FLOOD

FLOOD

 

When the boat appeared around the bend in the river, the ducks lifted noisily from the water and scattered. In the failing light, Callan saw them not as individual birds, but as a sudden rising. His heart lurched and the river seemed to hold its breath.

Idiot, he thought, you are tired and worn thin. There is nothing there. There never was.

He sat low, one hand upon the tiller. The engine made a thin, putt putt sound that seemed too small for the country it was crossing.

He eased the throttle forward and felt the answering pull of the water.

The river came slowly out into the flooded fields, losing its definition by degrees. The deluge stretched wide and silver. A breathing surface that made the land feel opened out.

The vague outlines of the roads ran away beneath the brown water. Ghost lines of field and hedge. The boundaries no longer held any meaning. A country beneath a country.

Follow the old map, he thought, don’t be tempted off.

He passed the first house close enough to touch.

Its roof had gone in. The upper floor had folded into the lower. Things floated among the beams: a chair, a cupboard door, a plastic bucket. Something white moved there, then vanished beneath the surface.

He looked away.

A little further, the body of a cow had caught upon the exposed branches of a Willow. Its legs were stiff and pale above the water and the hide had taken on the bleached colour of wet paper. It lay fat and swollen in the overflow.

He felt sorry for it. It looked as though it had once been a fine animal.

But the legs. They pointed at the sky with such useless insistence that a laugh escaped him. A short sound, which seemed wrong as soon as it had left him.

He drew the boat to a halt.

The cow held a grave, almost astonished expression. Its mouth lay slightly ajar. One ear flat against the water.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

There was something feeding on the exposed hide. Pale and moving.

At first, he thought maggots.

Then he saw they were not feeding, but growing.

A white mat had formed across the flesh, a carpet of fronds that reminded him of sea anemone. Each tentacle was no longer than his finger. Translucent as peeled onion, but bright pink at the tips.

The cow's skin shivered.

He held his hand over the creature’s flank. The tentacles turned. Slowly. That was the worst of it. Each one bending, questing for him in the air. A tremor ran through them. There was no sight in it. No thought. Only a blind insistence.

It did something to the strength in his legs.

He drew his hand back and watched them settle. Laughed again, but this time there was no humour in it. Only a disgust.

He gunned the boat’s throttle and drifted away.

Behind him, the flooded country was without distance.

 

Callan never knew beforehand who he would be meeting.

Sometimes the message only gave a place and a time.

A wharf beyond the old warehouses. The river road after midnight. The end of a track where the fields came down to the water.

He would slow the boat and see them waiting. Three or four together, sometimes one alone. All they had carried in small bundles, held close against them.

He did not know who they were, only that they came in small groups because small groups drew less attention.

Anything else was beyond his pay-grade.

They were young men mostly. With the look of people who had been awake too long. Some watched him closely. Others would not meet his gaze at him at all, having learned perhaps, that looking could easily be taken for asking.

They talked to one another, but never to him. Languages would rise and fall around the engine noise.

Sometimes there was laughter. Sometimes quiet singing. He found that strange. The fact that it could still happen.

He could only guess at what they talked about. Sometimes they gave away more than they knew. A twitch at the mouth. A hand lifted and held. A look that lingered a moment too long. From these he could sometimes work out what was said.

Others remained silent.

He preferred the silent ones. There was less to misunderstand.

At the landing places, they would become hurried. They would gather their bags, check their phones, look towards the road.

Then they would go.

Sometimes they thanked him. Oftentimes they did not.

He would sit with the engine ticking after they had gone and study what they had left behind.

An empty bottle. A worn glove. A crucifix.

Once, a child's shoe.

It all went over the side.

 

The rise, when it came, rose only a little above the surrounding land, but from the water it spread out, one low swell behind another.

A van was waiting there. Once white, now chipped and weathered, the paint gone to the colour of old bone.

He could hear the engine running, a low vibration carried over the flooded fields. The windows were dark.

