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.
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, from fasces (a bundle of authoritative rods), then fasciculus, 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.
I like the neatness of it.
By lunchtime, the internet was wild with news of the flooding. The Oxford Mail had already started live-blogging the event, mainly updates from the Met Office and the Environment Agency and 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. Homes 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 actually 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 if they’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 any 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.”
We’d had 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.
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 sand 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 hand-written 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. I hated this.
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 could hear 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 (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, open-mouthed, 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 but it 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. Awkward height 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.
“We can make you a pile here, right, lads?”
Nods, mumbles of assent. Nobody seemed to mind.
“Thank you,” I said bravely, dropping the syllables cleanly, like marbles, and secretly full of the most pathetic pride imaginable. I had spoken to strangers.
He must have caught me staring. His eyes were the plainest, deepest brown, wet earth, almost lightless.
The next thing I knew, he was dumping a sandbag into my arms. It was like trying to catch a baby whale. I oofed, and clung on, and just about managed to stop it flumping onto the ground.
He grinned, teeth and dimples and freckles moving like dust in a ray of sunlight. “Ayup, petal.”
Oh.
Ayup: from the Old Norse se upp, watch out, or look up. Usually a greeting.
Petal, most likely post-classical Latin. Even in remembering, slipping between the consonants, my tongue tastes the softness of the vowels.
I walked away from him, wrestling my whale and trying not to embarrass myself. As I dumped it on Mrs. P.’s doorstep, I heard stomping behind me, and there he was, a sandbag swinging from each hand.
“This it?”
I so desperately wanted to look at him. “You really d-don’t . . . I can . . . It’s my neighbour’s.”
The door swung open. “Damn right it’s my house, and I’m not vulnerable, and I don’t want to be up to my ears in sand.”
A soft thump as he lowered the sandbags. I wondered if he was smiling at her. “I’m just dropping them off.”
Mrs. P. regarded him with magnificent scorn. “So this is it, is it? The great Oxford Flood Risk Management Strategy. A man with some sand.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was afraid he might be angry or sad or, worse, that he might not care at all. Because he was a stranger and so he might not know. He might see Mrs. P., this walnut of a woman with gnarly hands and tight lips, and not understand. He might not understand that she was kind and funny and sharp, and that she was important.
But when he spoke, there was only warmth, deep as his eyes, and the velvet-rough edge of laughter. The sort of laughter I like best, laugher that isn’t really at anyone. Laughter that’s just there, for its own sake, like the touch of a friend, or a lover.
“You’d be surprised,” he told her, “what a man can do with some sand.”
“Humph.”
“We’re going to be here, all day every day, until it’s over. So, if you want anything, just let us know.”
“Humph.”
“And that goes for anyone in the area. We’re here to help.”
I knew. I just knew he was looking at me. And I couldn’t not look back.
Oh.
“Thank you.”
More marbles. P had once rebelled against me, so please was dangerous, but I was good at thank you. I could carry out whole conversations with it.
He probably thought I was a fool, tame thank you or not. And he was probably right.
He was turning to go back to his team. But then he paused. “You know why the houses on this street don’t have flood cellars?”
We shook our heads in unison. Mrs. P. looked like she didn’t care.
“Well, here’s the thing.” He tucked his hands behind his back, like a six foot four schoolboy reciting his Latin grammar. “If you all have flood cellars, and it floods, everyone’s fine. If you all have flood cellars, and a couple of you use them for storage instead, everyone’s fine and a couple of cheeky buggers get an extra basement. If everyone plays cheeky buggers, though, everyone floods.”
Mrs. P. withered him, but I knew what he was getting at. I grabbed a word and shoved it at him. “Tragedy.”
“Well.” He looked a bit bemused. “It’s not that bad. It’s just one of those things that—”
Sometimes I just wanted to fucking punch myself in the fucking face. “No.” I clenched my fists. “The tragedy of the commons.”
