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10

Flotsam and Jetsam

The rain came down so hard it had real weight, beating my head and shoulders into a flinch, pouring heavy over my waterlogged clothes and streaming in flukes from my hood and from my elbows and from the bottom of my coat. Hard, heavy, roaring and angry. It was difficult to see. I brought a hand up to shield my eyes but this created a new shelf and a flow of fresh rivulets were soon throw-twisting themselves off the ends of my fingers and curling their way under my hood to run down my cheeks and chin. I struggled to blink away as much water I could.

Then I saw what was out there, and it staggered me.

God, my lips said. The word was stillborn and tiny and bundled away in a sweep of the gale.

I’d been hoping the gateway might belong to an old house, the Willows Hotel according to my map, but it didn’t. I’d left the road too early or too late; this was the entrance to a park, not a driveway. Everything beyond the gateposts was furious: a river gone gigantic and deformed and crazy, banks burst and out on a greedy, rolling brown rampage. The size and force of it overloaded me, made me sick and dizzy. A too muchness.

My rain-blinking eyes struggled back from the flow and down to my feet. The water around my boots was peaty-brown and alive too, I realised. No boundaries. The river was here and reaching and grabbing and actually pulling at my feet and calves with a beautiful, mindless ache. A willpower in pressure. The river wanting to drag me off and smash me up and remake me as part of its pointless and stupidly powerful and passionate drive to change and obliteration.