Eileen called a plumber because a steady drip had kept her awake for three nights. Her husband had tightened the kitchen tap, wrapped it in a towel and finally suggested she was hearing the clock. Eileen removed the clock from the wall and put it in the shed. The drip remained.
The plumber, Dan, arrived with a tool bag and the reassuring manner of a man who had heard many theories about water. He turned the tap on and off. It stopped cleanly. He looked beneath the sink. The pipes were dry.
“Wait until the house is quiet,” Eileen said.
They stood in the kitchen. From somewhere came a soft tick, tick, tick.
“That,” she said.
Dan crouched by the cupboard and listened. The sound stopped. He straightened up; it returned. They repeated this twice. Her husband came in, saw two adults bending toward the sink, and retreated before he could be asked to hold a torch.
Dan inspected the seal around the dishwasher. No leak. He checked the radiator on the other side of the wall. It was cold and dry. He ran water into a bowl, wiped the worktop and listened again. Tick, tick, tick.
“You’re not imagining it,” he said.
“Please say that louder. My husband’s in the hall.”
Her husband returned. Dan had him stand by the tap while Eileen and Dan moved from room to room. The ticking was louder near the kitchen doorway. It seemed to come from the floor, except when Dan knelt down, when it seemed to come from the wall.
At lunchtime the husband brought out sandwiches and apologized for offering the plumber a puzzle instead of a leak. Dan said puzzles were fine provided they did not come with emergency call-out charges.
Eileen showed them the towel she had tied around the tap. Beneath it hung a small metal teaspoon. Her husband had put it there to catch the drip. Dan removed it. The ticking stopped.
“There,” her husband said. “The tap was dripping.”
Dan dried the spoon and held it under the spout. It stayed dry. Then he replaced it against the ceramic sink. A faint tick returned whenever someone walked past. The spoon was swinging against the basin because its string was caught in the drawer handle.
Her husband said the towel had seemed like a good idea at the time. Eileen folded her arms. For three nights she had listened to him tell her the house was silent while his homemade repair supplied a soundtrack.
Dan packed his tools and wrote a small invoice for the visit. Under “work done” he wrote: Removed spoon; verified tap.
Eileen paid and stuck the invoice to the fridge. That evening her husband asked whether she really needed to display it.
“Only until the next time you say I’m hearing things,” she said.
He stared at the line about the spoon. “At least I saved us the cost of a new tap.”
“Yes,” Eileen said. “For the price of a plumber to take down your cutlery.”