hitting a couple of chords.
‘Actually, I can only remember the chorus, which… Anyway, you can sing along just as soon as you pick it up.’
Lol looked around, eyes glittering between his little brassrimmed glasses, high on the energy. Singing lightly.
Jane stopped, recognising the tune: ‘Sidewalk Surfer’ by Super Furry Animals. Perfect fit.
‘That’s it?’ a guy said.
‘That’s it,’ Lol said.
He did it again. He smiled.
‘Altogether now,
If this had been a summer festival, they’d all have lit matches, held them up. River of light. Jane spotted Eirion rocking back in glee.
‘
His grin fading as she stepped over wires and collapsed next to him at his card-table under the deepset window. She hadn’t called him
‘Listen…’
He couldn’t hear her, with the whole audience going, ‘
Everybody loving it. Everybody loving it so much they wouldn’t notice Mum come in with her hair all soaked and her make-up running. Jane leapt up, but the crowd had closed between them.
62
En’t Good
You could smell him now. Smelled foul. It was almost sexual, Jane thought. Swollen, invasive, obscene, the river engorged.
Bastard hadn’t listened to a word she’d said. Rapists never did.
Jane, in her rain-darkened parka — she lived in the thing now — skipping back in disgust as he licked at her wellies. Eirion steadying her as she backed up against someone’s wall, clutching her mini Maglite torch like a votive candle.
Too late for prayers. You could tell why flood was such a powerful biblical device: fire consumed, flood just degraded everything, turned it into sludge.
God’s verdict on the vanity of the New Cotswolds.
Somebody had driven a car, a Mercedes four by four, halfway down the street and left it in the middle of the road with the engine running and the headlights on full, turning the churning water caramel, finding the roof and blind windows of another car, this one drowned. Parked on what used to be the street.
Jane and Eirion were standing just above the Ox. It had been evacuated; you could see tables piled on top of tables under the sallow bulbs of the public bar, its pool-table covered with heavy plastic, its gaming machines unplugged. The water, knee deep on the floor, looked like bad, gassy beer and smelled worse, and the road outside was full of people, like extras discarded by Hieronymus Bosch. Glistening like slugs as they struggled into waterproofs, joining the trickle down Church Street to the banks of the new lake.
The river was already a quarter way up the walls of the lowest two houses either side of the street, swirling like dark oil here, out of the headlights, and rising, rising, rising; if you tried to reach one of the door-knockers, the water would be to your chest.
‘Oh God,’ Jane said. ‘Poor Miss Huws.’
The last evacuee. You could see bits of her life washed into the street, a wooden stool, the floating lid of a breadbin, a loaf of sliced bread.
‘I can’t,’ she was sobbing. ‘Not in that!’
Gomer’s Matbro, this yellow hydraulic lift. The extended metal platform closing in on an opened upstairs window, its frame banging back against the wall. Someone was standing up in the platform, holding on to the metal guard rail, leaning across to the window.
‘Coming in, Miss Huws.’
James Bull-Davies.
‘Probably the first time a man’s ever been inside that bedroom,’ Jane murmured to Eirion.
It wasn’t funny, though. Edna Huws, a frail moth in her parchment-coloured clothes, shrilling at James in front of a crowd of sympathetic voyeurs.
‘I can’t! Where will I go?’
‘Rooms at the Swan,’ James shouted. ‘Barry’s attending to it now. Just leave the window—’
‘What can I wear? My clothes, my night-things—’
‘Worry about that when we get you out, old girl.’
‘This should not have happened, Mr Davies!’
‘Well, I’m afraid it bloody well has.’
‘Jane.’
Hand on her arm. Jane turned to find Mum at last.
‘God, you’re soaked to the skin.’ Horrifying reversal of usual roles. ‘You’ve got to go back, Mum, and get out of those clothes.’
‘Is Miss Huws OK?’
‘James Bull-Davies is in there, trying to persuade her to come out through the window. They’ve got all the people out of the other houses. And two labradors. Mum, listen—’
‘Good. You can’t believe it, can you? How quickly it happens.’
‘The point is there’s nothing you can do here. Come back to the vic,
‘Where’s Lol?’
‘Putting his gear away. Barry was saying they should lock it in. He’s worried about looters.’
‘In Ledwardine?’
‘Yeah, well… Look, Mum, please? Something I have to tell you.’
James was helping Edna Huws out of the window and into the Matbro, putting a small suitcase in after her. Miss Huws had a long raincoat round her shoulders; she was making kind of chicken noises as the platform came down to ridiculous cheers. All this crazy goodwill that came with communal adversity and Christmas.
‘Mum! Vicarage!’
‘I seem to have lost a heel.’
Mum reached down and pulled something from a shoe, hobbling back up the street against the flow of water coming down from the square.
All the same, the rain was easing off and the sky was actually clearing, disclosing a fragment of moon now, like one edge of a silver ring in a crumpled grey tissue of cloud.
But it was no better on the ground. Reaching the entrance to Old Barn Lane, Jane saw another, smaller crowd assembling halfway down where there was a dip in the road — like a reservoir now. Front gardens were underwater, all the lights were on in all the houses and there were people with plastic buckets and washing-up bowls vainly trying to send it back.
‘Oh Christ!’
