When the rain began

The news wasn’t good.

News never is nowadays.

I sat inside, listening to the radio, then decided to switch on the T.V.

There’s always a pleasure in seeing disaster in colour, especially when it’s heading your way. The guilty frisson, the Cassandra-like doom, the sense of overpowering forces wreaking havoc when you yourself are still safe and secure.

I don’t know what it is with me and the news.

So I watched, and listened, heard about the droughts in some far-off foreign country, the millions slowly on the march in Africa and heading for Europe, the floods and frightening thunderstorms. Christ, there were even a few earthquakes thrown in for good measure now.

And I stared at their faces, all those poor, desperate people, no money, no food - really, no hope. In a cruel and heartbreaking way it makes you feel good to be alive, it makes you grateful for what you’ve got.

Climate change. They’d talked about it long enough, and I’d lived through all those talks, the hopeless, rubbish leaders, the crooks, the toxic climate-deniers, the oil-puppets. Now at last it had arrived, and the no-hopers had faded away, enjoying their riches whilst they still could.

Climate change. Forces so vast, so indescribable that you can’t beat them. Cities lapped by water, winds tearing the heads off trees, the brutal sun winking down endlessly on growing deserts.

Climate change. It was the extinction of life, they said, but there was still a chance, still some hope if we could just find a last-minute fix.

Outside it looked like a normal day. You’d never know we were on the edge of catastrophe. Who could guess from the summer sun and the dappled leaves?

Only those pictures, beamed in from far away, hinted …

I remembered a childhood full of songbirds in the trees, birds fluttering across my vision. Now there were hardly any birds, and those that were left barely whispered.

I frowned, stretched, reached out, turned off the news.

“Jessy!?”

She answered from downstairs.

“Have you heard the birds recently?”

“The birds?”

“Singing?”

I went downstairs. It’s not the sort of conversation you carry on by shouting.

“Birds?”

“Have you heard them?”

“Not really.”

She looked puzzled.

I nodded. “Nor have I.”

There it was. Almost like Hiroshima. The wild things know.

“And have you seen the garden?”

She shook her head, puzzled again. “You might not have noticed, but I’m busy.”

“Everything’s been eaten. Lettuces, cabbage, even the honeysuckle’s got great holes in it, and the grass - surely it was longer than that two weeks ago?”

“If there’s no birds …”

Jessy liked to get absorbed, really absorbed so that she didn’t have to notice. She was washing the kids’ nappies by hand - ‘Every little helps,’ she’d said firmly - but it had already gone way beyond that stage.

“I guess so.”

“It’s probably seasonal,” she said, and it was clear that that was what she wanted to think. And who could blame her?

That night it began to rain.

We lay in bed, me and her, and the rain washed steadily over our little house as we drifted off to sleep.

When I awoke it was to a heavy, thunderous roar, a sluicing, whooshing, pouring drumming from cascades of water bouncing off the tiles. I struggled up and shut the windows, sensing that unrelenting power and force, and all that went round my head was, ‘Jesus Christ!’

Thank God it wasn’t hail.

All night that rain continued, all night it battered the house, and all night we lay awake, wondering what was to come.

We went out in the garden the next morning to survey the damage.

“It’ll be the rats that survive,” Jessy told me out of the blue, and I was shocked. “When we’ve gone.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but she shook her head.

“Maybe a million years, maybe ten million years - rats, cockroaches, spiders - in the sea, maybe squid.” She shrugged. “We’ve had our go,” she said, “We messed it up,” and looking round our garden she began to gently weep.

The fine weather continued for another day or so, and then a bank of clouds began to gradually build up, clouds that hugged the low horizon and roiled inside, gathering and stretching, always seeming to grow. Looking at those clouds you knew something big was on the way. After a while I stopped looking, because I didn’t want to know.

And then the real rain started - not fierce, insistent rain like a few nights before, but steady, relentless, heavy rain that had settled in for the long haul. We could still drive down to the shops, but each time we went the road was flooded a little deeper, and then one day they ran out of stock We had some of their last flour: we weren’t going to go hungry for a while, but it wouldn’t be long.

“I’m sure there was a tin left in the car,” I told her a few nights later, looking out of the window. The kids were crying now, and she didn’t know what to doany more. The rain thrummed in the background, whilst a lone snail trekked across the outside of the glass.

“I’m just going out!”

I stepped outside, heard my foot crunch on something, but I was too intent and busy to really notice. Not until I’d reached the car did I begin to feel surprised. There were other mattters on my mind, and only when I’d got back inside the house did I try to take it all in.
“I’ve got it!” I told her excitedly, holding out the can. “I knew it was there!” And then, ‘There was something crunching …”

She looked at me with incomprehenion, took the tin away with a look of relief, wiped a tear from her eyes - she was always crying these days - and hurried to the cooker.

I opened the door again and looked out. There was nothing to see, absolutely nothing. Just darkness, and the wet. But I bent down, peered at the ground, let my eyes adjust.

Slowly, carefully, by looking hard, I began to pick out their shapes. A sea of shapes. Little black dots, barely moving, stretching as far as the light. I stepped outside and with the house behind me saw further - and saw the whole garden -

Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t the rats that were going to survive -

Maybe the creatures that over the next million years would adapt and evolve, and perhaps one day become the Kings of creation -

Looking at this sea of them -

Were the snails.