Floodplains, their new buzzword. Typical estate agents, re-drawing all the maps to suit themselves. Capitalising on a bit of extra rain. Estates. His face tingled as he remembered the day he first set eyes on his cottage. That gnawing, spreading pain of conviction. A riverside residence, set tantalisingly close to the edge of an English river: tranquil, domesticated, and above all, civilised. A short drive from the hypermarket too. Perched, as they say, at the cusp of work and leisure. His cottage, yes. A far cry. It satisfied his deepest pastoral yearning. Best of all was the horse chestnut in summer, trickling shade and scattering his anxieties like confetti. And now he was thinking of selling it to buy a larger one, there was all this alarmist rubbish about floodplains. Reactionary and (more to the point) damaging to the potential profit. But he wasn’t ready to sell this year, so (thank God) waiting wasn’t yet an issue. By then the fad might have passed. It reminded him of the Doberman pinscher episode. Mauled children hitting the headlines daily, as though dogs were busy savaging the entire nation. Once the boredom factor set in and the sky didn’t fall down, they’d change the record and report on something half-decent for a change. Less of Al Gore with his powerpoint. It’d all fade away and everyone would start on the next public scare. Some plague or God knows what else. Perhaps there was never any need to worry for long, about anything.
He roused himself. Must have been sitting on the front drive, staring into the dark. He shifted his eyes. They ached. The windscreen was blurred and almost rippling. He moved delicately about the car, reaching for his keys, then reaching out for the door handle in a way that reminded him of feeling for the zip of a tent. He paused, growing aware of an ominous drumming on the metal roof. Time to order some more holiday brochures. He improvised a hat from The Times and stepped out. A cold blast swept up his ankles as he plunged into the chilling seas of his dream the night before.
Later, as his damp clothes exhumed clouds of contentment, it occurred to him for the first time since the days of gas fires on the council estates that radiators were the eighth wonder of the Northern Hemisphere. He watched his favourite French cookery programme then flicked through last year’s brochure, caressing its sleek pages, fantasising about tropical breezes and clean, white Caribbean sand spilling between his toes…
He awoke, blinking in a panic as though ambushed by a gang of paparazzi. The TV screen was a battlefield of dots, millions of them, jostling for position. He stared. Soon the screen cleared like a mist, and a news helicopter came into view, fretting above a cluster of floating houses, one red, one pink and one swimming-pool blue, both crumpled like his wet newspaper. And not so much floating as sunken, like wooden arks weighted down with bricks by mistake. New Orleans from the eye of a helicopter, just filming, not rescuing. He stirred from the recesses of the sofa and carried the remains of his salmon en croute into the kitchen, squashing the plastic tray into the last available space in the pedal bin. It stuck out stubbornly under the lid. Overhead he could make out the muffled sound of helicopter blades, slicing bluntly through the weeping sky. He switched off the lights and went upstairs to bed. Outside, the waters spread like an invisible stain across the landscape.
That night he snorkelled through a haze of rippling seaweed, his hair waving in the water. Tiny bubbles danced from his mouth and twisted upwards as he dived deeper into the watery aurora borealis. Yet the deeper he dived, the more stunning the underwater scene, the more he sensed the presence of another diver bearing a floodlight to threaten the amniotic softness of the underwater scene. And though the colours were dazzling, an unfamiliar voice drifted in and out of his consciousness like fish through coral. Sometimes clear, sometimes receding like a radio off-station. Bringing back words he barely recalled having heard. Some foreign government minister: you’re responsible for this devastation. Just take these Bangladeshi refugees! The bubbles swelled and loomed, the coral broke free like floating orchids. Then it blackened and crumbled into pieces.
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