Free After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry Page A

weather breaks.
    Behind us Walker paced up and down smoking so heavily it looked as though autumn had come and he was walking through morning mist. Elijah came to the window once or twice and looked down towards the yellow light by the reservoir as if he wanted to go down, but was terrified of what he’d find. I wonder what frightens him? Watching him there at the window I thought it must be something he sees that passes the rest of us by.
    The chair I’d carried out was too old and worn in the seat to be comfortable, but all the same I dozed off twice, my chin on my chest and the back of my neck stretched as if it would break. Behind me Eve went on playing, breaking off sometimes to swear quietly but viciously, and play a dozen times the phrase she’d mistaken, until the memory of it must have lodged in all the bones and tendons of her hands. The same phrases over and over seemed to give me a kind of clarity – I remembered the poem I’d seen that morning as clearly as if I had memorised it yesterday, or years ago perhaps when I was young, and my mind held on to things. I recited the lines to myself making them fit with the phrases she played… Wulf is on one island, I on another, Wulf is on one island, I on another… Then Alex came and woke me with a thump between my shoulders so hard it nearly threw me out of my chair.
    He said, ‘Sorry to keep you, John – shall we go?’ and crooked out his arm towards me. I took it, and it wasn’t until we’d gone a little further on I realised no-one had walked with me like that since I’d last seen my brother. He’s shorter than Christopher, and his arm was slender but strong. He said, ‘It’s good of you, you know. I don’t like asking the others. Clare’s afraid of the water at night – she thinks drowned men will come up and get her by the ankles. Have you been down and seen it yet?’
    I said I hadn’t, and he squeezed my arm.
    ‘It’s not much of a reservoir, really. We get our water from there, and so do the villages between here and the coast road, but no more than that. You’ve seen the valve tower?’
    ‘Is that what it is? I can see the light from my window. It doesn’t look like it belongs here.’
    ‘I hate the light. It keeps me awake and turns my skin yellow like a man that’s been poisoned… I’ve told Hester I can go down and take out the bulb, but she says she likes it, like a midnight sun – as if we haven’t had enough sun by now!’
    We walked slowly down towards the light, and as we left the house behind the hard earth became springy and pliable underfoot. As we drew nearer the rough land beyond the garden I could make out white patches on the earth, like smears of drying salt water. While we walked he told me more about the reservoir, quite contentedly, not at all as if he dreaded the water breaching the dam and reaching us where we stood. I wondered if Eve had been teasing me that morning as we sat under the dying elm, and felt suddenly very relieved. The whole business of the letters had been so childish and inane that I was glad I didn’t have to believe it after all. Alex went on talking, and I remember thinking how like his sister’s his voice was, cheerful and childlike and not much bothered whether or not I was listening, or had much to say in reply.
    He told me the reservoir was made before the war by flooding a hamlet that had once been within view of the house. The dam had stopped up a river so narrow no-one had really believed it would rise to cover the post office and chapel, and the dozen cottages clinging to the single road. There were no protests, he told me – no-one had much cared about the chapel, which had been used by a sect called the Particular People, famous for praying out of doors. Elderly couples in the cottages were only too glad to move to new apartments with neat kitchens and a warden who’d come if they had a fall on the doorstep. Only the postmistress had taken it badly, hoarding letters in their