FLOODED.

Mavis got out of bed still feeling groggy. They’d told her she could have a short holiday between treatments and that was what she intended to do. Luckily her sister Angela who owned the best hotel on the sea front had a few vacancies. She wanted to stay as an anonymous guest instead of with Angela in her private rooms. Mavis wanted no special privileges and certainly no fuss. She wanted to be an observer, to watch the other guests and see how they reacted when away from their normal environments. Most of all she didn’t want people keeping on about her cancer – Was she feeling okay, did she need more rest or more of this that or the other thing? The only thing she did allow was for Bob to come and fetch her. She felt too tired to battle with the public transport system. As she knew he would, he arrived on time. He was dependable, kind, reliable and funny. She’d never married, always thinking her job would be enough and anyway the children in her school of which she was now head were quite enough of a commitment thank you very much without adding to it. The horn startled her out of her reverie. She felt too sick to eat so just made do with coffee. Soon she was in Bob’s car and he was battling with the rush-hour traffic. What a lot there was too. She closed her eyes and secretly wondered if she’d ever make this journey again but these were thoughts she didn’t confide to Bob or indeed to anyone that is until she met Sarah.

The filthy waters were coming ever closer. The river was rising at an alarming rate and it was still raining. Sarah felt confident that she had done all she could to protect herself this time. She’d put sand bags up against the doors and covered the carpets with old towels. She’d moved all her valuables upstairs and sent the kids to friends, she’d stock piled bottles of water in case the supply was cut off and hoped to god the electricity held. She had done all she could but she was very annoyed. This was her queendom as she called it – An inviolable place – An extension of her body where nothing and nobody should penetrate unless invited. These stinking flood waters were threatening to break that rule. This after all was not a rule of their making but of hers and they had no regard for human restrictions. They marched on relentlessly like some sinister invading army of a callous and indifferent government of nature. They did their filthy deeds of wanton destruction and then the sun came out to smile on their handiwork. The circular came round that morning, advising everyone to evacuate their homes as the river defences weren’t expected to hold. “I’m damned if I’m going”! Sarah said to the toaster as she prepared her breakfast. “I’m a woman. I’ve been liberated. I will survive. I have survived widowhood, a mugging, the loss of my grandmother, the deaths of my parents, increasing back pain and being told I’m infertile. No bloody river is going to drive me from my home”. Sarah was whistling in the dark. By lunchtime the rain was still pouring. Now people were calling, urging her out. Her neighbours were packing, preparing to leave. The met. Office had got it right and she was going to be engulfed if she stayed. Like the last man standing after the fall of a great city she waited and she was not to wait in vain. Suddenly the defences had been broken and the filth was everywhere. The stink was unimaginable, the waters waist high. Sarah was lucky to get out of it alive as she couldn’t swim. She found herself in a soldier’s arms, being carried to safety. Amazingly she was relatively unscathed but had left her possessions to the mercies of the waters behind her.

Mavis was just unpacking when the ache began again. She spared herself the trauma of looking in her mirror. She knew she was only half what she had been. How had it come to this? She’d rallied her defences she’d exercised, never smoked, ate the recommended portions of fruit and vegetables a day, never been promiscuous and grew her own veg and fruit. She never allowed herself to get burned in strong sunshine and always made sure she had a good night’s sleep yet these filthy cancer cells had grown after dividing in an uncontrollably erratic way. Mavis was now warding them off, or trying to, with the equivalent of sand bags and extra walls in the form of radio therapy and chemo therapy. She couldn’t tell if the rain had stopped, whether the tide was still rising or just levelling out, whether the waters were receding or if the “met. Office” at the hospital were in error. What if they were? How could she stop herself being separated from her valuables – Angela and Bob? She couldn’t put them upstairs or secret them away or stop the flood waters from carrying her to the bottom of their polluted disgusting river. “Cancer” she said aloud. “The word must have something to do with water. With crabs that cling and move and don’t let go”. She shivered. She still felt sick.

When Sarah checked out of the hospital she had to get to a bank. Eventually she arranged for replacement credit facilities. Thank god she didn’t do as many old people do and keep her money under the bed. Every last tenner would be dead as a dodo by now if she had. The winds had reached gale force. The power was off and the waters half way up Sarah’s stairs. Roof tiles had gone and the place was in ruins. It was still raining. There’d been only a short respite since Sarah had left her home which she now felt had turned on and betrayed her. Tired and weary she checked in at the only hotel to still have a vacancy. Everyone had been making for the hotels after the disaster. Wearily Sarah climbed the stairs and as she got to the top, thought she heard the faint sound of sobbing but couldn’t be sure. “That isn’t a child” she thought. “Wonder what’s there to cry about. Whatever it is it won’t beat being flooded out”. She lay down on the bed, still trying to rid herself of the ghastly smell of dirty water.

