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The rain had stopped at least, leaving the night wet and heavy in its wake. I walked to the end of the road wondering how I could get to the drop-off point without a car. Marius had taken ours during the inequitable division of the assets. I thought about calling a taxi but the roads were nothing but traffic jams, and I couldn’t readily imagine persuading a cabbie to let me fill his boot with bags of sand.
There’d been something on the flood blog about extra pallets being delivered to our local pub, so I decided to try there first. It was only ten minutes up the road, past the frozen cars and buses, but although the door was open and the lights were on, the pub itself was empty. It was an eerie feeling, to be alone in a space designed for many people.
I coughed, not quite daring to shout out hello.
A strange thing perhaps, but the echo of my voice in my own ears always sets me…apart from myself somehow, self-conscious.
No answer. Just the hollow ricochet of my cough.
I moved through the spaces between unused chairs and tables, and finally into the beer garden where a handwritten sign told me there were no sandbags left.
On the street again, I stared up the road, trying to estimate how long it would take me to walk to Redbridge, and how many times I would have to do it. Assuming an hour per trip, and maybe ten sandbags for each house, it would take me all night and about twenty miles of walking.
Defeated, I returned home.
Whatever was going on at the Bronze Command was still going on. Some of my neighbours were out, putting up plastic barriers.
My own helplessness welled up inside me like dirty water. Ihatedthis.
Life is so full of rough edges—small tasks and expectations that scratch you bloody and remind you that you’re naked and alone.
And without a fucking car.
I glanced again towards the men in their bright jackets. I couldhear the rough, authoritative tones of their voices over the whirring of the trucks and the clanking of metal.
If I tried to talk to them, or ask for help, they might laugh at me. And my words would stick to my tongue, fighting their way to freedom clumsily, if at all.
But what was the alternative? Leave my elderly (insistently unvulnerable) neighbour to be flooded out?
It was a long way up my road. Every step became a heavy thing. The closer I got, the harsher the lights, the louder the voices, the faces of so many strangers blurring into a terrible collage.
There was silence now. Worse, somehow, than the noise. A dragon, openmouthed, waiting for me to speak, only to devour me.
I swallowed. Twisted my fingers together. Looked nowhere.
Mustered…anything. Courage. Defiance. Desperation.
Spoke.
“So there are no sandbags left. How f-fucked are we?”
“What do you mean?” Someone, slow and lazy, treacle drops and flattened vowels. “No sandbags?”
“At the pub. The blog. It said there were sandbags. At the pub. There aren’t. So if it f-floods. Are we fu-fucked?”
“We had forty tonnes of sand delivered to Redbridge earlier.”
“I…I don’t have a car. So. I can’t.”
“We’ve got some sandbags in the back. You can have those.”
Wordless. Mindless. Nothing butit can’t be this easy. “Really?”
A laugh. But it wasn’t unkind. “Aye, really.”
At last, I was able to look at him, connect the voice to a body, and resolve them both into the impression of a person. Awkwardheight and ungainly limbs stuffed untidily into orange waders and Wellington boots. He turned away, and began to unhook the sides of the truck.
I stared at the back of his neck and at his hair, which was a schoolboy tousle only charity would have called red. It was orange, carrot, ginger, marmalade, shining like an amber traffic light, tempting you to try your luck and run.14
