Meat by Ian Watson

Author:Ian Watson [Watson, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780575114685
Publisher: Gateway / Orion
Published: 2011-09-28T22:00:00+00:00

Something’s wrong, Deidre had thought as soon as she woke to the wind and rain against her window. ‘Awful wrong,’ she said aloud to nobody. An image was fixed in her mind of the Cobbetts’ home being submerged in a black flood. The road had become a raging river, the green a turbulent lake. Water swirled high up the walls of the Bell, up the church. It had almost drowned the houses on the green. Tim and Josh Cobbett were clinging to the steep roof of Stonecot, squealing for help, their feet jammed precariously in the gutter. How had they got up to the roof? But they had. Anything to escape from the water that even now was pouring through the upper windows of their home, sending tongues leaping high to lick at their ankles like waves of cold wet flames.

Switching her lamp on, Deidre slid out of bed.

‘You got to go and help, girl,’ she told herself. ‘No, that’s looney. What’s the time? Christ, they’ll think I’m round the twist. Just listen to that lot outside!’ She was already pulling on jeans and sweater. God, they’d be ruined. This sweater doesn’t need that sort of wash.

Wake someone up after midnight all because of a dream? Forget shoes; wellies are downstairs.

What about Mark and Pete? Rush them down to their gramps, bash on that door? No time, Deidre dear.

If only I had a shitting phone I could ring Stonecot. All about nothing. It isn’t nothing. It’s something. Something awful. Deidre had never known as vivid a dream, or remembered one as clearly.

Okay, get downstairs. Quick but quiet, and don’t fall in the dark. Get those wellies on; get out there.

The wind, sucking fiercely, tried to hold the door shut but she hauled it open, remembered to leave if off the latch. Before she got to the gate she was soaked. May as well carry on in that case, right, Deidre? Can’t get any deeper than soaked to the skin.

Oh yes, but you could. The village might have been an aquarium into which someone had dipped a cake-mixer on full power. As Deidre fought her way past Royal Corner, past the chapel, she suddenly knew that the whole of Wood-burn was indeed under wild water as if a dam had burst. She was wading along the bed of a river with yards of suffocating water above her head. That wasn’t so, of course. If she lost confidence and purpose it would become true. The rain would become solid, would fill her nose, her mouth, her lungs. The next morning she’d be found drowned on the path, water leaking out of her bloated corpse.

Go home.

No. She forced herself past Brightwell Farm. Was she swimming or walking? Past the old school house, past the one-time alms houses. Abruptly rain and wind quit resisting her progress. They subsided, slackened, let her through. Let Deidre join in the fun! Why not? She saw lights in Greenview House, she heard the thin screams from black Stonecot.

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