Waiting for the Flood by Hall Alexis

Author:Hall, Alexis [Hall, Alexis]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2015-01-28T08:00:00+00:00

Is mainly full of sofa.

An L-shaped pile of lavish squishiness that takes up most of two walls, indulgently big for two, far too big for one.

He remembers their housewarming: friends piled on there, laughing and talking. And the occasional evening when Marius was home, hands warm on his ankles, the evening drawing in around them.

That night was rain-struck, uncountable heartbeats thudding all around me. And I flooded the next morning. I came downstairs, and there was water creeping under my door, soaking into the carpet and lapping at the skirting boards, bringing with it the clinging stench of wet and dirt.

My door was swollen and sticky. It made a sound like a sob as I pulled it open. Coat over my pyjamas and Adam’s wellies on my feet, I stepped over my hunched and sodden sandbags, and into the drowned street.

It took Mrs. P. a little longer than usual to come to the door, but she was in rubber boots too, eating Crunchy Nut cornflakes direct from the packet, and seemed to be in good spirits. In all honesty, she was probably better off than I was. I had talked to Marius about flood prevention measures, but he had always seemed distracted. I don’t think either of us, at the time, had realised what it meant, but I probably should have known something was deeply wrong when the man I loved and lived with was reluctant to discuss the protection of our recently purchased home. But Mrs. P. had stone floors and a sump with a submersible electric pump in the kitchen. She’d wanted the house, and Mr. P. had said, “Well, if this is the one, we’ll make it work.” So the floods had come and gone, and they’d moved the furniture, and mopped the floors, and stayed.

Forever had been the plan.

“The thing is,” Mrs. P. told me once, “you never really believe you’re going to die. Even when you’re as old as I am. I don’t believe in God and heaven and all that malarkey—it’s the sort of thing that gets lost when you’ve lived through a war—so I don’t think I’ll ever be with him again, but it’ll be nice, in a way, when it’s all over, not to miss him anymore.”

I had missed Marius at first. But what were ten years to fifty? The violence of loss had become an ache which had faded into something else entirely: simply an awareness of absence, not even necessarily of a person, but of a life I thought I’d had.

“Is everything all right?” I asked, hovering uselessly on Mrs. P.’s doorstep. “Do you need anything?”

She helped herself to another handful of cereal. “Get along with you, Edwin. Everything’s fine. I don’t need you fussing over me.”

“I’m not fussing. I’m after your cornflakes.”

She held out the packet. “How’s your place doing?”

“Not . . . not as well as I’d like. I f-feel the water should be on the outside.”

“You need to get those carpets up.”

“I know.” I just hadn’t quite managed to .

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