“Oh. Right. Yes. Exactly.” It was like I’d turned on a light inside him. And I suddenly realised I’d been looking at him, and he’d been looking at me, all this time. Four whole sentences. Four whole sentences each.
“Is there a point to this?” asked Mrs. P.
“Well, the sandbag thing is similar. I could give you a big fancy speech about airbricks and flow capacity but in basic terms, if water gets into your house, it’ll get into your neighbour’s.”
She sighed. “All right, all right, I take your point. But if I end up having to eat my own arm like a coyote, I’m suing.”
Given what was clearly a dangerous tendency to stare at a stranger in Wellington boots, I had thought it best to limit my attention to the ground, or an empty space of air somewhere off to the left. But now I carefully focused on Mrs. P. My friend. I thought of tea and biscuits and Sunday afternoons—not a stranger whose ease and kindness was its own threat—and pulled out my words. Slowly, knowing that with Mrs. P. they would be safe.
“Last time I checked,” I said, “you have enough Hobnobs in there to last a nuclear winter.”
“A woman cannot live by Hobnobs alone.”
“No, you need—” custard creams “—Jammie Dodgers too.”
She nodded. “And protein.”
I went to get another sandbag. That little exchange should have pleased me, settled me. It had. It did. But there was a buzzing between my eyes and a tightness somewhere inside my skull.
No, you need Jammie Dodgers too.
Mrs. P. didn’t even like Jammie Dodgers. Too sticky for her dentures.
Oh God. I was choosing my words. A technique I had learned, then built into a habit, then built into an instinct. And then fought so desperately over the years to break.
All because of—
Damn the careless power of strangers.
And me for being weak and silly and vain. In the most harmful possible ways.
By the time I’d assembled enough sandbags to build a barrier, the man—my too-gentle nemesis—was back, this time with a roll of ground sheeting.
He glanced my way. “You know the trick?”
I needed him to stop looking at me like that. It was casual. The way he’d look at anyone, I was sure. But it made me feel so very there. I shook my head.
“There’s kind of a secret to it.” He smiled at me. “Can I show you?”
No one could have called him handsome, and the orange waders probably didn’t help—but when he smiled? Suddenly, handsome didn’t seem important anymore—only the things happiness could do to a man’s face. It was nothing more than the instinct of sociability, but it made me realise how long it had been since I’d been smiled at by a stranger. How long since I’d had someone to smile back to.
So I nodded. Yes, please, tell me a secret.
“Well, first you cover the doorway . . .” He began arranging sandbags over the plastic sheet, pulling them around until they were neatly lined up.
“You know,” said Mrs. P., “while you do that, why don’t I put the kettle on.”
He looked up, and there was his broad, effortless smile again. “That would be champion.”
Then he showed me how to build a defensive wall with sandbags, how to stack them in a pyramid, stamp them down against the ground to make a seal, and wrap the whole package in plastic sheeting. By rights, it shouldn’t have been particularly interesting, but his voice wrapped me up like a blanket, and I liked watching his big hands in their work gloves, pulling the sand this way and that with a kind of no-nonsense certainty.
It made me wonder how it would feel if—
No. I absolutely did not wonder that.
While he spoke, people gathered to watch and listen and ask him questions. It happened so gradually that it felt strangely natural, but soon nearly everyone was in the street, light spilling in puddles of gold from open doors. I recognised most of my neighbours, some of them I even knew by name, but I did not know them.
Tonight there was something different. Something both deeper and shallower than friendship. Familiarity, perhaps, the sudden realisation that we lived our sealed-up little lives in closeness to each other. That we had something to share and something to lose. Something to protect together.
He did that, somehow. He reminded us. And I watched it happen: the chain we formed for passing sandbags down the street, the way people took turns to help each other build their barriers, the handing out of cups of tea. Even the children were out, running here and there, as though it was a party.
Maybe it was. Of a kind.
And he was right in the middle of it, not controlling it or taking charge, but part of it, easily smiling, endlessly helpful. Effortlessly belonging.
