i fell in love under a badly administered municipal government

the first thing you should know is that the municipal corporation of this city has a complaints portal, and the complaints portal has a captcha, and the captcha does not work.

i know this because i spent four months of my life trying to report a dead body.

not a human body. a dog. a dead dog on the corner of a lane that had no name because the nameplate had been stolen, sold, and never replaced. the dog had been there for nine days. i know it was nine because i counted. on the ninth day i sat down on the kerb next to it and tried to file a complaint on my phone, and the captcha kept refreshing, and every refresh wiped the form, and after the eleventh try i said, out loud, to the dead dog, i'm sorry, i can't help you either.

that is the city i fell in love in. i want to be clear about that before anything else, because everyone else's love stories start with a meet-cute and mine starts with a corpse and a broken website, and i refuse to pretend otherwise.

i met him because of the water.

not in a romantic way. in the way where you're standing in a queue at seven in the morning with two plastic cans and you've been standing there since five-forty and the tanker is late and the man in front of you has been coughing into his fist for ten minutes and the woman behind you is narrating, to no one, the exact chronology of every tanker that has come to this colony in the last month and how each one was late. and the man in front of me turned around and said, to me, a stranger, she's been doing this since i got here.

and i said, she's the only honest person in this city.

and he laughed. and that was it. that was the whole meet-cute. two people in a queue for water that may or may not arrive, sharing a laugh at the expense of a woman we both respected.

his name is not important. what is important is that he was, and i say this with love, a complete fucking nerd about pipes.^*1

not in the cute way. not in the oh he knows about wine way. in the way where he could tell you, from memory, the year each pipeline in the colony was laid, and by which contractor, and which contractor's brother-in-law was on the standing committee at the time, and which pipe was ductile iron versus which was galvanized, and which one was supposed to have been replaced in 2017 under a scheme whose name he could recite in full, including the acronym, including the year, including the amendment that renamed it.

he had a spreadsheet. this is not a metaphor. he had an actual spreadsheet, on his laptop, with a tab for each ward, and colour coding, and a column called date of last actual repair (verified), and the word verified was in there because he did not trust the official dates, because he had, on multiple occasions, gone to a site and found that the repair had not happened, and had photographed the unrepaired pipe, and had updated the spreadsheet to reflect the lie.

i once watched him, on a sunday, for four hours, argue with a stranger on the internet about the diameter of a sewer line. the stranger said three hundred millimetres. he said two hundred and twenty-five. he produced a photocopy of a drawing. the drawing was from 1987. the stranger said the drawing was outdated. he said of course it's outdated, that's the entire point, the line was never upgraded, that's why the ward floods every june, would you like me to send you the flood photographs, i have thirty-one of them, sorted by year.

the stranger did not want the photographs. the stranger logged off. he sat there, in the dark of the room, with the fan on speed one, which was the same as speed two, and he said, quietly, to the laptop, coward.

i loved him within a month. i want to be honest about how stupid that is. i loved him because he had a spreadsheet and a grudge. i loved him because he once said, about a manhole cover, that one's mine, and i understood immediately that he meant he had reported it, and that he had reported it because he walked past it every day, and that he walked past it every day because his mother lived on that street, and that his mother lived on that street because she had been allotted a flat there in 1998 and had never been able to sell it because the building had no occupancy certificate.

that's the thing nobody tells you about love in a failing city. it is entirely made of logistics.

he explained the pipe layouts to me over the course of three weeks. in pieces. standing in queues. sitting on the parapet of a drain. once, memorably, in the stairwell of a building where the lift had been broken for eleven months and the residents had put up a handwritten sign that said lift under repair in 2019 and never taken it down, so the sign had become a kind of monument, a fossil of an intention. and in that stairwell, he drew me a schematic, on the back of an electricity bill, of how the drinking water lines and the sewage lines ran parallel under the main road, and how, at three specific junctions, they crossed, and how, at those three junctions, the joints were old, and how, at those three junctions, the only thing separating your drinking water from everybody's shit was a rubber gasket installed by a contractor who had, in a different context, been blacklisted.

he said this the way other people recite poetry. he said it the way other people say i love you. he said, and here, look, here, this is where it gets interesting, and i leaned in, and it was a drawing of a pipe crossing another pipe, and it was the most romantic thing anyone had ever shown me.

i'm not going to pretend the sex was transcendental. the ceiling had a damp patch shaped like a country that doesn't exist. the fan had three speeds and two of them were the same speed. the neighbour's television played a serial in which a woman was always crying. but there was a specific tenderness to it, a tenderness i can only describe as administrative. we were two people who had filed complaints. we were two people who had been ignored together. when you have been ignored together, being touched is a shock. it is almost rude. it is like someone calling your name after a year of no one calling your name.

he had a habit of narrating infrastructure during sex. not on purpose. it just came out of him, the way some people say i love you or harder. the culvert on the east side is collapsing, he'd say. the sump hasn't been desilted since 2019, he'd say. and i'd say shut up and he'd say i'm just saying and i'd say shut up and he would, for about ninety seconds, and then he'd say, did you know the pumping station runs on a generator because the feeder line was never connected, and i'd put my hand over his mouth.^*2

he read municipal audit reports for fun. i need you to understand this. for fun. he had a folder on his phone called reading and it was not books. it was cag reports. it was tender documents. it was minutes of council meetings, which are, i have learned, the single most boring genre of literature ever produced by human civilisation, and he read them the way other people read thrillers, which is to say he read them at night, in bed, and occasionally gasped.

