I draw the flood months before it happens. Not really – precognition isn’t one of my many talents. Here’s the thing.
In my head, my house is a castle. Emphasis on in my head. In the land of unfortunately bland reality, it’s a beige-walled bungalow squished on top of a small hill. I want it to be a moated fortress overlooking a fantastical landscape of forests and lakes and maybe a few dragons. The dragons symbolise my exams. They can’t get me here.
So I draw it into reality. Maths – Higher, lucky me – is a particularly fierce beast but it’s never come close to my castle. I’ve not been to school without my sketchbook in months now, even if it means leaving textbooks at home.
About two weeks before exams start, I open a new page and start to draw. I don’t use colour much but this time I get through a whole blue pen filling in the risen sea, from which the castle is among hilltops poking above the waves. I don’t really think through a backstory for the scene, aside from vague ideas about angry witches cursing the land. All I know is that it’s keeping the dragons away.
Worldbuilding isn’t my forté, okay? Turns out, neither is getting good grades. But the precognition thing is looking more likely by the day
The rain starts at the end of June, comes down with the great howling wind just after I finish my Leaving Cert, dark clouds rolling in the second I put down my pen. I assess my chances with more focus than I could ever give a maths question and decide there’s a solid 60 per cent chance I’ve failed an unreasonable number of subjects. All I want to do is get home.
I trundle up the hill with all the enthusiasm of a distractible slug, certainly not trying very hard to beat the looming downpour, knees aching. The King – our spectacularly stupid great dane – rushes down to greet me. At speed, the King bears an alarming resemblance to a huge, slobbering cannonball. I screech to a halt, bracing myself for the impending doom barrelling towards me. He’s about to break the speed of sound, looks like.
There’s a sharp whistle from the back door just as my life begins to flash before my eyes. It’s Cora, the prodigal daughter returned to us, summoning the beast back to his lair.
“So, how did it go, Kit?” she asks, as I lean my bike against the wall.
“Like, 50-50. Probably passed enough.”
“Your confidence is truly inspiring. Tea?”
“Jesus, no. It’s roasting. Get me some fridge-water, ASAP.”
Cora blinks, slow and comical. “Fridge-water?”
“Y’know, water that’s been in the fridge. Couldn’t be any more obvious.”
“You made it sound like scummy pond-water or something gross.”
See, this is why me and Cora get along surprisingly well, despite her overachieving tendencies. She’s just not that preoccupied with me following in her gold-paved law-studying footsteps. More interested in my name for cold water than my exam results. But, if I’d come home crying, she would’ve given me the motivational speech of the ages. Out of all the things Cora’s good at, being unexpectedly sound is probably the best. That or writing essays at breakneck speed.
I gulp down a nice cold glass of fridge-water, sitting on the kitchen counter. Somewhere in the distance thunder rumbles ominously, and right on cue Dad walks in, muddy trowel in hand, grinning like a maniac from behind the pair of hideous novelty sunglasses he bought in Mallorca two summers ago. He looks suspiciously pleased with himself.
“You unclogged the drains?” I guess.
“I unclogged the drains.” Yay, one point for that precognitive-me conspiracy theory. The drains have been a problem for ages and he knows it.
“Good thinking,” I tell him. “Getting that sorted before it starts raining.”
“Wouldn’t have been too bad. Sure, we’re on top of a hill. Even if it really poured, it’d just make the house damp and a turn the drive into a moat.” I try very hard not to choke on my fridge-water. Just this morning, I finished colouring my masterpiece, depicting pretty much exactly that.
Dad drifts away into the sittingroom, and I count the seconds it takes him to figure out that he’s still holding a muddy trowel. He U-turns after exactly nine and I watch as he disappears outside to the shed again.
It’s getting dark outside, which isn’t exactly normal for half four in the afternoon in June. Neither is the colour – ripe bruise. Another roar of thunder and Dad returns trowel-less, followed by Cora and the King. “Unplug everything! Get the torches out!” he yells.
“Bit dramatic, huh?” I say under my breath. Cora gives me an unimpressed look. “Don’t you ever read the news? This is a ...” she gestures vaguely, searching for the right word. “A once-in-a-millenia thing. I think. That’s what the weather guy said.”
I close the door behind them just as the rain starts bucketing down. It hits like a train, the wind too, roaring and thudding against the flat roof of the extension. The power goes out with a heavy air of finality as Cora swears loudly, tripping over my bag where I’d left it by the door. “Kit, for God’s sake ...”
Cora’s outburst notwithstanding, the first evening of the storm is surprisingly peaceful. We play chess – I lose every time, as expected – and thank our lucky stars that we have a gas cooker. Makes all the difference, having warm tomato soup. I get out my old Nintendo 3DS, and play Animal Crossing until the battery dies. Most importantly, I resolutely ignore the howling storm outside. I even go to sleep before 11 at night for the first time in … years, probably. Sure, won’t the weather have cleared up when I wake up?
The weather has not cleared up by the time I wake up. In fact, all it’s done is somehow get worse, going from above-average thunderstorm to Cthulhu’s Wrath unleashed upon the unsuspecting land. It’s 10 in the morning, or close enough to it, and it sounds like there’s an army of hairdryers outside my window – and they don’t seem to be going away any time soon. I squint at the glass, trying to look more than 12 feet out from the house and failing. People talk about rain being “practically horizontal”, but they lie. This stuff is pretty much flat as a table and it’s really something else. I feel like I should start praying to Zeus or something. Or Poseidon, I guess, because if that rain gets any heavier the air will be 100 per cent liquid.
Somewhere in the middle of my half-asleep musings on the technicalities of Greek mythology, Cora summons me for breakfast by knocking on my door like she’s about to arrest me. “Toast and jam, whether you like it or not!”
“That sounds like a threat,” I mumble.
“It is. I toasted the bread in a pan ‘cause the power’s still out. It’s a bit … charred.”
I consider my options. “What jam?”
“Raspberry,” says Cora. I pull on my dressing gown and open the door.
“I accept.”
It rains, and it keeps on raining. The sky settles into a dark concrete-grey, and Dad starts muttering anxiously about how we’re going to manage if this goes on for much longer.
“It’s only been a day,” I point out over halfhearted pasta. “It’s not the end of the world.”
“Debatable,” says Cora.
“No, don’t be like that, please. Stop catastrophising.” I wave my fork at her.
“We’re so screwed.”
“You’re just trying to piss me off now, aren’t you.”
It takes three days for the sun to emerge, cowed and a little wobbly, like me when I’ve got the flu. It wakes me up early, shining through the slits in my blinds. Somewhere, there’s birdsong. All very poetic. Right up until I peer out, blinking and confused. Sure, the rain’s stopped – but what I’m looking at isn’t all that different to my drawing. Despite the drain-unclogging, there’s pretty much a moat at the bottom of the hill, where some of the lower fields have been submerged. And now the air’s clear, I can see far enough out to know that it’s not just here. The news says we’re lucky that the power even came back on in the end, even though the water hasn’t gone down. I’m almost glad for the storm, if only for the quiet afterwards. It means I forget about my exams for a solid week or so, until the day we get our wifi again.
My school email inbox, which I check maybe twice a year, contains one single interesting message hiding among the spam and Duolingo reminders.
To all sixth years, it says.
Unfortunately, due to recent severe flooding, there has been an incident involving your exam papers. We believe they may have been inadvertently destroyed. Re-sits will be organised in due course. Our sincerest apologies.
I scream. Loudly.
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