His accent wasn’t strong, but it was unmistakable, its own rough music, and my ear seemed to seek it out. I think I was waiting for him to call someone else petal. I caught the occasional “duck,” and even a “chuck,” but he never said petal again. I had been so sure it was just a habit of speech. Why else would he have given the word to me?
After a while, I retreated to Mrs. P.’s kitchen to help with the tea-making. Something to do that wasn’t watching.
It was probably close to eleven o’clock when the rain began to fall again. Drizzle at first, making the night glisten, growing heavier and heavier until at last people began to drift away, disappearing into their homes.
I finished washing up, and then I realised I’d been so busy hiding that I’d forgotten to look after my own house. I didn’t expect there to be any sandbags left, but there was a neat row of them waiting for me by my front step.
Mrs. P. had lent me one of her umbrellas, which I tucked into the crook of my elbow as I shoved the sandbags into position. I was building them into a pyramid, as I’d been taught, when the voice I’d been half-hearing all night long said, “Don’t forget to stamp ’em down.”
The rain was sliding all over him, and his hair was soaked through, lying tight against his skull. The weight of water had pressed all the gold out until it looked almost respectable, red-brown and ordinary.
I rose from my crouch and put a tentative foot atop my sandbag stack. It wobbled, which meant I wobbled, which meant he caught my elbow.
Just kindness, I reminded myself. Like his smile.
But it had also been a long time since I’d been touched by a stranger.
I’d tried. After Marius had left me, I’d tried. I’d gone to clubs because there wasn’t much expectation of talking, and I’d found bodies to move against my body, but it had all felt so meaningless, the pleasure as random as notes hammered on an out-of-tune piano by a man who couldn’t play.
Once, because I hadn’t gone far enough afield, I’d seen Marius. He’d looked so . . . so . . .
He’d looked happy.
Bold and laughing and full of life, and me all full of nothing.
I hadn’t been clubbing since. Sex wasn’t the answer to whatever I was asking.
Sometimes I wasn’t sure I even knew what the question was, anymore.
Once I was steady again on my sandbag, I didn’t know if the stranger let me go or if I pulled away from him. All I knew was the warmth of his hand was gone. We worked in silence for a minute or two, stamping the sand flat, and then disembarked to bundle the bags in plastic sheeting. Then he stood back to survey our work, and pronounced it “grand.”
The rain was everywhere between us now. Even the tips of his lashes.
And all I wanted, in that moment, was to say something to him. Something that wasn’t yes, or no, or thank you, or some forced-out half-thought that wasn’t what I meant at all. “I d-don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so happy over some sand.”
Or, alternatively, I could just randomly insult him.
But he only shrugged, smiling a little, as if it were already a joke we shared. “Simple man, simple pleasures.”
I thought of everything he’d done that night, the way he’d talked to people, including me, and I didn’t think there was anything simple about him. “Sand and the tragedy of the commons?”
“Apparently so.”
God. Edwin. Do—
Something. Anything. “The t-tragedy of the commons. That’s a game th-theory th-th-thing isn’t it?” I asked.
Two th’s in close conjunction. What was I thinking? And such a scintillating opener too.
He shook some of the water from his hair. I saw the droplets glint in the moment before they fell. Without really thinking about it, I raised my arm and angled my umbrella so that it partially covered us both.
“Aye, it’s . . . a hobby, I suppose. Well, not a hobby. I don’t sit down for a riotous evening of strategic decision making with my friends. An interest.”
“I only know a little bit about it, but it f-feels a very abstract way of looking at things.”
“Oh?” He tilted his head, curious, eyes so steady on mine.
His attention. Sweet and intense at the same time. Like a barley sugar I could untwist from its plastic and hold in my mouth. A flood of secret pleasure. Everybody else I know is so used to me. I don’t think I bore them—at least, I hope I don’t—but I’m everyday, and in some very small way he was making me feel like Sunday best. “Well, in the prisoner’s dilemma I w-want to ask why the warden keeps setting the dilemmas in the first place.”