he once read me a paragraph out loud from a minutes document. it was about the allocation of funds for a stormwater drain. it was four sentences long. it contained the phrase subject to availability of funds. he read it, and then he looked at me, with real pain in his face, and said, subject to availability of funds. do you understand. the water has nowhere to go. it is going to go into the houses. and the fund is subject to availability.

and i said, i know.

and he said, i know you know. i'm just saying it out loud so it exists.

he kept a list of streets he had walked. not streets he liked. streets he had walked, catalogued by drainage quality, footpath integrity, and whether the streetlight worked. he rated them, out of ten. the highest score any street had ever received, in the years he had been doing this, was a six. i asked him what a ten would look like. he thought about it for a long time. he said, a street where nothing is broken.

and i said, then why rate them out of ten.

and he said, because a six means someone is trying.

he took photographs of manholes. hundreds of them. he could identify a ward by its manhole covers, because different contractors in different years had used different patterns, and he had, over time, developed the ability to date a manhole cover the way an archaeologist dates a potsherd. i once pointed at a manhole and said, that one looks old, and he knelt down in the middle of the road, in traffic, and looked at it, and said, 1994, possibly 1995, cast iron, the pattern is pre-standardisation, and got up, and dusted his knees, and looked so pleased with himself that i wanted to kiss him right there, in the middle of the road, over a manhole.

the thing about a person like this is that they are, technically, insane. there is no reason to know this much about a city that does not care whether you know it. there is no reward. the city will not thank you. the city will not fix the culvert because you have memorised its failure. but he did it anyway, and the doing of it was, in some way i still cannot fully explain, a form of love. not love for me. love for the city. love for the broken thing. a nerdy, obsessive, spreadsheet-and-photograph love for a place that was failing him, and would keep failing him, and which he refused to stop documenting.

i started saying things out loud that you're not supposed to say. at a wedding. at a funeral. at a dinner. someone would mention the water and i would say twenty-four people died and the tender was delayed and the table would go quiet and then resume, and i would say it again, louder, and the table would go quiet and stay quiet, and i would feel a kind of pleasure that i can only describe as sexual.

i liked it. i liked being the woman who ruined the dinner. i liked it the way i liked his hand on my back in the queue at five-forty in the morning, which is to say i liked it because it was the only honest thing available.

there's a specific kind of woman they invented a word for. they said the womb wanders. they said the uterus moves around inside the body and causes madness, and the cure was marriage, or confinement, or a bath, or a doctor's hand. they meant it as diagnosis. i take it as instruction. the womb wanders. mine wandered out of the house and into the ward office and stood in the queue and screamed at a clerk who was not responsible for any of it. mine wandered into a file and made a nest in it. mine wandered into a dead dog on a street with no nameplate and stayed there for nine days, counting.

you asked for manic rage. here it is, precisely: i once tried to report the same pothole under four different names because i thought the portal might route complaints by name and one of the names might get through. i used my own, my mother's, my mother's maiden name, and the name of a woman i invented who lived at an address i invented on a street that did not exist. the invented woman's complaint was the only one that got a response. it said: your complaint has been received and forwarded to the concerned department.^*3

that was the only response any of us ever got. forwarded. to a department. concerned.

we broke up, eventually. not because of the city. the city was not a strain on us. the city was the only thing we had in common. we broke up because he got a job in a different city, one with better water, and he asked me to come, and i said no, and i could not explain why, and i still cannot, except that leaving felt like abandoning the pothole. the pothole was mine. i had reported it. four times. under four names. one of which was a woman i'd invented, who had never existed and who had filed the only complaint that received a reply.

he's fine, i think. i don't know. i hope his taps run sweet. i hope the drain in front of his mother's building has been laid, finally, by someone, in some year, and the road closed over it, and never opened again.

and me, i stayed. i still stand in the queue. the woman who narrates the tankers is still there, still narrating, still the only honest person in the city. i still walk past the corner where the dog was. the corner still doesn't have a name. the complaints portal still has a captcha, and the captcha still doesn't work, and i have come to think of the captcha as a kind of god, or a kind of bouncer, or a kind of border guard, standing between me and the possibility of being heard, refreshing itself forever, refusing to prove that i am a person.

sometimes, at four in the morning, when the rage sits on my chest, i say his name out loud, the way other people say a prayer. not because i miss him. because his name is the only word i know that means the pipes under the road that no one ever dug deep enough to fix.

and there is one more thing. after he left, i found, in the drawer of the table by the bed, one of his printouts. it was a schematic of the water supply for the colony. the drinking water line and the sewage line, running parallel, crossing at three junctions. and at the third junction, in his handwriting, in red pen, he had drawn an arrow, and written a note, and the note said: check this one. please. i never checked this one.^*4

i never checked it either.

i walk past it every day.

and that's the essay, i suppose. that's the whole thing.

i fell in love under a badly administered municipal government, and the love was real, and the government was bad, and neither of those facts undid the other, and the water still tastes like iron, and the file is still perfect, and the file is still a corpse, and the captcha is still refreshing, and there is a junction under a road i walk past every day that nobody has ever checked, and i am still here, proving, over and over, to a website that doesn't work, that i am a person.