The Night of the Flood

by Zoe Somerville

  For a few long minutes she cried for her loneliness, for her stupidity and her failure. For all the wretched things she had done. No one heard and she sniffed, and wiped her nose on the damp sleeve of her mac and her hand. She realised she had smeared her face with blood and licked the line of it down her wrist. The salty tang of her own blood was oddly warm and soothing. She tried to think what to do.

  First, she would have a cigarette. The wind seemed to have moved eastwards so she turned her back to the land and looked out to the sea, holding the lighter close to her cupped, shaking hand. Once, twice, three times it sparked into light then was extinguished immediately. Then on the fourth go the tiny flame caught the end of the cigarette enough to light and she dragged on it, sucking and sucking, trying to keep the tar burning. But it couldn’t last. When it was extinguished the loss of it hurt. She wanted to cry but forced herself to take a nip from the flask instead. She held the fiery liquid in her mouth, swilling it around.

  Who was out there? Someone must be. And the person who came to her mind was Jack. She thought of him at the dance, his hand on her waist. In a wild moment, she decided that if she got out of this, she would go with him, to America, to the desert where it was dry and it hardly ever rained and to the skyscrapers where you could see for miles. They would ride horses together and he would show her his secret places and it wouldn’t matter where he was from or who his family were. She wouldn’t care. She would paint it all: the desert and the mountains and the sea. Nothing was real any more. She thought that not only was her world transformed by the water but she wanted to be too. It was insane, but it wasn’t impossible. Either way, it was too late to go back now.

  *

  Groggy, she jerked and her stomach leapt like a hare. She was hanging precariously at the edge of her cradle in the middle of the tree. Below her, glowing in the moonlight, the water eddied and lapped, black and deadly. She must have closed her eyes, drifted off. Images of red mountains fled from behind her eyes. Her eyelids were like weights, her feet stung with cold. All she wanted was to sleep. She must not sleep. Please God, don’t let me sleep.

  *

  Arthur groped with the oars, blind in the blackness, pulling, heavy and slow in the little boat through the floodwater. A deep ache jarred across his shoulder blades each time he pulled the oar back, as though he couldn’t do it again. Yet he did, over and over. He was a body, that was all. The hatred he felt for Jack burned inside him like a fireball of pain. It hurt, and burned slowly, as if it could not be quenched. He saw Jack’s red head in the autumn field interchanging with the barrel of his rifle, the explosion in his ears, the reverberation in his shoulder. Jack gone. He knew he was grinding his teeth and gripping the oars but he’d set himself on a path that he couldn’t now get off. The original plan to row to the farm seemed like a parallel world of ideas and reasoning. All that was left now was this place of darkness. A darkness that seemed to come from within him.

  Jack’s torch had died. Arthur’s eyes had adjusted to the night and he could make out the deeper black of vegetation and the lighter grey sheen of the water. They relied on the intermittent moonlight, breaking through cloud cover, to cast a silver glow on the flooded fields they were crossing. Even with the moon, it was hard to tell which was the earth, and which the sky, it was all a smudgy shimmer of black, silver and grey. The flooded fields reflecting the sky and back again.

  Neither of them spoke.

  Out of the emptiness, Arthur heard a high, human voice – ‘Peter!’

  ‘Verity,’ he said, in wonder, and then, ‘Oh God.’

  ‘Verity?’ said Jack. ‘You sure it’s her?’

  ‘She can’t be out here, she can’t.’

  There it was again. Closer. It was impossible for it to be her voice and yet it was. They couldn’t both be hearing things.

  ‘It is her,’ said Jack. ‘Jeez, we’ve got to get her.’

  There was a new tone in Jack’s voice, a determination, and Arthur knew with absolute certainty that they would do anything to find her.

  They both started shouting her name in chorus, their voices rising together and dying with the fierce cry of the wind, vying for supremacy.

