Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in Victoria Street ·
The Patient Flood on Victoria Street
A widow living in a dry terraced house on Victoria Street wakes to find water standing a finger deep on the stairs, rising each night by a single step, and a courteous voice on the landing asking her, kindly, to move upstairs.
Mrs. Irene Dace had lived at number twelve Victoria Street for forty-four years, and the house had never once flooded. It stood on the highest part of the street, with a damp course in the walls and a new cellar drain laid by the council in 1989. When the river rose in the winter, the water came up to the kerb on the lower road and stopped there. Irene had watched it every spring from the front window and felt sorry for the people below.
On the third of December she came down to make her tea and found the hall carpet wet.
It was not a leak. There was no pipe bursting in the wall, no damp on the ceiling. The water was standing in the hall, a clear shallow layer that lapped at the bottom stair, as if the house had been built on the edge of a pond. Irene put her slippers on the first step and felt it cold and still through the wool. She looked at the front door, which was shut, and the back door, which was shut, and the kitchen window, which was dry. Then she looked at the staircase, and saw that the water went up it.
It was a finger deep on the second stair, and on the third. She stood on the bottom step and counted. Seven stairs, then the landing, and the water lay on the landing too, a smooth dark sheet reflecting the light from the bathroom window.
She went up to bed. In the morning the water was on the fourth stair.
She rang the council. A young man in the duty office said he would send someone out. He did not sound surprised. He asked whether she had noticed any rain, or any change in the water table, and when she said no, he was quiet for a moment and then asked whether there was a voice in the house. She said she did not understand. He said he was sorry, and that she should try to keep dry, and that somebody would come.
Nobody came. The water rose again the next night, to the fifth stair. Irene moved her bed into the spare room. She kept her shoes on the wardrobe. She kept the kitchen clean and dry, and each evening she sat on the top step with a cup of cocoa and watched the level climb, one stair at a time, with the patience of someone waiting for a bus that is always late.
On the seventh night she heard the voice.
It came from the landing below, very soft and reasonable, a man's voice with a faint northern accent, the kind of voice that might have belonged to a retired schoolmaster giving instructions at a bus stop. It said, "Mrs. Dace, it's all right. You can move up. It's quite safe, and you won't have to go out in the cold."
Irene did not answer. She turned the cocoa in her hands. The water was on the seventh stair now, almost touching the landing.
"It's not cruel," the voice said. "It only wants room. There's a great deal of room upstairs, you know. Nobody uses the loft."
She had not been in the loft in years. The hatch was painted over. She thought of the old suitcases up there, and the Christmas decorations in their boxes, and the small window in the eaves that looked out over the roofs toward the river.
She went up to the loft ladder and pushed at the hatch, and it opened easily, and a warm breath of dry air came down the ladder, smelling of old wood and lavender. She climbed up. The loft was clean and bare, with a sheet of new boarding laid across the joists, and a folding chair set by the little window, and a tin flask on the boards beside it, still warm.
She sat down on the chair. Below her she heard the water settle into the hall, quiet and patient, lapping gently at the foot of the stairs, and she realised the house had stopped rising. The voice on the landing said, very kindly, "Good girl," and then said nothing more.
Irene sits in the loft now. The council has been to look at the house twice and found nothing wrong. The water is still in the hall, a finger deep, clear and cold and unmoving, reaching up the staircase to the seventh step and stopping there. Each morning she comes down the ladder with a tray, and sets it on the boards at the top of the stairs, and watches the surface of the flood shiver in the light from the landing window, as if something below had been waiting, quite politely, for her to come down and say good morning.