The Dew Point

I’m allowed to bleach the kitchen walls at last, and the washing machine, and cupboards scattered around the flat; the surveyor who first diagnosed the damp came and saw and wrote things down, and said: ‘it’s condensation that’s causing it.’ – ‘Condensation’, I said, ‘behind all this?’ The kitchen all around us, brown walled with damp. ‘People underestimate condensation’, he said. ‘In a flat like this, double glazed, there’s nowhere for water to escape.’

I look around. No, there’s no escape, no extractor fans. How could there be, in a room this size, six feet by six. Later, I went out to look at the kitchen wall, outside, where the rendering hasn’t reached. Naked brick, exposed; I took a stick of bamboo and idly scraped out stuff between the bricks. And then – it was the brick itself that started to come off. The brick itself, rotting; I touched it. Wet – and runny. Brick that came off on my nails. Brick eroding and coming off to the touch.

I’d heard about this. The damp eats the brick out, said one expert. It devours brick from within. And now, beneath the stairs, the discovery of an eroding wall, a wall turning to paste … There are many causes of damp, I know that now. An infinite number of causes. Condensation within, and a wall that’s becoming paste. A wall of paste and water within as it reaches the dew point on a colder surface.

And isn’t that a beautiful expression, the dew point? The washing machine is clean and white, so too with the microwave and the cupboards. And the walls of the kitchen, seven feet high, but also as high as the stars are wet with bleach and water. Take a breath. Breathe. But the spores are already there. Spores in your lungs, spores in your heart. An adult human gives off moisture to the air – two litres a day. But how much sporey damp do I breathe out?

‘That wall behind you’s looking distinctly wet …’, said Blah-Feme in the bar the other night. ‘Damp follows you like a dog’, W. said that.

The dew point – where the wall comes forward to offer itself to the touch of condensation. When condensation spreads and gives itself across the wall. And from the other side? Penetrating damp, find its way through pasty brick and the gaps between bricks. Penetrating, coming through, a slow, ceaseless tsunami, brown wave after wave.

On two fronts, then, the damp. And there was a third front, too, the worst: the leak from upstairs, so bad that they thought the washing machine from upstairs might come through the ceiling. The leak, for years. Wet brick, saturated brick. And then it was fixed, at last, in the end. And was there a fourth front, from the concrete, from the river that used to run from the burst pipe along the wall?

Along the wall, the damp is moving. Dark armies of damp, moving towards the fresh, dry plaster of the living room. When will it breach the door frame and come through? When to meet with the damp that’s already coming from the other room?

I’m stranded in space between the condensating damp. Stranded, as between two high walls of the sea, parted as Moses parted them. On a strip as wide as this room, the living room, still dry, still an island in a sea of damp. And on two sides of the island, the waves are lapping. As soon they lap over this island too, and it will have sunk, beneath the ocean’s smooth surface.

Or is it the two lips of a mouth that have opened, and I am the word it is trying to say? I think I’m looking for it here, that word. I think it’s speaking through me, a word of damp from within, penetrating out, and condensing outside, along the white page of the blog.