  *

  On her small island of safety, perched like a rook in a tree on the edge of one of her father’s fields, Verity was shaken awake by a cry and thought it was the wind or the sea. She must have fallen asleep again. She must not sleep. The moon illuminated the scene in a wash of light: a drowned world, what was her world, fields now rivers and lakes. Behind her, the pinpricks of yellow light from the house and inside, her father, safe and asleep. She clutched Peter’s hip flask to her chest, like a talisman. Peter would come for her. She had to think it, although for all she knew, he hadn’t made it back to the house. He might think she was safe in the house, on its rise above the sea. She was so cold, she had taken her arms out of the sleeves of the mac and was hunched inside it. She could no longer feel her toes.

  There was no point in cursing herself for her idiocy in setting forth from the safety of the farmhouse, for the loss of her torch, the flailing, splashing in the bitter cold seawater, until – beautiful luck – the semi-submerged tree saved her. She was lucky. This had to be believed. She took a tiny sip of the whisky from the flask, careful not to glug it down. A part of her tried to imagine she was on a Girl Guide mission where she had to make her supplies last. If she thought like this, she wouldn’t let the terror get to her. She was alive. The tide would ebb, maybe it was already ebbing. The image of her body, huddled, frozen stiff, found at dawn must be banished. The fire in her mouth distracted her, and burned its way down her insides. She had one cigarette left but so far had not been able to smoke it because of the impossibility of getting the Zippo to keep its flame in the wind. The Zippo had let her down. Why, she thought, if Jack loved her so much did he not come for her? Had he ever said he loved her? No. Stop it. Must stop it.

  Where was Peter? Please let him come.

  Gathering up her strength, she shouted again, ‘Peter!’

  *

  ‘That’s her. I tell you, Art, it’s her, we’re getting close.’

  Arthur was concentrating on rowing and only now did he try to picture her – where? What on earth was she doing out here? It was absolute madness. And where the bloody hell was Peter? He’d forgotten they’d come to help Peter, or so they’d pretended. And still, even in the strangeness of the dark, all he could see was an image of Jack and Verity dancing, twirling round and round in his head.

  They returned her cry with their own.

  *

  From somewhere out there, in the dark, Verity thought she heard her own name. Instantly, her body was alert. She flexed her aching fingers, tried and failed to flex her toes. They were numb and gone. She sat up, and, as much as she could, leaned out into the chasm of mute darkness and shouted with all the fear and loneliness of the night.

  No sound returned to her.

  *

  Jack’s face was white in the moonlight, lit up like a ghost. He was saying something Arthur didn’t want to hear. He wanted to block his ears, black over Jack’s bright moonface, blot him out. Shut him up. A scream from somewhere. Or the wind.

  ‘Art, look, before we get to her, I have to tell you. I should have told you about Vee, I didn’t realise you were—’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘You know, I don’t even think I wised up myself until tonight, not truly. I mean about her. See, I’ve been messing about, but I stopped it, tonight. It’s complicated, Art, I wish I could tell just how much. But that’s it. I’m not going—’

  The moon clouded over, plunging them into darkness, and at the same moment a spring snapped in Arthur’s brain. Everything surged out. He gritted his teeth and ground them together. She hadn’t given herself to him, had she? Why should Jack get away with what he’d done? He was a traitor. Nothing Arthur had ever wanted was going to come true. Nothing. Nothing. He lunged forward, throwing Jack against the prow of the
boat.

  ‘Shut up!’

  He hit the hard bone of Jack’s head.

  *

  Arthur was thrust back to the other end of the boat. He lay there, panting. Feeling came back to his body. His hand was throbbing and wet. Slowly, he realised that the boat had come to a stop. Cold water washed over his feet. They had hit something.

  From the other end of the boat, where the slumped figure of the American lay, he heard a groan.

  ‘Jack,’ he said, whispering tentatively, ‘can you believe it? The boat’s taking in water. Jack?’

  He didn’t want to believe it. There was no way he could get into the floodwater. The boat was the only thing keeping him from certain death. He felt on the floor of the boat. Seawater lapped at his trouser legs. His hand twinged, his head throbbed. Out of the night came voices, distant, echoing.

