Pudding
At half past ten on that same Monday night I was on the roof of a taxi on Low Drove with the dyke a hand's width from the road on either side, and the blood was winding her window down to tell me to get off.
"Get off my car," she said.
"There is water coming," I said. "A great deal of it. From that direction. I propose to be inside something."
"Not my car."
Next door, Mo Tebbutt's little car came out of her gateway backwards with its lights full on and Mo's face pressed to the windscreen, and turned, and went off up the drove toward the town at a speed I had never seen it do, spraying the reeds. The blood watched it go. She sneezed. Then she started her engine.
I went in through the window while she was looking at her mirror, which is how one gets into most things, and I arranged myself along the shelf at the back, under the rear windscreen, among a box of tissues and a road atlas. A little cardboard pine tree hung from her mirror on a string, and it smelled of a forest that had been sent to prison.
She looked at me in her mirror. Her eyes had gone to slits.
"If you sneeze on me," I said, "I shall not be responsible."
"If you sneeze on me, you walk."
"You are the one who sneezes, madam."
She did, three times, and drove.
I will not pretend I was brave in that car. I will tell you that I felt brave. I lay on the parcel shelf with my paws tucked under me and my eyes half closed, and as we went up the drove at a speed that made the reeds hiss, I felt like an admiral on a quarterdeck in a gale, steady and calm and greatly admired by the men. What I was doing was lying very flat and holding on to the road atlas with my claws.
The high street was a mile and more off. We heard it before we saw it. It sounded like a bath left running in the next room, and then, as we came round the bend by the church, like a river, because it was one.
The water was in the street. Not in the gutters. In the street, from one shop front to the other, brown and quick and full of things, going down toward the war memorial in a long muscle of current, and the orange light I had seen from the wall was going round on the roof of a white van that was parked half up the memorial steps, with its back doors open and a pump of some kind in the back of it, roaring. My back teeth ached. Somewhere under that memorial something of hers had cracked, and the whole street smelled of old pennies.
The Lamb had its lights on and its doors open and men in the doorway up to their shins. The chip shop had its lights on and nobody in it. The chemist's was dark at the front, with one light on at the back, and round the side of it, up the ramp to the car park, Mo's little car sat out of the water with its door open and nobody in it at all.
"Right," said the blood, and stopped at the edge, where the water began.
A man came out of the dark on the left and put both hands on her bonnet. He was very tall and very wet and he was wearing waders up to his chest, and he had a long neck and a torch strapped to his head, and he smelled of diesel and drain. A heron in waders.
"Can you get through?" he shouted, over the water.
"I've got a Skoda," said the blood.
"Keep to the crown of the road. Middle. Dead middle. It's knee here, it'll be more by the Lamb. I'll call it for you." And he got up onto her bonnet, waders and all, with the car dipping under him, and knelt there in her headlights facing forward with one arm out, as if she were a horse.
"There is a heron on your bonnet," I said.
He gave no sign. They never do.
"I can see that," said the blood, and put the car in gear.
We went in. The water came up round the wheels and the car went slow and heavy and the engine note went down, and the man on the bonnet called it, steady, every few yards. "Knee. Knee. Knee and a bit. Keep her coming. Ned. Pumps. Drainage board. Knee and a half. Keep her coming." The water slapped the doors. The little pine tree swung on its string. "Fire's all over at Wisbech, they've got their own, they'll not get here before morning. Board's me tonight. It all comes to my phone. Knee and a half. Bit left. Lovely."
"Your exhaust," I said to the blood. "I mention it only in passing. It is very low."
"I know where my exhaust is," she said.
At the Lamb she stopped with the water at the bottom of the doors, and the men came off the step and splashed out to her and got in, five of them, wet to the thigh and smelling of beer and fright, two in the back and three somehow in the front, and one of them sat on my tail.
"Get off," I said.
"Sorry, puss," he said, and didn't move.
"Where to?" said the blood.
"Church," said several of them. "Up the church. Up the hill."
She turned the car in a great slow wash and drove them out of the water and up the lane to the church on its rise, which stood up out of the dark with its door open and its lights on and people already in the porch, and they all got out, and one of them said, "What do we owe you, love," as a joke.
"Fourteen eighty," said the blood.
There was a silence in the car of a kind I had not heard since a bishop's dinner in 1770.
She had the meter running. I had not seen her start it. They paid her in damp notes and some coins and went up into the porch looking back at her.
The second run was the chip shop. The man who owns it was in the street up to his waist, shouting up at a window over the shop, and at the window there was an old woman in a hairnet who would not come down. The heron had gone to the Lamb for the landlord's dog. The blood got the taxi up onto the pavement at the chip shop front, as near to the door as it would go, and the chip shop man went in through his own front door for his mother.
I smelled it before I heard it. Water coming the wrong way. Not the brown street water, with its petrol and its chips. Colder. Ditch water, black, from behind, from the yard, under a door.
"The back," I said. "It is coming under the back door. Get her out of the front. Now. Do not let him take her through the back."
The blood looked at me in the mirror for perhaps one second. Then she got out of the car into water up to her knees and went in through the chip shop door, which I had not thought she would do, and I heard her say, "Not the back. Front. Now," in exactly the voice she uses for everything, and a moment later she came out with the old woman's arm over her shoulder and the chip shop man behind, and as they reached the car something went in the back of the shop with a sound like a cupboard falling over, and the water came through the shop from behind in a black flat wave and pushed the fryer over and came out of the front door round the blood's legs.
