‘See, the tide’s coming in and the sewer’s already full to capacity and that’s why it’s backing up,’ Peter shouted, so that Declan could hear him over the gushing water and the blustering wind.

‘Yes, but with this amount of pressure?’ Declan shouted back. ‘If you ask me, there’s something obstructing it. Or, like, partially obstructing it. Like when you squeeze a garden hose, do you know what I mean?’

They waited for a few minutes, and the geyser gradually started to subside. It sank lower and lower until it was only knee-high, but then it suddenly surged up again, until it was almost as high as it had been when they had first seen it.

‘That’s the tide,’ said Peter, and checked his watch. ‘It’s on the turn soon. We should be able to check then if anything’s blocking it.’

They sloshed back to their van and climbed back in, shaking the rain from their jackets. Peter switched on the radio to RedFM and then they both took out plastic boxes of sandwiches, and sat there listening to the Colm O’Sullivan music show and solemnly munching.

‘What’s your old doll given you today, boy?’

‘Turkey again. If you ask me she still has a load of it left over from Christmas. What’s yours?’

‘Some kind of cheese it tastes like, but I wouldn’t lay money on it.’

It took nearly an hour for the geyser to sink down as far as the surface of the flood water. After that, it simply bubbled and occasionally let out a belch of foetid sewage gas. Declan uncoupled the hydro jet pump trailer from the back of their van and wheeled it around next to the manhole. The pump would blast water at such high pressure into the drain that almost anything that was blocking it would be cleared away: tree roots, solidified fat, slurry, and almost any kind of waste from wet wipes and cardboard to industrial sludge and animal intestines from abattoirs.

Both Declan and Peter covered their eyes with goggles and their faces with protective masks, and then Declan lowered the jet pump nozzle into the bubbling water. He was able to feed it down hand over hand for about six and a half metres before he suddenly stopped and said, ‘Hello. There’s something here all right, boy. And it’s big, by the feel of it.’

He prodded the pipe down again and again. ‘It’s almost completely blocking the outflow, so that all this floodwater has nowhere to go except up… especially when the tide comes in. I’ll give it a blast and see if I can shift it.’