I am not fully sure yet of our lives; those clouds strike terror in me even now. If fate saved you without me, my poor dear, how would you feel? Alone, could you withstand your fear? How would your grieving be consoled?

Book 1 – Ovid, Metamorphoses 

I.

The first scream is primal. It is heard on every shore of this new, remote islet of swallowed houses and gulped yards. A woman keens like an untethered banshee, cloaked in a serous shawl. Those early seconds clinging to the hull reveal her empty breast, covered only in residual slime. Those waiting to be rescued, who have witnessed, are all shrieking from their windows at the scene. A realisation of irrevocable magnitude drains into her husband who, letting go of the elder child he had clutched in his arms, immediately plunges, searching for the floor of this terra incognita as she squalls and scoops in this fresh hell. 

In time-too-late, the rumour of the shriek has spread. Every man is searching with a wretched kind of madness, scooping, cupping into fluvial oblivion, returning to the domain of the clouds with nothing. This human’s eyes are full of grit disgorged by the salt of her tears – this is the inconsolable moment. She weeps and then, turning to prayer, begs for Heaven’s help at the steps where they both fell down, but the floor beneath her gives way to unfamiliar ground, uncharted torment. So little faith truly had they in any’s advice, yet why not keep looking? Unshrouded, unhomed, unhemmed, unhoped, possessed by unalterable grief, going back in her tracks – she has no choice but to embrace the murky desolations at her breast, and on this, with quivering, fearful lips, through tears, she cries out the babe’s name again. 

II.

One house is felled, but more than one must fall.

A black cat’s guts are strewn under the belly of a beast. She licks the fragments of the sac’s membrane off the last-born kitten, to dry, to warm, before dropping her head back into the comfortable curve of the oaken dragon’s tail. This view is obscured by an attic floor ceiling – only we know it is there. Below, in 121 King Street, a leg, a thigh, a knee, a foot, stands at the top of the wooden stairs where a shivering, smooth-coated rat has ascended from the sixth step. To catch sight of this encounter, we must look beneath this infernally black sky. The scuffed toe of a left boot kicks out at the tiny soul as we move down into the low-lying strut of the flagstones, in a world not to be lived in. 

This woman – unmarried daughter who has always known other people’s secrets and the little things they wished to hide – looks back at the vapoured window at that very moment, as if she might spring into a run to ascertain what is going on at the ground floors. The streets have been presented with an unprecedented spectacle. All curtains are always opened now, so they can all see, and be seen. 

The woman broods on the uneasy sense of mortality and this isolation, dictated by a slight change in the rhythm of her heart, affected by pneumonia since she was an infant. The doctor said she would never be rid on it, and true enough, she’s had an unseasonable cough since. Warmer air sweeps over her, the putrid smell of rotting foliage and faecal matter. She is shivering so much that she can hardly hold a pen; she stands spluttering, muttering to herself and mumbling at the large loom in the corner where the dress pieces are sat draped over the basket. Someone is singing from one of the windows on the thoroughfare where horses now wade. She looks at the compact torso of the mannequin, tuts at the thought of how she would have received 15 shillings for this job – her biggest this year. She was not moving anywhere whilst this dress was here. Supposed to be collected Sunday. Somehow it is now… 

She finds one of the curious effects is that it is difficult to remember the days of the week. Everything seems to be going so fast, away from her. She turns from the window to check on something that is now lost in thought, as so often is, sees the rat, or is it is a mouse, now waiting in the corner, its feverish twitch of the ears and little hands together, praying or trying to keep warm. They are in deadlock. Its bijou eyes now staring at the poor human being with curiosity. For none of us wished her any harm. What Agnes Palmer prays for is God – the King or God – some person to save them all. 

III. 

Their homes and household shrines were borne away. If any house remained that had withstood Disaster, vaulting waves now stretched across its roof and sank its towers.

The sky is hard and solid as a man swims across our stagnant, sudden sea, boots tied round the back of his neck with his cigarettes stowed inside; another takes to his skiff, plies his oars where yesterday he tended to his yard. We engulf, slightly less than before, and lay in waste, frolic with strews of hay and whole banks of soil and lift all drains and cesspits. At the same time, we are warm and cold, blind and seeing, into the skeletons of the animals drifting down in this destroyed ark of tangled timber, sheds bashing into the bridge, severed trees, decaying branches. 

Gaggles of corks bob past as we hold and carry the little, swelling body of one lady’s lost dog. We extinguish the stolid strength of bloated bullocks; misshapen foxes ferried alongside sheep with mouths gaping open at human groves and homes. Rabbits, hens, chickens and pigs – their faces gone stiff and pale. In this world of lovers, drunkards, canaries and cats all swept away, no laws, no enforcers, no punishments feared, so thieves reign freely. We wait with hundreds of canaries, drowned in their metal cages. The floating libraries of the citizens’ lives flow at will, marbled with streaks of milky foam: the couches, the cupboards, the chairs. Our womb blends into the bubbling sediment of the cemetery, into the depths of this laved, new world. 

Can you see us at last? From your flat wooden step? Can you see us, you, frail human being, who is at the mercy of tides, air pressure, currents and precipitation.

IV.

And so, we are a hard and toiling race / For thus we prove the way we first were born.

The children entertain each other. They entertain us. In our wanderings, we happen to find a small, dense crowd dressed in khaki caps, collars, evergreen waistcoats, trousers ripped to the knees, rolled up to the thighs. One, in the freedom of this sunken realm, has blundered over and wades with bleeding, open wound on his head, looking for his mother who is on a tram somewhere. Another lad is leading his donkey, up to his belly in it, when a butcher asks where he’s going with the mule. 

“Hant yew bin down therr?”, sloshes a tallish lad, holding the snapped bone of a fishing rod in both hands:

“Heh’yuh sinnut? My fa wuzz speekun ta Jimmy’s dad yisty – they wet acrorst ta bridge un said thuh hull end uv a gret ol’ gable arn a billdun hud fell awf anorl. E cuhnt buhleev’t”. 

The littlest of them, with setting plaster skin and unevenly scissored hair in hues of clay, fails to scrunch the fraying hem of his soaking shorts in his toy-sized hands. He scans all their faces and nods along as the boy (who is testing whether his cardboard ship rescued from his mantle will sail) speaks “My mawther on’t leave arr house, she on’t jump out tha bedrum windah”. 

They skim anything they can get their hands on. The most resourceful of this score, Edmund, the baker’s son, has harvested a stash of stones and shares amongst them whilst a pair of quarrelling brothers snatch at each other’s rocks. The bootmaker’s boy is het up by being unable to skim, walks forwards in half a strop, and casts his stone backwards. It clinks the pailing of a stubborn fence, gives a swift, muffled blomp and gurgles. Through land and sea, all waters heard this sound; it rang retreat into the air and every wave and ripple that heard held back. The boy turns to survey the earthy parts that had retained our syrupy pools and could swear, in those very seconds, he saw the stone soften slowly into shape. 

Not yet distinct or fully clear, like a marble cherubim just begun, appears two tiny unmuscular hands and sloping shoulders, swaddled in an unclasped robe. Hooked on a nail, the grey-blue pebbles of his infant eyes, dowsed.

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