After Me Comes the Flood (6 page)

‘Didn’t they tell you? We’re getting out of here, going to the sea. Won’t you come too?’

‘Of course,’ said John. How easy it would be to leave them then, with none of those inept excuses he’d dreamed up in the night. He imagined pushing open the door to his flat, and seeing inside the rush mat with three pairs of shoes neatly paired alongside, and the bookshelves as ordered as those in the shop. He awaited relief and longing for home, but neither came.

‘It can get a bit closed-in here sometimes,’ said the younger man suddenly, sitting up and grasping the arms of the chair: ‘Nice to have another face – another pair of eyes, if you see what I mean.’ He looked at John with such warmth and gratitude that he flushed, and stooped to pick uselessly at a shoelace. Then Alex said, worrying at a graze on the back of his hand: ‘I don’t think I did know you, back then, did I?’ His eyes met John’s, and for a moment he was the huddled wretched boy he’d been that morning.

‘Oh no, no. No – I don’t think so, I’m sure I’d remember.’

‘Only you see I am sometimes – sometimes not always clear…’ The graze evidently became sore; he winced, and rested his head on the arm of the chair. ‘But here it feels safe, as if nothing can make it through the forest to where we are. Do you see?’

‘I think so.’

‘Listen,’ he said, standing. ‘Would you help me with something?’

‘If I can, of course.’

‘I could do with a hand, later. Down by the reservoir.’ He looked anxious, and John remembered the tale Eve told, and saw that name again, with its familiar syllables:
Eadwacer
, written in the notebook upstairs and scratched into the wood on the kitchen table, and perhaps in other places waiting to be discovered.

‘If you think I can be any use,’ he said.

‘Can you swim?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said John: ‘I can’t remember.’

‘It won’t matter – was that Hester calling us to lunch?’ He put a hand on John’s shoulder where the shirt was damp with sweat growing stale, and said: ‘You’ve probably got time to change.’

Dear Jon (may I call you Jon?)

Last night I slept in your bed, and this morning I put on your clothes. I took them from one of the bags you left here: I hope you don’t mind. I’m sure they’re all wondering what a man like me is doing in a red tartan shirt with sleeves too short by an inch.

‘A man like me’, I said; but the point is that I must be a man like you – I must be you, and put you on when I put on these jeans (which I notice are not clean and have about them a smell a little like smoke and a little like the lawn outside, where all the grass has died).

I’ve kept a record of what I’ve done and said in your name. Don’t be alarmed – I’ve done no harm, though I’ve done what I ought not to have done, and left undone those things which I ought to have done…

I’ve been through your bags, and this is what I found:

A biology textbook, hardly read.

A joke set of plastic false teeth with pink feet attached.

Two bottles of clear nail varnish.

A Book of Common Prayer (marked with Elijah’s name, and an address scratched out).

Four white porcelain dolls’ hands, and a plastic doll’s leg.

A prescription for antihistamines made out to a Mr Williams.

A bottle of lavender oil (empty).

Five steel bolts, very clean.

A thin glove packed with gauze.

A glass eye.

Actually, the glass eye was in the pocket of these jeans. I thought perhaps you collected marbles, and found myself rolling it between my finger and thumb, wondering if you did the same for comfort’s sake. When I took it out just now and saw the green pupil and the bloodshot white I half expected it to blink, so I put it back in my pocket to protect it from the light.

Who are you – who are
we
? What did we all do that brought us here? I only know they can’t ever have seen you, or even heard your voice – when we spoke on the phone you had an accent I couldn’t place that was nothing like mine.

Who are you, Jon? And what are you doing with these things – that glove you could mistake for a severed hand, the limbs of a doll, the teeth you must’ve found in a joke shop on a pier? Carry on like this and you’ll have enough to make yourself a whole new man.

I’d guess that you’re young, and as troubled as they all seem to be. You’re shorter than I am and stockier too, and from what I’ve seen on your collar I imagine your hair could do with a cut. And you’re a thief, with the names of other men on your books and papers – is the textbook even yours? What was it you wanted to know – was there no-one to ask? You’ve read the prayer book – I can see that – Elijah would never have folded down the pages till the paper cracked. And I can see the page you’ve read most, because you touched the paper too often with dirty hands –
‘You have placed in the skies the sign of your covenant with all living things…’
(and I’m not a religious man but I know a rainbow when I see one).

I know what you’re thinking. I’ve no right to your clothes or your name or your place at their table. But read what I’ve written and you’ll see: they took my arm – they touched me and wanted me here…

Oh, but it’s useless I know. Soon enough they’ll catch me out and besides, it was never me they wanted.

