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Mrs. P paused, her breath harsh beneath the wind. “I’m sure there’s a river around here somewhere.”
“Just…wait a moment. I’ll check.”
I crept forward through a sticky mess of overhanging leaves, the wet gravel crunching beneath the heels of my boots. It was a rather jolly sound, really—defiant percussion within the symphony of rain.11
Another step and my boots were full of water, and I was soaked all the way to my knees. A cold, wild shock that made my breath catch and my heart jump.
“I think,” I called out, “I f-found the river. And it’s not where it’s supposed to be.”
Back at home, adventure concluded, I tugged off my sparkly boots, turned them upside down over the radiator to dry, and peeled out of my soaking pyjama bottoms before I ruined the carpet.
Tried not to think how ridiculous I looked, bare-legged in the hall, with nobody there to laugh and make it mean something.
The hallway is too narrow.
He remembers tangles, elbows and coats, and shoes and knees, and laughter and impatience.
He remembers arriving, and waiting for arrival: the rattle of a key, the slam of the door, footsteps upon the stairs. And hello darling, and I’m home, and I missed you.12
He remembers when that stopped. Not the day, or the moment, because there was never a day or a moment, but the poison-ivy sting of realising that one routine had become another.
At work the next day, fasciculing the letters and listening to the rain, I forbade myself to worry. Fascicule, fromfasces(a bundle of authoritative rods), thenfasciculus, meaning part of a work published in instalments. The technique was invented here, back in the seventies, and remains Oxford’s gift to the profession. It’s a method for storing loose leaves or single-sheet material without damaging it: pages are side hinged onto archival-quality paper sheets using Japanese tissue and starch paste.13
I like the neatness of it.
By lunchtime, the internet was wild with news of the flooding. TheOxford Mailhad already started live-blogging the event, mainly updates from the Met Office and the Environment Agencyand pictures of moderately threatening puddles. Then came the “precautionary” barriers, the sandbag deployments, and the messages from the council’s emergency planning officer. They basically amounted to “monitor the Environment Agency website, protect your home, expect power outages, and don’t drown.”
There was an interesting typo for a while: power outrages.
By late afternoon, the pictures had started flooding in. So to speak. Cars plunging through muddy waves. Houses already partially submerged. The usual arty shots of sun-gleam on new-formed waterways.
I put my things away, shed gloves and lab coat, and hurried home, past standstill traffic, brake lights blurring on golden stone.
I didn’t see any flooding until I suddenly realised the bottom of Christ Church Meadow was a lake, and the sports fields opposite my road were a haze of greenish-grey water.
My street was quiet at first, a few doorways here and there dutifully stoppered with sandbags. But at the far end there were a couple of flatbed trucks, engines rumbling, and several clumps of yellow-jacketed workers. Whatever was going on had not precisely drawn a crowd—that wasn’t the sort of thing English people did—but various individuals had found occasion to wander in that direction on some coincidental business of their own.
I was curious. A little concerned.
But I don’t like crowds, and I’m not good with strangers.
Of course Mrs. P knew what was going on. “They’re putting up demountable flood barriers, and we’re a Bronze Command.”
I had no idea what any of that meant, but it sounded as ifthey’d sent us Boy Scouts working toward their Community Flood Defence badges. “I’d better see about sandbags.”
She banged her stick against her doorstep, like a teenager moodily scuffing a toe. “I’ve decided I’m not going to bother this year.”
“Um.” I suspected a ploy to avoid putting me to trouble.
“Not after last time. The stupid buggers built them up so high I couldn’t get out my own house. And when I complained, they told me I was vulnerable. I said I wasn’t vulnerable, I was pissed off.”
There’d been a flood scare in 2009, not long after we’d moved in, not long before Marius moved out. I could remember driving out to the Park & Ride at Redbridge to pick up sandbags. For whatever reason, we hadn’t thought to keep them.
Maybe we’d secretly been looking forward to another adventure.
Because, now I thought about it, the whole business had felt like an adventure. A slightly surreal one, involving a huge pile of sand in the middle of a car park. We should have made castles while we still had the chance.
We were good at building things out of sand.
