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 un-flooded 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 pedestrians and 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 be really alone, 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’s there, and we somehow find each other at the end of the world.
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, clinging to 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.
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.
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.”
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,” and “dangerous,” and “dingbat.” From the driver came “not the police,” and “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 un-amphibious escape, but the 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. 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 hated b’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.
I was still trying to find something to say when Adam touched my elbow. “Come on, let’s get you home before you catch your death.”
That’s when my body abruptly remembered something other than the fleeting pressure of blunt fingers. It remembered how wet it was, and how cold. And I began to shiver.
“Here,” said Adam, “step where I step.”
So I did, picking my way carefully after him, my footsteps cradled by his, somewhere beneath the flood.
“What are you smiling about?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder, catching me in the act.
“Nothing . . . just thinking I feel like a spy. Or that I’m in an action movie. There should b-be theme music.”
“You joke, but as the water table rises, it can sometimes push young crocodiles up through sewer gratings and onto the streets.”
I stared at him.
He stared back.
“There . . . there . . . Are there . . . I’m sure there aren’t crocodiles in England.”
His face didn’t change.
“. . . Really?” And then I saw how his eyes betrayed him, darkly gleaming. Unthinkingly I nudged his arm, as though I weren’t bad with strangers, as though we were friends. “You b-bastard. You took advantage of me because you have a trustworthy face.”
He hung his head, but I didn’t believe him for a moment. “I’m sorry, petal.”
“You should be. I was terrified of crocodiles my whole childhood.”
“Aw, really?”
“I thought crocodiles lived under my bed and if my feet hung over the side, they’d get bitten off. So I slept in a ball. I think I still do actually.” Oh God. Shut up. Shut up. “Out of habit, I mean, not crocodiles. I d-don’t think that anymore. Obviously.”
He was quiet a moment. And then, faintly accusingly, “You know that’s adorable, don’t you?”
I tripped hard over adorable and couldn’t think how to answer. So I said nothing at all, and merely enjoyed my few minutes in a dangerous puddle with a man who maybe thought I was adorable.
Although he probably also thought I was profoundly dull. Giving him silence in return for his . . . Oh God, was he flirting with me? It seemed the wrong word for whatever it was he was doing; these small offerings of attention, his thoughts slipped into my hands like a chocolate bar in the playground.
I’d never had to navigate these delicate uncertainties with Marius. Let’s go, had been his first words to me. I want to paint you.
It was the sort of thing you could only get away with saying if you were a beautiful, dark-eyed, tousle-haired eighteen-year-old. He’d taken my hand and led me up the spiral staircase to his oak-walled, canvas-filled rooms, where he had painted me. Eventually.
When we reached dry land, Adam’s gaze alighted on my boots.
“Not,” he said, “what I was expecting.”
“B-best I had.”
“Hey, no explanation necessary.”
I stared at my feet, these strangers in purple. “Are you certain?”
He whispered something so softly I could barely hear it. I think he did it deliberately so I had to look at him again, and into his eyes, and all their wickedness and warmth. “W-what was that?”
He just grinned.
“D-did you really use the phrase ‘boot-scootin baby’?”
“That I did.” Unrepentantly, too. “What’s more, I bet you anything you remember the dance.”
He was right, of course. “W-well, I’m gay, and I was a teenager in the late nineties, so it would be culturally and physically impossible for me not to remember the ‘5,6,7,8’ dance.”
He laughed, made a gun out of his fingers, pointed them, and then spun round twirling an imaginary lasso.
Like the man had said, it was not what I was expecting, not from someone who was ostensibly an adult, and certainly not from a man in orange waders. He wasn’t by any means a natural dancer. His body had clearly been designed to be shirtless and hefting hay bales around in the hot sun, rather than swaying its hips clumsily to his own rendition of faux-country themed pop music in the middle of a half-flooded street in Oxford.
But there I stood, charmed, utterly charmed, by the fact he did it anyway.
He got to the line about a cowboy guy from head to toe, and stopped. “Except more like just your toes.”
“Yes. Cowb-boy guy in a very specific, localised area.”
“It’s important to mix it up.”
“Oh yes. I’m a—” I wanted to say badass, but I didn’t trust myself with a b and a d so close to each other, “—maverick. Mixing it up. Is totally what I do.”
He grinned. God. Dimples. And I caught myself wondering if he had any more. At the base of his spine. Above his hips. All full of freckles.
“So anyway,” I blurted out frantically, “w-what’s your excuse?”
“Excuse?”
“For listening to Steps.”
“I told you, two kid sisters.”
Oh.
There it was again: mischief, filling up his eyes like light. “And, as you say, gay teenagers in the late nineties, didn’t have much choice.”
Oh.
“Plus, I’m kind of a connoisseur of pop. The cheesier the better. If you think about it, ‘5,6,7,8’ is almost a precursor to ‘Gangnam Style.’ It’s all about the—”
His lasso hand came up again.
“You wouldn’t dare.”
He dared.
And laughing with him, right there on the pavement outside my house, felt a little bit like dying. As though I might never breathe the same again.
“You’d better go,” he said. “Have a good long shower, and get those clothes cleaned. You don’t have any exposed cuts, do you? And you didn’t ingest any flood water?”