It wasn’t the point, of course. Just foolishness. I waited for him to tell me so.
“Well,” he said gravely, “you see, the prison is on a barren island far from civilisation, and it’s staffed entirely by people who have themselves committed terrible crimes. So while it’s day-to-day functional, the administration tends to be a little unorthodox.”
I put my spare hand to my mouth. The taste of rain on my fingertips, something that felt like a smile. “I th-thought you were going to tell me I was being too literal.”
“I’d never. But now I think about it, aren’t plea bargains basically an iteration of the prisoner’s dilemma?”
“Only if you’re going to be all sensible and rational about it.”
“Sorry.” He grinned, teeth bright in the gloom. “I’m an engineer; I can’t help myself.”
“Why? D-do they take away your licence?”
“Yes. And then I have to spend the rest of my days working out the optimum distribution of gold coins among groups of strictly hierarchical pirates.”
I blinked up at him. “I d-don’t think I know those pirates.”
“Oh, it’s a—” he made a clumsy gesture of dismissal with one hand “—another game-theory thing. You have five pirates and a hundred gold coins—”
“D-doubloons. Spanish doubloons.”
“Sorry, yes, of course. Cursed Spanish doubloons.”
“Wait, why are they cursed?”
“Because it’s traditional. And, anyway, the pirates don’t know that, they’re just trying to distribute them. There’s a strict hierarchy among the pirates, let’s call them A to E, and the way it works is this: as the most senior pirate, Pirate A—”
“Captain, I think, t-technically.” What was I doing? I never interrupt people when they’re speaking because I know only too well how annoying it is. But with my every brattish interjection, the dimples deepened at the corner of his lips. And I was half-drunk on his smiling and the power of saying things that made him smile. “And B is p-probably quartermaster.”
“Not first mate?”
“In p-pirate—” Oh God, too many p’s upon each other’s heels, “—crews the quartermaster is second in rank to the captain. First mate is for the royal navy.”
He tilted his head. “You really do know a lot about pirates.”
“Oh . . . um-uh-uh . . .” I closed my mouth before I unspooled into strings of unfinished syllables. At least the gloom hid my blushes.
Perhaps I was rather too full of piratical factoids. Though my familiarity, such as it was, existed mainly to contextualise some rather more lurid (to say nothing of solitary) imaginings.
“The captain,” the man said, blissfully oblivious to the true and deviant purport of my thoughts, “gets to propose a distribution of the coins. And everyone gets to vote on whether to accept the distribution, including the captain, who, by the way, also gets the casting vote.”
“That doesn’t seem very fair.”
His eyes gleamed wickedly in the darkness. “Pirate. What do you expect?”
It was a good point. Well made. I swallowed.
“However, if they reject the proposal, they fling the captain into the shark-infested waters of the Caribbean, and the whole thing begins again with Pirate B in command.”
“So p-presumably—” I thought about it for a moment “—the captain has to give away most of the gold in bribes.”
“Well, you’d think.” He was grinning again. It should have been maddening. “But actually he can keep ninety-eight coins.”
“But how?”
“It’s, uh, quite boring really. You have to reason backwards, starting with the possibility that all the pirates have been killed except D and E.”
I closed my eyes and worked it through. If only two pirates were left alive, then pirate D would get to keep all the money. Which meant that if three pirates were left alive, then C would be able to bribe E, as E would stand to gain nothing if there were only two pirates. And so on, all the way up the chain to the captain.
I opened my eyes again, pathetically pleased with myself, wanting to lay my reasoning at his feet with a flourish. But plosives were lined up ahead of me like landmines. I was already struggling with pirate. Bribe would surely be unconquerable. I’d sink into my speaking as if it were quicksand, and he’d have to rescue me. And I’d inevitably resent him for it.
“He gives a coin to p-pirate C and E and keeps the rest.” I didn’t feel proud anymore. Just small and hindered. “But nobody would actually think it through like that.”