Lunch was okay but got stuck somewhere in the two women’s throats as they sat opposite to each other in the packed dining-room. They’d gone through the preliminaries – The social niceties that bind us together in an illusory sort of way. Mavis left out the story of the cancer and just explained that the hotel was run by her sister and that rather than stay with them in their private quarters she had chosen to be with the other guests. Sarah thought this a very odd decision but refrained from comment. In normal circumstances she would have noticed how frail and gaunt Mavis looked but the floods had engulfed her emotions by saturating her home. They’d momentarily whisked her empathy and sucked it away in their unforgiving quest to damage and destroy. They’d robbed her of the capacity to care about anything except her mother’s lost photographs, her wedding presents, her damaged record covers, her spoiled bed linen, her lost towels and teacloths and her beloved husband’s pottery and the carpets he’d chosen long ago. Mavis looked at Sarah who could have been transformed into a tailor’s dummy. She looked human, “ummed” and “awed” now and again which meant she heard what Mavis said and this meant her words were not just being spoken and received then ignored and discarded by the empty air. She could have been reciting nursery rhymes for all Sarah cared. Suddenly though amidst all the boring inconsequential rubbish that Mavis was talking, Sarah posed a question without really wanting the answer but hoping to find some common reference point which they could cling to. “Why did you come apart from seeing your sister I mean? Were you flooded out?” “No”. That did it. Sarah knew she had to get away. This shallow boring woman who had everything going for her and who talked nonsense from the time she opened her mouth till the time she closed it was bloody lucky then was she not? “Excuse me I must go”, Sarah said and without explanation was gone.

A bewildered Mavis sat staring into the middle distance, wondering what she might have said to offend the other woman. The next day at breakfast Sarah again sat at Mavis’s table – Hobson’s choice as there was no other. She mumbled an insincere apology and mechanically switched off and tuned herself out as Mavis prattled on. Then one word popped out of the torrent like a child’s arm may through a playground fence. “Cancer”. She’d been telling Sarah that she’d come to rest up a bit while undergoing a regime of treatment for cancer which was now in remission. Sarah dropped her spoon and it landed with a clatter in her cereal bowl. The room went quiet. “What did you say?” She asked. Mavis was on the point of repeating it when she saw Sarah’s eyes fill with tears. Remembering Jack and the abominable suffering that one would not let an animal endure, remembering the filthy flood water that had engulfed her home, suddenly coming alive to this woman’s pain and feeling guilty that last night she’d thought her lucky and quite frankly didn’t care then about anything she said or did, she allowed her own river of emotion to flood out and engulf her surroundings, carrying the diners and the hotel staff up into their vortex. Her salt water which was still polluted by intense anger grief and misery raged and burst from her like an ocean swallowing up the world. Mavis stopped chattering. She leapt from her seat and grabbed the other woman saying “I’ll be your sand bag. I’m not much of a support. Will let you down, am going to die but I’m here now. I thought you were lucky too. Carpets can be replaced and houses repaired and after all they are just bricks and mortar – Extensions of ourselves but not ourselves – The parts we can redesign or change if we have to. I am about to lose all of me. The woman who loves shopping and soap operas, the woman who likes a good nag with the neighbours, the woman who likes a game of bingo or a Saturday doing collections or whatever for charity, the Woman who has puppy walked guide dogs”. In the middle of the dining-room they stood and cried together, each for each other and both for themselves. Eventually Angela appeared and threatened to eject Sarah for causing distress to her sister.

During her final months Mavis paid a visit to Sarah in her new and reconstructed home. She chattered and prattled in a vain attempt to keep death away but in a stunning moment of profundity said something we all should remember. “We should never envy another the half when we don’t know the whole”. When she died Sarah suffered another loss but this time it was the loss of someone she’d never have thought it worth getting to know in normal circumstances. A sort of climate change had taken place in her heart as well as in nature. She realised how foolish it is to judge and write another off and how dangerous it is to depersonalise people, thinking them so much more inferior to and different from oneself. She rather had the same feeling when it came to what we’re doing to the planet – Thinking it ours alone and that what we want is of paramount importance and the others don’t matter because they’re lesser, further away, as yet unborn. It was with a sense of unease that she looked out of the window and noticed it had started raining again.