The Cat Found the Warm Spot Before We Found the Leak

Dirk Moves to the Passage

Our cat is called Dirk, after nobody in particular. He is fourteen, ginger, and so set in his ways that my wife says he has the personality of a retired magistrate. For most of his life he slept on the end of our bed in winter and under the lemon geranium on the stoep in summer. He did not change his arrangements for anything.

So in June last year, when Dirk started sleeping on one particular square of passage floor between the bathroom and the spare room, Marlene and I both noticed. It was not a sunny spot. There was no rug there. It was just bare terracotta tile, the same as the rest of the passage, and every night he curled up on the same square like it was a hot water bottle.

I put my hand on it one evening, mostly as a joke. It was warm. Not hot, but distinctly warmer than the tile a metre either side of it. I called Marlene over and she knelt down, which at our age is a decision, and put her palm next to mine.

"Underfloor heating," she said. "We must have installed it in 1991 and forgotten."

We had not installed anything in 1991 except the tiles themselves, which we laid on our knees over three long weekends while our daughter Anneke, then four, sat on a cushion and handed us spacers one by one.

The Hiss at Two in the Morning

I should say that I had been hearing something for weeks before that. I am seventy-one and I wake up at two most nights, the way men my age do, and in the quiet I had started hearing a faint hiss, like a radio left on between stations in another room. I would lie there and try to place it. The fridge? The wind off Walker Bay finding a gap in the window frame? My own ears?

I did not mention it to Marlene because I was fairly sure it was my ears. My father went deaf in his sixties and spent years hearing music that was not there. I did not want to be told it had started.

But the warm tile changed that. When I knelt down in the passage at two in the morning, with Dirk glaring at me for invading his spot, and put my ear close to the floor, the hiss was louder there. It was coming from under the house.

The Water Meter Does Not Lie

My neighbour, Mr Jacobs, is a retired plumber with very strong opinions about everything, including plumbing. When I described the warm tile and the hiss, he said two words: "Hot pipe."

He walked me out to the water meter at the front gate, told me to turn off every tap in the house, and then we stood there in our jerseys watching the little red dial. It turned. Slowly, steadily, like a second hand. Nothing in the house was running, and still the meter was turning.

"There it is," he said. "Hot water line under your slab. Probably copper, probably pinholed. Your geyser has been heating water for the ground for months."

Marlene, when I told her, went straight to the file where she keeps our municipal bills. Our water had gone up steadily since about March. Not a frightening jump, just a creeping one, and our electricity too. She had put it down to the tariff increases that everyone in the Overberg complains about. Now she sat at the dining table adding up the difference with a pencil and getting quieter and quieter.

The Part Where I Imagined the Worst

What frightened me was not the money. It was the tiles.

The plumber Mr Jacobs knew from his working days had retired. The next one I phoned said, over a crackly line, that he would have to "open the floor and follow it". I asked how much floor. He said he would not know until he started. I put the phone down and walked up and down the passage, looking at those terracotta squares, each one of which I could remember carrying in from the bakkie. There is one near the bathroom door that has Anneke's handprint in the grout, because she escaped her cushion one afternoon and we decided to keep it.

Marlene found me standing there and understood immediately. We have been married forty-four years. She did not say anything. She just stood next to me for a while.

Finding the Spot Without Guessing

Anneke, who lives in Cape Town now with her own children, was the one who said we did not have to accept guessing. She had a friend whose block of flats had been through something similar, and the friend had used a company that did leak detection with listening equipment and thermal cameras instead of a jackhammer. She sent me a link on WhatsApp with three exclamation marks, which is how she shows love.

I was sceptical. I am the generation that believes a problem you cannot see is a problem you have not really looked for. But I phoned, and a young man came out on a Thursday morning with two cases of equipment. He was patient with me, which I appreciated, because I asked him a great many questions and told him at least once about the handprint.

He used a thermal camera first, and on the little screen the passage floor showed up in blues and greens with one long orange smear running under exactly the square where Dirk had been sleeping. I laughed out loud. Marlene went to fetch the cat so he could see his own handiwork, and Dirk, who has no interest in technology, walked away.

Then he used the acoustic leak detectors, which looked like a stethoscope crossed with a hi fi, and moved slowly along the passage wearing headphones. He let me listen. Through the headphones the hiss was not faint at all. It was a roar, like a tap running full in a tin bath. All those nights I had been hearing it through thirty centimetres of concrete and tile and thinking I was going deaf.

Saving Most of the Floor

He marked one spot with a pencil cross on the grout line. One. He said that was where the pipe had failed, and that the copper in a house our age was probably thin in other places too.

I will not pretend I understood every option he explained, but I understood the important part. They could open a small section to repair the burst, and then, rather than chasing new pipes through the whole floor, they could do pipe relining on the old runs, which as far as I understood it means coating the inside of the existing pipes so they carry on doing their job without anyone digging them out.

They lifted four tiles. Four. Mr Jacobs came over to supervise, uninvited, and stood with his arms folded making noises that I eventually realised were approval. The handprint tile was two squares away from the cross and never moved.

What Dirk Thinks About All This

The passage floor is cold again. I found that I minded, a little, which surprised me. Dirk has gone back to the end of our bed, as if nothing ever happened, and he sleeps with his back to me in what I am sure is a pointed manner.

Marlene still has the pencil calculations from that evening in the bill file. She says she is keeping them as a reminder to look at the numbers when they change, instead of assuming the world is just getting more expensive. I keep something different as a reminder. It is the memory of lying awake at two in the morning, convinced I was hearing my father's deafness arrive, when what I was hearing was real all along.

Now when I wake at two the house is silent. I lie there and listen to it being silent. It is one of the more pleasant things that has happened to me in my seventies, and I owe the first clue to a cat who simply wanted to be warm.