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“Actually, no.” The uncertain light made his eyes gleam tigerishly. “Unless there’s massively more spoons than people, it’s always going to be better for any one person to take a spoon than put it back.”
“So, it’s insoluble?”
“Not at all. You just have to teach people to value everyone else’s access to spoons as much as they value their own.”
I tried not to stare at him. How did someone like this just…happen? Random act of atoms? Or was there a god somewhere who, thirty years or so ago, had woken up one morning and thought,What the universe needs right now is someone to think deeply about teaspoons. “But how do you do that?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Oh petal, it happens all the time. It’s why we don’t live in what Hobbes called the state of nature. People don’t want to hurt each other; it’s just sometimes they forget. That’s what community is. It reminds us we’re all connected. You take a spoon for yourself because you know there’s never any spoons. But then you only have to think for a second about everybody else, and you put it right back.”
“Good heavens.” I wasn’t even sure if I was joking anymore. “I’m never wantonly taking a spoon again.”
His shoulder nudged against mine. It was such a small movement, it could almost have been a mistake. “See? And I get why you think game theory is weird and abstract, but it doesn’t have to be. It basically just comes down to what people care about.”
There was something about his sincerity that made me feeloddly safe. Safe enough to be mischievous. “We are s-still talking about spoons, aren’t we?”
“And each other.” He smiled at me, letting the words hang there in the rain between us, and then went on. “That’s kind of what a community does, or family, or friends, or your partner—it teaches you how to count something as a win even if it doesn’t benefit you directly.”
I stared at him—so full of questions, things I had no right to ask someone I barely knew—and then at the pile of sandbags, because it seemed easier. “Sorry, I’m keeping you out in the rain.”
“If I was worried about getting my feet wet, I’ve made some seriously daft career moves. Which reminds me”—he pulled off one of his work gloves and held out his hand—“Adam. Adam Dacre. I’m with the Environment Agency.”
We shook. He was so warm. And I wanted so much to—26
He cleared his throat.
Oh, what was I doing?
I dropped the hand I’d held far too long, mumbled something that could have been goodnight but was probably nothing more than a pile of syllables, and fled into my house.
Away from Adam Dacre, with his easy smile, and his warm, warm hands. Whose kindness was far more dangerous to me than any force of nature. I knew it was nothing more than the vaguest sense of connection, the kite-string tug of an intriguing stranger. But I simply wasn’t ready to feel these things again.
To gather up the dust of my heart and scatter it again on the winds of hope.
The bedroom is a mess.
Because it’s better that way. It helps him pretend it’s a different place to the one he shared nightly with Marius.
It’s a smallish room with a too-big bed.
There are many things he could remember. Their joined hands wrapped together around the brass spindles.
But mainly what he remembers are moments in the dark, stirring to wakefulness in a pool of shared warmth, and lulled back to sleep by the rhythm of another’s breath.
The next morning I opened my curtains onto an unflooded street. Of course I was relieved, but it granted the previous night a rather dreamlike quality. Careful preparation for a non-event. I went to work as usual, and buried myself in ephemera and fascicules, and tried not to think of how I’d made a fool of myself because a nice man had smiled at me, talked to me, and called me “petal.” Though, as it happened, I ended up leaving at lunchtime because the flood blog posted a picture of a man kayaking past my street.
The strangest thing about flooding is the normality of everything else.
The city centre slumbered in a haze of gold and grey, like it was any other winter day. There were slightly fewer pedestriansand slightly fewer cars, but the shops were all open and the streets were dry. It was only when I headed south down a closed road, past drowned fields and a hotel that seemed to rise from the middle of a lake, that the flood became real again. And, all at once, I felt like I had walked into some quiet apocalypse.
It’s something I imagine occasionally: waking up to discover civilisation has ended, leaving nothing but empty streets and silence. I don’t actually want that to happen, but I ponder what I’d do, and how I’d stay alive. How it would feel to bereallyalone, and for my loneliness to be written on the landscape rather than merely upon me. There would be pockets of survivors, of course, because I’m neither quite so selfish nor so courageous as to kill everyone on Earth except myself. Sometimes there’s someone in particular. He’s not well-articulated in my daydreaming. I don’t think it matters who this man is or what he looks like, only that he’sthere, and we somehow find each other at the end of the world.27
I told this to Marius once. He told me, not nastily, that I was weird. He was probably right.
My street was not, in fact, a boating lake, as I’d half-convinced myself it might be. Most of it looked relatively dry, although the junction was underwater. Small waves lapped gently at the sandbag barriers that ran along the sides of the corner houses. This, too, seemed slightly unreal—a quiet incursion of water.
Adam and a couple of his men were putting up barriers to close off the road. He was a blur of busy colour in this subdued world. But I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t. I would have lost myself in worrying and seen myself too harshly through his eyes, clingingto his hand in the rain, so desperate to be talked to and smiled at and to share his thoughts, the sincerity and passion of a stranger at a strange time.
I’d worn my cowboy boots since they were the most flood-suitable footwear I owned, and had sat at the bench all morning with my feet tucked self-consciously out of the way in case someone saw or commented or laughed.