His laugh climbed into the sky like smoke, fading too quickly. “Maybe I should have said five accountants.”
Oh, what was I doing? Keeping this kind stranger standing in the rain. He was probably wet and cold and tired, and later he would tell this story to a friend or a lover. I imagined his big hands cradling a cup of tea—he’d like it hot and strong and sweet—and he wouldn’t be mocking exactly, only gently bewildered: I wanted to get home, he’d be saying, but this daft bloke kept me talking about game theory of all things. Then he’d shake his head. I suppose he was lonely or something.
“I d-don’t really see how this is any less abstract.” I hated how I sounded right then: prissy and cold. “It doesn’t actually illuminate anything about the way people really think or make decisions.”
“That wasn’t the best example,” he admitted sheepishly. And I hated even more that I had made him feel that way. “But you can use it as a sort of toolkit for understanding some stuff about the way the world works. Stuff that would probably drive me spare if I couldn’t say, Ah, that’s what’s going on there.”
I told myself that we were simply caught on the awkward edge of politeness—that uncertain moment between the suspension of the usual rules of interaction and their resumption. But instead of something helpfully noncommittal that would set him free to go away and forget about me, I heard myself ask, “What s-sort of . . . um, s-stu-stu-uff?”
Even though stuff is pretty much my public enemy number one. A sibilant, fricative nightmare, with that uh-uh-uh in the middle to pratfall over.
His smile shone at me through the gloom, bright as a crescent moon. “The worst and stupidest stuff. The petty things, you know, like why there’s never any spoons in the office kitchen. It used to really bug me that I was the sort of person to get wound-up over something like that.”
“Well, it’s very annoying.” Particularly because I was always so careful to return my teaspoons after use.
“It is,” he agreed, and I felt so absurdly touched to be sharing a small irritation with somebody who seemed less like a stranger with every word he uttered. “But it’s worth thinking about why it happens.”
“Because people s-suck?”
He shook his head in mock chagrin. “How did somebody so pretty get so cynical? It doesn’t really have anything to do with people sucking. Taking one spoon doesn’t hurt anyone, unless everybody does it. The problem is everybody does do it.”
I was interested, charmed, but I was also having trouble focusing on what he was actually saying.
Instead, I was thinking, Pretty?
Etymologically complex, that one. Roots in Old Norwegian, Low German, Middle Dutch, Mercian, so many varieties of pronunciation, of meaning.
When I did my MA in London, I’d been allowed to see the original manuscript of the York Mystery Plays in the British Library. Medium: ink on vellum. I have never forgotten that bold script, defying time with its aggressive downstrokes, its occasionally sensuous curves. I’d wanted to touch it, run my fingers over the shape of the words, the way one learns the sweep of a lover’s spine. The way I had once read Marius. I remembered now, with peculiar vividness, the lines, “he schall, and he haue liff / Proue till a praty swayne.” So dashing, the swish of the s, the loop of the y, the unflinching certainty of letters.
And, oh heavens, suddenly all I could imagine was a different body beneath my hands. Long flanks and freckles and . . . spoons. We were talking about spoons.
“Surely it doesn’t matter whether its malicious if you s-still can’t find s-something to stir your drink.”
“Maybe not. But rather than getting all pissy about it, I just think to myself . . . Right . . . Well . . . It’s just understanding people and groups and incentives. The tragedy of the commons again.”
I stared at him. This man who would make a rational choice not to be annoyed with his colleagues, where I would simply marinate in bitter quiet and sip my inadequately brewed tea. “B-but if the outcome is always no teaspoons, isn’t this a rather d-depressing portrait of humanity?”
“Well, that’s where it interests me most because—” he dusted sand from his gloves, and the particles danced golden in the rain like dust motes “—it doesn’t just show you the problem, it shows you the solution.”
“Get more spoons?”
“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 someone 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 feel oddly 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—
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 good night, 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.