  ‘We’ll have to swim. She can’t be far.’

  Silence in the blackness.

  The water was up to his knees. He was sitting in it. He was covered with freezing seawater, something slimy around his legs. The smell of seaweed was mixed with something rotten.

  Arthur imagined Jack grinning, though he couldn’t see him. Why was he grinning?

  ‘It won’t be far. She’s close. You heard her.’ The voice was distorted, as if he was already underwater. He wasn’t sure if he had spoken or Jack. It was true that when she had cried out, even given the wind and the darkness, he felt as if he could reach out and touch her. But he didn’t trust his own senses. Between their voices a black void.

  ‘Come on,’ said another voice, a distorted echo of his own.

  Arthur closed his eyes. Just a few strokes. He could swim. He had to swim. He plunged into the water, gasping. The coldest water he had ever felt. Cold everywhere, inside him. In his heart, in his lungs. He would die of the cold. Stop panicking. His arms splashed wildly. The boat. It was still there, behind him. It was sinking, but he wanted to cling to it, the only hard thing in a world of water. No. Splashing, his chin underwater. Don’t open your mouth. Don’t swallow. Don’t go under. Can’t go under. Move, he told himself. His limbs, in a spasmodic movement, smashed through the water. Don’t think about the shadow in the boat. Don’t think. Swim.

  PART 4

  EBB

  Sunday, 1st February 1953

  The morning after the flood

  Low Z depression

  Surge subsiding all along the coast

  Full moon

  1.

  To most people there is something desolating about the ebb of the tide, but to Muriel it had always seemed the best possible time of day. This is when the richest pickings were to be had – when the cockles and mussels came out, when the waders, the curlews and the godwits fed, and the oystercatchers moved along the beach, waiting for mussels to open their shells so they could suck up the soft insides.

  And she would never have said it, never have thought it consciously, but the time after a flood was always strangely full, teeming with life. Life had been undone, unmade, taken away by the sea. But what was left in its place? Her tiny brother was gone, his life barely begun. Her mother emptied out. There were other losses too; she felt them, like goosebumps all over her skin. But, but… she couldn’t deny it. The truth was, there was always something left behind, when the tide turned, dragging itself over the sand. Life bloomed in the ebb. And so it was now.

  Muriel sensed all this, in the aftermath of the flood, as the town reeled and the people reeled and rallied, and soon, out of the darkness of the night, she would find out what exactly had been lost and what was there to be taken.

  2.

  Thrashing, hot and wet, something clung to her, sticking. Verity surfaced, gasping for air. There was no air. Drowning. She was drowning in her own blood. Hot blood pulsed. In, out, in and out, in her head, in her body, deep down inside. Submerged, calm under water, she could see the green seaweed and it was her mother’s hair, waving. Mother, she said, but there was no sound in the water. Bubbles formed and separated and her mother turned to face her but her eyes were creamy-white, shiny pearls. She opened her mouth to say Mother and nothing came out. No breath. Down, down, down. Dark.

  White light, cold, shivering. Someone soothing. So cold. Mother? A cool hand on her hot-cold skin.

  Back down in the deep. Dark red. Her blood. In front of her, a fish swimming. Pink translucent skin, fins for hands and a grey eye, a fish-foetus swimming.

  3.

  Tuesday, 3rd February

  Verity had been asleep, on and off, for forty-eight hours. Or it could have been longer. The family doctor had been, felt her forehead and taken her temperature and said she needed to sleep it off. And so she did. She slept like a sated baby. On and on she slept, as if her body knew she needed sleep to save her energy, to feed it.

