested. ‘Hot weather storms are like that.’

  Two hours later, we were still in the van. We’d had our lunch and Kevin had brought tears to my eyes twice with fart gas. I could only open the window a crack or I risked drowning and gassing. It seriously pissed down.

  Kevin took a call on his mobile. It was Pip with the address of the Catholic church in Mullet Head. A leak in the roof. Kevin started the van and let it idle until the fog from our breathing had cleared from the windscreen. The wipers were useless. They couldn’t rake the water off fast enough. Kevin crawled the van through puddles and putted straight through little rivers that cut across the road. The engine coughed as he drove through the lake that had formed at the corner of the Christmas Bay turn-off and the highway.

  ‘Come on,’ Kevin growled.

  The motor coughed again then pushed the van through, making a bow wave that slapped against the half submerged white post on the shoulder of the highway.

  Kevin leaned over the steering wheel as he drove. ‘Unbelievable.’

  Mullet Head was drowning.

  A little red car had stopped axle-deep in a puddle on Beach Road. The driver — a girl who must have only just come off her P plates — gripped the steering wheel and looked at us. There was bum-clenching fear in her eyes.

  We sailed past onto higher ground and Kevin looked at me. ‘There’s a rope in the back.’

  ‘Rock scissors paper,’ I said.

  Kevin chose scissors. I chose paper, cursed then charged into the rain with a smile. And with the fire hose of the heavens open full-blast onto my hat, I knew what I had to do. I grabbed the rope and jogged into the water. My boots filled in two seconds and the feeling was delicious.

  The girl wound her window down a crack. I knew her face. She had tears in her eyes.

  ‘Want a hand?’ I shouted.

  She nodded.

  ‘Take it out of gear. When I give you the signal, take your foot off t
he brake so Kevin can pull you clear.’

  ‘It just stopped,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll be right,’ I said, and smiled.

  To attach the rope I had to submerge my arms until the sleeves of my coveralls touched the brown water. Not that it mattered by that stage: I was wetter than a porpoise’s peenie. The rain chopped into the puddle and drummed on the car. It was music.

  I did a kind of shoe knot with the rope, around something I hoped was the chassis, and shook it. I coiled the other end around the tow ball on the back of the van and tied it back against itself with another variation of the shoe knot.

  Kevin was watching me in the side mirror. I gave him the thumbs up and he crept forward. I jogged into the puddle again, nodded to the girl and pushed from the back of her car.

  The knots held. The back wheels of the van slid for a second then bit into the road and hauled the girl’s car clear.

  I undid the rope and the girl thanked me sixteen times through her window.

  ‘What now?’ I asked her.

  ‘My dad will be here in a minute. Thank you.’

  ‘No worries.’

  Kevin had spread a rag on my seat and, as I dived in, he threw a stained towel at my head. He smiled and drove to the church.

  I patted the water off my hat with the towel, then off the legs of my coveralls, my arms and my face. The towel smelled like dust and pipe glue but it was dry and rough against my skin.

  ‘You can wait here if you like,’ Kevin said, as he parked beside a lone white Corolla.

  ‘I’m wet now, what does it matter?’

  Kevin shrugged, popped the door open, sucked a breath and ran for the front door of the church. I walked. I felt the drops dancing on the skin of my arms and by the time I’d made it inside, I was satched again.

  The priesty guy introduced himself as Father Davis and gave Kevin and me towels. They smelled like mothballs.

  My boots squelched as Kevin and I followed Father Davis into the church. Even in the pummelling rain, the church still seemed quiet inside. I looked at the high ceiling, like Kevin, and tried to spot the leak. Tried to ignore the wet farts my feet made in my boots as we walked down the aisle.

  I saw too late that Father Davis had stopped. He’d stopped to cross himself and I thumped into him. Hip and shoulder. I knocked him flat then fell on top of him. He squawked like a seagull. I rolled off him and Kevin helped him up. His face was red. I apologised and he told me not to worry, that these things happen. He showed us the wet spot on the carpet and the ice-cream bucket he was catching the drops in.

  ‘Yes, that is a bit of a concern, isn’t it,’ Kevin said. ‘Unfortunately we can’t do anything about it now. We’ll come back when the rain stops and fix that.’

  Kevin took me by the elbow and escorted me back down the aisle, through the door and into the rain. He shoved me ahead of him. We made our dash to the van. Kevin was putting his seatbelt on and shaking his head.

  ‘You nearly killed the poor bugger,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we’ll be able to show our faces there again.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ I said.

  His mobile rang. It was Pip, giving us directions to another leaky roof at the industrial estate in Christmas Bay.

  ‘We’re still in Mullet Head,’ he said. ‘We only just made it through . . . No, flooded. The road was covered . . . All right. Yep. We’ll be back soon.’

  We didn’t get back to Christmas Bay. The puddle we’d forded on the way over had doubled in size. A lowered VK Commodore had tried to run through. The water was halfway up the driver’s door. The driver was a stick of a bloke with a thousand tattoos. He stood on the roof of his car and shouted orders at a young bloke in a red Land-cruiser on the other side who’d backed into the puddle until his exhaust bubbled. The bloke with the tattoos sported what would have been a mullet haircut and a bald patch. His mullet had been drowned.

  Kevin called Pip and explained that we wouldn’t be back at the depot anytime soon.

  ‘Hey? The church?’ he said into the phone. ‘Gary had a little accident . . . Right. I’ll pass that on.’

