After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry

below the thick water, the familiar red oval.
    He told me how he liked to go there alone, watching for waterfowl. One day he’d seen a pair of geese that looked as though their breasts had been painted red, and had never seen them again. There’d been kingfishers, and once an adder he’d known by the diamonds on its back. He pointed out the pine where he thought he’d heard a cuckoo (‘Just like the clock!’ he told me, although I don’t see why that would be a surprise). Then he turned his back to the dam as though he wanted to put it out of his mind, and in his rush to tell me everything he’d seen – mayflies mating on the water, and a vole lying dead with its tail in its mouth – he began to swallow and stumble over his words until I couldn’t follow what he was saying.
    All the things I’d heard that morning came back to me – the letters, the flawed dam and the water ready to rise; St Jude’s and everything Elijah had said; Eve playing to people I pictured leaning on white-painted walls to listen. I saw also the many versions of Alex I’d watched throughout the day: huddled by the front door, or asking for my help as easily as if we’d been friends for years. Looking at him then, as he stood linking his thumbs and flapping his joined hands, imitating a white moth he’d seen the night before, it suddenly seemed obvious that he was suffering in ways I couldn’t describe or understand.
    I found myself nodding and saying ‘Yes, yes, I see’, and moving back from the water’s edge. Then, without pausing for breath, he tilted back his head to look at the sky, and said, ‘I think that’s the Pole Star isn’t it? Elijah taught me how to find it once – look, you follow the line of the W, I forget what it’s called – yes, it’s the Pole Star right enough.’ Then he looked back at me, and it was as if locating that single point had steadied him, as though it were not something distant at all, but a bright shaft that pinioned him safely by my side. He frowned and shook his head, knuckling at his eyes like someone who’d just woken from a brief sleep. When I told him that he was right, and that every day it is there too, though we can’t see its modest light when the sun’s nearby, he gave me one of his frank childlike smiles and immediately I thought I must be wrong, and that I’d mistaken nothing but a harmless preoccupation for lunacy – it was as steady and direct a smile as I’d ever seen. Then he said, ‘Anyway, I’d like your help. Can you swim?’
    When I told him I’d really rather not in that dark water he laughed and said ‘Fair enough’, and told me he only did it now he knew the water so well he could have swum there blindfold. He stooped to unlace his trainers, and I asked him why it was he needed to go out there at all. I tried to sound as if I didn’t care, and he didn’t look up but said casually, as if I probably knew already, ‘Oh, I like to check at midnight, you see. No sense checking in the morning then leaving it all day – anything could happen at night, don’t you think?’
    Then he took off his socks, pushed them into the toes of his trainers, and began to stoop and stretch like an athlete before a race. Between deep breaths he told me why he wanted to swim out into the black water.
    He’d sat one day on the embankment wall reading a letter when he saw a bird fly up from near the centre of the dam. From its forked tail he’d thought it was a swift, but when later that night he’d looked it up he knew from its pale breast it must have been a house martin. For a few days he watched for it, and saw the same bird go to and from the dam early in the morning, and again at sunset. He could never make out where it had been going, but often it had a scrap of something in its beak – a piece of bark or blade of dying grass, and once a white fragment torn from a pillow or cushion – and he knew that somewhere it must have made itself a home in a cleft in the reservoir