Tales of Disturbance

The Wall

Through the window the sky closed over with a dreadful finality. The clouds locked together, like the dark shutters of an alien spacecraft. 

Then it started. Drip, drip, drip, and the heavens opened. Water poured aggressively, relentlessly, unceasingly and did not stop.

Where was it coming from? Dread spread in my heart.

 Drip drip drip. 

It fell ominously, secretly. It told things. Predicted the future better than any seer. 

We galvanized into action then - all of us, even Piper the cat seemed to be searching with us. All over the flat ceilings, we searched: me, mother, Henry, trying to find the source. Finally I opened a cupboard and out it poured: water, water,  soaking my thighs and feet and sleeves. 

Then Whooosh! Another noise. Gushing water, too close. The sort that should never be inside a house. 

WOOOOOOOSHHHHHHH! 

A peak into the living room confirmed the worst. We cowered at the door, unable to take it in. Water pouring through the ceiling, down the walls of the living room, puddling in great ponds on the floor. The light fixtures became power showers. The sockets were eyes that couldn't stop weeping, weeping. The water appeared to focus its energy on these dangerous courses, as if to spite us. 

It was brown. It smelt like we were living under a drain. Now a river, cascading down the wall, fast flowing and ignorant, yes ignorant; blindly ignoring the furniture, flowing right over it, all of it; the TV, the bookshelves, plants, pictures, shelves. Filling vases, waterlogging plants and causing the earth to saturate the floor below; pouring into discarded shoes soddening clothes and scarves and winter coats and photographs and school notes. It flooded the fireplace that stood defeated, like a shell of its former self. 

I panicked then, we all did. We stopped and stared. There was too much of it. Too much for buckets or plastic or finding sandbags from goodness knows where, or rescuing things that we wanted to save. There was too much of it for burying things underground in secret waterproofed hidey holes, three of which we had previously prepared. It was all too sudden and drastic for that sort of sensible thing.  

The water was a new government. An ideology that demanded everything.  

Something switched off in my brain - I remember thinking it was my source of hope. 

And something switched on in its place. I remember thinking it was fear.  

Mum's switch galvanized her into action. Her voice and her old red cardigan seemed to be everywhere.

But we backed away from the trouble. 

Away into our shared bedroom. We huddled there, both on the same narrow cot, while mother flew around with black buckets (the ones she'd brought with her from the farm where she grew up in county Meath for she wasted nothing.) We closed the curtains against the water, filling up in the streets, against the women with plastic hoods and inadequate shopping baskets, with their water clogged vegetables and sodden bread and their lives slowly turning to mush. 

The houses around here were inadequate. Built in a hurry to house the unwanted. Once the rains came they would stay and there would be no food but last minute grocery shopping was futile.

Then the electricity shut off. We were  plunged into darkness because of the closed curtains, but it suited the moment; it was like being thrown into a pit so black, it seemed to be dark on the inside of our heads, so we couldn't see to think. 

It was some time before mother came into the bedroom She peeled back the curtain so we could see again. She was dripping wet and held some candles like empty promises, and her hair was damp and hung in grey ratty tails over her face, her sunken grey eyes, her skin white as shock. 

We'll make it cosy. It'll be fun. 

We felt her smile but like her words, it didn't connect. She looked like a Madonna, reflecting on the terrors she'd seen at her station by the side of the cross.  

With a trembling hand, she lit a candle. All the time there was the noise of water dripping; then a kind of gushing out.  

'What are we going to do?' 

She sighed as the match snuffed out. The candle wouldn't take. 

It was probably damp already. The whole box already sodden - our only box. How would we light the fire, the oven? The rains would last for months. News reports said the rains might last forever. 

'What's that love?' her eyes were sad and far away. They were eyes that had seen too much. "We'll survive. That's what we'll do. What else can we do but survive.'

I was cold. I peeled back the duvet and got into bed. Henry pulled his knees up to his chest and snuggled in with me. Heavy like a sack of sand, he burrowed until his head was under, until he was right at the bottom of the bed.