  Kevin rang off and backed the van up a driveway. He dodged smaller puddles and took us back into the thriving centre of Mullet Head. I watched him.

  ‘Father Davis phoned,’ he eventually said.

  I swallowed and looked out the window. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Says he has stomach cramps.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Hasn’t stopped laughing since you bowled him over.’

  Kevin’s body started shaking. A smile creased into his beard then he exploded with a laugh that made me jump.

  ‘It was an accident,’ I said.

  ‘It was an accident,’ Kevin echoed, and nodded.

  ‘Piss off.’

  ‘You’re good value, Gary. I’ll give you that.’

  ‘Fanks. I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  ‘Good. It was supposed to be.’

  Red and blue flashing lights on the foreshore sucked us in. I thought it was the cops through the rain but it was the State Emergency Service’s chequered twin-cab ute with a trailer on the back. There were half a dozen people in reflective raincoats on the beach filling sandbags.

  Kevin parked and undid his seatbelt. ‘Might as well give them a hand, ay?’

  I was on the beach with my shovel in ten seconds. Well, not my shovel. I’d just grabbed one from the back of the van, but Kevin came up behind me and said, ‘Here, this is yours.’ We swapped so I had the shovel with the yellow handle.

  Kevin took a pile of bags from a woman in an SES coat and we found a patch of sand near their trailer. Kevin held the bags open, I shovelled. Two decent shovel fulls would fill a bag if I got it all in. By about the twentieth bag, we’d found a rhythm and were filling two bags when the guys next to us filled one.

  ‘Time for a delivery,’ the SES woman shouted. ‘All aboard who’s coming aboard.’

  I stuck my shovel in the sand and climbed onto the trailer with Kevin and three SES blokes. The woman jumped behind the wheel and floored it. I almost flipped out of the trailer. I grabbed Kevin’s arm and he pulled me upright.

  ‘You right? Better hang on, mate,’ he said.

  We charged up the beach, onto the road and through the town to a spot one hundred metres from the edge of the huge puddle. We set up a chain of bodies from the trailer to the spot on the footpath they’d decided to sandbag. It seemed to be a long way from the water but it made sense when Kevin explained that one foot of wall here would save about a dozen houses and shops if the water came up any higher.

  ‘Oh, it’ll come up all right,’ the SES woman said. ‘They reckon it’ll rain for hours.’

  We emptied the trailer.

  An SES bloke came running along the footpath. ‘Anyone got a boat?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, I have,’ someone said. ‘In Christmas Bay.’

  ‘Me too,’ Kevin said, and I remembered his kayak.

  ‘We’ve got one at the surf club.’

  ‘No good. Anyone in Mullet Head?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My mates have got one at the caravan park.’

  ‘Can you get it?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘It’s too deep for four-wheel-drives now and we’ve got a few people who want to cross. Nothing urgent but . . . ’

  ‘Do we need the van?’ Kevin asked me.

  ‘No. It hasn’t got a trailer. It’s just a tinny. We could carry it.’

  The SES woman said they’d bring it up on their trailer and we were off again, bumping around in the back as she took the speed humps in the caravan park at about sixty k’s.

  I dragged the tarp off Aggie and Gel’s tinny and four big hairy spiders scuttled over the upturned hull and under the boat.

  ‘Have you got a motor?’ the SES woman asked.

  ‘I . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘Or paddles?’

  Kevin lifted one side of the boat. I thought he was hunting for the spiders. ‘Yep,
’ he said. ‘Both.’

  Four of us turned the boat over onto the trailer. Kevin grabbed a spider gently and tossed it under the caravan. And another. He didn’t squash them like the SES bloke did; he just sort of scooped them out of the hull and pitched them into the dry dirt under the edge of the van.

  ‘You’re mad,’ the SES bloke said to Kevin.

  ‘Not really,’ Kevin said. ‘Just not scared.’

  ‘Fucken hero,’ the SES bloke grumbled. He stomped past me to pick up the little outboard and the fuel tank. He shook the tank and it sloshed.

  Kevin sent the paddles clattering into the trailer then climbed aboard. The SES bloke tucked the motor and tank under the side of the hull. The lead-footed SES chick gunned it. This time she did slow down for the speed humps.

  The puddle was seventy metres across by the time we made it back with the boat. We lifted it straight off the trailer and splashed in knee-deep.

  ‘You’d better get in,’ Kevin whispered. ‘Otherwise Gonzo here will be captain of your mate’s boat.’

  I launched myself into the boat and got stuck on the edge with my feet in the water. Kevin lifted my legs and swung me in.

  The SES bloke fitted the motor and slipped the tank under the seat. He told me to pump the bulb in the fuel line and he yanked on the cord until the thing coughed then started. Probably the first time it had been run in four years. Miracle.

  ‘Right, off you go. Who needs a lift?’ Gonzo said.

  There were three takers — two guys from grade five or grade six at Mullet Head Primary and a little girl who didn’t want to go in the boat. She didn’t scream but her eyes were wet and she wouldn’t let go of the SES woman’s jacket.

  ‘It’s all right, love. The man will look after you,’ the SES woman said.

  Man?

  I wasn’t entirely sure I was the right person for the job. Just because you’ve grown up in a coastal town doesn’t mean you know everything about boats. Doesn’t mean you know anything about boats. I’d ridden in them before, sure, and I’d seen the Crocodile Hunter and he made it seem simple enough. And it was.