That was when I remembered: he was kind, and this was his job, and suddenly I wasn’t laughing anymore. I wasn’t anything. And I hated both his kindness and his job because they felt so close to something else. Something they weren’t.
Flirting. I was pathetic.
So I reassured him, thanked him, and went inside, where I showered and cleaned my clothes. The washing machine thrashed softly beneath the fresh falling rain, and I was somewhere out of time, marooned in the middle of an afternoon.
Later that evening, a knock on my door and the blur of a yellow jacket through frosted glass made my foolish heart flutter.
But it wasn’t him.
His little task force was going door to door, warning each of us in turn that we might flood, either tonight or tomorrow, as river levels were predicted to peak. An emergency shelter had been set up in the Blackbird Leys Leisure Centre, but I didn’t want to go. And, from a quick glance down the street, it didn’t look like anyone else did either.
I packed a bag, though, as I’d been told, bunged up my toilet, turned off my electricity, gas, and water, and then went next door to check on Mrs. P.
She pointedly hadn’t packed a bag. But she had taken the precaution of boiling one last kettle, which meant we got to drink tea in the deepening dark, and listen to the rain as it kept on falling.
Afterwards, I moved some of her things upstairs, and stacked up everything else as best I could.
“Valuables, my arse,” she grumbled. “I’m eighty-two, I don’t have any valuables. I’ve just got a lifetime’s worth of crap.”
I smiled and thought of my house, too full and too empty of memories and things, half wishing the water would come and ruin it all, wash it away, and make me start again. Half-wishing, but mainly terrified.
Whatever we did, it would make no difference to the rain and the rising waters, so we lit all the tea lights we could find, huddled in blankets and played cribbage. Mrs. P. kicked my arse, because she always did.
“So, that wossisname,” she murmured. “He seems nice.”
I squinted fretfully at my hand, which was a big collection of nothing. “Adam.”
“Mm-hmm.” Then, after a moment: “Edwin and Adam sitting in a tree . . .”
Predictably, I lost track of my points, and she mugged them. “W-we were just talking.”
“You were making googly-eyes at him.”
I probably had been. Prickly heat burst out all over my skin, and I wasn’t sure if I was angry or embarrassed, or something else entirely. “This isn’t poker, you know. You’re not supposed to be trying to psych me out.”
She said nothing for a while. The shuffling of cards sounded like wings in the silence.
“Why were you spying on me?” I asked.
“There was nothing on the telly.”
I gave her a look.
“Oh come on, Edwin, I wasn’t spying. I wouldn’t do that. I just worry about you sometimes.”
“I don’t need you to take care of me.”
“No, you need a kick up the arse.” The cards slipped from between my fingers, and she pounced on them without hesitation or shame. “Ooh, you’ve got his nobs.”
“It’s d-d-dishonourable to peek at someone else’s cards.”
“Cribbage is cutthroat.” Mrs. P. met my eyes through the muddle of light and shadow. “I’m not trying to upset you. I just think it’s about time you moved on.”
“I have moved on.”
“Have you? Because it looks a lot like standing around to me.”
Was that true? Was that all I’d done since Marius left me? “W-well, maybe it’s more complicated than that. Ten years w-with the same man. It’s not s-s-something you just get over.”
“I know,” she said, with a gentleness that shook me more deeply than anything else she could have done. “You told me. Love at first sight. Together forever.” She moved her little peg away from mine, consolidating an impressive lead into a mortifying one. “But nothing’s forever, Edwin.”
I cringed a bit, remembering the things I’d said, between the snot and the tears, here in this very room. I’d been so angry at Marius, then, for turning the life we’d built into a pile of lies and broken promises. “What about diamonds?”
She smiled at me. “Not very cuddly. I’m not saying you should marry wossisname. Just give yourself a chance with him.”
“A chance to what?”
“Be with someone again.”
“I w-w-want to,” I whispered. “But what if it goes the same way? W-what if I’m unbeable with?”
She actually rolled her eyes. My deepest, most desperate late-night fear, and that was the reaction it inspired. “You met someone, you fell in love, you were together a long time, you broke up amicably. That’s not exactly a tragedy.”
“But isn’t that worse? Devastated by not exactly a tragedy?”
“Look—” she sighed, put down her cards, “—the thing is, life is . . . it’s . . . long. And it’s even longer at the beginning. You met Marius at university. You still had shell on. You both did. And you’re thirty now.”
“Thirty-one, actually.” As if that made a difference. As if it made the years after Marius any more meaningful.
“That’s a lot of living, and a lot of changing, and sometimes love doesn’t change with you.”
I blinked.
“Is this meant to be comforting?”
“I’m just saying. He loved you when you were eighteen.”
“And I would have loved him for his whole life.”
“Him? Or someone he used to be?”
I thought of Marius. Wild, wonderful, Byronic-fantasy Marius, who had somehow found something he wanted in the everyday quietness of me. Until he hadn’t. I put my head in my hands. “Oh, I don’t know anymore. I don’t know where love ends and habit begins.”
“Who does?” She reached out and patted my arm. “But Edwin, you need to let someone fall in love with who you are now.”
I must have answered with something silly or dismissive because the game went on, and I lost soon after. But once I got home again, as I blundered through my house by the light of my mobile phone, trying to find a torch, I couldn’t help thinking about what she’d said, and about what it would mean.
For someone to love the man Marius had left.