  On the third day she’d recovered enough to take food. Mrs Timms fussed about her room, straightening the kicked-off bedcovers and tutting at the barely eaten breakfast on the tray. When she left, Verity drove herself further down in the covers and watched the sickly morning light play on the bedspread. In here, the flood was a distant horror. It had happened out there, beyond the known universe of her bedroom. She didn’t know what day it was but knew from what Mrs Timms had told her that she had been in bed since the flood with a fever. The doctor said pneumonia. It was gone now and she was left wrung out like a dishcloth, her limbs soft and limp, her mind cloudy and prone to gazing at flecks of dust lit up in the light from her bedroom window. They told her she had been stranded in a tree half dead from hypothermia but it seemed incredible to her, as if it had only happened in a dream. Her dreams were watery and indistinct.

  She remembered snatches: a boat, a man with a moustache, Arthur. They told her Arthur, anyway. He’d come to the house, they said. A woman’s body upside down. But she wasn’t sure if any of it had really happened. Dancing. She remembered dancing with Jack. Him winking at her as she left the village hall.

  Something flashed in the corner of her eye. On the bedside table, the light had caught something silver. She reached over and picked it up. It was Jack’s Zippo. Idly, she tried to light it but it was water damaged and couldn’t spark. Still, she kept it in her hand, feeling the cool of the smooth metal in her palm. She wondered if Jack had also called to the house. Her body remembered him and she imagined him here in her bed, pulling up the white cotton of her nightdress and she shivered with an uneasy pleasure.

  Mrs Timms had been feeding her titbits of information about the devastation wrought on the town but it was obvious she was keeping most of it back. The torpedo boat perched on the quayside, pigs found squealing in garden trees, even the gruesome discovery of the body of a poor child dangling from a bush. All these were told with hushed relish but nothing about the farm itself and the losses here. Her father had only peered in from the door, nodded and left. Sometimes she would wake and Peter would be slumped in a chair by the window, his eyes closed. When he felt her gaze on him he would open his eyes and the look they exchanged told her not to ask too much. What she’d gleaned was that the bottom half of the land was still inundated by corrosive seawater, while the top section nearest the house was left wrecked by debris and salt. The cowshed had been ripped open by the force of the surge and Peter couldn’t save about half – twenty of the herd – from drowning. Many of his beloved Friesians were dead. Some of the hens had been found floating on a haystack. And over by the beach, the pine trees had been battered and the Jubilee Café had been swept away completely. She took all this in, passed on in hurried fragments, as if he was a long way away in another world. Far more urgently, she wanted to ask him about Jack and about Arthur but it was impossible. She hadn’t forgotten the morning with Arthur – so long ago now it felt like an age. That day was a maelstrom of contradictions that she couldn’t bear to examine.

  Sometimes she heard whispers outside her door.

  But she couldn’t wait any more, stuck in this prison. She heaved herself up and sat on the edge of the bed to get her br
eath, then pulled herself over to the window. The view was oddly unchanged, looking out beyond the pines to the grey, churning sea. But as her eyes adjusted to the unaccustomed pale wintry light, she saw that the nearest fields were filthy with flecks of dirty white and yellow – the deposits of salt and sand – and the trees were misshapen and haphazard as if someone had taken shears to them and chopped them about in anger. Even worse, further down towards the sea, where the end fields had been, it was like a looking-glass reflection of the grey sky. Above them seagulls screamed and swooped, feasting on dead worms. The cold reality of what it meant seeped into her bones: the farm would be unusable for years. She was enough of her father’s daughter to know that. And yet, it was removed from her now. She had plotted her escape route. She had Jack. Her heart quickened. It was treacherous, yes, to abandon the farm when she was most needed (though what could she do? she asked herself, and pushed away the thought that another daughter would do anything) and there was a pang of guilt at leaving Peter with this mess. And Arthur. But another, far stronger emotion was gathering force: the thrill of a real decision, the thought that was rushing up through her. That she would really, actually leave. Give it all up. Oh God, she would do it, she would throw it all away, to go and live, to really do something.

  In a state of trembling excitement, she pulled on some clothes and went downstairs, holding onto the rail as her legs were still wobbly. She couldn’t bear the thought of the ruined front rooms. All her mother’s furniture, some of it saved from the demolition of Felford – the last fragments of that old world – gone.