After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry

Author:Sarah Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Profile Books

SUNDAY

I

It had always been Walker’s habit to get up early and steal a march on the day. It had annoyed his mother, braced for a teenage son tangled in his sheets at noon; and it annoyed his wife, who wanted to be alone in the mornings when there was a chance of finding a jay on the lawn. But there it was: he found himself alert the moment his eyes opened; smoked before he drank or ate; and was never seen to be weary. Once – early on, before the days took on their pattern – Hester thought she’d beaten him to the kitchen, and had laughing laid out plates with a ringing of china on wood fit to quicken the dead, but he’d appeared a moment later, his grey hair bath-damp, smelling a little of cedar and on his second cigarette.

On the morning of John’s fifth day, which Elijah would once have called the Lord’s Day (and still did, sometimes, when he forgot to mind his language), Walker stood in the glass-house watching the sun come up. The pitched roof with its lapping glass tiles filtered the early light through a rime of lichen and moss, so that it cast a greenish pall upon the floor. Already the air was thick with moisture, and Walker pushed open a window and watched the reflected garden slide across the pane. He stood a while with his face turned to the opening, feeling a slight chill that would be gone within the hour. The sun had reached the high grass verge that bounded the reservoir, and he wondered where Alex had slept that night, if he’d slept at all – once they’d found him lying at the foot of the embankment, as if he’d climbed from the reservoir, and falling exhausted down the incline slept like a child where he lay.

The events of the day before were so vivid still that Walker wouldn’t have been surprised to find the woman at the window with the child in her arms. He hadn’t seen her, or the wound on the boy’s forehead, but overnight conjured up a lesion that opened to the bone, and eyes upturned to show their whites. Was it possible that Alex had hurt the boy? After all he was not well… He stooped to pick up a snail’s shell cleaned of its meat, and tossed it from palm to palm. It was weightless, and when he closed his fist it turned almost to dust. No – he could not believe that, or wouldn’t, at least. He opened his hand and let the fragments fall to the unswept floor.

Before Walker had come, the glasshouse had been locked for a decade or more. He’d had no interest in it at first, with its sour damp smell of neglect, though he and Eve had idly tried the key one night and found the swollen door could not be moved. It was Elijah who’d finally forced his way in, setting his shoulder to the door and leaving a dent in the rotten wood.

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