Keep this book safe, would you?
Please do that.

Yours,

John Cole

II

Later, when a too-heavy lunch had been eaten, and doors closed one after the other upstairs as the afternoon torpor settled on the house, John walked alone in the garden. The letter – torn from the notebook and placed under the painted Puritan’s frame – ought to have shaken him loose, but seemed instead to fix him in place. As he walked across the dying lawn he cast about for sight of Eve walking between the poplars or Hester at her window, already feeling it his duty now to observe, if not take part. He rolled the glass eye across his palm; there was the dying elm, and there the raised bright bank of the reservoir, but nothing moved – no shadow on the grass, or shiver in the branches overhead. There also, of course – he’d never thought to look! – would be the narrow track down which he’d walked, and beyond it the long road home. He stood sunstruck alone on the lawn –
I can go I must go I will
– then thought suddenly of the notebook upstairs. He imagined Clare finding it one early morning as she ranged about the house, passing it between them all, reading it aloud.

He turned back, to the grey-paved terrace and its broken sundial, and the roses dying in their beds. Upstairs a window was opened and the sun slid across the pane; a note or two was struck on the piano, but nothing came of it. John crossed the threshold to the blue room where he’d sat in silence the night before, feeling the glass eye grow hot in his palm, and gave a shameful cry of surprise as a hand emerged from a dim corner and beckoned him further in. Elijah, holding a glass of water in which floated an opaque ice cube cracking as it melted, gestured towards an empty chair. The gentle invitation had the proportions of a threat (
I think we’d better have a talk)
: John started guiltily, and dropped the eye, which made its way across the carpet, settled against the leg of an armchair, and fixed its gaze upon the ceiling.

‘John!’ It was clear he’d been waiting. ‘John! That is to say…’ Delicately, by little more than a raised eyebrow, he put out the question which John had dreaded and longed for.

‘Oh no – I
am
John. You see, that’s been my trouble!’

‘Care to tell me about it? I’ve kept a good many secrets’ – the preacher pulled, wincing, at the iced water – ‘not
all
of them mine.’

‘It was just a mistake,’ said John. ‘I didn’t mean to do it.’ The plaintive note in his voice was new and unwelcome, and flushing miserably he wished the arms of the chair would draw him in until he seeped into the wood.

‘So easily done,’ said the other man, benevolently. ‘Wide is the gate, and broad is the way…’ He paused, then thinking better of the turn he’d taken said: ‘You came in last night so pale, and seemed so weary, that it didn’t much matter that you weren’t the Jon I knew. Certainly you looked as though you belonged here – what right did I have to turn you out?’

‘Does everyone know?’ Appalled, John considered the possibility that all their welcome had been an act of amused pity. The glass eye rolled his way in sympathy.

‘Oh, no! No, they never knew the lad – he was one of mine, if you take my meaning, and fetched up at St Jude’s a while back, following his pastor like a dutiful member of the flock. A tendency to a particular kind of kleptomania, I’m given to understand. Harmless, but one never knows where these things lead. In my day we sang with the children “
Little
sins become
big
sins, and
big
sins
kill
” – just like that, can you imagine –
big sins kill
!’

‘I’ve no right to ask you, I know – but I’d like to understand at least what I’ve seen and heard since I came – what is St Jude’s? What does it mean? I thought at first of a church but can’t seem to make it fit.’

‘Ah…’ There was another of those slight changes of air, and Elijah sat a little straighter. He pursed his mouth in a gesture of distaste, drained his glass, and set it down. ‘Not a church, or not quite: a private hospital, a – what do they call it these days? – a psychiatric hospital, a convalescent home, an institute, a retreat. I was there first, biding my time, waiting for it all to pass. Quiet it was, at first; routine, order, soft-soled shoes. Then Alex came, not in his right mind. There’d never been anyone quite like him before, not in my time at least. A deep sadness in him, an anger even; they couldn’t contain it at first. And then the women came – I remember thinking it was like Mary visiting Christ in his tomb. Hester first, with Clare always at her side, and not long after that Eve also, though she looked so different then, and wore her hair so long she could wrap it round her like a scarf.’

‘Months ago? Years ago – weeks?’

‘I don’t remember. Autumn was coming – a year ago, I suppose. Then Walker came – something to do with the finance of the place; I never asked. And something altered, and in the end every boundary was crossed, every mark was overstepped, and we all left together – Alex, Clare, Eve and me. It was Hester’s doing, as things so often are. It’s a lonely place this, with all the rooms empty, and she told them “Send others, if they need it; if they’re not ready to be alone.” Between you and me, I think she’d hit on a way of saving her soul. But no-one ever came, and we never mentioned St Jude’s again. Then a month ago I took a call from Jon, and said: do come, do. There’s no harm in coming here.’