It started to rain, fine enough to make a skin on the water. It had seemed to creep up on him. It was a welcome thing, this sky. The darkness of it.

The van doors opened and three men got out. They wore an assortment of camouflaged jackets and waterproofed ponchos. Young men, though you had to look twice to see it. Something had come to rest in them too soon.

One carried a rifle slung at the shoulder. From his belt hung a pair of rabbits, gutted and drawn. The heads wrapped in plastic bags.

Callan noticed the wedding ring he wore.

The rifleman looked at the boat.

‘Just you?’

‘Just me.’

The rifleman seemed to accept this.

‘Pull up then. Don’t keep us waiting.’

Callan gunned the boat up to the rise and beached it gently on the dead grass. The keel made a perfectly smooth runnel in the mud.

The rifleman wandered back to the van.

‘You’ll want to see him. Special one, this.’

He took hold of the handle and slid the side door open.

Callan peered inside. For a moment there was only the smell of wet clothes and diesel.

The rifleman stepped aside.

‘Hope you know what you’re doing,’ he muttered.

The child was sitting in a nest of folded blankets behind the rear seats. Not much more than ten years old. He stirred under Callan’s gaze and came slowly forward, hunched like a penitent.

He was smaller than Callan had imagined. He wore a green jumper beneath a coat far too large for him. One of his shoes was untied. He stood blinking in the open door and looked at the water.

‘Come on,’ Callan said.

The child took his hand and climbed down.

They walked together back to the boat. If the rifleman whispered something under his breath as they went, Callan didn’t catch it.

He lifted the boy over the side of the boat.

The boy hesitated.

‘It’s all right.’

Behind, the van's engine revved. The gear box made a grinding sound. Then it pulled away along the track, its sound thinning over the water.

The boy sat where he was put, holding a little rucksack against his chest without speaking.

Callan pushed off from the bank with his leg and in one swift motion leaned heavily on the engine cord. The engine sputtered into life.

 

For a while there was only the small knock of water against the hull, and the dark widening between them and the shore.

The child sat very still.

Ahead, the flooded fields unfolded and when Callan looked back, the rise seemed further away than he would have expected.

They rode in silence.

After an hour the rain had soaked through the boy’s coat and darkened his hair. He sat without shivering, his hands folded between his knees.

‘You must be cold.’ Callan said.

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry.’

The boy looked at him.

‘Why?’

‘You’re soaked through. I’d give you a tarp if I had one. There’ll be dry clothes for you where we’re going. For now you’ll just have to bare it.’

They went on.

‘Hungry?’ Callan said.

The boy nodded.

He took a packet of biscuits from the bow locker and threw them over. The boy caught them and tore opened them. Began eating them one after the other without pause.

Callan smiled. He had the vague feeling of being watched, though the boy was not looking at him.

He turned the boat through a gap between two drowned hedges. Something knocked against the hull but they kept moving.

‘How old are you?’

‘Ten.’

‘Young to be travelling on your own.’

The boy considered this, ‘Yes.’

Callan looked at the water. There was no reason to doubt the boy, except that he seemed both younger and older than ten. His face was small and composed. There was a faint line behind his right ear, a pale scar, almost hidden by his hair.

‘Where’s your mother?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Your father?’

The boy shook his head.

‘You know where you’re from?’

‘A room’

‘A room?’

‘Yes.’

Callan waited for more, but nothing came.

The boat moved into a wider stretch of water. A dead branch knocked caught against the bow and trailed alongside them a while before slipping away.

‘You been on a boat before?’ Callan asked.

‘No.’

‘You’re not scared?’

The boy looked at him, ‘Are you?’

Callan laughed without much humour. The boy’s demeanour was starting to concern him. He wished he would ask a proper question.

‘Done this a hundred times.’

The boy did not smile.

Callan adjusted the throttle. The engine settled into a low, uneven note.

