She began to dig. Not with anger, but with a kind of grim respect. Each spadeful of mud was heavy, shiny as wet chocolate. She tossed it into a wheelbarrow, and as she worked, she uncovered strange things: a child’s marble, a broken pipe bowl, a fossilized sea urchin that her father must have thrown in years ago for drainage.
“Soakaway blocked with mud,” she muttered, reading the diagnostic note her late father had taped inside the fuse box. “When this happens, don’t call a man. Call a shovel.”
Armed with wellies and a long, narrow spade, Eleanor trudged to the far corner of the property. The soakaway’s inspection cover—a rusted iron disc—was half-submerged in black ooze. She pried it open with a crowbar. Inside, the pit was no longer a pit. It was a solid, packed column of silt, roots, and clay. Water had nowhere to go but back into the pipes.
The rain had been relentless for a week, turning the garden behind number twelve into a bog. Eleanor peered out the kitchen window, watching a puddle the size of a small pond creep toward her back door. She knew exactly where the trouble lay: the old soakaway, a gravel-filled pit dug by her father thirty years ago, was now a muddy tomb.