He shook his head, and left a quiet opening into which John – leaning forward, imagining a confessional grille suspended in the air between them – put all the events of the day before. Elijah greeted the tale without surprise or censure, nodding now and then, and murmuring ‘Yes, I see’ or ‘Yes, quite so’; and when John had finished he said, ‘I consider it none of my business whatever. Stay or go as you please, and I’ll say nothing. If asked, well – I can try my hand at a lie.’

Muddy with heat, John stirred in his chair; a new thought had come to him, and with great difficulty he forced it on to his tongue. ‘Then – is this why no-one ever asks me where I came from, or what I’m doing here?’

Elijah, standing with a groan, gave a smile of mischief and delight. ‘Oh, they think you came from there too. They all just assumed you were mad.’

III

It’s very late or very early, depending which way up you hold the day, and I’ve been down at the reservoir with Alex. He told me to wait for him after we’d eaten, and I sat till after midnight on the terrace, drinking the coffee Hester gave me (she makes it bitterly thick – no wonder I can’t sleep), watching bats come over the wall from the forest and listening to Eve play in the room behind me. She’d opened the windows wide and I could smell the lilies dying in their vases. By then the heat had made everyone tired and listless and no-one seemed to feel much like talking. Mostly they left me alone, although once someone put their hand on my shoulder on their way down through the trees. Clare sat cross-legged next to me for a long time, showing me how to blow a blade of grass like an oboe reed. I pretended I didn’t know how, and let her teach me, all the while thinking: tomorrow I’ll leave and be forgotten by the time the weather breaks.

Behind us Walker paced up and down smoking so heavily it looked as though autumn had come and he was walking through morning mist. Elijah came to the window once or twice and looked down towards the yellow light by the reservoir as if he wanted to go down, but was terrified of what he’d find. I wonder what frightens him? Watching him there at the window I thought it must be something he sees that passes the rest of us by.

The chair I’d carried out was too old and worn in the seat to be comfortable, but all the same I dozed off twice, my chin on my chest and the back of my neck stretched as if it would break. Behind me Eve went on playing, breaking off sometimes to swear quietly but viciously, and play a dozen times the phrase she’d mistaken, until the memory of it must have lodged in all the bones and tendons of her hands. The same phrases over and over seemed to give me a kind of clarity – I remembered the poem I’d seen that morning as clearly as if I had memorised it yesterday, or years ago perhaps when I was young, and my mind held on to things. I recited the lines to myself making them fit with the phrases she played… Wulf is on one island, I on another, Wulf is on one island, I on another… Then Alex came and woke me with a thump between my shoulders so hard it nearly threw me out of my chair.

He said, ‘Sorry to keep you, John – shall we go?’ and crooked out his arm towards me. I took it, and it wasn’t until we’d gone a little further on I realised no-one had walked with me like that since I’d last seen my brother. He’s shorter than Christopher, and his arm was slender but strong. He said, ‘It’s good of you, you know. I don’t like asking the others. Clare’s afraid of the water at night – she thinks drowned men will come up and get her by the ankles. Have you been down and seen it yet?’

I said I hadn’t, and he squeezed my arm.

‘It’s not much of a reservoir, really. We get our water from there, and so do the villages between here and the coast road, but no more than that. You’ve seen the valve tower?’

‘Is that what it is? I can see the light from my window. It doesn’t look like it belongs here.’

‘I hate the light. It keeps me awake and turns my skin yellow like a man that’s been poisoned… I’ve told Hester I can go down and take out the bulb, but she says she likes it, like a midnight sun – as if we haven’t had enough sun by now!’

We walked slowly down towards the light, and as we left the house behind the hard earth became springy and pliable underfoot. As we drew nearer the rough land beyond the garden I could make out white patches on the earth, like smears of drying salt water. While we walked he told me more about the reservoir, quite contentedly, not at all as if he dreaded the water breaching the dam and reaching us where we stood. I wondered if Eve had been teasing me that morning as we sat under the dying elm, and felt suddenly very relieved. The whole business of the letters had been so childish and inane that I was glad I didn’t have to believe it after all. Alex went on talking, and I remember thinking how like his sister’s his voice was, cheerful and childlike and not much bothered whether or not I was listening, or had much to say in reply.

