The water stopped on a Tuesday, in the last week of August, and nobody told the building first.
Ida came home at half past five, turned the kitchen tap and listened to the pipe give a small dry cough, the way a kettle sounds when it is empty. She tried the bathroom. Nothing. She stood for a moment with her hand still on the cold metal, then went down to the hall to read the notice taped beside the letterboxes.
Main in Kestrel Street. Repairs three days. Standpipe in the yard from seven in the evening.
Three days. The paper had come loose at one corner. Ida read it twice and went back upstairs, and the flat was exactly as hot as it had been ten minutes earlier.
She had lived on the fourth floor for two years. She knew the man below her played something with strings, badly, on Sunday mornings, and that somebody higher up cooked with cumin. She did not know a single one of their names.
At seven she went down with the only thing in her cupboard that held water, a coffee pot with a chipped spout. She had expected an empty yard. There were fourteen people in it.
Mrs Porter from the ground floor had two saucepans and a washing-up bowl. The caretaker, Tomas, stood at the tap with the key ring on his belt and let the water run for whoever was in front of him. Two boys from the fifth floor had a plastic crate of bottles. Somebody had brought a chair, and somebody else had brought a radio, and the pair of them were arguing about whether the radio counted as a chair.
“Stand here,” a man said behind her. “Out of the drain.”
He had two blue jerry cans, one in each hand, and he set one down at her feet without being asked.
“That’s yours,” Ida said.
“I brought two.” He tilted his head at the coffee pot. “You’ll be three evenings in that. Take it.”
His name was Emil. He filled her can and told her to let the first cupful run off on the stones because of the grit. He screwed the lid on tighter than she would have, and stood back to let the queue move, and did not try to keep talking to her, which is why she stayed next to him.
On Wednesday there were nine chairs. On Thursday there were eleven, and the electrician from the second floor ran an extension lead out of his window so that Mrs Porter could boil the kettle for tea, for everyone in the order they arrived.
Emil was in the yard both evenings before her. He knew that the tap had to be opened slowly or the pipe shook. He knew which valve Tomas should have closed on the first night and had not.
“You’re on the fifth, then,” Ida said.
“Something like that,” he said, and passed her a cup of Mrs Porter’s tea.
On Friday morning somebody unscrewed the standpipe tap in the night and took it away.
The yard that evening was a different place. Tomas stood with his hands open, saying it had been there at six. The two boys from the fifth floor said it had to be someone passing through. Madam Okonkwo from the first floor said it had to be someone who knew the tap was worth carrying. Then everybody looked at the same place at the same time: the empty space where Emil usually put his jerry cans down.
“Who knows his flat?” Tomas asked.
Nobody did. Ida heard her own voice before she had decided to use it.
“He didn’t take it.”
“You know him, then?”
“No,” she said. “He gave me a can and told me about the grit. That is all I know about him. He didn’t take it.”
It was not much of a defence. Nobody was convinced, and she stood in the yard with her face hot while the argument went on.
At ten past seven Emil came through the gate, grey with dust to the elbows, carrying the tap wrapped in a rag and a paper receipt in his other hand.
“The thread was stripped,” he said. “That’s why it was leaking down the wall. It’s been stripped for a year. I took it to the workshop on Vintner Street this morning, and the old man there cut a new thread, and I waited for it, because if I left it there it would be a week.” He held out the receipt to Tomas. “You don’t have to pay me. It cost nothing.”
Tomas looked at the receipt, then at his own shoes: he had lent that tap to a man on the third floor in June and never asked for it back.
Emil fitted the tap, opened it slowly, and the first water came out brown as tea, and then it came out clear.
Saturday morning the main was fixed. Water arrived at four in the afternoon with a bang in the pipes and everybody in the building ran a bath at once, and the yard stood empty and quiet, and Ida sat in her kitchen listening to the boiler and felt the flat go back to being a flat. She washed the coffee pot and put it away.
At seven she heard the chairs.
She went down because she could not think of a reason not to. Mrs Porter had the kettle out again and the radio was on, and the two boys from the fifth floor had brought a football and were not playing with it. Emil came in at ten past, in a clean shirt, with both of his jerry cans, which he filled at the outside tap by the bins and set down beside the chairs as if the evening still needed them.
“You’re not on duty,” Ida said.
“No,” he said.
“You don’t live here.”
“No.” He looked at the chairs, at the radio, at Mrs Porter handing round the tea. “I’ve been on this street since the main went. Three more days and I’m somewhere else. I thought I’d come anyway, while the chairs are still out.”
Ida went upstairs for the coffee pot. When she came back he had saved her a chair, and she sat in it, and the two of them drank Mrs Porter’s tea while the yard got dark and the windows above them came on one by one.