In truth, he had done this more than a hundred times. The money was reason enough. He knew the hidden channels, the raised banks, the places where the water looked shallow but could swallow a man to the chest.

For a while there was only the sound of the engine and the wind. Short waves slapped beneath the hull, lifting it unevenly.

The boy said. ’You have family.’

Callan looked at him strangely. It hadn’t been a question.

Then the boy said, very quietly: ‘You had a brother.’

The boy was watching the water as though he had said nothing unusual.

Callan felt his fingers tighten on the tiller.

‘What did you say?’

‘You were there when he died.’

Callan cut the engine.

The boat drifted towards the drowned hedge. He could hear the water ticking against the hull. Somewhere beyond the fields, a bird called once and fell silent.

The boy lowered his eyes.

Callan stared at him. Really stared. The ordinary face. The damp hair. The fine, pale line behind the ear.

‘You’ve got me mixed up with someone.’

He wanted to ask how the boy knew. He wanted to ask who had sent him.

The boy sat quietly in the bow, his hands folded upon his thighs.

‘It was so loud,’ he said.

Callan felt his body stiffen.

‘The door was unlocked. There was rain on the roof.’

The boat lurched crookedly.

’You had mud on your shoes.’

’Stop talking now.’ Callan stared at him.

‘He was seventeen.’

‘Shut up!’

‘You found a gun. Beneath the bed.’

 

The memories were hard as quartz. They possessed only the ability to wake him in the small hours.

For years he had recalled nothing in the order in which it had happened. Only the wretched weight of it.

The old caravan, hidden in bushes. Owned by a thin man who walked the lanes collecting scrap in a burlap sack.

His brother had got the door open. Hadn’t realised that it had been unlocked all along. He had laughed at that. He had always laughed when nervous.

Callan had found the shotgun beneath the bunk, wrapped in a grey blanket.

He remembered his brother telling him to put it back.

He had been convinced it wasn’t loaded. Young enough then to mistake fear for something he could overcome by making a joke of it.

He had pointed it at his brother. 

In jest. Only ever in jest.

The stupidity of it. Even now it made a weakness in him.

The noise, enormous in the little room. An opening out. A thin ringing in his head, as though a wire had been drawn tight.

For years he had carried the image of his brother falling, even as he understood that he did not actually remember seeing him fall. 

He remembered instead his hands pressed against his brother’s chest, not knowing where to put them, not knowing what he was trying to hold.

The rest was distance and running. A hand on the shoulder. Someone saying his name as if calling him back from far away. 

A small easing inside himself when he understood that his brother would not get up and shout at him, would not tell anyone what a fool he had been.

 

Callan couldn’t speak. That was the part carried where the old dark gathered. 

He fixed his mind on the engine’s vibration through the soles of his feet.

He remembered the kick of the shotgun against his ribs. Stopped himself.

The boy shifted.

‘Don’t.’ Callan said. His mouth had gone dry.

He thought about throwing the boy overboard, but the thought had scarcely formed before the boy drew his feet beneath him and gripped the gunwale.

Callan felt the blood drain from his face.

The water moved beneath them, black and depthless. The current turned the boat and Callan was no longer certain of which direction it faced.

The rain fell around them.

Neither one of them moved.

The boy reached for Callan’s hand.

Callan hesitated. Took hold of it. Found a surprising warmth there. A faint tremor. As though a small engine was running somewhere at a distance. He thought of a bird fallen from a nest, alive in his palm. The fragility of it. The terrible smallness. The trust of something that had no choice but to trust.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ he swallowed. There was something lodged deep in his throat that would not go down.

For a while they sat in silence. The boy regarding him with detachment.

The cold facts were loose upon the Earth. He felt himself pressed against them, held there.

‘I should have known,’ he whispered, ‘I should have …’

There was no finish. Every ending led directly back to the horror.

Finally, with great weariness, Callan reached over and pulled the starter cord.

The engine turned once, faltered, then caught.