She put the old woman in the back. The old woman put her hand on me and said, "Oh, there's a pussycat," and held on to me all the way to the church, and I let her.
"Twelve forty," said the blood, at the church.
On the way back down the lane she did not look at me in the mirror, and I did not look at her, and nobody mentioned the back door.
We came round the bend by the war memorial and a pair of headlights pulled alongside us in the flood, high and white, from a car twice the size of hers, a great square thing that smelled of new leather and money, and its window came down, and inside it there was a man in a padded waistcoat with no sleeves, of the kind that is worn by men who wish to be warm only in the middle.
"Jess!" he shouted. "Jess, isn't it? Gavin. Gavin Thew. Thew's Fen Edge Lodges, you'll have seen the boards. Listen. Three hundred and ten thousand for the cottage and the garden strip down to the dyke. Today. Cash, no chain, and I'll throw in a skip for the cat stuff."
"I am the cat stuff," I said, and he got a cat.
"It's half past eleven at night," said the blood. "I'm in a flood."
"It's a good offer, Jess. Think about it. I'll be in touch." And his window went up and his big car went off through the water, throwing a wave that rocked us.
"Who was that," she said.
"A gilet," I said. "With a man in it."
The third run was Mo.
She was in the back room of the chemist's, standing on a chair in her overall with the water swilling round the chair legs, holding a box of something up over her head with both arms, and she would not come down without it. The heron got her down. He waded in through the front of the shop with his head torch going, and came out with Mo over one shoulder, still holding her box up over her head with both arms, and put her down in the doorway of the Lamb while the blood turned the car round.
"That's Ned," Mo said to us through the car window, from the step, wet to the waist and shaking, with her box. "Ned's my lodger, he's a lovely lad." She pushed her wet hair off her face. "Agatha'd have knocked us all up an hour since. With her stick. She'd have had us all up the church before it got past the kerb."
"Get in, Mo," said the blood.
"Eleven twenty," she said, at the church, and Mo paid her, and kissed her on the cheek, and cried.
The fourth run was two old men from the almshouses behind the memorial, who came out holding hands and each holding a budgerigar in a cage, and at the church they asked what they owed, and the blood looked at the meter, and I looked at the meter, and the meter was dark.
"Nothing," she said. "Go on. Get in out of the wet."
By two in the morning the water had stopped coming up and started going sideways, and the heron and every man in the town who could stand were building a wall of sandbags across the bottom of the high street, below the memorial, to keep the water from coming any further up. The blood drove the sandbags. She went back and forth from the builder's yard to the wall with the boot full and the back seat full and the car down on its springs, and I lay on the parcel shelf and supervised, and twice the heron came to the window and said, "Lovely, that's lovely, another load like that," and once, while he was stacking the bags out of her back seat, I told him that in my day a heron stood in one place and was grateful.
"Mind your tail," said the blood, to me.
"I am minding the heron," I said.
He gave no sign. He went back to his wall.
At a little before three we went home, and we dropped Mo, who had been sitting in the church porch in a borrowed coat, at her own gate on Low Drove. She got out slowly. She stood by the car door with her box.
"I'll take my pear drops," she said, "and sleep like a log, and I won't hear a thing. Not the water, not the sirens, not the Second Coming." And she went up her path, and stopped at the wall, and took a tin out of her coat pocket, and opened it, and put a sardine on the saucer, in the dark. Tomato. In a crisis. The woman is a sadist.
The blood went into the cottage to wash her face. I went with her, because she had left the door open, and because I did not wish to be on the wall just then.
She ran the cold tap in the kitchen sink and put her face in her hands under it. I sat on the kitchen floor near the range. The range was cold. The pumps were humming, far off, over the fields. The tiles were cold under me and smelled of boots and mud.
And then they were not cold.
It came from behind me, from the scullery, from the drain. It came all at once. The heat came across the tiles like a hand flat on the floor, and the smell came with it, the iron face down on the wet shirt, and the tiles in the scullery doorway went soft, and I went backward.
I did not decide to. I went backward an inch, and then another, toward the scullery, with my claws out and screaming on the glaze, my whole body flat as a rug, my legs going and nothing under them. The tiles did not care. An inch. Another. The heat got into my fur from behind. I could hear it, a long slow breath coming in.
I did not say anything grand. I had nothing grand. I said her name. Not the witch's. The other one.
"Jess."
The tap stopped. A hand came down out of nowhere into my scruff, the whole of my scruff, and closed, hard, and held.
It pulled. The floor pulled. I hung between them with my claws in the tiles and my body stretched out like washing. Nine seconds. I know it was nine because I heard her counting under her breath, one, two, three, as if she were counting change, and on four she sneezed, all over the back of my neck, and she did not let go. On seven she got her other hand under my chest. On nine the floor let go of me like a mouth giving up on something, and the tiles were cold again, and I was up in the air against her coat, with my heart going, and her heart going, and the smell of hot iron going out of the room like a guest who has not been asked to stay.
She stood in the middle of the kitchen holding me against her with both arms. Her face was enormous. She sneezed twice more, and held on.
"What was that," she said.
"That was home," I said.