One

CHAPTER ONE

The man had not hugged himself this hard since the storms first began. He crouched beneath the window, whilst hail crackled like static against the sable glass above his head, and the wind shook his bones and the lightening painted memories on the the whites of his eyes. The photographs he held in his hands were curled at the corners and the faces of his family were too faded to make out and he wished he could remember their names and he clung tightly to his nameless, to the memory of his love and to his hate of the men that took his love away.

He awoke at dawn with clingy paper on his skin, shivering next to the fireplace with the dangling fingers of daylight poking through the glass. The man shielded his eyes. He held the crumpled photographs tightly against his breast.

Cold water sloshed up around his body and the numbness brought on by hypothermia stirred a warmth deep inside his Self. Some kind of joy was rising from a place within, an innate emotion tacked onto the survival experience and the recognition that he was still alive. Then the glow began to harden and became heavier and felt more like a stone inside his gut, the realisation that he was still alive became a bitter medicine, which dissolved the last fleck of hope into sickness, anchored, permanently hanging down from his slow beating heart. Every new day he managed to stay alive was so bittersweet.

He was instantly aware of all of his senses. The man raised himself up onto his elbows. They were red and itchy in the water.

The room seemed to look different every time he opened his eyes. Water dripped rhythmically through a raggedy hole in the ceiling and he watched his paper float like dead birds across the front room and out through a crack in the mortar and into the new world.

He pushed his way to his feet and made his way down the stairs to the lower bedrooms to check the damage. The water was deep when he reached the bottom. The walls were bare by now, all the framed family pictures saved from any damage by the floods, allowing the rotten wallpaper to stain and peel. The water had risen by a foot, but from experience he knew it would subside through fissures in the cheap wooden skirting and leave an inch or so to sit permanently over the carpets. There was nothing he could do now.

This was still his home.

The man made his way back to the upper floor and into the kitchen. Nothing had changed. The floor was still all patched with mould and the cabinets were still rotting quietly away. His rope ladder was still hanging down from the hole in the ceiling, a little twisted, and the oven and sinks were still desert red and rusted.

The man looked back at the fireplace. He had been asleep the first time the waves shook the house. He could remember the darkness. The girls were screaming. It took a moment or two for him to realise he was awake. He had had these dreams before. We all had them. The news reports warned us that it could happen and we did not believe them. We could not. We had too much to lose. Even as the truth began emerge in the North, before our very eyes and reflected in the lenses of the television cameras, we lived in our smug joke and mocked those who were preparing for the worst. Then the worst happened.