Art Pact 12


We stood in the living room and scratched our heads.

"That bucket's not going to last forever," Joe said after a few minutes of silent hem-ing and haw-ing. "Should I - I mean, could I get another bucket?"

"That bucket will run out too, you know."

"Yes," Joe said slowly. "I do understand that none of the buckets in this house are bottomless. Shall I get another one or shan't I?"

"What are we going to do with this one?" I asked. The thick black oil was a few centimetres from the top of the metal pail. "Yeah, you might want to get a new one. Uh, quickly."

While Joe hustled around in the kitchen, banging and clattering underneath the sink, I tried again to plug the hole. The pressure of the oil wasn't particularly high, but it was enough to make it impossible to simply hold a finger over the hole. When I tried, the oil spluttered and jetted around the end of my pointer, splattering the pristine white surface of the freshly-painted wall. When I took my hand back it was covered in gunk, which I wiped on the flysheet. The little black arc of liquid popped back into shape, just in time for Joe to come back with another container, intercepting the stream in mid-air. It was a washing-up bowl.

"Only thing I could find," he said. Between us we lowered it to the floor and swapped it out with the now full bucket, which after a little debate and hand-waving we emptied into the drain. We knew that was probably not the best thing to do, but needs must when the devil drives, after all, as I told Joe. "Thanks for that," he said, rolling his eyes.


We continued this routine for another half an hour, swapping between the bucket and the washing-up-bowl while hoping that Mrs. Green wouldn't come home early. Our only progress in that time was to clean up the patches of oil on the wall and carpet, so that the only sign that anything odd was up was the constant flow of crude coming out of an otherwise perfectly normal living room wall. We made some attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery - Joe went outside, upstairs, and finally up in the loft to try to trace the "pipe we'd obviously drilled into". I did the same, but looking under the floorboards for the elusive conduit - easier said than done, since we couldn't take up the floorboards closest to the wall because of the flow of oil raining there.

The problem was, I clearly hadn't drilled into a pipe. Don't get me wrong, I'm no building savant. I've drilled into pipes before - I've drilled into water pipes by the handful, and once I drilled into a gas pipe. But there's a feeling you get, a bit of feedback from the end of your drill suddenly cutting into a metal shell. I hadn't got that at all, just the feeling of drilling into plaster and brick, then the weird sensation of the drill losing grip as oil suddenly flooded out of the hole.

So it wasn't a surprise when Joe finally descended from the loft and said:

"Nothing."

"Told you so."

I checked the bucket. Only half-full, so we had another few minutes. We sat on the sofa, careful to keep our still slightly oily hands clear of the cream-coloured fabric.

"Now what?"

"Hmmm... well..." he scratched his chin. "We could fix a seal over it. O-ring around the hole, then a metal plate over the O-ring, screw that in place. Not perfect, but it should work out."

"But we have to fix it permanently. She's not going to want a metal plate stuck in the middle of her room, is she?"

"I don't know." He checked his watch. "How long do you think it's been since we put this bucket it?"

"Five minutes?"

"Right. And let's say it's full in another three. That's twenty-five litres of oil in eight minutes. Call it twenty-four, that's three litres a minute. She could have a barrel of oil in under an hour."

"And?"

"And what? Don't you get it? Crude oil is £60 a barrel. She'd be able to sell it. That's over a grand a day, right there in that wall. A metal plate will do for the moment, but you know what she'll be wanting to put in eventually? A tap!"

We considered the wall.

"I wonder," he said thoughtfully. "It's just... it's a shame she'd be getting the money."

In his eyes I saw the ugly shape of a scheme beginning to form.

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