PART 1
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The End of the Day
15 December
AND IT CAME TO PASS
He looks like a prophet, arm extended in exhortation as he stands beside the war memorial. Emma comes to a halt across the road, umbrella clutched in one hand, the other supporting a stack of books wrapped in brown paper and string. Should she—? If she—? The books tilt and she supports the tower with the umbrella pole. He is speaking but she can’t hear him over the sound of the traffic and the Salvation Army band playing carols on the corner of Neville Street.
A double-decker stops at the lights, obscuring Emma’s view. While the bus waits, she salvages the stub of her previous thought, which was to do with the weather and the music. Snow had fallen, snow on snow – the words of the carol are incongruous. The rain falls and falls. Pouring down roofs and hurrying along gutters. Skimming windows and diving off sills. Collecting in divots and rolling away in search of its level. At first it was inconvenient. Then irritating. Now it’s intimidating: a reminder of water’s powers. Of its ability to loosen soil and cut stone, to slip into wall cavities and under the lips of doors. Even when the clouds are wrung out, the air holds wet memories and damp steals into houses, hitching rides on clothes and shoes, and in the segments of folded umbrellas.
It has been years since it snowed. Emma remembers testing a drift beside the back door with a 30-cm ruler, barely discovering the ground before its whole length disappeared. Those were the days. Those days – she thinks of Dylan and James’s reception class nativity when she hears that. And it came to pass in those days … So began Dylan’s part when he was Narrator One, years ago, perhaps even during the year of the snow. Emma doesn’t remember what came next, but the way he said those days seemed very knowing. Afterwards, they would say it when something went wrong: And it came to pass in those days that Dylan forgot his lunchbox; that Dylan had to stay in at break time; that Dylan’s teacher sent another note home. And, as Emma waits for the stationary traffic to shift on this wet Saturday morning in December, she thinks: And it came to pass in those days, that Emma went forth to town for some Christmas presents and, while walking past the war memorial, beheld a man pointing to heaven.
The bus coughs; then it pulls away, and she can see him again. Yes, a prophet, she thinks. All he needs is a staff. And a robe. A robe of righteousness – has she made that up? She doesn’t think so; it’s got a decidedly Biblical ring. A sandwich board stands beside him, covered in a series of exclamations: ‘RECORD RAINFALL EVERY WINTER FOR YEARS TO COME! BRITISH CITIES MOST THREATENED IN EUROPE FOR FLOODING! SEA LEVELS TO RISE BY 1.2 METRES! CLIMATE CHANGE THREATENS FUTURE OF GOLF!’ Too much information, Emma decides. And the exclamation marks are misjudged.
He gestures right, the thrust of his hand pointing past the arcades and ice-cream shops, beyond the carousel and Silcock’s Funland, over the hump of the Marine Way Bridge and on to the sea. She suspects he is talking about the tide. Last year, the sea occasionally burst over the wall and on to the road, as if it was playing peek-a-boo. Perhaps he is envisioning a stage beyond games, when the sea lifts its skirts, steps over the wall and tramps along Marine Drive; when empty shells line the road like ears, listening for the next incursion, and the next.
Meanwhile, in parks and play areas, puddles collecting in the grassy landing spots under climbing frames and swings are spilling into ponds. The fields beside parks and the rugby and football pitches at the schools are newly formed lakes – Emma has seen ducks swimming on them. There is water everywhere and temperatures are mild, meaning the mosquito eggs that lie waiting in the moist, frequently flooded soil will survive the winter and wake when covered by spring and summer rains.
Emma watches as people pass him. She has no idea whether he usually stands in front of the memorial on a Saturday morning or if this is a one-off. She tries not to use her car where possible, which means she rarely shops in town. Someone stops to take his picture. He doesn’t appear to mind, but he must. How could he not? The photograph will probably end up online where he will be misunderstood. His clothes are wrong: the safety boots, combat-style trousers and checked shirt might look perfectly reasonable if he was, say, digging a trench or mowing a lawn. But here, in town, his clothes seem aggressively outdoorsy – he has the look of a professional protestor, more firebrand than friend. And where is his coat?
There is still so much to do. The food and the final presents. The wrapping. The decorations. And she needs to decide about a tree. Last year’s repotted spruce sits on the patio in a horrible stasis, her ministrations – she has fed it vodka, lemonade and dissolved aspirin – have so far failed to either cure or kill it, and she won’t buy a plastic tree or one that has been grown as part of a monocrop and sprayed with glyphosate. The spruce can have another week, she decides, not willing to write it off quite yet.
The traffic moves again, and Emma waits a while longer, until she is convinced she has seen the worst of it. He is not frightening or accosting anyone. People are ignoring him with the equanimity they afford chuggers, Mormons and Big Issue vendors. Though it is hard to tell from this distance, she suspects he is shivering. Or maybe he is feverish with purpose, vitalised by an opportunity to alleviate some of his own fear by passing it on to other people. But that is just speculation and can be put to one side in favour of what she knows: he is wet and cold; he is beset and troubled. His name is Chris, and he is her husband.
A FLOOD OF WATERS UPON THE EARTH
The rain falls like stair rods, long bolts stabbing the van. Chris glances down at a pair of cardboard carriers in the passenger footwell before returning his attention to the road, which appears in frames as the wipers whip back and forth and the windscreen is speared then cleared, speared then cleared.
Every morning when he wakes, Chris listens for the rain. The drunk ‘let me in’ kind that batters the skylight like fists. The blasting Blitzkrieg kind. The splatting and pattering kinds. The trickling and plopping kinds. Always rain.
Every morning while James is out delivering newspapers, and Emma is busy rousing Dylan, Chris types a message in the local Buy, Sell & Swap Facebook group: ‘CHRIS ABRAM, AVAILABLE FOR GARDEN DESIGN, MAINTENANCE AND ODD JOBS – TODAY!’ The take-up has been poor. He usually gets a ‘like’ or two before his words are pushed down the page by someone selling a bin bag of baby clothes, a saggy second-hand sofa or an antique fax machine.
At this time of year, he should be trimming manicured lawns, pruning hard fruit trees, planting bulbs and clearing leaves. There are sheds to treat, blown-out fence panels to replace and damaged trees to tend. Instead, he unblocks gutters, pressure washes driveways, bails excess water from ponds, and waits. For the phone to ring. For the rain to stop. For the first frost. He used to love winter. Crisp ground and sparkling fields; the whole world sharp and shiny.
When jobs don’t come in during the week, the boys go to school, Emma goes to work, and if Chris has nowhere to be, he can linger in the kitchen, reading up on rain gardens and tinkering with accounts that have never been so up to date. Saturdays are different – worse, though today is less so, he decides, glancing at the cardboard carriers in the passenger footwell as he joins the Formby bypass. But Saturdays, in general, are difficult. A few weeks ago, he was supposed to be repairing a shed roof, but it was bucketing down, and he’d had to postpone. He put a message on the Buy, Sell & Swap page and, rather than sit at home awaiting a response in full view of his family, Chris drove into town, where oily buses, full to the gills, crawled through puddles, and shoals of pedestrians dived in and out of shops. Irritated, he turned on to the coastal road and headed to the northern end of the beach. He parked and waited. After an hour, he gave up and headed home.