He told me the reservoir was made before the war by flooding a hamlet that had once been within view of the house. The dam had stopped up a river so narrow no-one had really believed it would rise to cover the post office and chapel, and the dozen cottages clinging to the single road. There were no protests, he told me – no-one had much cared about the chapel, which had been used by a sect called the Particular People, famous for praying out of doors. Elderly couples in the cottages were only too glad to move to new apartments with neat kitchens and a warden who’d come if they had a fall on the doorstep. Only the postmistress had taken it badly, hoarding letters in their sacks for weeks so they were never delivered, and were dislodged when the water came. For a long time after, he said anyone passing by would have seen white envelopes floating on the black water.

‘About a week ago the water got just low enough to see the post office sign. When we get there, tell me if you can see it.’

I asked him about the valve tower, and who came there. We’d drawn near it by then, and its yellow light gave him a hard translucent look as if he were made of amber. The tower was smaller than it had looked from the window, with red bricks neatly set in a checkered pattern, and a crenellated roof. The door was sheet metal, secured with rivets and heavily padlocked, but I could see through a grimy window to a mechanism studded with dials, and a computer with a dusty screen. A laminated sheet of paper stained with damp had been taped to the door. It said NO ENTRY.

‘It’s supposed to regulate the flow of water from the dam,’ he told me. ‘They come once or twice a year, maybe more. I never see them.’ Then his arm through mine tensed suddenly. He lowered his voice to a whisper, although there was no-one near who might have heard. ‘I tried to call them. I did. There’s a number on the door. Yesterday I called and the day before, and twice this morning before anyone was up, but they won’t listen. They said they’d send someone this month, maybe next, but it might be too late by then – the summer’s ending and there’ll be rain for days.’ We’d reached the place where the parched lawn gave way to gravel and rough grass, and banks of bramble with berries dying unripe between the leaves. The brambles had put out low branches that crept across the ground and caught our ankles as we passed.

We came to the cannonball Eve told me had been brought down from the attic – it must have been found on a tideline somewhere, and was crusted with barnacles and rust. Alex bent to pick it up, holding it out to me cupped between his hands, laughing and hefting it from side to side as though he wanted me to see how strong he was. He carried it a few feet, pretending to toss it in the air like a tennis ball, but I could see how the weight of it raised ridges of muscle and tendon in his arm, and when he dropped it I thought I’d hear it ring like a ship’s bell on the hard earth. I looked at Alex, who’d stopped suddenly when he dropped the cannonball, and was staring fixedly at the embankment. It was only ten or fifteen feet high, on a sharp slope he could’ve dashed up without losing his breath or footing, but he looked for a moment old and defeated. He started plucking feverishly at the skin on his bottom lip, leaving a smear of blood. I walked past him and said loudly, ‘I’ll beat you to the top.’ It was childish of me, but it worked – he laughed and overtook me, and I reached the crest of the embankment a moment after him.

We stood together on the high grass verge, the valve tower throwing its light on the dwindling reservoir. The waterline must once have been almost level with the grass embankment, but had receded in the drought and left a kind of rough beach littered with feathers and algae. All around us the dark pines of the forest stooped towards the water as if they were thirsty. I’d grown so used to parched lawns and dying flower beds that the few spikes of purple foxglove growing near the water’s edge seemed strange and rare, and I looked down at my feet afraid I might trample them into the ground. Alex swept out a hand to take in the reservoir from where we stood to the dam wall in the distance. ‘What do you think?’

It was smaller than I’d thought, and darker. The surface of the water was black and opaque, and the reflection of the moon at our feet looked very small. He beckoned me nearer the edge, asking if I could see the post office sign, and I stepped forward until I was almost on the rubble beach. The pupils of my eyes opened to the dark until I could make out, just below the thick water, the familiar red oval.

He told me how he liked to go there alone, watching for waterfowl. One day he’d seen a pair of geese that looked as though their breasts had been painted red, and had never seen them again. There’d been kingfishers, and once an adder he’d known by the diamonds on its back. He pointed out the pine where he thought he’d heard a cuckoo (‘Just like the clock!’ he told me, although I don’t see why that would be a surprise). Then he turned his back to the dam as though he wanted to put it out of his mind, and in his rush to tell me everything he’d seen – mayflies mating on the water, and a vole lying dead with its tail in its mouth – he began to swallow and stumble over his words until I couldn’t follow what he was saying.

