The Water Heater Goes Click

At twenty past seven this morning I turned on the shower, waited the way you always wait, counting to fifteen, and from the kitchen came a noise I'd never heard before. Click. Click. Click. Like someone trying to light a cigarette in the street in a gale. Then nothing. The water kept running, mind you. Ice cold.

I got in anyway. I lasted four seconds, I counted them, and got out letting out a yell that wasn't a word. Marta hammered on the bathroom door to ask if I'd fallen. I told her no, the water heater had died. There was a silence on the other side of the door, the silence of someone who hasn't showered yet.

The water heater

Our water heater lives in the kitchen, above the sink, tucked into a cupboard with no door. It's white, or it used to be, and it has a little round window where, when it's working, you can see a tiny blue flame, like the one on a toy stove. In four years I had never paid it any attention. It's one of those things in a house that only exist when they break, like the back brake, like ankles.

Marta stood in front of it in her pyjamas, with yesterday's two jumpers on top, and turned on the kitchen tap. Click, click, click. She gave it a little knock on the side with her knuckles, very respectfully, the way you knock on an office door. Nothing.

So she got out the big pot, the artichoke pot, filled it with water and put it on the hob. "Like at my grandmother's," she said. She washed her hair bent over the bath, with a ladle, while I poured the lukewarm water over the back of her neck and she said "more", "less", "ow", "more". She went off to work with wet hair and a mood I wouldn't wish on anyone who crossed her path.

Señor Ramón's voice notes

We call our landlord Señor Ramón, although he has never told us to. He lives in Burjassot, never comes round and never writes: he sends voice notes. Long ones, with the radio on in the background and a dog that barks whenever he says something important. I messaged him at quarter to eight with a photo of the water heater and the word "click" three times.

At half past nine he replied. One minute forty seconds. His trusted repairman can't come until Friday afternoon. That water heater is "very good, one of the old ones". We had probably done something to it. And at the end, after the dog, a sentence I couldn't make out, something about "checking underneath". The dog barked right over that bit.

Friday. Today is Wednesday. I worked out how many pot showers that meant and played my nine o'clock Haydn faster than I should have, out of pure spite.

What Nil knew

In the afternoon, at school, I had Nil at five. He came in blowing on his fingers, as always, and asked me why my hair was up in such a weird bun. I told him the truth: I hadn't been able to wash it because there's no hot water at my place.

Nil put his violin down on the chair and looked at me with that seriousness children have when they find out a grown-up doesn't know something obvious.

"Does it go click-click?"

I said yes. He explained, very slowly, the way you explain a scale to a beginner, that the water heater at his house has a battery. A fat one, the round kind. That it's underneath, in a little box, and when it goes click-click and won't light it means the battery's run out, and his dad changes it and says a swear word, and then it works. "Underneath," I thought. Señor Ramón's dog.

I thanked him and we played the minuet, him a lot calmer than me.

A one-fifty battery

On the way home I stopped at the bazaar on Calle Cádiz. The girl behind the counter handed me two fat batteries in a blister pack without me having to explain anything, as if every November half of Russafa came in asking for the same thing with dirty hair. One euro fifty.

At home I climbed onto the kitchen chair, the same one I used to get the coat down, and looked at the underside of the water heater for the first time in my life. There it was: a little black lid with an arrow. Inside, a battery with a faded label and a date written in marker pen by someone who wasn't us. 2021. I put the new one in, plus end where the drawing said, and turned on the tap.

Click. And then a sound I don't know how to write, like a big sigh inside a box. The blue flame appeared in the little window. I didn't swear once. I'm writing that down because it's a first.

I sent Señor Ramón a photo of the flame. He replied with a six-second voice note: "That's what I said." The dog didn't bark.

Marta got home at half past eight. She locked herself in the bathroom for almost forty minutes and the hallway filled with steam all the way to where the bike sleeps. From my room I heard her sing, for the first time in four years, a Fallas pasodoble she doesn't know all the words to. She kept forgetting the same bit and starting again from the top, a little louder every time, as if the hot water might remind her.

I'm not going to tell her how thin the walls are.