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I hesitated a moment on the pavement, wondering how deep the water was.
This is the story of my life: standing on the edges of things and worrying, when I’m supposed to just walk through them.28
I tucked in my trousers, pressed myself against the wall of the house where the flooding looked to be at its shallowest, and inched forward. The water covered my toes, then my feet, then my ankles. My boots were better than shoes would have been, but they weren’t exactly watertight. I told myself that cold and indignity were not the worst things in the world.
Though, truthfully, I’m a little bit scared of both.
An engine growled somewhere behind me, and I turned just in time to be drenched by a passing car as it ploughed through the flood. I gasped, drowning in the sudden chill and in that sense of clammy dread that always comes with knowing you’ve been made to look ridiculous.
“Oi!” Adam leapt his barrier like the hotshot hero in an action movie and waded after the car. “Oi. Mard arse. Stop.”29
He banged on the fender until the driver stopped and wound down the window. I couldn’t hear much of what was said at first,possibly because Adam’s accent had thickened to a low growl, but I caught words like “bow waves,” “dangerous,” and “dingbat.” From the driver came “not the police,” “own business,” and “in a hurry.”
I glanced towards the other men. They were grinning—thankfully not at me, but in the direction of Adam. There was no mockery there, just a touch of anticipatory glee. A shared joke I couldn’t understand.
After a moment, Adam stepped away from the car, his hands in the surrender gesture. It made him look very tall indeed, and not in the least bit like he was surrendering to anything. “Well, it’s your choice. But you know water only has to be about six inches deep before it’s getting sucked into the exhaust or washing into the air intake, right? And once you’ve got flood water in your engine, then you’re looking at about five grand’s worth of damage. This on top of all the pedestrians and cyclists whose day you’ll be ruining in your rush to drive down a closed road in the middle of a flood.”
The driver sighed and leaned out of the window, squinting into the distance. “Well…well…how deep is it down there?”
“Off the top of my head? I’d say…ohhh…six inches.”
The driver ducked back inside. And then the car turned round very carefully and crawled back the way it had come.
Adam strode back, rubbing his hands together. “Well, that’s one problem fixed. Now for this flood.”
One of his colleagues shook his head. “What you are, mate, is an arsehole whisperer.”
“I might keep that one off my CV, if it’s all the same to you.”
I began to edge away, making my unamphibious escape, butthe universe had not yet finished fucking with me. I heard splashing, and there was Adam coming after me, his gangly-legged stride carrying him easily through the flood water. In daylight and up close, he was merciless, all smiles and freckles, the brightest, boldest flame a moth could wish for.
“Don’t you know it’s dangerous to walk through flood water?”
The memory of yesterday rolled through me awfully, filling my mouth with silence.30
Until, “Oh, I’ll just turn round and go b-b-back, shall I?”
I didn’t mean to be horrid. It was the last thing I wanted and the last thing he deserved. But that was all there was just then, self-consciousness and sharpness, different sides of the same spectrum, and I was a milk snake, defenceless, masquerading in red and black.
He shrugged. “I could give you a piggyback.”
The worst of it was, I could imagine it, clinging to his back and laughing. “If w-walking through f-flood water is dangerous, I’m sure piggyb-b-ba-backing”—God, I hatedb’s today—“is even worse.”
“I’m a professional, remember?”
“At”—I ran at it like a wild horse at a too-high fence—“piggyback?”
And he was laughing, and I’d made it happen. “I’ve two kid sisters, so—seasoned amateur, I guess.”
“I…I’m… There’s just me.”
“Yeah, you’ve got the look of an only child.”
Oh.
“A little bit enchanted,” he went on quickly. “And, believe me, you’re not missing out. Hell hath no fury like a house with two teenage girls in it.”
Enchanted? It wasn’t the sort of word I was used to hearing about myself. Had Marius seen me that way once? Before he’d learned I wasn’t.