All the things I’d heard that morning came back to me – the letters, the flawed dam and the water ready to rise; St Jude’s and everything Elijah had said; Eve playing to people I pictured leaning on white-painted walls to listen. I saw also the many versions of Alex I’d watched throughout the day: huddled by the front door, or asking for my help as easily as if we’d been friends for years. Looking at him then, as he stood linking his thumbs and flapping his joined hands, imitating a white moth he’d seen the night before, it suddenly seemed obvious that he was suffering in ways I couldn’t describe or understand.

I found myself nodding and saying ‘Yes, yes, I see’, and moving back from the water’s edge. Then, without pausing for breath, he tilted back his head to look at the sky, and said, ‘I think that’s the Pole Star isn’t it? Elijah taught me how to find it once – look, you follow the line of the W, I forget what it’s called – yes, it’s the Pole Star right enough.’ Then he looked back at me, and it was as if locating that single point had steadied him, as though it were not something distant at all, but a bright shaft that pinioned him safely by my side. He frowned and shook his head, knuckling at his eyes like someone who’d just woken from a brief sleep. When I told him that he was right, and that every day it is there too, though we can’t see its modest light when the sun’s nearby, he gave me one of his frank childlike smiles and immediately I thought I must be wrong, and that I’d mistaken nothing but a harmless preoccupation for lunacy – it was as steady and direct a smile as I’d ever seen. Then he said, ‘Anyway, I’d like your help. Can you swim?’

When I told him I’d really rather not in that dark water he laughed and said ‘Fair enough’, and told me he only did it now he knew the water so well he could have swum there blindfold. He stooped to unlace his trainers, and I asked him why it was he needed to go out there at all. I tried to sound as if I didn’t care, and he didn’t look up but said casually, as if I probably knew already, ‘Oh, I like to check at midnight, you see. No sense checking in the morning then leaving it all day – anything could happen at night, don’t you think?’

Then he took off his socks, pushed them into the toes of his trainers, and began to stoop and stretch like an athlete before a race. Between deep breaths he told me why he wanted to swim out into the black water.

He’d sat one day on the embankment wall reading a letter when he saw a bird fly up from near the centre of the dam. From its forked tail he’d thought it was a swift, but when later that night he’d looked it up he knew from its pale breast it must have been a house martin. For a few days he watched for it, and saw the same bird go to and from the dam early in the morning, and again at sunset. He could never make out where it had been going, but often it had a scrap of something in its beak – a piece of bark or blade of dying grass, and once a white fragment torn from a pillow or cushion – and he knew that somewhere it must have made itself a home in a cleft in the reservoir wall.

‘Everyone knows, don’t they, how house martins make their nests in houses or barns – anywhere they find a place,’ he said. ‘But it was a long time before I knew what it meant, although now it seems so obvious – yes, yes: you thought of it straight away, didn’t you, I can tell! Somewhere there must be a hole or crack, just big enough for the bird to be making its nest, growing wider and longer every day while we all sit down there in the garden. But even then I didn’t see it. I was slow, always have been, but now I understand, now I know what’s coming. They say a storm’s on its way, and the water will rise and – oh,’ he stopped and put his hand on my shoulder and said, smiling, ‘I don’t need to tell you, do I, it’s so obvious – it’ll go into the crack and force it open, and then…’ He waved savagely towards the reservoir then swept his arm down towards the house, and I imagined that after it he brought a hundred thousand gallons of dirty water. ‘Hester, Elijah, Walker, Evie, Clare,’ he said, as if he were seeing them all going under.

With every name he pressed my shoulder until it hurt, then suddenly he let go and took off his T-shirt. I remember turning away out of decency and confusion, then remembering that he also was a man and turning back. He was sunburned on his neck and forearms, and elsewhere his skin was pale as Eve’s – it looked in the dark as though he were dressed in white. When he turned away from me I saw, on his upper arm where a muscle dipped as he moved, a patch of darker skin the size of my palm, as though he were always accompanied by a small shadow. Then he dropped the shirt and looked out over the water. ‘It’s all right, I won’t be long,’ he said kindly, and I realised I must have looked apprehensive, and tried to pin up a smile. He said, ‘It takes me sixteen minutes – I know because I timed it. Four to swim there and four back, and a little while to see what’s happening.’

He dropped the rest of his clothes in the dust, and I was so anxious to help, and so unsure what I should do, that I picked them up and began to fold them over my arm. His T-shirt had picked up burrs from the weeds growing thickly on the bank, and I tugged them free from the folds of cloth and tossed them into the water. He said, ‘I haven’t found it yet – the place where the dam’s breaking. But as the water-level gets lower and lower, I stand more chance of finding it, you see, and then’ – he nodded towards the valve tower – ‘then they’ll have to come, won’t they?’